Critics of modern art will at least applaud the irony. The Tate Gallery has paid £22,300 of public money for a work that is, quite literally, a load of excrement.
The canned faeces of Piero Manzoni, one of Italy's most controversial artists, have been bought by the gallery from a sale at Sotheby's.
Can 004 is one of an "edition" of 90 tins of merda d'artista created by Manzoni in 1961 as an ironic statement on the art market. Each can contained 30 grams of his faeces and Manzoni sold it for the same price as if it were gold.
The price paid by the Tate for its merda - £745 per gram - exceeds, however, the £550 that the contents of the tin would cost if they were made of 24-carat gold.
The gallery yesterday defended its decision to spend taxpayers' money on the work. The money for the purchase came from the Tate's acquisitions budget, which it receives from the Government.
"The Manzoni was a very important purchase for an extremely small amount of money: nobody can deny that," said a spokesman for the gallery.
"He was an incredibly important international artist. What he was doing with this work was looking at a lot of issues that are pertinent to 20th-century art, like authorship and the production of art. It was a seminal work."
The purchase is not the only excreta the Tate has in its collection; it has also bought three paintings by Chris Ofili featuring elephant dung.
Although the tin was bought in the Italian art sale at Sotheby's some time ago, the gallery has kept secret the amount it paid. It put the can on display last year without making any public announcement.
Last week the gallery denied that it had tried to play down the purchase. "We buy 500 works a year so we can't talk about every one," said the spokesman.
Manzoni died, aged just 29, within two years of creating his tinned art. He was a hard drinker and his alcohol consumption led to him to suffer from a liver condition. In a letter to a friend, he explained that his motivation for tinning his faeces was to expose the gullible nature of the art-buying public.
"I should like all artists to sell their fingerprints, or else stage competitions to see who can draw the longest line or sell their shit in tins," he wrote. "If collectors really want something intimate, really personal to the artist, there's the artist's own shit. That is really his."
The cans were sealed according to industrial standards and then circulated to museums around the world.
In addition to the Tate, both the Pompidou Museum in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York have bought cans since. At least 45 of the original 90 cans have exploded, however. This is exactly what Manzoni intended.
Soon after he created the cans he told a friend "I hope these cans explode in the vitrines of the collectors." The Tate Gallery says that it has had no such problems.
Artist’s Shit 1961
Piero Manzoni
Summary
In May 1961, while he was living in Milan, Piero Manzoni produced ninety cans of Artist's Shit. Each was numbered on the lid 001 to 090. Tate's work is number 004. A label on each can, printed in Italian, English, French and German, identified the contents as '"Artist's Shit", contents 30gr net freshly preserved, produced and tinned in May 1961.' In December 1961 Manzoni wrote in a letter to the artist Ben Vautier: 'I should like all artists to sell their fingerprints, or else stage competitions to see who can draw the longest line or sell their shit in tins. The fingerprint is the only sign of the personality that can be accepted: if collectors want something intimate, really personal to the artist, there's the artist's own shit, that is really his.' (Letter reprinted in Battino and Palazzoli p.144.)
It is not known exactly how many cans of Artist's Shit were sold within Manzoni's lifetime, but a receipt dated 23 August 1962 certifies that Manzoni sold one to Alberto Lùcia for 30 grams of 18-carat gold (reproduced in Battino and Palazzoli p.154). Manzoni's decision to value his excrement on a par with the price of gold made clear reference to the tradition of the artist as alchemist already forged by Marcel Duchamp and Yves Klein among others. As the artist and critic Jon Thompson has written:
Manzoni's critical and metaphorical reification of the artist's body, its processes and products, pointed the way towards an understanding of the persona of the artist and the product of the artist's body as a consumable object. The Merda d'artista, the artist's shit, dried naturally and canned 'with no added preservatives', was the perfect metaphor for the bodied and disembodied nature of artistic labour: the work of art as fully incorporated raw material, and its violent expulsion as commodity. Manzoni understood the creative act as part of the cycle of consumption: as a constant reprocessing, packaging, marketing, consuming, reprocessing, packaging, ad infinitum. (Piero Manzoni, 1998, p.45)
Artist's Shit was made at a time when Manzoni was producing a variety of works involving the fetishisation and commodification of his own body substances. These included marking eggs with his thumbprints before eating them, and selling balloons filled with his own breath (see TateT07589). Of these works, the cans of Artist's Shit have become the most notorious, in part because of a lingering uncertainty about whether they do indeed contain Manzoni's faeces. At times when Manzoni's reputation has seen the market value of these works increase, such uncertainties have imbued them with an additional level of irony.
Further Reading:
Germano Celant, Piero Manzoni, New York 1972
Freddy Battino and Luca Palazzoli, Piero Manzoni: Catalogue raisonné, Milan 1991, pp.123-8, 472-5, catalogue no. 1053/4, reproduced p.472
Piero Manzoni, exhibition catalogue, Serpentine Gallery, London 1998, reproduced pp.201-6 in colour
Freddy Battino and Luca Palazzoli, Piero Manzoni: Catalogue raisonné, Milan 1991, pp.123-8, 472-5, catalogue no. 1053/4, reproduced p.472
Piero Manzoni, exhibition catalogue, Serpentine Gallery, London 1998, reproduced pp.201-6 in colour
Sophie Howarth
November 2000
November 2000
Shit! Manzoni's work doesn't do what it says on the tin
So Piero Manzoni filled his cans not, as labelled, with Merda d'Artista, but with plaster. Does that matter? Does the concept still stand? Or should the Tate get rid of their investment fast?
In 2000 the Tate bought a tin purporting to be the excrement of Italian artist Piero Manzoni for £22,350 from Sotheby's. The news provoked outrage. How could Nicholas Serota lavish such money on this four decades old send-up on the absurdity of the art market, whose artistic intervention, after all, was not intended to be a thing of beauty or permanence? Indeed, Manzoni once said that he was exposing "the gullibility of the art-buying public" with his tins of Manzoni's Merda d'Artista. Hadn't the Tate been had from beyond the grave by the cheeky Italian?
Maybe not. Maybe the Tate's purchase was astute. Last month a tin of Merda d'Artista as sold by the same auction house in Milan for £81,000.
Perhaps now the Tate should offload their can on the market pronto and pocket the profits. I say pronto, because there are reports that Manzoni's excrement did not fill those tins. Agostino Bonalumi, who worked with Manzoni, recently wrote in Corriere della Sera, that the 90 30-gramme tins that Manzoni filled in 1961 before his untimely death aged 29, contained not faeces but plaster. This might be one of the greatest outrages perpetrated in the history of art. Or not.
Quite possibly the contents don't do exactly what they say on the tin. "I can assure everyone the contents were only plaster," writes Bonalumi. "If anyone wants to verify this, let them do so." Good point: surely now is the time for Serota to get out the can opener and find out. Is there a conceptual art curator at Tate Modern who specialises in determining the authenticity of 46-year-old Italian artist's faeces? It would be a singular job description.
But no. The Tate tin will keep its mystery. A Tate spokesperson says: "Keeping the viewer in suspense is part of the work's subversive humour." But did Manzoni leave instructions to that effect, or are the Tate making it up as they go along? If the latter, the thought is that they are protecting their investment: the value of the work might well plummet if the boring truth that Bonalumi posits was discovered.
Does it matter? Does it matter if Manzoni's tins do not contain merda d'artista? It's actually a more serious question than you might think because it concerns what kind of authenticity is necessary in art and what is contingent. For example, would it matter if the 8,601 diamonds that stud Damien Hirst's new work, For the Love of God, were really paste? Would it be an hilarious Manzonian artworld gag if all the cordons, bag checks and bouncers that prefigure the spectator's five minutes' face time with Hirst's head were completely unnecessary and that the diamonds were not worth £15 million? Or would the revelation be really, really annoying and make us poor shnooks queuing at the White Cube feel cheated? And, even more crucially, how much would the revelation that the diamonds were dross affect For the Love of God's £50 million price tag?
Similarly, would it matter if the condoms on Tracey Emin's bed had not seen active service in the artist's love life? It's an intriguing question since, surely, much of the interest in and value of Emin's self-revelatory work relies on the presumed authenticity of the sex life she discloses in her work. Her condoms must be real or we would be entitled to be quite cross. Or would we?
Either way, if there is an afterlife, Piero Manzoni surely must be enjoying the fact that the art world remains just as ludicrous as when he sought to expose it nearly five decades ago.
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In 1961, Piero Manzoni produced 90 cans labeled Artist's Shit, Contents 30 grams net, Freshly Preserved.
The Italian artist went on to sell his ‘art’ for the price of its weight in gold. This made many people very angry, mostly because no one could work out whether it was a disgusting and demeaning insult to the public, or whether it was an absurdly clever piece of modern art. Almost 50 years on, one of these cans sits on a plinth in one of the most popular art galleries in the world, London's Tate Modern, where it still provokes outrage and admiration in equal measure.
Manzoni intended the cans to play a subversive role in the art world, following on from Duchamp's Fountain, which was a urinal he placed in an art museum in 1917. Like many surreal moments, they cease to be so when ignored or accepted by the establishment. In 2006, fearing the latter had happened, 77-year-old artist Pierre Pinoncelli attacked a replica of the urinal with a hammer in the Centre Pompidou, Paris. He was arrested and prosecuted for damaging the artwork, but succeeded in avoiding paying for the damages by arguing that Duchamp would have approved.
Excrement is arguably the original man-made material – producing it is an act of creation in which we are all involved. However disgusting we may find it, there is a certain pride associated with doing it well, or at least regularly. Prior to Manzoni, it was the feces of kings and queens that were most valued because of their importance in medical diagnosis. For instance, the stools of the British king, George III, were port-colored during his bout of madness, one of the clues that enabled historians and scientists in recent times to diagnose that his insanity had a physical origin, namely the condition porphyria.
In contrast, the normal brown color of stools is produced by a combination of bile and bilirubin, the former producing the yellow overtones, while the red pigment bilirubin comes from red blood cells, and also fluoresces. Excrement also contains anerobic bacteria from the gut that break down the fecal matter, and it is this bacteria that poses the main problem for anyone wanting to preserve excrement. These bacteria do not require oxygen and will continue to thrive in a sealed can, building up gases and ultimately causing explosion.
To kill such bacteria, two alternative strategies can be employed prior to canning. The first is pasturization, an extremely unpleasant process of heating to kill the bacteria. The alternative is the drying of excrement, which occurs naturally on a sunny day in every pasture in the land. Sun-dried excrement is not only easier to preserve, but is also a useful fuel when it originates from certain animals, the best examples of which are the bison and the cow. Unfortunately, dog excrement is not as useful in this respect, which is a pity given its prevalence in cities and the awkward problem of its disposal.
London's Materials Library was recently given an opportunity to examine the can of Artist's Shit owned by the Tate Modern: to investigate nondestructively whether there was excrement in the can (a podcast of the tests can be found at www.tate.org.uk/modern/tours/materialslibrary/).
The first test performed was to gently shake the can. This revealed an acoustic signature highly suggestive of a granular material. There was no audio evidence of the presence of a liquid nor the did the can show signs of bulging, which supports the view that if the can does indeed contain excrement it might be of the sun-dried variety. The Materials Library then examined the can using optical microscopy under ultraviolet (UV) light to look for signs of fluorescence arising from bilirubin pigment that might have been spilled during canning. However, although they found areas that seemed to show signs of spillage, this was not associated with any fluorescent markers and is thought instead to be more likely the result of flux used during the canning process. A more sophisticated test, such as a magnetic resonance image (MRI) scan, was ruled out because of the ferric nature of the can. And although X-rays could have be used it was recognized that even a synchrotron would not be able to identify the contents of the can unambiguously as excrement.
The current value of a Manzoni can is around $30 000. This price tag alone is perhaps the most extraordinary and surreal element of the art.
So does it matter whether there is any excrement in the can at all?
Currently, the only sure way of knowing is to open the can, but this would destroy the art and the price tag. This then is perhaps the art world's equivalent of Schrodinger's cat, where uncertainty is the key to the power of the idea. There is one other way to collapse the Manzoni wavefunction, which is to ask someone who was there when the cans were created. No such interviews exist, but when Manzoni's mother was asked, she shook her head and said, “He's a nice boy.” Surely a statement as contradictory as any in quantum theory.
Copyright © 2007 Elsevier Ltd.
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Seminal ... Manzoni's work.
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Critics of modern art will at least applaud the symbolism. The Tate Gallery has paid �22,300 ($61,000) for a work that is, literally, a load of excrement.
The canned faeces of Piero Manzoni, one of Italy's most controversial artists, were bought by the gallery from a sale at Sotheby's.
Can 004 is one of an "edition" of 90 tins of merda d'artista created by Manzoni in 1961 as a statement on the art market. Each can contained 30 grams of his faeces and Manzoni sold it for the same price as if it were gold.
The price paid by the Tate for its merda - �745 per gram - exceeds, however, the �550 that the contents of the tin would cost if it were made of 24-carat gold.
"The Manzoni was a very important purchase for an extremely small amount of money: nobody can deny that," a spokeswoman for the gallery said. "He was an incredibly important international artist. What he was doing with this work was looking at a lot of issues that are pertinent to 20th-century art, like authorship and the production of art. It was a seminal work."
The purchase is not the only excreta the Tate has in its collection; it has also bought three paintings by Chris Ofili featuring elephant dung. Although the tin was bought some time ago, the gallery has kept secret the amount it paid. It put the can on display last year without making any public announcement.
Last week the gallery denied that it had tried to play down the purchase. "We buy 500 works a year so we can't talk about every one," the spokeswoman said.
Manzoni died, aged just 29, within two years of creating his tinned art. In a letter to a friend, he explained that his motivation was to expose the gullible nature of the art-buying public.
"I should like all artists to sell their fingerprints, or else stage competitions to see who can draw the longest line or sell their s--- in tins," he wrote. "If collectors really want something intimate, really personal to the artist, there's the artist's own s---. That is really his."
The cans were sealed according to industrial standards and then circulated to different museums around the world.
In addition to the Tate, the Pompidou Museum in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York have bought cans since. At least 45 of the original 90 cans have exploded, however. This is exactly what Manzoni intended. Soon after he created the cans he told a friend "I hope these cans explode in the vitrines of the collectors."
The Telegraph, London
***
Artist's Shit - Merda d'artista
Artist's Shit (Italian: Merda d'artista) is a 1961 artwork by the Italian artist Piero Manzoni. The work consists of 90 tin cans, filled with faeces, each 30 grams and measuring 4.8x6.5 cm, with a label in Italian, English, French, and German stating:
- Artist's Shit
- Contents 30 gr net
- Freshly preserved
- Produced and tinned
- in May 1961
Inspiration and interpretations
At the time the piece was created, Manzoni was producing works that explored the relationship between art production and human production, Artist's Breath ("Fiato d'artista"), a series of balloons filled with his own breath, being an example.
Manzoni's father, who owned a cannery, is said to have once told his artist son, "Your work is shit."[1]
In December 1961, Manzoni wrote in a letter to his friend Ben Vautier:
Another friend, Enrico Baj, has said that the cans were meant as "an act of defiant mockery of the art world, artists, and art criticism."[3]
Artist's Shit has been interpreted in relation to Karl Marx's idea of commodity fetishism, and Marcel Duchamp's readymades.[1][4]
Value
A tin was sold for €124,000 at Sotheby's on May 23, 2007;[5] in October 2008 tin 083 was offered for sale at Sotheby's with an estimate of £50-70,000. It sold for £97,250. The cans were originally to be valued according to their equivalent weight in gold — $37 each in 1961 — with the price fluctuating according to the market.[1]
Contents of the cans
One of Manzoni's friends, the artist Agostino Bonalumi, claimed that the tins are full not of faeces but plaster;[6] in contrast, Manzoni's girlfriend Nanda Vigo, who helped him produce the cans, claimed the contents really were faeces. Vigo's assertion is disputed by Manzoni's brother and sister. An art dealer from the Gallery Blu in Milan claims to have detected a fecal odor emanating from a can.[7] The cans are steel, and thus cannot be x-rayed or scanned to determine the contents, and opening a can would cause it to lose its value; thus, the true contents of Artist's Shit are unknown.[8] Bernard Bazile exhibited a partially opened can of Artist's Shit in 1989, titling it Opened can of Piero Manzoni (French: Boite ouverte de Piero Manzoni). Even so, the contents were unable to be identified.[1]
The piece received media coverage due to a lawsuit in the mid-1990s, when an art museum in Randers, Denmark was accused by art collector John Hunov of causing leakage of a can which had been on display at the museum in 1994. Allegedly, the museum had stored the can at irresponsibly warm temperatures. The lawsuit ended with the museum paying a DKK 250,000 settlement to the collector.[9]
Footnotes and External Sites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist%27s_Shit
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