Piero Manzoni - Merda D'artista (1961) - panoramio

''Artist's Shit'' (Italian: ) is a 1961 artwork by the Italian artist

Piero Manzoni Piero Manzoni di Chiosca e Poggiolo, better known as Piero Manzoni (July 13, 1933 – February 6, 1963) was an Italian artist best known for his ironic approach to avant-garde art. Often compared to the work of Yves Klein, his own work antici ...

. The work consists of 90

tin can A steel can, tin can, tin (especially in British English, Australian English, Canadian English and South African English), steel packaging, or can is a container for the distribution or storage of goods, made of thin metal. Many cans ...

s, each reportedly filled with of

faeces Feces ( or faeces), known colloquially and in slang as poo and poop, are the solid or semi-solid remains of food that was not digested in the small intestine, and has been broken down by bacteria in the large intestine. Feces contain a relati ...

, and measuring , with a label in Italian, English, French, and German stating:

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'' (), a series of balloons filled with his own breath, being an example. In December 1961, Manzoni wrote in a letter to his friend

Ben Vautier Ben Vautier, also known simply as Ben (born 18 July 1935 in Naples, Italy), is a French artist. Vautier lives and works in Nice, where he ran a record shop called ''Magazin'' between 1958 and 1973. Biography Benjamin Vautier was born on 18 Ju ...

: Another friend,

Enrico Baj Enrico Baj (October 31, 1924 – June 15, 2003)June 15 according to the Guardian, June 17 according to the-artists.org was an Italian artist and writer on art. Many of his works show an obsession with nuclear war. He created prints, sculptur ...

, has said that the cans were meant as "an act of defiant mockery of the art world, artists, and art criticism". ''Artist's Shit'' has been interpreted in relation to

Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...

's idea of

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, and

Marcel Duchamp Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, , ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso ...

's readymades. In September 2021, YBA artist

Gavin Turk Gavin Turk (born 1967) is a British artist from Guildford in Surrey, and is considered to be one of the Young British Artists.Tate Modern. (2009)'Pop Life: Art in a Material World' Retrieved 14 August 2012. Turk's oeuvre deals with issues of aut ...

made a piece called "Artist's Piss" where he canned his own urine and sold it for its weight in silver.

Value

A tin was sold for

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124,000 at

Sotheby's Sotheby's () is a British-founded American multinational corporation with headquarters in New York City. It is one of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewellery, and collectibles. It has 80 locations in 40 countries, an ...

on May 23, 2007. In October 2008, tin 83 was offered for sale at Sotheby's with an estimate of £50,000–70,000. It sold for £97,250. On October 16, 2015, tin 54 was sold at Christies for £182,500. In August 2016, at an art auction in Milan, one of the tins sold for a new record of €275,000, including auction fees. The tins were originally to be valued according to their equivalent weight in gold – $37 each in 1961 – with the price fluctuating according to the market.

Contents of the cans

One of Manzoni's friends, Agostino Bonalumi, claimed that the tins are full not of faeces but plaster. 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. 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). The can's contents were difficult to identify on sight, being variously described as "paper wrapping with unidentified contents", "an unidentifiable wrapped object" and "a can within a can". Bazile did not attempt to extract or open the inner object. The piece received media coverage due to a lawsuit in the mid-1990s, when an art museum in

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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 high temperatures. The lawsuit ended with the museum paying a 250,000 Danish kroner settlement to the collector, approximately US$35,000.

References

Sources

*''Neue Zürcher Zeitung'', Nr. 89.76

External links