Curated by Germano Celant<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The artistic activity of Piero Manzoni (Soncino, Cremona, Italy, 1933 \u2013 Milan, Italy, 1963) spans little more than five years, from 1957, when he began to gain recognition as an artist, to 1963, when he died in his studio. His work centres on the commodification of the art object and the socio-economic system that legitimises this process. Manzoni employed a variety of aesthetic and conceptual strategies that simulate artistic practices, lodging his criticisms from within the art system itself and using every possible medium to express himself, from the concrete materials of the Achromes <\/em>pictures to his own body, including his bodily functions, his breath, and his fingerprints. These investigations resulted in series such as Fiato d\u2019artista<\/em> (Artist\u2019s Breath), balloon \u201csculptures\u201d blown up by Manzoni himself, and Merda d\u2019artista <\/em>(Artist\u2019s Shit), tin cans filled with the artist\u2019s own excrement and sold for their weight in the (going) price of gold \u2013 a reflection on the clash between an object\u2019s aesthetic value and its market value. Manzoni also utilized the viewer\u2019s body, for example in the Sculture viventi<\/em> (Living Sculptures), which he created by signing his name on the bodies of friends and colleagues (who quite literally embodied the name of the artist), in exchange for a \u201ccertificate of authenticity\u201d that gave them the status works of art. The artist thus demonstrates that anything or anybody can be transformed into art, including the Earth itself, which is supported by the Socle du Monde <\/em>(Base of the World).<\/p>\n [K.G.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Curated by Germano Celant The artistic activity of Piero Manzoni (Soncino, Cremona, Italy, 1933 \u2013 Milan, Italy, 1963) spans little more than five years, from 1957, when he began […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26950,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101133","mostra","type-mostra","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n