Piero Manzoni, "A Retrospective"

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One of the advantages of being a dealer like Larry Gagosian is that you possess the financial wherewithal to mount what is generally called a museum-quality gallery show (MQGS, if you will), in which artworks are presented with the solemnity of an exhibition at MoMA. Like its institutional cousin, the MQGS features wall texts and tags, sumptuously produced catalogs and the presence of uniformed guards. This treatment is usually accorded only to the bluest of blue-chip artists, but also, more edifyingly, to vintage figures overlooked by museums, or at least not examined by them in a while. At their best, such shows can fill gaps in our understanding of Modern and contemporary art, though it’s always important to keep in mind that the MQGS is first and foremost an exercise in high-end marketing in which art history itself becomes fungible. The Piero Manzoni retrospective currently on view at Gagosian’s 24th Street space is a prime example.

Manzoni (1933–1963) would seem the perfect subject. Born into an aristocratic family in Soncino, Italy, near Milan, he lived fast, died young (at 29, of cirrhosis), and while one could argue whether he left a beautiful corpse (even as an adult he had the preternatural appearance of a pudgy, overgrown kid), he did leave behind a highly influential corpus of objects that anticipated the Italian Arte Povera movement as well as Conceptual Art in the United States. In his most famous—or notorious—piece, created in 1961, he sealed 30-gram measures of his own excrement into 90 tuna-fish-size cans, indexing their price to the market value of gold. When, nearly 40 years later, the Tate Gallery in London bought one, they paid $52,000 for it—about $1,700 per gram, or 100 times more than the going rate for gold in 2000.

Legendary in his own country, lionized by European museums, Manzoni isn’t that well known here beyond the audience of dealers, collectors, curators and art students on the prowl for an edgy role model. But if the Gagosian show, organized by curator German Celant with the aid of the Archivio Opera Piero Manzoni, is meant to redress this lack of wider recognition by making the case for Manzoni’s historical significance, it falls short. Although radical, Manzoni’s total output was small, spanning a mere seven years between his first group show in 1956 and his death. And while not every single thing he ever made is on display, it feels that way—oppressively so. Yet the result seems like blowing an awfully big bubble out of a tiny drop of soap. It certainly doesn’t help that, going through the galleries, one’s eye is almost always immediately drawn to the pieces by other artists—contemporaries of Manzoni like Yves Klein, Willem De Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg—hung here to provide context.

Throughout his career, Manzoni contrasted the materiality of making art with the immateriality of art as an idea. It was a notion he pushed to extremes with items like his canned poop, meant to imply that shit, in its own way, is as much a product of artistic effort as painting. By the same token, he created empty pedestals that would allow viewers to become “artworks” simply by standing on them. He also rolled up long scrolls on which he had drawn a single continuous line, and secreted them into containers. There were hard-boiled eggs, marked with his thumbprint, meant to be eaten. While this kind of ironic interrogation of art endeared him to future adherents of institutional critique, Manzoni’s fuzzy transubstantiation seems slight. His works are better off being contemplated in reproduction. In real life, they make him look like a lightweight, especially compared to other artists who hoed similar rows, like Duchamp and Klein.

The argument for Manzoni seems to boil down to (1) his radicality and (2) the speed with which he arrived at it. There’s no doubting Manzoni’s precociousness or energy. An indefatigable self-promoter, he was a tireless emissary for other artists as well, a hyperkinetic bee darting between the various blossoms of European postwar avant-gardism. The gallery’s walls are covered with a timeline offering a detailed testament to Manzoni’s every move, but it seems absurd to include real-world events like NASA launching its first satellite in 1958: It suggests a symmetry that simply isn’t there.

One wonders, finally, about the need for this historical hard sell. Notwithstanding the Tate purchase, if the last 15 years in the art world have proven anything, it’s that people are willing to pay buttloads for crap.

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