Merda d’artista
May 1961
I can’t pinpoint a date for this one, but during May 1961 Italian artist Piero Manzoni shat in some tins, so I think we can all agree that – precise or otherwise – this is a 65th anniversary that simply cannot go unmarked.
Manzoni made 90 of these signed and numbered tins, labelled (in four languages) Artist’s Shit, and sold them for the price they’d fetch if the contents were gold – about $37 at the time.
Manzoni was (says the Tate) “best known for his ironic approach to avant-garde art”, which is Art World Speak for piss-taking prankster.
He was also known for his 1960 work Artist’s Breath – a series of balloons he’d blown up and attached to boards.
These days, the one in the Tate looks like this
…which I would guess was exactly what he wanted. How could a restorer tackle that?
He also made a plinth which sits upside down bearing the words SOCLE DU MONDE (base of the world) claiming the entire planet as a Manzoni artwork. It’s now at the Herning Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark.
It’s the shite in a can he’s best remembered for, of course. They’re worth a lot more than their weight in gold now. The last one to go to auction, in 2015, went for £182,500. But that’s not the best thing about them.
Because no one really knows what’s in there. If you open one to find out, you destroy the artwork. Even if you have £365,000 lying around and buy two, you can’t open one without making both worthless.
We are simultaneously certain and uncertain about what’s inside.
Schrodinger’s scat, if you will.
In his book Breakfast at Sotheby’s – an A-Z of the Art World, writer and former Antiques Roadshow expert Philip Hook says
One tin is rumoured to have been opened in a museum, for conservation purposes, and found, distressingly, to be empty.
...which rather begs the question: would it not have been more distressing to find a desiccated turd in there? And also: “rumoured”? Hook may have been Director of Impressionist & Modern Art at Sotheby’s for some years, but I remain sceptical.
In 2007, one of Manzoni’s collaborators, Agostino Bonalumi, said the tins were actually filled with plaster – which sounds credible. It’s something an artist would be likely to have in their studio, whereas filling 90 tins with 30g each would require 2.7kg of excrement, or (based on the average human output being 128g a day) about three weeks’ worth of crap.
Even if you did three cans a day for three weeks (four if you don’t fancy filling tins with turds at the weekend), rather than stockpiling your faeces and doing all the canning in one day, it wouldn’t be a pleasant process. The set of scales you used to get the quantities right wouldn’t be one you wanted to use again, for starters. So, when you consider the logistics, plaster seems a lot more likely. However many flies there may have been in Manzoni’s studio 64 years ago, there were none on Piero.
In the end, as the Guardian says:
Does it really matter, though, what went into Manzoni’s tins? Not really. The joke, the artistry and their collectability turn on the artist’s attempt to shock, and on the fact that he signed the tins. Manzoni said that the gullible art world would buy anything signed by an artist, even a tin of faeces. He was right. Manzoni has had the last laugh. Even the excrement po-faced collectors bought from him was fake.
In his BBC4 documentary, Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art?, James Fox said “If this tin contains anything, it contains an idea”. You might want to ask ‘but is it art?’ Well, that’s up to you. I can only say that, when The Serpentine held an exhibition of Manzoni’s work in 1998, I liked it so much…
…I bought the t-shirt.