There’s no specific 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 62nd anniversary that simply cannot go unmarked.
Manzoni made 90 of these signed and numbered tins, labelled Merda d’artista, and sold them for the price they’d fetch if the contents were gold — about $37 at the time.
Manzoni was (thank you, Tate) “best known for his ironic approach to avant-garde art” — which for my money means a serious artist who liked taking the piss. Or, to put it another way: my kind of chap.
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 considerably 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 spoiling the mystery and making both (and, indeed, all the others) worthless.
We are simultaneously certain and uncertain about what’s inside. Schrodinger’s scat, if you will.
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 about the place, whereas 90 tins of 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.
To begin with, the set of scales you used to get the quantities right wouldn’t be one you wanted to use again, and on top of that, your studio, in the unimprovable words of Viz Comic, would start to smell like Gillian McKeith’s Tupperware cupboard.
So, when you consider the logistics, plaster seems a lot more likely. However many flies there may have been in Manzoni’s studio 62 years ago, there were none on Piero.
As that Guardian article says, in the end it doesn’t matter what’s in there.
…and seven minutes into this (all of which I can recommend) art historian James Fox says that what’s in those tins is 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.
