The new Danish Minister of Culture Per Stig Møller has apprently been too busy in his previous job with the wars in Irak and Afghanistan to know that the cans of Manzoni(Randers ArtMuseum) contains...
'The cans of Artist's Shit have become the most notorious, in part because of a lingering uncertainty about whether they do indeed contain Manzoni's faeces. At times when Manzoni's reputation has seen the market value of these works increase, such uncertainties have imbued them with an additional level of irony...(Tate Gallery)
So much for plaster, art and irony Per Stig !
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Deeper Into Shit
Delving deeper into the Baj text, I want to deplore the polarities of purity and danger, white and brown, sacrament and excrement, art and shit. These "polarities" probably escaped Manzoni. Artopian artists tend to work outside of dichotomies. As Dadaist Tristan Tzara proclaimed, art is anything the artist spits out. This may not really solve the definition/identity problem, but at least it subverts formalist definitions and allows some wiggle room.
It is not much of a stretch to change spit to shit. Art is shit. Art is produced by the artist's body. Or is art really the waste product of the artist's nervous system? Or the critic's brain?
Manzoni's canned shit proclaims that gold and shit are equivalent in terms of ultimate value. Gold is shit. Monetary value is shit. Freudians know of these shit/money equations. They also know all about the infant's more than fickle fecal gift.
Purity too is a kind of shit -- bullshit. Humans cannot produce purity, much less perceive it. Even so, Manzoni himself never achieved the gratuitous "purity" of, say, Rauschenberg's all-white paintings of 1951, one of which is on display at Gagosian as part of several touchstone lineups intended to put Manzoni in context.
I think Manzoni's all-white achromes, whether composed of calcium sulfate-soaked canvas or gone all feathery, linger over texture far too long. Manzoni never achieves the nothingness of Klein's all-blue monochromes or his exhibition of an empty art gallery. When it comes to Manzoni, only his shit was pure.
So was there indeed some deep conflict expressed by what some might see as an opposition between Manzoni's white paintings (e.g., purity) and his canned shit (e.g., danger) that, suggests artist Baj, led to Manzoni's unusual premature demise? That opposition is too simple. If there had been any disequilibrium, it was caused by Manzoni treating purity and shit as identical, not as opposites. Or in his own immortal words:
It is not a question of shaping things or of articulating messages. (And one can't resort to extraneous interventions, parascientific mechanics, psychoanalytic intimacies, graphic compositions, ethnographical fantasies because every discipline carries within it the elements of its own solution.) For are not fantasizing, abstraction, and self-expression empty fictions? There is nothing to be said: There is only to be, to live.
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