Arts Media, Boston, May, 1998, page 15:                                                 

Piero Manzoni at the Serpentine Gallery, February 28 - April 26, 1998,
Kensington Gardens, London, England

 I had always thought of Piero Manzoni (1933-1963) as merely a prankster artist, setting the stage for Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Orlan - artists who thrive on shock value. This was based on the work of his I  learned about in art school - the infamous canned excrement, Merde d'artista. I was overwhelmed and giddy with the Manzoni exhibition at the newly renovated Serpentine Gallery, a lovely exhibition space on the edge of Kensington Gardens. Between the semi-opaque skylights and ceiling-to-floor windows casting simultaneous spells of intense light and subtle illumination, Manzoni's work absorbed and reflected back every ray. A Catholic and an anarchist, Manzoni died at the age of 29, but his  rebellious aura permeates contemporary art, even overpowers it. The initial shock of Hirst's sharks in formaldehyde wears down into dull acknowledgement. Koon's pornographic photographs with Ciccolina are almost forgotten. Manzoni's shit, emptied breaths, and conceptual flurries, continue to expand the map of revolutionary artistic possibility.

The Serpentine Gallery, which focuses on contemporary art,  chose to reopen their doors with Manzoni because of his  pivotal role in the shattering of modernism into performative, conceptual, and biting post-modernisms. Manzoni, along with Duchamp who said that everything is art, Lucio Fontana's slit canvases, and Marcel Broodthaers' painted bones,
helped to undermine traditional notions of artistic production and reception, validate subversive strategies as effective means to bring about change, and demonstrate the use of humor as a provocative formal gesture.   Walking into the room of achromes, I was reminded of Robert Ryman's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art - all that splendid, meditative white. Manzoni's achromes are raw canvases, undyed linens, felt, and off-white cloths - some stitched into minimalist grids, others soaked in plaster, kaolin, and glue, and left to harden, buckle, crack, and form on  their own. Critics, and even Manzoni himself, claim that the achromes are nothing but emptied receptacles. But, like Rachel Whiteread's cast concrete house that conjures up ghostly tenants and the gravity of housing issues,  have the pulls and folds of curtains, some like pale acne flesh, and others read as near fatal lines on an electrocardiograph. There are bread rolls  in plaster, imprisoned clumps of inedible food, its potential energy crystallized. Unlike Joseph Beuys' notorious felt suit, Manzoni's felt is not anything but a stained grid, flat cushions of soft gray, bleached blue, and drained pink.  Stepping into the next room, I am struck by a formal shift from an overcast sky to a blooming flower garden. Vitrines of fuchsia, violet, and Yves Klein blue house bursts of hairlike clouds. Feathery fiberglass and wisps of cotton and wool appear electrified with static charge. Although these pieces are also achromes, they do not absorb all the light into themselves, but reflect brilliantly, especially within the saturated vitrines. Display cases contain the detritus of Manzoni's Fiato d'artista (Artist's breath) - collapsed red balloons, once full of Manzoni's breath, their strings sealed with lead. Manzoni said, "When I blow up the balloon, I am breathing my soul into an object that becomes eternal."  One is hit with a slap of mortality when one sees the deflated remnants of such a serious  breath.  In the middle room Manzoni's presence is immortalized. Two large cases stand side by side. One is filled with scattered and stacked tins of  his canned excrement, Merda d'artista, which Manzoni sold for their weight in gold. Down the side of the pedestal is a list of the private owners who lent their tins to the Serpentine. I am amused by the success of Manzoni's critique of the commodification of art, his scatological offering. The other case contains Manzoni's Lineas (Lines), which are ink lines on paper in labeled cardboard cylinders. Manzoni claimed, "The nature of the Linea is eternal and infinite, the concept is everything. I put the Linea in a container so that people can buy the idea of the Linea. I sell an idea, an idea closed in a container. "
 
There are also two large plinths in the gallery. Both prefigure by decades, Janine Antoni's chewed cube of chocolate, Gnaw, and Mona Hautoum's magnet and iron filings cube, Socle du Monde, (an homage to Manzoni). One wooden base,  Base magica (Magic base) turns whoever stands upon it into a work of living art. A copper plate calls this piece Scultura vivente (living sculpture). There are two shoe prints on the top of the plinth upon which the viewer is compelled to stand. Dishearteningly, I did not see anyone attempt to stand on it. The other iron and bronze plinth, Socle du monde (Base of the world), is dedicated to Galileo, and appears to be upside down, supporting the earth in reverse. According to Manzoni, this is the base of the world.

 
   Perhaps the most beautiful pieces are the most fragile - his Uovo  con impronto (Egg with
thumbprint) from 1960. Manzoni consecrated a number of hard-boiled eggs with his inked thumbprint. The public was allowed to eat them, swallowing the entire exhibition in 70 minutes.  One performance was called The consumption of art by the art-devouring public. One recalls Felix Gonzalez-Torres' candy spills, from which one could take a Baci or
caramel spiral, (a minuscule, yet critical, piece from the pile that equaled the weight of Torres' and his lover's bodies). One either let the chocolate melt on her tongue like the Eucharist, or kept the candy as a fetish. Similarly, Manzoni's uneaten eggs have discolored, some of the shells have cracked, breaking up Manzonis sacred thumbprint, revealing the
calcified egg inside. The eggs are cuddled in the familiar achromatic wool, protected by simple wood boxes. A man's black thumbprint upon a white egg can not help but reference his desire for a return to origin. In one of Manzoni's many manifestos he proclaims, "Art is not true creation except insofar as it creates where mythologies have their own ultimate origin. In order to assume the meaning of one's own time, it is therefore necessary to attain one's own individual mythology at the same point at which this becomes identified with the universal mythology. Everything must be sacrificed to this possibility of discovery, this need to assume one's own gestures."