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Henk Peeters, with Manzoni his signature and certificate
Peeters felt the most affinity with Piero Manzoni; he had a very different relationship with Yves Klein, whom he soon found “too mystical.” While Klein sought indefinability, immateriality and boundlessness, Peeters and Manzoni sought materiality and plasticity. But a healthy dose of irony also made their work very different to that of Klein. Peeters and Manzoni shared the opinion that no more illusions should be painted, but that it concerned just “being.” “Only to live” is a statement of Manzoni that Peeters quoted in apparent agreement. In 1961, Peeters was signed by Manzoni and thus declared a living artwork. In this capacity, Peeters gave the opening speech at the Manzoni exhibition at the Stedelijk Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven (September 26, 1969).
i stand here, not really as a speaker, but as part of the exhibition. here, on my arm, rubbed off by regular bathing, was once the signature of piero manzoni. in the exhibition you'll be able to see the certificate of authenticity, that i have been declared an artwork by manzoni.
the first self-witnessing artwork. let the nightwatch tell us something about rembrandt, those painted guys just keep their mouths shut.
you'll now be able to hear from me what i know about my creator (setter: everything lower case[mr1] !). i have to honestly admit that the text i came to eindhoven with this afternoon, has undergone some thorough alterations during these last few hours. not that my view of manzoni would have changed so quickly. it was just a huge surprise to see an exhibition here – a splendid one for that matter – of someone who turns out to be so remarkably different from the person to whom this text is dedicated.
this problem is so important to me at this present moment, that it seems the best thing i can do is to outline to you this manzoni, absent in the exhibition, as thoroughly as possible, so that you won't get a distorted image as you would in just seeing this exhibition on its own.
nevertheless, the experience as with this exhibition is not entirely unknown to me. the yves klein exhibition at the stedelijk museum was something similar, as there too the yves that i knew was completely lost in a beautiful painting exhibition.
yet in the assessment, a major role will be played by the fact that the figure of manzoni, as well as klein, will evolve with you. that in the further development you'll continue to see a confirmation of what their factual conception was, thoughts that went much further than they were capable of painting. that's why their paintings suddenly become classically beautiful, faster than you could have imagined. most of what you see here, i already saw shortly after it was made. but at the time i saw it as an illustration of what we were concerned with besides the purely painterly. now these canvases have actually become paintings again in the old fashioned sense, although [if you ask me] the factual development still lies prior to the moment that the artwork comes into existence. that's why the museum setting doesn't really agree with me at all and i ask myself whether this exhibition would ever have come into being had manzoni still been alive.
when jean leering asked me to relate some of my personal memories of manzoni as an introduction to this exhibition, he added: manzoni remains less clear to us than for instance an yves klein. and with that he is then compared with a kindred spirit artist, both of whom have played a major role in a movement that has gone down in history as 'zero' or 'nul'.
that doesn't mean to say that his contribution would be any less, certainly not less, not more, different. and different to what extent, was less clear to us then than it is now, when we see a good overview of his work. with klein (1928-62) this was already the case and paul wember, with his comprehensive documentary, pinned yves klein down and placed him in art history. this is much less the case with manzoni (1933-63), the interpretations are still far too varied for that and so you'll also have to weigh up my words in this light.
please don't think that i want to use yves klein as a springboard to get to manzoni. i would do them both an injustice. although mutually recriminating each other of plagiarism in the comradely tradition both, with hindsight, turned out to be separate, original figures and it is now quite explicable that their misunderstandings were summed up so seriously, given how little they knew of themselves and of each other.
yet i can say that it was particularly manzoni who often posed problems to us during his life. but this had more to do with his stand, which alone had already clearly distinguished itself from that of klein. yves stood remarkably far from everyday life. he saw himself as a kind of medievalist, who found enough explanations for life in mysticism to worry about actual phenomena.
klein was concerned with art history, where he kept seeing his place being clearly marked out. he therefore also naturally developed from one phase to the next. for him it was still ultimately an artistic development, however paradoxical this now sounds to the reader of his writings. his ideology was that of isolation in the horizontal sense, that's why he rose so high.
manzoni, however, gradually became more directly focused on the scene. perhaps a little too much on the isolated aspect of the art world. but it explains a lot of his brilliant ideas, that were often reactions to or parodies of what he saw or heard.
he processed much of what arose through conversations with friends and gave the impression to many that he took off with their ideas. i have to say that i also couldn't stand him for a while either when i saw that he quietly incorporated a phase of my – which i thought to be 'own' – work in his oeuvre and as compensation proposed to divide europe as a market: me italy, germany and (with a feeling for history) japan, you the rest. switzerland remains neutral and that's where we'll have a joint exhibition. which liechti-lienhard would then organise, but which never took place because of piero's death.
i got to know manzoni in 1960, when he called me from rotterdam to arrange a meeting - he was there with gust romijn. it sounded as though he had severe angina, but it later turned out that this louis armstrong-esque voice actually belonged to him, perhaps partly due to chain smoking.
i was already slightly acquainted with his work through the exhibition that hans sonnenberg had held of him in the rotterdamse kunstkring. he came here to rotterdam through a friend that had a freight company and was therefore able to help him with cheap transport. nevertheless, i saw the work a year later at the posthoorn in the hague. for the most part they were smaller works of strips or square cloths that were soaked in china clay and glue and stuck onto linen, as well as smoothly plastered surfaces with only an edge as a sort of panelling in the bottom half of the canvas and next to it structures in lumpy plaster of paris or wrinkled cloth, everything bright white. a relief, such an immaculate exhibition, those were my first impressions.
most canvases stayed with hans sonnenberg in rotterdam after the exhibition, who sold most of them to martin visser in 1962, one of the first to take an interest in this work, and the rest except for one, to a belgian gallery who knew that manzoni had passed away just before sonnenberg did. whatever further impressions the exhibitions may have left behind is now difficult to ascertain. with the exception of jan schoonhoven i never met any colleagues who had a good word to say about them. the criticisms excelled in stupidity, but that was no peculiarity in our beloved fatherland.
in those days holland was just getting drunk on cobra, tachism and this serenity was just a bit too early, the hangover of expressionism was still in its infancy.
only the work of the 'dutch informal group' (1958-60) showed related phenomena. at the time this group included armando, even kees van bohemen's work was fairly quiet then compared to his usual self, jan schoonhoven and myself, though bram (van den boogaard) bogart also joined in sometimes in the beginning. we too were interested in the monochrome.
jan henderikse, who was also one of us, made smooth white, grey or black surfaces in a thick impasto, armando also went completely black then, schoonhoven made grey, almost clogged up drippings and with me it was grey with a white or black edge.
together we drew the obvious conclusions from tachism (tobey, rothko) or matter painters (dubuffet, tapiès) and yet also remained proud of the fact that we didn't come from the 'cold art kitchen' of geometry. we shared these origins with manzoni and yves klein, who i'd gotten to know earlier in paris. through him contact was established in 1960 with his, then future, brother-in-law günther uecker and through the latter we also got acquainted with mack and piene. towards the autumn the 'informal' became the 'nul' group, in kinship with the german 'zero'. plans for the 'nul' exhibition at the stedelijk originated in the spring of '61 in uecker's studio during a conversation with armando, klein, henderikse and myself.
shortly afterwards manzoni came to see me at home and we drew up the final list of participants, for which he'd brought the agreed cooperation of fontana and castellani. more or less against his will we also added lo savio to the list, who was making a big impression in leverkusen at the time, but we'd already lost contact with him prior to the exhibition.
at such times manzoni was very certain in his opinions, he had a clear view of the development. he also pointed me to gruppo T, of whom he particularly found gianni colombo to be of significance.
even though he preferred to talk about himself, although only in the knowledge however that one was interested in his ideas, he still took notice of the work of others. he was one of the first for instance to show an interest in my work. he was thrilled with a white plastic panel with tufts of cotton wool, that he immediately took away with him and later gave me a splendid blue surface of fibreglass hairs for in return, which also hung in the nul exhibition. i then lent this to the same belgian gallery where sonnenberg sold his collection, but who never actually returned it.
for the nul exhibition itself, manzoni's contribution came in the form of piero himself, entirely clad in light brown corduroy as ever, and we thought he'd put on some extra weight. when i asked about his work, the small suitcase that he always carried with him opened up and from it came, besides six tins of 'artist's shit' (30 grams, freshly preserved, made in italy), a tiny white panel with nylon fibres (i still have it today). he hung it high up in the room that was allotted to him and castellani and went in search of a café.
i became a little worried then about a good presentation of his work. luckily sonnenberg still had some of the classic 'achromes', some more also became available elsewhere - also from gust romijn – and so his contribution grew. 'het vrije volk' delivered a roll of newsprint paper with which he would try to beat the line drawing record.
our german colleagues were repeatedly angry about his submission of 'artist's shit', to which manzoni sought revenge and asked me to deliver 20 or so white chickens to release in their kinetic show during the opening.
when we weren't getting anywhere, he suggested to me to simply board up his room with the inscription 'the spirit of the artist resides inside'. but after he'd spent the night taking in some dutch courage, we found him with a few bags of fibreglass on the afternoon prior to the opening working on an enormous panel of two by three metres, which he signed and bequeathed to the stedelijk museum, who left it for the garbage man after the exhibition.
an exhibition, that was one of the shortest in the stedelijk's history – thirteen days – and yet one that pulled in over a thousand visitors a day.
it wasn't down to an enthusiastic press: pretentious krautish pranks (kouwenaar), infantile knock ups born out of boredom, said doelman, who thought fontana was an obtrusive little old man, nihilistic and intolerable, thought adri laan, enough to cause a stomach ache, ascertained jan donia, a zero point, it can't actually be any worse, said gabriël smit, a manifestation of malaise and boredom, of listless discontent with itself and the world, a mentality that social psychologists should occupy themselves with, but justifying this exhibition and all the uproar the least (hans redeker phd), or a mental exercise for empty people, jacked up by semi-spirituality (marius van beek in 'de tijd'), presumably they made a wrong choice in their initial career, hopes dolf welling, who thinks the advertising element is a very nasty side to this project. and wentinck says to sandberg: whoever exhibits cézanne and van gogh, and then these charlatans, swindlers and nitwits around the corner, understands both nothing of art and nothing of a museum.
i give you these statements in order to sketch an atmosphere that now appears almost pathological to us, not even seven years later. that this work, which is now hung around us, appearing so beneficially calm and serene, was able to make our dutch art critics so angry. when the second nul exhibition in 1965, where manzoni could only be represented by his work, delivered us so many pats on the back, it was clear that the movement as such was finished. the groups disintegrated into art producers scrapping over a piece of the market. piero was spared much in this respect, but knowing his mentality i strongly believe that he would still have withdrawn himself from this consolidation, remaining uncontrollable to every museum director. the first nul exhibition focused largely on the monochrome. earlier (1961) kultermann had already dedicated an exhibition to this theme, where manzoni as well as klein were represented, although no dutch artists however.
klein interpreted the monochrome in an almost mystical, zen-buddhist manner, manzoni declared the achrome to be far more sensory, materialistic. both declared the artistic problem to be a thing of the past (a little too early in retrospect), klein talks about the 'inexplicable' and makes the artist out to be a god; manzoni sees the transgression of art as a condition to life itself. in 1960 he wrote in 'azimuth', a magazine which he published twice in collaboration with his friend castellani: up until now the artist was concerned with the denial of nature. the pure white linen is covered with unnatural colours and conceived forms. the unlimited possibilities the material offers, are denied instead of exploited. why is the surface not accepted and seen as a fragment, as evidence of endless space? with this he resolutely draws conclusions from fontana's spatialism and there's no point in debating the fact that klein was already making monochrome paintings in 1954 and manzoni in 1957, if the explanation of the work is actually completely different. manzoni develops out of baj (around 1955), via burri's saccos (the first achromes), fontana was clearly a godfather to a development which enabled manzoni to still discover much unknown territory as a pioneer.
i can still remember all of klein's reproaches towards fontana as well as manzoni as though they were following in his footsteps. now we see each of them, just to stay with this trio, as a completely individual personality, even in their very connected contributions towards zero/nul.
and in that respect manzoni is then a more likely consequence of fontana, with whom he shares a materialistic way of thinking, and then yves klein runs parallel on the opposite side of the stage.
manzoni then says: you don't have to paint illusions anymore (and klein starts with the illusion itself: exhibiting the void), the painting is now what it is, not what it represents. there is nothing more to say, simply to be. one only has to live …
with this statement he searches for more than just an explanation to his paintings. manzoni did more than painting. these words serve as an explanation for his own existence, a life which he knew would be short-lived. it makes it a lot more understandable that he had to search so diligently for an explanation for his thirty year existence. he suffered from an incurable liver disease and lived on medicines and painkillers.
with hindsight it becomes ever clearer that the need to set an end point, if only with the years on end certainty that death would suddenly catch him unawares (manzoni established his oeuvre in just six years), would form a defining element in his work. more than that: it motivates everything. with each new encounter, that little suitcase continued to open and his entire oeuvre was on display. you saw the complete work of manzoni in miniature format, first the white achromes, then the lines (after 1959), which kept getting longer. he made one in denmark that was at least seven kilometres, but ultimately the record fits in the little suitcase: the line of infinite length, contained in a solid wooden cylinder. next the 'bodies of air', small white balloons (1959), of which you'll see a reminder in the exhibition in the shape of a kind of crumpled condom. after the opening you'll see it in its original, virgin state in a film, where it floats in free space in an upwards stream of oxygen (1960). the first sculpture without a plinth was followed up by a 'magic plinth' in 1961, a pedestal with two steps that invites everyone to take their place to become an artwork for as long they remained there.
with this he broke through the 'art'-ificial boundaries between art and nature, and literally brought art to life. in the same year he signed naked girls at jes petersen in glücksburg, not only as a parody on what yves klein was doing with his 'human brushes' but to declare life itself to be art.
his largest creation follows in 1962: 'hommage a galileï', the plinth is now turned on its head and bears the entire terrestrial globe. it's very cleverly been left out of this exhibition, as manzoni's intentions are made much clearer by the large photograph on the wall. and with this the little suitcase has exceeded its limits, it is now full of art, reality is outside.
the accompanying story of manzoni subsequently becomes longer still, as the list of proposed projects grew. from inflatable animals that led autonomous lives through new technical possibilities. they fed on solar power through silicon cells. they also had to be able to fuck, although he thought science would have to deal with the reproductive side, but he had full confidence in this. he also had designs for enormous antennas that would be able to receive music from space by means of amplifiers, rooms with vibrating walls, he had plans for a pneumatic theatre and he was working on an electronically controlled 'labirinto' shortly before his death, projects that we are now acquainted with under the term 'environments'. and so the invisible little suitcase grew, but each random moment was a completed stage, its creator could take leave at any moment. again and again, he went to the point of extremity to always come to a conclusion.
that's why we as survivors have much to thank this extremist. yet this appreciation is still rather slow: barely known before his death in his own country, and in our country a handful of admirers through a silly coincidence, a relationship now awarded by jean leering with this first retrospective, ten years after his (almost) first solo exhibition in the rotterdamse kunstkring, six years after his death.
and what is the effect, or why has so little of it filtered through? how is it that everything on one side, the historic, goes so quickly, but then on the other side, the processing, the acceptation, so slowly? i must say that this problem has particularly preoccupied me in recent years. how was it possible that the nul exhibitions, in which manzoni had such an important part, were accepted so quickly and painlessly, but that it also stopped there, that you currently don't see an exhibition anymore or you do discover something by yourself or your friends, albeit with other names below them and that's why the prices are also higher.
that some of us became involved in the system of production and have to fabricate ad nauseum their own discoveries, paralysed through it and therefore unable to change anything to it. a kind of volkswagen-syndrome: only professionals see the difference in the new models.
that we now all play a role in the glorious history of art, but that nothing else actually comes of it besides a bit of trade. that i've drawn conclusions and don't play along anymore.
'a new art needs to come' wrote armando. in contrast i would like to propose 'a new audience needs to come'. for me, manzoni has clearly demonstrated this problem. he therefore won't form a new school, as he's already closed all of the schools. his work never displays the continuity of the artist that is snared in a cliché.
every moment, every work was a final conclusion, unrepeatable. in a book about manzoni, pagliarani writes: his problem was chopping down, not shooting roots. of course manzoni's background also plays a role in this, scion of an illustrious noble lineage. allesandro manzoni once brought our ancestors to tears with books such as 'the betrothed'.
an environment in which work was never seen as a livelihood, also made it possible for him to always adopt such a free attitude, although for his family he lived, figuratively as well as literally: in a side street of the via manzoni (the via cernaia in milan).
and to be a count in the twentieth century is already so absurd, that it wasn't any trouble for him to unscrew all other surviving values like 'art' and such, in one go (note the play on words as nowadays 'to loosen the screws' can simply mean conformism. the power of manzoni therefore is that the end result didn't lead to a new style of art, a way to commence production, no, each phase was a conclusion which only knew one way out: the road to life itself. in this sense he was more of a pioneer to 'nouveau realism' or 'conceptual art' than many colleagues.
a good illustration of this is his proposal for a contribution to an exhibition with the theme 'the sea': just put a bowl of seawater there for me.
no prospect of a new art, only reality, life itself as a solution to all artistic problems.
Text spoken by Henk peeters at the opening of the exhibition of the work of Piero Manzoni on Friday 26th September 1969 at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.
Translation Mike Ritchie
the first self-witnessing artwork. let the nightwatch tell us something about rembrandt, those painted guys just keep their mouths shut.
you'll now be able to hear from me what i know about my creator (setter: everything lower case[mr1] !). i have to honestly admit that the text i came to eindhoven with this afternoon, has undergone some thorough alterations during these last few hours. not that my view of manzoni would have changed so quickly. it was just a huge surprise to see an exhibition here – a splendid one for that matter – of someone who turns out to be so remarkably different from the person to whom this text is dedicated.
this problem is so important to me at this present moment, that it seems the best thing i can do is to outline to you this manzoni, absent in the exhibition, as thoroughly as possible, so that you won't get a distorted image as you would in just seeing this exhibition on its own.
nevertheless, the experience as with this exhibition is not entirely unknown to me. the yves klein exhibition at the stedelijk museum was something similar, as there too the yves that i knew was completely lost in a beautiful painting exhibition.
yet in the assessment, a major role will be played by the fact that the figure of manzoni, as well as klein, will evolve with you. that in the further development you'll continue to see a confirmation of what their factual conception was, thoughts that went much further than they were capable of painting. that's why their paintings suddenly become classically beautiful, faster than you could have imagined. most of what you see here, i already saw shortly after it was made. but at the time i saw it as an illustration of what we were concerned with besides the purely painterly. now these canvases have actually become paintings again in the old fashioned sense, although [if you ask me] the factual development still lies prior to the moment that the artwork comes into existence. that's why the museum setting doesn't really agree with me at all and i ask myself whether this exhibition would ever have come into being had manzoni still been alive.
when jean leering asked me to relate some of my personal memories of manzoni as an introduction to this exhibition, he added: manzoni remains less clear to us than for instance an yves klein. and with that he is then compared with a kindred spirit artist, both of whom have played a major role in a movement that has gone down in history as 'zero' or 'nul'.
that doesn't mean to say that his contribution would be any less, certainly not less, not more, different. and different to what extent, was less clear to us then than it is now, when we see a good overview of his work. with klein (1928-62) this was already the case and paul wember, with his comprehensive documentary, pinned yves klein down and placed him in art history. this is much less the case with manzoni (1933-63), the interpretations are still far too varied for that and so you'll also have to weigh up my words in this light.
please don't think that i want to use yves klein as a springboard to get to manzoni. i would do them both an injustice. although mutually recriminating each other of plagiarism in the comradely tradition both, with hindsight, turned out to be separate, original figures and it is now quite explicable that their misunderstandings were summed up so seriously, given how little they knew of themselves and of each other.
yet i can say that it was particularly manzoni who often posed problems to us during his life. but this had more to do with his stand, which alone had already clearly distinguished itself from that of klein. yves stood remarkably far from everyday life. he saw himself as a kind of medievalist, who found enough explanations for life in mysticism to worry about actual phenomena.
klein was concerned with art history, where he kept seeing his place being clearly marked out. he therefore also naturally developed from one phase to the next. for him it was still ultimately an artistic development, however paradoxical this now sounds to the reader of his writings. his ideology was that of isolation in the horizontal sense, that's why he rose so high.
manzoni, however, gradually became more directly focused on the scene. perhaps a little too much on the isolated aspect of the art world. but it explains a lot of his brilliant ideas, that were often reactions to or parodies of what he saw or heard.
he processed much of what arose through conversations with friends and gave the impression to many that he took off with their ideas. i have to say that i also couldn't stand him for a while either when i saw that he quietly incorporated a phase of my – which i thought to be 'own' – work in his oeuvre and as compensation proposed to divide europe as a market: me italy, germany and (with a feeling for history) japan, you the rest. switzerland remains neutral and that's where we'll have a joint exhibition. which liechti-lienhard would then organise, but which never took place because of piero's death.
i got to know manzoni in 1960, when he called me from rotterdam to arrange a meeting - he was there with gust romijn. it sounded as though he had severe angina, but it later turned out that this louis armstrong-esque voice actually belonged to him, perhaps partly due to chain smoking.
i was already slightly acquainted with his work through the exhibition that hans sonnenberg had held of him in the rotterdamse kunstkring. he came here to rotterdam through a friend that had a freight company and was therefore able to help him with cheap transport. nevertheless, i saw the work a year later at the posthoorn in the hague. for the most part they were smaller works of strips or square cloths that were soaked in china clay and glue and stuck onto linen, as well as smoothly plastered surfaces with only an edge as a sort of panelling in the bottom half of the canvas and next to it structures in lumpy plaster of paris or wrinkled cloth, everything bright white. a relief, such an immaculate exhibition, those were my first impressions.
most canvases stayed with hans sonnenberg in rotterdam after the exhibition, who sold most of them to martin visser in 1962, one of the first to take an interest in this work, and the rest except for one, to a belgian gallery who knew that manzoni had passed away just before sonnenberg did. whatever further impressions the exhibitions may have left behind is now difficult to ascertain. with the exception of jan schoonhoven i never met any colleagues who had a good word to say about them. the criticisms excelled in stupidity, but that was no peculiarity in our beloved fatherland.
in those days holland was just getting drunk on cobra, tachism and this serenity was just a bit too early, the hangover of expressionism was still in its infancy.
only the work of the 'dutch informal group' (1958-60) showed related phenomena. at the time this group included armando, even kees van bohemen's work was fairly quiet then compared to his usual self, jan schoonhoven and myself, though bram (van den boogaard) bogart also joined in sometimes in the beginning. we too were interested in the monochrome.
jan henderikse, who was also one of us, made smooth white, grey or black surfaces in a thick impasto, armando also went completely black then, schoonhoven made grey, almost clogged up drippings and with me it was grey with a white or black edge.
together we drew the obvious conclusions from tachism (tobey, rothko) or matter painters (dubuffet, tapiès) and yet also remained proud of the fact that we didn't come from the 'cold art kitchen' of geometry. we shared these origins with manzoni and yves klein, who i'd gotten to know earlier in paris. through him contact was established in 1960 with his, then future, brother-in-law günther uecker and through the latter we also got acquainted with mack and piene. towards the autumn the 'informal' became the 'nul' group, in kinship with the german 'zero'. plans for the 'nul' exhibition at the stedelijk originated in the spring of '61 in uecker's studio during a conversation with armando, klein, henderikse and myself.
shortly afterwards manzoni came to see me at home and we drew up the final list of participants, for which he'd brought the agreed cooperation of fontana and castellani. more or less against his will we also added lo savio to the list, who was making a big impression in leverkusen at the time, but we'd already lost contact with him prior to the exhibition.
at such times manzoni was very certain in his opinions, he had a clear view of the development. he also pointed me to gruppo T, of whom he particularly found gianni colombo to be of significance.
even though he preferred to talk about himself, although only in the knowledge however that one was interested in his ideas, he still took notice of the work of others. he was one of the first for instance to show an interest in my work. he was thrilled with a white plastic panel with tufts of cotton wool, that he immediately took away with him and later gave me a splendid blue surface of fibreglass hairs for in return, which also hung in the nul exhibition. i then lent this to the same belgian gallery where sonnenberg sold his collection, but who never actually returned it.
for the nul exhibition itself, manzoni's contribution came in the form of piero himself, entirely clad in light brown corduroy as ever, and we thought he'd put on some extra weight. when i asked about his work, the small suitcase that he always carried with him opened up and from it came, besides six tins of 'artist's shit' (30 grams, freshly preserved, made in italy), a tiny white panel with nylon fibres (i still have it today). he hung it high up in the room that was allotted to him and castellani and went in search of a café.
i became a little worried then about a good presentation of his work. luckily sonnenberg still had some of the classic 'achromes', some more also became available elsewhere - also from gust romijn – and so his contribution grew. 'het vrije volk' delivered a roll of newsprint paper with which he would try to beat the line drawing record.
our german colleagues were repeatedly angry about his submission of 'artist's shit', to which manzoni sought revenge and asked me to deliver 20 or so white chickens to release in their kinetic show during the opening.
when we weren't getting anywhere, he suggested to me to simply board up his room with the inscription 'the spirit of the artist resides inside'. but after he'd spent the night taking in some dutch courage, we found him with a few bags of fibreglass on the afternoon prior to the opening working on an enormous panel of two by three metres, which he signed and bequeathed to the stedelijk museum, who left it for the garbage man after the exhibition.
an exhibition, that was one of the shortest in the stedelijk's history – thirteen days – and yet one that pulled in over a thousand visitors a day.
it wasn't down to an enthusiastic press: pretentious krautish pranks (kouwenaar), infantile knock ups born out of boredom, said doelman, who thought fontana was an obtrusive little old man, nihilistic and intolerable, thought adri laan, enough to cause a stomach ache, ascertained jan donia, a zero point, it can't actually be any worse, said gabriël smit, a manifestation of malaise and boredom, of listless discontent with itself and the world, a mentality that social psychologists should occupy themselves with, but justifying this exhibition and all the uproar the least (hans redeker phd), or a mental exercise for empty people, jacked up by semi-spirituality (marius van beek in 'de tijd'), presumably they made a wrong choice in their initial career, hopes dolf welling, who thinks the advertising element is a very nasty side to this project. and wentinck says to sandberg: whoever exhibits cézanne and van gogh, and then these charlatans, swindlers and nitwits around the corner, understands both nothing of art and nothing of a museum.
i give you these statements in order to sketch an atmosphere that now appears almost pathological to us, not even seven years later. that this work, which is now hung around us, appearing so beneficially calm and serene, was able to make our dutch art critics so angry. when the second nul exhibition in 1965, where manzoni could only be represented by his work, delivered us so many pats on the back, it was clear that the movement as such was finished. the groups disintegrated into art producers scrapping over a piece of the market. piero was spared much in this respect, but knowing his mentality i strongly believe that he would still have withdrawn himself from this consolidation, remaining uncontrollable to every museum director. the first nul exhibition focused largely on the monochrome. earlier (1961) kultermann had already dedicated an exhibition to this theme, where manzoni as well as klein were represented, although no dutch artists however.
klein interpreted the monochrome in an almost mystical, zen-buddhist manner, manzoni declared the achrome to be far more sensory, materialistic. both declared the artistic problem to be a thing of the past (a little too early in retrospect), klein talks about the 'inexplicable' and makes the artist out to be a god; manzoni sees the transgression of art as a condition to life itself. in 1960 he wrote in 'azimuth', a magazine which he published twice in collaboration with his friend castellani: up until now the artist was concerned with the denial of nature. the pure white linen is covered with unnatural colours and conceived forms. the unlimited possibilities the material offers, are denied instead of exploited. why is the surface not accepted and seen as a fragment, as evidence of endless space? with this he resolutely draws conclusions from fontana's spatialism and there's no point in debating the fact that klein was already making monochrome paintings in 1954 and manzoni in 1957, if the explanation of the work is actually completely different. manzoni develops out of baj (around 1955), via burri's saccos (the first achromes), fontana was clearly a godfather to a development which enabled manzoni to still discover much unknown territory as a pioneer.
i can still remember all of klein's reproaches towards fontana as well as manzoni as though they were following in his footsteps. now we see each of them, just to stay with this trio, as a completely individual personality, even in their very connected contributions towards zero/nul.
and in that respect manzoni is then a more likely consequence of fontana, with whom he shares a materialistic way of thinking, and then yves klein runs parallel on the opposite side of the stage.
manzoni then says: you don't have to paint illusions anymore (and klein starts with the illusion itself: exhibiting the void), the painting is now what it is, not what it represents. there is nothing more to say, simply to be. one only has to live …
with this statement he searches for more than just an explanation to his paintings. manzoni did more than painting. these words serve as an explanation for his own existence, a life which he knew would be short-lived. it makes it a lot more understandable that he had to search so diligently for an explanation for his thirty year existence. he suffered from an incurable liver disease and lived on medicines and painkillers.
with hindsight it becomes ever clearer that the need to set an end point, if only with the years on end certainty that death would suddenly catch him unawares (manzoni established his oeuvre in just six years), would form a defining element in his work. more than that: it motivates everything. with each new encounter, that little suitcase continued to open and his entire oeuvre was on display. you saw the complete work of manzoni in miniature format, first the white achromes, then the lines (after 1959), which kept getting longer. he made one in denmark that was at least seven kilometres, but ultimately the record fits in the little suitcase: the line of infinite length, contained in a solid wooden cylinder. next the 'bodies of air', small white balloons (1959), of which you'll see a reminder in the exhibition in the shape of a kind of crumpled condom. after the opening you'll see it in its original, virgin state in a film, where it floats in free space in an upwards stream of oxygen (1960). the first sculpture without a plinth was followed up by a 'magic plinth' in 1961, a pedestal with two steps that invites everyone to take their place to become an artwork for as long they remained there.
with this he broke through the 'art'-ificial boundaries between art and nature, and literally brought art to life. in the same year he signed naked girls at jes petersen in glücksburg, not only as a parody on what yves klein was doing with his 'human brushes' but to declare life itself to be art.
his largest creation follows in 1962: 'hommage a galileï', the plinth is now turned on its head and bears the entire terrestrial globe. it's very cleverly been left out of this exhibition, as manzoni's intentions are made much clearer by the large photograph on the wall. and with this the little suitcase has exceeded its limits, it is now full of art, reality is outside.
the accompanying story of manzoni subsequently becomes longer still, as the list of proposed projects grew. from inflatable animals that led autonomous lives through new technical possibilities. they fed on solar power through silicon cells. they also had to be able to fuck, although he thought science would have to deal with the reproductive side, but he had full confidence in this. he also had designs for enormous antennas that would be able to receive music from space by means of amplifiers, rooms with vibrating walls, he had plans for a pneumatic theatre and he was working on an electronically controlled 'labirinto' shortly before his death, projects that we are now acquainted with under the term 'environments'. and so the invisible little suitcase grew, but each random moment was a completed stage, its creator could take leave at any moment. again and again, he went to the point of extremity to always come to a conclusion.
that's why we as survivors have much to thank this extremist. yet this appreciation is still rather slow: barely known before his death in his own country, and in our country a handful of admirers through a silly coincidence, a relationship now awarded by jean leering with this first retrospective, ten years after his (almost) first solo exhibition in the rotterdamse kunstkring, six years after his death.
and what is the effect, or why has so little of it filtered through? how is it that everything on one side, the historic, goes so quickly, but then on the other side, the processing, the acceptation, so slowly? i must say that this problem has particularly preoccupied me in recent years. how was it possible that the nul exhibitions, in which manzoni had such an important part, were accepted so quickly and painlessly, but that it also stopped there, that you currently don't see an exhibition anymore or you do discover something by yourself or your friends, albeit with other names below them and that's why the prices are also higher.
that some of us became involved in the system of production and have to fabricate ad nauseum their own discoveries, paralysed through it and therefore unable to change anything to it. a kind of volkswagen-syndrome: only professionals see the difference in the new models.
that we now all play a role in the glorious history of art, but that nothing else actually comes of it besides a bit of trade. that i've drawn conclusions and don't play along anymore.
'a new art needs to come' wrote armando. in contrast i would like to propose 'a new audience needs to come'. for me, manzoni has clearly demonstrated this problem. he therefore won't form a new school, as he's already closed all of the schools. his work never displays the continuity of the artist that is snared in a cliché.
every moment, every work was a final conclusion, unrepeatable. in a book about manzoni, pagliarani writes: his problem was chopping down, not shooting roots. of course manzoni's background also plays a role in this, scion of an illustrious noble lineage. allesandro manzoni once brought our ancestors to tears with books such as 'the betrothed'.
an environment in which work was never seen as a livelihood, also made it possible for him to always adopt such a free attitude, although for his family he lived, figuratively as well as literally: in a side street of the via manzoni (the via cernaia in milan).
and to be a count in the twentieth century is already so absurd, that it wasn't any trouble for him to unscrew all other surviving values like 'art' and such, in one go (note the play on words as nowadays 'to loosen the screws' can simply mean conformism. the power of manzoni therefore is that the end result didn't lead to a new style of art, a way to commence production, no, each phase was a conclusion which only knew one way out: the road to life itself. in this sense he was more of a pioneer to 'nouveau realism' or 'conceptual art' than many colleagues.
a good illustration of this is his proposal for a contribution to an exhibition with the theme 'the sea': just put a bowl of seawater there for me.
no prospect of a new art, only reality, life itself as a solution to all artistic problems.
Text spoken by Henk peeters at the opening of the exhibition of the work of Piero Manzoni on Friday 26th September 1969 at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.
Translation Mike Ritchie
