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Lot Essay
Linea m. 1,76 stems from one of Piero Manzoni’s most iconic and provocative series: the Linee, or ‘lines.’ Each of these works consists of a sealed, cylindrical box containing a rolled length of paper, on which a line is drawn in black ink. A label on the tube records the line’s length and date of execution in English and French. In the present example, we are told that the line is 1.76 metres long, and was made in November 1959. Like many Linee, it also includes a small ‘sample’ swatch of line pasted to the exterior. Intended to remain unopened, the Linee are radical works whose central component is less an object than an idea: Duchampian in spirit, they anticipate much of the conceptual art that would not emerge as a definable movement until well after Manzoni’s death in 1963. As Manzoni put it, ‘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’ (P. Manzoni, quoted in Piero Manzoni, exh. cat. Serpentine Gallery, London 1998, p. 110). The present work has been held in the same private collection for more than half a century. It was included in Manzoni’s landmark posthumous retrospective at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, in 1971; in the major period survey Identité Italienne: L’art en Italie depuis 1959 organised by Germano Celant at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, in 1981; and in a solo show of Manzoni’s work at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples, in 2007.
The very literal expressions of the body in his famed Artist’s Breath (1960) and Artist’s Shit (1961)—the latter of which caused great controversy when shown in the 1971 Rome exhibition—are only the most notorious among Manzoni’s pioneering conceptual statements. He also consecrated boiled eggs with his thumbprint, which gallery-goers were invited to eat; he signed people’s bodies to declare them works of art; his Socle du monde (1961), a plinth inverted as if to support the earth, claimed the entire world as an artwork. Like the Linee, these works were at once utopian assertions of artistic agency and parodies of an art world defined by object-worship. Manzoni made at least fifty Linee between April and December of 1959, ranging in length from 0.78 to 33.63 metres. In July 1960, he would create a line 7,200 metres long using a newspaper printing press in Herning, Denmark, which was subsequently entombed in a large lead-iron container and buried in the ground: he also made several works that he christened Linee di lunghezza infinita (Lines of infinite length), which were in fact cylinders of solid wood. Bringing together the ideas of infinity, value and the raw magic of the creative act that were central to Manzoni’s practice, works like Linea m. 1,76 are elegant relics of his ritual-conceptual vision.
The very literal expressions of the body in his famed Artist’s Breath (1960) and Artist’s Shit (1961)—the latter of which caused great controversy when shown in the 1971 Rome exhibition—are only the most notorious among Manzoni’s pioneering conceptual statements. He also consecrated boiled eggs with his thumbprint, which gallery-goers were invited to eat; he signed people’s bodies to declare them works of art; his Socle du monde (1961), a plinth inverted as if to support the earth, claimed the entire world as an artwork. Like the Linee, these works were at once utopian assertions of artistic agency and parodies of an art world defined by object-worship. Manzoni made at least fifty Linee between April and December of 1959, ranging in length from 0.78 to 33.63 metres. In July 1960, he would create a line 7,200 metres long using a newspaper printing press in Herning, Denmark, which was subsequently entombed in a large lead-iron container and buried in the ground: he also made several works that he christened Linee di lunghezza infinita (Lines of infinite length), which were in fact cylinders of solid wood. Bringing together the ideas of infinity, value and the raw magic of the creative act that were central to Manzoni’s practice, works like Linea m. 1,76 are elegant relics of his ritual-conceptual vision.