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拍品專文
The Achrome, a non-formal, non-tonal, colourless zone of material nothingness, was to prove not only the culmination the existentialist direction of much of the art of the 1950s, but also the creative tabula rasa that enabled and inspired much of the art of the 1960s from Minimalism to Arte Povera.
'We absolutely cannot consider the picture as a space onto which to project our mental scenography', Manzoni had asserted in 1957. 'It is the arena of freedom in which we search for the discovery of our first images. Images which are as absolute as possible, which cannot be valued for that which they record, explain or express, but only for that which they are to be' (P. Manzoni, For the Discovery of a Zone of Images, 1957.) Recognising that the existentialist trend of the Informel had run its course and responding to the Spatialist explorations of Fontana, Alberto Burri's self-asserting material works and the mysticism of Yves Klein's monochromes, Manzoni created in the Achrome what he described as a 'totem'. This was essentially a non-picture, a real material presence that asserted only its own formal and material properties and finally and irreparably broke down the illusive and conceptual space that has traditionally surrounded the picture plane and established the work in the real physical space of the viewer.
Although the Achromes were later to take many different material forms, the crucial element that allowed Manzoni to do this was kaolin. Applied to loose pleats of canvas, the chalky enigmatic materiality and colourlessness of kaolin both allowed and enhanced the sense of the canvas actively expressing itself without recourse to the interaction of what Manzoni rather caustically termed the gestural 'gymnastics' of the artist. In this way Manzoni's Achromes go one step further than Klein's monochromes in that, instead of having only one tone, they have, as their name suggests, none. Like Fontana's canvases, they are also spatial statements but ones that exist even without needing the artist's gestural intervention. They also have no sense of history and therefore carry no cultural baggage. In this respect they are a clear development away from the informel and from the meandering scratches and human traces of Twombly's white-ground paintings because, through the kaolin, they define their own sense of surface without betraying a sign of a human presence having ever passed over them.
The absence of any sense of an individual presence, any sense of the work having been made according to the direction or action of an individual and of the work being anything to do with a personal vision or expression, was vital to Manzoni. Responding to a Jungian view of life as being a series of responses to and interactions with a collective unconscious shared by all mankind, Manzoni believed that 'there comes a point where individual mythology and universal mythology are identical. In this context it is clear that there can be no concern with symbolism and description, memories, misty impressions, of childhood, pictoricism, sentimentalism: all this must be absolutely excluded. So must every hedonistic repetition of arguments that have already been exhausted, since the man who continues to trifle with myths that have already been discovered is an aesthete, and worse' (P. Manzoni, quoted by G. Celant in Piero Manzoni, exh.cat., Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1974, pp. 16-17).
Following Jung's theory of a universally shared collective library of archetypes, Manzoni asserted that 'the foundations of the universal value of art are given to us now by psychology. This is the common base that enables art to sink its roots to the origins before man and to discover the primary myths of humanity. The artist must confront these myths and reduce them, by means of amorphous and confused materials, to clear images'. The Achromes are the ultimate expression of such clarity. At the same time they are also, seemingly, an authorless product. The authorlessness of the Achrome was important for Manzoni, because he recognised, as Roland Barthes was later to point out in his groundbreaking 1968 essay The Death of the Author, that an author was largely a product of the social and historic conditions of his time. 'The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original,' Barthes argued. For Manzoni, the task of the artist in avoiding this inbuilt inability of the individual to create anything truly original was to be found through what he described as an 'immersion in himself' until 'he has got beyond the individual contingent level' to a point where he can 'probe deep down to reach the living germ of total humanity'. 'Everything that is humanly communicable is derived from this,' Manzoni asserted, 'and it is through the discovery of the psychic substrata that all men have in common that the relationship of author-work-spectator is made possible. In this way the work of art has the totemic value of living myth without symbolic or descriptive dispersion; it is a primary and direct expression' (ibid., 1957).
The Achrome was therefore both a tabula rasa and a building block, a concept which, like Malevich's Black Square, was intended as the corner stone of a new art. A new art which, in Manzoni's case, and as the Achrome made clear, appealed to a collective sense of humanity and existed beyond the individual. Its legacy was to show not only that everything can be art but also that art can and does exist independently of the artist. Forming the cornerstone of Manzoni's art and the springboard from which all his later actions and expressions sprung, the Achrome developed to take on many forms, manifesting both its universality and its emptiness in a variety of materials.
This work takes what is perhaps the most classical of all the formats of the kaolin on canvas Achromes. Emphasising the pleated, three-dimensional material nature of the canvas by being presented in complete contrast with the traditional smooth surface of the stretched canvas, this form of Achrome is among the most elegant and minimal of all the canvas works. Creating a series of horizontal pleated lines across the blank surface of the work, this format of Achrome conveys a sense of itself with the same kind of innate and minimal style that characterises the elegant slashes of Fontana's Attese. Unlike the Attese, however, the innate beauty of these works comes from within the formal properties of the work itself and not from the exterior action of the artist. Like the later Linee (lines), the consumable eggs with thumbprints or his signed living sculptures, the innate beauty of these Achromes reveals itself in the simplest and most direct of ways. Manzoni's function as an artist has been merely to set the seal of his individuality upon this by creating the context within which this innate and, he would argue, universal, quality can be seen.
'We absolutely cannot consider the picture as a space onto which to project our mental scenography', Manzoni had asserted in 1957. 'It is the arena of freedom in which we search for the discovery of our first images. Images which are as absolute as possible, which cannot be valued for that which they record, explain or express, but only for that which they are to be' (P. Manzoni, For the Discovery of a Zone of Images, 1957.) Recognising that the existentialist trend of the Informel had run its course and responding to the Spatialist explorations of Fontana, Alberto Burri's self-asserting material works and the mysticism of Yves Klein's monochromes, Manzoni created in the Achrome what he described as a 'totem'. This was essentially a non-picture, a real material presence that asserted only its own formal and material properties and finally and irreparably broke down the illusive and conceptual space that has traditionally surrounded the picture plane and established the work in the real physical space of the viewer.
Although the Achromes were later to take many different material forms, the crucial element that allowed Manzoni to do this was kaolin. Applied to loose pleats of canvas, the chalky enigmatic materiality and colourlessness of kaolin both allowed and enhanced the sense of the canvas actively expressing itself without recourse to the interaction of what Manzoni rather caustically termed the gestural 'gymnastics' of the artist. In this way Manzoni's Achromes go one step further than Klein's monochromes in that, instead of having only one tone, they have, as their name suggests, none. Like Fontana's canvases, they are also spatial statements but ones that exist even without needing the artist's gestural intervention. They also have no sense of history and therefore carry no cultural baggage. In this respect they are a clear development away from the informel and from the meandering scratches and human traces of Twombly's white-ground paintings because, through the kaolin, they define their own sense of surface without betraying a sign of a human presence having ever passed over them.
The absence of any sense of an individual presence, any sense of the work having been made according to the direction or action of an individual and of the work being anything to do with a personal vision or expression, was vital to Manzoni. Responding to a Jungian view of life as being a series of responses to and interactions with a collective unconscious shared by all mankind, Manzoni believed that 'there comes a point where individual mythology and universal mythology are identical. In this context it is clear that there can be no concern with symbolism and description, memories, misty impressions, of childhood, pictoricism, sentimentalism: all this must be absolutely excluded. So must every hedonistic repetition of arguments that have already been exhausted, since the man who continues to trifle with myths that have already been discovered is an aesthete, and worse' (P. Manzoni, quoted by G. Celant in Piero Manzoni, exh.cat., Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1974, pp. 16-17).
Following Jung's theory of a universally shared collective library of archetypes, Manzoni asserted that 'the foundations of the universal value of art are given to us now by psychology. This is the common base that enables art to sink its roots to the origins before man and to discover the primary myths of humanity. The artist must confront these myths and reduce them, by means of amorphous and confused materials, to clear images'. The Achromes are the ultimate expression of such clarity. At the same time they are also, seemingly, an authorless product. The authorlessness of the Achrome was important for Manzoni, because he recognised, as Roland Barthes was later to point out in his groundbreaking 1968 essay The Death of the Author, that an author was largely a product of the social and historic conditions of his time. 'The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original,' Barthes argued. For Manzoni, the task of the artist in avoiding this inbuilt inability of the individual to create anything truly original was to be found through what he described as an 'immersion in himself' until 'he has got beyond the individual contingent level' to a point where he can 'probe deep down to reach the living germ of total humanity'. 'Everything that is humanly communicable is derived from this,' Manzoni asserted, 'and it is through the discovery of the psychic substrata that all men have in common that the relationship of author-work-spectator is made possible. In this way the work of art has the totemic value of living myth without symbolic or descriptive dispersion; it is a primary and direct expression' (ibid., 1957).
The Achrome was therefore both a tabula rasa and a building block, a concept which, like Malevich's Black Square, was intended as the corner stone of a new art. A new art which, in Manzoni's case, and as the Achrome made clear, appealed to a collective sense of humanity and existed beyond the individual. Its legacy was to show not only that everything can be art but also that art can and does exist independently of the artist. Forming the cornerstone of Manzoni's art and the springboard from which all his later actions and expressions sprung, the Achrome developed to take on many forms, manifesting both its universality and its emptiness in a variety of materials.
This work takes what is perhaps the most classical of all the formats of the kaolin on canvas Achromes. Emphasising the pleated, three-dimensional material nature of the canvas by being presented in complete contrast with the traditional smooth surface of the stretched canvas, this form of Achrome is among the most elegant and minimal of all the canvas works. Creating a series of horizontal pleated lines across the blank surface of the work, this format of Achrome conveys a sense of itself with the same kind of innate and minimal style that characterises the elegant slashes of Fontana's Attese. Unlike the Attese, however, the innate beauty of these works comes from within the formal properties of the work itself and not from the exterior action of the artist. Like the later Linee (lines), the consumable eggs with thumbprints or his signed living sculptures, the innate beauty of these Achromes reveals itself in the simplest and most direct of ways. Manzoni's function as an artist has been merely to set the seal of his individuality upon this by creating the context within which this innate and, he would argue, universal, quality can be seen.