Piero Manzoni was always at the Giamaica. The Giamica, which the poet Beniamino Dal Fabbro had renamed 'Jamais ca' it was in Brera the artists' section of Milan. This cafe-bar is the counterpart of the Cedar Tavern in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. De Kooning and Gorky used to drink there, and so did Manzoni, one glass of white wine after the other. With his large head and short neck, Manzoni was like a character out of Alfred Jarry, a King Ubu, or even the son Ubu would have liked to have had, but not that Archeopterix, a creature half human and half bird, born by his unfaithful wife. What is certainly true is that Piero Manzoni learned from Jarry and King Ubu the art of ruling general states and the various strategies of the avant-garde. At the same time, he was listening to Leonardo, a tramp in Milan's Central Park, who at night would whisper in his ear, painting is a mental thing.
He was the last of the avant-garde. Or at least that's what I believed when I met him in Brera in December 1956. The heaviness of his body seemed to disappear behind the extraordinary plasticity of his face. Nothing escaped his eyes; it was as if he could see in front, behind, and to the side simultaneously. His penetrating glance rapidly synthesized and conceptualized objects, people, situations, and behavior. He was able to translate into plastic form the interplay of associations and messages carried between the realms of visual and mental fantasy. During that period, he painted hominids that appeared to be embryos born of a drunken dream and placed them in that zone of images he described in his writings and manifestos, as well as in his paintings.
Since there was such a striking affinity between Manzoni's hominids and the children of my so-called nuclear period (1951), I said to him,
"let's stick together, let's exhibit together, write manifestos, let's be a nuisance, let's protest against every art mafia and against the aethetics of - art for art's sake ! "
We worked together for two years. We published manifestos such as the one entitled The End of Style (September 1957) or the article that predated it, Per una pittura organica (June 1957). Together, in October of that same year in Milan, we organized the last exhibition of the Nuclear Movement in which Asger Jorn and Yves Klein, also took part. Our association continued thereafter with various " Baj, Fontana, Manzoni " exhibitions similar to the one that opened thirty years later, September 1989, in New York at Marisa Del Re Gallery.
I used to meet him at the Giamaica, and sometimes I would go up to his studio: a stark, bare room where he was beginning to immerse himself in the whiteness of kaolin and plaster. He would spread out canvases and then crumple and wrinkle them into thousands of stiffened white folds. He used white cotton, white polystyrene, and rolls of white paper. We worked on paintings together. I loved violating the whiteness and the hardened folds of canvases that were the opposite of Fontana's slashes. I violated them with figures that were full of expression, gesturings, and interplanetary dadaism. I believe that it was this very concept of expression (and therefore expressionism) that divided us by the end of the fifties.
During the following years, Manzoni moved into inventions that became increasingly more esoteric and conceptual:
the packages,
the Azimuth,
the eggs of the artist to eat Aesthetics,
the alphabets,
and a myriad of other projects, such as the one for a pneumatic theater, that often did not leave the paper they were written on.
Within him smoldered the legacy of our shared experiences. It was apparent both in that intense desire of his to communicate, through the vehicle of artistic expression, and in his thrust against the empty and formal manifestations of the dominant culture. In short, he continued to protest against the artistic and critical establishment, which was then (and is perhaps also now) especially burdensome.
He was against art that is pretentious, conventional, purist, ascetic, that is always ready to bend to the directives of a kind of bureaucracy of the beautiful: the beautiful of the polished, lacquered, varnished, and shining surface. Piero wrote several letters to me on these topics.
His rabid involvement in the polemics of art and the art world finally pushed him to the brink of psychological collapse (see R.D.Laing, The Divided Self), which in turn moved him in the opposite direction of his desire to purify, whiten, and conceptualize all things. His inner confict ended in tragedy.
In 1961, in an act of defiant mockery of the art world, artists, and art criticism, which in unison treated him as though he were retarded, Piero Manzoni invented The Artist's Shit. He performed the operation himself: produced it, put it in a box, sealed it, labled it, numbered it, and signed it. This filthy gesture brought all his relationships-not only with the art world but also with his own former aspirations toward visual and conceptual purity-into crisis. He became increasingly restless; he started to travel and to drink heavily.
By the age of thirty he had drunk himself to death.
He died in his studio at number 16 via Fiori Chiari, on February 6, 1963. On the building is a plaque that reads: