Body, Subject, Self: The Art of Piero Manzoni

Abstract

Piero Manzoni (1933-1963) is one of the best-known and under-theorized artists in all of postwar Europe. His body of work includes a range of practices from monochrome painting to readymade objects, from participatory sculpture to designs for architecture. More than simply innovative in its form and media, however, Manzoni's practice articulates a politics of the body and of the self that departs radically from the belief systems at stake in the work of his contemporaries in both Europe and America. If other postwar artists still claimed access to transcendence, to nature, or to autonomous subjectivity, Manzoni responds with works that reveal the body and the self as material and discursive effects of power relations.