Fiato d'artista

It could be bought for 200 Lira per liter, the artist’s breath. It couldn’t be seen. But it was given a form in the inflated balloon which you now see slumped down in "Fiato d’artista". A hallmark of the work of Italian artist Piero Manzoni, who died young in 1963, at the age of twenty-nine, was that the subject matter of his art was invisible, and that it set off a charged dialectic between visibility and invisibility. In his final years Manzoni—regarded as one of the precursors of conceptual art—was increasingly concerned with interrogating the body and its interior. In 1961, he packed his excrement in a tin and entitled the work "merda d’artista", a gesture that gained iconic status in 1960s society, which was still characterized by very strict convention. Fiato d’artista adds a deeply melancholic note to the mordant irony of the edition of ninety tins: time has released the subject matter, the artist’s breath, a long time ago. What remains are the signs of the fastener, two lead seals, which were not able to hold in what cannot be held in.