This article proposes a deepening of critical readings on Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit (1961). In order to move away from the hypertrophy of the iconoclasm attributed to the work by a substantial number of critics, we contextualize the edition based on its relationship with other works by the artist and with the poetics of important intercessors, notably Yves Klein and Marcel Duchamp. Questions related to articulations between aesthetic experience and political economy and the cleavage between Manzoni’s work and informalism were mobilized in the construction of a ground from which Germano Celant’s theses about the artist could be tensioned, and the cultural foundations that permeate the reception of Artist’s Shit could be glimpsed.
Piero Manzoni; Artist’s Shit; Iconoclasm; Materialism; Formless
