Piero Manzoni – Artist’s Shit

Super-Grotesk fett on a typographic pattern made of caps from Memphis zart, for the labels of Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit.

From the Tate Modern website:

In May 1961, while he was living in Milan, Piero Manzoni produced ninety cans of Artist’s Shit. Each was numbered on the lid 001 to 090. A label on each can, printed in Italian, English, French and German, identified the contents as “‘Artist’s Shit’, contents 30gr net freshly preserved, produced and tinned in May 1961.” In December 1961 Manzoni wrote in a letter to the artist Ben Vautier: “I should like all artists to sell their fingerprints, or else stage competitions to see who can draw the longest line or sell their shit in tins. The fingerprint is the only sign of the personality that can be accepted: if collectors want something intimate, really personal to the artist, there’s the artist’s own shit, that is really his.”

(…) Artist’s Shit was made at a time when Manzoni was producing a variety of works involving the fetishisation and commodification of his own body substances. These included marking eggs with his thumbprints before eating them, and selling balloons filled with his own breath (see Tate T07589). Of these works, the cans of Artist’s Shit have become the most notorious, in part because of a lingering uncertainty about whether they do indeed contain Manzoni’s faeces. At times when Manzoni’s reputation has seen the market value of these works increase, such uncertainties have imbued them with an additional level of irony.