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Piet Dirkx cigarbox 330
Gilbert & George/ Naked shit paintings
The blog of yesterday reminded me that Piero Manzoni was not the only artist who used faeces as a subject in their art. Gilbert & George is another example who used the subject in a far more explicit way than Manzoni did. With the canned Manzoni multiple it is still uncertain if the contents is the same as the label indicates , however with Gilbert & George it is no question at all, because the pictures show the subjects as they are.
Still the composition and execution are 100% recognizable Gilbert & George, but personally i like the more society and critical related subjects better and far more pleasing to look at, but just to show that many more artists used the subject it is nice to devote a blog on these 2 great artists.
Books on Gilbert & George are available at www.ftn-books.com
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Piero Manzoni…artist’s shit (1961)
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.’ (Letter reprinted in Battino and Palazzoli p.144.)
It is not known exactly how many cans of Artist’s Shit were sold within Manzoni’s lifetime, but a receipt dated 23 August 1962 certifies that Manzoni sold one to Alberto Lùcia for 30 grams of 18-carat gold (reproduced in Battino and Palazzoli p.154). Manzoni’s decision to value his excrement on a par with the price of gold made clear reference to the tradition of the artist as alchemist already forged by Marcel Duchamp and Yves Klein among others. As the artist and critic Jon Thompson has written:
Manzoni’s critical and metaphorical reification of the artist’s body, its processes and products, pointed the way towards an understanding of the persona of the artist and the product of the artist’s body as a consumable object. The Merda d’artista, the artist’s shit, dried naturally and canned ‘with no added preservatives’, was the perfect metaphor for the bodied and disembodied nature of artistic labour: the work of art as fully incorporated raw material, and its violent expulsion as commodity. Manzoni understood the creative act as part of the cycle of consumption: as a constant reprocessing, packaging, marketing, consuming, reprocessing, packaging, ad infinitum. (Piero Manzoni, 1998, p.45)
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. 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. ( text on this subject comes from the Tate site : http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/manzoni-artists-shit-t07667)
www.ftn-books.com has some nice publications on Manzoni
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Bruce Nauman (1941) and the CAROUSEL (1988)
Why a blog on Bruce Nauman? simple, because i think he is one of the truly great artist from the 20th century. Never have met him, but i was one of the first to see his spectacular carousel with dead animals of which several versions are known. The one in the collection of the Gemeentemuseum was bought by Rudi Fuchs for the collection of the Gemeentemuseum for a modest amount of only 300k guilders, but at that time it was a huge amount for the museum. I am glad that it was bought because together with the Donald Judd in the garden and the large Sol LeWitt, these works are the highlights in the acquisitions of the dutch museums in the eighties. Most of them collected dutch art and did not focus on the international art scene. For this different point of view on collecting the Gemeentemuseum is now rewarded with some excellent, international important, works of art , which are great additions to their collections…..but back to Nauman. Nauman way of interpreting socially relevant subjects and translating them into works of art using language and neon made him a first.
Nauman began in the 1960s with exhibitions at Nick Wilder’s gallery in Los Angeles and in New York at Leo Castelli in 1968 along with early solo shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in 1972. Nauman’s use of neon as a medium was very recurrent in his works. Neon also connotes the public atmosphere by the means of advertising, and in his later works he uses it ironically with private, erotic imagery as seen in his Hanged Man (1985).
His Self Portrait as a Fountain (1966) shows the artist spouting a stream of water from his mouth. At the end of the 1960s, Nauman began constructing claustrophobic and enclosed corridors and rooms that could be entered by visitors and which evoked the experience of being locked in and of being abandoned. A series of works inspired by one of the artist’s dreams was brought together under the title of Dream Passage and created in 1983, 1984, and 1988.[ In his installation Changing Light Corridor with Rooms (1971), a long corridor is shrouded in darkness, whilst two rooms on either side are illuminated by bulbs that are timed to flash at different rates.
Since the mid-1980s, primarily working with sculpture and video, Nauman developed disturbing psychological and physical themes incorporating images of animal and human body parts, depicting sadistic allusions to games and torture together with themes of surveillance. In 1988, after a hiatus of nearly two decades focused on time-based media, he resumed his work with cast objects. And at this time he made several versions of the “CAROUSEL”.
the Gemeentemuseum “Carousel” from 1988
The stainless steel version in action
Books available at www.ftn-books.com
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George Hendrik Breitner (1857-1923)
What makes this painter so special for me?… Possibly because he made one of the paintings i truly admired when i was young.
One of the first times i visited the Rijskmuseum and the Stedelijk Museum i encountered this beautiful woman, lying on a couch, wearing nothing but a red japanese kimono. Everything is the paintings was new to me. Dutch impressionism, the loose touch with the brush, the high details and the sensuality in the painting made it beautiful to me. What i did not know at that time, is that Breitner was one of the first to use photography as a start for his paintings and this girl in a red kimono ( name was Geesje Kwak , a famous model at that time) would be painted in many versions and depicted on many paintings. There are “Red Kimono” paintings in the collections of the Rijksmuseum, Stedelijk Museum, Museum Twenthe, Teylers Museum. A few years ago there was this exhibition in the Rijksmuseum on all these versions of the girl in the red kimono. Unfortunately i did not visit it , but i still have some excellent catalogues on Breitner available at www. ftn-books.com and study this wonderful painting.
https://youtu.be/rWwWtKRnFMs
These and other titles on Breitner are available at www. ftn-books.com
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Guido Lippens (1939).. ever changing style
Guido Lippens has made paintings and drawings in so many styles. Sometimes with a free hand like the drawings by Jan Schoonhoven and other times painted, like a super realistic painting,…. with grids and patterns. Paintings for the art of painting, but without any depth or feeling. Lippens , born in Zeeland is not very known outside this province, but has had his moments and exhibitions during the last 5 decades. He even had one time an exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, but his most famous one was the one in the Noordbarabants Museum, which catalogue is available at www.ftn-books.com
