Having the Midas touch is often thrown around as a way to describe someone successfully turning something around, though its macabre undertones are often overlooked. Like the minor detail that King Midas could not even touch his morning brioche without it becoming an indigestible ingot. Lifelong celibacy is another inconvenience that springs to mind. Science and alchemy has spent literally centuries trying to compose chemical ways of turning everything from mud to duck eggs into gold. Sadly for them, the impossible shortcut to this hallowed matter successfully continues to elude. However, the artists obviously found their own solution to this conundrum.
Piero Manzoni spent much of his brief artistic career using a range of alternative materials, communicating his unique type of ironic conceptual art in the attempt to "tap mythological sources and to realise authentic and universal values".
In 1961 he created 90 limited edition cans filled with 30g of his secret ingredient, which were sold for the same price as the current market value of gold, the intention being for the value of the work to fluctuate and grow in direct proportion to gold stocks. The secret ingredient was his poo. Though this was no secret as it was emblazoned in several languages all over the can. Many have for decades, doubted the contents of the cans after one of Manzoni's colleagues disclosed (after Manzoni's premature death at 29 in 1963), that they were all simply filled with cheap plaster to further heighten the irony of their success on the international art market.
One can (which shall remain numberless) which was recently on loan to the Randers Museum of Art in Denmark, not wishing to be outdone by the surrounding pieces of art work, spontaneously combusted in full public view. And smell. The myth was solved and the contents verified as genuine faeces, though the debate as to whose still lingers, air-fresheners have dealt with the rest. Somewhat annoyingly for the gallery, the insurance company refused to contribute for the exploding shit-can, forcing the gallery to cough up 50 000 Euros to 'restore' it. Restore it? How exactly does one restore an exploded can of old excrement? Answers via comment below or email please.
The bids for the remaining cans at auction remain equally explosive and firmly in major collections such as the Tate in London. Sotheby's sold a can for 124 000 Euros in 2007, and offered another can in 2008 for an estimate of 50-70 000 Euros. Further heightening the pieces irony, successful bidders now get a can filled with mischalleneous doo-doo that may also self-destruct without warning. Rather like the stock markets really. So no one smelt the crisis coming?
Though many artists' work has often privately and sometimes publicly been described as 'shit', few can lay claim to literally being excrement and getting away with it. Manzoni's "Merda d"artista" continues to be the shining beacon of irony in the art world, tagging along doggedly on the auction roller-coaster as all sorts come up for grabs. In a world where what is art is so frequently scrutinised and equally ignored, depending on what the fat-cats of art are pushing this season, one could argue that it is all a load of real art or a pile of [mostly fake] s***.
"Jetset Violet"
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