Rome

surpassed, and which out-Duchamps Duchamp in a small way—was Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista, which is (or possibly is not) what it says it is: the artist’s shit, a small lump or turd weighing about thirty grams, sealed in a small tin can and forever invisible.

Manzoni was born near Cremona in 1933 but lived in Rome; he had no art training, and did not need it, since his work consisted entirely of ideas about art rather than the making of aesthetic objects. One part of this field was his Achromes (No Colors), white canvases covered with white gesso that was scratched or scored with parallel lines. (They did not have to be canvases; some Achromes were made of white cotton wool, or even bread rolls—white bread, naturally, rather than the grainier brown Italian pane integrale.) The chief influence hovering behind these was that of the French artist Yves Klein, whose show of monochrome canvases, all painted the same IKB or International Klein Blue, Manzoni had seen in Paris in 1957. Another was that of Robert Rauschenberg, who had done a group of all-white canvases as far back as 1951; and one should not forget the Russian Malevich’s White on White (1918).

Manzoni did single lines, drawn on a roll of paper of a precisely given length, such as a kilometer; these scrolls were rolled up and kept in polished metal drums. He designated friends (one of whom was the writer Umberto Eco) as living works of art, issuing them with certificates of authenticity. He exhibited red and white balloons which he had blown up himself and then tethered to wooden bases, under the title Artist’s Breath; these were intended as relics or souvenirs of “creativity,” though of course they did not last long; the rubber perished. In 1961, he installed an iron block in a Danish park; its title, Base of the World, was inscribed on it upside down, so that the viewer could imagine the whole world reposing on the block, rather than vice versa. Thus, before his early death from a heart attack in 1963, Manzoni had created a small, wry, sharp body of work; how things might have developed from there is of course unknowable. Probably, one suspects, not so very far…

But the little can of excrement was the signature of his career, as nobler things had been of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s. Rumor insists that he got the idea from Salvador Dali, but in any case it was a neat conceptual jeu d’esprit. Opening the can would, of course, destroy the value of the artwork. You cannot know that the shit is really inside, or that whatever may be inside is really shit. The obvious target of this object, or gesture, is the overvaluation of art as a fragment of the artist’s being—the idea that, in buying a work of art, one also comes to own not just a made object but a part of a creative personality. It is the kind of thought that tends to dissipate when explained, as good jokes do. It is also a point which can only be made once, which redoubles the “uniqueness” that Manzoni’s idea proposes. The edition size is ninety cans, and so far none has been opened; it seems unlikely that any will be, since the last can of Manzoni’s Merda d’artista to go on the market fetched the imposing sum of $80,000—no shit, one is tempted to add.

Other artists gathered under the umbrella of Arte Povera produced objects of some modest interest. Probably the best of them was Giuseppe Penone (b. 1947), who hit on the memorable idea of taking a wooden construction beam with knots showing and then, starting from the exposed knot ends, whittling back into the substance of the wood to disclose what had originally been the younger form of the tree, hidden inside—an intriguingly poetic reversal of time and growth.

There was, however, a limit to how much conceptual art the Italian market and its public could continue to absorb with interest. No matter how many art followers might admire such products of Arte Povera as Mario Merz’s igloo constructions of metal, glass, neon, and other mixed materials (praised at the time for their allusions to “nomadic” and “primitive” cultures), or Jannis Kounellis’ Twelve Horses (just that: twelve live horses—straw, bridles, horseshit, and all—displayed in Rome’s Galleria L’Attico in 1969, which one postmodernist art historian called “the model of prelinguistic experience, as well as … nondiscursive structures, and nontechnological, nonscientific, nonphenomenological artistic conventions”—enough dry jargon to choke any pony —people still seemed to want something to hang on their walls, which one could not easily do to a horse or an igloo. Enter, at this point, a brief temporary salvation in the form of the Transavanguardia.

This clunky neologism was coined by the Roman art historian Achille Bonito Oliva, who acted as ringmaster for a group of young painters, of whom the most prominent were Sandro Chia (b. 1946), Francesco Clemente (b. 1952), and Enzo Cucchi (b. 1949). It meant absolutely nothing definable but pointed to a mood of eclectic revivalism, of eager neophytes shoring fragments—of archaeology, of religion, of what you will—against their ruins. But at least it meant painting, for which a surfeit of conceptual art seldom fails to excite nostalgia, especially if the painting is of human figures. These, the Transavanguardisti supplied in some quantity. Their quality was a different matter. It produced interest in America—indeed, it was the only new Italian art to stimulate excitement on the American market. Nevertheless, this was quite short-lived.

The most dramatic painter of the three was Cucchi, who did large doom-laden panels of frantic chickens caught in what appeared to be mud slides in a cemetery, with shovelsful of brown and black paint two inches thick.

Chia, on the other hand, had a curiously revivalist flair. In the early 1980s, he appeared to be influenced by an almost forgotten figure, the Fascist painter Ottone Rosai (1895–1957), whose roly-poly figures—buttocks like blimps, ladylike coal-heaver arms—had been part of a conservative reaction against Futurism. Chia was running what appeared to be more lighthearted variations on Rosai’s fatness. In the same way, he alluded to de Chirico— not the early master of strange cityscapes, but the de Chirico of the 1930s, kitschy antiquities and all. If these padded boys and dropsical nymphs were to meet the demands of real classical art, it would seem a breach of etiquette. But in the stylistic context of Chia’s work, such demands could hardly be made. Everything looked so ebullient, juicy, and harmless that non-Italians thought it “typically Italian,” like a painted cart or a singing gondolier.

But at least it was less pretentious than the work of the third Transavanguardista, Francesco Clemente. Clemente spent part of each year in Madras, in southern India, and his work is a stew of European and Indian quotations, full of quasi-mystical teases. He acquired a reputation as a draftsman, quite undeserved: Clemente’s figures are boneless, and his conventions for the human face—he is fond of portraiture—are close to a joke, with their poached-egg eyes and strained, one-expression mouths. These effete masks suggest no ability to peruse a face and its particularities. They are nothing more than figuration cut adrift and stripped of its reason for being.

One can hardly blame Clemente for this—he clearly can’t do any better. And at least he isn’t quite the pseudo- classical pasticheur that other Italian postmodernist contemporaries are, with their slimy parodies of neoclassical profiles and flaccid musculature. But the blame, if any, should go to the mechanisms of late-modern taste, the flaccidity induced by the market acting in concert with the supposition that only the new can be the good. It is probably true that the person with a serious curiosity about contemporary art can bypass Rome on his or her travels. Anything of that kind there is seen, as it were, under license: it has come from other galleries in other countries of Europe, or from New York. An air of distinct secondhandedness and second-rateness prevails. Rome today originates nothing. If a pilgrimizing artist in the seventeenth century, when Rome was incontestably the school of the world and all works of art were certified by their relation to the great city, had been told that this would happen within fewer than three hundred years, he would have recoiled in disbelief. Time was when the opportunity to exhibit or do a commission in Rome would have been regarded, and rightly, as the climax of an artist’s career; today it hardly matters, because the Mandate of Heaven (in that expressive old Chinese phrase) has moved elsewhere, and did so many years ago.

No Italian painter or sculptor after (say) 1960 had anything like the same effect on other artists in his medium that Italian filmmakers did in theirs. Film was where the creative vitality of Italy, driven underground by World War