Piero Manzoni, “Artist’s Shit”, 1961

Piero Manzoni (Soncino, 1933 - Milan, 1963) was a short-lived but immensely influential Italian experimental artist.

Manzoni is most famous for a series of artworks that call into question the nature of the art object, directly prefiguring Conceptual Art. His work avoids normal artist's materials, instead using everything from rabbit fur to human excrement.

His work is widely seen as a critique of the mass production and consumerism that was changing European society after WW2.

In 1960 Manzoni marked a number of hard-boiled eggs as works of art by imprinting them with his thumbprint. He let the spectators eat the whole exhibition in 70 minutes.

In May 1961 Manzoni defecated into 90 small cans and had them sealed with the text Artist's Shit. Each 30-gram can was priced by weight based on the current value of gold. In the following years, the cans have spread to various art collections all over the world and netted large prices, far outstripping inflation.


Alberto Burri (Città di Castello, 1915 - Nice, 1995), was an Italian abstract painter and sculptor.

Alberto Burri, “Big Sack”, 1953, oil on burlap.

Alberto Burri earned a medical degree in 1940 from the University of Perugia and was a military physician during World War II. After his unit was captured in North Africa, he was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp in Hereford, Texas in 1944, where he began to paint. After his release in 1946, Burri moved to Rome; his first solo show was at the Galleria La Margherita in 1947.

Burri soon turned to abstraction and unorthodox materials, making collages with pumice, tar and burlap. In the mid-1950s, Burri began producing charred wood and burlap works, then welded iron sheets. In the early 1960s he was burning plastic, and in the early 1970s started his "cracked" paintings.

Spatialism is an art movement, headed by Italian artist Lucio Fontana (Rosario, Argentina, 1899 – Comabbio, Italy, 1968) in 1946. Fontana called the movement Movimento Spaziale. The most important concept was to eradicate the art of the easel and paint, and try to capture movement and time as the main factors in the work. Fontana's most famous works are his slashed canvases, which broke right through the picture place.

The legacy Fontana left was one for conceptual artists and environmental artists who would continue his ideas of transcending from the canvas and into the realm of reality.



The Gutai group was an artistic movement and association of artists founded by Jiro Yoshihara in Japan in 1954.

Yoshihara wrote the manifesto for the Gutai group in 1956. Among its preoccupations, the manifesto expresses a fascination with the beauty that arises when things become damaged or decayed. The process of damage or destruction is celebrated as a way of revealing the inner "life" of a given material or object.

In 1956 Atsuko Tanaka, a Japanese avant-garde artist who helped pioneer the Gutai movement, came forward with her best-known work, the Electric Dress. Composed entirely of light bulbs of all shapes, sizes and colours, and a plethora of connected electrical cords, the Electric Dress resembles a post-modern Christmas tree when not worn (as was often the case).

Tanaka, by updating the kimono, sought to highlight the leap from traditional Japanese society to one representing the bright lights of the modern world. The aim of the Gutai group was to break with the past and blur the boundaries between art and life in post-war Japan, seeking a new beginning in order to put the horrors behind. Tanaka, in her twinkling dress was surely symbolic of this fresh and shiny start.

“Auto-destructive Art” is a term invented by the artist Gustav Metzger in the early 1960s. From 1959, he had made work by spraying acid onto sheets of nylon as a protest against nuclear weapons. The procedure produced rapidly changing shapes before the nylon was all consumed, so the work was simultaneously auto-creative and auto-destructive.

In 1966, Metzger and others organised the Destruction in Art Symposium in London. This was followed by another in New York in 1968. The Symposium was accompanied by public demonstration of Auto-destructive art including the burning of Skoob Towers by John Latham. These were towers of books (skoob is books in reverse) and Latham's intention was to demonstrate directly his view that Western culture was burned out.

At the beginning of the sixties Gustav Metzger was lecturing at Ealing Art College, where one of his students was rock musician Pete Townshend, who later cited Metzger's concepts as an influence for his famous guitar-smashing during performances of The Who (The first one in 1964, at the Railway Tavern in Harrow and Wealdstone, North London). In 1967 Jimi Hendrix made its first U.S. appearance, at the Monterey Pop Festival where he burned and destroyed his guitar.


Vivienne Westwood in 1977 created the 'Destroy' muslin T-shirt. It was formed from two squares of fabric with elongated, straitjacket-like sleeves caught back with D-rings, evoking a straitjacket and printed with the word 'destroy' and a swastika. Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren used highly charged slogans and provocative images in a deliberate attempt to provoke the establishment. The muslins quickly became tattered, only adding to their appeal.