Artist’s Shit by Piero Manzoni

Tate online:

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. Tate’s work is number 004. 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.’

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.

The League Of Resonance

Latest Maling project.

The League of Resonance seeks out the intangible and barely perceptible. We detect vibrations that form the backdrop to the mythical narrative of daily life. We situate ourselves in places of intrigue, we listen, we talk, we connect and we hum. In collecting and combining the resonance of individuals: their stories, perceptions and rituals, we unravel the backdrop to this myth. Together we create a new sound. This sound is The League of Resonance.

Luke Hand

I first met Luke in 2008 after being introduced to his apparently now dormant musical project Dizzygiggles by a mutual friend. I gave him a copy of The Mishukis’ Everyone’s Too Stupid and he reciprocated by sending me a double-sided CD of his songs ingeniously fashioned from two CDs hand-glued together, with a personalised sleeve written on what appeared to be toilet paper. Since my old toploader died I can’t play it anymore, but it’s still a treasured possession.

Back then he was, like me, working in a market research callcentre; these days he’s studying Sound Art at RMIT. Last year he produced an audio collage intended to convey the ambiance of a football match which was played over the loudspeakers at the MCG as part of Sports Club 2: The Arena for Next Wave.

More recent projects include calculating the metrics of a bag of chips, painstakingly re-rendering page one of the September 12, 2001 edition of the New York Times at 8x life-size in colour pencil, producing an album of original sound pieces based on The Telegraph’s laughably pretentious track-by-track review of the new Radiohead album, etc, etc, etc, etc. His phone seems to be a fairly significant tool of his practice, which of course we like.

Year of the Rope by Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh

(Via Twyllan Mynodal.)

Intro to interview here (word doc):

No two artists are more central to a discussion of the Life/Art Experiment than Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh. For years, on opposite coasts, they had each cordoned off whole sections of their daily lives and called them art. When we heard that they were working together on a one-year piece, it seemed like a natural. When we heard they had vowed to spend a whole year in New York City tied to each other with a piece of rope, it seemed perfect—yet hardly possible. Alex and Allyson Grey were artists married to each other, and just as obsessively concerned with coupling at the intersection of art and life. In June 1984, while the Hsieh/Montano piece was still in progress, High Performance asked the four artists to meet for a conversation about it.

Joshua Sofaer

Joshua Sofaer (b. 1972 Cambridge, England) is an artist who is centrally concerned with modes of collaboration and participation.

From Perform Every Day:

In a world of natural look makeup where people spend hours putting on various different applications in an attempt to look like they are wearing none at all, is it any wonder that there is some confusion over what reality might really be?

Part of this confusion is to do with performance; how to discern ‘what is’ and ‘what is performance’? From the global ramifications of party and nation politics to the esoteric world of live art, from the tragic spectacular of international terrorism to the undergraduate drama student, from the stock-market to soap-opera, from high performance drugs to performance studies – ‘performance’ is the modus operandi of contemporary culture. It seems now that there is only performance.

Do not despair!

If we begin to understand the things we take for granted in our everyday lives as constructs of performance in and of themselves, if we relish these everyday performances for what they offer us, then there is hope. We become the audience of our very own private theatre.

Also: Any Questions; Seven Reasons Why Live Art Gives Better Value.

Robin Hely

Whatever his shortcomings as a human being, he’s undeniably an amazing artist. And his sociopathy and his genius kind of go hand in hand.

“As an artist, I have a big problem,” he said to me once. “I don’t really like art. I just love fucking with peoples’ heads.”

Yeah.

“Interventionist performance art”, he’s calling it now. Previously known as “interactive public theatre”. I still like “reality art”. Whatever it is, it’s something else.

Interesting review of “Sherrie“. Origin of the spycam. Missing Person –> Who Is Robert Henley?. Oh, and then there’s this. Changed my life, y’know.

I miss the evil bastard. He’s never dull.

(Previously.)