No line goes on forever, each line is as long as its tube will permit, and if we draw a line from where we stand, it can only be as long as the circumference of the globe. Manzoni is not the only artist to have been attracted by the concept of a line. Hundertwasser had his students’ draw one continuous, unbroken line on the four walls, floor and ceiling of a classroom. Walter de Maria drew chalk lines and dug mile-long ditches in the desert. La Monte Young, whose one tone in music equals the concept of drawing a line, wrote a musical one-liner that would have pleased Manzoni: "Draw a straight line and follow it" (Composition 10, 1960). There is no doubt that further examples of the mystique of the line in art can be added, but it is not likely that anybody has handled the concept with Manzoni's menomania.

Manzoni's lines can be described physically (e.g. ink on newspaper print), dimensionally (e.g. 1,000 meters) and dated (e.g. July 24, 1961). But they do not express anything (a concept of distance can be expressed more effectively in other ways), they simply are and this literalism is one of their main strengths. The inventive, which we may associate with life, and the gratuitous, which we can associate with death, are always on a collision course in Manzoni's arsenal of gestures. Appropriately, he walked a thin line between the two. To propose the concept was inventive, to execute it was gratuitous, for the lines are arbitrary in length, measure nothing, and, rolled up in a tube, exist I limbo only. For no good reason at all, they are hidden. This undoubtedly adds to their mystique. The lines are not to be taken out of their containers to be exhibited. We are encouraged to take them on faith as long as the label guarantees the content. From the rattle in Duchamp’s With Hidden Noise, to Sol LeWitt’s cub buried at the Visses in Bergeijk, to Robert Barry’s inert gas released into the Los Angeles atmosphere, conceptual art has relied on our faith in the artist speaking the truth and on the assumption that believing the unseen is somehow a more intense experience. The wooden cylinder, labeled Line of Infinite Length 1960), moves beyond the area of credibility, which it obviously does not have, either for the eye or mind, into that of metaphysical speculation.

In 1960 Manzoni traveled to Herning, Denmark, where he produced the longest line of his career on a 7,200-meter roll of newsprint, sealed in a leaden container. Manzoni meant the Herning line to be the first in a series of extremely long lines. He wrote in Immediate Projects (1962), “I shall leave on example in each of the major cities of the world until the sum of their lengths equals the earth’s circumference . . . From a line drawn around the globe (impractical) and a line of infinite length (impossible) we have now moved to the concept of a collection of lines adding up to a desired length. A total of 5,555 cities would have to be found if all lines were of the length of the one in Herning, and one shudders at the time, energy and funds involved in the completion of this project.

Around 1960 Manzoni’s activities took on a more uncompromising complexion. Myth and a wry process of demythification counter each other n a way that opens up numerous readings, touching on art history, the artist’s powers of transformation, and the equating of price and value in art. Not only the art object but its social fate-its prospective history-are included in a frame of reference clearly outlined by a wit sharpened by somewhat mordant energies. One gets the sense of a quickening tempo, of time paradoxically stretched by crowding more into a shorter duration. Constantly traveling, Manzoni seemed to make up in distance what he lacked in time. During the brief years of his maturity, he cultivated his art interests like a roadshow performer, constantly meeting new people, making new commitments, and anticipating the jet-set mobility of today’s conceptualists.

On July 21, 1960, Manzoni invited friends and supporters in Milan to attend a ritual curiously reminiscent of a Catholic mass. The artist boiled eggs on a range set on a table. Then he marked each egg with this thumbprint. As people filed in they were given eggs to eat. The event lasted for an hour and ten minutes. The quasi-religious aspect of this-preparation, consecration, communion, is hard to avoid.

The construction of the Magic Base extends his parallel. In 1961 Manzoni constructed his first Magic Base in the form of a truncated pyramid bearing footprints to accommodate people who, for as long as they stood there, became “sculptures” by artist’s fiat. Like the priest who effects the transubstantiation of bread and wine, Manzoni isolates a willing subject by placing him a few notches above where he stands every day and declares him a work of art. In both instances we rely on the discretionary powers of the officiator; we accept, on his authority, that a wafer can be a body and a body can be art. Again, Manzoni may not have intended to draw this parallel, but the elements for doing so are all there.

It is only natural that Manzoni, who entered into a union with those who had eaten his art, and who conferred art status on those who stepped up on his pedestal, should seek more effective ways of making art out of his fellow man. The artist’s signature and a certificate of title should make the recipient into a work of art and in 1961, at the Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome, Manzoni started to exercise this privilege on a few chosen friends. With a fine sense of discrimination, the artist did not treat all bodies alike. Some subjects were certified a work of art for life, others could claim art value only for that part of their body to which the artist had affixed his signature; some were declared art under certain circumstances, i.e. only while sleeping, drinking singing etc.: the art status of a few would go into effect only after they had aid the artist an agreed-upon amount. By the end of that year seventy-one living sculptures could be counted, a modest number by the standards of that Christian community to which it seemed to aspire.

In May 1961, Manzoni carried through his most radical and, in many ways, most savage gesture: he produced ninety cans of Artist’s Shit, each with a net weight of thirty grams, which he offered for sale at the then-current price of gold. After the breath and thumbprints, this was the third and most shocking of the artist’s offerings, yet entirely consistent with those that went before. We are reminded that nobody took much notice of Duchamp’s Bottle Rack or Bicycle Wheel until, in the 1917 exhibition of The Independents, his Fountain became the subject of a controversy. History has a curious way of repeating itself; when fellow exhibitors in the 1962 tentoonstelling nul at the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam got wind of Manzoni’s plan to prominently display his recently produced Artist’s Shit, they ganged up to prevent him from doing so. Depressed and angry, Manzoni threatened to withdraw and leave the room empty, with the door nailed shut and bearing a sign reading, “The spirit of the artist resides inside.” What might have been accepted today as a work of a conceptual artist, was then pooh-poohed by his friends as a cop out. So instead, Manzoni proposed-but was never allowed- to release twenty white chickens into the German Group Zero’s pristine kinetic environment. He must have sensed that Zero was going to end up as another “cold art kitchen.”

Ironically, Manzoni’s memory was kept alive for years in the work of the Zero and Zero-related artists from Düsseldorf to Milan and from Paris to Buenos Aires. With its suppression of style and handmade quality, the achrome inspired countless white reliefs; it became prototypical for cool art in the 1960s, and obligatory for anybody doing their white-on-white show. Manzoni did, indeed, take good care to “reinvent, over and over again” an achrome which could easily have become his stock-in-trade. The squarely divided stitched surfaces gave way to cotton or synthetic fiber surfaces, sometimes treated with cobaltic chloride, causing them to change hue with atmospheric changes. These chemical agents guaranteed that the work would not remain the same, the inverse of the traditional painter’s concern. In his few remaining years Manzoni used arrays of cotton balls, rabbit skin wool and fluffy artificial fibers to avoid repeating himself. But his real heirs were not those who stuch to a variety of white and silver surfaces. It is the body and concept artists of the late 1960s who seem to have taken Manzoni’s lesson to heart. An autonomy of viewpoint and a sensibility to life that transcends a concern for purity of medium comes through in Manzoni’s idiosyncratic exploits.

There is more than a hint of Dada in Manzoni’s lifestyle and actions. He even reminds us of F.T. Marimetti, the Dada among the Futurists, although such comparisons are tenuous when not substantiated. There is no evidence that Manzoni thought of himself in terms of following a historic path or working within a known esthetic. An almost awkward reserve and a hesitation to please, features one senses in his work as well, set Manzoni apart from the elegant Fontana and the flamboyant Klein. He did not care about appearances, was less assured and seemed painfully clumsy by comparison with the other two. There was no need to rebel against his environment or to draw away from it; at the most he acted as its conscience and sometime gadfly. Manzoni arrived at a time when the public was prepared to accept anything; instead of fighting an uphill battle, he found himself in a quandary as to how he could maintain a level of suspense and wonder. Appearances to the contrary, Manzoni was not a cynic but an exalted believer with a tragic, highly self-destructive bent. He saw no basic conflict-as long as there were buyers-between a quest fro the absolute and an exchange of shit for gold. It was inevitable for Manzoni to push his art to the brink of taboo. A plan, however, to enshrine bodies and sign them was never put into effect. Nor did he, ultimately, package his blood in the manner in which he had made an art commodity of his breath and his feces.

Friends have reminisced how Manzoni always traveled with a small suitcase in which he carried samples of his work: miniature achromes, lines in tubes, balloons to be filled with artist’s breath, certificates of authenticity, thumbprinted eggs and cans of shit. This arsenal of his works and gestures had, of course, a precedent in Marcel Duchamp’s 1938 Boite-en-Valise. Yet, what to Duchamp had been a way of holding on to his past as he was about to leave occupied France was to Manzoni a way of making sure of his future. Duchamp reduced his life’s work to miniatures in a suitcase, as others write their autobiography when life threatens to run away from them. Manzoni packed his ideas in a suitcase and took them on the road to push for their sale or execution, because he knew that he had little time to lose.

Manzoni was more interested in art strategies than in art forms. In the face of death, art for Manzoni became a strategy of survival. Since limits equal death, he had to defeat them. This accounts for his megalomaniacal streak, as well as for his need to push art to its eschatological limits. To put man, the creator, on a sculpture base, is a last resort gesture: he plays Faust instead of the artist’s role of homo faber. But, when he has a sculpture base installed in the city park of Herning, Denmark, and inscribes it “Upside Down,” then we realize that what we have taken to be an act of hubris is, in reality, a gesture of resignation, in the sense that we all carry the world on our back and live with it.

Manzoni’s thumbprinted eggs have perished, the balloons with his breath have shriveled, and the warning on his cans of shit, “without preservatives,” may come back to haunt their collectors. He did not make any serious effort to insure that his art would survive him, the underlying ambition in every creative act. Bent on exhausting art, he must have been oblivious to time as he drove himself to the brink of involuntary suicide. He ran through art the way a gambler runs through money, feverishly depleting his resources. Trying to get to the bottom of his art, he invited an end that surprised nobody. In the early morning of February 6, 1963, Manzoni succumbed, on the doorstep of his studio on the Via Fiori Chiari, to a fatal combination of cirrhosis and exposure to extreme cold.

Abstractionists and conceptualists have claimed Manzoni’s work as a precedent, and these claims are legitimate in view of the achromes and the lines. But even more clearly, Manzoni was a forerunner of body art. His radical gestures have found their most dramatic confirmation in those acts by contemporary artists in which the body becomes the locus and material of creative preoccupations of a diverse range, from Oppenheim to Acconci, from Herman Nitsch to Antoni Miralda. In that sense, one can say that Manzoni’s “body” survives in the art of others in ways he could hardly have anticipated, but which, one suspects, might have pleased and amused him.