ARTIST RESEARCH: Piero Manzoni_ Linea m 1000

I am inspired that Piero Manzoni tried to create infinite line, being and unlimited possibilities, and to make the infinite line exist only viewers' imagination. He explored related concepts of gestural performativity in his action with line. Line is not only trace of ink, but also abstract and infinite being. 
His presentation of a container with line painting is powerful to emphasize on his action, process and line itself. Maybe, I tried too hard to make more to prove a productive artist, show more to prove a professional artist and talk more to support my work. visible, invisible, tangible, intangible, finite, infinite..... 


 

  

On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century

November 21, 2010–February 7, 2011

Manzoni considered the two-dimensional surface of painting and drawing not as something “to be filled with colors and forms” but as a place “of unlimited possibilities” in which a line could exist “beyond all problems of composition and size,” he wrote. The line in this work is more than half a mile long, but in theory, Manzoni believed, such a line could stretch to infinity. One of many similar drawings by the artist, Linea m 1000 is invisible, contained in a generic canister; in this way the work anticipated the Conceptual art of the 1960s, in which the idea—in this case, line—was more important than the form of the artwork.

LINEA DI LUNGHEZZA INFINITA

1960

Courtesy :

Milan, Nada Vigo collection

From 1959 to 1961 Manzoni painted lines in ink onto rolls of paper of different lengths, which he packaged in cylindrical black cardboard containers. These tubes had a label stating the month and year of execution, the length of the line in centimeters and a certificate of authenticity. On July 4, 1960 (between 4pm and the 6.55pm), in a printing works at Herning in Denmark, Manzoni created his longest line (7,200 metes), which he vacuum-sealed in a chromium-plated metal cylinder and then buried it so it could be unearthed by chance some time in the future. The artist’s aim was that this would be the first of a series of very long lines to be left in all the world’s principal cities. The sum total of the lengths of the lines in this series was suppose to measure the circumference of the earth. Manzoni also planned to trace a white line right around the meridian of Greenwich, and in 1960 finally conceived the Line of infinite length: a wooden cylinder without openings which ideally contained a line which exists only as a pure concept. With the Lines, his research, starting from the restricted perimeter of the white canvas, had come to objectify, mentally and physically, endless time and total space in which – since not even the possible misunderstanding of the picture existed any more – all the questions of form, color, depth and dimensions no longer had any sense and the artist could embrace complete freedom. “Why worry about how to place a line in a space?” wrote Manzoni in 1960. “You can simply trace a very long line to infinity…The only dimension is time. It goes without saying that a ‘line’ is neither a horizon nor a symbol, and is not valid as more or less beautiful but as more or less a line: to the degree that it is … It is not a question of articulating messages…There is nothing to say: there is only being, there is only living.”