Sometimes making art can be straightforward, nothing more than a person standing on a box for a minute, striking a pose, and having their photograph taken.
These are the instructions for Piero Manzoni’s Magical Base (1961), his playful conceptual machine that turns living, breathing bodies into works of art. By quite literally placing the everyman on a pedestal, it flipped the ready-made on its head, blurred the boundary between artist and audience and anticipated the Actionist art of the coming decade.
Magical Base is set to be reactivated in the perfect white cube of Magazzino Italian Art’s isotropic room, a mecca for Arte Povera devotees in Cold Spring, New York.
Six decades on from its creation, the museum’s director, Nicola Lucchi, believes it’s a work that has taken on new meanings given the smartphone camera and proliferation of digital images. “It speaks to today’s obsession with filtering life through screens and the constant curation of identity on social media,” Lucchi said over email. “The logic of the ‘selfie’ is pushed to an extreme: instead of taking a self-portrait in front of an important artwork, you become the artwork. It short-circuits the whole system.”
Installation view “Piero Manzoni: Total Space” at Magazzino Italian Art. Photo: Alexa Hoyer.
On April 10 and 11, anyone can become a work of art for the price of admission. As before, members of the public need only climb onto a wooden pedestal (markers indicate where to stand) and have themselves documented. The museum, in turn, will issue visitors with a photograph and record of participation. One guaranteed participant will be the British violinist Daisy Jopling who is set to perform from the pedestal at 3 p.m. on the second day.
The activation stops short of issuing certificates of authenticity (or signing bodies themselves) as Manzoni did for many of his Living Sculptures of the early 1960s. Debuting in Milan in 1961, the conceptual barb was one of Manzoni’s final gifts to the art world; he would die two years later. Across more than 70 living sculptures in which Manzoni signed a participant’s body (though occasionally he only marked a limb), the Italian questioned the assumption that art must be a permanent object, while critiquing the art market’s fixation on the artist’s hand as a creator of value. Another riff on this theme, Artist’s Shit (1961), saw Manzoni fill 30 cans with his own excrement and set their value to the price of gold.
Installation view of “Piero Manzoni: Total Space” at Magazzino Italian Art. Photo: Alexa Hoyer.
Magazzino’s activation is taking place as part of the museum’s exhibition “Piero Manzoni: Total Space” which, like Magical Base, focuses on the artist’s attempts to collapse the lines between object and viewer.
This exploration began in the late 1950s with Manzoni’s Achromes, that removed color and narrative (and eventually the canvas itself) in works of unlikely materials such as fur, velvet, and bread. “The absence of image does not open onto a symbolic space,” Lucchi said. “But instead allows matter iteslf to assert its presence on the canvas.”
A selection of Achromes line the gallery walls and two unrealized works stand at its center. One is Phosphorescent Room, a cube of glowing paint. The other is Hairy Room, whose walls are laden with plush synthetic fur. Both have been donated to Magazzino and make for compelling, though uncertified, photo-ops.
“Piero Manzoni: Total Space” is on view at Magazzino Italian Art, Cold Spring, New York, through June 29, 2026.