Piero Manzoni: Total Space by Ron Horning for The Brooklyn Rail

The current exhibit at the Robert Olnick Pavilion of Magazzino Italian Art, of thirteen works by or about Piero Manzoni (1933–63) amounts to a retrospective covering most aspects of the seminal Italian artist’s output from 1956 until his death at twenty nine.

The exhibit includes six of the combines that Manzoni called “acromi,” the Italian plural for colorless or neutral, and that translators into English have imported wholesale as “achromes”; two posthumously executed rooms, the “Stanza fosforoscente,” or “Phosphorescent room,” and the “Stanza pelosa,” or “Hairy room”; four video shorts, in rotation on a monitor, about Manzoni’s art that were produced by an Italian news movie service, largely as gags, in 1959–1961; and a “magic” base, plinth, or pedestal, that transforms anyone who stands on it into a work of art for as long as he or she stays there.