After selling his breath, Piero Manzoni, in May 1961, made 90 boxes of Artist Shit. Accompanied by a label describing precisely its content
artist shit, net weight 30 g, preserved in the natural
each box is weighing 30 grams, they are sold at a price of 30 grams of gold. As for the currency, parity is no longer short and a box is now estimated at 30,500 euros.
In 1989, for an exhibition at Roger Pailhas gallery in Marseille, Bernard Bazile opened a Merda d'artista. The autopsy, however, was partial and did not exhaust the mystery. Inside was a container wrapped in cotton and in which ... (hihihi)
According to the interests, moral, financial or aesthetic specific to each, Bazile's gesture was interpreted as the end of a trickery, a revenge, a liberating act, vandalism or "customization". In short, it was the improvement or the depreciation of a work which, from multiple, is becoming unique by its double signature (Manzoni + Bazile). Afterwards, Bernard Bazile relaunched the pavement left by his predecessor, making it reappear in his exhibitions, accompanying him on the occasion of documents relating to debates crystallized by the original object:
It's O.K. to say no!
In 1993 at the Pompidou Center in Paris.
Since 1999, it is on the theoretical side that the artist continues to open the box. Without guilt, nor obligation of artistic result, he went to meet the owners of Shit of artist, private or institutional, passing them to the question on the why and the how of their possession:
In what circumstances and at what price did you buy the box? What sense do you give him? What's inside the box? Do you think you will part with it one day?
If the history of art is the police investigation, Bernard Bazile has donned the raincoat of a Colombo. The state of his research is now compiled in A measure for all. Produced and exhibited by the Institute of Contemporary Art (IAC) of Villeurbanne, the work is a documentary broken in five rooms and sixteen screenings, distributed according to the four languages in which the box was made (German, English, French, Italian). There are about fifty people - Alfred Pacquement (director of the National Museum of Modern Art), Pierre Huber (Swiss gallery owner) or Lila and Gilbert Silverman (American collectors).
Very quickly, the box becomes a can opener of the art system, a tool to dissect its levers and its actors. Bazile is not Michael Moore and he does not put himself on the stage. No need of that; Manzoni, who died in 1963, has issued a mat for him to visit happy or dubious collectors and a Trojan horse to enter institutions, which take care to justify - even if no museum has actually acquired his box , managing to be offered. In this tower of Babel languages and stories, it is impossible not to go astray and think of something else. In Cloaca, for example, the machine to make shit Belgian Wim Delvoye, machine that required a huge budget for its design.
