On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Piero Manzoni’s death and the 90th anniversary of his birth, it is impossible not to remember the figure of one of the greatest Italian artists who appeared in the stimulating climate of the 1950s and 1960s. Demis Martinelli and Rosalia Pasqualino di Marineo curated the “Relazioni (im)possibili. Il fil rouge da Piero Manzoni a oggi”exhibition at the Museo della Stampa, organized by the Piero Manzoni Foundation in Milan and the Pro loco APS in Soncino (CR) until October 1st, to highlight the relationship between Manzoni’s work and that of several artists of recent generations who were invited to exhibit with him.
The Giovanni Morbin work, who graduated in Venice with Emilio Vedova, consists in the construction of functional objects to which he confers the value of active instruments for the performative artworks that become hybrids between the artist and the object of his representation. His action connects with Manzoni, artist of the “Consumazione dell’arte dinamica del pubblico divorare l’arte” the famous event during which he signed with his own imprint a series of boiled eggs and delivered them to visitors to be eaten entering into a kind of secular communion with the artist himself.
In Soncino, Morbin proposed the “Quarta settimana, performance” in which he realized an interactive, physical and symbolic exchange between himself and the participants. After having made the cast of his face, he baked it in order to create bread with the shape of heads seen in front and with his face, then laid down in a basket and distributed to the public to be eaten. No money request, no exchange of vulgar coins, just sharing, indeed the free consumption of the artist artwork who basically waits for his creations to be devoured, eaten, consumed and not only with the eyes. So Morbin, like Manzoni, grants himself, his face, his work in the name of food art: an art to eat.
