Piero Manzoni’s participatory art returns to life at Magazzino Italian Art
At Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring, New York, a pedestal is once again becoming the center of the work. On April 10 and 11, the museum will reactivate Piero Manzoni’s Magical Base, inviting visitors to step onto a marked wooden platform, pose for documentation, and leave with a photograph and a record of participation.
The project turns the audience into the artwork itself, a gesture that remains as disarming now as it was in the early 1960s. One scheduled participant will be British violinist Daisy Jopling, who is set to perform from the pedestal at 3 p.m. on the second day.
Magical Base is being presented within “Piero Manzoni: Total Space,” an exhibition that traces the Italian artist’s sustained effort to collapse the distance between object and viewer. That inquiry began with the Living Sculptures, first introduced in Milan in 1961, when Manzoni signed participants’ bodies and questioned the assumption that art had to exist as a permanent object. The work also pointed directly at the art market’s dependence on the artist’s hand as a guarantor of value.
Manzoni’s critique was never limited to one format. In Artist’s Shit (1961), he filled 30 cans with his own excrement and assigned them the value of gold, a provocation that still reads as both absurd and exacting. The exhibition also includes Achromes, the artist’s stripped-down works that removed color and narrative, and eventually even the canvas itself, through materials such as fur, velvet, and bread.
Two unrealized works anchor the installation: Phosphorescent Room, a cube of glowing paint, and Hairy Room, whose walls are covered in synthetic fur. Both have been donated to Magazzino and, like Magical Base, extend Manzoni’s interest in participation, perception, and the unstable boundary between artwork and viewer.
“Piero Manzoni: Total Space” is on view at Magazzino Italian Art through June 29, 2026.
