The ‘Homage to Manzoni’ exhibition by Cyprus College of Art is based around the conceptual artist Piero Manzoni, who in 1961 produced a series of 90 tin cans of what was labelled ‘Artists Shit’. This readymade emulated in its own way those of Marcel Duchamp’s work 40 years prior. In this project the aim is to pay homage to Manzoni but with a new twist based around the New Aesthetics movement.

 

The New Aesthetics movement begins with the premise that art is a material phenomenon that starts from the way artists have a physical engagement with the world and the materials of art which create a material outcome. However New Aesthetics does not end with the physical nature of the artistic act and the material nature of the final outcome. Such theorists such as Clive Head, Alan Pocaro and Michael Paraskos, emphasis the idea that a work of art creates its own reality that exists outside of our everyday reality. Therefore the picture plane of a painting for example, acts like a gateway between the two realities; our ordinary reality on one side and a new unknown reality of the painting on the other. In New Aesthetics the reality of the painting is hypothesised as being as real as our ordinary reality that we live in. It is not a representation or an image, but is a reality.

 

Relating the New Aesthetics theory back with Manzoni’s tin can, the can now is viewed as a portal, in which the contents of the can are in ‘divine darkness’. These are unknown and unseen by the viewer; an alternative reality on the other side of that picture plane. Henceforth the panting on the wall becomes the label of the tin can. The label is the only window into the alternative world and what is contained within the can.

 

However through the combining of a conceptual artist with a non-conceptual concept, it is accepted that the project contains some irony. Non conceptual art has had a tendency to juxtapose that of conceptual art. The ‘Homage to Manzoni’ exhibition looks at combining the two and hopes that one can engage the other. nd let your users know a little more about you.