The most illuminating definition of Piero Manzoni's "Artist's Shit " can be found in the 1993 documentary film by Mario Martone about Lucio Amelio, titled Lucio Amelio. Terrae Motus , shot just before the legendary gallery owner's death. At one point in the film, Lucio Amelio, speaking of art and death, goes to fetch Piero Manzoni's work. In presenting the little box, holding it in his hand, after emphasizing the artist's death at the Christ-like age of 33, without pretense and in a Neapolitan language (these are the moments when the Neapolitan language reveals its familiarity with darkness), he defines the little box as "a sculpture," its condition as "tomb," and its contents as "body." (There are 30 grams of shit, and they are 30 grams of the artist's body, Lucio Amelio specifies, with a resonance, in his emaciated face, already almost exhausted by the final seal, that cannot fail to leave us astonished and reverent.) This little box, a sculpture, is the artist's tomb, and it holds a piece of the artist's body. Sculpture, sculpture, and relic.
First and foremost, it is a sculpture , the fruit of necessity and urgency, of toil, prompted by a pressing and unstoppable creative impulse, resulting in effort, pain, and lamentation, springing from the artist's innermost being and viscera, literally from his deep and secret intimacy, with an irrepressible and burdensome impulse; and it is no coincidence that a feeling of liberation, relief, a long and proud breath, after the apnea and suspension, will follow the event and this twisting of the soul. First and foremost, it is a sculpture in which all the ceremonies, the tremendous seriousness of childhood, in doing a poop, are reenacted and restored, except for the incalculable presence of maternal caresses and encouragement.
Therefore, a solemn sculpture, but also a relic , according to the fabulous Catholic and Mediterranean tradition. A wonderful and venerable relic.
Piero Manzoni's shit falls entirely within the category of relics, and the devotion associated with them. Its very preciousness and display in display cases and tabernacles of museums, places of worship, and temples of art confirm its status as a matter of reverence and veneration, not unlike the blood of Saint Januarius or the skin of Saint Bartholomew. Its very multiplied reality (in 90 specimens) responds to the demands and history of devotion, to the needs of sanctuaries and the faithful, which, however, it can only partially satisfy, and increasingly less so, due to the many requests and disputes it arouses, given its high value and prestige.
But above all, it is its substance, beyond hagiography, which fits perfectly into the history and virtues of the trade and cult of relics. Without having to resort, for legitimation, to the so-called royal relics, such as the fragments of the cross (with the connected phenomenon of the reintegration of the wood to make up for the excessive requests, so that as many pieces as one wanted could be detached and the cross remained intact) or the nails or the crown of thorns (for the custody of which the Sainte-Chapelle was erected) and the many thorns scattered between Andria, Rome and Predappio, it is sufficient to recall, for class identity, those shameless, horrifying, but very human, linked to the body and viscera, such as the foreskin of Jesus Christ (preserved in Calcata until the moment of its theft) or the various drops of blood, between Mantua and Bruges, flowing from the spear of Longinus (in Padua a wad soaked in it is preserved), or the hair of Mary, scattered everywhere, or the scab from the milk of her breast, or the finger of Saint John, or the portion of dung of the donkey on which Jesus entered Jerusalem (a most precious relic, kept in Cologne and which inaugurated the tradition of dung-smelling), or the tooth of Saint Apollonia, the molar of Saint Nicholas, a piece of the tongue of Saint Blaise, and the phalanx of Saint Roch. And to this brief list I would also add the piece of bread of Fra Cristoforo (it is the famous "bread of forgiveness"), kept in a small wooden box and given, at the end of The Betrothed , as a relic to Lucia (school memory can play these pranks and these vendettas, especially since for Piero Manzoni it is also a cumbersome namesake and ancestor, as well as an indigestible Milanese chronicle). In this regard, on the back of the tribute poster printed by the Schwarz Gallery in February 1964, a year after Piero Manzoni's death, with heartfelt greetings and testimonials from friends, artists, and critics, Arturo Schwarz himself wrote that "if the Manzonis are remembered, I certainly don't believe it will be thanks to Alessandro, the author of the most servile and anonymous novel of the nineteenth century, but rather it will be thanks to the rare qualities of Piero Manzoni." The amusing controversy was already underway.
As for precedents in the history of art, it is sufficient to recall Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau with the collection and religious custody, in niches and tabernacles, of relics of friends (their cigarette butts, nails, locks of hair, pieces of pencils, etc.) including the author's own bottle of urine.
Thus, Piero Manzoni's shit (like his breath, his breath, or the designed vials of blood), in form and in appearance, fits perfectly into this astonishing constellation, without any hint of blasphemy or sacrilege, if tradition is respected. A relic, soon to be imbued with intellectual devotion, in a tuna or Manzotin "open and taste" can, with all the sanctifying trappings of the times and the commodity, yet still presenting itself as a numinous value (the price set by Manzoni himself as equivalent to the value in gold at the time of any transition or commodification—thus 30 grams of gold—symbolically establishes its splendor—and the subsequent speculation and excessive value belong to devotional speculation and to the fact that any relic can fall into the hands of greedy and crafty merchants). Furthermore, as mentioned, it is a work that required passion (effort, cramps, twisting of the viscera, shame, intimacy, requests for grace, liberation and loss).
What kind of relic are we faced with? I would say, without a shadow of a doubt and with all due respect, a relic of the Corpus Christi species . Once again, it is Lucio Amelio who suggests this, with tremendous seriousness and a suggestion of a superior and outrageous order, when he not only reminds us of Manzoni's death at 33, but also presents the little box, saying, "This is the body of the artist," just as a priest, turning to the faithful, raises the bread of the host and says, "This is the body of Christ." The image of the artist as Christ needs no remembrance, despite its countless interpretations, from Dürer to Gauguin, to name just two.
But be careful, because Manzoni's relic enjoys, compared to any other, even to the Eucharist itself, an exceptional and suspensive status, by grace, without comparison, and this precisely and only by virtue of its condition, incarnation and subsistence in the form and in the imperishable form of feces.
Let us return to the catechism. One of the critical points of transubstantiation—that is, of the host, a piece of bread, or wine, into the real and present body and blood of Christ—is digestion and intestinal passage: how long does God's presence in the host last during the journey from the mouth to the sewer? We are speaking of the theological implications of the metabolization of the Eucharistic species and the transformation undergone by the bread and the living substance consumed by the faithful through the digestive tract. St. Thomas Aquinas, in question 77 of the Summa Theologiae, had already affirmed that the host can become corrupted, and at that precise moment, the body and blood of Christ no longer remain in the sacrament. There is a withdrawal: Christ's presence under the sacred species is preserved and endures, after the Mass, as long as the species of bread and wine subsist, a concept reiterated by John Paul II in Ecclesia de Eucharistia . In Pope Urban V's 1264 bull Transiturus de hoc mundo, it was already clearly stated that bread is assumed but not consumed, eaten but not transmuted. Piero Manzoni does not avert (because of the sanctity of the artist's body) this conclusion, but instead affirms the presence of the divine even in the final phase of the process, in the guise of shit, which is worth its weight in gold. For the Church, the host swallowed by the faithful dematerializes without leaving a trace; for the Transiturus , the bread of the host disappears as soon as it passes the believer's throat, as soon as it is out of touch and visibility for the faithful.
And here too, if Manzoni, by not allowing his boxed body to be seen or touched, adheres to the intangible and invisible status of Christ's body after the mouth, yet its journey from the mouth to the esophagus does not undermine the prestigious nature of the artist's body; indeed, it persists even after expulsion, it is imperishable and a supreme and sacrosanct relic. The defecated host "was" the body of God, the artist's shit "is" still the artist's body; it has not ceased to exist, and indeed, in a certain sense, it will confirm its intact, stratospheric value to the world of worship and economics. If we assimilate Christ's body up until an instant before reaching the intestine, Manzoni's shit, on the contrary, has endured and undergone the entire assimilation, attesting to it, kilo or pulp, in a form simultaneously vile and sublime: it leads, as it must for every artist, the incarnation to its very depths. Indeed, the Church has even attempted to traditionally set the duration of the host at about twenty minutes (before which it is recommended not to leave the church). Furthermore, the first digestion occurs in the mouth ( prima digestio fit in ore ), and here too we remember that it should not be chewed, but dissolved or swallowed; Zoppoli, in the Manual of Christian Theology , specifies that the species remain consecrated until they alter, and therefore already in the mouth (the problem of alteration is another issue, also concerning hosts consecrated in tabernacles or ciboria that yellow or grow mold, or in the case of wine that turns sour).
Manzoni endures every change, preserving the sacrosanct and precious heart of his body intact: it is the value in pure gold that attests to its unaltered value, even after the evacuation and the ignominious labor of intestines and guts and sacks where whatever is thrown away becomes shit. Radical changes to the intestine do not alter its value; on the contrary: a very gentle journey from foul-smelling mush to bolus, gastrointestinal chyme and chyle to feces, to proclaim its splendor. Let us remember that the host even requires a fast from midnight for communion (reduced to three hours since 1957 and to one hour since 1965), and this serves to prepare for it a corporeal tabernacle of the purest possible purity. If the host already alters and corrupts upon contact with the tongue and saliva, in Manzoni everything is sacred: from the mouth to the sphincter orifice.
This is why it is a most sacred and precious work. Manzoni's body, the artist's divine substance, never leaves the incarnation, through a perpetual and enduring transubstantiation, from the mouth and tongue, to the sphincter, the asshole, and the evacuation. The shit is artist's shit, and for this reason it possesses a special identity and stands above the host itself and the temporary transubstantiation of Christ, guaranteeing a special and moving communion with the faithful. The body, the artist's tomb, as Lucio Amelio said, is placed in a never-ending salvific plane.
The article was published in the magazine "Container. Intermodal Observatory" (second issue B, July 2022). Thanks therefore to Daniele Poletti and Luigi Severi. Special thanks to Gianni Garrera for the doctrinal and theological references.
On the Specific Value Form of the Art Object, in View of Piero Manzoni’s “Merda d’artista” and Robert Morris’s “Box with the Sound of Its Own Making” (both 1961).
PROPOSITION.
In the following, two works from 1961 – Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista and Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making – serve as objects in a value-theoretical demonstration. [1] Manzoni’s Merda d’artista consists of 90 cans, said to have been filled by the artist with his own excrement. [2] Morris’s sound box is a cube made of walnut wood, through which a recording of the sound of the box’s own making can be heard. Both of these works, in their different ways, create the impression of containing traces of the artist’s physical labor, or of their digestive process. After all, the body is “at work” during defecation, hence the metaphor of “doing one’s business.” For the psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster, expelling feces from our bodies every day is a form of labor. [3] Against this backdrop, I will illustrate how Manzoni’s cans and Morris’s box both preserve the trace of work processes. I argue that these two artworks not only demonstrate the factors underlying the specific value form of the art object but also present them in an exaggerated and humorous way. From a value-theoretical perspective, this strong connection between the art object and its creator’s work process – pointedly emphasized in both Morris’s sound box and Manzoni’s Merda d’artista – is what makes the work of art the specific kind of commodity it is.
Ordinary commodities, or commodity fetishes, as Karl Marx called them, abstract from the concrete labor that has been expended on them, thus concealing this labor, rendering it invisible. [4] By contrast, the pieces by Morris and Manzoni conjure up the presence of precisely this production context and the physical work process, enabling them to present themselves as commodities of a specific kind. Morris allows acoustic traces of his work to emerge from the interior of the sound cube, while Manzoni fills the cans with the physical result of his process of bodily excretion. In both of these cases, rather than the work process being disguised, as with the commodity fetish, it is indicated to be present in latent form. The narrow reduction of artwork to commodity fetish, as in Theodor W. Adorno’s reflections on artistic labor, is clearly inadequate here. [5] This is because, although Adorno claimed autonomy in art was only possible with the concealment of labor, Manzoni’s and Morris’s works in fact show the opposite: the possibility of the process of artistic labor becoming tangibly present within the art object itself.
The fact that art objects, such as cubes or cans, are especially suitable for such value-theoretical demonstrations can be attributed to the interior space created by their three-dimensionality. I argue that the presence of this interior space can promote the suggestion of an inner animation, something crucial from a value-theoretical perspective. But I also work out the ways in which auxiliary aspects – including signatures, limited editions, and the production of the artist’s legend – can help to underwrite these works’ particular value-form. I outline how Morris and Manzoni respond to the specific constraints presented by an emerging media society through these and other works, which are also marked by the personal. I regard Manzoni’s cans, in particular, as the seismographs of a shift in the reigning value system that would take place somewhat later, after the demise of the Bretton Woods Agreement (1973). Although I suggest the cans and Morris’s sound box succeed in inciting the viewer’s desire for there to be a person within the product, I ultimately show how they disappoint and counteract this desire. It is precisely because these objects withhold something from us that they hold such considerable potential for fascination.
1. MORRIS’S SOUND BOX AND MANZONI’S “MERDA D’ARTISTA” ARE OBJECTS OF A SPECIAL KIND.
Morris’s box and Manzoni’s cans exemplify sculpture’s paradigm shift in the 1960s and 1970s, marking the transition from sculpture to object, a development that was particularly characteristic of Minimal Art. [6] Around this time, the term object was applied to sculptural works of art, above all as a way of clearly differentiating minimal objects from sculptures and paintings. Donald Judd described the works of Minimal Art as “specific objects” – having a specificity he primarily attributed to their constitutive materials, such as steel or metal. [7] This, in my opinion, serves as evidence of the need, felt even back then, to emphasize the special status of these objects. Although their serial nature meant they were aligned with the industrial production of “ordinary” goods, they nevertheless remained objects of a special kind, which Judd accordingly described as “specific.” From a value-theoretical perspective, what is interesting in this context is that Judd furthermore located the specificity of minimal objects in their three-dimensional character. [8] This three-dimensionality creates “actual space” that is “intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.” [9] Judd’s emphasis on three-dimensionality thus sought to assert the superiority of the minimalist object over the painted image. For Judd, the power of this object comes from its suggestion of an “actual” and “powerful space.” [10] Such a space could be said to exist in both Morris’s sound box and Manzoni’s Merda d’artista cans, where it is foregrounded and “filled” in a emphatically “actual” and “powerful” way.
Like Judd, Morris always emphasized the three-dimensional character of his minimalist works, characterizing them as “process type objects” – that is, objects that not only result from a process but that incorporate this process into themselves. [11] Morris praised the painter Jackson Pollock for incorporating the process into his final product, but he considered the interior space in Minimal Art’s three-dimensional objects to be even better suited for the preservation of process. [12] With Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, Morris seems to have taken this idea to its extreme. Through its integration of sound, the box also violates modernism’s law of purity, with previously separate fields of music/sound and sculpture/object here subject to direct mutual short-circuiting.
Minimal Art’s serial-industrial production methods and the readymade strategies of Pop Art also find resonance in Manzoni’s cans. After all, these are ordinary commercial cans, 90 of them, manufactured industrially, in their form reminiscent of tins of tuna or pâté. The mode of packaging alone emphasizes the commodity character of this work of art. But the labels attached also demonstrate a mimetic orientation toward the aesthetic of the commodity. These labels claim to guarantee that the contents are “authentic,” with “no preservatives” having been added. While adopting the rhetoric of the food industry, Manzoni also signed each individual can: as a result, the cans hover between being standard commodities and unique works of art. Food production companies also attempt to lend their products credibility and a sense of seriousness: for instance, the German brand “Dr. Oetker” refers to its founder’s doctorate. But no one seriously thinks that some part or trace of “Dr. Oetker” is present in his frozen pizzas. However, Manzoni and his cans filled with his own feces do feed this fantasy, which is further fueled by his signature.
Piero Manzoni with some cans of “Merda d’artista,” Milan, 1961
2. THE SIGNATURE IS THE DECISIVE FACTOR FOR THE ART OBJECT’S SPECIFIC VALUE-FORM.
In the context of fine art, the signature traditionally functions as the site where the product and the person of its creator are tightly bound together. [13] To put it another way, the signature authenticates the unique character of the artistic work by guaranteeing that the work can be traced back to its own singular creator. From a value-theoretical perspective, the signature is such a crucial element precisely because it certifies the unique character of the work of art. It transforms art as a commodity into a commodity of a specific kind. What is interesting in this context is how Manzoni’s cans – by virtue of their exaggerations – both encourage and work against the belief in their uniqueness. The signature certifies that they contain their creator’s feces, but nothing more than that – that is, they are filled with something essentially repulsive and without material value. On the one hand, spectator expectations – of being brought close to the work’s creator – are certainly exceeded. As with the relic of a saint, the artist’s feces have been in contact with his body. On the other hand, Manzoni also seems to disappoint his audience, which wants the entire artist, right down to his skin and hair, but receives only the artist’s excrement, nothing more. Another way of putting this is that Merda d’artista drives the main ideological operations of the art commodity to extremes while simultaneously undermining their workings. The illusory idea that artists are contained within what they produce is both taken literally and forestalled.
At the same time, we are reminded of the artwork’s ability to turn shit into gold. As is well known, ephemeral and abject materials can go through a process of upgrade and revaluation when they are used in art objects: these include Eva Hesse’s latex (which is difficult to preserve) and Dieter Roth’s chocolate (which rots away). From Sigmund Freud’s perspective, shit is the first gift given by the child, the gift that Manzoni seems also to be giving us here, contained within his cans. [14] It is almost as if he is alluding to the anal origins of creative work, a psychoanalytic concept. Manzoni’s work also has an echo of Freud’s long-standing linkage of fecal interest and financial interest. [15] This is because his cans also come with a price.
3. THE ECONOMY OF THE CAN IN THE 1960s.
It was no coincidence that it was the “can” format to which Manzoni turned. We might, in this context, also think of Jasper Johns’s Ale Cans (1964): this work features two ale cans cast in bronze, thus they are not readymades in the strict sense; they have also been painted on and seem far more sculptural than Manzoni’s cans. [16] In 1962, shortly after Manzoni’s exhibition of his cans, Andy Warhol exhibited 32 paintings entitled Campbell’s Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Warhol’s images were presented on a kind of supermarket shelf, emphasizing their similar status to commodities. Manzoni’s can serves to contain his corporeal excretions, whereas Warhol’s can is the central figure within an image. One might say Warhol sacralized the can, enhancing its value by portraying it as a sacred object. Manzoni, by contrast, used the can as a container for his shit (rather than food), in this way devaluing and profaning it as an object.
4. THE LIMITED EDITION AS A WAY OF PRESERVING VALUE.
Despite their differences in media and iconography, what connects Warhol’s and Manzoni’s cans is their shared emphasis on their own status as a limited edition. Manzoni always spoke of “90 cans of Artist’s Shit,” while Warhol’s work is often called “32 Campbell’s Soup Cans,” as if the number of these hand-painted works formed an integral part of the work. [17] In both cases, reference to the edition’s limitation ensured that serially produced works could approximate the status of unique works of art, since by definition limitation means their numbers are limited. What’s more, this limitation exists because of a decision made by the work’s author, who in doing so recalls themselves to mind, so to speak. By deciding the size of the edition, the artist brings their own authorship into play. In this context, it makes sense that Morris’s sound box is only available as a very limited edition: there are three exhibition copies in addition to the original, which is now held at Seattle Art Museum. [18] This means that the box is not a unique object. Morris deals with it like a piece produced in a limited edition, reducing its authenticity; it exists as a plural thing but in only three copies, which shifts it back in the direction of uniqueness. And since Morris himself has determined the exact number of copies to be made, here, too, he resonates within his own work, inside these limited-edition sound cubes, as the work’s unique author.
5. ARTISTIC LABOR IS INCREASINGLY SIMILAR TO LABOR IN GENERAL BUT REMAINS COMPARATIVELY PRIVILEGED.
In this context, it is telling that Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making seems not to have been industrially made, as was quite common with the objects of Minimal Art. Instead, the box results, audibly so, from its creator’s (supposed) craftsmanship: Morris claimed to have made it with a hammer and saw in a three-and-a-half-hour process, and the recording of which plays from inside the box. [19] To me, Morris’s box seems to offer symbolic proof that there is something specific about artistic labor, despite repeated attempts, since the 1920s, to take artistic labor closer to labor in general. Artists such as Alexander Rodchenko and, later, Richard Serra portrayed themselves as industrial workers in photographs, whereas the work put into Morris’s box is presented as craftwork or, more precisely, as a combination of manual and intellectual activity, since the box containing the sound of its own making is clearly based on an idea, which the artist then creates manually. The box also reminds us that artistic labor remains a comparatively privileged activity, as opposed, for example, to waged labor. As a rule, artistic labor results in a product with a materially unique character that is still attributed to its creator even when it circulates independently of them.
Since the 1960s, market constraints have increasingly intervened in artistic practice (with fewer and fewer artists able to make a living from their work). Nevertheless, in contrast to waged workers, artists can, largely speaking, determine the subject of their work, as well as their own working hours. Other workers can only dream of such freedom. However, Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making also contains a hint of symbolic identification with waged labor. The tape recording documents the time – three and a half hours – spent making the piece, suggesting the possibility of calculating an hourly wage for the artist, as with waged workers. But at the same time, Morris’s piece also shows that in relation to artistic labor, the actual duration of working time is unimportant. Unlike industrial work, work created in a comparatively short time can also pay very well in the art world. Morris, by making the time spent working on the box into the subject of the work, alludes to the similarities and the differences between artistic labor and other forms of labor.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a Marxist slogan was prevalent among artists: render your conditions of production transparent. Morris’s sound box may seem to align with this, but it does so only on a superficial level. Although the box supposedly contains the acoustic trace of its own production, we ultimately learn little about the nature of the work. The labor that made the box literally remains in the dark: the sealed box makes any direct access to the artist’s working process impossible. It appears solely as an acoustic trace.
6. THE PRODUCTION OF LEGENDS LENDS PERSONALITY TO IMPERSONAL-SEEMING WORKS.
As well as through the signature and the limited edition, the artwork’s specific value-form has traditionally seen its value guaranteed by the production of legends associated with the artist. Since the early modern period, artists’ life stories have been chronicled according to certain narrative patterns, lending greater credibility to their work. [20] You could even say that, beginning in the 1960s, as mechanical and serial processes threatened the close tie between works and authors, anecdotes have been used all the more urgently, precisely in order to repair the formerly tight connection between the two. Warhol was very adept at enriching his works with legends. Thus, he claimed to eat Campbell’s soup every day, lending a personal touch to his apparently impersonal Campbell’s Soup series, creating the impression of a kind of physical proximity. [21] As sculpture expanded and dissolved its boundaries from the 1960s onward, enabling it to be anything ever since, relations between objects and their creators demanded strengthening. Manzoni went particularly far in this respect, claiming to have filled each can with 30 grams of his own shit, sealing them up to be “smell-free.” The supposed content of the cans brings us closer to the artist’s most intimate activities, his physical excretions. Morris also tried to give his sound box a personal aspect, explaining that he used walnut wood because it reminded him of the smell of walnut trees in the yard of his childhood home. [22] In this way, Morris’s choice of materials helps to energize the neutral form of the cube with something personal. Via this personal anecdote, Morris inscribes a biographical subtext into the box, creating the impression that the artist’s personal origin story is materially resonating within this work. We are a long way from Minimal Art’s supposed depersonalization of the work of art.
7. MAKE USE OF THE SUGGESTIVE POTENTIAL OF INTERIOR SPACE.
It is no coincidence that Manzoni’s cans and Morris’s sound cube were created at a time when parts of the New York and Western European avant-garde were breaking away from Abstract Expressionism, the previously dominant belief system. Artists opted for serial industrial processes and readymade strategies in order to undermine the deep connection between the physical artist’s inner body and the painted image, a connection that had been claimed by Abstract Expressionist painters. In particular, the avant-garde now sought to vehemently reject the premises of action painting, as formulated by critics such as Harold Rosenberg. Where Rosenberg claimed that the painted image was inextricably bound up with the artist’s biography, artists associated with Minimal and Pop Art insisted on the impersonal nature of their own process. [23] Rosalind Krauss has argued that minimalist sculpture sought to abandon the impression of a living “interior space,” as was typical of the work of such modernist sculptors as Henry Moore and Anthony Caro. [24] Instead of suggesting that form unfolds from this living interior space, as the modernists had done, the artists of Minimal Art followed an “ordering system” that “came from outside the work.” [25] Krauss claims that this move enabled them to strip objects of their illusionism, their uniqueness, and their privacy. [26] However, Krauss’s account seems to ignore what is at stake in many 1960s art objects and to miss the point of Morris’s sound box and Manzoni’s Merda d’artista cans. Both of these works, in fact, convey the existence of exactly the kind of “illusionistic center or interior” that Krauss suggests has been overcome. Both Morris and Manzoni fill this interior space and even render it more alive. One could take things a step further and say that these objects, thanks to their three-dimensionality, make the spectator mindful of a living inner space and, ultimately, create an indexical trace comparable to the painterly trace. Whereas painters can avail themselves of a large repertoire of gestures that can be read as ostensible traces of their creators, the only device available to the industrially manufactured cube or the Pop Art readymade box is their interior space. And this is indeed what Morris and Manzoni put to use.
In his book Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (What we see is what looks at us), Georges Didi-Huberman pointed out that there is something human to be found in minimalist objects, contrary to Krauss’s opinion. [27] For Didi-Huberman, the works of Minimal Art have a “latent anthropomorphism”; [28] he also distances himself from the view, held by Krauss and Judd, that minimalism is characterized by a “pure and simple rejection of inwardness.” [29] Instead, he suggests, the interior is precisely what is important in minimalist cubes, although their interiority can often oscillate between fullness and emptiness and should therefore be understood as a “unsettling place.” [30] Against this backdrop, we can characterize both Morris’s sound box and Manzoni’s Merda d’artista cans as “unsettling places.” They make comparable claims – to be filled with the sounds of the manufacturing process or the traces of their creator’s body – but ultimately, in neither case, do we know if this is true. To investigate that claim – by opening the box or one of the cans – would be tantamount to destroying these as works of art. Since the content of these objects ultimately remains in limbo, something unsettling and alarming continues to emanate from them.
8: PERSONALIZATION AS A RESPONSE TO THE RISE OF THE MEDIA SOCIETY.
Many other works by Morris and Manzoni from around 1960 likewise exhibit a strong tendency toward personalization. For Manzoni, a key example in this context is Fiato d’artista (1960), a labeled piece of wood with the remains of a deflated balloon attached, which Manzoni is said to have inflated and which thus would have contained his breath. Breath is the ultimate symbol of being alive, and the work here claims to have captured the indexical trace of Manzoni’s breath. Fiato d’artista literally seems to breathe the spirit of its creator and retain a sign of life from the artist, who died young a few years later. The suggestion that is crucial for an art object’s specific value-form – that it contains traces of its absent creator – is here, again, taken to the extreme while also exposed as an illusion: the artist’s breath has, of course, long since escaped the deflated balloon. Manzoni’s Sculture viventi (1961) also equates artistic works with individual humans: the artist placed people on pedestals, individually signed them, and then declared them works of art with the Certificato d'autenticità. Though Manzoni here reserves the right to pick only certain people, as when he officially, via his signature, elevated the artist Marcel Broodthaers to the status of a work of art. Manzoni behaves like the godlike creator of human works of art: he decides who is entitled to this status. But the series can also be understood as a commentary on the new constraints of a media society in which everyone, very much including artists, is required to engage in self-presentation and self-marketing. Sculture viventi declares certain other people to be living works of art, and in doing so, Manzoni imposes on them the concentrated proximity between person and product that a media society demands. His work transforms them into humans in product form, certifying the transformation with his signature. Since then, the compulsion to self-promote – especially on social media – has increased considerably. However, unlike with Manzoni’s work, people now undertake self-promotion on their own initiative. Examples include digital platforms like Instagram, where young artists, in particular, must now market themselves incessantly, if they are not to fall into oblivion. [31] Robert Morris demonstrated several times that the artist-subject cannot be killed off, not even in the context of Minimal Art, a movement usually considered critical of the idea of the subject. His piece I-Box (1962) stands out especially strikingly in this context. The work is a relief-like gray object, including a flesh-colored door painted in the shape of a capital letter I. When this door is opened, one is confronted with a black-and-white photograph of Morris, naked and grinning, with a semi-erect penis. Morris here presents his own body in a casually sexualized pose, which also reflects his interest in the Judson Dance Theater, an experimental dance company with whom he frequently collaborated. Here, too, intimate relationships were brought to the fore, as well as everyday movements like standing and walking. At the same time, Morris’s I-Box is a reminder to us that even the most impersonal cube can be traced back to a creator. All that is needed is that we open the box – that we look into it in more detail – and we might find traces of the person behind the work.
9. MANZONI’S CANS AS A SEISMOGRAPH OF CHANGES IN VALUE.
The pricing of Manzoni’s work must also be viewed as an integral part of it. In an interview, Manzoni said that he set the price per can (each of which supposedly containing 30 grams of feces) to correspond to the current daily equivalent of a single troy ounce of gold. [32] By allowing the price to be dictated by fluctuations in the price of gold, Manzoni highlighted not only the structural relationship between art and money but also contemporary parallels between the work of art in its materiality and uniqueness and the qualities of the dollar as a currency, prior to the expiry of the Bretton Woods system in 1973. The dollar had been the global anchor currency, partly secured on the material value of gold, a relation reminiscent of the crucial material dimension that underlies the art object’s specific value-form.
Almost prophetically, Manzoni seems to have foreseen the consequences for the art world of the end of Bretton Woods and the associated free-floating currency exchange rates. After the dollar came off the gold standard while continuing as the world’s reserve currency, works of art came to the foreground as possible objects of speculation, since they are materially based currencies, as the dollar formerly was. The great commercial success of the New York Scull Auction (1973), a sale of contemporary artworks that was strongly opposed at the time by many artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, was clear evidence of this development. For the first time, an auction for contemporary art made high profits. Manzoni’s pricing also seems to have anticipated the fact that the market prices of artworks would become subject to stronger economic fluctuations than ever before. His cans herald the rise of the art object to a speculative investment in the wake of the dollar’s departure from the gold standard; they also point to the increasing arbitrariness of art prices. By determining the price of his cans in an ultimately arbitrary manner, Manzoni also tells us that the price of an artwork cannot fundamentally be justified. Price determination may offer the appearance of plausibility, but it nonetheless remains random.
CONCLUSION.
Although both Morris’s sound box and Manzoni’s Merda d’artista cans suggest that they contain the artist’s labor (Morris) or the product of his labor-like digestive process (Manzoni), in fact, this is precisely what they withhold from the viewer. We have no access to the work itself, only to its supposedly indexical traces. This figure of withdrawal – that something seems present and yet remains absent – is crucial for the art object’s specific value-form. If the work did not withhold the artist and their working reality from us, it would lose its fascination and its disturbing aspect. Thanks to the processes alluded to, art objects suggest that traces of the artist or at least the traces of their labor process are contained within them. But ultimately, they keep all of that from us. They feed our phantasmatic longing for the person in the product while simultaneously disappointing us. For the spectator, conversely, this means remaining engaged with the object – in other words, recipients twist it and turn it to lend it symbolic meaning, which will eventually be transformed into market value. As a recipient, one also does work: the interpretive and theoretical work that enters into these objects – work that likewise resonates within them and contributes to their specific value-form.
Translation: Brían Hanrahan
~
Isabelle Graw · June 2024. Issue No. 134 "Sculpture".
Isabelle Graw is the cofounder and publisher of TEXTE ZUR KUNST and teaches art history and theory at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Her most recent publications include In Another World: Notes, 2014–2017 (Sternberg Press, 2020); Three Cases of Value Reflection: Ponge, Whitten, Banksy (Sternberg Press, 2021); and On the Benefits of Friendship (Sternberg Press, 2023).
For legal reasons, some images that accompany this text in the print publication cannot be included here.
“Artist’s Shit” (Italian: Merda d’artista) is a work of conceptual art by the Italian artist Pier Manzoni from 1961.
It is a series of metal cans with contents consistent with the title. The artist determined the price of the can as the equivalent of the grammage in gold.
Your work is crap – it is said that this critical statement by the father of the Italian artist Manzoni gave him the idea for a new work of art. In response to this insult, Manzoni packed his droppings into 90 numbered cans in May 1961. Each contained 30 grams of excrement and was labeled with the name of the artist’s Shit (in Italian, English, French and German), with the entire description of the can read:
Artist shit
Net content 30 g
Preserved fresh
Manufactured and preserved
in May 1961
Today, Manzoni cans are priced at $ 100,000.
Actually, a classification question opens up: is Manzoni’s Shit a sculpture, installation, or performance? It is supposed to be an installation, though small in size, but maybe a sculpture, because it is a closed object filled with content, or maybe a performance, because creating this object required a “performance” on the part of the artist…
On the Tate Modern website, which is the proud owner of the 004 can, Sophie Howarth writes:
In December 1961, Manzoni wrote in a letter to artist Ben Vautier: “I wish all artists would sell their fingerprints or hold contests to see who can draw the longest line or sell their shit in cans. The fingerprint is the only sign of personality that is acceptable: if collectors want something intimate, truly personal, from an artist, there is, for example, an artist’s shit like this, something that is really his. ” It is not known exactly how many cans of Artist’s Shit were sold during Manzoni’s lifetime, but the receipt of August 23, 1962 confirms that Manzoni sold one Alberto L Albercia for 30 grams of 18 ct gold. Manzoni’s decision to price his excrement on a par with the price of gold clearly alluded to the tradition of understanding the artist as an alchemist. As Jon Thompson wrote: Critical and metaphorical reification of the artist’s body, its processes and products by Manzoni showed the way to understand the artist’s personality and the creation of the artist’s body as a consumer object. Merda d’artista, artist’s shit, dried naturally and preserved “without added preservatives”, was a perfect metaphor for the carnal and disembodied nature of artistic work: a work of art as a wholesome raw material and its violent labeling as a commodity. Manzoni understood the creative act as part of the consumption cycle: as continuous processing, packaging, marketing, consumption, reprocessing, packaging, and so on. Artist’s Shit was created at a time when Manzoni was creating various works involving the fetishization and commodification of the substances of his own body. These included fingerprinting the eggs before eating them and selling balloons filled with his own breath. Of these works, the Artist’s Shit cans have become the most famous, in part because of the continuing uncertainty as to whether they actually contain Manzoni feces. Such uncertainty gave them an extra level of irony.
Manzoni’s artist and friend, Agostino Bonalumi, argued that the cans were filled with plaster, not droppings. They cannot be x-rayed as the cans are made of steel, so the true contents of Artist’s Shit remain a mystery. Interestingly, in 1989, Bernard Bazile launched an open Manzoni’s can, calling it “Piero Manzoni’s Open Can”. However, it was an unopened, packed item.
During his short life, Manzoni managed to create a work steeped in criticism and rooted in a rather unusual mood at the time. Manzoni belonged to the generation of artists recognized by the Italian art critic Germano Celant as supporters of Arte Pover, a term coined and promoted at his inaugural exhibition In Spazio or “The Space of Thought” in 1967. All exhibition participants from various Italian cities, including Manzoni, shared a radical common position towards the “art system”. Arte Povera was a kind of a descendant of conceptual art, although the context of Italian society, still struggling with fascism, was clearly different than in other Western countries, especially in the United States. The same can be said about Piero Manzoni, because in 1967 he was already an artistic radical who, with his work, challenged contemporary tendencies.
Shit! Manzoni's work doesn't do what it says on the tin
So Piero Manzoni filled his cans not, as labelled, with Merda d'Artista, but with plaster. Does that matter? Does the concept still stand? Or should the Tate get rid of their investment fast?
In 2000 the Tate bought a tin purporting to be the excrement of Italian artist Piero Manzoni for £22,350 from Sotheby's. The news provoked outrage. How could Nicholas Serota lavish such money on this four decades old send-up on the absurdity of the art market, whose artistic intervention, after all, was not intended to be a thing of beauty or permanence? Indeed, Manzoni once said that he was exposing "the gullibility of the art-buying public" with his tins of Manzoni's Merda d'Artista. Hadn't the Tate been had from beyond the grave by the cheeky Italian?
Maybe not. Maybe the Tate's purchase was astute. Last month a tin of Merda d'Artista as sold by the same auction house in Milan for £81,000.
Perhaps now the Tate should offload their can on the market pronto and pocket the profits. I say pronto, because there are reports that Manzoni's excrement did not fill those tins. Agostino Bonalumi, who worked with Manzoni, recently wrote in Corriere della Sera, that the 90 30-gramme tins that Manzoni filled in 1961 before his untimely death aged 29, contained not faeces but plaster. This might be one of the greatest outrages perpetrated in the history of art. Or not.
Quite possibly the contents don't do exactly what they say on the tin. "I can assure everyone the contents were only plaster," writes Bonalumi. "If anyone wants to verify this, let them do so." Good point: surely now is the time for Serota to get out the can opener and find out. Is there a conceptual art curator at Tate Modern who specialises in determining the authenticity of 46-year-old Italian artist's faeces? It would be a singular job description.
But no. The Tate tin will keep its mystery. A Tate spokesperson says: "Keeping the viewer in suspense is part of the work's subversive humour." But did Manzoni leave instructions to that effect, or are the Tate making it up as they go along? If the latter, the thought is that they are protecting their investment: the value of the work might well plummet if the boring truth that Bonalumi posits was discovered.
Does it matter? Does it matter if Manzoni's tins do not contain merda d'artista? It's actually a more serious question than you might think because it concerns what kind of authenticity is necessary in art and what is contingent. For example, would it matter if the 8,601 diamonds that stud Damien Hirst's new work, For the Love of God, were really paste? Would it be an hilarious Manzonian artworld gag if all the cordons, bag checks and bouncers that prefigure the spectator's five minutes' face time with Hirst's head were completely unnecessary and that the diamonds were not worth £15 million? Or would the revelation be really, really annoying and make us poor shnooks queuing at the White Cube feel cheated? And, even more crucially, how much would the revelation that the diamonds were dross affect For the Love of God's £50 million price tag?
Similarly, would it matter if the condoms on Tracey Emin's bed had not seen active service in the artist's love life? It's an intriguing question since, surely, much of the interest in and value of Emin's self-revelatory work relies on the presumed authenticity of the sex life she discloses in her work. Her condoms must be real or we would be entitled to be quite cross. Or would we?
Either way, if there is an afterlife, Piero Manzoni surely must be enjoying the fact that the art world remains just as ludicrous as when he sought to expose it nearly five decades ago.
Merda d'artista (Artist's Shit) is a 1961 conceptual artwork by Italian artist Piero Manzoni consisting of 90 numbered tin cans, each measuring approximately 4.8 by 6.5 centimeters and purportedly filled with 30 grams of the artist's own feces preserved by an unspecified method.[1] Manzoni priced each can according to its weight in gold on the day of purchase, equating the excrement's value to that of a precious metal and thereby critiquing the commodification and subjective valuation in the art market.[2] The work emerged amid Manzoni's broader experiments with bodily substances and imprints, such as Artist's Breath and thumbprints, as a provocative statement on authorship and the fetishization of the artist's persona over traditional aesthetic or material qualities.[2] Despite its claims, authenticity controversies have persisted, with at least one opened can revealing plaster rather than excrement, raising questions about the consistency of contents across the edition and the conceptual integrity of the piece.[3] In the decades since, individual cans have fetched substantial sums at auction, underscoring the irony of the work's initial satire on art's economic absurdity.[4]
Historical Context and Creation
Piero Manzoni's Artistic Evolution
Piero Manzoni was born on July 13, 1933, in Soncino, near Milan, Italy, into a noble family that exposed him to artistic circles during the post-World War II era.[5] His early development drew from the Italian avant-garde, particularly the Spatialist movement led by Lucio Fontana, with whom Manzoni's family maintained close ties through social connections in Milan and Liguria.[6] These influences encouraged Manzoni's departure from traditional painting toward experiments questioning artistic authorship and materiality, evident in his initial abstract works before 1959.
By 1959, Manzoni initiated his Linee (Lines) series, producing continuous ink lines of fixed lengths—ranging from 1 meter to over 100 meters—drawn on paper rolls and sealed in cylindrical metal or cardboard containers with certificates specifying the exact measurement and date.[7] This methodical output, totaling around 100 lines by 1961, shifted focus from visual representation to the verifiable act of creation itself, commodifying the artist's gesture in a portable, authenticated form.[8]
Concurrently, from late 1959 to 1960, Manzoni created Corpi d'aria (Bodies of Air), a limited edition of 45 pneumatic sculptures each comprising a wooden base, inflatable balloon, mouthpiece, and stamped certificate bearing his fingerprint.[9] Buyers were instructed to inflate the balloon with their own breath or the artist's, transforming ephemeral human exhalation into a saleable artwork priced at 30,000 lire, thus extending authorship to the viewer's participation while emphasizing the body's intangible outputs.[10]
This trajectory culminated in 1961 with Sculture viventi (Living Sculptures), where Manzoni issued Certificati di autenticità (Certificates of Authenticity) declaring purchasers—often friends or gallery visitors—as artworks themselves upon signing their bodies, priced by body weight in grams of gold.[11] These acts progressively equated the artist's physical presence and biological traces with aesthetic value, laying groundwork for further provocations in materiality. Manzoni's career ended abruptly on February 6, 1963, when he suffered a myocardial infarction at age 29 in his Milan studio, constraining his total output to under a decade of production.[12]
Development and Production in 1961
In May 1961, Italian artist Piero Manzoni produced Merda d'artista ("Artist's Shit"), consisting of 90 sealed tin cans each containing 30 grams of feces purportedly his own.[13] The edition was created as a limited series numbered 001 to 090, with Manzoni signing each lid.[14][15]
The cans measured 6.5 cm in diameter and 4.8 cm in height, utilizing standard canning processes to seal the contents, thereby preserving them without detectable odor.[13][16] Labels affixed to each can bore text in Italian, English, French, and German: "Merda d'artista (Artist's Shit) / contents, 30 gr net / freshly preserved / produced and tinned in May 1961."[15][17]
Manzoni priced each can according to the market value of 30 grams of gold on 20 May 1961, equating the work's worth directly to the artist's bodily output in a literal economic critique of contemporary art valuation.[14][18] Initial distribution occurred through Milan galleries, including sales facilitated by associates in the local art scene.[19] Certificates of authenticity accompanied the numbered edition to verify provenance.[13]
Physical Composition and Authenticity
Description of the Cans
Each of the 90 cans in Piero Manzoni's Merda d'artista (Artist's Shit) measures approximately 4.8 cm in height by 6.4 cm in diameter, constructed from standard tinplate with a soldered lid for sealing.[20][21] The exterior features a blue printed paper label wrapped around the body, displaying the title Merda d'artista, Manzoni's signature, the edition number (1 to 90), and production specifics including "Peso netto gr. 30" (net weight 30 grams) and "Prodotto e conservato fresco nel maggio 1961" (produced and preserved fresh in May 1961).[22][23]
The cans purport to contain 30 grams of Manzoni's own excrement per unit, sealed without preservatives or additives shortly after production in Milan during 1961.[24][14] Accompanying each numbered can was a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist, affirming the contents as his feces prepared and canned in that year.[14]
The packaging emulates small commercial food tins, with the label's typographic style and bilingual text (Italian and English) evoking consumer product branding from the era.[14] Due to the material's susceptibility to corrosion from imperfect seals, surviving examples are typically maintained in climate-controlled institutional storage to mitigate degradation of the tinplate and lid.[20]
Verification and Contents Disputes
In 1969, the Tate Gallery acquired one of Manzoni's cans but has never opened it, citing the need to preserve its integrity and market value, with curators noting that the artwork's authenticity relies on the sealed state and accompanying certificate rather than empirical contents verification.[25] Similarly, institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art hold unopened examples, prioritizing scarcity-driven economic factors over destructive testing, as opening would irreversibly diminish resale potential despite advanced analytical capabilities like spectrometry being feasible for non-invasive checks.[26]
Public openings remain exceedingly rare, with anecdotal reports of at least 45 cans bursting due to internal pressure from presumed decomposition gases, though spilled contents were not systematically analyzed or confirmed as feces.[17] A notable claim emerged in 2007 when Italian artist Agostino Bonalumi, a close collaborator of Manzoni, asserted in an interview that the cans contained plaster rather than excrement, reasoning that Manzoni could not physiologically produce the required 2.7 kilograms (90 cans at 30 grams each) in the short production window, and that substitutes were used to fulfill the edition.[3] This allegation, tied to surging auction prices around a London sale fetching £81,000 for one can, fueled speculation of production inconsistencies or fraud, though no independent scientific corroboration followed, and Bonalumi's statement reflects personal testimony rather than forensic evidence.
Debates persist over uniform contents across the edition, exacerbated by Manzoni's death in 1963 at age 29, which precludes direct artist confirmation, and the absence of peer-reviewed chemical analyses on opened samples.[27] While some unverified accounts describe dried, feces-resembling material in rare inspections, others suggest decay artifacts or non-organic fillers mimicking expected texture, underscoring how certification documents and edition numbering, not verifiable substance, causally determine perceived authenticity and value in the art market.[14]
Economic Dimensions and Market Dynamics
Original Pricing Strategy
Piero Manzoni established the pricing for Merda d'artista by valuing each 30-gram can of feces at the equivalent market price of 30 grams of gold, a deliberate mechanism tying the artwork's worth to a fluctuating commodity standard rather than traditional artistic criteria. Produced and sealed in May 1961, the cans were offered at approximately $35 per unit, corresponding to the prevailing gold price of $35 per troy ounce (31.1 grams).[14] This formula—30 grams of artist's excrement equated to 30 grams of gold—extended the valuation from the material's weight alone, positioning the contents as a proxy for the artist's bodily output without regard for sensory or utilitarian qualities.[18]
The approach functioned as an economic experiment, assigning value through arbitrary equivalence to expose how market dynamics could elevate ephemeral matter via certification and scarcity. Initial distribution yielded sparse sales among the 90 cans, with buyers acquiring them primarily through galleries in Milan and Europe at the gold-linked rate, underscoring the strategy's reliance on the artist's emerging reputation over immediate demand.[14] Unsold units remained in dealer inventories, where the fixed gold-based pricing provided a baseline for subsequent transactions, though original offerings emphasized equivalence to precious metal over speculative markup. This model empirically demonstrated art valuation's detachment from production costs, predicating worth on persona-driven scarcity in a nascent conceptual market.[28]
Auction Records and Value Appreciation
Initial resales of Merda d'artista cans in the decades following their 1961 production remained modest, reflecting limited market interest in Manzoni's conceptual provocations during his lifetime and immediate posthumous period. Values began appreciating noticeably in the late 20th century amid growing recognition of Manzoni's influence on post-war European art, with sales in the 1990s occasionally exceeding $50,000 as institutional collections sought examples.[29] By the early 2000s, prices had escalated further; for instance, the Tate Gallery acquired a can in 2000 for £22,350, signaling broader curatorial acceptance.[3]
Subsequent auctions demonstrated sharp value growth, driven by the work's finite supply—90 cans originally produced, with an estimated 45 or fewer remaining intact due to explosions from unpreserved contents, openings, or losses—and controlled authentication by the Fondazione Piero Manzoni, which certifies legitimacy and restricts market entry.[17] Key record sales include a 2007 Christie's auction of can No. 54 for £182,500 (approximately $360,000 at the time), and a 2016 Milan sale of No. 69 for €275,000 (about $300,000), setting a then-world record amid surging demand for conceptual artifacts.[22] [30]
Post-2020, despite broader art market fluctuations from economic uncertainty, Merda d'artista values have held stable at high levels, with private sale estimates often surpassing $300,000 and auction lots commanding premiums due to speculative interest in branded scarcity rather than material properties. This persistence underscores bubble-like dynamics in the contemporary art economy, where provenance and narrative hype elevate priced items far beyond comparable commodities, as critiqued in analyses of Manzoni's oeuvre as a parody of value assignment.[32] [16]
Interpretations and Philosophical Underpinnings
Manzoni's Stated Intentions
Piero Manzoni articulated Merda d'artista as a radical assertion of artistic autonomy, positing excrement as the artist's most direct and unmediated bodily production, superior to traditional media like paint or marble in its authenticity and immediacy. By canning his feces in 1961, he rejected aesthetic hierarchies that privilege skill or beauty, instead elevating waste as a pure emanation of the self, free from external manipulation. This aligned with his broader oeuvre, where the body served as the origin of art, as seen in contemporaneous works like Fiato d'artista (Artist's Breath), emphasizing organic traces over fabricated forms.[2]
In accompanying declarations, Manzoni equated the transformative power of artistic intent with alchemical reversal, stating that "if the artist says his shit is gold, it is gold," thereby satirizing the arbitrary assignment of value in art and commerce, where perception overrides material reality. This pronouncement critiqued the commodification rampant in Italy's miracolo economico of the late 1950s and early 1960s, exposing how institutional endorsement could elevate the profane to the prized, independent of intrinsic properties.[14]
While drawing from Dada's irreverence and Marcel Duchamp's readymades—which repurposed everyday objects—Manzoni stressed the distinction of his material's vital, personal genesis, produced internally rather than appropriated externally, to affirm the artist's sovereignty over meaning. He envisioned the work as a preserved annual output, sealing portions of his excrement to maintain its "freshness" as an enduring testament to creative essence.[14][2]
The project's origins trace to Manzoni's patrician upbringing in a Milanese industrial family; his father, Egisto Manzoni, who operated a meat-canning factory, allegedly dismissed Piero's pursuits with the barb, "Your work is shit," prompting the son to literalize the insult as defiant reclamation, turning dismissal into a foundational act of value inversion.[14][26]
Broader Conceptual Critiques
Critics sympathetic to conceptual art interpret Merda d'artista as a deliberate subversion of bourgeois art conventions, transforming excrement—a base, ephemeral substance—into a commodified artifact that interrogates the constructed nature of artistic value and authenticity.[2] By pricing each 30-gram can equivalent to its weight in gold on the production date in May 1961, Manzoni highlighted the arbitrary mechanisms of the art market, echoing broader challenges to traditional notions of originality and the "aura" of unique objects in an era of mass reproduction.[33] This perspective posits the work as a provocative commentary on consumerism, where the artist's bodily output becomes a personalized extension of creative labor, defying expectations of aesthetic refinement.[34]
Skeptical deconstructions, however, reduce the piece to an elaborate stunt predicated on exploiting audience gullibility and institutional credulity, with its purported profundity unmasked as performative provocation lacking substantive artistic merit.[35] Empirical examination reveals that surging auction values—such as the 2007 sale of one can for €180,000—stem not from inherent qualities but from speculative hype amplified by celebrity narratives and collector prestige, debunking myths of unassailable "genius" in post-war modern art.[36] These critiques emphasize observable market behaviors where promotional discourse and scarcity engineering eclipse content, rendering the work a case study in value inflation detached from verifiable aesthetic or intellectual contributions.[37]
Causal analyses draw parallels to psychological undercurrents, such as Freudian coprophilia, wherein feces symbolize infantile gift-giving or creative potency, yet Manzoni's alchemical elevation of waste underscores a mythic transformation belied by prosaic realities of production and trade.[38] Grounded in art market data, this reveals how celebrity attribution trumps material essence, with the cans' authentication reliant on Manzoni's signature rather than empirical content verification, perpetuating a system where narrative potency drives economic outcomes over intrinsic properties.[14]
Perspectives aligned with free-market principles affirm the work's valuation as a pure outcome of voluntary exchange, yet critique avant-garde conceptualism—including Merda d'artista—for its institutional subsidization and estrangement from standards of beauty, skill, or alignment with productive societal labor.[39] This detachment, often propped by public funding and elite curation, contrasts with market-driven appraisals that expose the fragility of claims to transcendence when stripped of external validation, highlighting a rift between subsidized experimentation and value rooted in consumer demand or traditional craftsmanship.[40]
Reception, Controversies, and Cultural Impact
Initial Public and Critical Responses
Upon its debut in May 1961, Merda d'artista elicited a range of responses within Milan's avant-garde circles, with some viewing the sealed cans as a bold conceptual innovation challenging commodification in art, while others dismissed it as an immature provocation lacking substantive merit.[6] The work's presentation at galleries such as Galleria Hanappe limited immediate public outrage, as the tins' opacity prevented direct confrontation with the purported contents, resulting in more subdued debate than overt scandal compared to Manzoni's prior bodily interventions.[41] Initial sales were minimal, with only a few of the 90 cans reportedly purchased at the artist's pricing of 30 grams equivalent to the daily gold value (approximately $37 per can), underscoring public and collector ambivalence toward its audacity.[17]
Following Manzoni's death on February 6, 1963, the work gained wider notoriety across Europe, featured in exhibitions that amplified its shock value in media accounts focused primarily on the literal and metaphorical implications rather than aesthetic depth.[42] Critics aligned with modernist trends, such as Gillo Dorfles, lauded elements of Manzoni's oeuvre—including Merda d'artista—for embodying an anti-establishment edge that critiqued bourgeois art norms, positioning it within broader 1960s experiments in dematerialization and absurdity.[6] Conversely, traditionalist voices in Italian and European press decried the piece as obscene vulgarity, interpreting it as emblematic of cultural decadence wherein provocation supplanted technical skill or traditional craftsmanship.[41][43] This polarization reflected deeper tensions in postwar art discourse, with empirical evidence of sparse early transactions indicating that acclaim remained confined to niche avant-garde audiences amid broader skepticism.[14]
Ongoing Debates on Artistic Legitimacy
Critics argue that Merda d'artista lacks intrinsic artistic merit, as it demonstrates no technical skill, aesthetic appeal, or communicative depth beyond the artist's self-declaration, reducing art to arbitrary labeling rather than creation.[44] This perspective holds that equating preserved feces with art erodes objective standards, inviting the reductio ad absurdum that any object or excrement could qualify as artwork, thereby commodifying provocation at the expense of craft and universality.[45] Proponents, however, defend its legitimacy as a conceptual breakthrough that interrogates the fetishization of the artist's persona and the art market's valuation mechanisms, though such claims are scrutinized for prioritizing intent over tangible qualities.
Cultural analyses highlight how institutions, often supported by public funds, exhibit Merda d'artista—as in the Tate's holdings—while sidelining representational works, revealing a preferential tolerance for scatological shock value that aligns with avant-garde norms but selectively disregards bodily taboos in non-progressive contexts. This institutional embrace prompts logical critiques: if excrement's artistic status derives from context rather than inherent properties, it exposes pretensions in subsidized cultural gatekeeping, where empirical disgust is overridden by elite consensus.[46]
In the 2020s, social media discourse has intensified scam perceptions through memes likening the work to ephemeral stunts like Maurizio Cattelan's duct-taped banana, portraying Merda d'artista as emblematic of hype-driven fraud in contemporary markets.[47] Authenticity disputes further erode legitimacy; in 1989, artist Bernard Bazile opened a can for display, revealing desiccated contents encased in a smaller tin—possibly plaster rather than feces—contradicting claims of 30 grams of artist's excrement per can and amplifying arguments that the work's value hinges on unverified faith rather than verifiable substance. These episodes sustain a truth-seeking tension: while institutional persistence affirms a form of cultural artifact status, logical scrutiny reveals its endurance as potentially causal to market dynamics rather than artistic profundity.[45]
Influence on Contemporary Art Markets
Manzoni's Merda d'artista established a precedent for decoupling artistic value from material substance, pricing each 30-gram can equivalent to its weight in gold at approximately $37 in 1961, yet achieving resale values far exceeding gold's appreciation, such as $67,000 per can at Sotheby's in 1991—over 70 times gold's contemporaneous ounce price of $374.[14] This model emphasized certificates of authenticity and conceptual framing over physical content, influencing the market's acceptance of works where provenance and scarcity dictate worth, as seen in the sealed cans' enduring trade value, with individual tins fetching up to €124,000 at auction.[48] Such dynamics contributed to conceptual art's market dominance, shifting emphasis from craftsmanship to idea-driven commodities and enabling high valuations for minimal-effort outputs tied to the artist's persona.
The work's legacy amplified the commodification of shock and body-based art, paving pathways for later practitioners like Damien Hirst, whose preserved animal installations—echoing Manzoni's alchemical transmutation of base matter—have commanded multimillion-dollar sales, such as The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living for $8 million in 2004, though direct causal links remain interpretive rather than explicit.[49] Similarly, Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1987), submerging a crucifix in urine, extended the provocation-commodity paradigm, with prints selling for tens of thousands, reflecting normalized market tolerance for bodily detritus as high-value provocations.[50] These evolutions underscore Merda d'artista's role in broadening conceptual art's economic footprint, prefiguring body, performance, and land art markets by prioritizing the artist's output as a scarce, certifiable asset.[51]
Parallels extend to the NFT boom of 2021–2022, where digital certificates imposed scarcity on reproducible files, mirroring Manzoni's transformation of ubiquitous excrement into limited-edition value through buyer belief in authorship and blockchain validation, as in Beeple's Everydays: The First 5,000 Days fetching $69 million at Christie's.[52] This precedent facilitated NFT art sales exceeding $2 billion in 2021, trading on conceptual scarcity akin to Manzoni's tins, though without physical anchors, highlighting market reliance on shared perceptual equivalence over tangible utility.[52]
Critics argue this normalization eroded merit-based valuation, fostering inflation detached from skill or beauty—contemporary art auctions routinely exceed $10 billion annually, with conceptual pieces comprising a disproportionate share despite minimal production costs, enabling elite signaling over accessible aesthetics.[16] Proponents counter that it democratized definitions, challenging institutional gatekeeping and expanding market inclusivity for idea-centric works, though empirical surges in post-Manzoni conceptual sales suggest causal reinforcement of speculation-driven economics rather than intrinsic merit.[4]
‘Your work is shit’ – the Italian artist Piero Manzoni was allegedly told by his father. In response to this slur, he came up with the idea of canning his own excrement as a work of art. Merda d’artista 1961 was made into an edition of 90. A neat riposte considering his father owned a canning factory. John Miller on the excremental value in Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista – sold in cans by weight at gold’s daily market price (becoming literally worth its weight in gold).
If you stuck a piece of shit on the wall, it would be all the same to them as long as someone told them the shit was worth money. That’s the nouveau-riche approach
Andrea Fraser, performance script for May I Help You?
Fraser’s statement issues from the mouth of a supposed patrician, a woman who might serve on a museum’s board of directors. Hers is a provocation meant to distinguish between old money and new, between those with a vast store of cultural capital and those in the business of acquiring as much as they can in the shortest time possible. For the patrician, the acquisitive efficiency of the nouveau riche is odious because the very prospect of ready exchangeability jeopardises longstanding traditions of cultural inheritance. This efficiency, as such, produces a relative indifference to deeply ingrained aesthetic experience. Curiously, her rhetorical substitution of shit for art recapitulates the logic of Piero Manzoni’s legendary work Merda d’artista 1961, a provocation of an entirely different order.
Merda d’artista is an edition of 90 signed and numbered works that Manzoni said he made from his own excrement. Each is a 30-gram can of shit, measuring 4.8 x 6.5 cm, “freshly preserved, produced and tinned”, as stated on the label. This information appears in Italian, French, German and English, against a background pattern produced by repeating the artist’s name in block letters. Because Manzoni sold each can by weight at gold’s daily market price, the shit literally became worth its weight in gold. In retrospect, this has proved to be a bargain. At $35.20 (£18.07) per ounce – the price at which the London Gold Pool (an international consortium of central banks) wanted to fix the precious metal – a tin originally would have cost about $37. That was 1961. Thirty years later, Sotheby’s auctioned one for $67,000. Then, the price of gold had climbed to $374 per ounce. If Manzoni’s initial pricing scheme still held, it should have cost only $395.77. In other words, in 1991 Merda d’artista had outperformed gold in price by more than 70 times.
Ordinarily, prices serve to objectify value. More precisely, most people believe that prices objectify value. Alternately, objectifying value becomes the operative function of prices, regardless of whether people believe in them or not. Is the process of objectification, however, in itself objective? Merda d’artista is a clear enough gesture, but its recourse to exchange value puts a far less tractable host of metaphysical capers into play. Consider gold – an international medium for exchange since 1500BC. Perhaps because it serves almost exclusively as an emblem of value, the economist John Maynard Keynes once called the precious metal a “barbarous relic”. No doubt, he distrusted its irrational, even libidinal, allure, but to say that it is barbarous amounts to a no less troubling disavowal. For example, it was politicians and economists, not barbarians per se, who drew up the Bretton Woods Agreement to regulate the international monetary system in the wake of the Second World War. One of the agreement’s key provisions stipulated that countries fix their national currencies to an exchange rate indexed to gold – supervised by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). What this suggests, at the very least, is that value has become a negotiated property, even if the basis for such negotiation is not entirely rationalisable. Therein lies the rub, namely the politicisation of value within political economy. Curiously, just one year before Manzoni produced Merda d’artista, the price of gold spiked at $40 per ounce – up about $5 from its usual level; this came at a time when fluctuations of just a few pennies made headlines. Thus, in 1961, at the behest of the US Federal Reserve, the London Gold Pool formed to help to stabilise prices – and Manzoni in turn used them, nominally, to ascribe an exact value to his multiples.
Merda d’artista’s exactitude breaks with the universalist tone of Manzoni’s manifestos, wherein, for example, he called for art “to sink its roots to the origins before man and to discover the primary myths of humanity”. In contrast, the prosaic wording on the can’s label – “freshly preserved, produced and tinned” – suggests much more. For example, what does freshly preserved mean in the end? Ordinarily, fresh and preserved are antonyms, even if keeping food (relatively) fresh is the aim of preservation. The order is also curious. It suggests that the artist preserved his excrement even before he produced and tinned it. Moreover, how does preserving differ from canning, anyway? At the very least, this redundant anti-chronology underscores Manzoni’s pointed conflation of production and waste. To be fair, he ultimately did engage a primary myth, though perhaps one of inhumanity, to paraphrase Keynes: that of the commodity fetish. To do so, he came up with a novelty item not far removed from whoopee cushions, hand buzzers and plastic vomit. Supposedly, he made this work in response to a taunt from his father: “Your work is shit.” Since his father ran a factory that produced canned meats, Manzoni, in effect, paid him back in kind. Thus, what distinguishes Merda d’artista from the whoopee cushion is, not surprisingly, discourse. It is a gesture, not an industrial product – even if it presents itself otherwise.
Artist/critic Brian O’Doherty calls gestures “a form of invention”. He says the formal content of a gesture consists of its “aptness, economy and grace”. A gesture is didactic to the degree that it teaches “by irony and epigram, by cunning and by shock”. All these qualities derive from its poetic compression. As such, even though Manzoni spent much of his artistic career honing a reductivist literalism, one can easily read metaphors into Merda d’artista. For example, since Sigmund Freud understood art making as a sublimated anal drive, according to him, all artworks have an overdetermined relationship to faeces. In the infantile imagination, faeces, the first thing a child produces, also counts as a primordial gift. The obverse of this may be Karl Marx’s declaration that under capitalism even the greatest artwork is worth only so many tons of manure. Accordingly, in Manzoni’s constellation, the can interrupts the primordial nature of his gift. Add to all this, alchemy. Also add an antiexpressionist polemic: that which literally comes from the artist’s interior turns out not to be revelatory, but repellent. Thus, it must be contained.
The technique of canning implies ersatz culture and ersatz cuisine, reflected in phrases such as canned laughter. Even so, few have ventured to open one of Manzoni’s multiples – Tate prudently describes its copy (Number 4, acquired in 2000) as “tin can with paper wrapping with unidentified contents”. Someone who did open one was the artist Bernard Bazile, who showed it as a work of his own, titled Boite ouverte de Piero Manzoni 1989, at the Centre Georges Pompidou. Bazile only opened the can slightly, revealing an unidentifiable, wrapped object. Thus, the mystery remains. The internet, for its part, abounds with rumours of anything from one to “half the cans in the edition” leaking or exploding. One source even reports that X-rays have revealed a can within the can. Oddly enough, the literalism of this work lends credence to its metaphorical potential.
Although Manzoni famously worked in competition with Yves Klein, the most significant precedents for Merda d’artista lie within specific Marcel Duchamp works, such as Air de Paris (50cc of Paris Air) 1919, Monte Carlo Bond (1924), or Objet d’ard (1951). Drawing from these, Manzoni ingeniously synthesised literal, economic scatological elements in an entirely new work. Accordingly, Merda d’artista enacts its greatest violence not on the art object, but instead on the discourse in which it is ensconced. His gesture anticipates that criticality will become a recursive guarantor of value. He began by literalising his father’s taunt, by taking a metaphor at face value. He went from being someone who, oedipally, “did not give a shit” to self-realisation as a “shit giver” – or a shit seller, to be precise. Curiously, not giving a shit means apathy; giving shit, aggression. In this connection, selling counts as aggression. The artist’s shit begins like that of anyone else: not only worthless, but also disgusting. Next, Manzoni declares his shit an artwork, thus valorising it. He makes the valorisation explicit by equating the value of shit with that of gold. Through these acts, his literalism becomes paradoxical.The shit is no longer valued as “a thing in itself “, but as something that results from a social process of packaging and re-contextualisation. As the price differential between gold and Merda d’artista has gone on to prove, linking it to gold did not ultimately establish the value of the work. Instead, it was the gesture of linking it to gold. Consequently, just as shit metaphorically contaminates the process of valuation (be it that of art or gold), so marketability in turn contaminates critique by instrumentalising it. In this same vein, artist Coco Fusco cites a performance by the Cuban artist Alexis Esquivel that also exposes the cynicism of instrumentalised critique:
[H]e sat in the middle of the Plaza Vieja on a tiny wooden stool, next to a display shelf for crafts. The shelf was virtually empty, except for one large ceramic statue of a corpulent black woman in a flowered dress with exaggeratedly Negroid features. As soon as a spectator arrived, Esquivel would launch into somewhat pedantic discourse about the sculpture [it depicts the most marginal of those oppressed by slavery and racism], and, why, despite its outward similarity to many others sold in flea markets throughout Havana, his was actually more valuable because of its ‘ideological charge’.
While Esquivel targeted the socialist rhetoric of an older generation, Manzoni seemingly anticipated what would become a connection between conceptual art and capitalist information economy. While Esquivel never sold his ceramic statuette, Manzoni’s Merda d’artista certainly established itself, for better or worse, as a collectable. Yet both artists ultimately target representational systems (which include the critical discourse that describes them) as relatively abstracted, free-floating entities. This certainly is a precondition of pop culture, where the consumption of the image rivals the consumption of the thing itself - if such a dichotomy can still hold. Oddly enough, since no one reportedly has identified definitively what lies within Manzoni’s cans, this ostensible transmogrification by critique may be nothing more than a chimera, yet it reflects rules that we all live by, like it or not.
Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista, purchased in 2000, is on view at Tate Modern.
Možda se radi o čokoladi: III — Trange-frange nauka
Glomazni feudalni sistem vlasti preko noći je prisvojio novovekovnu računarsku paradigmu. Tek tako: puf! Iznebuha. Dobar dan! Bez zadrške, promišljanja ili, daleko bilo – kritike. Naša mala država nije čestito imala ni kanalizaciju, ali će imati digitalizaciju!
Otomanski totalitarni sistem išao je ruku pod ruku sa informacionim tehnologijama. Spahije na vlasti, koje nisu prišle tastaturi, držale su velelepne govore o digitalnoj revoluciji. Informatika je budućnost, a mi smo njeni gospodari – poručivali su. Instinktivno su shvatili da što pre guzice treba ugurati u ekspresni voz za sutrašnjicu.
Vodio sam pre dve ili tri godine učenike na takmičenje iz programiranja u susedni, malo veći grad. [1.] Smestili su nas u veliku svečanu salu, podelili nam poklon-kese sa propagandnim materijalima sponzora manifestacije. Dobar je deo obrazovnog procesa već bio privatizovan.
Takmičenja iz programiranja preuzele su privatne agencije. Vodile su pedantnu evidenciju o darovitim učenicima, od malih nogu, za moćne korporacije. Navodno, briga o talentima. Prodavali su prikupljene informacije. Trgovina belim robljem, visoko organizovana i legalna.
Sedeli smo tako, sa šarenim prospektima u rukama, i gledali projekciju kratkog dokumentarnog filma o mogućnostima upotrebe androida u bogatim zemljama. U Japanu su androgini androidi u bolnicama tešili usamljene pacijente, u Americi su naoružani vojni androidi pucali i trčali kroz šumu. Al' budućnost ipak biće svetla. [2.]
Onda je u salu ušao predstavnik Ministarstva. Mlad, doteran, namrgođen. Direktor škole u kojoj je takmičenje organizovano, i nekoliko koleginica, okružili su perspektivnog političara. Obletali su oko njega kreveljeći se ponizno, poput muva kad saleću lešinu. Gost ih je gledao s visine. Tu i tamo, procedio bi po koju reč. Onda se zvanično obratio okupljenima.
Podmladak ministarstva govorio je roditeljima i učenicima. Aplaudirali su kao ludi. Verovatno je svako već zamišljao svoje dete, u najmanju ruku, kao sledećeg Gejtsa ili Džobsa ili Zakerberga. Instant milijarderi, uz ponosne mame i tate. Oči su im se caklile. Iza mojih leđa se smije ujka Sam, u mojim očima igrali su dolari. [3.]
Niko nije imao ni najmanju nameru da izusti ni dve iskrene reči svim tim lutkama koje su tapšale rukama. Horor šou.
Zamišljao sam da im je gizdavi izdanak uspešnog stabla rekao da je nauka decenijama u ćorsokaku. Kako bi im se to dopalo? Na koji način bi publici ukratko objasnio kako je savremeno doba trange-frange trgovinu podiglo na nivo nauke, a humanost srozalo ispod svakog nivoa? Kako bi najavio da će računarske tehnologije efikasno dokrajčiti prirodu planete? Srećom – možda bi naglasio – nivo svesti toliko će potonuti, da niko o tome neće ni voditi računa.
Izum računara produžio je agoniju doba razuma, dospelog do samouništenja, i nastavio iluziju naučnog progresa. Računar nas je sve uposlio i dao nam novi razlog da nastavimo sa starim besmislom. Obrazovanje još postoji da bi se digitalizovalo. Drugačije – odavno bi krepalo. Da li bi takvim izjavama oduševio roditelje?
Kada se propagandni cirkus završio, počelo je takmičenje, u sali su ostali samo nastavnici. Uglavnom su predavali u osnovnim školama. Govorili su o uslovima u kojima rade. Većina škola nije imala fiskulturnu salu, ni računare, ni internet. Nekim školama, Elektrodistribucija je isključivala struju, usled neplaćenih računa. Oni srećniji, koji su imali opremu, nisu imali udžbenike. Živote su posvetili osmišljavanju nastave.
Bilo je mučno već i slušati njihove probleme. Pokušavali su da zadovolje zahteve ministarstva i ambicije roditelja i prohteve učenika. Sedeli su pogrbljeno, u krugu, u izlizanim farmericama i prašnjavoj obući. Sastanak anonimnih vaspitača. Jadali su se međusobno. Tuga prava.
Predstavnik ministarstva nije pomenuo ni jedan od tih problema, kamoli nedostatak odgovarajuće literature. Euforične roditelje ne treba opterećivati sitnicama.
Kada se takmičenje završilo, tražio sam sa učenicima pešice put do glavne autobuske stanice. Prolazili smo kroz oronula, siva i neuređena predgrađa, utonula u blato, otpatke i apatiju. Pretpostavljam da oduševljeni roditelji nisu primetili ništa od toga. Projektovali su ispred sebe sliku uspešnih naslednika, i prosto zanemarili sve drugo. Posmatrali su svet kroz ružičaste naočare.
Ni jedna vlast nije popravljala fasade, asfaltirala ulice i čistila trotoare. Daleko je isplativije fabrikovati ideološke šarenice.
Ovo je prvi put da pisac otkriva nešto konkretnije o sebi u zapisima — barem kako sam ih ja hronološki poređao. (O ovoj važnoj temi pisaću više nekom drugom prilikom.) Pažljiviji čitaoci možda su primetili da je u prethodnom segmentu moj prijatelj pomenuo bolest od koje mu je preminuo otac. Ovog puta saznajemo da je bio zaposlen u školi. Štaviše, jedno vreme smo bili kolege, ali ni o tome sada ne bih više — neka sve sačeka svoj trenutak.
Moj prijatelj je bio izuzetno obrazovan, iako možda čitaocu tako ne deluje, usled jednostavnog jezika kojim piše. Završio je cenjeni računarski fakultet u prestonici, ali se nikada nije bavio programiranjem. Ne znam zašto — uvek je vešto izbegavao tu temu. Iz njegovih zapisa može se naslutiti da su postojale ideološke barijere, ali da li je to bilo sve — verovatno nikada neću saznati. Možda se sada, gde god da je, ipak bavi svojim izvornim pozivom?
Pronicljiviji čitalac mogao je primetiti da autor dosledno izbegava da u tekstu pominje čak i imena gradova u našoj bližoj okolini.
Pomalo neobična citirana rečenica u celosti glasi:
"Al' budućnost ipak biće svetla,
bolnice kad počne da čisti
jedna malo neobična metla."
Radi se o stihu iz špice nekada veoma popularne televizijske serije Metla bez drške. To je jugoslovenska serija za decu i mlade, snimana u periodu od 1989. do 1994. godine. Baš u to vreme moj prijatelj je pohađao srednju školu, očigledno da je serija ostavila jak utisak na njegovu generaciju.
Citat je iz pesme Ujka Sam grupe Zabranjeno pušenje. Pesma se nalazi na njihovom drugom, dvostrukom studijskom albumu Dok čekaš sabah sa Šejtanom, objavljenom 1985. godine u izdanju Jugotona, nedugo nakon Zimske olimpijade u Sarajevu. Upravo te godine moj prijatelj, tada osnovac, preselio se s porodicom iz Bosne u naš mali grad.
Album je prepoznatljiv po oštrim komentarima na političku situaciju u Jugoslaviji, i dodatno je obeležen čuvenom aferom "Crk'o Maršal", kroz koju je bend tada prolazio. Stih glasi:
"Političar na radiju pričao je o jubilejima,
time valjda hoće da nas zbari,
al' iza mojih leđa se smije Ujka Sam,
u mojim očima igrali su dolari."
Prve radne logore u našem malom gradu otvoriće nemačka i turska firma. Tako zakon, i red, i tradicija nalažu. Bili smo vekovni neprijatelji. Ulice i škole nose nazive ratnih heroja. Branili su domovinu od Turaka i Nemaca. Razbijali smo jedni drugima glave, na bojnom polju. Danas razbijamo glavu kako da preteknemo, a niko nas buzdovanom ne juri.
Dosta nam je streljanja i nabijanja na kolac. Okupatorima nudimo jeftinu radnu snagu. Automatizovana fabrička traka civilizovanija je od nemačkog tenka ili turske sablje. Država se još obavezala da o našem trošku izgradi puteve za njihove kamione. [1.]
Rasprodajemo resurse. Koka-kola je standardnom procedurom, preko sestrinskih korporacija, nabavila brojna vrela čiste vode u našoj maloj državi.
U dolini pored našeg malog grada, punoj izvora lekovite vode, Evropska unija planira da oformi najveću deponiju u regionu. Legendarni lokalni biolog i nastavnik u srednjoj školi, ispitivao je biohemijski sastav svakog zdenca. Postavio je uočljive table sa detaljnim nalazima.
Po svemu sudeći, Staza zdravlja pretvoriće se uskoro u otpadnu magistralu. Većina odbornika u lokalnoj skupštini, glasala je za. Potomci uticajnih porodičnih stabala, podižu vredno ručice, kada je evropski interes u pitanju.
Italijani su dobili dozvolu da energetski eksploatišu vodeni tok najpoznatije reke što protiče kroz grad. Stani, stani, Ibar vodo. Nemcima je dodeljen gradski vodovod. Cena vode upetostručena je za samo nekoliko godina. [2.]
Delegatima koji su odlučivali o sudbini prirodne sredine, dostavljen je štampani materijal od nekoliko stotina stranica, samo desetak minuta pre početka sednice. Verovatno su pohađali seminar o brzom čitanju. Za papir velikog broja brošura, posečena je omanja šuma.
Upravo je duž Staze zdravlja sproveden ekološki genocid nad drvećem. Oborena stabla transportuju se danonoćno, kaže lokalni šumar. Uprava šuma naše male države, izdaje u zakup planinske parcele privatnim firmama. Rodbinske veze vredno rade. Privatnik neumorno seče, dok ne ogoli teren. Ne vodi se računa o sezonama. Šuma ne stiže da se obnovi, žali se nemoćni čuvar.
Crveno-bele rampe branile su pristup stablima. Oborene su, odvaljene i bačene u jarak pored puta. Korita reka su ogoljena. Vode se izlivaju. Traktori brekću u mulju, ali ne posustaju. Umesto pesme ptica, lugovima odzvanja zvuk motornih testera. Na sve strane čelične kuke, lanci i sajle za izvlačenje. Blato je crno, i masno, i sjajno od mašinskog ulja i nafte. Preko znaka pored puta, koji je nekada upozoravao da je seča šume strogo zabranjena, prelepljen je oglas firme za remont motornih testera.
Budućnost je neizvesna. Zgrabi koliko možeš, odmah.
Dobro je što legendarni lokalni biolog više nije živ. Kao naučnik starog kova, verovao je u nastavak tradicije naučnim sredstvima. Do kraja života čuvao je koze nakon posla. Svojom je rukom brao lekovito bilje, i pažljivo pripremao tonike, balsame i kreme. Ljudi od kojih je savremena medicina digla ruke, hrlili su kod njega. Izlečio je nebrojene otpisane slučajeve.
Naredna generacija slistila je vekovnu tradiciju i resurse, zarad kratkoročne koristi, bez razmišljanja. Umovanje je kočnica i nesumnjivo vodi u ćorsokak.
Duž Staze zdravlja, pokrivena rastinjem i sasušenim lišćem, proteže se zaboravljena pruga uskog koloseka. Nekada se njome kretao čuveni voz Ćira. Brekćući je vukao vagone krcate drvenom građom, za potrebe moćne Austrougarske imperije. Carstvo se raspalo. Ćira je završio u muzeju, a pruga je napuštena. Seča je nastavljena. Posao su preuzeli domaćini.
Gori smo od okupatora. Mrcvarimo prirodu. Uzećemo joj dušu.
Imućni domaćini podižu mini hidrocentrale duž čistih planinskih reka. Ne vode računa o migracijama ribe. Ribari su ogorčeni. Jednom smo na planini sreli grupu starih pecaroša. Predvodio je mršavi gospodin sa jednim plućnim krilom. Drugo su mu hirurški odstranili zbog raka. Možda bi moj otac još bio živ da je na vreme pristao na terapiju? Ribari su pretili dinamitom i diverzijama.
Meštani preziru brane za bogaćenje. Hteli – ne hteli, u obavezi su da ih finansiraju. Na svakom računu za struju, stoji stavka za povlašćene proizvođače električne energije.
Seljani se organizuju. Postavljaju table sa upozorenjima. Velika bela slova vrište sa jarko crvene površine. "Investitori malih hidroelektrana, niste dobrodošli! Ovo je naš ekološki raj. Ovde vekovima žive zajedno ljudi, pastrmke, rečni rakovi, orlovi i ostali živi svet. Branićemo složno našu reku do kraja!" [3.]
Na većini staza nalaze se napuštene škole. Nekada su bile pune đaka. Deca su odrasla i otišla. Ljudi bez potomstva utapali su tugu u alkoholu. Škole su pretvorene u kafane. Onda su preživeli meštani ostarili, pevaljke su ućutale, pa su i birtije zatvorene. Oronule zgrade lagano se raspadaju. Vraćaju se u zagrljaj prirode, odakle su privremeno otrgnute, zarad ljudskih ambicija.
Globu naplaćuje globalizator. Nadamo se da će otete resurse negovati, zarad duže eksploatacije. Samo se nadamo, jer smo pobeđeni. Ili smo pobedili? U udžbenicima piše jedno. U realnosti je drugo. Slavimo dane oslobođenja, i od evropskih, i od azijskih zavojevača.
Kada je pre nekoliko meseci obišao radove na izgradnji novih pogona, predsednik je izjavio da treba da budemo ponosni što ćemo proizvoditi kablove za poznati turski automobilski brend, i izrazio veliko zadovoljstvo što ćemo štepati gaće za nemačka dupeta. Ili sam zamenio poreklo plemenitih stražnjica i kola? Kakogod, na izradi kablova uskoro će raditi hiljadu zaposlenih, sa najčvršćim do sada obećanjem da će se ta brojka narednih godina upetostručiti.
Gaće će prišivati dva puta manje zaposlenih. Nismo sigurni koliko je to, jer fabrike još nisu bile otvorene. Kada se nula podeli na dva dela, u matematici se ne dobija više od nule. Politika dalje vidi i drugačije računa.
Savremeni okupatori štede municiju, a kudikamo su efikasniji u razaranju od istorijskih prethodnika. To se zove naučni progres.
Porobljavanje ima više šanse za uspeh, od obećanog poevropljavanja.
Smatram da je važno primetiti da moj bivši prijatelj u zapisima nigde ne pominje ime naše države, niti naziv našeg malog grada, pa čak ni konkretne lokacije ili poznatije stanovnike koje povremeno opisuje. Ipak, onima koji poznaju pomenute osobe neće biti teško da ih povežu s opisima. Ne razumem se u postupke pripovedanja, ali čini mi se da autor nije želeo da svoja opšta zapažanja i zaključke ograniči geografijom, jer oni nose potencijalno šire značenje. U tom smislu, nije teško zaključiti da je ipak imao nameru da ove zapise jednoga dana objavi. To, u krajnjoj liniji, daje smisao zadatku koji sam dobrovoljno preuzeo.
Ne proveravam verodostojnost navedenih podataka. Ako ovi zapisi uopšte imaju neku vrednost, onda je ona pre svega umetnička, a ne dokumentarna. Ukoliko je moj prijatelj iskreno verovao da je nešto istinito, iako istorijske činjenice govore suprotno, onda u njegovim ličnim zapisima prednost dajem upravo tom njegovom uverenju. Pogotovo jer su slične impresije delili i mnogi ljudi koje poznajem. Čak i tamo gde su tvrdnje provereno pogrešne, te zablude su značajno oblikovale opšti ton i raspoloženje koje je autor, čini mi se, želeo da dočara.
Među pronađenim materijalima nalaze se i drugi dokumenti: fotografije, isečci iz novina, reklamni flajeri… U ovom konkretnom slučaju, mogu da potvrdim da se na jednoj od fotografija nalazi crvena tabla sa natpisom koji je doslovno citiran u tekstu. To mi govori da zapisi ipak nisu proizvoljni – naprotiv. Na osnovu onoga što sam do sada pročitao, stičem utisak da je moj prijatelj bio prilično dobro upućen u društvena zbivanja. To dodatno potvrđuje ono što sam nagovestio u prethodnoj belešci: ako istorijskih omaški ima, one su verovatno namerne, pažljivo pomešane sa ličnim utiscima i mišljenjima ljudi iz njegove okoline. U tom sloju subjektivnosti ne vidim laž, već vrstu pripovedačkog tkanja koje, možda i bolje od sumnjivih istorijskih činjenica, dočarava depresivni duh vremena koje je slepo srljalo ka pandemiji.
Možda se radi o čokoladi: I — Prihvatljiva praksa patriotizma
Prostorija agencije što nas štiti od zagađenja smeštena je u prizemlju naše zgrade. U opštinskim sobama više mesta nema. Lokalne vlasti zakupljuju poslovni prostor. Mala cena za nova radna mesta. Zaposleno je četiri-pet pristojno odevenih golobradih mladića.
Ujutru mladi zaštitari parkiraju luksuzna vozila strane proizvodnje u našem blatnjavom dvorištu. Izbegavaju plaćanje parkinga u ulici. Mere štednje. Elegantno skakuću u sjajnim kožnim cipelicama, zaobilazeći bare. Rad na terenu! Disciplinovano zauzimaju startne pozicije ispred računara. Dečki koji obećavaju. [1.]
Prostorija je minimalno opremljena, čista i osvetljena. Na zidovima je okačeno nekoliko uramljenih postera ugroženih vrsta. Da ne zaborave mladići koga štite. Pride, da ubede komšiluk da je okrečena bela betonska kocka zaista opštinska agencija.
Kompletna oprema može da se natovari u automobilsku prikolicu i po potrebi iseli za petnaest minuta. Oni koji su na vreme pustili korenje u opštinskoj zgradi, nisu izloženi ni pogledima, ni poniženju, ni paničnom strahu od preseljenja.
Jedan od plakata prikazuje rodoslov lokalnih otrovnica. Rizično radno okruženje. Ako se zastakljene zmije ustreme na plastične miševe, biće belaja. Izgubiće dečaci sredstva za rad, a priroda protekciju!
Još od zemljotresa, naš mali grad leglo je zmija. Agencija nije sigurna koga da štiti - građane ili reptile. Naša sugrađanka u poodmaklim godinama, Stanislava, zatekla je jednog jutra zbunjenog gmizavca na zavesi u spavaćoj sobi. Njena trošna kućica nalazi se u centralnoj gradskoj zoni, između glavnog šetališta i keja. Zmije zalaze u dvorišta iza glavnog trga, ali vijugaju i po pijaci, i vuku se po keju.
Stanislava živi sa sinom. On je pozvao vatrogasce. Divlja živuljka nije pokazala osobit interes za povratak u prirodnu sredinu. Zavolela je grad. Vatrogasnoj ekipi ispred nosa, utekla je kroz rupu u podu.
Spasioci nisu obučeni za poteru za beznogim ljubimcem. Ponudili su ljubazno da izvale parket. Stanislava je zanemoćala. Pristigli su i novinari. Umalo se nije stropoštala pred svima. Nezaposlenom sinu pritisak je skočio nebu pod oblake. Oboje životare od skromne penzije.
Malo je nedostajalo da dobronamerni dobrovoljci načine veći zijan od zmije. Okončali su misiju. Zatiranje ljubaznih domaćina odloženo je do daljnjeg. Sve ima svoje vreme, mesto i metodu.
Odmah iza dvorišta, ponosno se izdižu nove zgrade na keju. Luksuzni stanovi za pupoljke bogatih krošnji. Stanislavino stablo osuđeno je na skapavanje od socijalne sušice. Nema zaklona od zakonom zaštićenih zmija. [2.]
Zmije koje zalaze u grad, uglavnom nisu otrovne. Tako tvrde vatrogasci. Otrovnice vrebaju na pojedinim padinama okolnih planina. Naselio ih je nekada moćni institut za virusologiju.
Pored poskoka i šarke, na izvesno vreme odomaćila se i zvečarka. Američka vrsta nije opstala, ali se njen otrov izmešao sa domaćim toksinima. Tako su socijalističke zmije postale smrtonosne, poput uvoznih kapitalističkih. Institut ih je lovio zbog vakcina i seruma.
Sa sumrakom socijalizma, institut je posrnuo. Demokratska vlada formirala je Koordinaciono telo za vođenje pregovora i predlaganje mera za unapređenje proizvodnje i distribucije imunoloških lekova. Bio je to kraj instituta i početak osnivanja bezbrojnih komisija. Republička porodična stabla, delegirala su tamo svoje potomke, da ne rade ništa uz bogatu nadoknadu iz budžeta.
Institut je krepavao. Konkurisao je sa uvoznim vakcinama, na tenderima Republičkog fonda za zdravstveno osiguranje. Lokalni gmizavci bez nadzora, oteli su se kontroli. Slike potomaka te familije, znamenitog prekookeanskog porekla, vise na zidovima agencije.
Momci rade punom parom. Svake sezone iznova sastavljaju Lokalni ekološki akcioni plan prigradskih i seoskih mesnih zajednica. Samo od početka ove kalendarske godine, prisustvovali su Drugoj radionici za pripremu šestog Nacionalnog izveštaja Konvencije o biološkoj raznovrsnosti, i stručnoj obuci u Regionalnoj Privrednoj komori našeg okruga.
Za to vreme, prestonica naše države postala je zvanično najzagađeniji grad na svetu. Vest nas je obradovala jednog maglovitog jutra, pre dve sedmice. Opet smo bili najbolji, na globalnom nivou, bar na jedan dan. [3.]
Po indeksu zatrovanosti vazduha, naš mali grad ne zaostaje za elitom. Ljudi napolju nose maske za disanje, kao u Pekingu. Dečaci iz Agencije ne preporučuju duže zadržavanje na ulicama. Savetuju da zamandalimo prozore i kupimo prečišćivače vazduha. Sjajan savet - za proizvođače prečišćivača.
Kažu da nas energetski sektor truje, sagorevanjem zastarelih fosilnih goriva. Možda su zato objedinjeni resori energetike i zaštite životne sredine?
Kroz prozor našeg stana lepo se vidi dimnjak postrojenja koje greje grad. Dok gledamo kako se vijori pogubni dim, držimo ruke na vrelim radijatorima. Srećom, trovači nas greju. Bez preke potrebe ne napuštamo tople stanove. Izbegavamo zagađenje.
U našoj porodici, moja majka uvek pronađe krivca. U državnim institucijama svi su ispravni. Kažnjenih nema, nema ni novca za prelazak na alternativna goriva. Niko nema hrabrosti da lomi grane još jednom uspešnom stablu.
Ugušićemo se kao pacovi. Momci iz Agencije sastaviće izveštaj. Cenovnik su sastavili. Kompanije koje emituju zagađujuće materije plaćaju propisanu ekološku taksu, u zavisnosti od količine opasnih čestica koje puštaju u vazduh.
Od tog novca otvoriće u novim agencijama nova radna mesta za nove golobrade mladiće.
Ove zapise pronašao sam među stvarima svog bivšeg prijatelja. Bivšeg – ne zato što više nije među živima (mada ni to ne mogu sa sigurnošću da tvrdim), već zato što se davno, bez ikakvog traga, odselio. Pretpostavljam da je reč o njegovim dnevničkim beleškama. Objavljujem ih jer mi, na neki čudan način, prijatelj nedostaje. Možda i zato što osećam izvesnu odgovornost, jer su zapisi, planski ili igrom sudbine, upravo meni povereni. Moguće je da sam ih pronašao zato što on sam nije smogao snage da ih objavi.
Kroz spise se otkriva jedan lik koji je meni gotovo nepoznat – iako sam verovao da smo bliski. Moram da upozorim čitaoca: redovi su jetki, protkani ironijom, povremeno i zlobom. U njegovu odbranu mogu da kažem samo to da je, u vreme kada su zapisi nastajali, prolazio kroz tešku krizu srednjih godina. Zajedno smo se tada šalili na tu temu. Nisam ni slutio koliko ga je depresija pogodila — do mere ogorčenosti koja se graničila sa bolešću.
Kada je reč o datiranju, ni tu nisam siguran. Znam tek da su zapisi morali nastati pre 2020. godine, jer se te godine odselio i od tada mu se gubi svaki trag. Sve ostalo bilo bi puka pretpostavka.
Spread over two floors in the Fotografiska building in New York’s Flatiron District, the exhibition Vivian Maier: Unseen Work (which runs through September 29) reveals a trove of surprises. The late, great street photographer was also an evocative portraitist: Maier, a notorious loner, liked to click with people. The urban documentarian of humdrum life had a knack for humor and an eye for drama.
“The scenes she photographed are often anecdotes, coincidences, lapses of reality, the residual moments of life to which no one pays attention,” notes Anne Morin, director of DiChroma Photography in Madrid and the curator of the show. “Each of her images are situated in a place where the ordinary sheds its skin and becomes extraordinary.”
Unknown Legends
The Maier scenes range widely: from newspaper headlines peeking out from piles of debris to abstracted closeups of found objects; from candid surprised faces to random odd shots of homeless people sleeping on benches. Her Super 8 films explore waves of Chicago pedestrians, a detached swarm of humanity.
As the largest Maier retrospective yet shown in America, Unseen Work bears earmarks of completism. “Some of the newest images are quite aesthetic—but many leave you wondering the intentions,” opined the Phoblographer. “They leave me wondering why these images needed to be in a museum in the first place.”
By all indications, Maier’s photographs were not intended for museum walls. In her career as a nanny, she obsessively chronicled her life and times, but rarely shared her images with others—or even developed them into prints. Her pack-rat mentality preserved the negatives, hundreds of thousands of them stowed in boxes until the end of Maier’s life (at age 83) in 2009.
It was only afterward—when photo collectors including John Maloff and Jeff Goldstein brought her work into the art world, chronicled in Maloff’s fascinating 2013 documentary Finding Vivian Maier—that she became a photography star.
Lights Out
And Fotografiska New York is no ordinary museum. Founded in 2019 as a stateside installment in a global cadre of photography venues—in cities including Berlin, Stockholm, Tallinn, and Shanghai—the Manhattan locale has sported six floors of exhibition space and launched some 49 ambitious and far-ranging displays, from the eccentric to the mainstream. (Showing concurrently with Maier: Brooklyn street photographer Bruce Gilden and a bevy of People magazine’s iconic portraits.)
Fotografiska has been one of the few U.S. museums devoted to photography with the space and vision for shows usually found overseas in places like Madrid’s PhotoEspaña or Arles’s Les Rencontres de la Photographie. Sadly, having survived Covid, Fotografiska New York will close its doors on September 29, at the end of its exhibitions on Maier and Gilden. While tight-lipped about the future, the museum, a for-profit business, claims it will relocate somewhere in Manhattan with a broader floorspace.
“We’ve been having ongoing challenges with regard to the exhibition spaces,” executive director Sophie Wright told the New York Times about the move—which happens as the building changes owners. “The verticality of that building is not easy to manage. Our audience has been given a bumpy experience.”
Fotografiska hopes to announce a new temporary home soon. (Yet one can’t help thinking of restaurants closing “for renovation” and wondering whether they’ll ever reopen.) It’s somehow fitting that this venue’s swan song is a vast survey of a lonesome photographer who was unknown in her lifetime, rediscovered in the internet era, and somehow became emblematic of how we see one another in the world now.
The Art of the Selfie
According to the 2021 biography Vivian Maier Developed, by genealogist Ann Marks—which meticulously traces the artist’s life, with help from photo archives in the John Maloof Collection—Maier took up photography in earnest in her mid-20s after buying a top-viewing Rolleiflex camera. “It was designed to be held at the waist, facilitating inconspicuous picture taking,” Marks notes. “With its square format, there was no need to shift from horizontal to vertical positioning. … Soon she began to compose self-portraits while cradling her camera, presenting herself as a serious photographer.”
The reclusive Maier, who routinely hid her past and inner identity from people she met, had an affinity for selfies and left behind hundreds of them. “Vivian Maier is such a big phenomenon nowadays because this problem of [the] self-portrait resonates with the selfie culture we see today,” curator Morin told artsy.net. “All that crisis of identity we are viewing on social media, with tons of selfies, finds an echo in the work of Maier. Perhaps 30 years ago, she would not have been so famous or so interesting because the selfie was not so important at that time.”
Maier’s artful self-portraits, ranging from geometric mirror shots to peekaboo shadows, seem to reflect her evolving artistic personae: the confident young New Yorker who held professional photography aspirations; the adventurous, self-sufficient world traveler; the contented nanny in the Chicago suburbs who took her charges on photo trips around the city; and, later, the oft-uprooted worker who struck a lone pose against scenes of desolation and decay.
The Kids are Alright
Throughout her adult life, Maier worked as a nanny to support her creative calling as a photographer. Her stints of employment, and relationships with families who hired her, varied widely. (One gig with talk-show host Phil Donahue lasted just a few months.) By all accounts, she was most comfortable during the 11 years she spent with the Gensburg family in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois.
“She was like a real, live Mary Poppins,” Lane Gensburg later said of Maier. (However, Marks notes that Maier, a serious film buff, “wholeheartedly despised” the movie about the fictional nanny: “Her angry notes describe it as ‘outdated,’ ‘a real fiasco.’ and portraying a servant-child type of relationship.”)
In her years with the Gensburgs (1956–67), Maier bonded with the three brothers while documenting both their suburban lives and the cultural mosaic of the nearby Windy City. She left the family when the boys grew up but remained friendly. She never again found such a great fit.
Four decades later, at the end of her life, the Gensburg brothers helped Maier secure an apartment and then, after a head injury caused by a sidewalk fall, a live-in care facility. By then destitute, demented, and very delinquent on payments to a storage-locker company, Vivian Maier lost most of her possessions when the company auctioned them off.
Photo collectors John Maloof and Jeffrey Goldstein were among several bidders who claimed her photographs, negatives, and undeveloped film rolls (amid voluminous boxes of newspapers, books, broken cameras, and bric-a-brac, most of which was tossed or donated).
Maier never recovered from the fall. When she passed away in 2009, the Gensburgs held a memorial and published an obituary, which helped Maloof track down and identify the mysterious photographer whose images were, after appearing on Flickr and eBay, going viral and selling like pricey hotcakes in cyberspace.
Isolation and Empathy
Part of the paradox of Maier’s life and work is the disconnect between them. What the Gensburgs—or any of her employers—didn’t know about was her tangled family background, which she kept under wraps. She had her reasons: “She clearly concluded that no one would want to learn their nanny had an unstable, narcissistic mother; a violent, alcoholic father; and a drug-addicted, schizophrenic brother,” Marks explains. “It can safely be assumed that Vivian did not have DNA on her side.”
Long estranged from her nuclear family, Maier battled demons of her own: a severe and debilitating hoarding habit; and a condition that in Marks’ account, posthumously, experts term a “schizoid disorder.” The former wreaked plenty of havoc in Maier’s life, but also compelled her to preserve her trove of unpublished images. The latter strained her human interactions, yet may well have intensified her work.
Maier possessed a drive to document all her movements in the world, yet lacked any sense of follow-through in sharing them. She shunned close human contact (no hugs!) but found fascination in people she witnessed. She was detached enough to invade her subjects’ privacy, yet connected enough to see their lives. She expressed her inner self in outward reflections. She was of the last century, but it could’ve been ours.
Unlikely Legacy
After it was discovered by the art world, Maier’s body of work set off a feeding frenzy among collectors, curators, fellow photographers, critics, historians, photo aficionados … and capitalist venturers. With no direct heirs, the contents of her estate sparked disputes, lawsuits, and deal-making, with John Maloof emerging as the owner of the lion’s share of the archive and New York’s Howard Greenberg Gallery as its U.S. rep. The work found its way to walls in dozens of museums around the world before landing at Fotografiska.
Who knows what Maier would say about all this? “Nothing is meant to last forever,” she once told an employer. “You have to make room for other people. It’s a wheel. You get on, you have to go to the end, and then someone else has the same opportunity.”
Through September 29, this body of work sits in a grand photo-exhibition venue that will soon be shuttered. Through the magic of the camera, reflections from the eyes of Vivian Maier have attained a sort of permanence.
In “Finding Vivian Maier,” a new documentary about Maloof’s discovery that he directed with Charlie Siskel, interviews with Maier’s former charges, now middle-aged, do little to diminish the wondrous peculiarity of her story.
When John Maloof, a real-estate agent, amateur historian, and garage-sale obsessive, acquired a box of photographic materials and personal detritus at an auction in suburban Chicago in 2007, he quickly realized that he had stumbled upon an unknown master of street photography. But despite his vigorous snooping, he could find no record of Vivian Maier, the name scribbled on the scraps of paper that he found among the negatives, prints, and undeveloped rolls of film. He tracked down the rest of the boxes emptied from an abandoned storage garage, amassing a collection of hundreds of thousands of frames shot in New York, Chicago, France, South America, and Asia between the nineteen-fifties and the nineteen-seventies. Two years after he bought the first box, he Googled the name again and, to his surprise, found an obituary announcing that Vivian Maier had died only a few days before. The short text had just enough information for Maloof to deduce that Maier had worked as a nanny in suburban Chicago.
In “Finding Vivian Maier,” a new documentary about Maloof’s discovery that he directed with Charlie Siskel, interviews with Maier’s former charges, now middle-aged, do little to diminish the wondrous peculiarity of her story. They remember her as a woman of contradictory impulses: she was uncompromising yet playful, endlessly curious yet intensely private, and, despite being a caretaker, could be aloof to the point of callousness, even cruelty. Although none of her charges seemed to realize that she was amassing a vast body of vital work, they remember countless day trips to the seedy streets of Chicago; the daunting bustle of downtown; the boredom that set in when Maier would linger too long, taking what seemed like endless pictures of one thing.
With a twin-lens Rolleiflex camera held inconspicuously at hip-height, Maier captured fleeting moments and turned them into something extraordinary. One scowling lady fixes another’s wrinkled veil; a child with grimy cheeks and tear-filled eyes defiantly crosses her arms in front of a window display of draped gloves; a nun waits in the shadows; a prostrate inebriate cups his forehead; a young man rides an absurdly large horse under the El. Doorways, parking spots, bus stops, industrial neighborhoods, movie-theater box offices, city parks, suburban dead ends, train platforms, empty restaurant tables, storefronts, newspaper stands—she photographed the in-between, unexamined places.
“Why would a nanny be taking all these pictures?” Maloof asks in “Finding Vivian Maier.” His puzzlement reflects the central anxiety of the film, and of the Maier legend in general. Why would a photographer with the fierce dedication, creative vision, and formal skill of a Robert Frank, a Diane Arbus, or a Garry Winogrand withhold her work from the world and choose instead to spend her life raising other people’s children?
For filmmakers, for her fans, and for the people who knew her when she was alive and now must reconcile that elusive figure with her posthumous reputation as an artist, Maier’s story is titillating precisely because of how it deviates from the familiar narratives about artistic aspiration. They can’t understand why she never put aside her profession for her passion. People who never saw her without a Rolleiflex around her neck express bewilderment that they were in the company of a great talent. (“She was a nanny, for God’s sakes.”)
In the film, domestic work is placed in opposition to artistic ambition, as if the two are incompatible. But are they? Street photographers are often romanticized as mystical flâneurs, who inconspicuously capture life qua life, who are in the world, but not of it. The help, like the street photographer, is supposed to be invisible. Menial tasks like child care have, historically, been relegated to working-class women, who give up domestic autonomy to live in intimate proximity to their employers while remaining employees. In the best circumstances, a nanny becomes a trusted member of the family and allows her identity and independence to be entwined with, even subsumed by, the people for whom she works. In the worst circumstances, she is expendable, replaceable; her bath-time instructions and dinnertime offerings and bedtime kisses are tasks just as easily completed by the helpers who precede or follow her. Both the photographer and the nanny evoke fantasies of invisibility that rely on the erasure of real labor, but for opposite ends. “Women’s work” is diminished and ignored while the (historically male) artist’s pursuit is valorized as a creative gift. Perhaps the nanny could be the perfect person to photograph the world unnoticed. Maybe the very thing that made people hire her as a nanny—her watchfulness, her “alertness to human tragedies and those moments of generosity and sweetness,” as the photographer Joel Meyerowitz puts it in the film—made her the artist we know she was.
It seems that, for Maier, the nanny’s life allowed her to be with people, but not of them. She actively cultivated her own unknowability, perhaps as a way to maintain this separateness. She never spoke of a desire to make a living as a photographer. In Chicago, where she lived for decades, she refused to give film processors and pawn shopkeepers her real name, instead handing out fake names all over town. She demanded separate locks for her rooms in her employers’ homes, and forbade anyone from ever entering her space. She didn’t mention family or old friends. She lied about where she was born, claiming France as her homeland (she was born in New York City in 1926), and spoke with a contrived Continental accent that no one could place. She dressed in an outdated style, or, as one interviewee put it, “like a Soviet factory worker from the nineteen-fifties.” In the film, an acquaintance recalls asking her what she did for a living. Her response: “I’m a sort of spy.”
Most people who hear about Maier might agree with the photographer’s pawnshop broker, who tells the filmmakers, “I find the mystery of it more interesting than the work itself.” The filmmakers give Maier’s purposeful obscurity and fiercely guarded solitude a tragic cast: Her former charges recall her “dark edge,” the way she spoke about the brutality of men, the temper that, on occasion, bordered on abusive. Her old employers described how she filled her quarters with hoarded treasures and towering piles of yellowing newsprint. She was obsessed with newspapers in particular; one woman recalls how Maier went nuts upon realizing that a neighbor had taken old editions out of the house in order to finish a painting job.
Her archives of pictures, films, and voice recordings reveal a fascination with rape and murder, urban blight and the ravages of poverty, the brutality of the city stockyards, political unrest. The film implicitly suggests that there is something off about this, that her interest in “I told you so” stories, the ones that revealed “the folly of humanity,” “the bizarreness of life, the unappealingness of human beings,” as one of her charges describes it, is symptomatic of a haunted, morbid psychology. The insinuation is that interests in such subjects is inherently unseemly, even though these are the kinds of stories that have captivated journalists for eons.
“Finding Vivian Maier” shows that stories of difficult women can be unflattering even when they are told in praise. The unconventional choices of women are explained in the language of mental illness, trauma, or sexual repression, as symptoms of pathology rather than as an active response to structural challenges or mere preference. Biographers often treat iconoclastic women like Yoko Ono, Marie Curie, Emily Dickinson, and Vivian Maier as problems that need solving. They’re problems as in “How do you solve a problem like Maria,” to borrow an allusion from an Ariana Reines’s essay about another often simplified woman photographer, Francesca Woodman.
There’s no disputing that Maier was peculiar and prickly, and that her interests spanned the benign and the morbid. But she was neither a Mary Poppins nor a surrogate Mommie Dearest. The people who knew her described an impenetrability that, even in retrospect, threatens the fantasy that people who choose to care for children are all hugs and rainbows. Her story suggests the unsympathetic possibility that a woman might choose something like nannying because it has an economic rather than emotional utility. As Janet Malcolm writes in her New Yorker essay about the Bloomsbury Group, “A House of One’s Own,” “Every character in a biography contains within himself or herself the potential for a reverse image.” So let’s consider “Finding Vivian Maier” in reverse: Maier challenges our ideas of how a person, an artist, and, especially, a woman should be. She didn’t try to use her work to accumulate cultural or economic capital. She was poor but uninterested in money: when Maloof went through her possessions, he found thousands of dollars in uncashed Social Security checks. She didn’t marry or have children, and, when people mistakenly called her Mrs. Maier, she would reply, “It’s Miss Maier, and I’m proud of it,” echoing another female artist, who often instructed strangers not to call her “Mrs. Stieglitz” but “Miss O’Keeffe.” She died before developing more than a thousand rolls of exposed film, and there is no proof that she ever made a concerted effort to show her work to any dealers or other artists. To suggest that her choices were the result of some as yet uncovered emotional trauma is to assume that her life was lived in reaction to pain. But this shoehorns her into the very conventions of capitalism and bourgeois values that she eschewed so aggressively.
When she was a girl, she briefly lived in close quarters with a noted female photographer, Jeanne Bertrand, who may have taught the young Maier how to take pictures. I wonder what Maier learned from her, what she told her about trying to be an artist. I wonder what kinds of opportunities would have existed for Maier decades later, and which of the same impediments. Maier had neither money nor connections, but she had control over how she lived, what she looked at, and what she photographed.
Maier was not a closed-off shut-in like Henry Darger, another Chicago artist canonized after his death. Her photographs of the urban and suburban streets track the fluctuations of the economy, the growth of the city, the cycles of the seasons, the emotions in the faces of the children she cared for, the way her own body advanced through the years. She chose her job not because she especially loved children but because of the life it enabled her to have, what it allowed her to see. She valued her freedom above all. Her art and profession have more in common than it may initially seem. She was a perpetual outsider, and she liked it that way. She moved among people but did not belong to any of them. She was close but not entangled. She could always walk away. In the documentary, when Maloof describes how Maier spent the late fifties and sixties, travelling and photographing the world alone, this did not strike me as the least bit sad. It seemed that, on those trips, Maier was the most free she had ever been, and ever would be. That’s how she wanted to see herself. And she did.
Some tellings of Maier’s story suggest that perhaps we should feel a proxy regret, that we should feel sorry about her solitude, her rages, her dark edges, her impecunious existence. Shall we make her a martyr or can we allow that she may have had the life she wanted? How did she see herself? We know that she was looking at that, too—the copious self-portraits prove it. She often photographed her own sphinx-like expression in the reflection of bathroom mirrors, car windows, shop windows, shards of glass and curves of aluminum. She captured her shadow creeping across the frame to touch an empty sidewalk, a lone horseshoe crab, a flowering lawn. These pictures help me to understand, finally, that Maier isn’t invisible, except to us. She was looking at herself all along.
A decade ago, experts and the general public were surprised by the impressive photographic work of a previously unknown artist: Vivian Maier. With her camera, she told everyday stories from New York and Chicago by capturing decisive and often bizarre moments on the street. Her photos document real life in the United States from the 1950s onwards in the most impressive way. Although she had no photographic training and no interest in presenting her extraordinary skills to a wider audience, her work has attracted unprecedented posthumous attention.
Biography as film and book
In addition to Vivian Maier’s surprising work, her discovery provided enough material for the 2013 Oscar-nominated documentary Finding Vivian Maier. Unemployed estate agent John Maloof stumbled across a gem by chance when he bought a box of Maier’s negatives at auction, triggering an avalanche. In October 2009, as a hitherto photographic layman, he asked in Flickr’s Hard Core Street Photography Forum: “Is this kind of work worthy of an exhibition or a book? Or do works like this happen often?”
The search for Vivian Maier and the meticulous research of her biographer Ann Marks have brought numerous pieces of the puzzle of Vivian Maier’s problematic life circumstances to light. After six years of intensive detective work, the book Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny was written. It is captivating and even really exciting at the end. Nevertheless, it leaves the reader enough room for their own interpretations.
The biographer devotes a great deal of time to researching Vivian Maier’s family history and her personal environment. Apart from some of the children she looked after, Vivian Maier had hardly any personal ties to other people. Anyone who sees her sometimes distant, but often ironic pictures today would like to know more about Vivian Maier and her ability to create such masterpieces. During her lifetime, however, no one was able to do so, as she only took photographs for herself and showed no interest in experiencing the effect of her pictures.
Contradictions and coincidences
Vivian Maier was obsessed with photography, but had no professional goals as a photographer. She is only known to have worked on one commission, for which she noted the sale price of $1.00 on the negative sleeve. She collected her photographs of street scenes in cardboard boxes and did not even develop the exposed films at the end. Her gainful employment as a nanny seemed to be adequate and could be easily reconciled with the time she had available each day for photo stalking while the children were at school. Joint exploratory walks may be exciting for some children, but the reality of carcasses in a cattle yard was not exactly child-friendly. The best documented is the good relationship with the Gensburg family, whose three sons Vivian Maier looked after for eleven years from 1956 to 1967. However, the Gensburgs only found out about the extent of Vivian’s street photography after her death through John Maloof.
Good street photographers comment on the everyday life of their time through their choice of subject, image composition and the right moment. They find their personal signature not so much through professional photographic training, but through the learned ability to be unobtrusive and make quick decisions. Typical: the sleeping newspaper vendor in his kiosk framed by comics and news about glamor and terror. In Vivian Maier’s case, however, this inconspicuousness was often accompanied by a boldness with which she was able to photographically expose some people without regard for personal rights.
Estate, copyright and curation
Legal issues almost prevented Vivian Maier’s estate from remaining accessible to the public. John Maloof, the discoverer of Maier’s photographs, is in his own way similarly obsessed as she is. He devotes the energy she put into working with her camera to cataloging and curating the collection. Controversies about pictures that no one else had saved threatened to sabotage everything as soon as the world became interested in Vivian Maier.
The second strength of Ann Marks’ book, in addition to tracing Vivian Maier’s life, is the fact-based documentation of the handling of her estate. She herself was not burdened with all the issues that were disputed after her death. At least a foundation is now ensuring that Vivian Maier’s work no longer has to languish in boxes. In 2017, John Maloof bequeathed a collection of Vivian Maier’s camera equipment and 500 photographic prints to the University of Chicago. Thus, apart from completely inappropriate financial considerations, it is possible to explore how Vivian Maier herself probably wanted her photographs to be processed.
The Story of Vivian Maier, a Legendary Photographer We Almost Never Knew
If you haven’t heard of Vivian Maier, you're hardly alone. It's something of a miracle that anyone has, even though she stands among the best street photographers of the 20th century.
Maier made tens of thousands of intimate, humorous, and powerful portraits over the course of her life, and shoved them all into boxes that went undiscovered until a serendipitous $300 bid at an auction in 2007. It was only after Maier's death in 2009 that people recognized the genius of her photos, which can hang alongside those of Robert Frank, Dianne Arbus, or Henri Cartier Bresson.
Finding Vivian Maier tells the story of her long life (she died at 83) and exquisite work, and chronicles the immense task of piecing the story together from the clues she left behind. No less fascinating is the story of the film's co-director, John Maloof, who placed that winning bid and worked hard to bring Maier's work the global recognition he’s certain it deserves.
Maloof purchased a box containing 40,000 negatives of photos Maier made in the 1960s. He hoped to use them to illustrate Portage Park, a book he co-authored about life on the city’s northwest side. The photos didn't suit his needs, but Maloof grew so obsessed by them that he left real estate to take up photography. Unsure what else to do with the pictures, he posted a selection of them online and created a Flickr thread asking, "what do I do with this stuff?" The thread blew up, and Maloof realized just what he’d stumbled on: A one-of-a-kind historical document and trove of unseen world-class art.
Maier’s photos, snapped mostly with the boxy Rolleiflex camera perpetually dangling from her neck, are clever, idiosyncratic, and sensitive to the absurd nuances of daily life--qualities of a great street photographer. But her talent, sense of humor, and physical appearance (Maier took her share of selfies) are all we learn about her from the pictures alone. Maloof needed to dig for everything else.
One of the great achievements of this documentary is the DIY detective work Maloof and fellow filmmaker Charlie Siskel did in piecing together the narrative of a deliberately mysterious woman. Using every resource he could think of--including scouring Google images to match the steeples seen in some of Maier's photos with those seen in the French countryside-–the sudden documentarian guides us through the story of Maier’s life. His passion for telling the story is contagious, and it's easy to share his excitement over each new tidbit of information. The picture that emerges is, like her work, sometimes charming, and sometimes all too real.
Maier was born in New York and made her living as a nanny there and in Chicago, probably because the job allowed her time to make pictures. The children, now grown, that she cared for and many of their parents provide the most insight. They describe Maier as intelligent, adventurous, and intensely private. She had also mastered the photographer's balance of being curious and bold while remaining aloof and removed. She also could be irritable and temperamental, prone to strange (even violent) outbursts that sometimes cost her jobs. Through it all, she never quit taking photos, even if meant bringing her young charges to the shopping center, slum or slaughterhouse she felt like shooting that day.
Her compulsive chronicling of the world around her expanded to include color photography and film; reels and reels of audio tape feature guerrilla interviews conducted in supermarket lines. Maier also was a bona fide hoarder, stacking newspapers in her rooms until the floors literally sagged. Early in the film Maloof lays out artifacts, acquired from storage lockers and other buyers at the 2007 auction, and they cover the entire floor. The material includes more than 100,000 negatives; thousands of notes, receipts, newspaper clippings; and countless marginalia. There was a lot to unravel, let alone weave into a coherent story, and the filmmakers do a great job bringing it all together.
Some reviews have panned Finding Vivian Maier for being little more than an advertisement for the publishing business Maloof has built upon her photos. He briefly addresses this in the documentary, arguing that with Maier dead and no estate to represent her, there is no one else to champion her work. In the film, he reads the rejection letter the MoMA sent him early in his project. Whether the project is driven by duty or profit ultimately doesn't matter, because it's a fascinating story told well, and we're lucky Maier's photos fell into the hands of someone with the will and the means to ensure people saw them.
Another relevant question is whether Maier would wanted the attention. The film makes abundantly clear just how obsessed she was with privacy. Maloof acknowledges this conundrum, but finds justification with the discovery (accompanied in the film by a soaring string section soundtrack) of a single note to a small photo printing shop in a tiny village in France. In it, Maier suggests going into business with the printmaker to create postcards from some of her photos. Her humble proposal may not indicate anything akin to interest in the vast publicity campaign that's made her posthumously popular, with her likeness and photos circulating the globe under the Maloof Collection emblem.
Still, without Maloof's work, the odds that Maier's amazing body of work would ever be widely seen are miniscule. It isn't easy getting people to notice, much less celebrate, a new name in the arts. The photographers so often invoked to describe Maier's work had time to define their era and influence later generations of photographers. Her work has the legitimacy to be no less influential, but lacks the cultural currency. That is changing, however, with the reach of the internet. Finding Vivian Maier is therefore not just an account of a gifted photographer's life, but a call for the art establishment to take her work seriously.
In that way, it has a chance of adding a name to the canon of great street photographers. That is an achievement worth celebrating.
Artists tell stories. Vivian Maier never got to tell hers while she was alive. Instead during her life, she opted to tell the stories of others. A nanny by trade, a street photographer by hobby, Vivian Maier died with over 150,000 unpublished photos to her name - and that’s it. Mostly based in New York and Chicago, Maier captured images of the jostling cities and their at-the-time normal events, immortalizing the lived experience of US megacities’ citizens in the mid-to-late 20th Century.
Maier’s Life
There are few things about Maier’s life we know for certain. Vivian was born in New York City on February 1st, 1929 to a French mother. Shortly after her birth, they would go back to France, eventually returning to New York for a brief period in 1939. In 1951, Maier would make the trip alone back to New York where she would live until her move to Chicago in 1956. Here, she would continue to be the “Mary Poppins” nanny of three boys, highlighting her trips in her now-iconic works.
And those are just about the only things that are certain. In 2007, John Maloof, a photo collector writing a book on historic Chicago, blindly purchased a box full of negatives from a storage auction. Unknowingly, he had purchased a lot from Vivian Maier’s storage facility, which she had ceased to make payments on in her old age. After developing some of the photos and recognizing their immense beauty, he acquired more of her photos from a different buyer at the same auction. Mystified by this enigmatic auteur he had stumbled upon, Maloof searched for further information about who Vivian Maier was; unfortunately, he was unable to find any details about her until a final Google search in 2009 revealed her death just two months prior – starting the hunt to tell Maier’s story.
Maloof’s search was compiled into the 2013 documentary, Finding Vivian Maier. While the documentary aims to uncover the life of the nanny, the search ends with more questions than answers. Later, the more comprehensive Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny book was published in 2023. The work took genealogy and family records along with an in-depth analysis into her 140,000 photos to shed light into Maier’s world of mystery.
Her Work
Maier’s timelessness starts with her subjects. Her captures of the poor, children and the “average person” illuminates a side of 60s Chicago rarely shown before. This realness captivates the viewer with a rare intimacy of the normal. Today, its easy to find glamorous photos of Chicago’s Skyline and the historic State Street, but it’s not authentic. Most history serves as a highlight told by the winners, forever excluding the emotion and complexities of real life. Maier’s work is a time capsule of real lives, creating a gateway for audiences to realize some things never change.
Aside from her diverse catalog of emotions, Maier’s ability to capture raw emotion adds to her timelessness. She never backed down from intimacy, oftentimes capturing moments that throws the audience into her eyes. She used simplicity to convey pathos, Maier captured images of elderly love, childlike curiosity and human connection frequently. Her eye for simple photos and emotion provides the audience a genuine emotional connection to 60s and 70s Chicago. She shows elements that could easily have been lost in the annals of history.
Not only did she paint pictures of real emotion, she chronicled the pulse of the nation. Whether its the street-style recreation of Marylyn Monroe’s iconic shot or her frequent capture of newspapers, it displays an artist in-tune with her time. Maier’s captures of the working class on the streets of Chicago and New York provide a unique, high-quality snapshot into real life at a time where photos were only taken by the wealthy.
Maier’s later-in-life colored photos show yet another side of Maier. Her use and capture of bright colors shows an artist with an affinity for vibrance. She loved bright fashion, a side of the city fashion rarely represented in street photography at the time. Her captures of complimentary colors spans outfits, flowers and social settings. This period of hers adds a sense of liveliness to her work, a feeling that’s rarely authentic in historic captures of the cities.
Legacy of Her Works
Maier’s story is one that leaves more questions than answers. With Maier’s before-fame passing, the questions keep piling on. But now, they shift to questions of legacy rights. Who has the rights to her iconic catalogue? Who is responsible for managing her post-mortem millions? And more importantly, is this what the reclusive Vivian Maier would have wanted?
Currently, Maloof owns the rights to over 90% of Maier’s total outputs. He uses his majority ownership to tell her story, creating collections and distributing to museums across the globe. Despite international success, Maloof cannot sell her works. Although Maloof owns the physical copies of Maier’s work, copyright rights for the content of the photos withstand the authors passing for 70 years, unless otherwise stated in the will. Due to this, her work and legacy is protected from complete private ownership.
With Maier’s passing before her superstardom, one can’t help but wonder if this what she would have wanted with her thousands of works. In her life, Maier was reclusive. The people closest her always saw her and her trademarked camera, but never saw the works her camera produced. She was an intensely private person, and as evidenced by her mysterious behavior, never let anyone get too close. The intimacy of her works shows a side of Maier she never let come to life.
Personally, I think this adds to her legend. In her life, no one got to truly know Vivian Maier. In viewing her thousands of photos the audience feels privy to parts of her it feels we weren’t supposed to see, adding to her intrigue. While her photos characterize the artist more than she ever would allow while she was alive, it promotes an air of mystery atop of her incredible snapshots into 60s America, creating a sense of mysticism around her works. In a world where everything needs a reason and a motive, Vivian Maier’s is one that gets more perplexing the more you analyze it. It’s unlikely anyone will ever know the true Vivian Maier, but no one was supposed to. Some things are simply better as a mystery.
Biographers get distracted by the photographer’s unusual life story—to the point of diminishing her work itself.
Until 12 years ago, the photographer Vivian Maier was largely unknown. Though she shot incessantly from 1950 until about a decade before her death in 2009, she hid her pictures, literally locking them away. Often, she didn’t even bother to develop her rolls of film. She made money as a live-in nanny for families in New York and Chicago (briefly working for talk-show host Phil Donahue). As she got older, she rented storage lockers to house her overwhelming accumulation of books, magazines, newspapers, and other miscellany. The contents of those lockers were auctioned off in 2007 after she fell into arrears, which is how then-26-year-old John Maloof, a former art student, began purchasing the bulk of Maier’s archive: more than 140,000 images, most of them undeveloped and unprinted. A couple of years later, he uploaded some of the pictures to a street photography group on Flickr to immediate acclaim.
The images arrived already imbued with the aura of permanence. They sometimes evoke the wanderlust of Robert Frank’s photos, the wry self-deprecation of Lee Friedlander, or the grubbiness of Weegee, but they’re not derivative. Attentive to plaintive or absurd interludes in American life, primarily in New York City and Chicago, Maier made a piecemeal record of the sudden encounters and furtive gestures that turn any street into a guerrilla theater. She captured politicians on the campaign trail (Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, LBJ); celebrities at premieres or out in the wild (Frank Sinatra, John Wayne, Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn); laborers and commuters; drunks, criminals, and down-and-outs; flaneurs and well-coiffed women in furs. She cataloged the textures and cast-offs of the urban environment: graffiti, fire escapes, signs, garbage, shadows, abandoned newspapers, half-demolished buildings. She easily switched between registers, from gentle wit—as in a 1975 photo of an elderly trio crossing a Chicago street in rhyming yellow apparel, or a 1960s photo of an imperious dog loitering beneath a pay phone—to almost ethnographic sincerity, as in her photos from a six-month solo voyage around the world in 1959. She often photographed children, particularly when they were aggrieved or lost in adultlike introspection. Above all, she made images of casual lyricism, as in her celebrated 1957 photo of a woman in white drifting through a dark Florida night. Maier’s are the kinds of photos about which you can only say: These are the real deal.
The fact that Maier was dead by the time she became famous has proved a boon for her posthumous renown; in her absence, the mysteries around the photographer-nanny became irresistible hooks for editors and curators. Maloof has been entrepreneurial about marketing her story. At least half a dozen monographs have appeared in the last decade, bolstered by numerous exhibitions and a steady chorus of press. In 2015, Finding Vivian Maier, a documentary that Maloof co-directed, was nominated for an Oscar and burnished Maier’s legend further. If she’s not quite in the canon yet, she’s certainly wait-listed.
Maier has also been the subject of two notable biographies. The first, Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife, by Pamela Bannos, was released in 2016. The second, Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny, by Ann Marks, exemplifies the allure and risks of writing about the enigmatic Maier. Marks, a former marketing executive at Dow Jones, began to dig into Maier’s life after watching Maloof’s film. She kicks off her biography with a brassy sales pitch: “By book’s end, key questions will be answered, including the one everyone asks: ‘Who was Vivian Maier, and why didn’t she share her photographs?’ Mystery solved.”
Well, maybe, maybe not. Treating Maier like a riddle makes for good jacket copy but can also turn her into a kind of Rorschach: One sees in her whatever the critical mode du jour demands. Circa 2011, she was “the best street photographer you’ve never heard of,” to quote Mother Jones. Today, she is an aerosol of neuroses and quirks, the lonely spinster who shampooed with vinegar and slathered Vaseline on her face; who wore men’s size 12 shoes; who dumped drippings from a roast pan into a glass and drank them. As Marks describes Maier’s eccentricities, she starts to play the amateur clinician, marshaling hypotheses from medical experts whose secondhand diagnoses foreground a story of trauma and unwitting victimhood. Commercial publishers require a takeaway, and so Maier becomes here something she would have detested: an inspiration.
Maier is a tricky subject for a biographer. She spent the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s as a nanny, shuttling between families, or sometimes enjoying the reprieve of stable employment. (Her longest post was 11 years.) Whenever she moved, she locked her room and forbade anyone from entering. She seems not to have had romantic relationships, and had few personal ties. She left behind little by way of diaries or letters. Marks bases part of her portrait of Maier on the recollections of people who knew her glancingly, who remember her as an “extraterrestrial” figure. “She was … a very foreign presence in Highland Park,” recalls a friend of the Gensburgs, the family that employed Maier the longest. Marks’s physical rundown suggests why:
[Maier] dressed formally; her everyday attire consisted of a tailored suit or crisp Peter Pan–collared blouse paired with a calf-length skirt. She still wore old-fashioned rolled-down stockings, unable to make the transition to pantyhose. It was all covered up with oversize men’s coats in beiges and grays and topped with a trademark floppy hat.
Adding to the sense of foreignness was Maier’s brusqueness and penchant for French expressions. She presented a stern image that seemed at odds with the sensibility of her photos: The strict disciplinarian who insisted that her young charges address her as “Mademoiselle” and who sometimes slapped the children in her care also created a portfolio rife with humor and tenderness. More puzzling still, the woman who once traveled the world alone, who frankly espoused her opinions, and who seethed with ambition spent most of her adult life in the suburbs, anonymously plying her art. Marks begins her book with an epigraph of dichotomous terms acquaintances used to describe Maier, among them: Caring/Cold, Feminine/Masculine, Jovial/Cynical, Passionate/Frigid, Social/Solitary, Mary Poppins/Wicked Witch.
Despite her outward formality, a streak of playfulness runs through her photographs. In her more than 600 self-portraits, she finds ingenious ways to use mirrors and storefront windows to reflect her plain intensity, or else manifests as a kind of negative presence, as in more oblique shots of her shadow against sidewalks and walls. A self-portrait from the 1970s depicts her shadow against a laborer’s mud-spattered behind; another shows her shadow hovering amid a patch of buttercups (an image later used on a dress displayed in Bergdorf Goodman’s storefront). Other self-portraits are more direct: Maier reflected in a car mirror, her face neutral, aloof. According to Marks, Maier almost never let anyone else take her picture. How are we to understand these paradoxes?
In Marks’s telling, Maier inherited a split sense of self. Maier’s mother, Marie Jaussaud, was born in France in 1897, the illegitimate daughter of a teenage fling. “The baby girl was welcomed into a world where she officially didn’t exist,” Marks writes, noting that this shame “set into motion three generations of family dysfunction.” By 1919, Marie had immigrated to New York City, where she married an alcoholic steam engineer named Charles Maier. The couple gave birth to a son, Carl, in 1920, and to a daughter, Vivian, in 1926. The Maiers’ marriage was unhappy, and in 1932 Marie and Vivian fled to France, leaving young Carl behind. Mother and daughter returned to New York in 1938, where Maier eventually lodged with a widowed family friend, and found work in a doll factory (perhaps accounting for some later shots of dolls discarded in trash cans).
In 1950, Maier again returned to France. It was there she began taking photographs with a box camera: panoramas of the Alps, studies of the region’s working class, portraits of family. “It is clear from her early negatives and prints that Vivian possessed a great deal of confidence,” Marks writes. “She typically covered her subjects with just one shot, an approach that would become a trademark.” In the spring of 1951, Maier returned to New York, where she continued shooting, and even flirted with the idea of launching a picture postcard business. Most importantly, Maier revolutionized her practice by purchasing a Rolleiflex camera, which allowed her to literally shoot from the hip.
Marie almost entirely disappears from the biography after this point. “[She] stands out as disturbed and mentally unstable, even among a group of troubled individuals,” Marks writes of Maier’s mother. A doctor who examined the family records for this biography suggests that Marie had narcissistic personality disorder. She rarely held a steady job and was allergic to housework. She fabricated medical ailments, and in a letter to an officer about Carl’s care, she strikes a paranoid tone, lamenting that everyone had “plotted against” her. Although Marks acknowledges that it’s impossible to accurately diagnose Marie, this doesn’t stop her from premising the whole biography on such drive-by psychologizing. Indeed, the book is a case study for what responsible biographers shouldn’t do.
Some of Marks’s theories are more credible than others. It’s likely, for example, that Maier was a hoarder. By the time she died, she had crammed more than eight tons of possessions into storage lockers. (Her hoarding cost her at least one nanny job.) At other times, though, Marks’s hypotheses are purely speculative. “Physical and sexual abuse can contribute to trauma,” she writes, “and Vivian’s behavior suggests that she may have endured this type of exploitation.” The behavior in question—Maier’s distaste for physical intimacy, her fusty wardrobe, and her cautioning young girls against sitting on men’s laps—doesn’t strike me as compelling evidence of childhood sexual abuse so much as the traits of a reserved woman with old-fashioned notions of propriety. “[Maier’s] brother was definitively diagnosed with schizophrenia, and her mother almost certainly had a history of some sort of mental illness,” Marks writes. “Many felt Vivian’s grandfather Nicolas Baille may have also, based on his antisocial behavior and extreme paranoia.” (Marks doesn’t specify whom she means by “Many.”) She asks the same doctor who diagnosed Maier’s mother to take a crack at Maier herself. The verdict: Maier was perhaps a “classic case of schizoid disorder.”
Marks uses the fact of Carl Maier’s schizophrenia to prop up this diagnosis. One of the assets of her largely lackluster biography is the gumshoe work she does chasing down Carl’s records and filling in his story. (The book’s multiple appendixes, including one devoted to “genealogical tips,” suggests that building out a family tree is Marks’s real passion.) Carl was imprisoned at age 16 for tampering with the mail and forging a check. He joined the military but was dishonorably discharged for a drug-related offense. He bounced in and out of psychiatric hospitals as an adult and died of an aortic thrombosis at a rest home in 1977, at age 57. He and Maier had little contact with each other, although Marks portrays them as heirs to a common bloodline of mental illness. Marks takes Carl’s diagnosis at face value, despite how often the label schizophrenia was slapped onto criminalized bodies at mid-century, particularly among institutionalized drug users. Still, let’s grant that Carl had some kind of genetic psychological disturbance—what does that mean for Maier?
It means that her creativity, her art, is inextricable from mental illness. That’s a generic enough argument, but in Marks’s hands, it turns cloying. Her interpretations of Maier’s work sometimes take unfortunate cues from clinical analyses. She quotes a father-son duo of Freudian therapists who posit that “the negative themes that surface in Vivian’s portfolio—including death, violent crime, demolition, and garbage—represent subconscious reflections of her low self-esteem.” Name any worthwhile photographer—any worthwhile artist—and you’ll encounter “negative themes.” This is vapid psychoanalysis and even worse critical writing.
As I read, I was increasingly irritated by this reductive and patronizing portrayal of Maier. (This is underscored by how Marks refers to Maier as “Vivian.” “I use her first name throughout because this is how most people know and speak about her,” Marks writes by way of explanation. She doesn’t consider that Maier, who worked in a service capacity all of her life, was unlikely to be addressed by her surname.) “With immense strength of character and perseverance,” Marks writes, “Vivian developed compensatory qualities and coping mechanisms, like photography, to manage her mental health issues.” In Marks’s account, Maier is a mentally ill woman who took photos almost as a therapeutic tic rather than a full-fledged artist with (perhaps) a mental illness. Maier’s self-portraits, according to Marks, are simply ways to substantiate herself in the world—signposts of a woman who was forever unmoored. Even Maier’s prolificness is evidence of a compulsion, as if her taking pictures was of a piece with her hoarding of newspapers. Marks never considers that perhaps Maier just enjoyed being a photographer, and that the act of framing a shot was itself creatively fulfilling. Would anyone point to a writer’s pile of false starts and trashed drafts as signs of a mental disorder?
Just because Maier often didn’t develop her rolls of film and rarely produced prints (and almost never exhibited them) doesn’t mean that her creative practice was somehow stunted or insular. That’s a careerist view of how a photographer should operate. Maier was undoubtedly a serious, dedicated, and consummate artist, largely self-taught, who honed her craft over decades. As Marks herself notes, Maier was more than a hobbyist, even from the beginning: “Altogether, the thousands of early images … confirm how intensely Vivian worked to master the basics of photography during her time in [France].” In New York, Maier sought out “colleagues to learn from, collaborate with, and engage in shoptalk.” She assiduously cropped images and experimented with color film. Even by the end of her career, Maier was known to leave precise instructions for the technicians entrusted with developing her images. But by pressing her into a queasy Hallmark narrative of a woman triumphing over her demons, Marks’s biography unintentionally undervalues Maier’s achievement. Photography wasn’t a “coping mechanism” but her life’s work.
“I’m sort of a spy,” Maier once told someone who asked about her profession. She was being cheeky, but the remark indicates how she saw herself: as a witness and a trespasser, a woman interested in momentary revelations of truth, no matter how painful or embarrassing or fraught. Her photographs represent a vast album of American street life across five decades, and, parallel to that, a chronicle of Maier’s own place in that landscape. It’s a body of work that’s simultaneously objective and subjective, in which Maier is both the author and a recurrent, ambiguous protagonist who lends the entire undertaking a kind of self-referential weight. Contrary to Marks’s argument, I see no meaningful distinction between the photographer and the world in Maier’s work. She doesn’t appear to me as an isolated woman trying to fix her coordinates in a universe from which she was somehow estranged. She looks, instead, like a woman who was profoundly and intuitively present.
If you read enough biographies, you realize that the genre has a fatal flaw, a system error: Every person is unknowable, not least of all to themselves. There is, in everyone, some small cinder of truth that never sees the light of day. Biographers pretend that this cinder can be revealed, and that order can be imposed upon an unruly life. That’s a lie. Ann Marks hasn’t solved the mystery of Maier—why would we want her to? The photographer’s mystery remains intact, suffusing the thousands of indelible images she left behind in those storage lockers. It’s better to look there for the truth of her life, in those pictures of the world that she put away, as if she saw, and understood, what the rest of us never would.
~
Jeremy Lybarger · Dec 21, 2021.
The Life and Work of Street Photographer Vivian Maier
A LIFE IN SHADOW: The North Shore families who hired Vivian Maier as a nanny came to know a kind but eccentric woman who guarded her private life and kept a huge stash of boxes. A chance discovery after her death by a man named John Maloof has spotlighted her secret talent as a photographer and led to a growing appreciation of her vast work.
On an unremarkable day in late 2007, John Maloof, a young real-estate agent, spent some time at a local auction house, RPN Sales in Portage Park, combing through assortments of stuff—some of it junk—that had been abandoned or repossessed. A third-generation reseller, Maloof hoped to find some historical photographs for a small book about Portage Park that he was cowriting on the side. He came across a box that had been repossessed from a storage locker, and a hasty search revealed a wealth of black-and-white shots of the Loop from the 1950s and ’60s. There’s got to be something pertinent in there, he thought. So he plunked down about $400 for the box and headed home. A closer examination unearthed no scenes of Portage Park, though the box turned out to contain more than 30,000 negatives. Maloof shoved it all into his closet.
Something nagged, however—perhaps a reflex picked up from working the flea market circuit as a poor kid growing up on the West Side of Chicago. Though he knew almost nothing about photography, he eventually returned to the box and started looking through the negatives, scanning some into his computer. There was a playfulness to the moments the anonymous artist had captured: a dapper preschool boy peeking from the corner of a grimy store window; an ample rump squeezing through the wooden planks of a park bench; a man in a three-piece suit napping, supine, in the front seat of his car, his right arm masking his face from the daylight. Whoa, Maloof mused. These are really cool. Who took them?
A contact at the auction house didn’t know the photographer’s name but told Maloof that the contents of the repossessed storage locker had belonged to an elderly woman who was ill. As time passed, Maloof tracked down a handful of people who had acquired similar caches of negatives once owned by the same woman, and he bought the boxes off them. With the collection becoming expensive to maintain, this lifelong reseller did what came naturally: He cut up some of the negatives and hawked them on eBay. They proved startlingly popular—some sold for as much as $80 a pop. Maloof realized that he’d come across something special, and he determined to crack the case of the anonymous photographer.
One day in late April 2009, more than a year after he bought that first box at RPN, Maloof got a break. He found an envelope from a photo lab buried in one of the boxes. Scribbled in pencil was a name: Vivian Maier. One hit from a Google search linked to an item from the Chicago Tribune that had been posted just days before. It was the paid death notice for an 83-year-old woman: “Vivian Maier, proud native of France and Chicago resident for the last 50 years died peacefully on Monday. Second mother to John, Lane and Matthew. A free and kindred spirit who magically touched the lives of all who knew her. Always ready to give her advice, opinion or a helping hand. Movie critic and photographer extraordinaire. A truly special person who will be sorely missed but whose long and wonderful life we all celebrate and will always remember.”
After a call to the Tribune left him with a faulty address and a disconnected phone number, Maloof didn’t know where to turn. In the meantime, though, he started displaying Maier’s work on a blog, vivianmaier.com. Then, in October 2009, he linked to the blog on Flickr, the photo-sharing website, and posted a question about Maier’s pictures on a discussion board devoted to street photography: “What do I do with this stuff (other than giving it to you)?”
The discussion went viral. Suggestions poured in, and websites from around the world sent traffic to his blog. (If you Google “Vivian Maier” today, you’ll get more than 18,000 results.) Maloof recognized that this was bigger than he’d thought.
He was right about that. Since his tentative online publication of a smattering of Vivian Maier’s photographs, her work has generated a fanatical following. In the past year, her photos have appeared in newspapers in Italy, Argentina, and England. There have been exhibitions in Denmark and Norway, and a showing is scheduled to open in January at the Chicago Cultural Center. Few of the pictures had ever been seen before by anyone other than Maier herself, and Maloof has only scratched the surface of what she left behind. He estimates that he’s acquired 100,000 of her negatives, and another interested collector, Jeff Goldstein, has 12,000 more (some of them displayed at vivianmaierphotography.com). Most of Maier’s photos are black and white, and many feature unposed or casual shots of people caught in action—passing moments that nonetheless possess an underlying gravity and emotion. And Maier apparently ranged far and wide with her camera—there are negatives from Los Angeles, Egypt, Bangkok, Italy, the American Southwest. The astonishing breadth and depth of Maier’s work led Maloof to pursue two questions, as alluring in their way as her captivating photographs: Who was Vivian Maier, and what explains her extraordinary vision?
Filing away negatives one day, Maloof, who today is 29, found a promising lead: Stuck to the bottom of a shoebox was a Highland Park address for someone named Avron Gensburg. Another quick Google search pulled up a related address with the names John and Lane—the same names as two of the people mentioned in Maier’s death notice. A little more sleuthing revealed that from 1956 to 1972, Maier had lived with Avron and Nancy Gensburg in Highland Park as a nanny for their three boys: John, Lane, and Matthew.
Today, Lane Gensburg, a 54-year-old tax attorney, is the citadel of Maier’s memory, and he is adamant that nothing unflattering be said about the woman who raised him from birth. When he starts talking about Maier, his eyes soften. “She was like Mary Poppins,” he tells me. “She had an amazing ability to relate to children.”
Maier had answered the Gensburgs’ ad seeking a nanny in 1956, and when she arrived, she almost looked the part of Mary Poppins. Under a heavy coat, she wore sturdy shoes and a long skirt with a lace slip, and she carried an enormous carpetbag. “She was dressed so differently,” recalls Nancy Gensburg. Maier was tall—five feet eight—but she appeared taller. “A very classy lady,” Nancy says. Maier’s trademark was the camera dangling around her neck. She was also very French. “She looked French, quite frankly,” Lane says. “She had a prominent nose.”
Technically, Maier wasn’t French, though she spoke with a watery French accent. According to her birth certificate, which Maloof found buried in some possessions the Gensburgs gave him, Vivian Dorothy Maier was born in New York on February 1, 1926, the daughter of Maria Jaussaud Maier, a Frenchwoman, and Charles Maier, an Austrian. By the time Vivian was four years old, her father was out of the picture, for reasons unknown. She and her mother pop up in the 1930 census, but the head of the household was a 49-year-old Frenchwoman named Jeanne Bertrand, identified as a portrait photographer. In the early 1900s, Bertrand was a successful and award-winning photographer who had an acquaintance with Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, an artist and the founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Jim Leonhirth, a freelance journalist in Tennessee who is writing a book about Bertrand and other photographers from her era, knows nothing about Bertrand’s connection with Maier, but he confirms that Bertrand had steady work in a New Jersey studio around the same time that Maier and her mother were living with her.
Maier and her mother returned to France for long periods of time, but where they lived is not known. On April 16, 1951, at age 25, Maier sailed unaccompanied from Le Havre in northwestern France and arrived in New York ten days later. What Maier did in New York for the next five years—besides take pictures, which abound in Maloof’s collection—remains unclear, but it’s likely she picked up work as a live-in caregiver, an occupation she would keep for the rest of her life.
Even among the people closest to her, she could be elusive about her background. The Gensburgs aren’t sure what brought her to Chicago or when she arrived. She was more forthcoming with her insights and opinions. “She really wasn’t interested in being a nanny at all,” Nancy Gensburg says. “But she didn’t know how to do anything else.”
The Gensburg boys adored Maier’s knack for creating quirky adventures. She wanted them to explore life beyond the confined suburbia of Highland Park—“the sticks,” as she put it. Maier and the boys might see the latest screening of an art film, visit the famous monuments of Graceland Cemetery, bundle up for the Chinese New Year parade, or forage for wild strawberries in a forest preserve—one of Maier’s favorite activities.
After one particular trip to the city with the boys, Maier returned to Highland Park in a state. While on the train, Lane had gestured out the window to the apartments along the el. “Look, Vivian!” he said. “The closets are hanging outside!” He had never seen clothes drying on a line. “Do you really think everybody has a dryer and a washer, Lane?” Maier asked. The little boy nodded. “That’s just terrible,” she told their mother later.
“She wanted them to be very aware of what was going on in the world,” Nancy Gensburg says.
On her days off, Maier would take a spin on her moped or go to the movies. If someone famous was in town—President Kennedy or Eleanor Roosevelt, for example—she’d pack up her cameras, work her way through the crowd, and snap a souvenir. Other days, she’d lock herself in her private bathroom, which she’d converted to a darkroom. “We could never get in,” recalls Avron Gensburg, the retired head of an arcade game manufacturer. “Not that we wanted to.” Maier didn’t talk about meeting up with friends, and there was no evidence of a boyfriend, let alone a husband. (To those who made the mistake of calling her Mrs. Maier, she’d respond tartly, “It’s Miss Maier, and I’m proud of it.”)
Maier collected things—or perhaps it’s equally true to say she had trouble throwing things away. Negatives, cameras, clothes, shoes, tape recordings, documents—Maloof’s attic is now a cluttered repository. She had an especially weak spot for newspapers. In her little bathroom at the Gensburgs’, the stack of papers on the back of her toilet reached the ceiling. However, “she didn’t keep papers just to keep papers,” Nancy Gensburg points out. “There was always an article that she’d want to get back to and couldn’t.”
For six months from 1959 to 1960, Maier circumnavigated the globe alone. Although she never talked about her family, Avron Gensburg recalls that Maier inherited part of a small farm in Alsace, and it appears that she sold her share and used the money to travel to Los Angeles, Manila, Bangkok, Beijing, Egypt, Italy, France, and New York. “If she wanted to go, she’d just get up and go,” Nancy recalls. The family would hire a temporary replacement while Maier was away; she never said where she was headed. “You really wouldn’t ask her about it at all,” Nancy says. “I mean, you could, but . . .” Her voice trails off. “She was private. Period.”
Maier would share some of her photographs of the children with the Gensburgs, but she wouldn’t gift them. “If you wanted a picture,” Nancy says, “you had to buy it.” But Maier wasn’t selling her photography for profit. “Someone had to want it more than she wanted it. It’s like an artist who would paint something and then hate to get rid of it. She loved everything she did.”
When Maier left the Gensburgs’ employ in 1972—by then, the boys were old enough not to need a nanny—she took everything she owned and didn’t mention her subsequent jobs, not even when she’d stop by later to visit the boys. Despite the gaps in her timeline, it seems she never strayed very far from the North Shore; she always managed to land in another house in need of a nanny.
One belonged to Phil Donahue. After he moved his TV talk show to Chicago in 1974, he separated from his wife, and a divorce followed. He and his four boys ended up in Winnetka. “There was no Aunt Bee,” Donahue recalls, referring to the iconic caregiver from The Andy Griffith Show. “The women who came into my life as nannies didn’t last too long. No matter who they were, the kids hated them. They were rent-a-mothers.”
Maier lived with Donahue for less than a year, and his children, as well as a couple of his nieces, don’t share the Gensburgs’ memories of her as Mary Poppins incarnate. She was the eccentric Frenchwoman who dragged them to obscure monuments, served them yucky peanut butter sandwiches with apricots, and made the girls a present of a paper bag full of green army men.
Donahue’s youngest son, James, who was around 12 at the time, remembers that Maier would roam the neighborhood taking odd photographs in a getup that reminded him of Maria von Trapp, the only other European woman he had met at the time. (Von Trapp had made an appearance on Donahue.) Maier would startle easily and exclaim, “Oh! Bah la-la bah!”—an expression that can be heard on audiotapes she made of interviews she conducted with the children or elderly people under her care. On those recordings, she dodges questions about herself.
Donahue recalls that Maier took pictures, but he doesn’t remember any prints. “I once saw her taking a picture inside a refuse can,” he says. “I never remotely thought that what she was doing would have some special artistic value.”
Over the years, her subject matter changed. She stopped shooting in black and white, and her work became more abstract—artfully placed garbage, for example. There were no more pictures of the pyramids; she no longer made exotic trips. And she seemed to grow even more elusive—she would go long periods, sometimes years, without checking in with the Gensburgs.
By the time she arrived at the busy Glenview home of Zalman and Karen Usiskin in 1987, Maier was hauling around 30 years’ worth of photography. When she interviewed with Zalman, a mathematics professor at the University of Chicago, and Karen, a textbook editor, she made one thing clear: “I have to tell you that I come with my life, and my life is in boxes,” she said. No problem, they told her. They have a large garage. “We had no idea,” Zalman says. “She came with 200 boxes.” The family placed them in storage, and they sat untouched until Maier left a year later.
The Usiskins say Maier was good with their two children, but they heard she was less than kind to the taxi drivers on her trips to do the family’s grocery shopping. (She never learned to drive.) Back at home, she’d set aside all the bruised fruit, which she’d bought especially for herself. “If we would have a piece of meat [at dinner],” Karen says, “she would eat all the fat off of it—like somebody who was looking for calories to stay alive.” Karen surmises that Maier wasn’t comfortable buying expensive things. “I think that she had a real identity with being a poor person,” she says. “That was something that she was proud of.”
From 1989 to 1993, Maier cared for the disabled daughter of Federico Bayleander in his Wilmette home, and the stories about her start repeating: She was good with his daughter. She stored hundreds of boxes in his basement. She enjoyed critiquing movies and passionate conversations about politics. Neighbors complained that she was rude on the telephone. And there was something distinctive about her walk—a determined and heavy-footed gait, her arms swinging in large strokes.
After Bayleander, there was an employer in Oak Park and eventually a move to a cheap apartment in Cicero. When Lane Gensburg and his younger brother, Matthew, reconnected with her in the late nineties, they insisted on putting her up in a nice apartment in Rogers Park. “We were comfortable as long as we knew where she was,” Lane says.
He believes Maier was living off Social Security before his family stepped in to help, but she apparently had other sources of income. Today, Maloof can reach into almost any of her boxes and pull out a dozen stock certificates or uncashed refund checks from the Department of the Treasury, some of them for more than a thousand dollars.
The Gensburgs worried about her. Fearless as ever, Maier would walk around late at night in the more unsavory parts of Chicago and chat up the homeless under the el, giving advice or directing them to a shelter.
Around Christmas in 2008, Maier slipped on some ice while walking downtown, hit her head, and ended up in the emergency room. “We thought she was going to make a full recovery,” Lane says.
The Gensburg sons called in the best doctors and later moved her to a nursing home in Oak Park, where they would visit her after work. On the way to one of their visits, Lane and Matthew picked up their mother and grilled her: “Did you bring The New York Times for Vivian? Should we get her some coffee ice cream? She loves coffee ice cream.” Nancy muses, “They knew everything about her. She was just a unique person. But she didn’t think anything of herself.”
Maier passed away at the Oak Park nursing home on April 20, 2009. The Gensburg sons scattered her ashes in the forest where they all had found joy together picking wild strawberries.
When I first visit his two-flat, I’m blown away by the sheer amount of stuff Maloof has acquired. Upstairs is Vivian Central. By Maloof’s rough estimate, he now owns more than half a dozen of her cameras, more than a hundred 8 mm movies, 3,000 prints, 2,000 rolls of film, and 100,000 negatives. Steamer trunks and boxes line an attic wall. He pops open a trunk bursting with Maier’s clothes—felt hats, baggy coats in muted tones, black shoes so heavy they could double as dumbbells. Many of the boxes contain newspaper clippings encased in plastic frames or vinyl binders stuffed with everything from movie reviews to obituaries. One headline catches my eye: “Fellow Veterans Honor Victim of 1995 Heat Wave,” on a story about Rodney Holmquist, who had served in the navy and died alone. Twenty veterans rescued his body from a pauper’s grave and reburied him with military honors.
Although Maloof has thrown out numerous boxes full of newspapers, he’s holding on to the rest of Maier’s belongings to search for more clues to her story. In late 2009, he ran into an old high-school friend, Anthony Rydzon, who had majored in documentary filmmaking at Columbia College, and Rydzon suggested they make a film about Maier. They had the time: Rydzon had recently lost his job as a stagehand, and Maloof had switched from selling real estate to reselling products on eBay. Today their movie project is on hold, but there’s talk that a professional documentary team might be interested in telling Maier’s story. The two friends spend nearly every day in the attic scanning Maier’s photographs, prepping prints for various exhibitions, and sifting through boxes for new leads on people they might interview.
The immense volume of the photos makes for a daunting archiving effort. Maloof estimates that he’s scanned only one-tenth of the negatives in his collection—and he’s barely glanced at the remaining 90,000. When he finds a particularly strong photograph, he posts it on his blog.
With the excitement online and the exhibits around the world (the Cultural Center show opens January 7th), there is ample evidence of the popularity of Maier’s work, but how much of that stems from the unusual story of Maloof’s discovery and the curious nature of the woman behind it all? During our interview, Phil Donahue—who knew Maier only as a nanny, not an artist—asked, “Is there a preponderance of evidence out there that these [photographs] are really special?”
Colin Westerbeck, the former curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago and one of the country’s leading experts on street photography, thinks Maier is an interesting case. He inspected her work after Maloof e-mailed him. “She worked the streets in a savvy way,” he says. “But when you consider the level of street photography happening in Chicago in the fifties and sixties, she doesn’t stand out.” Westerbeck explains that Maier’s work lacks the level of irony and wit of some of her Chicago contemporaries, such as Harry Callahan or Yasuhiro Ishimoto, and unlike them, she herself is often a participant in the shot. The greatest artists, Westerbeck says, know how to create a distance from their subjects.
Yet Westerbeck admits that he understands the allure of Maier’s work. “She was a kind of mysterious figure,” he says. “What’s compelling about her pictures is the way that they capture the local character of Chicago in the past decades.”
In any case, John Maloof has made it his mission to spread the word on his remarkable discovery. “I owe Vivian an honest effort to get her recognized as one of the great photographers of her time,” he says. “I’m only spending time on her story because the world is demanding it from me. The more I learn about Vivian, the more fascinated I am about this woman. She was a singular person, extremely intelligent, and her talent was extraordinary. I get great satisfaction in sharing it with the world.”
But Maier was an intensely private person. What would she think of Maloof’s mission? Wouldn’t she hate it? Maloof believes she wouldn’t mind because the world has moved on, and he lets her speak for herself. After a long search, he plays a recording from an interview she conducted with an elderly woman: “I suppose nothing is meant to last forever,” Maier says in her accented English. “We have to make room for other people. It’s a wheel—you get on, you go to the end, and someone else has the same opportunity to go to the end, and so on, and somebody else takes their place. There’s nothing new under the sun.”
Biographer Ann Marks uncovered details of the reclusive Chicago photographer and nanny’s life.
The mystique of Vivian Maier, the reclusive Chicago photographer/nanny who found posthumous fame, shows no signs of losing its grip on the cultural imagination (see: Vivian Maier: In Color at the Chicago History Museum through May 2023).
But a new biography by first-time author Ann Marks — who became fascinated by Maier after seeing the 2013 Oscar-nominated documentary Finding Vivian Maier, produced by John Maloof, Charlie Siskel, and actor Jeff Garlin — suggests that a lot of what we think we know about Maier may be wrong. In Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny (Atria Books, December 7), Marks dived into exhaustive genealogical research, analysis of all 140,000 of Maier’s extant images, and other personal records to offer a portrait of a woman who “overcame tremendous family obstacles to lead a full, satisfying life on her own terms.”
We caught up with Marks, a retired chief marketing officer of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, by phone to talk about some of the insights she uncovered. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Was there a particular aspect of Maier’s life or work that initially piqued your curiosity?
There were two things after I watched the documentary that I couldn’t stop thinking about. One was all the different adjectives that everyone used to describe Vivian. In the book, I kind of start off with that because they’re just such opposites. Some people thought she was nice; some people thought she was mean. Some thought she was old-fashioned; some that she was feminist. It was just completely contrasting descriptions. And I thought: How could I make sense of this? Why do people have different perceptions? And then the second thing was, I just couldn’t believe in this day and age, with all the digital records, that all these genealogists used their skills and time, and John and Jeff used their money to find out anything they could about Vivian, and they kind of turned up a little bit empty. I thought that there’s something so strange about that, and I felt like I needed to crack that, because everybody has a family, and I needed to find out where they were.
How long did it take for you to find that all these dichotomies really did come from a deep, tangled family history?
I spent about five years on the research, and then two years getting published. Everywhere I went, I found really interesting things, and then I sort of was able to unravel the whole family story and the France story. [Many believed Maier was born in France, but in fact she was born in New York.] I was able to find people in New York who knew Vivian, which was a huge part of cracking her story, because she was like a different person there. And that’s when she started photography. In fact, I ended up finding that her whole attitude about photography, her behavior, was completely different in New York. And so it really opened up new learning about her for sure.
What specific things made you understand that the popular narrative around Maier — including the idea that she never wanted to exhibit her work — was not necessarily the correct one, or at least the full one?
I uncovered some key things pretty early on. There was a reason for her to be secretive about her life. It wasn’t because she was an oddball eccentric. She had a really bad family life, and there was no benefit to her in telling these upscale families in Highland Park [where Maier worked as a nanny] that her father was an alcoholic and he was violent and her brother was in jail and in institutions and her mother was a narcissist. Her whole story was painful enough, but you would never want to expose it to other people, especially if you would be watching their children. So I find that her behavior was actually rational, when a lot of people thought it was very strange.
Talking to people in New York really changed everything, because it became very apparent to me that she did try to be a professional photographer. She was very open with her photographs. There’s one family in New York that has hundreds of vintage Vivian photographs. In Chicago, she’d give people like two at the most. So she was much more generous and open with her photography in New York. The aftermath of her traumatic childhood caught up with her, and it really changed her ability to share her photographs. You could very much argue that she’d wanted to be a photographer and show her work and was proud of her work and would have been just fine with what’s happening now.
What was the most profound discovery in all the research that you did that perhaps you hadn’t expected to learn?
There were a number of aha moments, but the biggest was when I listened to her tape recordings. Because I had a perception of Vivian just based on how people described her — even with the contrasting adjectives, you feel like there’s kind of a seriousness, a detachment. You just get a vision of what she was like. Well, when you listen to the tape recordings, she’s nothing like you think she is. And I realized that everybody’s perception was based on her physical presence, which could be off-putting, but she was actually warm and patient and nice and nothing like what we’ve come to think about her. So I just looked at her in a whole new light, and that’s when I really wanted to understand why she appeared the way she did, why she presented herself the way she did, who was the real Vivian, and how was that expressed, then, through her photography.
