Artist
Piero Manzoni
ìManzoni is dead.  I mean physically.  He died young.  Is there any connection between this premature death and his chosen artistic stance?  The humor he employed is no easy position.  And if that was the cause, then we have some serious questions to ask of the art world -- of the world in general.  Manzoni will certainly be listed in the book of terrors of the twentieth century.î Marcel Broodthaers:(1963)
The artist must consciously delve into himself, past that which is individual and contingent, to the living seed of his human totality.
What might have seemed paradoxical on first glance becomes obvious: the deeper we reach into ourselves, the more we open up, because the nearer we are to the seed of our totality, the nearer we are to the seed of the totality of all men.  Art is not true creation and foundation except insofar as it creates and founds where mythologies have their ultimate
foundation and their origin: on the basis of the archetype.  In order to assimilate the meaning of one's own time one must reach individual mythology at the point where it coincides with universal mythology.  The difficulty lies in casting off the extraneous facts and pointless gestures that contaminate the usual art of our time, and that indeed are
sometimes emphasized to such a degree that they become emblematic of artistic modes.  The sieve that allows us to separate the authentic from the superfluous, that leads us to discover a coherent, orderly complex of meanings in an incomprehensible, irrational sequence of images, is self-analysis.  Through self-analysis we can reestablish a connection
with our origins, eliminating all pointless gestures, everything that is personal and literary in the worst sense of the word; nebulous memory of childhood; sentimentalisms; impressions; deliberate constructions; practical, symbolic, or descriptive concerns; false anxieties; latent
facts and the continuous hedonstic repetition of worn-out discoveries - all must be eliminated (within the limits of possibility, naturally: the important thing is never to attribute value to subjective conditioning).
Piero Manzoni
The Concept of the Painting (1959)