the gesture

excremental article in tate etc summer 10

"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."