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On 8 February 1963, two days after the Italian artist Piero Manzoni’s sudden demise, his friend and fellow artist Lucio Fontana commented in a radio interview that:

Manzoni’s most important discovery, exceptional I would say, was
the ‘Line’, which I believe to be an artistic innovation of international
bearing … Manzoni was a man of research and the ‘Line’ was and is
not easy to understand and to accept, however, it is my firm conviction
that Manzoni’s ‘Line’ has marked a fundamental point in the history
of contemporary art.^[1]

Line (fragment) (fig. 11.1), made in c.1959, is the sort of object Fontana would have had in mind as he spoke, a piece typical of the simultaneous conceptual depth and material simplicity that characterises much of Manzoni’s work.^[2] Painted in black on long strips of white paper, these long lines were rolled up by the artist and enclosed inside special cardboard cylinders before being labelled with the date, a signature, and the total length of the line created (fig. 11.2). Yet for all their physical sparseness, these concealed scrolls had a significant intellectual grounding on which Manzoni had been working for some time.

A central figure in the international neo-avant-garde scene of the 50s, Manzoni was concerned with the conceptual process of freeing paintings’ surface from the rules of representation.^[3]��In 1957, he began his first ‘white paintings’, pieces that from 1959 he referred to as��. As the artist himself explained, these were the result of his experiments with the use of constantly different techniques and materials, from both the natural and synthetic world, to create a series of white surfaces where observers’ energies of thought and image might be released.^[4]��They were no longer canvas prisoners of painted fiction, forced into a confined space where drawings and colours pretended to be something else. Manzoni felt he had overcome a central artistic problem of what to do with composition and form, creating a new, unrestricted aesthetic model that made tangible contact with ideas of the infinite.^[5]

The roll format was integral to developing this process, growing into a substantial series,��Lines, between 1959 and 1963. After two years’ research on �ٳ����Achromes, in the spring of 1959 Manzoni exhibited sheets of white paper with hand-drawn black lines in a café in Milan named Bar La Parete. Soon after, he transitioned from a single sheet to a roll of paper, and that summer presented his first exhibition of��Lines��painted on paper rolls of different lengths. The exhibition ran from 18–24 August in Galleria del Pozzetto Chiuso, an unconventional exhibition venue in the Italian Mediterranean town of Albisola, on the Ligurian coast. Perhaps inevitably, the show caused considerable scandal in the Italian province, and the only��Line��to be exhibited in its entirety there was vandalised when a visitor spat on it.^[6]��Still, Manzoni’s interest in the series grew, as did the size of his creations. In his earliest��Line-works, the length of the strips became their title:��Line m 6,��Line m 8,17,��Line m 9,84,��Line m 19,11, and��Line m 33,63��(all made in 1959). By 1960 he had managed to construct a line painted on a continuous 7.2km-long piece of paper (figs 11.3–11.4).^[7]��This industrial-level project began when the businessman and patron Aage Damgaard invited Manzoni to Denmark to create experimental works in his shirt factory, Angli, in the town of Herning. It was there that the artist met the editor of the local newspaper,��Herning-Avisen,��who allowed him to use the press’ machines and paper rolls to create �ٳ����Line, which was then dated, signed, and marked with his finger print before—like its smaller precursors—being sealed inside an enormous zinc cylinder (66 x 96cm). This was perhaps the closest Manzoni was to come to actually fulfilling his totalising conceptual goal of an infinite work, an infinite line.

It is interesting to contextualise Manzoni’s��Lines��within an international framework of antecedents in the United States, Japan, and Europe, for he was far from the only post-war artist turning to notions of the continuous page to give physical form to their expansive conceptual ambitions.^[8]��Manzoni’s research into notions of ‘void’ and ‘infinity’ were closely linked to European and American art movements who were themselves influenced by existentialist philosophy, language reductionism, and new waves of Zen philosophy.^[9]��The paintings of Barnett Newman, for instance, especially those displayed in his second solo exhibition at The Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in April 1951, were not rolls in themselves but nonetheless drew on a related compositional language of stretched, seemingly never-ending forms. In��(1950) the canvas is reduced to a slim section only four centimetres wide, extending vertically for more than two metres. It comes as no surprise that Newman, who said that ‘the idea of a “finished” picture is a fiction’, called his vertical strips of colour ‘zips’, ‘preferring it to “band”, for it connoted an activity rather than a motionless state of being’.^[10]��The following month, The Betty Parsons Gallery also hosted Robert Rauschenberg’s first solo exhibition, and it was here that the artist met John Cage.^[11]��They soon collaborated on a continuous scroll, Rauschenberg’s����(1953) , a rolled work created with Cage’s help. As Rosalind Krauss observes:

Tire Print from 1953, was made by lining up sheets of paper over more than
twenty-two feet of road and then directing John Cage to drive a car over
them. It was certainly a way of making a mark. But beyond that it was also
a way of finding an operational means of producing extension—of
accounting procedurally for the way that one piece of the art space relates to
the next’.^[12]

This was as much a philosophical movement as an aesthetic or formal one. Throughout the 50s and 60s, the writings of Alan W. Watts—such as��The Way of Zen��(1957) and��Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen��(1959)—had made extremely widespread in the West a number of cultural ideas that had been being taken up by artists in Japan for some time, ideas that injected strategies of infinity and distance into American and subsequently European scenes.^[13]��Manzoni himself came increasingly into contact with Japanese avant-garde artists from 1959,^[14]��and was likely aware of a continuous work made three years earlier in 1956 by Akira Kanayama,��Footprints (Ashiato), presented at the Outdoor Gutai Art Exhibition in the pine forest of Ashiya Park in the city of Ashiya (fig. 11.5).^[15]��The piece comprised a strip of vinyl almost one-hundred metres long, running throughout the entire exhibition in a circuit. On the white surface of this unrolled vinyl, the artist had reproduced footprints at regular intervals, evoking in the viewer a natural path through the park; the path, however, led nowhere, ending at a tree trunk. Kanayama’s choice of vinyl instead of paper suggests an increasing interest in new materials from the chemical industry and emergent issues within contemporary consumer society; the work chimes with Manzoni’s later 7.2-km��Line��in both its elongated forms and technological engagement: the interest in mechanical seriality in��Footprints��is further confirmed by the footprints themselves, reproduced using a repetitive stencil technique.^[16]

The most forceful collision of these twinned American and Japanese concerns with visual and conceptual continuity took place in September 1962, when—in the wake of Rauschenberg, Cage, and Gutai’s research, as well as Allan Kaprow’s New York ‘Happenings’^[17]—Eastern and Western avant-gardes came together as part of the first Fluxus Festival in Wiesbaden, Germany.^[18]��Here, the visual and fantastical quality of continuous rolls was again invoked, this time by the Korean artist Nam June Paik, who created a performance with the revealing title��Zen for Head. In a total exchange of different artistic disciplines that was typical of Fluxus, Paik accompanied La Monte Young’s����by marking a four-metre-long line on a strip of paper using only his own head covered in ink and tomato juice. Rather than colouring the paper roll with instruments or machines—objects that were to characterise Paik’s later expressive and conceptual work in the form of the monitor—the final dynamic, informal line evolved from the interaction of the body with its continuous material support.

These international concerns, to come full circle, combined with Manzoni’s ongoing��Lines��to embed linearity and continuity in European practice of the late 50s, where—unlike Paik—the concept of ‘line’ was to increasingly come under sway of the machine. The roll embodied a metaphor of uncontrolled need and a collectively shared experience of painting. In the first��Industrial Painting��exhibition at Turin’s Galleria Notizie in May 1958, Italian artist Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio exhibited��,��now housed at Tate Modern, London. Gallizio had set up a makeshift studio in the small town of Alba, Piedmont, where he lived and worked as a pharmacist, chemist, and herbalist. Here, he converted a cellar into a space for the production of rolls of industrial painting, including a rudimentary, hand-driven machine that used brushes to distribute colour onto rolls of canvas. In actual fact, the system not only used paint but resins, solvents, and chemical mixtures that Gallizio had invented and experimented with alongside Asger Jorn, Constant, Guy Debord, and other friends involved in the International Situationist movement, which was officially started in July 1957.^[19]��Gallizio’s aim in this work was to use industrial techniques to create a surplus of paint, simultaneously overturning the laws of the market and liberating artists from the limitations of inspiration and physical dimension; this idea was not unrelated to the concept of��potlatch, a key theory in the Lettrist International, a co-founding group of the SI.^[20]��Once it had undergone the mechanical process, the roll was left in the open air where it was contaminated with atmospheric agents.^[21]��Sold by the metre at an extremely low price, the long canvas could be cut to suit the client’s needs, its inspiration emerging from a coincidental combination of technical and natural elements.

Such mechanical concerns were not Gallizio’s alone. In the third edition of �ٳ����Situationist International Bulletin��(December 1959), Gallizio republished a text that had already been presented one month earlier in��Notizie-Arti Figurative.^[22]��The article began with a quotation from the French journal,������ֳ��������,��dated 8 October 1959, which reviewed a performance by the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely in the square of the Musée d’Art Moderne, the day before the opening of first Paris Biennale. The work-machine protagonist of Tinguely’s performance was named����é�ٲ�-�Ѳ��پ��� n.17, and is described as follows in the journal:

Seen from close up, it is made of a series of interwoven pulleys driven by a small,
two-stroke engine. It unrolls a long roll of paper that is automatically covered with
splashes by convulsively moving ink rollers. A knife cuts the finished product into
pieces, with a chaotic, circular and sputtering movement.^[23]

Again in 1959, on 12 November,����é�ٲ�-�Ѳ��پ��� n. 17��was the protagonist of a now-legendary performance at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, an event originally intended as a conference. Here, the machine was modified so it could be driven via pedals by two racers, who took it in turns to see who was able to unroll the one-and-a-half-kilometre-long roll of paper first. Before cascading into the room, the band of paper was automatically painted by an ink-roller.^[24]��The audience, sitting in the stalls, was suddenly overcome by a flow of paper that was thrown at high speed from the machine driven by the first cyclist.^[25]

Machine interventions in the continuous page are common features of Rauschenberg’s��Automobile Tire Print, Kanayama’s��Footprints, Gallizio’s��Industrial Paintings, and��.��Yet, it is important not to see these, nor Manzoni’s��Lines—even his 1960��Line of 7.200 Meters, made on the Herning print machine—as a blind triumph of technology. As Fontana implied in his radio eulogy to Manzoni with which I began, the scope of �ٳ����Lines��were both their material simplicity��and��their conceptual complexity, characterised by a mesh of intertwined concerns, especially philosophical and social dimensions. Consider the ultimate intended destination of Manzoni’s 7.2-km��Line, which he had intended not to openly parade for its infinite capacity but instead to enclose in zinc and then bury, alongside another monumental examples, in the most important cities in the world; the total sum of the lengths of the individual��Lines��when unrolled would equal the circumference of the earth.^[26]��Tinguely and Paik co-opted the scroll for performative actions—collective and collaborative—that were governed to some degree by chance and which culminated in paintings of intriguing continuous coincidence. Gallizio’s��Industrial Painting, too, and Rauschenberg’s��Automobile Tire Print, likewise arose from an extraordinary time-based action, carried out in collaboration. For Manzoni, however, neither the making of �ٳ����Line��nor the shared performance of its creation was the ultimate objective: it was the reflective properties of �ٳ����Line��in itself that was central.^[27]��The lined roll was closed and hidden, the artwork formed through a combination of the artist’s action (in the past) and the viewer’s faith (in the present). Capitalising on this playful paradox, in 1960 Manzoni created various wooden tubes containing��Infinite Lines: as long as they remained closed, the roll maintained the idea of the infinite but once it was opened, the infinite line disappeared.^[28]

This is the greatest philosophical contribution of Manzoni’s��Lines. They comprise universal concepts that open up infinite possibilities of thought, uniting artist and viewer in endless imagination. Manzoni did not see these rolled works as portrayals, but rather as an unlimited, time-based surface, where the idea of ‘infinite possibilities’ could be concretised. As he wrote in his 1960 text,��Libera dimensione��[Free Dimension]:

Why not empty, instead, this recipient? Why not liberate the surface?
Why not attempt to discover the limitless significance of total space?
Of pure and absolute light? … The infinitability is rigorously
monochrome, or better still of no colour … Artistic criticism which
makes use of concepts like composition and form has no value: form,
colour and dimensions have no sense in total space … All such
problems like composition of form, form in space and spatial
profundity are extraneous to us; a line can only be traced without
limits of length into infinity and beyond any problem of composition
or dimension. Dimension does not exist in total space … This indefinite
surface, uniquely alive, even if in the material contingency the work
cannot be infinite, is, however, infinitable, infinitely repeatable, without a
solution of continuity. And that is even more apparent in the ‘lines’, for in
these there no longer exists the possible ambiguity of the ‘painting’. The line
develops only in length and extends towards infinity. The only dimension is
time. And it hardly needs to be said that a ‘line’ is not a horizon or a symbol and
it has value not as something beautiful but in the degree to which it exists.^[29]

��is an art historian, art critic and curator, focusing on modern and contemporary art. He is the director of MuDA Museum in Albissola, Italy, which includes the Asger Jorn House Museum. He is also Lecturer in Communication of Cultural Heritage at the University of Genoa, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 2011. Currently his research focuses on the international connections of the 1950s and 60s Italian avantgardes, with particular regard to the use of clay and ceramics in sculpture and architecture. He is the author of books, exhibitions, and essays on topics such as the diffusion of Italian sculpture in America between the nineteenth and the twentieth century, Futurism, and artists such as Arturo Martini, Enrico Baj, Lucio Fontana, Asger Jorn, Wifredo Lam, Leoncillo, and Piero Manzoni, among others. He has held Research Fellowships at the Henry Moore Foundation, the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, and the INHA in Paris.