Establishing a ‘missed link’ between the work of Piero Manzoni and Hélio Oiticica and their respective cultural contexts, this book sheds new light on overlooked aspects of these two artists’ practices, particularly focusing on the shift from painting to performance in the long 1960s.

Lara Demori envisions a transnational juxtaposition, a conceptual dialogue that discloses overlooked resonances between the work and the modus operandi of both artists, repositioning claims of national exceptionalism within a web of constellated practices. This book proposes their oeuvre as heterogeneous critical models to unpack categories of thought used to analyse the postwar decades: Tabula Rasa, Anti-Art, Open Work, and (self-)Marginalisation and Freedom. These, in turn, are charged with specific histories and offer new paradigms for the formal and social inventions perpetuated by the art of Manzoni, Oiticica, and fellow artists in the context of the détournements that crossed the 1960s on a global scale.

This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, modernism and post-modernism, Italian studies, and Brazilian studies.