I Am (Garau)

Io sono (which translates to “I am”) is an artist's multiple by the Italian artist Salvatore Garau. 

As conceptual art, it consists of a certificate of authenticity which has affixed to it detailed diagrams and instructions for its proper display by its buyer. Two editions of the piece sold for $ 30,600 USD at auctions to significant media attention.

Manufactured between March 2020 and September 2020, during the Covid19 era, the pieces are an "empty space", with a certification papers signed by the artist sold at 18,000 $, and next for $32,000 for a paper certification with Garau signature, the price value for Sal Garau oil on canvas become, with the artistic coefficient more then $350.000.

Public presentation
The Invisibile Sculptures of Garau were first exhibited at the Piazza Scala of Milano, in front of Galleria di Piazza Scala (Gallerie d'Italia), whose museum collection contains his works. Salvatore Garau organised an elaborate photo shoot and a short film to ppromote the event. He was to write later in the year that the bodies had sold well.

Like Piero Manzoni, by making a purely transient work, that would deflate before the buyer’s eyes, Garau was parodying the traditional sculptural emphasis on permanence and mocking the traditional emphasis on the artist’s creative force. He was also wanted to launch a sign of closeness for the social distancing due to the Covid19 pandemic, but above all to launch a provocation against NFTs for environmental protection and energy consumption.

History 
In May 2020, during the end of the Covid19 pandemic, Salvatore Garau sealed a card attesting to the existence of an invisible sculpture. In the months when the museums were closed, he created in a square a rectangle of white tape outside, in front of the Art Museum in Piazza della Scala in Milan, which contains one of his paintings, 1.50 x 1.50 meters, to which he applied an identification tag, translated into four languages (Italian, French, English and German), with the title "Buddha in contemplation" along with the signature of the artist.

The artist price can be established in grams of pure gold, by direct exchange that did not involve the transfer of money, and by establishing a link between value and gold similar to that of the gold base. Later Garau carried out a second imaginary conceptual work, "Aphrodite che piange" by installing a white circle in front of the US Stock Exchange on Wall Street in New York City.

In Milan, in 2021, a private collector obtained the sample titled “I am” for $18,000, including auction fees, a new world auction record.

The first examples were provided in Milan by Italian futurist painters who let their paintings breathe deeply, leading them to expand to overcome the limit, so far crossed, of the frame, this artistic research is overcome by Umberto Boccioni , in his house in Porta Romana in Milan (district of the Prada Foundation) he was carrying on in sculpture. The fact is that in the early 1900s the perception of the physical world was completely transformed and artists absorbed these discoveries. There are countless examples in the history of art demonstrating that when the knowledge we have of the surrounding world changes, the way of representing it inevitably changes in turn. It was discovered that the space between bodies is crossed by invisible forces: electromagnetism, light, heat, all elements that the futurists introduced into their works. Garau finds the solution to the problem of understanding space and its representation of its relationship with the subject that occupies it, which has always been one of the crucial points of modern art. Since the time of the Historical Avant-gardes, the space of the painting became the field of experimentation.

Meaning of the work 
 Garau’s work aims to be a challenge to NFT’s digital artwork that causes heavy pollution and energy consumption, while preserving his ecological concept, which has always been present in his artwork;
 Garau’s work seeks to make people feel the closeness of loves, and the sentimental energy that can exist in thoughts in moments of social distancing in the world because of Covid19;
 the work paradoxically alludes to the cult of remains, which consider them sacred regardless of their actual nature;
 in an ironic sense, it alludes to the idea that an already established artist would find a market and the consent of a critic for any work he produces, beyond its specific quality;
 the operation of Garau at the same time the artistic value of this work by Piero Manzoni is delicately conceptual art, and therefore accessible to all without restrictions due to either the purchase cost, material possession or physical accessibility, nor due to technical reproducibility. It is therefore, according to Duchamp, a typical "anesthetic".

Related works

Fiato d’artista
The most famous related work is the Fiato d’artista (Artist’s Breath), involving red, blue or white balloons inflated by Piero Manzoni himself, closed with string and lead, with the name "Piero Manzoni" punched into it, then attached to a wooden base with a plaque on it using gesso. The pieces were made in 1960, and 11 examples are known to have survived, although all are now in an extreme state of decomposure. When exhibited now, the works inevitably assume the aura of a modern memento mori, featuring a rotting plastic membrane stuck to a polished wooden base, with a brass plaque commemorating the original act.

Influences 
Garau is known to have been heavily influenced by Marcel Duchamp and Yves Klein, who had released 1001 blue balloons on the opening night of his "Proposition: Monochrome" exhibition at Iris Clert’s gallery, 1957, but with a completely new, romantic and reflective approach and conceptual meaning, which once again involves the viewer in creating his works interactively as he did at the Venice Biennale with the interactive work "Tiepolo in becoming".

Salvatore Garau, as Marcel Duchamp said, considers that the true symbolic value of a work lies in the relationship with the body of the artist (it is the artist sanctified by the market), whose manifestations therefore take on, in the dimension of the critic. Here is a paradox, a value equivalent to that of the remains: the Imprints and the signatures, the Fiato d'artista, the Artist feces by Piero Manzoni are just as many examples.

Andy Warhol would later use balloons with nothing inside, in a similar way, but filled with helium rather than suspended in a stream of compressed air. Indeed, his first balloon, made in 1965, corresponded to an unfulfilled project described by Manzoni in a letter as ‘a cluster of pneumatic cylinders, elongated in shape, like steel, which would vibrate in the blowing of the wind.’ Damien Hirst has used ping pong balls suspended in compressed air, but within the context of floating above a bed of sharp knives or a skeleton.

His most lasting influence, however, was on Arte Povera, a group of Italian artists, including Alighiero Boetti, who brought everyday materials into their work in a movement analogous to contemporary radical politics. (see Protests of 1968) 
But it is also a tribute to Garau's friend, Michelangelo Pistoletto, with whom he made the exhibition "Il Clandestino", who created the installation "We are fragments of the large mirror".

Related pages
 Comedian (artwork)
 Fountain (Duchamp)
International Exhibition of Nothing
In front of you (Garau)

Notes

Other websites 
 Artista vende una obra invisible por US$ 18.300
 Le sculture invisibili di Salvatore Garau: metafore del presente 22 Februaro 2021

Sculptures
Conceptual art