Between 1959 and 1961, Piero Manzoni realized his Infinite Line.  Some sections of the Infinite Line were realized by applying a paintbrush to a rotating roll of paper. Since one of his greatest problems was finding a way to produce an uninterrupted line of a great length, he used a newspaper printer and other mechanical devices to achieve his goal; however, when the roll of paper was exhausted, he had to lift his brush and start again with another roll. His long-term project aimed to produce a line as long as the Prime Meridian of the world, the Greenwich Mean Time as a way to include both concepts of time and space in this work.

Since Manzoni invested a lot of thinking toward finding a way to produce his line, I am wondering why he did not consider making it with a sewing machine. The process of tracing his infinite line would have been certainly much simpler than with a newspaper printer and a paintbrush.

Although the needle of the sewing machine goes up and down, the machine itself remains immobile; the line is produced by pushing paper or canvas under the needle. If Manzoni had used a sewing machine, it would have linked more than one support, solving many of his problems at once, therefore allowing him to make a line as long as he liked. Not only that, but as I stated in my article in The Brooklyn Rail  “Why didn’t Lucio Fontana use my sewing machine?” the sewing machine makes it possible to produce a real three-dimensional line with a top and a bottom that may be moved through space.