Giovanni Muro (q) - November ,1983; “The narrow road to the interior”.

Giovanni Muro (1948-2009), was an Italian abstract expressionist artist, operating on the fringes of the last glimmers of the Povera Arte and Minimalist movements. In April 1983 Giovanni’s show at Andrea Odini’s new gallery had passed off with more praise than actual sales , but nevertheless was felt by him to have been an important landmark. Meanwhile , despite his weak condition during the early months of 1983 (see Giovanni Muro (n)), Stefano , Giovanni’s father , was to survive late into that Autumn, with occasional accesses of energy and resolve enabling him to be a bit more mobile , while also giving his family something to attach their hopes to. Indeed ,occasionally (and much to the consternation of Antonia, his wife), Stefano would even take himself off for an hour or so, usually to a local cafe or bar, but sometimes further afield, before returning, exhausted and somewhat closed-in on himself. Then, on Friday ,18th November, following a light lunch with Antonia (and despite the early and unseasonal sleety rain that was steadily falling), Stefano , dressed in a brown suit , shirt and a tie, the suit and the collar of the shirt now several sizes too large for his reduced weight, had abruptly put on his coat and hat and seen himself out of the apartment . It was to be some two hours later that Stefano was to be found unconscious at Ca Pesaro, on the second floor , at the foot of the narrow staircase descending from the Oriental Museum located on the floor above. Despite a lack of any eye-witnesses , it seems that Stefano fell while descending the staircase; there had been no cry or shout from Stefano, but the noise of his tumble had alerted the attendants , who had quickly gathered around his now prone and crumpled body lying on the floor, a small amount of bright red blood matting his hair where it touched the marble. With a befitting solemnity and resolution ,a line of samurai , assembled in a case immediately next to where Stefano now lay, seemed to be standing guard , as if over their fallen lord. Stefano had been taken quickly by an ambulance boat to the hospital of Santa Giovanni e Paolo, but he was never to regain consciousness and died some ten days later on 28th November ,and the family and a few friends buried him the following Tuesday. While he had lain in the hospital ward , Antonia, Lucia (her daughter), and Giovanni had sat together for long periods in semi-vigil beside his bed, their conversation stilted and subdued. Apart from the usual round of family subjects and the question of Stefano’s prospects for recovery, the issue that they returned to repeatedly was what Stefano had been doing in that gallery that day, as they had had no sense of him having ever shown any interest in Chinese or Japanese history or cultural artefacts prior to that moment. With that in mind Giovanni visited Ca Pesaro early the following week and was able to meet the attendant who had been on duty on the 3rd floor the previous Friday afternoon. She had tried to help with Giovanni’s enquiries, but while she could remember Stefano having been there ( as there had been few other visitors to the gallery that day , probably due to the bad weather, and because he had been permitted to come up in the restricted access lift due to his frailty), apart from recalling that he had paused for a good while in front of an elaborate Japanese sedan chair or palanquin, dating to c.1790, that had once been for the use of a noblewoman , standing on show in the middle of the room , she had not otherwise been able to assist Giovanni: “E in mistero profound..non?”, she had concluded , looking into his eyes and at the same time shrugging in a manner that seemed to be indicating that the conversation was to end if not already at an end. “Had he met or been with anyone?” Giovanni had asked in response , knowing that he was stepping over a line of social decorum by doing so. The assistant had replied that as far as she had been able to observe ,given her other responsibilities, he had not, mentioning that she should now be on her break. “Of course, of course. Thank you for your time”. They separated, with Giovanni crossing the room to also admire the sedan chair, as if by so doing he might somehow connect with his father’s intentions of just a few days before . But whether it was because of the strain that he was under or an ignorance of this style of artistic tradition and craftsmanship ( and , maybe, in all likelihood a combination of both), while on another occasion he might have either contrasted the sedan’s both simultaneous affinity with and also “otherness” from proximate Venetian forms , such as an 18th century decorative felze, or maybe in his mind compared the effect of the Sedan’s Urushi lacquer work with that of the multi-coated paint layers used for gondolers, on this occasion Giovanni merely ended up with a feeling of his own ephemeralness ; and this feeling was compounded by a self-consciousness about being in this richly endowed but unknown room ,that was so close to home , and being wholly removed from his characteristic frames of reference . So much so , that the longer Giovanni gazed at the Sedan chair’s lacquered surface, the more it seemed to be a gigantic dark glass, held up by imaginary footmen; a mirror reflecting back to him one of his more immediate and questionable areas of ignorance ,founded , if he was honest with himself, upon a parochial disinterest. Giovanni took care while descending the stairs before returning to the hospital to update his sister and mother. And all might have settled down again thereafter; the overpowering sense of anxiety and of guilt-inducing “mystery” surrounding the circumstances of Stefano’s death receding as each member of the Muro family chose instead to remember Stefano while he was alive , and with Giovanni promising to himself that he would “make time before too long” to gain a better appreciation of Japanese art and culture. But one day , while sorting out the bottom of a cupboard at his parents’ apartment, Giovanni came across a large Manila envelope , sent by airmail to Stefano many years previously to an address in Venice that Giovanni did not recognise and bearing a block of franked Japanese stamps . Inside was a small pamphlet of Haikus, set out in parallel text , Japanese/English, with a book mark placed between the leaves and inscribed in an elegant and unfamiliar hand : ”To my only Stefano ; from your trusted and beloved H. Sendai, 1939”. The bookmarked poem , in Japanese and also transcribed from the English rendition on the right hand page , read: “いざさらば雪見にころぶ所迄 iza saraba / yukimi ni korobu / tokoromade” “ Now then, let's go out / to enjoyb the snow... until / I slip and fall! “ Matsuo Basho, 1688. Having given pause to consider the matter, Giovanni chose not to tell his mother of this find. Would it have been better if he had? Would it have been better if Giovanni had not found the volume, an object that he grew to treasure over the following years, learning most of the short poems that it contained by heart? And either way, should we be grateful that in his ignorance Giovanni never made the connection that not only did the above great Japanese poet ,Matsuo Basho , also die , like Stefano, on the 28th November (having once visited Sendai on one of his quest-like journeys that he had made toward the end of his life ) , but so too had the great Venetian architect and stylist Carlo Scarpa . Furthermore , in the case of Scarpa ,who had died only five years previously , on 28th November 1978, what might Giovanni have thought if he had known that Scarpa’s death was also due to his having fallen down some stairs in mysterious circumstances some ten days beforehand , but this time in Sendai , while on his second visit to Japan (a visit that some to this day speculatively link to an interest of Scarpa in following in Basho’s footsteps by retracing one of his journeys )? Did the date , location and manner of the fall , combined with the book of poems , somehow link Stefano to Scarpa or was the date and location of the fall an oblique link back to Basho and to “G”? Or was it all of no significance whatsoever , not even worthy of being considered to be coincidental? In any event , instead of having to address any such conundrums, Giovanni moved on , continuing in ignorance of such an echo-chamber of enquiry and supposition, albeit one relating to both his father’s death and also, possibly, his younger life’s formative years, and instead completing his resolutely Venetian inspired polyptych : “Christ is dead - for S.A.G. (after Titian) “ in early 1984. A copy of each of Giovanni’s Panels is set out below, along with some images of the room on the third floor at the Museo d’Arte Orientale Ca’Pesaro that Stefano had last visited and also the staircase where he fell . These boards are followed by a series of illustrations from the work of Carlo Scarpa that bear the mark of his admiration of what he described as the “essentiality” of Japanese Design and “its extreme good taste” . However , as the images below show, in Scarpa’s case his rather generalised application of elements of an ahistorical Japanese architectural aesthetic (such as the choice and juxtaposition of materials , his sense of proportion ,the fall of light and shadow and a subtle breaking down of the ideas of “inside” and “outside” ),was combined with an acute clarity about the accompanying , anchoring detail ,and it was this obsessive attention to such specifics that ultimately elevated this element of his “style” beyond the crudeness of pastiche. In any event this honouring by Scarpa of a Japanese-inspired aesthetic was only one of a number of influences upon what came to be Scarpa’s “style”, and one that to a great extent was the product of a mediation via the powerful precursive influence of Frank Lloyd Wright ( and , to a lesser extent, the editorial biases of the “Japanese Design” magazine ,that we know that he subscribed to ), his first hand experience experience being restricted to a single earlier visit that he had made to Japan in 1969 , by which time this Japanese aesthetic element in his work had been long established ( see for example the stair , window grill and water features in his Olivetti showroom on the North colonnade of St Mark’s piazza of 1957/1958). On the subject of Scarpa’s fall in Sendai and the discourse concerning its suggested relationship with the journeys of Matsuo Basho, it may be most fruitful to see it as a sort of fictive metonym for Scarpa’s spirit of unended aesthetic quest , a feeling that was to a significant extent enfolded in his feeling for Japanese aesthetic principles and culture . For Scarpa , respect for traditional Japanese aesthetics was not about adhering to a geometric or style rule book , but rather involved a commitment to an open-ended quest , a quest for an evermore truthful realisation of that “essentiality” in each of his commissions , albeit within the constraints and responsibilities imposed by the site, the building’s purpose and it’s social context. Seen in this way each work by Scarpa was for him a step upon a journey into a personal interior and while we can share the resultant building it is much harder for us to accompany him on the “narrow road “ itself. Perhaps that is why the linking of the circumstances of Scarpa’s death to Basho is so resonant , for it lifts the circumstances of his end from the realm of bathetic mis-fortune by aligning it with a sense of that life-long quest for “essentiality”. Finally , a word on Frank Lloyd Wright and his own engagement with Japanese aesthetics. Ironically, Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous building that was actually commissioned and built in Japan , the second Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, was designed in the then increasingly fashionable “New Mayan” style, so when seeking to trace his use of Japanese tropes and aesthetics in his work it is not perhaps the best place to begin. Indeed to trace the roots and nature of Frank Lloyd Wright’s engagement with Japanese traditions of design culture and how he proceeded to establish a theoretical context for it that he could then apply in his own work, one needs to look outside of architectural forms and practice and follow instead the influence upon him of the American philosopher Ernest Fenollosa , an influence that would lead directly to Frank Lloyd Wright’s life long study of Japanese wood-block prints and his book “The Japanese Print, an interpretation” of 1912. An excellent note by Professor Kevin Nute on this subject , published on the Smithsonian website , is contained in the following link: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/frank-lloyd-wrights-japanese-education-180963617/ So, the final three series of images below illustrate , firstly, the Imperial hotel in Tokyo ,that Frank Lloyd Wright designed in 1919 ,secondly , his direct engagement with Japanese aesthetic and spatial values in some of his completed buildings and thirdly both architects use of abstracted square patterns ( in Scarpa’s case the then newly created Olivetti corporate logo in the showroom in Venice that Scarpa designed for the company in 1958 ), along with a photograph showing the entrance that Scarpa designed to a landmark retrospective exhibition relating to Frank Lloyd Wright staged at the Maxxi in Rome two years later , in 1960, showing a wall-mounted, abstract ,square-shaped linear design, an arrangement that in a way shows an aesthetic lineage between the younger and older architects beyond any “Japanese” influence. This board is dedicated to the memory of : Stefano Alighieri Muro - 06.05.1920- 28.11.1983 Carlo Scarpa - 02.06.1906-28.11.1978 Frank Lloyd Wright- 08.06.1867-09.04.1959