Giovanni Muro (d)- 1978 - dark days and new influences

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. 1978 witnessed some of the most difficult political times in Italy since the end the Second World War, including the kidnap and murder of Aldo Moro in Rome by the Red Brigade in the early Spring. Nevertheless , attempts were still made to maintain a sense of civil normality, including proceeding with the innovation of holding a cycling time trial event in Venice on Sunday 21.05.’78 as part of that year’s Giro Italia , the course proceeding along Zaterre using ramps over the bridges, before crossing the grand canal on a pontoon in order to finish in front of St Marks, a televised spectacle that Giovanni and his partner,Giulia Rossi, chose to ignore, while resenting the disruption that it caused. Similarly, the Art Biennale duly opened on 02.07.’78, with the theme “From nature to art; from art to nature” , which despite the nationalistic elitism that he associated with the event (including as played out in the chaos of the previous year’s “ Biennale of Dissent”) , appealed to Giovanni’s growing concern with art’s potential for intervening with environmental issues. That ,and the fact that in a concession to the political and cultural times ,it had been resolved by the organisers that there would be no prizes that year, was enough to persuade Giovanni and Giulia that they should go. So on a hot day in late July, having met at a small cafe behind la Fenice, in its pre- arson glory, Giovanni and Giulia crossed Mauro Staccioli’s sculptural “barrier" to the entrance to the Biennale Park, and made their way first to see Alberto Moretti’s work in the Italian pavilion . In a calculated response to the times, albeit one that now appears stolid and anachronistic, Moretti had presented a politicised and dryly earnest show, featuring flag installations and conceptually framed by a long quotation from chairman Mao, called : Ideologia come Techne; l’arista al servizio del Popolo . Giulia later recorded that at that stage Giovanni was convinced that they had made a mistake in coming and had suggested returning along the breakwater . However , after a rather intense discussion , they elected to press on and explore what else the Bienalle had to offer. An innovation of the 1978 Biennale was a small, discrete exhibition of photographic work, curated by Luigi Carluccio, with it’s own catalogue and it was this show within a show that they next visited . It was an eclectic review and one of the exhibitors chosen by Carluccio was Luigi Ghirri , who was represented by a number of coloured, stripped-back images of walls and gardens Ghirri was familiar to Giovanni , for when he was in Milan the publishing house of Geiger had issued a limited edition work by the painter Franco Guerzoni called Affreschi , that had included supporting photographs by Ghirri, Guerzoni’s slightly older , close associate from Modena . Those photographs of broken buildings and crumbling plaster had made an immediate impression upon Giovanni and he had always been bemused that the book did not credit Ghirri as a co-author ( Giovanni rationalised this as being “Art publishing’s” continued distrust of the democratising force of the camera). In contrast , the photographs that Carluccio had selected were in colour and had a sense of the infinite formal potential of the everyday, staying the hand of time but not of progress. These images ,along with a sequence of photographs by Massimo Nannucci from 5 years earlier called Mimetizzazione,thrilled Muro to an extent that Giulia found mildly mystifying, but she was pleased that the day was back on track , as there had been some exhibits that she had particularly wanted to see, including the work of Joan Hills and her partner, Mark Boyle in the British pavilion and a special exhibition curated by the Austrian/Italian Poesie Concrete artist, Mirella Bentivoglio, called “Materialazzione del linguaggio- La Donna tra parola e installazioni” ( “Materialiation of the woman’s language- between word and image”). Accordingly, they crossed the garden and reached the British pavilion, where Mark Boyle and Jill Hills (“the Boyle Family”) had a presentation that included works from both their super-realist , site- specific series of sculptures ,including from the Red Wall series , that Muro said reminded him of Nino Migliori’s “Muri” series , dating back some 30 years or more to the 1950’s and which to his mind very much expressed the idea of “great abstraction, great realism”( a quotation from Kandinsky) that was a Lode Star for the whole of the Biennale . However the Boyle Family also had on show a large photo- composite collage made up of vastly magnified electron microscope images of follicles and it was these that Giulia found most stimulating. What Giulia found hard to take though was the way the the pavilion was expressly described as being Mark Boyle’s work and his alone. Giulia recognised his drive, vision and creativity but could not comprehend why the contribution of Jill Hills was not more prominently acknowledged. Following the Boyle pavilion Giulia and Giovanni headed over to the Bentivoglio curated selection of works. Sadly, from Giulia’s point of view, they did not stay long but her eye was caught by a small assembly of photographic and textile works by the Sardinian artist Maria Lai. Finally, as they turned for home Giulia and Giovanni crossed over the Grand Canal at Academia and visited an exhibition at the Magazzini del Salle Zattere featuring feminist artists from Naples and Varese. This time it was Muro who was underwhelmed, while Rossi was enthused, specifically by the textile works by Milli Gandini and Mariuccia Secol from the Varese group and their contributions to the “ Immagine” display. For both Giovanni and Giulia, as they looked back over the following days ,these works , in their different ways , would come to possess them. Specifically , with Giulia you can trace the confluence of the experience of her seeing the fabric works of Maria Lai, Gandini and Secol ,so close in time to experiencing the artistic and scientific practices implicit in the electron microscope collage of the Boyle Family , her later advocacy of fabric-based art strategies ( both reaching back to both “Opus Angliorum” embroidery and also to early textile works of individual strength and integrity such as Prudence Punderson’s “First, Second and Last Scenes of Mortality” of 1783 and of the formal and tonal discipline of , say, early 19th century German samplers ( that seemed to anticipate later design innovations of the Bauhaus movement), while also passionately advocating the validly of contemporary fabric-based artists such as Heidi Bucher, Magdelana Abakanowicz ,Jagoda Buic and Olga de Amarel). It was this profound engagement with fabric techniques and aesthetics over time and its role as a medium for female expression that would in turn give rise to the theoretical pre-occupations of her hugely influential paper “Filament e fibre” , that she would publish in mid 1981 , an epiphany that she would later acknowledge when her selected essays were published , in a slightly amended form, in 2002. Similarly, in his own way, Giovanni ,who was increasingly concerned with colour photography’s potential as a democratising and radicalising art form , would be directly affected by what he saw at the Biennale, both in a growing contempt for the hectoring intellectualising of artists such as a Moretti ( and in later years Muro would take an acid pleasure in Moretti’s shift to largely centrist banality, as he saw it) and also as a method for establishing what Pier Giovanni Castagnoli would subsequently describe in the context of Guerzoni’s late works as : “...a restitution of memory that produces and valorises the present , and the exercise of [art] as an excavation and revelation of the active body of the surface in its boundless generative faculty ”, albeit that in Giovanni’s polemical and politicised frame of mind the “surface” should be something in the world that had either been shaped and informed by humans or otherwise reflected back a truth about the conditions of their existence. In pursuing this it was to be Nannucci’s and certain of Ghirri’s photographs and the Boyle Family’s site specific works , with their complete conviction and asserted status as a typographically exact facsimile of the contingent earth (rather than a conflated, mediated or distorted “artistic response”) , along with the oblique reference point of Nino Migliori’s “Muri” prints, that would most stimulate Giovanni and directly lead to his break through photographic series of late ‘78 and ‘early ‘79 that would become known as: “Il Choido di ferro e la storia Persa”. For Muro , an aesthetic commitment to the abstracted real was to be the route whereby he could challenge not only the quotidian balm , as he saw it , of photo-journalism ( a “balm” to the viewer even where the subject matter was as brutal and direct as the subject matter of the fearless Letizia Battaglia ) , but also the latent neo- romantic nationalism of fellow contemporary photographers like Gianni Gardin , whose tropes of picturesque fields , elegant poor and charming waifs, Muro saw as having an affinity with “ the bloating saccharine that capitalism hid in mass- marketed processed food and drink ” . In recognition that the ‘78 Art Biennale would be a moment of transition and development for both Giulia and Giovanni , this board documents some of the experiences that they had that day in the Summer of 1978.