Giovanni Muro (l) - Benedetto del Tronto ; August 1969

Giovanni Muro (1948-2009), was an Italian expressionist artist, operating on the fringes of the last glimmers of the Povera Arte and Minimalist movements . Early Autumn 1982 and Giovanni was in a small bar in Venice, down near Zattere , after work one evening. As had become quite a regular fixture in his life in recent months he was in the company of Ferruccio Bortoluzzi , who had arrived a little late, accompanied by a large , heavily bearded , close eye-browed, well manicured man , probably some ten years older than Giovanni , introduced by the name of Andrea Odini. Although it was still warm Ferruccio was , as ever, dressed as if it was January, continuing to wear his beret and dark wool coat even after they’d all sat down at a table in the comfortable confines of the back room of the bar. It transpired that Odini was an important collector of contemporary Italian art and a recently established gallerist , who owned a significant number of Bortoluzzi’s minimalist assemblages. Indeed he had a newly acquired work by Bortoluzzi with him, imperfectly wrapped in the whitest of paper, out of which protruded, at an angle, a metal flange, making the whole resemble a maquette for a homage to Casper David Friedrich’s painting , Sea of Ice. Maybe that’s why Ferruccio is feeling the cold tonight thought Giovanni , hiding the smallest of smiles behind the glass of wine that he was sipping. However it soon became apparent that Giovanni could not afford to distract and distance himself with unspoken apercus , for Odini was urgent, brusque and direct. That said he also had a tendency , before speaking, of seemingly chewing on his thoughts , the silent facial movement of lips and beard reflecting more deeply set muscular ruminations , before throwing out words suddenly , emphatically and in a rush, the whole process being like a superstitious and anxious gambler warming the die in his hands before casting them down onto the table, believing that only a double six would do. “So, Mr Muro; why did you chose to be such an artist?” In one sense the answer to this challenging but reasonable question (albeit that the use by Odini of the word “such” invited a taxonomic analysis that Giovanni wished to keep at a distance), lay in a battered shoe box that Giovanni's sister would find under his bed after his death. In another you had to go back to the Summer of 1969, when Giovanni, aged 21, had just returned to stay with his parents in Venice , having finished the second year of his University course . His hair, like most young men in his situation at that time had been allowed to grow out over the previous months and was now long and unkempt, but rather than having the ubiquitous deep student tan ,he was almost alarmingly pallid. It soon became apparent that a prolonged stay with his parents , enduring what he perceived to be their reactionary , bourgeoise, politics ,would end in painful conflict , and so he and a couple of friends set off in a car to travel down the coast of the Marche until they found somewhere to stop. That place proved to be the seaside town of Benedetto del Tronto and, more precisely, the beach bar called Chalet il Penguino , where they lazed in the sun, watched the many bikini clad women who crossed the sands to get drinks and ices and guessed how long it would be before yet another punter would put Mario Tessuto’s “Lisa dagli occhi blu” on the jukebox rather than the Stones or Zagar and Evans. What was wholly unknown to Giovanni at that moment was that exactly 10 years previously, in August 1959, one of his favourite contemporary artists, Pier Paolo Pasolini, poet, novelist, cineaste and provocateur, had also visited the beach of San Benedetto del Tronto, before travelling on to Venice and Trieste to complete his photo journalistic journey along Italy’s coastline, serialised that Summer in the July to September editions of the popular monthly magazine “Successo “. Pasolini saw a beach and a town that was essentially the same as Giovanni found, but in a raw, newly formed state, without any naturalising patina of wear and tear. This is what he wrote: “ San Benedetto....equipped with all the latest, terrace bars on the beach, jukeboxes and, above all, beautiful women. Behind, a bustling town, all small villas and pensioni and hotels, with gardens and bazaars. But all this is still as though added, recently acquired. What’s lacking in the bourgeois and working class crowd gathered here, is an historical intelligence. It’s a province , no longer a depressed area. And one can love anything except the provinces...” “The long road of Sand” by Pier Paolo Pasolini; published by Contrasto Had Giovanni been aware of Pasolini’s sentiment then maybe his easeful immersion into a sun and beach- centred way of life , until then unfamiliar to him, would have been less immediate and complete. He might also have wondered how in a space of a mere decade Pasolini had gone from being a jobbing journalist and aspiring poet/ novelist to , in the August of 1969, being on a stage in the cinecitta complex in Rome directing the great Maria Callas in his film “Medea”and why there was no perceptible trace of his presence on the sands that they had in some sense shared. Had he also known , Giovanni might also have pondered on the circumstances that had resulted in Pasolini’s murdered body being found on a desolate beach some six years later across the country , near Ostia... Away from the beach Benedetto del Tronto was hosting its 8th Biennale of art , under the title “Al di la della pittura”. Contentiously the 3 organisers for this edition , led by Luciano Marucci and supported by Gillo Dorfles and Filberto Menna, had chosen to have a non pictorial, multi- media agenda , including randomised , electronic music that was unlikely to find its way onto any bar jukebox, an international survey of “multiples” and an exhibition by a limited number of Italian artists in a large higher education school set back from the beach (now known as Istituto Alberghiero Buscemi) that the publicity said excluded both paintings and free-standing sculptures and where each exhibitor had been given their own room . One hot but windy afternoon in early August, having been in Benedetto for something over a week and by now quite bronzed, Giovanni , who had his camera with him , loaded with a roll of black and white film, decided to get away from the sand being blown across the beach and wander up into town to see what was happening, while the others took part in an improvised game of volley-ball in front of the bar. Arriving at the Biennale, Giovanni was grateful to be out of the sun and wind for a while, although after an hour or so he was disappointed . Overall, save for a number of Gianni Colombo's “Spazio Elastico” works and conceptual lamps in the "multiples" exhibition, that played with grids and the interaction of minimalist variations and repeated forms, little that Giovanni had seen had really engaged him, maybe because the exhibition spaces felt second-hand and provisional to him or maybe because what was on show was just too eclectic and ambiguous/ inscrutable . Nevertheless Giovanni had entertained himself by photographing some shadow effects caused by the light that burst into the unprepossessing rooms through the school-room windows, which was pleasing. But then, toward the end of the mixed artist show , Giovanni came across a work by the Greek born artist Jannis Kounellis, who, knowing how to conjure a sensation out of the most marginal of circumstances , had chosen to present a work that was comprised of the doorway to the room that had been reserved for him, blocked up with large boulders , with a photograph attached to the wall on one side showing the empty and now unreachable space beyond. It is rarely the case that a work of the imagination instantly detaches itself from its creator and in his or her own lifetime takes on an independent force and energy that the maker can barely account for; but Kounellis' work, like some primal henge or mausoleum ,seemed to Giovanni to achieve exactly that, a judgment that has been largely supported by the subsequent passage of time. Giovanni liked the way the piece conflated the human scale ,functionality ,simplicity and framing of the doorway (as if a sort of pre-cultural Vitruvian man), with the ironising weirdness of Kournellis’ use of rough boulders in an internal space. He loved the way that it triggered a sort of “kinesis” , whereby the nondescript empty school room beyond the blocked door was endowed in his mind with the charged ambience of a large, sacred, silent vessel or reserved space, like the sanctuary behind the Pluteus of an early Christian Church or the empty burial chamber of a robbed out Etruscan tomb. And beyond all that he loved the way the stones retained their cool mass to his surreptitious touch (there was a small sign near the floor asking people not to do so , but no one in attendance to actually enforce the edict), and their rich ,limestone odour ,while dust from their hard surfaces filtered the light , making the air visible. After a while Giovanni stood back and took a standard photograph of the work before using up the rest of his film taking a series of close up shots of the boulders and stones. Then he had sat on the floor and just watched and waited. This moment of epiphany or of finding his “sbocco” was to be almost immediately re-enforced through Giovanni coming across and immersing himself in Carla Lonzi’s significant book “Autoritratto”, that was to be completed and published that year and sought to break down the hegemonic privilege of the critic and meld her voice and values with those of the artists whose conversations she had tape-recorded, including Jannis Kounellis. Giovanni put down his drink ; “Because there was for me no choice” he replied, with a look that Trollope had once described as being “a rather fierce grin” , all the time trying to match Odini's unblinking stare. ”Would you like to see some of my work?” Curiously little else by Kounellis in his long career had subsequently acted on Muro in the way that this work of 1969 had done . For him it was , or was to become, like Burri’s “Sacco Rosso” works from the 1950’s , a moment and an object where the apparent generosity and pleasure of creation was exactly balanced by the absolute generosity and pleasure of participation/ observation. It is said that at the end of the 1969 exhibition Kounellis’ stones were carted away and disposed of as the school needed its room back , but something remained .Indeed, in future years there were to be many further re-enactments of this work, collaboratively created in galleries , large and small , the world over, by more or less gifted curators, using locally sourced stone and varying laying techniques ,and all referencing in their title their lineage to the original work of 1969 (although it seems that the idea of the photograph revealing an image of the space beyond was abandoned along the way). On this board you will find pictures of some of the items in the shoe box of memorabilia relating to this time that Giovanni’s sister had found after his death , including postcards from Benedetto del Tronto that Giovanni had bought back with him, some of his photographs from that day ( that would later form one of the works of his that Odini would exhibit in his first public show some months after the meeting in the bar, displayed in a 3x3 grid pattern, echoing the forms that Giovanni had seen Gianni Colombo exploring some 12 years previously and subsequently progressing in the 1970's), and a small set of cuttings that made up a partial pictorial history of Kounellis’ work in its various iterations in the years after 1969 , that Giovanni seems to have put together and that his sister chose to continue to add to in homage to her brother after his death. This board is dedicated ,with respect and gratitude, to the memory of Jannis Kournellis, 23.03.1936-16.02.2017