Giovanni Muro (h(i)) - the atrocity exhibition ;1980-part 1; the preparatory materials

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 . Late Winter of ‘79-‘80 saw Muro in a somewhat embattled state of mind for a number of reasons: the job at the University , while undemanding and paid the rent, was a cul de sac ; due to Giulia’s work pressures he was seeing less of her than he’d have wished and all the while their co-habitation was causing endless tension with his parents (although it was also true that his younger sister , who he was very attached to, showed no concern on that score at all).But, above all these factors , his career as a photographic artist seemed to be faltering and he knew in his heart that the “Dressing the altar” series ( see Giovanni Muro (f)), had lacked sufficient ambition and focus to maintain such momentum that he had. What gnawed at him was the question as to whether this was something that just had to be worked through or was it an indication of a more fundamental failing on his part? Despite that recent set-back he remained convinced that colour photography was a powerful medium for combining a “ready made”/ “art as appropriation” theoretical approach with a minimalist aesthetic and a politicised point of view. Muro was disdainful of the soft, saturated colour abstractions of Franco Fontana ( eg his Lucania series ) and Lia Rondelli ( such as Reflessi of 1977 with flags and laundry reflected elegantly in water , or, indeed his earlier series of studio- based studies called Sequenza dell’ ombré) while he also objected to the agrarian and nation- mythologising prettiness of , say, Piero Masera, but he still admired the urban minimalism of both Nino Migliori’s “Muri “ series of photographs and also Massimo Nannucci’s Mimetizzazione series of 1973 , while Mark Boyle’s/ the Boyle family’s work continued to offer him a sense of direction and ambition. Giovanni was also a strong supporter ,perhaps surprisingly, of the assertive, inventive audacity of some of Luigi Ontani’s photographic montages from the early 1970’s , especially those where he adopted themes and forms from earlier artworks (albeit he was equally disdainful of the near- obsessive narcissism , as he viewed it, of Ontani’s recurrent use of his own body as the subject of his works). In summary, by the Spring of 1980 Muro had got to a point where he believed in the potency of coloured photography montage, particularly when it was combined with a minimalist , but not wholly abstract, aesthetic and a preparedness to appropriate existing art works to make a new image or assemblage of images that were charged with a clear political and aesthetic agenda, but he was struggling to create work that could not only occupy that theoretical space but would be powerful in its own right.In short Muro was struggling to find his true subject, while all the time he was conscious of the temptation to fall into either photo- journalism on the one hand or the merely engagingly discursive on the other. It was while Giovanni was developing these thoughts that he heard from one of the students at the university that Ian Curtis of Joy Division had hanged himself. It was a terrible and wholly unforeseen blow .Giovanni immediately determined that he would create a work that would commemorate Curtis and do so by applying his ideas of photographic montage , minimalism and appropriation to his maximum ability. Over a long week-end Muro concluded that the piece should take the form of a multi-work installation and, as as it was to be an Art Biennale year again in Venice ,when normally closed or limited-access buildings were made available for shows and installations,Giovanni set out to look for a suitable space. Finally , after some wrangling and cajoling , Muro secured for a couple of weeks in late July the small, deconsecrated chapel of Chiesa de San Gallo, to the North of St Mark’s piazza. As you’ll see from the images on this board, Muro decided to work via the historicised medium of the triptych, producing a number of photographic montages that were intended to function as altarpieces . The ambition was that each would be potent in its own right while also setting up a dynamic interaction with the other triptychs and the installation in general. For the main altarpiece at the East end of the chapel Muro turned to a 15th century painting, Madonna and the dead Christ by Cosimo Tura, that hung in the Correr museum off St Mark’s piazza. When Giovanni had worked there several years previously he had often sat in its presence for hours , unable to fully resolve in his mind the tensions in the painting, a work that seemed to Giovanni to be as contemporary now as the day it was completed. In order to create the triptych Giovanni, having first photographed the painting, then overlaid an image of Ian Curtis’ face that he cut out from a magazine over that of Tura’s Christ, before re-touching the resulting assemblage with paint so as to try and effect a naturalised and blended transposition . Then Giovanni re-photographed the end result, which ,finally, he printed and framed alongside two other of his photographic images. The triptych for the north chapel caused technical difficulties of a very different nature. Giovanni was clear that while the whole installation should address the Christian theme of bodily sacrifice, it should only do so as part of wider Western European traditions of death and loss . Equally , Giovanni also wanted the installation to both have a specifically Venetian tone and for the sense of “Loss” to be specific to music and of the most brutal kind. To this end Muro determined to incorporate into his installation , as the centre panel of the north chapel alterpiece, Titian’s late, great work “The flaying of Marsyus”, with its theme of vengeful and affronted Gods asserting their power through violence and the silencing of Marsyus and his music. However, Titian’s work, “ in the flesh”, to use that pungent phrase, was near-on two metres square and ,as it was hung in a gallery in the regional town of Kromeriz, in Czechoslovakia, behind the Iron Curtain, was extremely difficult to either see or even obtain a satisfactory copy of. Consequently that altarpiece ended up being aesthetically the least well resolved, with the balance between the three panels being somewhat awkward, while the central image itself suffered from it being based on a small, low-resolution copy . All in all it was far from what Giovanni had seen and lived with in his mind, but time and resources were not on his side. The final triptych on the South altar was a more straight forward affair, recognising the way in which so much of Curtis’ imagery was rooted in a neo-urbanism on the fringes of desolation , a psychic and physical place where, despite the pervasive decay, paradoxically, it was the potency of nature to take a stand and re-colonise the lost ground that was most apparent. Out of the blue, as he was finishing these works, it was announced that Joy Division would be releasing the album that Ian and the band had just finished before his death and on Friday the 18th July, just a week before Giovanni’s installation was due to open, “Closer” was released. The opening track “Atrocity Exhibition” , was named after a 1970 collection of stories by JG Ballard and Giovanni immediately decided that that would also be the title for his San Gallo piece, while the refrain in that track “I still exist” should be used as the title of the Cosimo Tura based triptych. Giovanni did not want the installation to be just a site or "sight" to be something that one visited but kept at a distance. To that extent Giovanni’s decision to entitle the installation “the Atrocity Exhibition" was intentionally ironic in that for him it was not to be conceived as an "exhibition" to be viewed while one kept one's distance but a completely interactive and immersive experience, with a real sense of participation. To achieve this sense of immersion Giovanni had developed a number of practical strategies , including: • limiting the number of participants to no more than 10 at any time; • having fixed times for a finite number of daily " performances" ; • requiring every participant to be seated throughout, in absolute silence and without any photography; • giving each participant a condolence sheet when they entered the chapel ( using on the cover the image of the Service of the Dead by “Hand G” in the Milan/Turin book of hours and on the back a number of quotations that contextualised the experience) ; and • placing a warm , abstract patterned carpet, similar to the weaves of Gunta Stolzl who Giulia so admired , on the floor beneath the chairs , so as to part dissolve the gulf between the institutional space of the church and the personal space of each participant. With Joy Division’s album out Giovanni worked tirelessly in the following week, missing University duties, to incorporate it’s sepulchral tonality and mordant lyricism into the above outlined framework. Ideally Muro would have had more time to achieve this integration but even so “The Atrocity Exhibition” evolved in the week between the album’s release and the opening of the San Gallo installation so that many aspects of Closer became embedded into the work. For the first audiences, once the doors of San Gallo were shut on them and all were seated in the candle-lit semi-dark, perfumed and fogged with incense, and they were facing the triptychs and with their eyes slowly adjusting to the low level of light, the attendant would then play a tape of each track from Closer, in their original order, but with a period of silence between each track that was exactly the same length as the preceding song. This meant that the performance lasted exactly 88 minutes and 32 seconds, as the album itself lasted 44 minutes , 16 seconds and the gaps for contemplation ranged from 2 minutes 53 seconds to 6 minutes 10 seconds. In order to achieve this Giovanni had each of the album’s tracks transferred to audio tape , but leaving the tape clean for the required time period between each of the recorded songs. At the end, after the 6 minutes and 10 seconds of silence had expired after “Decades”, being the final track, the candles would be extinguished , the doors opened , the light would enter and the acrid eddying smoke of burnt candle grease would be the sign that it was over. However , as each participant left they were handed a piece of paper in an envelope . The paper was headed "Atonement" and beneath it was the name of one of the 9 tracks from Closer together with a note of its playing time and the name of a place in Venice that the participant could walk to from the chapel in the performance time of the track and a map to get you there. For example a participant who received “Decades” might be informed that Santa Maria Formosa was 6 minutes 10 seconds walking time away from Chiesa San Gallo and shown the route through the complex of streets to get there. Each participant was asked to do their walk as they left in memory of Ian. After some last minute issues the work was installed and opened on time and gained some good notices. It is even said that Anselm Keifer, who had a large display at the Biennale that year, had wanted to come . But what is incontrovertible is that early during the first week a Bologna based gallerist associated with that City’s DAMS art institute ( Discipline Della Arti Della Musica e Dello Spettacolo ),approached Giovanni with a proposal to recreate the installation in his gallery later that Autumn.For a few days Giovanni was in a state of fervent excitement, mixed with anxiety, feeling that a real break-through was imminent. But then on 2 nd August 1980 there was the Bologna train station bombing and that changed everything and the moment was lost . The installation closed at the end of the second week and the various elements were dispersed and stored. Giulia refused to have the Tura hung on the wall of the flat. On this board one can see some of the initial workings by Giovanni, including his manuscript notes for the proposed layout and for the Condolence sheet , along with an extremely rare image of a Polaroid mock up of “Shadowplay”, an earlier idea for the south chapel ( and Polaroid mock-ups for the three eventual altarpieces ). Given the strict "no photographs” policy and low lighting levels, no satisfactory film record seems to have survived of the event itself , although it is known that despite the previously mentioned parental tensions Giovanni's father did lend him his super 8 camera to record the installation , so it is hoped that at some stage this film may be uncovered. The next following board contains images of the final triptychs as they appeared in the installation, along with an image of San Gallo itself