The Galleria Il Ponte continues its season with an exhibition dedicated to Giuseppe Chiari to mark the artist's eightieth birthday.

Giuseppe Chiari is one of the leading names associated first with Fluxus and later with Conceptual and Performance Art.  From a background of different disciplines, he has established new theoretical and practical standpoints in relation to art.  His approach to art has always been irreverent, his behaviour alternative, walking the tightrope between to do or not to do, to say or not to say, while continually challenging the limits of language.

The exhibition is orchestrated to allow the artist's work to create the scene, through material (musical scores, photos, writing) saved from the beginning of the seventies up to the present. Here is to be found, or lost, in one momentous movement, within his celebrated statements, the underlying theme of the last forty years of Conceptual Art.

The mise-en-scène is neither retrospective nor didactic; rather it is a unitary work composed of numerous elements, and it ends with a piece on the pianoforte, that musical instrument par excellence and emblem of conformist sound with which Chiari has a love-hate relationship, bestowing on it equal measures of ridicule and praise.

CATALOGUE: format 30x21.5cm, 96 pages, with b/w reproductions.
Interview with Giuseppe Chiari by Andrea Alibrandi, poetical text by Marco Badi, biography by Susanna Fabiani. 'Il Ponte' Editions, Florence.

Biography of Giuseppe Chiari

Press office: Susanna Fabiani: catalogue and photographs available on request
susy@galleriailponte.com

From a conversation with Giuseppe Chiari

Andrea Alibrendi: In your artistic biography you come across as being a 'composer', you made your first appearances in public in 1962, not in a concert hall but in some of the main contemporary art galleries of the time: at the Galleria Blu in Milan with   'Gesto e segno', at the Galleria La Salita in Rome with 'Gesti sul piano' and again in Rome, at the  Galleria Numero, with 'Musica e Segno'.

Giuseppe Chiari: During the fifties I led a private artistic life.  I was writing and drawing but I also composed and many of my compositions were not written on music sheets but on any old paper and often with geometric lines.
I enjoyed being in the company of poet friends such as Lamberto Pignotti and Sergio Salvi, who used to take me to Paszkowski, where I was accepted at the table of Bigongiari and Luzi. That's where I met Giorgio Bonsanti, editor of the magazine Letteratura, which later published my article, Il suono non è suono (Rome, 91/92, 1968), and when I read it now I'm surprised at how clear my ideas were even then - they weren't so different from now.
During those years I basically led an artist's life in cafés: I was part  of the poets' café  circle - because you could do anything at Paszkowski - you could arrive with a drawing, a composition, recite some poetry…
During one of these evenings, at the Palazzo di Parte Guelfa in Florence, I took part in a debate between Russian composers, who were going around bad-mouthing Schönberg and the twelve-note system. It was there that I met Pietro Grossi,  who taught cello at the Conservatorio Cherubini, and later on in the evening he invited me to his house. That invitation changed my life as an artist. Grossi gave me a structure that was more scholastic, more bureaucratic I would say. He wasn't remotely interested in my music. He didn't want to give his opinion about how good it was, he was interested in principles. When I told him I wrote music according to my own principles, of maths, arithmetic, combinations, a bit like the twelve-note system, albeit an extremely free one, in a serial way, he realized I was that kind of composer and that was enough for him. He'd been very timidly trying to explain for ages at the Conservatory that one can write music with a combinatorial technique.
In 1961 he got me involved in the foundation of a musical association 'Vita musicale contemporanea'. This wasn't just a theoretical association - it really existed, and we organized concerts, conferences and debates. It was through my coordinating work that I came into contact with many artists, including Sylvano Bussotti, with whom I began to work closely; but it was mostly from his friend Heinz Klaus Metzger, an expert of philosophy and contemporary music, that I got an enormous amount of information. I took as much as I could from him because I was greedy for knowledge, I wanted to understand the music of others. At a distance, it was this knowledge that enabled me to get into Fluxus.  Because in Fluxus we don't ask a lot but we do ask people who know what's going on in the world, people who are very well informed.
Fluxus is a real melting pot of ideas; it was the brainchild of George Maciunas, a Lithuanian dada-type artist, a friend of established poets, who lived in the East Village of New York. He came to Europe and got in touch with already established artists like Vostell, Spoerri, Robert Filliou, Jean Jacque Lebel, and invited them to take part in an event, the Festival Fluxus which began life as a music festival. He asked these artists not to perform their work as it was but to do something theatrical and he gave each of them about ten or fifteen minutes.  Not all of them accepted, but for those who did it was a real challenge. When Maciunas asked Metzger about Italian artists the latter answered that those willing in Italy to take part in these festivals, apart from Bussotti, might be Chiari, Castaldi and a film person called Carpi, who died a short time afterwards.  Castaldi never wanted anything to do with Fluxus, and so Chiari and Bussotti were left. Maciunas wrote to me. I replied that I was keen to take part and I sent some scores and he asked me to translate the instructions into English and to reduce it all to one single sheet so that he could make a lot of copies.

A.: When we think about email and the speed of modern communication, we marvel at how such a network of contacts could spread. 

C.: It was all done by post, duplicates and then photocopies; Maciunas said that if it weren't for the photocopies Fluxus wouldn't exist. The reduction of a performance to such a simple medium, with such large-scale distribution became one of the formal characteristics of both Fluxus and myself too. I couldn't get to Wiesbaden, but my work could, and the pianist Frederic Rzewski performed it.
This was the start of the performances, but they hadn't become that yet: they were happenings. And the evenings were called Happening & Fluxus.
But to answer your first question, at that point I was a contemporary musician. I was perhaps a writer, I was considered a poet, because I was always around Luzi, Pignotti, Miccini - I wrote automatic poetry and my compositions were thought of as contemporary literature because they were strange. If we want to split hairs I was not, by definition, a painter - although I became one a little later - because I worked with ink. I used a lot of ink on musical scores, on pages, on transparent paper and I also did a lot of photos, so there was already some kind of visual work…..
The exhibitions you mention brought me very close to the world of painting and the one at the Galleria Numero in Rome, Musica e segno, was an exhibition of musical scores that I did with Sylvano Bussotti. These scores represented a change in the way the musical score was presented and read, not least because they were made with signs outside the staff.  What a musical score conveys can be an informal painting, almost exclusively in black and white: in any case, it's all visual material. These 'visual works' toured the world, from the Galleria Numero in Rome they went as far as the United States, mainly to Buffalo, where they were a great success. These were my scores for the cello and the piano based on signs - an informal painting which could also be called sign painting.

A.: In your work as 'visual composer', then,  is there some reference to be found to informal painting?

C.: I was very fond of informal, I liked it and when Renato Ranaldi, who knows something about painting, saw my work he said that it was substantially informal.
There's a significant overlapping between informal and improvization: informal is based a lot on improvization and on chance, like the work of John Cage, which in some way is completely informal. I wrote a piece for the clarinet saying play whatever you want. It was considered a provocation, a gesture 'à la Chiari'. I was convinced of what I wrote: take your clarinet and improvize. I did special numbers on improvization in Germany and around the world. Improvization is really a multi-disciplinary technique, automatic writing in literature, gestural expression in painting, the musica d’azione in my Il metodo per piano. This in some way connects me to the gallery environment.

A.: Were your sign scores still meant to be performed?

C.: They were created for instruments, for the cello, for the guitar,... they've also been performed.  The idea of music was there, but it was gestural music, visual music that breaks down the barrier between sound and noise, between space and time.
There's also another element that substantially alters things: there were also offers to buy these scores. We were in a gallery in Rome, Genoa or Naples - I can't remember - and the gallery owner phoned and asked if  La cancellazione di Beethoven  was on sale.

A.: Does the presence of a market, a public that wants to possess these paintings, change in some way the meaning of the work?

C.: Yes and no. The first piece sold was Für Elise, the first page of Beethoven's piano solo, in which ten notes were erased. This piece came out on the cover of a small Neapolitan magazine edited by Luca Castellano. And the offers began to pour in - it had been mistaken for a painting. So they came to me, in the words of one of my conceptual pieces. I've accepted the market, but at the same time, I've never fully accepted it.

A.: There's a kind of link between Chiari, the contemporary musician who turns the idea of the score, the idea of music itself, upside down, and what is happening within the figurative and visual dimension, in which you are completely involved. The negation of the informal, of the painterly gesture and the disappearance of colour - does all this proceed at the same time as the conceptual situation takes shape? How does it all happen?

C.: The conceptual approach brought a lot of black and white to the painting scene - using colour was a mortal sin. In the long run this helped me because much of my work is in ink, therefore in black and white, so to a certain extent that was the reason I was accepted. This was before 1968 - everything seemed difficult but in the end we were really keen on expressing our ideas, what we felt.  At that time I was in a position of great demand and everyone was amazed that I had drawers full of stuff (paper with notes, declarations, signs in black and white, photos). Conceptual art covers a broad spectrum: in other words, Kosuth saw L’arte è facile as conceptual, because what I think of as painting is to write L’arte è facile in ink on a piece of paper, and frame it and hang it on the wall. The gesture is conceptual because I've got a phrase, a concept and I believe it should be a painting. 

A.: Does this transform the gesture-score into a conceptual statement?

C.: In reality, the typed phrase L’arte è facile was never sold because what interested was hand-writing, calligraphy in ink: 'I like the way he writes'.  Anyway, the idea passed and so did the concept.  If we think about it, it's the market that says: I don't want typing, even if it's enlarged, I want Chiari's writing, which is still an informal work. And in the end that's what I believe. I'm not interested in conceptual for it's own sake.  It interests me as a vehicle.  Conceptual art as a fashion permitted me to have something in black and white at the Galleria di Toselli.

A.: The informal gesture of your writing therefore remains vital and the idea is conveyed by this gesture. The artistic scene of the time recognizes and accepts all that as conceptual art.

C.: I have my ideas and I want to find a place where they are accepted.  I'm not interested in whether or not my work is recognized as conceptual.  What I wanted was for my music to be played in concerts, and that happens rarely and usually when played by the composer. Even my music has taken this direction.

A.: So, as Gillo Dorfles wrote, your work needs the narcissistic presence of its creator, of his gesture, because "(Chiari) has identified, within the manipulation of his own corporeality and in the planning of a creative process, the matrix for an aesthetic activity". (In 'Il metodo per suonare di Giuseppe Chiari', Turin 1976). That's why the performance takes on such importance.

C.: Things are never that simple. The performance is to do with space, ritual. You can do a performance in an art gallery, but you can't do performances at the  Teatro Comunale in Florence. Even if I were the one playing, it would still be a concert.  It's the space, the container that gives it a sense: if I did I gesti sul piano at the Galleria Il Ponte it would be  a piano performance, if I did it at the Conservatorio Cherubini it would be an improvized concert and as such, it would create a big enough scandal to be thrown out. At the Il Ponte Gallery it's considered quite normal, just like other informal works, except that instead of being done on canvas, it's performed on the piano.
Actually, the thing that's incredible is that during a piano concert at the Galleria Toselli – and there are situations where I consider playing to be keeping at a distance of one and a half metres from the piano and staying still for two minutes –, the public was so demanding that they started criticizing me on the side: 'you should have been a bit wilder - even if your playing is a bit haphazard, Beethoven's structure is still there, the timing, the accent is still the same', and in the end what they're saying is that it's still banal romantic music, there's no conceptual music. At the same time, if at La Scala you do a piece by Shostakovich, where the orchestra and the percussion mime on the stage, with the lights down, the rhythm of intercourse, it's considered scandalous. What I mean is, there are accepted norms: the same public has different expectations in different places. They point out that I'm too romantic, and at La Scala they are scandalized - so it's all to do with the place.  Performance is ruled by conventions.
However, the world of performances is another great world that welcomes and accepts me. In 1978 Krinzinger organized the Internationales Performance Festival at the Österreich Kunstverein in Vienna which he then took on a tour of Europe. Alongside Acconci, Nitsch and another five or six main names, there was also Chiari. The following year at the Centre Pompidou there was L’art corporel: I got there with my sheet and I tore it up really slowly. There was a lot of improvization also there. The season of performances, which came after conceptual, passed without leaving a deep impression on the market except for some photos.

A.: Your statements are figurative declarations, in which you hover between provocation and nonsense.  Behind them there's a long build-up; it's as if the musical scores for an instrument were robbed of the consonance with their performance to take on the form of aphorisms. But in these statements you continue to relate to your interlocutor, it's as if the spectator is about to assume the role of player, and has to interpret your script. In your statements, as in all your art, to quote Ada Lombardi there is 'a 'political design', which is the affirmation of the individual and of his 'authority' to exist and determine his 'artistic' presence. It's an individual project, for other authoritative individuals, invited to take part as 'active' public and to play the game of 'easy' art... the public becomes an 'active instrument' and the music is pure individual thought, someone's 'reappropriation'...('La scelta trasgressiva di Giuseppe Chiari', Naples 2005, pp. 42,43)'.

C.: I don't want to begin a revolution.  It's not that I want to transform and educate: my job isn't to educate. When education is art, it's indirect. At the moment the statements that are making me a fortune  and are a big success are Ti piace la Sacra Famiglia dell’Impannata and the Zingarella del Boccaccino. But nobody buys them, they buy the coloured collages. I have to bear that in mind, remember it. These phrases advertise, they're advertising slogans.  People buy the coloured piece because I did the Zingarella del Boccacino, because it advertises it. You buy the milk, not the advertising slogan that made it famous.