Giovanni Muro (q3) 12.05.1984 - Fire at the Giardini

“ When we looked at them, such nice kids with their V- neck jumpers, checked shirts, and sensible haircuts , we felt that for now they were safe from drugs, schizophrenia, and the dole” Annie Ernaux; The Years. “...the torches of Gethsemane cast light only on the loneliness and fear...”. Mauro Amadori- an extract from his last letter, 12th May 1984 “In fact, hoping does not mean just looking ahead with optimism, but above all looking back to see how it is possible to configure that past that lives on there , so as to replay it in the light of possibilities still to come. To commit suicide instead is to decide that our past contains the ultimate and definitive meaning of our life, so it is no longer the case that one can re-imagine it, but only to simply end it. ” - Umberto Galimberti First the Giardini book pavilion had burned down after 34 years and now Mauro had been found dead in his flat. Sitting in the inhospitable living room, on the old sofa that Mauro and Mirella had bought together some twelve years before, now stained and sour smelling, Giovanni leafed through a box of Mauro’s old black and white photographs.Save for a few sequences that revealed that ,like Diane Arbus , he had at some stage clearly made a habit of taking photographs while at the cinema, capturing crepuscular “stills”, especially from Antonioni’s films of the early ‘60’s (although one of them seemed , paradoxically, more authentically evocative of Cindy Sherman from her own “Film Stills” collection), most were of found elements of urban decay Whatever Mauro had seen in these images of walls , pipes and windows, it was those that featured people and the anecdotal that caught Giovanni’s eye. Maybe, as he had looked through the view-finder at a mottled wall, with flaking paint and salt-rotted brick, Mauro had felt a surge of satisfaction as he saw the edges create a frame that held within them a satisfying concatenation of colour, shape and line, and had fondly imagined the ending photograph blown-up and mounted on the wall of an airy gallery , using scale to defy the viewer to try and take it all in with one glance , and labelled with a knowing obliqueness. But here, amassed together in the cardboard box , the effect of so many prints was like the abstracted-image equivalent of leafing through a tourist brochure of unpeopled villas , with their fugue-like procession of pattern and colour within a restricted palette of blue and white, each designed to only arrest attention for the fraction of a second it took to determine whether the image “connected” with some associative , psychological , deeply buried root , that triggered desire and interest but often remained unexcavated and was ,maybe, unextractable. Then, towards the back of the box Giovanni came across a photograph of a young , well dressed and turned-out adolescent , proudly holding a camera, maybe taken in the early ‘60’s, who was instantly recognisable as Mauro and then, behind that,a larger format photograph in a faded cream cardboard frame of a chubby, cheerful toddler, again, presumably Mauro, in a white sun-hat and jacket, collapsed on the grass, open mouthed and staring at something out of view, while behind him the lower legs and shoe-clad feet of men and women could be glimpsed casting shadows on the pavement they were walking along. Giovanni stared intensely at the latter photograph , as if by doing so it would suddenly reveal more or burst into life , but to no avail . Indeed the very opposite seemed to happen and what at first glance he had interpreted as unguarded joy and happiness might in fact have been the moment just before the boy’s face had contorted into a frustrated and angry rage. Such was a young person’s inner life, but as one grew older did it really change, or were such moments of choice and emotional transition just more muffled and oblique? Was this toddler even Mauro? Again , Giovanni’s initial feeling had been one of absolute certainty, but as he gazed at the photograph in his hands his confidence ebbed away. Giovanni thought back to the elegant reporter who had befriended him back in 1968 ( see Giovanni Muro (A1)), and then onto the urbane and modish man who for a short period in the early years of the 1970’s had made a name for himself as the City’s leading photographer , neither a paparazzi nor a mere photo-journalist , constantly finding imagination, dignity and light in the most unexpected circumstances. Giovanni still remembered Mauro’s energy as he tried to use a torch late at night to track and photograph one of the few butterflies that had emerged from Raphaele Opstaele’s “Mass Moving” installation in St Mark’s square at the time of the 1972 Biennale . Then on to more difficult times , when ,as the years passed and Mauro’s consumption of drugs and alcohol had increased , they had lost contact . Giovanni would still occasionally glimpse Mauro out on the streets but from afar he had seemed to have been lost,even to himself , with his hair cut short , his bearded face dry and emaciated like some latter day Van Gogh at Saint Remy, although he was perhaps closer to that of Kirk Douglas’ portrayal in Lust for Life, and his mouth silently mouthing unspoken words. Just when had the visions started , when had Mauro first heard the voices ? When had his neighbours grown wary and distrustful and when had his few remaining friends , including (Giovanni recognised) , himself, melted away? Giovanni turned his mind outwards again to the photograph in his hands. What had happened to Mauro in those intervening years and why ? The toddler in the photograph still see-sawed in Giovanni’s hands between joy and trauma . Was the thing that had come to possess Mauro been already latent within him on that sunny day all those years ago ? And , if so, what , if anything, might have helped turn things around? Some hours before , a little after ten o’clock on that grey Saturday morning in mid-May, Giovanni and Giulia had stood a few metres away from the scant, charred remains of Scarpa’s bookstall in the Giardini, that had been built on temporary cement footings back in 1950 , very close to the Italian pavilion. Together, they sheltered under the charred canopy of trees, from which flecks of ash , burned bark and leaf would intermittently fall ,while the smell of baked resin and fading smoke filed the air. Judging by how high up the trees the flames had reached and the comprehensive ruin before them, the fire must have been intense. But while the loss of Scarpa’s building was pitiful, to Giulia’s surprise neither she nor Giovanni appeared to be especially churned up by the spectacle of destruction . Maybe it was because they felt themselves to be only witnesses to an aftermath , and that things would have been different had they been standing before the blaze, as Margarita Terekhova had done in Tarkovsky’s Film “Mirror”, watching the barn being consumed in the terrible lush destruction and the uncontrollable flames. But even with that scene , the viewer’s inner eye tended to read the on-screen destruction , if not generically then at least contextually , say either through associations with Russia’s still recent photographic iconography of burnt farmsteads and smoke plumes rising stark on vast horizons or as a further expression of Tarkovsky’s personal , elemental, image-world , that drew upon not only the discoveries of earlier cinematographers but also mid-nineteenth century romantic pictorial idioms. Had Giovanni or Giulia stood as witnesses in the previous night ,watching the flames consume the building and hearing its timbered fibres crack, hiss and collapse, would their minds have been satiated with that spectacle in itself or would they too have looked to attach some external association to the moment or draw something more personal out of themselves? However to Giovanni’s mind, despite that human tendency towards synthesis and contextualisation of experience neither the scene before them nor Tarkovsky’s elemental imagery , of water or, in this case, fire, was in any way symbolic , in that neither “stood” for something else . Who knew what the pyromaniac who had set the pavilion ablaze before, presumably, watching the consequences from the shadows , had intended by his actions, but with Tarkovsky you felt that each image had been selected to only exist in that narrative context and not to represent something greater than itself. Instead, at least with Tarkovsky, the viewer was offered the seductive contrast of being aware that to the film’s characters the raging fire was absolutely immediate , present and ungovernable , while through the image being “ on-screen, seen first in a mirror and then through a framing doorway and at all times shaped by a long, single ‘take’ , being simultaneously and overtly distanced and framed to the cinema-goer . On the other hand these classic , heart stopping scenes , that were central to the experience of Tarkovsky , also obliquely united the experience of the characters and the audience by stimulating them , each in their own worlds, to summon up anachronic personal recollections of indeterminably far-off events from the memory banks of the experienced or documented past. Everyone saw the fire but their thoughts were elsewhere. Maybe that was where art and prayer went their separate ways, one triggering the viewer’s access to a diffuse, image-based hinterland , while the other insisting upon a striving for a singular , wrapt meditation upon the singular absolute. If so then maybe the emergence of “religious art” had inadvertently planted the seeds of the destruction of the conditions necessary for such intense prayerful meditation as advocated by the early church ? For while a solitary image in a monk’s cell , say one by Fra Angelico in the convent of San Marco in Florence, might help the supplicant/penitent focus on Christ’s life, the prodigious multiplicity of such images that were created over time and increasingly available to the population at large, and , once seen , forever impressed upon the viewer’s unconscious mind, ultimately occasioned a retreat from the intense, spiritual ambitions of the early saints, as the prayed-before icon or image more readily provoked and was often dependent upon thematic and stylistic memories of and allusions to similar images , rather than focusing- in upon what the object-in-view represented , a tendency further amplified by Christianity’s love of typological exegesis. A twig broke under Giovanni’s feet. Giovanni recognised in himself a strong desire to secure a souvenir from the surviving debris, as early pilgrims had gathered up soil and stones from the holy land and had purportedly retrieved shards of the one true cross. Was that feeling a further sign that he and Giulia were in a similar way late to the scene , self-conscious and self-willed observers of an aftermath rather than wrapped up in the moment itself ? Afterall , there were no recorded souvenir hunters at the crucifixion, unless one counted Veronica and her cloth or the soldiers who played dice for Christ’s torn clothing (or, maybe, those who had recovered Christ’s body itself, hauling it down and carrying it off... )? Giovanni stiffened and stepped back a few paces. Maybe it was that he wanted a souvenir because he knew that he was lacking the necessary openness and empathetic intensity, a sort of holy simplicity, to truly memorialise within himself the moment? But if so, was this lack only specific to this experience or was it a more fundamental failure of faculty ? Wouldn’t it all have been easier if he’d simply brought his camera? Giovanni forced himself to look up from the photograph of the toddler and confront the far off wall, with its montage of unsettling photographs of nighttime fires , including a torn-out copy of the Limbourg brothers’ depiction of the torch-lit arrest of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane. Mauro, Mauro, Mauro...what had he done? Giovanni turned his eyes away. On the table was Mauro’s camera. Giovanni got up and crossed the room and picked it up. There were still two untaken shots on the roll of film. What had Mauro’s final photographs been of ? Maybe it was the effect of cradling the camera in his hands but Giovanni now felt more free to let his eye rove and to take in more of the flat’ details. Across the hallway Giovanni could see the closed door to Mauro’s bedroom, where his body had been found. His parents would soon be here. Giovanni could imagine the scene but equally knew that it would turn out different to that. In the corner was a stack of records and Giovanni crouched down and expertly assessed what was there , which was by and large what he would have expected ( Bob Dylan ,from his early electric period , along with albums by Miles Davis , the Velvet Underground and Pink Floyd), but interspersed with more esoteric works, such as by Bernard Parmegiani , Giusto Pio and Basil Kirchin, their covers scuffed and stained, and one or two inexplicable records, including a soundtrack album by Piero Piccioni to the film Camille 2000- surely, please, a sentimental gift. Giovanni was pleased to uncover , albeit towards the back of the stack , the album by the Keith Tippett Group that Giovanni had given to Mauro many years ago ( see Giovanni Muro (A3)).What had happened to Mirella? You couldn’t blame her but her departure had maybe marked the start of Mauro’s decline. No doubt there would be those at the IAUV who would petition for the pavilion’s restoration, not least due to its significance in understanding the evolution of Scarpa’s ideas of space and structure beyond the direct influence of buildings by Frank Lloyd-Wright . But in truth they had had their chance during the previous years , when it had remained shut up , unloved and in a deteriorating condition . Now, while it could be rebuilt it was beyond restoration. In any event the original intent in 1949 was that it should be only a temporary construction funded by Carlo Cardazzo for the 25th Biennale, while later Biennale committees were ,at best, agnostic to this non-Nation-state edifice surrounded by the country-specific pavilions , not least Scarpa’s own remodelled facade of the nearby Italian Pavilion. Giovanni removed the film from the camera and placed it in his jacket pocket, sat down again on the sofa and prepared to wait. Meanwhile, several hundred kilometres to the south, in Bolognano, Joseph Beuys , awash with symbolism , a sense of destiny and a need to self-dramatise and memorialise his own significance, was at that exact moment commemorating his 63 rd birthday by planting tree saplings and shrubs , self-referencing his earlier “7000 oaks” project (that he had inaugurated on 16th March 1982 in Kassel prior to Documenta 7 ), surrounded by camera-toting towns-folk, supporters and reporters. The post-modern was in full swing and Giovanni was going to be late to that as well. As Giulia turned the key in the lock of their flat on their return from the Giardini, the phone on the table of their hallway began to ring. “ I wonder what they want ?” said Giulia as she reached over to pick up the receiver while Giovanni shut the door behind them.