Giovanni Muro (v)- Winter ‘85/‘86
“Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening”
Pauline Oliveras.
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 .
During the last months of Giovanni’s life , when he was staying with his sister, Lucia, and before he was taken into hospital, Giulia was a regular visitor. They didn’t talk a great deal but would usually sit together on the small sofa in the reception room at the front of the flat, watching or listening to the video film or album that Giulia had brought with her, in both cases being usually more or less contemporary works.
One late afternoon Giulia brought along a copy of an album of songs by the Brazilian musician Seu Jorge, primarily containing loose “covers” by him of tracks by David Bowie from his Hunky Dory to Diamond Dogs phase of the early 1970’s, performed by Jorge in a gentle samba style and sung in his Brazilian mother tongue . A number of the tracks on the album had been originally performed by Seu’s character, Pele dos Santos, in the 2004 film , “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”, directed by Wes Andersen , a director who both Giulia and Giovanni admired, albeit on the limited basis of their mutual regard for his previous film, the Royal Tenenbaums , which, unlike Giulia, was the only Andersen film that Giovanni had seen.
The album cover , that Giulia propped up on the mantelpiece, before she took the record out of its inner sleeve and placed it onto the turntable, was gorgeous in its formal simplicity, dominated by a rich yellow pastel background, that balanced both the lettering and also the portrait of Seu in a similarly pastel blue tee shirt ,wearing a red woollen hat and shouldering his acoustic guitar, held at the neck by Jorge’s beautiful hands, that were languidly bent at the wrist.
Looking up from the settee (to the side of which there stood a small, low table , upon which there was an array of medicine bottles and a glass of water), Giovanni had fulsomely praised the image ,suggesting to Giulia that the photographer’s confident use of chromatic tensions, and the isolation of Jorge against a flat yellow background, was rooted in a deep appreciation of a range of pop-art influences that had been knowingly deployed in a very controlled way, reflecting the deep interactions between the respective art and cultural movements of North and South America in recent decades. Giulia listened to Giovanni as she returned to sit with him on the settee, crossing the oblong rug with the curious pattern that Lucia had borrowed from her mother’s flat , but said nothing : having seen the film the previous year with a close friend who Giovanni did not know, and having read the album’s liner-notes, Giulia knew that the image on the album cover was in fact a cropped still of Seu , in the guise of dos Santos, taken by Andersen from the film. Furthermore the cover’s pastel shades were another, minor-key, expression of what Giulia considered to be Andersen’s most singular contribution to film, namely his use of colour and tones as leit motifs for character, sentiment and theme. Indeed Giulia had recently come to the conclusion that rather than these thematic colours and palettes underpinning and re enforcing the narrative ”story-line” of his films, the “narrative” seemed to exist largely to permit Andersen’s exploration and deployment of the former.
Giulia and Giovanni sat together , waiting for the album’s first track. There was a crackle and a gentle thrum of the needle before the sparse room was filled with Seu’s guitar, that was almost immediately accompanied by his rich vocal, unmistakably picking out the melody to Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel”, but in a language that came from somewhere very different.
Instantly Giovanni was back in time, to late 1985. He had been walking across Campo Manin on a damp, chill day, barely conscious of where he was going, the route was so familiar, when a busker had caught his attention with a samba-tinged version of Bowie’s , then still recent, Ashes to Ashes . Despite the cold and the threat of rain, Giovanni had stopped and enjoyed the moment before dropping a small note into the performer’s open guitar case and carrying on to the café where he was to meet Giulia.
“Well, if Antonia is going to be with Lucia for Christmas, why don’t you spend the day with me? It will be fun.”
“Antonia” was Giovanni’s widowed mother and Giulia’s proposal , that had been entirely unforeseen by Giovanni, would endlessly fill his thoughts in the coming days, even though it seemed to Giulia to be a simple and natural idea.
The 25th December that year was fog-shrouded in Venice , but although the air was chill it was not nearly as cold as it had been at the beginning of the year, when for a few days in early January even the lagoon and many of the canals had frozen over in the sub-zero temperatures and football had been played on the iced-over waters.
After lunch Giovanni and Giulia had exchanged presents.
Giovanni had wanted to give to Giulia a book that celebrated Melvin Sokolsky’s ’63 and ’65 “bubble” fashion photographs , taken for Harper’s Bazaar and featuring the brilliant model Simone d’Aillencourt, but had been frustrated to discover that to date no such work had been published. Eventually, running out of time, Giovanni had come across a second-hand copy of Nell Dunn’s long out of print 1965 book called Talking to Women, that included a poignant discussion with the late Pauline Boty, and had bought that for her , along with a recent album called Ignite the Seven Cannons by a British band called Felt, largely because of the track “Primitive Painters”, that featured extraordinary vocals by Liz Frazier, and the track “Textile Ranch”, that Giovanni hoped Giulia would find to be amusingly and tangentially appropriate, given her recent promotion ,after two years at Palazzo Mocenigo, to the position of head of modern fabric design.
For her part Giulia gave Giovanni a copy of Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs album. Giovanni held the album in his hands, his arms stretched out in front of him and one eye shut. He had always admired ,rather than “loved” , Anders Petersen’s Café Lehmitz photographs from the end of the’60’s, but had only ever seen rather small reproductions of them in magazines and art books. Now , here, on the cover, enlarged and cleanly printed, was one of the more disturbing yet tender images from the series, an image of Rose and Lilly that both acknowledged and captured the joy ,warmth and solace that the habitués of that Hamburg bar had found at moments together , while at the same time pointing up the caricatured but still recognisable archetypal roles and relationships that these dispossessed and societal outsiders had characteristically embraced beneath their surface transgressions and wearied next-to -last stands against the night.
Although the photograph of Rose and Lilly was wonderful, the person who featured in a number of the Lehmitz photographs and preyed on Giovanni’s mind most was “Marlene”, a woman of a certain age, who, one night , in front of the 26 year old Petersen, had tried to dance herself clean, presumably to music from the café’s wurlitzer jukebox , that Petersen had written about and that was often to be seen in the background of his photographs. There was something about Marlene ( of course she had to be a ”Marlene”….), that made you want to ask Petersen: “ Didn’t you get it? What is it that you still don’t understand ?”, while all the time not really getting it or understanding it yourself. There were so many potential narratives latent in those few photographs that in truth all narrative had been lost; what had once been a series of moments in time, with noise and stuff outside of the frame, let alone personal histories and current situations, had become timeless, not necessarily in a good way.
They played their records and drank and laughed throughout the afternoon. Then Giovanni had , a bit awkwardly, asked Giulia about the two of them and their relationship. Abruptly Giulia had got up and gone to leave the room. Then, framed in the doorway (there was no actual door as it had been removed so as to create a sense of greater space in what was a very small apartment), Giulia had turned around: “What’s with all this “are we on or off” talk?” she had said. “On-off-off-on…Jez, we’re not like this crappy bit of plastic you know!” and with that she feverishly toggled the light switch by her shoulder up and down , up and down, before going out into the hallway . Darkness. Giovanni sitting on the floor heard the toilet door shut, the one door in the flat that remained. Tom Waits sang on:
….l see that the world is upside down
Seems that my pockets were filled up with gold
And now a cloud gonna cover everything up
And the wind's blowing cold
I don't need anybody
Because I learned
I learned to be alone
I said anywhere, anywhere
Anywhere I lay my head, boys
I will call my home…
Giovanni heard the cistern empty.
Darkness. Early in the New Year Giovanni had signed up for a series of weekly talks, promoted by his university, to be given on the subject of “ ‘Danger Music’ and “sonic awareness”: 30 years of American serialism and minimalism ”. The talks each had a different presenter but all were held in the ground floor meeting room of the Scoletta dei Calegheri in Campo San Toma.
The upper storey of the building, that had been built over 500 years before by the guild of the shoe makers or cobblers, had been converted into a local library, and Giovanni enjoyed turning up 5-10 minutes early so that he could browse the shelves. Like so many public book collections, the contents of the shelves were often slightly out of their Dewey-designed order and were slowly ageing and depleting, like a once great mind suffering the early stages of memory loss. But while it was obvious that many of the books no longer reflected the latest scholarship, tastes or production values, a few seemed to have achieved a different status and to have assumed an aura with age, whereby simply touching them and being in their presence connected the visitor to a moment when something important had become known or, at least preserved or celebrated. It was probably in the nature of things that different visitors to such libraries would be drawn to different books that in their eye had such a quality. In the case of Giovanni and the library at Scoletta dei Calegheri, it was a rather beautiful book relating to William Congdon’s paintings and, in particular, his paintings of Venice and Saint Marks, that he routinely removed from the shelf so as to briefly turn the pages, before carefully returning to its place, knowing that one day he’d come back and see that it had gone.
At first the course’s attendees had been few in number and rather earnest, but as the weeks had passed it had gathered more subscribers, many of whom seemed to be perhaps less interested in the historical account of the music ,that was the stated focus of the lectures, than they were in the attendant cultural attitudes and life-styles.
The evening sessions followed a constant pattern: everyone would gather in the ground floor room to the left of the entrance foyer by 7.00pm on the Tuesday evening and would then sit down on the carpeted floor, forming a broad circle facing a table, upon which there was placed a stereo system. There would be a short introduction to the composer and that week’s work and then ,reflecting Dick Higgins’ idea that he had stated in “Danger Music number 3” (after which the series had been in part named), the lights would be switched off , incense would be burned and the music would be played.
After an initial introductory talk , when the works of earlier innovators, including Joanna Beyer and Lou Harrison, had been foregrounded, each subsequent session had focussed on either a particular composer or recording and had so far featured works by John Cage, Harold Budd, Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich .
Sometimes Giulia would accompany Giovanni, in which case he would not first visit the library. Tonight they were there together and as they entered the meeting room they were each given a shallow wicker basket, which was a novelty. Looking around, Giovanni thought that there must have been about 25 or so attendees of various ages that evening and given the numbers they each had to sit in a somewhat tighter circle on the floor, Giulia to Giovanni’s right and a large man in his 40’s, heavily bearded and wearing a jumper that had seen better days, to his left. They all placed the baskets in front of themselves.
The presenter was a woman of striking appearance: maybe in her mid-forties, instantly and unswervingly intense, worryingly thin and with a very tight haircut. Heavy Jewellery adorned her neck and wrists, with an Egyptian-style broach attached to the front of the wrap that she wore over her shoulders.
Her subject was the album “Electronic Music”, that had been released on the Music of our Time label in 1967 and featured works by Steve Reich, Richard Maxfield and Pauline Oliveras . It was clear this music, especially that of Pauline Oliveras, meant a great deal to the speaker and during her introduction she mentioned that she had been fortunate to attend some concerts given by Oliveras on her Accordion in the late ‘60’s.
When the formal introduction was over , as was expected , the lights were then switched off and some incense was lit. The smoke, that the librarian upstairs had previously complained about, was richer and more pungent than usual.
Giovanni was by now familiar with the way that in the darkness his hearing and sense of smell intensified and the way that his retinas widened to almost give him a sort of night-sight. Across the circle Giovanni could see that one of the attendees was wearing a watch with a luminescent face. He sensed the speaker moving into the space between the table and the circle of baskets, the rustle of her long skirt and a squeak from one of her shoes when she walked, betraying her location.
Nevertheless when she spoke she seemed very close.
“I want you to breathe, .....breathe deep….Listen...Listen to your heart, your blood, your soul….
Put your arms around your neighbours’ back…that’s it…..Feel their warmth, feel their breathing….now….I need you all to breathe in unison, innnn….ouuuttttt, innnn…. Outtttt…that is it… good…..”
Five seconds or so passed.Giovanni’s eyes were now so attuned to the darkened room that he thought he could see where the combination of the effect of the draughts from under the doors and the speaker’s movements , as she seemingly conducted their breathing with her arms and swayed to an inaudible rhythm, were causing the incense to curl in eddies. Despite the incense he could distinctly make out Giulia’s perfume and a less refined odour from the man on his left.
“Now. Very, very slowly I want you to take off your clothes , all of them, and place them in your basket.”
Silence.
It seemed that something in the darkened room was in the balance and soon there would be a decisive reckoning. Then the sound that Giovanni had dreaded, the unmistakable sound of someone taking off their jumper. Soon more followed, including Giulia, her arm slipping away from his back as she made to stand up. There was nothing for it. Giovanni also stood up and undressed, carefully placing his pants , keys and wallet into his trouser pockets and everything into the basket. Sitting down again the room suddenly seemed to be almost chill, but Giovanni reasoned to himself that that might have been due to the light moisture that now sheathed his skin. At least , thought Giovanni, there was no chance of an erection, but just thinking that somehow made it a much more probable event. My mind is like that of an ape.
“Right. Now , each of you, bring your baskets to me , add them to my clothes and then mix them around with your hands, starting on the left”. One by one they each came up to the front. By the time it was Giovanni’s turn there was quite a pile. He tipped over his basket then thrust his arms into the still warm garments and churned them around. Giovanni let his mind wander and found himself in an instant trying to compare this experience visually with Pistoletto’s Venus of the Rags, with the lecturer standing in for the statue, but he realised that he was too much of a participant to develop any such analogy and that this lack of distancing was itself something of a novelty to him.
Before long they were all seated again. Giovanni could feel Giulia’s skin against his, an experience that she was sharing with someone else on her right hand side.
The lecturer started the music: aching, swooping, clamouring sounds, each note giving little guidance as to the following one, their volume ranging up and across the register.
The man to Giovanni’s left began to rock gently, back and forth.
Suddenly from the other side of the room there came a terrible, terrible wailing, as if someone was combining ECT with primal therapy, right there. It went on and on, evermore intense.
The lecturer paused the music. The cry subsided to a sobbing, heaving whimper. Consoling voices. That sounds like someone’s been having a very bad trip thought Giovanni.
Just then the door behind them opened, the lights came on.
Giovanni’s eyes were stung by the sudden brightness.
The librarian stood in the door.
“Just WHAT is going on in here?” She shouted .
Within moments , like Massacio’s Adam and Eve, one shielding his eyes and the other her breasts, Giovanni and Giulia, along with all the other attendees, made their naked way in search of their clothes.
Maybe 5 seconds or so had passed.
“Do you like Jeu Jorge’s approach and style?” asked Giulia. Giovanni stirred and nodded , then turned to look intently at her. They looked at each other. “Do, do you remember that time….?” While his lips moved his voice trailed away to silence and his eyes moistened. Giulia placed her hand on his. “What....?” she gently asked. Giovanni did not reply.
“Shall we try a dance?”
“I’d like that” said Giovanni.
So they stood up and shuffled gently on the curiously patterned rug , arms around each other’s waists, heads close to each other, as Seu Jorge played.
“I think I’m going to love you forever.”
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