Giovanni Muro (n) 20th November 1982- Ruins (1)- "sous erature”

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. The plane’s departure had been delayed due to the bad weather. Now , some 50 minutes later, in the dusk, through the window , over the wing, Giovanni could see a vastness of black clouds gathering across the southern slopes of the Trentino and the eastern arc of the Veneto and out into the Adriatic. Although the cabin crew had been alerted by the captain that the descent into Venice was imminent ,lights had been dimmed, seat belts had been fastened , tables had been stowed, seats had been set to upright and all cigarettes had been extinguished, the plane showed no signs of losing altitude ,save for suffering occasional and temporary falls as it passed through air-pockets. To his right , across the aisle, a young woman nursed a mercifully peaceful baby. A brief flash of lightening illuminated a fraction of the far-off clouds, but, despite the passengers being tensely quiet, the corresponding sound of thunder would never reach them, as Giovanni and they circled in the gathering dark. On Giovanni’s lap were some type-written notes ,that would later form the basis of an account of a visit that he had made earlier in the year to Campo Zanipolo to meet his sister (see Giovanni Muro (m) 19th May 1982. Campo San Zanipolo- Francesco Guardi and the Republic’s end). On the flight Giovanni had made numerous manuscript annotations to the text and one whole paragraph had been scrubbed through, although the words were still mostly legible: « The real politic of the Venetian State’s finesse in siting Colleoni’s memorial statue in Campo Zanipolo rather than at Piazza San Marco, thereby failing to adhere to the terms of his will that had endowed Venice with a substantial legacy in contemplation of him being honoured by the state with such a prestigious location, was well-known. However , in pondering what might have been , Giovanni shared a too-facile predisposition to conjure up an image of the Piazza as it was today , with its elaborate mechanical clock, elegant campanile and famed proportions, but endowed with the statue, that in his imagination would have been situated in the north east corner, between the clock tower and the basilica. But in 1495, when the Colleoni memorial was being completed in Campo Zanipolo , the tower to hold the new clock on the north side of Piazza San Marco had not as yet been built ,while the huge exercise in civic landscaping around the bell tower and the piazzetta , to be undertaken under the direction of Jacopo Sansovino ,was still some forty years off in the future. Furthermore ,as both de Barbari’s woodcut of 1500 and also the somewhat later painting known as the “Tallard” Madonna ( that was probably the work of someone who was either close to , or otherwise influenced by, Giorgione), showed, the bell chamber of the campanile and its roof were at that time very different to that which would be depicted later by Canaletto and the many other painters who would seek to capture it’s likeness, that Galileo, accompanied by the Doge and his entourage, would look out from using his new-fangled telescope in the late Summer of 1609 , that Goethe had twice made his way up to in 1786, via the ramped steps of the tower, and that , albeit being a pastiche after its rebuilding between 1904-1912 , after its utter collapse on 14th July 1902 , was so familiar today , both to the million or so tourists who visited Venice each year, and also, due to the efforts of tea towel sellers, stamp designers, bar-mat manufacturers , parasol vendors and postcard purveyors, countless others across the globe.» Goethe. Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, who had come to Venice for the first time, anonymously, in 1786 and who had loved the sunlight, the limpid beauty and the opportunity for moments of isolated , urban anonymity, like those solitary figures to be found, in the midst of Canaletto’s teeming canvases, on balconies or leaning out of windows, acting out their existential dramas of quietude and voyeurism. Goethe, who only a couple of months earlier Andy Warhol had made the subject of yet another work in his seemingly endless series of screen prints of the famous , this time in a set of four and based upon the Johann Tischbein portrait , the sketch of which Goethe first mentioned in his journal on 29th December 1796 and that was now in the Stadel museum in Frankfurt. Not that Warhol had been the first to seek to make artistic capital out of the idea of Goethe in Italy ; Cy Twombly had marked out that territory just a few year’s beforehand. But what did they know or really care about him? More lightening, this time followed by heavy rain ,that streamed across the window to Giovanni’s left and thrummed down upon the fuselage. The plane was descending. Giovanni’s inner ears began to really hurt due to the changing pressure, as too perhaps did the baby’s, for it began to cry uncontrollably and intensely. Giovanni swallowed hard , trying to ease the pain.Somewhere below in the dark was Venice, a City that Giovanni loved as one should love one’s home, but that sometimes seemed to choke him. A City where Goethe had observed that its ”architecture rises out of its grave like a ghost from the past and exhorts me to study its precepts , not in order to practice them or enjoy them as a living truth, but, like the rules of a dead language in order to revere in silence the noble existence of past epochs which have perished forever”. It had been these words written by Goethe in his journal on 12 October 1786, that Giovanni had recently looked up again having been reading a short story called “Unguided Tour” by Susan Sontag ( something that he’d been prompted to do after seeing a film crew in Venice , up near the Arsenale, working on a scene for a movie that he’d been told was based upon it and that Sontag herself was directing), and had been struck by the phrase : ”I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.” On their own these two observations, insulated within their narrative settings, were compact and relatively inert, but uncoupled from their context and melding together in his mind they seemed to spark and reverberate, creating some form of new, third term between them, a more inchoate but more pressing, troubling and insidious thought deep within Giovanni , that left him ill at ease. What was it? Was it perhaps the sense that his endless chasing of the past through what remained of it in the present, his reverence for all that had survived in Venice and beyond but that was now (despite the efforts of Warhol, Twombly and the rest of their fellow high-end rag and bone pickers to rehabilitate , recontextualise and repurpose this residue ), seemingly forever excluded from a redemptive participation in a living history, however calamitous , was at root a complex , personal strategy to divert himself away from facing up to the seeming unattainability of him ever achieving a mature, mutual love and passion with another? Had he somehow managed to subdue the pain of this self-knowledge and active feeling of being beset by a profound form of unrequited love , but only by allowing himself to be possessed by another form of the unattainable? And was the sense of unrequited love that he was diverting himself from an unreciprocated love for another or, unnervingly ,for himself ? The plane landed. From somewhere towards the rear of the plane there was clapping. Giovanni folded up the sheets of paper and looked out of the window at the glimpses of grass and tarmac illuminated intermittently by the plane as it taxied to its berth, all the time hoping that the baby would start to calm down and the pain in his ears would ease. At the edge of Giovanni’s vision a rabbit, disturbed by the noise and light from the plane, bounded away into the impenetrable gloom, across a hard path [as in Mantegna’s Agony in the Garden].