Giovanni Muro (e) -“Il Choido di ferro e la storia Persa" ; 1979- the break-through

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 . In late 1978 , as a consequence of Romano Chirivi’s and the IUEV’s earlier proposals for a massive redevelopment of Venice’s entire Castello area , plans were discussed for a radical re-development of the Arsenale in Venice, still designated as military property, although in practice largely abandoned. Sensing a potential calamity , one of the environmental groups that Giovanni was a fringe member of , decided to stage an event to raise awareness of the issue with the wider community. As part of the group’s planning , the idea was developed to create an “ Intervention of Art”, with artists responding to or celebrating the Arsenale’s status as a site of proletarian endeavour and sacrifice. With that in mind some half dozen group members and a couple of undergraduates from the Arts faculty of one of Venice’s universities ( although in years to come it would appear that many more thought that they had somehow been there as well),including Muro, broke into the Arsenale one bright Winter’s morning and sought to find in that act of trespass something tangible and creative to offer up for the Intervention. Muro had his camera and over a couple of hours , before he and two other group members were cornered by the police ,took a series of photographs , including of close-up images of nails embedded in the rotting plaster. Having been questioned earlier in the year over the Uriburu 10 th anniversary Grand Canal commemoration ( see “Giovanni Muro (c)), Muro was now seen by the police as a problem agitator and was detained over- night as a lesson before being released. Fortunately Muro was able to retain his camera and film rolls and his detention was seen by the group as a sign that their cause was just and they were being effective in putting pressure on the authorities through their actions. Muro was subsequently one of the exhibitors and, after his arrest, participants , at the exhibition and day of “co-ordination and discussion”. For his display , made up of 14 photographs of the wall nails ,there was a testament typed up as a hand-out, the text of which was as follows: “Il Choido di ferro e la storia persa People of Venice : our buildings, our shadows, our very sun , have all been appropriated, elided, substituted, sacrificed in the name of art. For what? To substitute a living, complex City for a simulacrum, a sun-lit or moon-illuminated confection; to produce innumerable studies and works of "Art" that for those who care to truly look at the physical record are merely depictions of the City as palimpsest, its unique rhythm and formation forgotten in favour of an inchoate but "pleasing" version of the present : "la Serenissima” factory-processed as branded baby food and spoon-fed to the masses. Canaletto ,Turner and Monet each stand accused and guilty , while Ruskin for all his academic pretensions, merely fed off the surface , ignoring the blood, toil and communal (and sometimes factional) industry that made all that we see. Even our modern masters, those imperial visitors from the United States and Britain , stand accused of painting our City into the past . Today we need to open our eyes, using the aperture of the camera lens ,and see the traces of our true , proletarian past in the survivals of the present. At the Arsenale we need no myth of Vulcan’s forge: our ancestors made their own nails, with fire, ore and drawing wire. People were scarred, burnt, damaged. But the ships were built. Now most of those nails have been lost with the ships they helped manufacture: sunk in the depths ,rotted in water and mud or dismembered in a breaker's yard. But some of these nails survive; not hammered into the sacred wood but hammered into the now aged brick and plaster walls of the Arsenale's wharfs , warehouses and assembly yards, precious reminders of the redemptive sacrifices of our Venetian ancestors who worked there over many centuries. These nails are one of our City’s relics and should be as treasured , as the Rialto bridge or St Marks itself. Maybe more, for these nails, these opera mundi, are ours and ours alone .” Although the testament and ,indeed , the photographs were not to everyone’s taste ,it happened that the art’s editor of one of Italy’s more socialist newspapers was at the event and did like what he saw and decided to write a feature on Muro’s photographs, borrowing liberally from the hand-out . This led in turn to the photographs being exhibited more formally in early ‘79 in one of the palazzos set back from the grand canal and Muro being invited to participate in a number of the numerous conferences on “art and Intervention” held in largely university Cities across northern Italy in the febrile political atmosphere of 1979. Due to the continuing economic problems nothing came of the re-development plans for the Arsenale, but one tangible consequence of Muro’s Intervention was that when many years later the Arsenale’s buildings were in fact , sympathetically, re-developed , largely as exhibition space for the Biennale, it was a condition of that project that the nails should not be touched ( despite claims that they were at most a hundred years old and had been industrially produced in a factory many miles from Venice). Accordingly Muro’s nails can still be seen today jutting out from the sand-blasted brick pillars and walls. On this board are 8 of the original series of 14 images, as no print is known to survive of numbers 4, 5, 8, 9, 10 and 13.