Thought as Film. Fabio Mauri and the Relationship between Art and Cinema
by Laura Cherubini
‘ What is called thinking?’Martin Heidegger
From Fabio Mauri’s first Schermo (Screen) to the numerous films he presented as Proiezioni (Projections), it is easy to define the artist’s work as suffused by the cinema. The flagship example of this was Intellettuale (1975), in which Mauri projected the film The Gospel According to Matthew onto the living body of its director, his friend and first critic, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Mauri made his initial Schermo, a drawing on paper, in late 1957. At this time, European art was defined by the monochrome, a tangible demonstration of a desire to transcend the Informale through the practice of paring away, almost creating a structure of emptiness. Mauri also worked on highly rigorous monochromes. He wrote: ‘Monochrome, the act of painting a single colour on a surface (canvas or an object) is an imperative “reduction” of the conventional expressive space, of the world of imagination, to the art of painting.’ He continued, however: ‘The “screen” is not a monochrome; it’s two. So similar – indeed identical – to the monochrome, the screen is the second form or category in this field, practised consciously or otherwise, more frequently. It is not a monochrome. It does not strictly envelop the world within itself. Nor is it the material to which it is reduced. Minimal or boundless, the intent is to contain, to ‘veil’ … The screen is a complex statement presented as elementary.’
Mauri immediately grasped that the screen was the world’s new symbolic form.
In 1959, Appia Antica magazine published his first cancelled-out screen with the inscription ‘The End’. Of this longstanding series of works, Emilio Villa wrote: ‘The painter narrates a film made of such fragile material that it cannot withstand the touch of life, and is rapidly erased: and then that barely-restrained, irate gesture of the cross, as if to say: the end.’
Mauri’s entire body of work was permeated by the mindset of the screen. He created two works on chipboard with film, a screen with discs, and Autoritratto cancellato (Erased Self-portrait), a screen featuring a package of pasta (a little before he produced a wall-hung drawer packed with domestic objects), all of which he executed between 1957 and 1960. Cinema a luce solida(Solid Light Cinema) of 1968 was a crystallised outgrowth of the screen; Luna (Moon) (1968) was not only an attempt to traverse the lunar surface in a way other than contemplating its image, but marked the crossing of the screen’s threshold, as Mauri evolved at pace. Some of his titles signposted how things would move forward from here: All Quiet on the Western Front,
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev describes Mauri’s further works with screens: ‘After his first Disegno, in 1958–59, Mauri developed a series of small Screens with protruding parts, all of the same size (approximately 62 x 45 x 12 cm). The artist also addressed television, the physical object containing and revealing a flux of surrogate images in lieu of reality […] Mauri’s first works in this series were on sheets of extra-strong, A1-sized paper stretched over a protruding frame. Because when stretched the wet paper easily tore, the artist experimented with cardboard, before moving on to cotton canvas, finding that raw canvas retained a kind of paper-like transparency. On other occasions, he painted the canvas in white tempera. He added a rectangular shape with rounded corners, protruding from the top of each work, from the two-dimensional level of the frame, reminiscent of a screen’s edge. The paper or canvas in the lower portion of each painting was generally smooth and stretched. He referred to some Schermi as ‘Cinema Pockets’, because they sported a fold in the lower section.’
Interestingly, in the late 1950s, the artist also worked on highly rigorous monochromes, almost a structure of emptiness, and on object assemblages (Cassetto, 1959–60).
The screen’s potential to accommodate assemblages of elements of any kind became increasingly evident. He also began dividing his larger screens into a veiled upper portion and a lower portion filled with objects like 45-rpm records; he referred to these works as Targhe (License Plates), for their reference to roadside signage. By 1964, Mauri’s screens (Sinatra, for example) increasingly hosted figurative elements, becoming virtual spaces of possibility. He also continued to make screens with the inscription ‘The End’. ‘Because in my mind the screen had become a kind of witness to history, a kind of opaque mirror, albeit capable of retaining projections of the world, of containing them …’
Christov-Bakargiev commented: ‘The screen is indeed an empty container for every possible film, this screen where the projection has already taken place’,
Clearly, on one hand, Mauri fully participated in the general trend for monochrome; on the other, he transcended the moment, blazing a pioneering path through multifaceted work that paved the way for artwork on the nascent mediaverse. Not too far into the future, cinema, television, computers, our whole lives became channelled in screen format.
Discovering Solid Light
As we see in the artist’s Schermi (surfaces that virtually receive projections) and Proiezioni (showcasing the objectivity of the screen, or the world, as it takes on a mental proposition, moulding it to generate a third meaning), Mauri’s work is thoroughly imbued with the idea of projection. A later development of this concept can be found in Macchinaper forareacquerelli (Machine for Drilling Watercolours) (1994), in which a pantograph, essentially a machine for projecting, is used as a means to create a scaled-up projection of a work. Mauri made multiple projects in this manner, one involving two projectors, projecting against one another.
In his Pile a luce Solida (Sold-Light Torches) and Cinema a luce solida (Solid Light Cinema) of 1968, Mauri moved on to a crystallised extension of the light beam. With these works he rehabilitated Fortunato Depero, an artist erroneously considered at that time of lesser importance. Mauri was highly interested in the Futurists’ works: Depero and Giacomo Balla had sought to rebuild the universe. He was particularly interested in Depero’s solidified-ray light bulbs. The idea of imbuing light with substance also stemmed from the concept that all of the universe’s constituent components are real objects, includingthought, leading him to focus on the physicality of projection. One example was the lampshades that he designed for the ‘Arte-oggetto’ exhibition at Galleria La Salita, Rome, 1964: small screens resembling miniature cinemas, adorned with decalcomania images. ‘With a parallelepiped-shaped head, rounded edges and a long, triangular-section body, the projector has a vaguely anthropomorphic appearance, in addition to the idea of a machine suggesting the idea of a spectator. The beam of light forms an isosceles Perspex pyramid applied to the wall, the apex coinciding with the hole in the projector in front of it, illuminated from inside.’
Christov-Bakargiev wrote: ‘Developed in 1967/68 and exhibited in Rome and Milan in 1968, Pile and Cinema a luce solida provided the next chapter in the objectivisation of messages and, in consequence, the communications media. Much as the Schermo placed the viewer before the projection space or the Schermi-Targhe highlighted the beholder’s participation in the message, Pile and Cinema presented the beam of light used to create every projected image as a solid three-dimensional object, subtracting it from any presumed, communication-related neutrality. Like signs, like thought, like ideology, on which the artist would focus in the 1970s, light was heavy and cumbersome, a far cry from the utopian vision of technological and kinetic art in which it was perceived as a playful, liberating element. Mauri’s reflection radically opposes that vision like some massive boulder’.
1968 was a key year for Mauri’s works, not just because it was when the concept of luce solida took shape. During that watershed year, as part of an event that closed the curtain on one decade and opened the stage for the next, ‘Il teatro delle mostre’ (The Theatre of Exhibitions) – a showcase for installations and actions conceived by Plinio De Martiis – Mauri took viewers into the suspended and futuristic spatial environment of Luna, an irreversible, propaedeutic gesture for his later performances and projections.
Fabio Mauri, Luna, 1968.
Photo: Yuma Martellanz, Naples 2016
They Film Everything
For Mauri, until Pile and Cinema a luce solida, the ‘invasion’ of American Pop Art into the 1964 Venice Biennale had led to dwindling exhibition opportunities. The artist used the time to think long and hard about the values and specificity of European culture. Ahead of research trends, he alighted on ideology as the topic he should investigate to uncover the characteristic hallmark of European culture. Consumption and commodities typified American society; ours was identified not by an object but by the mental form of ideology. Performance, however, was the stylistic medium best suited to exploring the discourse of ideology. In 1971, at his first major group performance, Che cosa è il fascismo (What Fascism Is) provided a key pathway between his screens and performance-based practice as he gradually incorporated projections into his performances.
Manipolazione di cultura (Manipulation of Culture), a graphic work begun in 1971, is key to the artist’s understanding of the issue of ideology. It is divided into tripartite bands: the upper band is an image from Fascist and Nazi photographic archives; the middle part is occupied by a black field; the lower part contains a caption that, without revealing the plural, indeterminate subject, describes what is happening in the image above. Manipulating the manipulation, Mauri reveals the ideological mechanism at play. The myth of cinema had become increasingly central to the artist: the closing image in the book portrays director Leni Riefenstahl with a film camera. Referring to cinema’s role as a formidable Fascist propaganda weapon, the book concluded with the words ‘Filmano tutto’ (They film everything).
Neige
‘Mauri created Il televisore che piange(TheWeeping TelevisionSet) for RAI-TV, his only made-for-television work, in 1972. Apart from News from Europe/Vegetables (1978), it was his sole experiment in video art. Il televisore che piange is fundamental to understanding the deep relationship between Mauri’s 1950s semiological works and his ideological works of later years. Il televisore che piange is an imageless screen soundtracked with a sobbing human voice. It speaks of suffering in the media age, a time when the emotion of suffering is not generally present in our TV-conveyed virtuality, unnecessary as it is for screening sad films. The screen itself is a form of suffering, alienation, and discomfort.’
In 1975, Mauri revisited the theme in a sophisticated collage, Teatrino e ideologia, structured to resemble a television set. It’s worth noting that Fontana – an artist whom Mauri greatly admired – and his Teatrini also used the structure of this household appliance fast becoming an inseparable companion. Regardless of what was being broadcast, Mauri perceived television as a diminutive, ideological theatre.
In a rare foray into video, Mauri created News from Europe/Vegetables in 1978 in Vancouver, Canada: reality held more power for him than any fiction could. Il televisore che piange and News from Europe/Vegetables were the two significant exceptions in which Mauri used a then-new medium to convey his critical perspective on the communications system.
The World as Grand Projection
‘From the very start, I perceived the world as a vast, only partially deciphered projection. The screen is the symbol-object representing this state of affairs, our presence before reality … We cannot see all possible reality … We see portions of the world, portions our culture allows us to distinguish and perceive … On screen, humans depict figures, bodies, invisible thoughts and feelings … We see through screens, through the technology of cinema, photography, etc … The first screen I drew, a blank sheet of drawing paper with a black frame around it, became something other than itself. It became light and dark, a space with an absence of drawn marks; a smaller projecting screen (1958) resembled a television; a black monochrome, another projecting screen … The screen was an initial moment, a surface poised to welcome images and meanings.’
After the 1964 Venice Biennale American invasion, Mauri began reflecting on what was typically European: ‘We weren’t at the centre of consumer society, we lived on its outskirts … It gradually dawned on me that our equivalent to America’s Coca-Cola wasn’t in Europe some other object, it was ideology.’
The epiphany, for Mauri, was the enormous impact of history and ideology on our individual destinies. The screen continued to appear, sometimes in the form of the inscription ‘The End’, an opaque mirror, a witness to history. Cinema a luce solida, a crystallised extrusion of the screen, emerged from the physicality of projection (and Depero’s solidified ray bulbs), as did Pile a luce solida (1968), which Fabrizio Dentice described as ‘a simulacrum of a projector, a simulacrum of light beamed from lens to screen.’
The era of Mauri’s Proiezioni began in 1975. Oscuramento (Darkening) was a complex action that Mauri staged that year in three different locations in Rome, which he called ‘stations’. The first station was the Cannaviello Studio, where Miklós Jancsó’s film Red Psalm was projected onto the director’s body. About a late nineteenth-century peasant revolt in Hungary, narrated in a ritual-like musical rhythm, Red Psalm won the Best Director prize at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.
Station two was at the Rome Wax Museum, in an adjoining space to one containing wax effigies of participants in the last Fascist Grand Council, with singer Maria Carta nearby. Station three was photographer Elisabetta Catalano’s studio, where ‘war coffee’ was served (upon presentation of the ticket from the Wax Museum), and model Danka Schroeder and Gil Cagné danced to vintage songs. The windows were – as in wartime – blacked out, using portraits (this was, after all, an accomplished portraitist’s studio) of powerful politicians, ruthless dictators and unsettling figures like Franco Freda, who had been accused of the Piazza Fontana massacre. Viewers began by watching a projection, stepping back into history. Finally, with the alarming dangers of the present-day looming and besieging them from outside, they were incorporated into the story, in part by drinking the ‘ersatz’ coffee. Alberto Boatto described it as a Proustian madeleine – sipping the liquid and being plunged back into a polluted past, a baleful time – but added that it was in actual fact a ‘forward-looking return’. For Christov-Bakargiev, Mauri strove, through the ‘burning experiences of true historical memory’ to ‘involve the spectator’
A Sculpture of Flesh and Light
On 31 May 1975, Mauri projected the film The Gospel According to Matthew (1964) onto its maker Pier Paolo Pasolini, an artist, writer, friend
Mauri recalled: ‘I know the Bible and the Gospel quite well; it was one of my readings between the ages of twenty and twenty-seven. We were at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, which was showing an exhibition on French and international Dadaism. Because I thought my work bore no relation to what was going on inside, excellent as it was, I did the presentation just outside the Gallery.’
In January 2002, Mauri reenacted this historic performance at the Cineteca Nazionale in Bologna, featuring images taken at the 1964 event by Masotti, who had meticulously preserved all documentation. When examining the photographs, some of which Mauri had never seen before, the artist recalled: ‘Among the various characters, you can make out Francesco Leonetti, a close friend of Pasolini’s. We all worked on this little magazine, Il Setaccio, in Bologna together when I was fourteen years old.’ Leonetti had a role in the film because Pasolini frequently enlisted the help of friends. Indeed, Mauri appeared in Pasolini’s Medea (1969), despite declining several prior invitations, in the challenging role of King Pelias.’
Mauri projected film footage onto unique screens, subjects and objects that, through overlay and deformation, became imbued with new significance and meaning. He pointed out: ‘The very physicality of the luminous beam broadcast onto the screen-world is a metaphor for the birth and transformation of meaning, a model for the relationship between intellectual activity and reality.’
Titled Intellettuale, the segment starring Pasolini (after one with Jancsó) was subsequently restaged a number of times, the director’s white shirt serving as screen. Pasolini
It should be noted that the film has almost no dialogue and only a bare-bones script. As S. Murri wrote, ‘Stylistically, in Gospel, “cinematic” silence predominates – a blending of background noises, a wordless and pure sonic horizon, something that became an essential characteristic of Pasolini’s cinema as he gradually abandoned “dramatic” use of words in favour of the drama inherent to image.’
Naturally intertwining with history and art, the film references painting throughout: from casting lead Enrique Irazoqui for his resemblance to El Greco’s Christ (reality once again imitating art), to the primary reference, Piero della Francesca, whom Pasolini included among his influences, alongside Masaccio and the Ferrara workshop (‘a bit of Longhi’s taste, there’), the Salome dressed in a cultured double reference to Botticelli and Filippo Lippi’s frescoes in Prato, as well as paintings by Carlo Levi. Pasolini had studied with art historian Roberto Longhi,
‘Although Pasolini submitted with docility, without attempting to make any suggestions, one may sense a spirit deeply in tune with his own: reliving a simulation of the Passion of Christ on the flesh, revealing a connection with bodily physicality that exists in any artistic work (and which, as we have seen, Pasolini considered “equivalent to reality”.)’ writes Francesco Galluzzi.
Mauri described the operation as ‘an X-ray of the spirit’.
Ideology and Anthropology
In Mauri’s Proiezioni series, the screen serves as a contemporary symbol of a new liturgy, encapsulating eye, mind and world. In this series, he projected a number of different films onto a wide array of ‘screens’: human bodies, a bucket of milk, a fan, scales, bus windows …
In 1976, Mauri projected another Pasolini film, The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966) in the courtyard of a tenement building in Milan (Senza, Galleria Toselli, Via Melzo), seeking to superimpose the film’s substance onto signs of everyday life, turning the residents into spectators and image-providers. The choice of this film, which foregrounded a left-wing intellectual character, personified as a ‘Marxist crow’, during what critics
The Hawks and the Sparrows tells the story of Totò and Ninetto, two nomadic figures wandering in the outskirts of the city through suburbs, quarries and viaducts. Archetypes of the underclass, Totò and Ninetto encounter the crow (which ultimately doubles for Pasolini), voiced by Francesco Leonetti. As in Aesop’s fables, the speaking creature puts the key question to the two: ‘Where are you going?’ (translatable as ‘Where is the proletariat going?’). This question remains unanswered. Astutely, Gianni Biondillo
A macro-episode in the film occupies a third of the entire running time: the ‘Tale of the Crow’, in which Fra’ Ciccillo and Fra’ Ninetto preach to the hawks and sparrows. So important is this episode that its working title in this section of the screenplay became the title of the whole movie. The episode highlights the contrast between what Biondillo calls ‘the aberrant periphery’ and ‘noble Assisi’. To evangelize the sparrows, Fra’ Ciccillo kneels among the ruins of a small village. In Pasolini’s work, the poetics of the ruin had a special meaning: Rome was in a state of aggressive, chaotic growth, where evident displacement was underway: ‘And they stood there, melancholic after so many years amid the new buildings, as if lost in an oasis of forgotten pain’ – (Biondillo notes that Pasolini felt the same way: a ruined figure displaced in relation to the new, technology-led culture that was imposing its conformative values on what was fast becoming the former proletariat). The episode of the friars leaping about when they discover that sparrows communicate in jumps, was shot in the squalid desert of Rome’s outskirts (featuring for the final time in one of the writer’s films), where alongside the ruins, new ‘monuments to senselessness’ (Jean Starobinski), unfinished buildings, remained incomplete due to lack of funds, permit problems or judicial seizure.
In the end, Totò and Ninetto eat the presumptuous crow, a clear metaphor for assimilating its teachings. As Francesco Gullizi points out, ‘Quoting Giorgio Pasquali, Pasolini often said teachers are meant to be eaten with spicy sauce.’
Expanding this to an anthropological horizon was clearly indicated by projecting The Hawks and the Sparrows, Pasolini’s most ideological film, onto a working-class courtyard and its inhabitants. The effect was a kind of lockdown, however: rather than looking out, people shut their windows, protecting their privacy from this invasion of art, although some younger residents came down to watch as part of the audience.
As well as projecting The Hawks and the Sparrows outside a gallery in a courtyard, and in a billiards hall on a billiard ball, Mauri projected other films in a gallery setting: The Gospel According to Matthew on a shirt, Pabst’s Westfront on a fan, Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky on a milk bucket, and Dreyer’s Gertrud on a pair of scales.
With Intellettuale, in a certain sense Mauri had found a vocation for the kind of behaviour-based art that critic Achille Bonito Oliva had previously ascribed to Pasolini. By projecting The Hawks and the Sparrows, Mauri expanded that horizon to include anthropology, foreshadowing a trend to shift the gaze from actor to spectator, as well as taking art into the city and into people’s homes.
Light as Plot
Mauri began his complex series of Proiezioni works in the mid-1970s, on a variety of occasions with a variety of titles as the proiezione concept became increasingly central to his work. He pursued this series to understand how the mechanism of knowledge functions in the world, to decipher why we project a culture onto the world as a plastic externality. He was uninterested in light per se, the immaterial substance of projection; what interested him was what it could potentially convey. Projected onto the things of this world, not only did it illuminate them, it transformed them, turning us into spectators of the origin and metamorphoses of meaning.
The artist said: ‘Thought is light with plot, that is, a film. Projected onto a semi-new object, the world, a new hybrid is born. The process is a quasi-physical experiment on the birth of meaning and variation of sense.’ We may, in the Proiezioni, see a process of thought being plasticised. Ivan Barlafante suggests that we pay attention to the volume of the films, almost always turned up uncomfortably loud.
Part of Oscuramento, the first projection took place in Rome. On 9 December 1975, Mauri staged Senza ideologia at Teatro in Trastevere, in an eight-station layout conceived with Daniela Ferraria and Mara Coccia, a gallerist who very much believed in Mauri’s work. Savino Caronia sat in a black balaclava like a guerrilla in the atrium, Viva Zapata!
He raked his beams of light across the most varied backdrops: a working-class courtyard in Milan, a passing ship in Venice, a fan for Westfront, a milk bucket for the epic purity of Alexander Nevsky…
In Mauri’s own words, projections take place ‘on the dynamic of things’, whether the materials are fluid or airy (milk, wind, smoke …). Perhaps the most interesting of all were the scales, on which he projected Dreyer’s Gertrud, registering the weight of its image as an embodied after-effect of thought. How can a thought poison a room (as the title of a series of screens from 1972 with Gothic inscriptions asks)? Because it is physical it occupies space; it is a substance, poisonous or redemptive.
In Formazione del pensiero anarchico (Formation of Anarchist Thought) (1973), Mauri writes: ‘The language of art endows thought with objectivity and all appearance.’ Art is, therefore, the tool best suited to investigating the formation of thought, capable of rendering it concrete, solidified in practicality, as Mauri did with his luminous torch beams.
Intermezzo
Like Oscuramento, Dramophone (Studio Cannaviello, Rome, 1976) was a work in three stations. At the first station, a little dog sits in front of a gramophone, in evident reference to ‘His Master’s Voice’ records. Above this is a large drawing with a disc, as a ‘metaphor for the world already recorded’, as Mauri stated. At the second station, a basket of flowers stood in front of two large photos of the poet Valdimir Mayakovsky and the dictator Victoriano Huerta, while young men danced to revolutionary music, unsuspecting predestined victims of ideology.
At the third station, an actor plays the figure of ‘unwitting witness’: ‘Fjodor Chaliapin jr., son of the famous Russian bass, sitting on a flowered armchair from the artist’s Rome living room, a record player at his feet playing arias from Boris Godunov performed by his father … Bearing unwitting witness to the major international events of the twentieth century, the by-now-elderly Chaliapin told this and his own story: in 1910, he was a child at the Court of the Czars; in 1917, he witnessed the October Revolution, which he defines as ‘just a big accident’. In the 1930s, as an actor, he performed in Germany with Dietrich and in America with Garbo in Anna Karenina. After WWII, he permanently settled in Italy, and then after a layoff returned to the profession of acting.’
Notwithstanding his sincerity, the unreliability of this ‘witness’ was striking in terms of arriving at any kind of true understanding of the events through which he lived. Mauri told me that Chaliapin had experienced every historical moment of the century: he’d been in Nazi Germany, in New Deal America, had landed in Europe with the allies … all with total unawareness. The artist had been struck by this, and the fact that testimony is not judgement. Chaliapin (who later acted in the films The Name of the Rose and Moonstruck) talks about himself; his witness statements are true, but they are all personal history.
Living Flesh, the Artist becomes a Screen
News from Europe/Vegetables is a 23-minute colour film that premiered in September 1978 at the Western Front Society in Vancouver. I met Mauri that year, in 1978. He told me a lot about his stay in Canada, and the interest he’d found there in the language of video. When, many years later, I asked him why he had almost never turned his hand to making videos, he replied that he always preferred looking at what was around him rather than through the lens.
The video was divided into two parts. In the first, News from Europe, battle scenes from a silent film
This work developed out of earlier projections (1975) onto the body-screens of filmmaker friends Miklós Jancsó and Pier Paolo Pasolini. It also paved the way for Mauri’s astonishing lecture-projection-performance Ricostruzione della memoria a percezione spenta (Reconstruction of Memory When Perception is Off) (1988), an experiment in visualising thought on the author’s head.
‘When choosing which scenes from which film and author to use, the visualization of the artist’s role perpetually advanced “battles” with the world. In the second part, titled News from Europe/Vegetables, four young Canadian artists engage in dialogue with the artist, who expresses his thoughts on being a European. He states that he doesn’t believe in the values of youth, balance and happiness, which he considers surface appearance. In surprising, artificial shapes and colours, a number of vegetables sprout from the artist’s hands and mouth. Thoughts are like vegetables, their form regulated by the laws of gravity, taking on different forms for the very reasons the author identifies in the formula for errors in calculation and judgement scribbled on a blackboard.’
The video continues on Mauri’s shirt: a female hand presents vegetables and fruits for the artist to hold, like a saint’s identifying attributes (a rose, a lily, a jar of ointment). The hand writing out the mathematical formula (it would be interesting for a mathematician to study the equation, I numeri malefici and Insonnia per due forme contrarie di universo, both 1978) above the still life of the vegetables belongs to the shirtless Mauri, which ultimately scribes, ‘The End’.
The final question asked of Mauri in this video is whether he prefers ‘a clinic or a museum’. Expressing his personal love and hatred for Europe, the fundamental oxymoron underlying all dichotomies and antitheses on which his work rested and was built, the artist concludes: ‘It’s all the same: there’s nothing better or worse for him than Europe.’ The alternatives of his life really were the clinic and museum – illness or art; fortunately, the latter prevailed.
On the Street, in Motion and in Stillness
Although all the artist’s work engages profoundly with the public, only infrequently did Mauri have anything to do with what is known as ‘public art’. As Christov-Bakargiev wrote of a rare billboard work: ‘The only time Mauri created a work for the urban environment, the artist disregarded every single one of the conventions of advertising communication. Insonnia per due forme contrarie di universo [Insomnia for Two Opposite Forms of the Universe], part of the 1978 “N.d.R.” event organized by the “Uffici per l’immaginazione preventiva”, featured a road sign split in two: one side represented two physics formulae with their respective mathematical curves; the other side depicted a man’s face split in two.’
On the billboard’s left-hand side, two different models describe the physical universe: one in motion, one at rest. On the right, an ‘insomniac’ man is torn asunder by an impossible choice between the two models proposed. In contrast to standard advertising and billboard communication approaches, Mauri chose to intellectually engage passersby with a scientific and philosophical theme that touched on both physics and metaphysics, exhibiting an enigmatic and challenging image in a public space.
The canons of advertising and marketing demand essentiality, vividness and immediacy. What Mauri offered the man on the street, unversed in the subject, was a bifid, complex, intellectual image concealing more than it revealed, in yet another way challenging American Pop artists, many of whom were originally billboard painters. More commonly used to display a single image, the billboard ended up being split into four parts by vertical and horizontal dividing lines that disrupted the logic of advertising.
Catalano, Falasca and Benveduti installed the work in a billboard space near a bicycle shop on Via Portuense. When Mauri suggested reprising the installation many years later, he put a bike rack in front of the billboard, as if the image had dragged this piece of reality along with it.
‘The photograph of the divided face comes from an image in one of the artist’s Proiezioni: his projection of Dreyer’s film Gertrud onto paper as it emerges from a moving printing press. The two different sheets of paper struck by the projected image, serving as the screen for the projection, split the image at the break between the sheets. The artist projected the work in Toronto, Canada, shortly before creating the billboard for “N.d.R.”’
Mauri’s projections always targeted mobile, unstable or precarious screens, surfaces like the fan, the scales, or milk. The moving printing press produced an image in a state of simultaneous stillness and motion.
That same year, Mauri projected Eisenstein’s unfinished film Thunder Over Mexico
Fabio Mauri, Insonnia per due forme contrarie di universo, 1978.
Photo: Tonio di Carlo, Roma 1994
In a little-known projection, Senza titolo (Untitled), screened in 1983 in Capalbio to celebrate a wedding anniversary, Mauri’s choice of film was unexpected: ‘Gone with the Wind, which I projected onto a Tuscan garden for a wedding party, of which little remains in my memory (it was beautiful, a slope dotted with pine trees, Clark Gable on the right, on the first pine tree, kissing the girl six pines down: the kiss between distant pines was beautiful!).’ So Gone with the Wind
In 2002 Mauri also planned projections resembling an open-air cinema for Scalinata fantastica (Fantastic Staircase), designed with architect Aldo Ponis for the Roman district of Trastevere, but never realised.
On 6 June 1984, Mauri directed a piano concert at Teatro Montezebio, with music by Antonello Neri, accompanying a projection of Viva Zapata!. Entitled Toccata su figure ostinate (Toccata on Obsinate Figures), Mauri described it as ‘a concert for the eyes’.
In 1995, for ‘Fermata d’autobus’ (Bus Stop), an exhibition curated by Achille Bonito Oliva at the Flaminio ATAC Space conceived by Renato Mambor, Godard’sAlphaville
In 1996, Mauri received a highly sought-after invitation: Kerry Brougher included him (with Mimmo Rotella, the only other Italian) in a large exhibition to celebrate the centenary of cinema.
In the catalogue, Brougher writes: ‘In these works Mauri links each separate component of the cinematic experience into one sculptural unit connected by the cone of light; cinema is turned into a concrete object with physical ‘weight’ and rendered malleable, its monumentality and hypnotic essence, its view of the world, reduced to a tangible state primed for dissection.’
In 2005, Mauri presented Murato vivo (Walled-up Alive) at the La Nuova Pesa gallery in Rome, projecting Ballad of a Soldier
At this point, we should dwell on the type of film Mauri projected, often used to possess a body through celluloid.
Mauri’s citation of Leni Riefenstahl in Manipolazione di cultura was to show how formidable cinema had been as a weapon of propaganda. During the Second World War, a parallel cinematic war was fought out. Goebbels infused cinema with colour and endorsed big-budget productions like Kolberg, shot in 1943–44, conceived to compete with American blockbusters. Interestingly, Mauri designed (and prepared sketches for) an exhibition in Lille in 2003 to include a veritable battle between films, fought out through intersecting projectors. As he says, Linguaggio è guerra (Language is war); cinema is perhaps war too. In the event, only the words ‘The End’ were digitally projected in Lille.
Mauri also selected a number of movies about revolts and revolutions: Red Psalm, Viva Zapata!, Thunder Over Mexico and The Battle of Algiers. The Great Sioux Massacre may have been a reference to the extermination of the Jews, given the Star of David on the shoulder of the young man on whom it was projected. All were stories about pain, of which Mauri’s entire body of work spoke. On several occasions, he told me, ‘I went back and faced all that pain again.’
Metropolis and Alphaville are two examples of dystopian science fiction selected by Mauri. Both are set in a city of the future, Paris in the first, a magnified New York skyline in the second. In neither is the future benign. No utopias, these futures are generated and incited by fear.
Different as the menacing science-fiction film Aphaville may seem from Gertrud – a bourgeois epic drama – both movies revolve around a similar tension between rationality and sentiment. Gertrud in particular was a keynote Mauri film, presented multiple times in different works. A guiding work that revealed Mauri’s thought, it was capable of acting as a weight on the balance in the projection of 1975, as well as appearing in the works Insonnia per due forme contrarie di universo (1978), and Piccolo cinema with overturned seats in 2005 at the Fondazione Volume.
Inverosimile
At Hangar Bicocca, Milan, in 2007,
On entry, viewers found ‘flats’ (theatrical stage elements covered in black cloth) on the left, on which Mauri projected films like The Battle of Algiers.
The Bicocca work was the most radical outcome of a journey that had begun outside the screen, one that had taken us to the moon, crossed its threshold, and then back inside again, via projections. Despite having worked in the widest array of media (painting, installation, performance …) and, often far in advance of his time, focused on the most disparate of themes (ideology, cinema and other media, history, philosophy, religion, and war …), Mauri did not consider himself at all eclectic: ‘The fundamental enigma that has always interested me is life. I’ve always worked on one thing: language-based understanding of the world.’ This fundamental unity of purpose clearly and transparently emerges throughout his oeuvre, spanning many, multifaceted aspects underpinned by profound coherence. Paradoxically, this pioneer of relationships between art and cinema – a path commonly taken by contemporary artists today – did not turn to making films or videos as one the many forms in which his work became material. Mauri’s explanation for this would seem to suggest the highly eccentricgaze that motivated him to turn a local district into a theatrical backdrop: ‘I haven’t been a moviemaker because every time I look through a camera, I pull my eye away from the lens to look at what’s around me!’
Epilogue: Screen, the Final Metamorphosis
Towards the end of his life, Mauri returned to the idea of a modified screen with a series of Zerbini (Doormats) that were the final metamorphosis of this theme. These works reprisedand intensified his word-based practice that had begun with the first ‘The End’, with perhaps the transitional step being a work from 1994, bearing the words Questo quadro è ariano (This Painting is Aryan). Here, the gaze is directed to the floor. Much like his surface made of polystyrene in Luna, these doormats are to be walked on, to be experienced with every step.
We should not forget that in Che cosa è il fascismo the action took place on a rug, flooring that was transformed into the table that served as the stage for Che cosa è la filosofia (What Philosophy Is). The idea of working on the ground would come flooding back many years later, in 2007, with Inverosimile, when the end-purpose was not witnessing a projection but, rather, inhabiting it. Inverosimile is the last stop on the journey with Mauri, where the viewer is surrounded by images and immersed in an interplay of light, gesture, structure, projection and reflection. If the essence of Inverosimile is to live inside the image, the essence of Zerbini was to live inside thought.
In one of his last ever exhibitions, at the Auditorium (‘L’Universo d’uso’, Festival della Filosofia, Rome, April 2008), Mauri placed writings on the floor for the visitor to walk on; it was impossible when doing so to escape being enveloped by their meaning. In 2009, he had decided to exhibit some of his new Zerbini at the edition of documenta in Kassel, to which he had recently been invited by Christov-Bakargiev.
NOTES
Notes provide synopses, information and remarks on the films cited above. Films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mauri’s friend and frame of reference, are treated more extensively in the main body of this essay.
I would as always like to thank Ivan Barlafante, Claudio Cantelmi, Marcella Campitelli, and Sara Codutti for their unstinting assistance, many suggestions, and invaluable collaboration.
F. Mauri, ‘La miserabilità e l'arte’, in La Tartaruga, no. 5–6, March, Rome 1989, p. 79.
E. Villa, ‘Fabio Mauri’, in Appia, no. 2, January, Rome 1960, p. 19.
All Quiet on the Western Front, Lewis Milestone, 1930.Based on Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, the film effectively conveys a pacifist and anti-militarist message, telling the story of the horrors of trench warfare on the Franco-German front through the eyes of young German soldiers recruited after a professor’s enthusiastic speeches. In the final scene, Paul, played by Lew Ayres, is killed while trying to catch a butterfly. MGM would later fire Ayres in 1942: due to his pacifist beliefs, he refused to fight in the war.
This and other quotes from the artist are from conversations with the author of this essay at the Brera Academy in Milan on 22–23 November 2001, and 14 February 2002.
C. Christov-Bakargiev, ‘I prototipi: schermi’, in Fabio Mauri.Opere e Azioni, p. 81.
G. Dorfles, ‘I cinema a luce solida’ in Domus, no. 467, 1986, pp. 93–94.
C. Christov-Bakargiev, ‘Nello schermo: insonnia per diverse forme contrarie di universo’, in Fabio Mauri. Opere e Azioni, p. 23.
Ibid., p. 26.
F. Dentice, in L’Espresso, p. 83.
Red Psalm, Miklós Jancsó, 1971.In 1890s Hungary, peasants rebel and kill a Count. Soldiers initially appear to be on their side, only to massacre them. The director uses dance and song to celebrate this “revolutionary liturgy”.
C. Christov-Bakargiev, ‘Nello schermo: insonnia per diverse forme contrarie di universo’, in Fabio Mauri. Opere e Azioni, p. 19.
M. D’Alesio in Fabio Mauri. Opere e Azioni, p. 155.
F. Mauri, "Senza". Significati a me noti delle proiezioni su oggetti e corpi, in F. Mauri, Le proiezioni 1970-1978, La nuova foglio editrice - piano inclinato, Macerata; Galleria del Falconiere, Falconara, 1978.
See Marcella Cossu’s essay in Fabio Mauri. Opere e Azioni, p. 164.
S. Murri, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Editrice Il Castoro, Milan 1995, pp. 54–55. Moravia spoke of silenzio plastico.
See A. Marchesini, Citazioni pittoriche nel cinema di Pasolini (da Accattone al Decameron), La Nuova Italia Editrice, Florence, 1994, pp. 75–85.
G. Magaletta, La musica nell’opera letteraria e cinematografica di Pier Paolo Pasolini, Quattro Venti, Urbino, 1997.
Pasolini described himself as a lifelong student of Longhi, considering him the reason for his ‘figurative enlightenment’.
F. Mauri in Pier Paolo Pasolini. Figuratività e figurazione, exhibition catalogue (Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 1992), edited by D. Trombadori, Carte Segrete, Rome, 1992, pp. 69–70.
Ibid. On Pier Paolo Pasolini’s performance in Intellettuale, Giacomo Marramao wrote: ‘A man already condemned, like Christ, to a violent death that would occur shortly after.’ L’esperimento del mondo. Mistica e filosofia nell’arte di Fabio Mauri, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin, 2018, p. 20.
L. Micciché, Pasolini nella città del cinema, Marsilio, Venice, 1999, pp. 159–69. In 1995, Pierre Huyghe made a remake of The Hawks and the Sparrows titled Les incivils(Casting, Fac-simile, Milan).
Pasolini. Il corpo della città, Edizioni Unicopli, Milan 2001, pp. 76–78.
Viva Zapata!, Elia Kazan, 1952, based on John Steinbeck’s biography of revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata, played by Marlon Brando. Zapata fights for the rights of the peasants against corrupt dictator Porfirio Díaz. In the south, he and his brother Eufemio (Anthony Quinn) and Pancho Villa in the north join forces with reformist Francisco Madero. They overthrow Díaz, but when Madero takes his place, nothing changes. Madero trusts traitor general Victoriano Huerta (who appears in some of Mauri’s works), who has Madero imprisoned and assassinated. Eufemio becomes a petty dictator; Emiliano stays a rebel, true to the cause, but is eventually lured into an ambush and killed, giving birth to the legend. After this, the campesinos learn to fight their own battles. Frida Kahlo recalled, ‘I was seven years old during the Ten Tragic Days, I witnessed with my own eyes the struggle between Zapata’s peasants and the Carrancistas.’ That she declared she was born in 1910 rather than 1907 was certainly not to make herself appear younger; it was to align her birthdate with the revolution, as a way of identifying with it.
The Great Sioux Massacre, Sidney Salkow, 1965.A review of the myth that built up around General Custer, portrayed by Joseph Cotten, whose true story was told by two soldiers who survived the massacre at Little Big Horn.
Saint Joan the Maid, Marc de Gastyne, 1929. Canonised in 1920, the historical figure of Joan of Arc inspired many a film, of which Cecil B. DeMille made the first in 1916. Featuring an intense performance by René Falconetti, Dreyer’s film was released a year earlier, overshadowing the film by painter and set designer de Gastyne, whose 1929 film was graced by highly Pictorialist cinematography, and made extensive use of dissolves. Jeanne lives in the village of Domrémy, in Lorraine. She hears French soldiers telling tales against the English invaders. Shortly afterwards, a divine voice instructs her to go to the Dauphin to request an army. She sets off on her journey (first act). Leading an army, she recaptures Orléans (second act). Seized by the Burgundians, allies of the English, she is sold to the enemy. She is burnt at the stake in Rouen on 30 May 1431 (third act). Simone Genevois, who had previously played the role of teenage Pauline in Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927), played the starring role. She then quit cinema. She was sixteen years old, the same age as the real Jeanne; Falconetti was over thirty-five. The film survived in fragments. An incomplete reconstruction was assembled in 1983, opening with a text by Michelet. A new lens, later patented, was used for the battle scenes. The movie has been described as a Hollywood film with a soul. A precedent for Mauri’s projection took place at Galleria Punto Blu in Reggio Calabria, where, however, he used a back as a screen.
Westfront, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1930.A pacifist film focusing on the final months of the First World War. A German soldier experiences the horrors and futility of war. His return home offers little respite; the film ends with the soldier’s death. Three years after release, the authorities banned the movie. In the original edition, the word ‘fine’ was followed by a question mark.
The same image as in a portrait executed by Elisabetta Catalano.
Alexander Nevsky, Sergei Eisenstein, 1938.Recalling a historical episode from 1249, this grand, epic film was made with anti-Nazi intent. Prince Alexander Nevsky led the Russian army to repel an invasion of the Teutonic Knights in the Battle on the Ice. The battle scene is renowned for its abstraction and formal sophistication. Prokofiev composed the soundtrack.
Gertrud, Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964.The director’s final film was set in the upper echelons of early twentieth-century society in Stockholm. Gertrud is a former opera singer married to a wealthy lawyer poised to become a minister. The other men in her life are a former lover, a poet whom she left, and a vain young musician with whom she is in love. The husband becomes a minister, but Gertrud refuses to make any compromises. She leaves him, and heads to Paris to study with a doctor friend. Thirty years later, we find her living in the countryside without regrets. The husband represents the political and economic order, but the two artists are unable to escape the male order; Gertrud, who doesn’t belong to it, is the only one who is free. In the end, the words ‘Amor Omnia’ are written on her tomb. Although the film was not naturalistic, Dreyer used direct sound recording. Despite negative reviews at its December 1964 premiere in Paris, in 1968, Jean-Luc Godard said, ‘Gertrud is as full of madness and beauty as the late works of Beethoven.’
A similar operation took place in Toronto in October 1978, with a few variations, including Pasolini’s Medea, Delbert Mann’s All Quiet on the Western Front, reprising an anti-militaristic message, and Kenji Mizoguchi’sUgetsu Monogatari, in which soldiers murder a woman.
M. D’Alesio, ‘News from Europe/Vegetables’,in Fabio Mauri. Opere e Azioni, p. 186.
C. Christov-Bakargiev, Nello schermo: insonnia, p. 28.
See C. Christov-Bakargiev, note on Insonnia per due forme contrarie di universo in Fabio Mauri. Opere e Azioni, p. 189.
Thunder Over Mexico, Sergei Eisenstein, 1931–32.Mexico was very much in the news during this period, attracting not just political exiles but intellectuals from all over the world, from Mayakovsky to Artaud, Benjamin Péret, John Reed, Luis Buñuel, Edward Weston and Tina Modotti (almost all of whom were guests at Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s blue house). Soviet director Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein went to Mexico to make a film that would tell the story of Mexico (1931), working title ‘Que viva Mexico!’. He never finished the movie, although some of the material was reused in films and shorts. The original plan was to show a synthesis of Mexican history, from pre-Columbian civilisation to Spanish domination and the 1910 revolution, the century’s most important revolution after (even if it was chronologically before) the Soviet one. The story was split into a prologue, four episodes – Sandunga, a wedding; Maguey, the rebellion of three peasants against a landowner; Fiesta, a bullfight (in reality, these two central episodes cover the same situation from different perspectives, distinguishing between the viewpoints of landowners and peasants); Soldadera, an episode from the 1910 revolution (a popular revolutionary song, ‘Adelita’, referred to a soldadera: Frida Kahlo used the text in a painting) – and an epilogue. Eisenstein managed to film all parts of the movie except Soldadera between the autumn of 1931 and January 1932, before economic and other issues with ‘progressive’ producers Upton and Mary Craig Sinclair forced him to quit the set.
Metropolis, Fritz Lang, 1926. A city proud of its skyscrapers harbours a working class enslaved beneath the surface, toiling away. In this underground world, Freder, the dictator’s son, meets Maria, a young woman who is inspiring the workers to pray. The leader commissions a scientist to create a fake Maria to incite the workers to revolt. The real Maria saves the children; Freder persuades his father to reconcile. In the original ending, Freder and Maria were to depart on a spaceship, giving precedence to the futurism of science fiction. It was the first film to scrutinise capitalist exploitation, where the dictator/master represents capitalism and dictatorship, whereas Maria symbolises working-class hope. The film’s style blended Expressionism and Surrealism in its futuristic sets. Rather than adapting the book by Thea von Harbou (Lang’s wife), the script, structured like an opera, was written during production and published afterwards. In 1984, musician Giorgio Moroder created a new version with a rock soundtrack that, among others, included songs by Freddy Mercury. In 1927, Luis Buñuel hailed Metropolis as ‘the most beautiful book of images ever seen’.
Gone with the Wind, Victor Fleming (and George Cukor with Sam Wood), 1939.Based on a Margaret Mitchell novel that became the most famous love story in film history. Vivian Leigh plays capricious Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara, daughter of an Irish-American landowner. Scarlett is in love with the cultured and refined Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard), who out of affinity married her gentle and delicate cousin, Melanie (Olivia de Havilland). Against the encroaching backdrop of the American Civil War, which is about to turn her world upside down, Scarlett pursues her illusion of love, marrying two other men despite not loving them, and crossing paths with the unscrupulous if charming Rhett Butler (Clark Gable, in a role he initially turned down despite the fact that it was written specifically for him), who is in love with her. He becomes her third husband, though she only realises he is her true love at the end. As he leaves her, uttering the famous line, ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’, she dreams of winning him back, saying, ‘After all … Tomorrow is another day’. This timeless cinema classic won eight Oscars. According to Claudio Cantelmi, Mauri wanted to project it a few years later in Posillipo, as a wedding gift for Piera Leonetti, his partner’s daughter.
According to the curator, on Jeff Wall’s recommendation. The works exhibited were: Intellettuale. The Gospel According to Matthew, and thethree projections of Senza ideologia with Alexander Nevsky, Gertrud and Westfront. The Battle of Algiers was projected onto the ceiling. Both exhibition and catalogue delved into the relationship between art and cinema from the perspective of dismantling the dream factory: Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors, edited by Kerry Brougher, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, March – July 1996; The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, September 1996 – January 1997; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome June–September 1997; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, October 1997 - January 1998.
Ibid., pp. 95, 98.
Ballad of a Soldier, Grigory Chukhray, 1959.A film with a pacifist message and a remarkable sense of landscape, which received a special award in 1960 at Cannes, and was nominated for an Oscar for best screenplay, on which the director collaborated, in 1962). Young soldier Alyosha wins an award. The one thing he asks for is to be given leave, so he can visit his mother. After an adventurous journey, he merely has time to bid her farewell before returning to the war, from which he will never return. The film’s final words were: ‘He only had time to be a soldier.’
Mauri usually used Claudio Cantelmi as his assistant for projections and film research. In the 1970s, he would have rented projectors and films; by the late 1980s, when Marcella Campitelli and Claudio Cantelmi (both former students of Mauri’s at the L’Aquila Academy of Fine Arts, as was Ivan Barlafante) arrived at the studio on Largo Febo, there was only one projector, but the artist was on the verge of acquiring more. Not long after this, Mauri moved to a nearby studio on Via dell’Anima. The assistants made the move by hand, dragging the horse from Ebrea through the streets. Mauri was keen to own at least one copy of each film used in his Proiezioni (he had two of Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew). He sent Cantelmi to a 16mm-film rental store run by two elderly people near the railway station. With the film rental business in freefall, the owners sold up. Cantelmi assisted Mauri with Proiezioni from 1988–1989, starting with Ricostruzione della memoria a percezione spenta, until 1994, when the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome put on a major Mauri retrospective.
P. Virilio, Guerra e cinema. Logistica della percezione, Lindau, Turin, 1966.
Not Afraid of the Dark, Emergenze project, curated by B. Pietromarchi, Hangar Bicocca, Milan, 2007.
The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966.In 1957, clashes between French paratroopers and rebels holed up in the Algiers Casbah turned bloody. Pontecorvo shot the film in Algiers during the Algerian War, with local government support. All actors except Jean Martin were non-professionals; Yacef Saadi was a real fighter. Pontecorvo was also contracted to personally oversee the music with Ennio Morricone and Morricone’s, drummer. Quentin Tarantino reused the soundtrack in Inglourious Basterds.
Some of the Zerbini were in fact exhibited posthumously in 2012 at dOCUMENTA(13).
Insolubile, Galleria Martano, Turin, 2008.