Giuseppe Chiari

Giuseppe Chiari was born in Florence on 26 September 1926. He graduated in Engineering while studying piano and composition privately. In 1950 he began composing on rational and mathematical bases. In 1960 he was one of the co-founders, with Pietro Grossi, of the association Vita Musicale Contemporanea, chaired by the physicist Giuliano Toraldo di Francia and sponsored by, among others, Sylvano Bussotti and Heinz Klaus Metzger; the latter introduced him to the international avant-garde. With Bussotti he organised the travelling exhibition Musica e segno (Galleria Numero, Rome, and Creative and Performing Art Center, Buffalo) in 1962.

In September 1962, Frederic Rzewski performed his work Gesti sul pianoforte at the Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik in Wiesbaden and, following the publication of La strada (1965) edited by George Maciunas, Chiari's name became inextricably integrated into the activities of the Fluxus group. In 1963, again Rzewski performed his action music work Teatrino at New York's Judson Hall during the First Avant Garde Festival organised by Charlotte Moorman.

In the same years, Chiari began collaborating with the magazine 'Marcatré', which counted composer Vittorio Gelmetti among its editors for musical content. During this period, Chiari also forged important alliances with other leading exponents of the avant-garde music scene, including Jon Phetteplace, Alvin Curran, Richard Teitelbaum - who, with Rzewski, formed the improvisation group Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) -, Steve Lacy and Cornelius Cardew, with whom he performed in several concerts.

In 1963-64, he participated in the founding of Gruppo 70 in Florence, with the visual poets Sergio Salvi, Lamberto Pignotti, Eugenio Miccini, Lucia Marcucci, Luciano Ori and the painters Antonio Bueno and Silvio Loffredo; he took part in the conferences Arte e comunicazione and Arte e tecnologia held at Forte Belvedere, and helped to organise the group's first collective exhibition, Tecnologica, at the Quadrante Gallery in December 1963.

From 1964, Chiari's activity entered a new phase: the performance of himself and his works in order to achieve a radical demystification of the existing divide between author, actor and listener. As a logical extension of this performative practice, from 1965 onwards he began to develop various Methods for Playing, which included methods for playing the piano, guitar, water, rattles, bells, stones, video cameras or for playing by breaking. Each method starts from objective considerations about the nature of instruments, objects and available matter, and reciprocally reverses their functions: concrete materials without a specific function take on a musical function; objects without a musical function are treated as if they were matter, without function, or as musical instruments; musical instruments are treated as if they were matter or objects without a musical function.

Starting from this position, Chiari extended his behavioural reflection to the deconstruction of the use of media (Video Concert, TV Happening), to the analytical relationship with the environment in its domestic declinations (from Suonare la stanza to Concerto per luci in the 1990s) and to urban and social planning declinations (Suonare la città that debuted during the Campo urbano event in Como in 1969). The prominence of graphic signs in his scores, as an expedient to define the processual and non-deterministic logic of his music, did not go unnoticed by John Cage who included Chiari in his monumental anthology Notations published in New York in 1969 by Something Else Press.

Parallel to his performance practice, in the early 1970s Chiari undertook a fertile, and since then uninterrupted, series of exhibitions, including solo shows in the following galleries: Milano (Milan, 1970), Il Centro (Naples, 1970), Toselli (Milan, 1971 and 1973), LP 220 (Turin, 1972), René Block (Berlin, 1973); he also participated in major international exhibitions - Venice International Art Biennale (1972, 1976, 1978), Documenta 5 (Kassel, 1972), Contemporanea (Rome, 1974), Projekt 1974 (Cologne, 1974) - thus establishing himself on the European conceptual art scene.

From 1972 onwards, the hallmark of Chiari's work became clearly defined as the production of 'statements' marked in very large letters on various media and using different techniques (Indian ink, felt-tip pens, chalk, stamps).

In 1976 he participated in the Venice Biennale in the section International News 1972-76, where he presented the performance entitled La confessione. In 1978 he was again invited to the Italian section of the Biennale, where he wrote in chalk on the wall 'Art is a little thing'. In 1982 he took part in the exhibition 1962 WiesbadenFLUXUS 1982 in Wiesbaden, a celebration of the Fluxus group's 20th anniversary. In June 1983 he presented the anthological exhibition Music is Easy (Works 1963-1983) at the Salone Villa Romana in Florence, and in 1984 he was invited for the fourth time to the Venice Biennale in the section Art, Environment, Scene, where he showed a videotape. In the same year, he published the multilingual book Aesthetik with Edition Copie in Hannover. Among the numerous personal and anthological exhibitions that followed, the most important are Extra, Galleria Vivita, Florence, 1986; Giuseppe Chiari. Opere 1962-1986, Galleria Milano, Milan, 1986; Chiari, Centro Culturale Belvedere, San Leucio (Caserta), 1987; Viva, Studio Leonardi, Genoa, 1988. The group exhibitions that followed: Happening & Fluxus, Galerie 1900-2000, Paris, 1989, and Ubi Fluxus ibi motus, Ex Granai della Repubblica alle Zitelle, Venice, 1990 (Edizioni Mazzotta) consecrated him as the most respected Italian representative of the Fluxus movement.

Extensive reviews of his visual production have been presented in numerous exhibitions, including: Musica Concettuale, Palazzo Rocca - Spazio Multimediale per l'Arte Contemporanea ex Chiesa di San Francesco, Chiavari, 1996; Collage, Rocca di Umbertide - Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea, Umbertide (Perugia), 1996; Una canzone, B&D Studio Contemporanea, Milan, 1997; Bianco e nero, Prato, 1998. In 1999 he published a book of sentences: Sentences on the occasion of his solo exhibition at Galleria Martano in Turin. Other important retrospective exhibitions followed (Musica et cetera, Palazzo Fabroni, Pistoia, 2000-2001; Quit Classical Musik, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, 2001; Le scelte trasgressive, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome, 2005; Mi hanno cercato, Galleria Il Ponte, Florence, 2006), as well as its regular inclusion in all major group exhibitions dedicated to the Fluxus movement, not least the exhibition celebrating the group's fiftieth anniversary, Fluxus at 50, hosted by the Museum Wiesbaden in 2012; Thing/Thought: Fluxus Editions, 1962-1978, MoMA, New York, 2011-2012.

Giuseppe Chiari died in Florence on 9 May 2007