Giuseppe Chiari (26 September 1926–9 May 2007) was an
Avant-Garde
The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical ...
Florentine
conceptual artist
Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art, sometimes called instal ...
and
experimental music
Experimental music is a general label for any music or music genre that pushes existing boundaries and genre definitions. Experimental compositional practice is defined broadly by exploratory sensibilities radically opposed to, and questioning of, ...
ian active in
Neo-Dada
Neo-Dada was a movement with audio, visual and literary manifestations that had similarities in method or intent with earlier Dada artwork. It sought to close the gap between art and daily life, and was a combination of playfulness, iconoclasm, a ...
circles, specifically the
Fluxus
Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product. Fluxus ...
art movement. Chiari was a supporter of
intermedia
Intermedia is an art theory term coined in the mid-1960s by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe various interdisciplinarity art activities that occur between genres, beginning in the 1960s. It was also used by John Brockman to refer to works ...
work conducted between music, speech, gesture and image.
Life and work
Giuseppe Chiari was born in Florence, Italy on September 26, 1926. In Florence he devoted himself to studying
piano
The piano is a stringed keyboard instrument in which the strings are struck by wooden hammers that are coated with a softer material (modern hammers are covered with dense wool felt; some early pianos used leather). It is played using a keyboa ...
and music composition in parallel with studies in mathematics and engineering (1946–51).
He is an exponent and main promoter of the group of ''Florentine artists'', operating from the end of the Second World War to today including
Sylvano Bussotti
Sylvano Bussotti (1 October 1931 – 19 September 2021) was an Italian composer of contemporary classical music, also a painter, set and costume designer, opera director and manager, writer and academic teacher. His compositions employ graphic n ...
,
Daniele Lombardi
Daniele Lombardi (Florence, August 12, 1946 - Florence, March 11, 2018) was a composer, pianist and visual artist.
Biography
He is an exponent and main promoter of the group of ''Florentine artists'', operating from the end of the Second World ...
, Giancarlo Cardini,
Albert Mayr
Albert Mayr (born 1943 in Bolzano) is an Italian composer of experimental and contemporary music. He studied music and composition in three different cities: at conservatories in both Bolzano and Florence and at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in Ger ...
,
Pietro Grossi
Pietro Grossi (15 April 1917, in Venice – 21 February 2002, in Florence) was an Italian composer pioneer of computer music, visual artist and hacker ahead of his time. He began experimenting with electronic techniques in Italy in the early sixt ...
,
Marcello Aitiani
Marcello Aitiani (Castrovillari, 1951) is an Italian painter and composer. He has carried out musical and classical studies. Graduated in Law, at the same time he dedicated himself to research in the field of visual arts and music, and telematic ...
e
Sergio Maltagliati
Sergio Maltagliati (born 1960 in Pescia, Italy) is an Italians, Italian Internet-based artist, composer, and visual-digital artist.
His first musical experience with the Gialdino Gialdini Musical Band was in the early 70s.
Biography
Sergio Ma ...
. These musicians have experimented the interaction among sound, sign and vision, a synaesthetics of art derived from historical avant-gardes, from Kandinskij to futurism, to Scrjabin and Schoenberg, all the way to Bauhaus.
He was especially drawn to the work of
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading fi ...
, and himself began to take an interest in promoting experimental research in visual music in 1961. In 1962, at the Fluxus Festspiele internationale Neuester Musik in Wiesbaden, he joined the
Fluxus
Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product. Fluxus ...
group, taking on the role of artist-composer-philosopher. Among his writings are: Music without counterpoint (1969), Untitled (1971), Mother Music (1973); Teatrino (1974) Art (1974), Method for playing (1976); Aesthetik (1984), Doubt harmony (1990) and Music (1994).
Chiari made what he called "action music" based on a complex method of execution and traditional instruments: music that takes as its essential element
random
In common usage, randomness is the apparent or actual lack of pattern or predictability in events. A random sequence of events, symbols or steps often has no :wikt:order, order and does not follow an intelligible pattern or combination. Ind ...
sounds (water, dry leaves, stones). His work “Giuocare con l'acqua e dire la parola acqua” (“Playing with water and saying the word water”) is quite remarkable for both the transformation of the pages of the script into an aesthetic object, and the clarity and rigour of the texts that preludes to the later production of statements typical of
conceptual art
Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art, sometimes called insta ...
. His Work ''Fogli pentagrammati'', 1975, is in Museo cantonale d'arte of
Lugano
Lugano (, , ; lmo, label=Ticinese dialect, Ticinese, Lugan ) is a city and municipality in Switzerland, part of the Lugano District in the canton of Ticino. It is the largest city of both Ticino and the Italian-speaking southern Switzerland. Luga ...
.
Museo cantonale d'arte, Lugano: Giuseppe Chiari
/ref>
Chiari experimented with different visual mediums: from painting-collage
Collage (, from the french: coller, "to glue" or "to stick together";) is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. ...
s, sheet music
Sheet music is a handwritten or printed form of musical notation that uses List of musical symbols, musical symbols to indicate the pitches, rhythms, or chord (music), chords of a song or instrumental Musical composition, musical piece. Like ...
, and photographs. His graphic and pictorial work is partially preserved at the International Centre of Contemporary Art Tornabuoni in Florence.
Bibliography
*A. Bonito Oliva, Il territorio magico. Comportamenti alternativi dall'arte, Firenze 1972
*Giuseppe Chiari e la teoria dell'arte in Fluxus, a cura di E. Pedrini, Napoli 1992
*H. J. Wagner, Giuseppe Chiari, in ''Komponisten der Gegenwart
The ''Komponisten der Gegenwart'' (KDG) is a music encyclopedia in German language about composers of the 20th and 21st century. It is a looseleaf service with information on currently about 900 composers.
Editors
Hanns-Werner Heister and Walter ...
, edited by H. W. Heister, W. W. Sparrer, Munnich 1992
*L. Vinca Masini, Giuseppe Chiari, Firenze 1993.
See also
*Performance art
Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...
*Happening
A happening is a performance, event, or situation art, usually as performance art. The term was first used by Allan Kaprow during the 1950s to describe a range of art-related events.
History
Origins
Allan Kaprow first coined the term "happen ...
s
*Fluxus
Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product. Fluxus ...
*Intermedia
Intermedia is an art theory term coined in the mid-1960s by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe various interdisciplinarity art activities that occur between genres, beginning in the 1960s. It was also used by John Brockman to refer to works ...
*Experimental theatre
Experimental theatre (also known as avant-garde theatre), inspired largely by Richard Wagner, Wagner's concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, began in Western theatre in the late 19th century with Alfred Jarry and his Ubu Roi, Ubu plays as a rejection of bot ...
*Avant-garde
The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical ...
References
External links
Archivio Conz
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chiari, Giuseppe
1926 births
2007 deaths
Fluxus
Mass media theorists
Postmodern artists
Italian contemporary artists
Italian conceptual artists
Experimental composers
Male classical composers
20th-century male musicians