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: Theoretica ...

Florentine conceptual artist 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 work ...

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, Giancarlo Cardini, Albert Mayr,

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 e Sergio Maltagliati. 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 f ...

, 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

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 order and does not follow an intelligible pattern or combination. Individual ran ...

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 ins ...

. His Work ''Fogli pentagrammati'', 1975, is in Museo cantonale d'arte of

Lugano Lugano (, , ; lmo, label= 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. Lugano has a populat ...

.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 (art), assemblage of different forms, thus creat ...

sheet music Sheet music is a handwritten or printed form of musical notation that uses musical symbols to indicate the pitches, rhythms, or chords of a song or instrumental musical piece. Like its analogs – printed books or pamphlets in English, ...

, 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 Walte ...

, edited by H. W. Heister, W. W. Sparrer, Munnich 1992 *L. Vinca Masini, Giuseppe Chiari, Firenze 1993.

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

Life and work

Bibliography

See also

References

External links