UNE PARTITION DE GIUSEPPE CHIARI
A score by Giuseppe Chiari

UNE PARTITION DE GIUSEPPE CHIARI
A score by Giuseppe Chiari

While it is difficult to confirm the exact identity of this work as it bares no inscription, signature, or accompanying documentation, however stylistically and contextually the image may well be a score by Giuseppe Chiari, the Florentine composer, philosopher and sole Italian member of Fluxus. For Chiari the photograph was not merely documentation of art but art itself. Chiari's practice was built on the dissolution of boundaries between music, gesture, image and body, and he returned repeatedly to the female figure as his primary subject. His 1968 performance Don't Trade Here in Berlin, for instance, explored the sonorities of a young woman's body, and his score Per Arco, performed by cellist Charlotte Moorman in Valpolicella in the early 1980s, was published as a portfolio of photographs, confirming that for Chiari, a photograph of a body in relation to an instrument could function as a fully realized score. The halftone printing style of the image in this box is entirely consistent with Fluxus offset production of the late 1970s, while its subject matter, a woman, an instrument, an erotic charge, with no conventional musical notation in sight, fits squarely within Chiari's documented aesthetic.

Giuseppe Chiari (attributed)

Offset halftone photograph on paper

Artist multiple; photographic score; printed matter