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THE DIRECTOR WHO BECAME THE SCREEN.FABIO MAURI, PIER PAOLO PASOLINI, ANDINTELLETTUALEMarco Senaldi

Dedicated to Italian artist Fabio Mauri,who died in Rome, May 20th, 2009, age 83,

leaving all of us with a lot of questions without answers.

On May 31, 1975, the artistic performance Intellettuale took place during the opening of the newGalleria dArte Moderna in Bologna, Italy. It was a historical performance by Italian artist FabioMauri (1926-2009) which soon become a sort of myth of Italian art and cinema in the following

decades, and even appeared on the front cover of Italian cinema journals such as Cineforum.

To give a brief summary of this performance, Pier Paolo Pasolinis film, Il Vangelo secondo Matteo(1964), was projected on the living body of Pasolini himself, a close, childhood friend of Mauri. The whiteshirt worn by Pasolini who was seated on a high chair, served as a screen for the moving images. Mauriemployed a real cinematographic projector and a copy of the film in 16 mm (as he usually did in hisinstallations). This, along with the fact that the lights were turned off, transformed the gallery space intoa sort of movie theatre. In contrast to the reduced size of the screen, the volume of the soundtrack wasaugmented a detail that increased the audiences, and, above all, Pasolinis disorientation. The lattersaid that he was not able to follow his film, because of the gap between images and sound, and because ofhis position with respect to the projector, whose light beam struck him from an unusual position. Years

later in a 1985 article (now included in the anthology, Scritti in Mostra), Mauri said that during the per-formance, Pasolini assumed an expression of suffering and became rigid in a hard spasm, but at theend he said thanks to me for the opportunity I gave him to rethink himself inside his own work.1

To fully understand the meaning of this enigmatic performance, it is necessary to take a step back.In fact, this was not the first time that Mauri projected movies on objects or living people. A monthbefore, on April 8, 1975 in Rome, Mauri released the performance Oscuramento, in three differentparts that took place in three different locations. As it is easy to understand for an Italian speakingperson, the word oscuramento has to do with obscuration, obfuscation, or lack of light but alsowith the practice (dating back to World War II) of turning all lights off, in order to avoid to be identi-fied, during the US and UK Air force bombing on Italian cities. Oscuramento was a re-enacting of a

dramatic World War II experience and, at the same time, a reversal of the light-projection on whichcinema itself is based. The performance began at six in the evening, at the private art gallery Studiodarte Cannaviello. The first part ofOscuramento called the intellectual part, consisted in the projec-tion of Hungarian director Mikls Jancss film,Red Psalm (Mg kr a np, 1971), on the torso of Janc-s himself in a semi-obscured room a clear anticipation ofIntellettuale.

However, Mauri had worked on the theme and the role of the screen since the beginning of his artis-tic career at end of the 1950s in the Schermi series. This series first piece is a simple 50x70 cm sheet ofpaper framed by a black strip, so as to specify the role of the sheet/canvas as a possible screen for a vir-tual/possible projection. Later, he employed the technique of jutting out the canvas, to provide a thirddimension to the two-dimensional painting as if the canvas had conquered a new dimension inbecoming a screen. And, at the beginning of the 1960s, Mauri continued the cinematic metaphor,

introducing the words Fine/The End at the very centre of this framed image, as if the painting werethe last frame of a real film. This same theme can be found again in one of his most famous perfor-

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Fig. 1 Fabio Mauri, Intellettuale, 1975, Il Vangelosecondo Matteo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, GalleriaComunale dArte Moderna, Bologna. Photo: Anto-nio Masotti. Courtesy Studio Fabio Mauri.

Fig. 3 Fabio Mauri, Intellettuale, 1975, Il Vangelosecondo Matteo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Galleria

Comunale dArte Moderna, Bologna. Photo: Anto-nio Masotti. Courtesy Studio Fabio Mauri.

Fig. 2 Fabio Mauri, Intellettuale, 1975, Il Vangelosecondo Matteo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, (the poetFrancesco Leonetti as Kaifa), Galleria ComunaledArte Moderna, Bologna. Photo: Antonio Masotti.Courtesy Studio Fabio Mauri.

Fig. 4 Fabio Mauri, Intellettuale, 1975, Il Vangelosecondo Matteo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, (Fabio Mauriand Pier Paolo Pasolini) Galleria Comunale dArteModerna, Bologna. Photo: Antonio Masotti. CourtesyStudio Fabio Mauri.

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mances, Che cosa il fascismo (1971), a choral performance, first released in Rome, at Stabilimenti SafaPalatino, an industrial warehouse that is very famous in Italy because it was used during the fascistera as film studios. Often repeated and re-released during the following years, Che cosa il fascismoremains one of the masterpieces of Italian political art. In the huge space of those studios, Mauri re-enacted a typical fascist propaganda manifestation, with a sports competition, ideological choreography

and fascist paraphernalia. Fascist propaganda documentaries that the Istituto Luce (founded by Mus-solini in 1924, under the motto Il cinema larma pi forte Cinema is the mightiest weapon) hadmade were projected on a wall screen. The words The End, depicted on this screen, remained visiblebehind the moving images, and retained their prophetic meaning. Clearly, fascism (as all totalitari-anisms) soon arrived at its own End with World War II. In another sense, fascism was the very Endof Western ideology, the very decline of the West (to quote the famous essay by Oswald Spengler).

From the mid-1970s onwards, the desire to give a thickness to images lead Mauri to devise theProiezioni series. On December 9, 1975, Mauri gave Senza ideologia, a performance in 8 parts. Here, heused real objects and people as screens, and projected films such as Elia Kazans Viva Zapata! (1952) onthe naked back of a sitting boy, Carl Theodor DreyersLa Passion de Jeanne dArc (1928) on a naked blackgirl, Dreyers Gertrud (1964) on a balance, Sergei EisensteinsAlexander Nevsky (1938) on the white sur-face of a bucket full of milk, and Georg W. Pabsts Westfront 1918 (1930) onto the moving blades of a fan.

Quite obviously, Mauri was not the first to project images on objects or living bodies. Man Ray inhis Self Portrait (1963), recalls a party (dating back to the 1920s) during which he projected movies byGeorges Mlis on the white shirts of guests. In more recent times, referring to French Lettrism andSituationism movements, Fredric Devaux, in his Le Cinma lettriste,2 quotes MarcO (nickname ofMarc Gilbert Guillaumin)s ideas of moving screen, double screens, coloured screens and so on, pub-lished in the only issue of the Lettrist journal, Ion.3 The famous Lettrist leader, Maurice Lemaitre,with his Un soir au cinma, released at the Cinmathque Franaise in Paris in 1962, claims to havebeen the first to have projected a film on the audience. The film was partly projected on his own body.

A remarkable detail is the use of the expression cran vivant.4And it is well known that the idea ofliving projection was extensively employed by Robert Whitman in his happening/art action Prune Flat(1965), and shortly after by Andy Warhol in hisExploding Plastic Inevitable Show (1966-1967), as partof the music group, The Velvet Undergrounds scenography.

Nonetheless, Fabio Mauris work is quite different. In those beautiful installations/performancesthere is a gap, an asymmetry between images and the surface/support on which they are projected.They have a pictorial value, or a theatrical one (Whitman), but they are not directly linked to thescreen (as in cinema). Lettrists here went far beyond this point, because they considered cinema to bea cultural form, and the audience as part of this form. Thus, they projected images on the spectators(or even on the directors) in order to engage them as an active element of the spectacle. On the otherhand, as the Lettrists themselves often stated, Lettrist cinema was a cinema cisel (chiselled) whosefilm was practically scratched, destroyed, devoid of meaning (Lemaitre suggested employing a knife inorder to chisel the surface of film!). This is exactly the opposite of Mauris idea, which was to employmasterpieces of cinema history for their historical meaning. In a recent interview, Mauri stated: [I]project auteur films, that is, films made by experienced people, people able to interpret facts, peoplewho can articulate a judgement to project an image on a body, or on 50 litres of milk, modifies theprojection, i.e. can produce a completely new meaning.5According to Mauri, then, images are full ofmeaning. Moreover, according to him, images have a real weight: in fact, as strange as it may seem,the balance on which Gertrud was projected was not indifferent to the projected images indeed, thepointer indicated a weight. According to Mauri, images definitely have a weight if not in a physicalsense, certainly in a spiritual and cultural one. They also have an ideological weight, which is the hid-den sense of his performance, and in general of his artworks. Che cosa il fascismo, for instance,staged not a generic fascist reunion, but a specific propaganda manifestation that really took place inFlorence in 1938, in which Mauri and Pasolini took part, and whose imagery was crucial to them both,and which marked their lives. For those reasons, these images should be handled very carefully. In

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fact as Mauri states art (i.e. artistic images) is not a surface effect, but it is something that givesobjecthood to thoughts and to appearances.6

WithIntellettuale, Mauri pushes those ideas toward a more radical meaning, almost turning themupside down. In this case, projection provokes a unique effect: it is a radiography of the spirit. It alsoimposes a passive role on the author so that authors own body is responsible for what he did. 7

There is a short circuit between images and meaning. The projection of a specific film on the body ofits director, entails very complex issues. The director becomes the screen of the movie he himselfmade, but since his physical presence is necessary to make the movie visible, he can no longer seewhat he created. Moreover, due to fact that the film is only partially visible (the shirt is not at all aproper screen, and the projection is highly irregular, and not easy for the spectators to follow), at thesame time the film is released, it is partly denied. The enigmatic core ofIntellettuale lies in this dialec-tical turn. It is the radical feature that puts it beyond the territories of modernist avant-garde.

What then are the main issues raised byIntellettuale? Lets begin with the visual structure of theperformance, that is, the screen ascran vivant.

Since, in this case, it is a living body, the screen is no longer a mere dead support for movingimages. Notwithstanding the fact that we confront ourselves with projected images, the structure ofIntellettuale is truly based on reflection. In this sense, Intellettuale is more a reflection piece than aprojection one. Mauri does not want to explicate Pasolini-the-man, nor does he want to analyse thefilm, Il Vangelo secondo Matteo. Placing one in front of the other (as the projection and the screen),Mauri wants, instead, to give way to a short circuit a sort of new apparatus in which the author isreflected into his artwork and vice versa. In this dispositive, the screen is no longer a phenomenal sur-face in opposition to a noumenal thing-in-itself as intended for instance by Stanley Cavell in hisPur-suit of happiness The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, where he reads the temporary barrier (theblanket-wall called the Walls of Jericho) between Gable and Colbert in It Happened One Night byFrank Capra (1934) as a sort of Kantian Phenomenon.8

The reflexive feature displayed in Intel lettuale recalls the critique addressed to KantianNoumenon by Hegels dialectic. Appearance is not a curtain that hides essence, the two are linked bya dialectical movement. In a passage of his famousPhenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel argues thatbehind the curtain of phenomena there is nothing unless we ourselves go down there in order tomake something visible.9 We may say that the same is true for Intellettuale. Behind the curtain ofthe screen there is nothing, unless someone (the director himself) goes down there in order to makesomething visible.

In this sense, when Mauri speaks about the ability art has to objectify ideas, his position recallsAdornos (Hegelian) inversion of the concept of abstraction/concreteness. For Mauri art has a strongand specific gravity10 and has weight (it is concrete) instead the body, as a mere material thing, isan abstraction...

Therefore, Mauri refers to metacorpo (i.e. meta-body) when discussing something that goes beyondthe classical notion of body qua (living) object. Meta-body is a theory-laden body (to re-employ ImreLakatos epistemological concept). And, in this precise sense, his work goes far beyond (so called) bodyart or performance, and beyond experimental cinema as such. For Mauri, instead, performances areclose rituals. The notion of the body that they display is a very classical, Cartesian one, but herefused to be assimilated with this category. For those reasons, Mauri uses film images as essentialappearances, provided by objecthood, weight and uses Pasolini as a meta-body.

In a recent interview about Intellettuale, Mauri explains: During the action, Pasolini was nolonger able to realize at what point the movie was. Me, I did not know what I wanted exactly, but itwas something about consciousness. I was subjecting him to a test.11 This notion of test, or spiritualexercise means in the end that art for Mauri is not a simple play with images, but it is a painful,unpleasant, heavy effort, (recall here the rigid spasm that struck Pasolini during the projection). Inother words, art is something that can reverse appearance and essence i.e. it is a dialectical test.

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This reflexive relationship between what one is and what one does (in this case, to be a director,and to do films, moving images) is the very conceptual engine, the hidden ideological kernel ofIntel-lettuale. However, this self-referential structure displays itself as contradiction. The audience whoattended the Galleria dArte Moderna performance could see Il Vangelo, but only in fragments. Theycould not even see Pasolini himself, whose face was hidden by shadow in the semi-obscure room. They

were simple spectators, but the witnesses of a contradictory work of art; they tested the contradictionbetween a film and his creator.

It is extremely interesting that Hegel in his ill-famed (for its obscurity) Science of Logic12 (1812-1813), places reflection at the end of the dialectical opposition between essence/appearance. The philo-sophical hero of logics section on reflection is the figure of the subject. In fact, the subject is not justsomething that thinks he exists, but it is something that reflects upon his own ontological position;the subject is inherently self-contradictory. Jacques Lacans dialectical reversal of Descartes famousCogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) resides in this point. In fact, Lacan (a Hegelian, if ever therewas one) re-writes the Cartesian dictum in this way: I am one who thinks: I think therefore I am.13

Mauri himself, in 1995, defined the artist as a paradox. A man who believes absolutely in his ownproblematic [problematicit].14

In this way, the choice Mauri made regarding Pasolinis production was correct. Avoiding both intel-lectual films (such as Teorema, 1968), and neo-realistic ones (such as Accattone, 1961) Mauri decided toproject the controversial film,Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, on its director, Pasolini. The reason is clear. Onecould say that in Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, Pier Paolo Pasolini projected himself into the ChristianGospel, up to the point of identifying himself directly with Christ. In the mid 1980s, not only did Mauridepict Pasolini as a Paolo di Tarso, Pasolini himself felt the attraction of Christs figure of sacrifice justas strongly. And Pasolini chose his own mother, Susanna, for the role of Maria, the mother of Christ.

One may say that the short-circuit structure of the test to which Mauri subjected Pasolini (and, byconsequence, himself) reflects this projective identification back on Pasolini himself.

As Slavoj Zizek has said, this loop structure is what defines the very concept of the subject. Lacans ideaof the subject as barred (in Lacanian symbolism expressed by $) and his insistence on folded spaces(Moebius strip, and so on) should be read in the sense of this negative relation of the subject (not to theobject) but to himself... the limit impeding the subjects self-expression, is actually the subject himself.15

It is easy to emphasize that both Mauri and Pasolini were such barred subjects in themselves i.e.two $, marked by the traumatic experience of fascism and World War II. Mauri was so struck by thepower of images, that when, just after the end of the War, he saw the images of the Nazi camps, healmost went crazy, and recovered for years in mental hospitals. In psychoanalytic terms, Fascism wasthe primal scene for both Mauri and Pasolini; the first traumatic experience that they both neverstopped restaging. And in this sense, one could suggest that Che cosa il fascismo is the (hidden)palimpsest of Pasolinis last film, Sal o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975), a sort of re-staging of fascistfantasies and of its funeral and erotic paraphernalia. Thus,Intellettuale may be read as a reflexive testfor the ontological (un)consistency of the subject.

In this way, it could be interesting to read this famous statement that Pasolini makes in his essay,Osservazioni sul piano sequenza (a few months prior to his death in 1975): so it is absolutely necessary todie, because until we live, we lack any meaning.16 The living subject is intimately crossed, split, barredfrom within and to live means this lacking of sense, which ends up only with death. In this sense, onlyart and artworks may survive subjects, and even to take new meanings not foreseen even by their cre-ators. In other words, the fate ofIntellettuale is inextricably linked to friendship, ideology, subject anddeath. On December 9, 1975, at the Galleria Toselli in Rome, in fact, Mauri re-staged Intellettuale, but inthe very absence of Pasolini. On November 2, 1975, the great Italian director was found dead in circum-stances that remain today quite obscure. On that occasion, Mauri projectedIl Vangelo secondo Matteo onthe white shirt that Pasolini was wearing when he was killed (fig. 1). To quote the words that Mauriwrote on that occasion to explain his installation to the audience: Lautore scomparso, lopera darte ugualmente eloquente (The author disappeared, nonetheless the work of art speaks for itself).17

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Joachim Jager, Christopher Eamon, Annette Husch,Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection. Film, Videos and Installations from1963 to 2005, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2006.

Theodor W. Adorno,Drei Studien zu Hegel, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1974.

Daniel Birnbaum, Chronology, Sternberg Press, New York 2005.Fredric Devaux,Le Cinma lettriste 1951-1991, Paris Exprimental, Paris 1992.

Philippe Dubois, Un effet cinma dans lart contemporaine, in Cinema & Cie, no. 8, 2006, pp. 15-26.

William I. Fowkes,A Hegelian Account of Contemporary Art, UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor-London 1985.

G. W. Friedrich Hegel,Phnomenologie des Geistes, Goebhardt, Bamberg-Wrzburg 1807.

G. W. Friedrich Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik (1812-1832), in Id. Gesammelte Werke, vol. XI-XII-XXI, edited by Hagemann-Jaeschke, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg 1978-1985.

Jacques Lacan,Ecrits, Seuil, Paris 1966.

Jacques Lacan,Le sminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre XI. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (1964), Seuil, Paris 1973.

Jacques Lacan, Seminaire IX. Lidentification (1961-1962), unpublished.

Fabio Mauri, Attraversando lo specchio dellideologia, interview by Stefano Chiodi, in Reset, no. 100, March-April 2007, pp. 87-90.

Fabio Mauri, Scritti in Mostra, Bompiani, Milano 2008.

Marco Senaldi,Enjoy! Il godimento estetico, Meltemi, Roma 2003.

Marco Senaldi (ed.),Il marmo e la celluloide. Arte contemporanea e visioni cinematografiche, exhibition catalogue, La VersilianaPietrasanta, Silvana editoriale, Milano 2006.

Marco Senaldi,Rapporto Confidenziale. Percorsi tra cinema e arti visive, Pi Greco, Milano 2007.

Marco Senaldi,Doppio Sguardo. Cinema e arte contemporanea, Bompiani, Milano 2008.

Slavoj Zizek,Enjoy your symptom! Lacan in Hollywood and out, Routledge, New York 1992.

Notes

1 Fabio Mauri,Rapporto di un curatore. Pasolini (1985), in Id., Scritti in Mostra. Lavanguardia come zona. 1958-2008, Il Sag-giatore, Milano 2008, p. 202 (my translation).

2 Fredric Devaux,Le Cinma lettriste 1951-1991, Paris Exprimental, Paris 1992, pp. 113 ss.

3Ion, 1951, quoted inIdem, p. 224.

4Idem, p. 74.

5 Fabio Mauri, Attraversando lo specchio dellideologia, interview by Stefano Chiodi inReset, no. 100, March-April 2007, p. 89(my translation).

6 Fabio Mauri,Formazione del pensiero anarchico (1973), in Id., Scritti in Mostra, cit., p. 35 (my translation).

7 Fabio Mauri, Attraversando lo specchio dellideologia, cit., p. 89 (my translation).

8 Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massa-

chusetts-London 1981, pp. 71-110.9 G. W. Friedrich Hegel,Phnomenologie des Geistes (1807), Goebhardt, Bamberg-Wrzburg 1807, p. 139.

10 Fabio Mauri, Senza (1975), in Id., Scritti in Mostra, cit., p. 46 (my translation).

11 Fabio Mauri, Attraversando lo specchio dellideologia, cit., p. 89 (my italics, my translation).

12 G. W. Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik, in Id., Gesammelte Werke, vol. XI-XII-XXI, edited by Hage-mann-Jaeschke, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg 1978-85 [1812-32]), Routledge, London, 2002, p. 442.

13 Je pense que je pense que je suis, in Jacques Lacan, Seminaire IX. Lidentification (1961-62), unpublished, typewritten version, p. 99.

14 Fabio Mauri, The Jewish and Myself (speaking personally) (1995), in Id., Scritti in Mostra, cit., p. 258.

15 Slavoj Zizek,Enjoy your symptom! Lacan in Hollywood and out, Routledge, New York 1992, p. 137.

16 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Osservazioni sul piano-sequenza, in Id.,Empirismo Eretico, Garzanti, Milano 1977, p. 241 (my translation).

17 Quoted in the official website of the artist, www.fabiomauri.com/proiezioni/, last visit 10 April 2010.

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