Nitsch in the Heart of Naples
Defining itself as an archive and laboratory of contemporary art, the Museo Hermann Nitsch, dedicated to this great figure of Viennese actionism, opened in 2008 in Naples. Today it fits into a project of an “arts district”.
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To understand the links between the Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch and Naples, one need only take a walk to the museum dedicated to him. I suggest that you go there in the wake of a visit to the National Archaeological Museum: leaving this majestic neoclassical building, you will walk through the relaxed Piazza Bellini, stroll among the booksellers of Port’Alba and, after crossing Piazza Dante, enter Pontecorvo, a popular neighbourhood with its market and its maze of alleys jammed in monumental Naples. Here the ascent to the hill of Castel Sant’Elmo will begin.The itinerary will be neither long nor short, it will not be measured by a digital navigator, it will plunge you into such a tangle of architecture and epochs that it will short-circuit any notion of antiquity and the contemporary. On the way, almost forgetting your goal, the sight of a signpost may deceive you. It will point you to a charming little cul-de-sac. The doors of the houses and the flowerpots will make you hesitate, but once you turn the corner, a terrace will open up overlooking the historic centre of the city, with its majolica domes, baroque bell towers and, in the background, Vesuvius looking down on Capri at the far end of the gulf. Guardian of this panorama will be a fin-de-siècle factory, which the gallery owner and patron Giuseppe Morra chose to dedicate to Hermann Nitsch, and with good reason. After your walk through the heart of Naples, it will no longer be necessary to document the work of this master, a major representative of Viennese Actionism, who made his actions a total work of art. Nitsch worked on the same temporal short-circuit that you will have experienced when you come to the museum. He worked on an ancestral memory and its power to animate our experience of the world.
SOUND VISCERA
Last September the wonderful action n°158, accompanied by the Nuova Orchestra Scarlatti and conducted by Andrea Cusumano, inaugurated Sinfonia Napoli 2020, the museum’s new exhibition for the years 202022. In his actions, Nitsch returned to religious rituals, to the archetypes of mythology, he staged them with a realism that gave flesh and blood to symbols and gestures. In spite of the accusations of obscenity and violence against their author in his early days, his actions weren’t aiming for scandal, and this allows the performative machine imagined at the end of the 1950s to be still relevant today. The power of Nitsch’s
Orgien Mysterien Theater (1) is musical, its synesthetic variables—actions, smells, tastes and sounds—are modelled on the structure of a symphonic score that manages to touch our “sound viscera”, to find the “cry” that precedes all music. His actions intertwine totemic rituals, their recollection in historical religions and our secular experience of the body, with its travesties and contemporary taboos. They are capable of bewitching the audience and leading them into the depths of our psychology, in a crescendo that offers a process of cathartic liberation from religious, moral and sexual prohibitions. The Nitsch Museum is therefore not a neutral exhibition space, but rather a ritual place where painting as colour and matter enters into dialogue with life, where the works— canvases, stretchers, drawings and photographs—are the instruments and relics of the artist’s theatre. The vigour of abstract expressionism avoids any decadent slip into symbolism or scholarly quotation. The presence of the works, skillfully rhythmed in space, builds rough associations between monstrances and pharmaceutical utensils, stills and shrouds, blood, sugar, colour, meat: everything is tense, ready to welcome the next ritual.
A MASTER
Nitsch’s encounter with Naples dates back to 1974, when the young Giuseppe Morra, overwhelmed by the discovery of his work at Documenta V, invited the artist to carry out his 45th action in his gallery in the chic district of the city.The next day the artist was imprisoned, but Morra managed to maintain the action despite police intervention. At the time Nitsch didn’t speak Italian and the gallery owner didn’t speak German, but the understanding between the two was perfect. Since then, Morra has allowed Hermann Nitsch to carry out some of his most important actions, not only in Italy, and published his theoretical works and theatrical scores. “More than a travelling companion, Nitsch was a master for me, the one who took me by the hand and accompanied me in in learning about literature, philosophy, aesthetics.” A path shared with several artists that led the gallery owner to create a foundation, the Fondazione Morra, which is developing the project of an “art district”, including three other places near the Nitsch Museum: the San Martino vineyard (seven hectares of urban countryside at the foot of the famous charterhouse and Castel Sant’Elmo); the Associazione Shōzō Shimamoto and Casa Morra, the latter established in 2016 in the Palace Cassano Ayerbo d’Aragona, the 4,200 square metres of which refurbished space allows it to organize exhibitions, host residences and preserve archives and works by artists, groups and movements such as Allan Kaprow, the Living Theater, Fluxus, Gutai, body art and Viennese Actionism, to name but a few. From these actions and works that have built a new language of art from the United States to Japan, Morra wants to make a living heritage for Naples, to help establish a new economic and social dynamic in working-class neighborhoods: an ambitious and well-constructed dream by Fondazione Morra, which sees Nitsch and other artists as a source of energy and awareness in the pulsating heart of the city.
(1) Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries: a total art experience conceived by Nitsch and linked to the psychoanalytical concept of abreaction, that is, the emotional discharge that allows a subject to eliminate the effects of dramatic events.