Living Theatre

Casa Morra - Naples, Italy

By Santa Nastro

Casa Morra was born in the volcanic mind of Giuseppe Morra. A former gallerist, collector and Maecenas of many artists, Morra founded a museum dedicated to Hermann Nitsch. In 2016 he started this new project. The space, in a superb 18^th-century palace in Naples, Italy, hosts a magnificent collection and is devoted to the surrounding community, organizing workshops, shows, laboratories, a cinema and documentary archive led by the filmmaker Mario Franco, and much more.

Casa Morra opened with numerous installations by Allan Kaprow, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage that we can still admire at the entrance. Then, Morra decided to dedicate the second stage of his project to another iconic trio of artists: Julian Beck, Hermann Nitsch and Shozo Shimamoto, being shown now.

The choice of the artists is not casual nor curatorial; it combines numerology and Snakes and Ladders-type rules in a fairly complicated way that tethers the institution to the project for 100 years. Based on this premise, the show, “The Giants of Art and Theatre,” will last for one year. Upon entering, the visitor is first greeted by a huge room dedicated to Shimamoto (Osaka, 1928-2013), one of the fathers of the Gutai group. Big canvases are punctuated with arabesques that overwhelm their surfaces. That gesture is sensual and full of rage but at the same time natural and peaceful, as the Buddhist Japanese culture requires. And Buddha is, it almost goes without saying, one of the protagonists of Morra’s solo show.

“I Giganti dell’Arte dal Teatro. Julian Beck-Hermann Nitsch-Shozo Shimamoto,” 2017, installation view Casa Morra. Archivio d’Arte Contemporanea, Naples, Italy. Courtesy Fondazione Morra. Photo: Amedeo Benestante.

He sits watching the world in front of him, above a throne made of plastic glasses, the same that Shimamoto uses to blend colors. It’s then Nitsch’s turn. The legendary figure of Viennese Actionism and the Orgies Mysterien Theater, the artist, born in Vienna in 1938, is present at the opening with a performance and a series of crucifixions, paintings and cases filled with tools, sugar cubes and ampoules displayed with an obsessive sense of cosmic order. A big part of the show is also dedicated to Beck (New York, 1925-1985) and the Living Theatre (the foundation owns the entire archive of the collective). Here you can find-and they’re a real gem-Beck’s first paintings, made in the period when he was one of the artists represented (together with Jackson Pollock) by Art of This Century, Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, where he had his debut. He then met his wife and work companion, Judith Malina. Together, they founded Living Theatre in 1947. In spite of his success as a painter, Beck abandoned his practice in favor of a new form of total art, where life and action coincide and collide. Living Theatre’s actions, which the show in Naples illustrates with documents, texts and images from the original performances, are choral, involving, experimental and a result of a collective way of working. In addition, Casa Morra didn’t forget to show Beck’s work as a cinema actor: Indeed, the show displays the poster of Edipo Re, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, with stars like Franco Citti, Alida Valli, Carmelo Bene and Beck.

The exhibition ends with a focus (in collaboration with Lucrezia De Domizio Durini) on Joseph Beuys’ project Difesa della Natura (Pescara, 1984), the follow-up to the lifetime action 7000 Oaks started in Kassel, during documenta, in 1982.

(October 8, 2017 - October 2018)

Santa Nastro is an art historian, journalist and art critic based in Rome. She is the author of the project arTVision and member of the editorial committee of Artribune. Her texts have been published in Exibart, Corriere della Sera, Arte Magazine, Alfabeta2 and Il Giornale dell’Arte, among other publications and exhibition catalogs.

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