PASSAGES: MELTED-FLESH AND SOFTENED BONE
edit by Alberto Abruzzese

At the junction between the mass culture industry, across the territory and throughout the media, a man of the western world – by sex and membership standing at the pinnacle and the centre of modernity – had the foresight to sense not the resistant nature of the machine, but the fluidity of an amoeba within humanity, a life form devoid of arts, soft and inclusive where flesh is liquefied and bones have no reason to exist. Here José Ortega y Cassett hit on the intuitions of the major intellects of western thinking, minds capable of stretching their thought on life to the limits of modernity: Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan. The efforts of the post-moderns have added little or nothing to their predictions. Still today the art forms and arguments which manage to interpret its sense in an anti-modern sense refer to a crisis of human primacy in a phase – from the thirties to the fifties – which marks the inescapable transit from an industrial to a post-industrial society. Before us we have but one novelty: our more mature technologies are taking on the expansive form of an amoeba, a limitless vocation for flow. Today attention is directed at the material foundations innovation can provide for intuitions that were once rooted in the darkest regions of the interior: the attempt to deliver a trace of that subjectivity – of bodies – which has been at work within human experience in the world so as to make sense of its radical transformation. The question we must ask ourselves – in the art of communication, the art of representation and the art of living, in other words, the artificial world that we are, and always have been – is not the same as the authors mentioned above. They dealt with the “secrets” hidden in the birth of the metropolis and elaborated them while interpreting the contradictory nature of the mass media. Like Baudelaire they “descended into hell”, the hell of the repetitive destiny of the modern world, of its banality (the greyness constantly referred to in the literary research of Franco Rella). Now it is a matter of driving their reasoning past what they themselves conceived, and asking if it can be projected even beyond. It is here – I believe – that art criticism, the sociology of communication or media philosophy fails even when the have reached the zenith of sophistication, that is to say when they are saturated with that extremely negative wisdom that modernity has always accessed in certain figures or fields, but has hardly ever wanted or been able to take into account as a “power system”.

With the images he has obtained thanks to the practice and even more so the sense of the “x-ray” – the opportunity for indiscretion and profanation which have always been part of childhood and simple instincts, the instinct of those who are “poor in spirit” – Renato Meneghetti is a part of those aesthetic experiences (rather implicitly terminal more than contradictory) where what is refused is not photography, or rather technical reproducibility, but the historical objects– for the institutions of art and society – that have constituted the basic material to which expression was bestowed (and the contents for building social reality).
Therefore Meneghetti is dealing with a matter of the world, which for me, as a methodology, has an epochal relevance precisely because it is post-historical, anti-humanistic; profoundly anti-modern. It is rare that this can be encountered in an artist who is immediately accessible in his critical discourse, in other words the discourse which – starting from a specific position, attitude, mental or emotional affiliation – divides the work of an author-text between different meanings or intents, taking sides for one rather than the other. It is likely that my criticism – my approach – chooses a different point of view that that chosen by the author, or at least is lateral to the set of meanings that he would have attributed, appreciated in his work, but I find the artistic experience he proposes to be extremely rich. It is in perfect keeping with my personal quest for a line of conjunction and separation between the dawn of nineteenth century photography and the digital languages and biotechnologies of today. It crosses that whole arch of time, therefore, from the full constitution of modern man to his disintegration. From men who produces machines to machines who produce men. From human to post-human.

I will immediately attempt to express what I sense from Renato Meneghetti’s radiographic view which invites us to penetrate our human bodies and other things. Through various levels of technical elaboration (each of which can surely be related to previous works thus contradicting and disenchanting them), the author offers images which are, in every respect, non-places and precisely for this reason they are perfectly inhabitable – the only symbolic sense of belonging that is truly accessible – for those who see modernity as their extreme breaking point and cross its space-time limits. Meneghetti frames details, which are landscapes and landscapes, which are details. Intrusion (a word Meneghetti holds dear) beyond what is visible, beyond its threshold, right inside organic and inorganic matter. A technical procedure, which is transformed into visions of worlds, spheres of sensibility where matter, flesh, cartilage and bone become landscape. Indeed there are passages: displays aimed at seducing the passer-by, attractions or a fair. But these are no longer the displays of a mass industrial society full of mirrors and reflections. Looking hard at those images of entertainment society, Walter Benjamin could only imagine their real backstage scenario. Through his surrealist writings – perceptively altered, drugged – he could only allude to the spectator’s interior, psychophysical experience (it was the identification of the sex appeal of the inorganic to which post-modern aesthetics returned half a century after modern aesthetics had assigned it exclusively to consumers of cinema and television, to the silence – another world loved by Meneghetti the painter and musician – of the spectator).

We read: “Photography is our exorcism. Primitive societies had the mask, bourgeois society had mirrors, we have images.
We believe we can overcome the world with technology, but it is the world which imposes itself on us, and this reversal of roles has come as quite a surprise.
You may believe you are photographing a scene for the simple pleasure of it – in actual fact it is the scene which wants to be photographed. You are only an extra in its show. The Subject is only the agent of this ironic appearance of things. The image is a perfect medium for the huge advertisement that the world makes for itself, that objects make for themselves – forcing our imagination to step aside, our passions to turn outwards, smashing the mirror we hold out, hypocritically, to capture them.
Today the miracle is that appearances, which were willingly reduced to slave status for a long time, have turned towards us and rebelled against us, becoming sovereign, thanks to the very technology we have used to expel them. Today they come from other places, of their own accord, from the heart of their banality, they burst in from every direction, joyfully multiplying themselves.
The joy of photography is an objective happiness. Those who have not experienced this objective rapture, in the morning, in a city or in a desert can understand nothing of the pataphysical delicateness of the world”. The words of Baudrillard written in 1998.

Pretence: from the tribal to the Fordist dimensions of serial work and to the post-Fordist concept of glocal work (together on earth and in heaven, in life and death, here and beyond the skin): what happens if it is the banality of human interiors that photographs us? That joyfully multiplies? We cannot afford to overlook one single word of this citation: it is full to the brim of references to before, during and after modernity. It is a sort of compendium of “objective” relations between the “us” which Baudrillard wishes to speak about and still can continue to speak about and the “banality” of the world which – under this still humanistic, though disenchanted viewpoint - seems to have taken possession of humankind. It is a kind of guiding text which would be a very good introduction to a discussion on the “x-rays” by Renato Meneghetti, artist and ex advertising man (experts in the field recognise his style, graphics and design immediately). In fact his work called “x-rays” deal precisely with the throbbing issue of that dirty word “advertising” no longer from the point of view of human desperation which despises it in the name of the world, its most profound being, non-apparent, but from the point of view of its happy proliferation and metamorphosis. There is a human journey to be read into product communication (this much has been explained by multimedia workshops of modern artists from the Middle Ages through to Andy Warhol but also by the MRP agency) and there is a journey through image communications which deals with the post-human.
Since Meneghetti is not one of those artists who despise advertising (he was an artist before becoming an ad man) or pretends not to do it, he has already had the chance to say that he “forestalled his opponents” (cfr. “Hous Organ”, 1989). Is he right? Is he a good ad man because he is a good artist or is it the contrary? This many-sided artist defending his creativity – as such it has always been ahead of its time, unexpected invention – against the automatic ability of advertising which, depending on the flow; has he assimilated the idea of passing beyond the human skin? Or has it been advertising that produced this encroachment and was it the artist who went with the flow? Is it a matter of metropolitan drive towards transparency or Baudrillard’s extroversion or what? Meneghetti defends the originality of his choice in giving expression to a radiographic view of the body. A very human and spiritual view, or a hyper-human, inhuman, exquisitely material view? Creation (prosthesis, technology) aimed at winning over the soul or the body?
If we return to reading Baudrillard, we see how many answers he can give us to this list of crucial question. But why crucial? It is to answering this question that I would like address myself here, repaying - if I can - the richness of ideas that vividly emerge from Meneghetti's experimentation. The interpretation of his works, starting from the turning point when he approached the x-ray plate and spirit colours - identified by Gillo Dorfles in 2000 as a stylistic feature, between the sixties and the nineties, that was opposed to the artist's spinning virtuosity - cannot remain solely within the outlook of genial conservatives like Jean Clair, who see the surpassing of the expressionists or Duchamp as nothing other than the extension and radicalisation of traditional, anthropocentric perspectives on art.

Before me there is a poster by A. Mazza and dated 1909, it shows the image of a beautiful woman with bared shoulders who looks the spectator straight in the eye, and – as had happened before, at that time and in the future up to the Art Nouveau of the thirties and beyond – the female body alone is sufficient as a testimonial to seduce by the simple virtue of being readily erotic. But in this case the stereotype is cruelly thwarted: where the woman's pose should reveal the appealing right eye and shoulder - generously revealing her breast in that mixture of sacred and profane taken by poster artists from the icon of the mother-virgin during their academic studies – here we have the warm alluring colour paling, freezing thanks to a spectral, dead, unnatural light, thus letting part of the hidden image of a skeleton emerge from that warm flesh full of life and beauty. The spectator’s gaze falters in the emptiness of the eye-socket and the inexpressive darkness contrasts the desire that has just been stimulated by the pupil of the other eye. This image has all the artistic ingredients of memento mori: according to the writings of Baudrillard on symbolic exchange always brought into play in the society of pretence, and therefore of merchandise, we know how closely seduction and death are related.
The woman is therefore "divided" between life and death, between living flesh and bone, as long as she does not need to be justified – as is, in fact, the case here – by a product that she wishes to communicate, it could be the result of a particularly daring advertising invention, aimed not at advertising but at explaining it, revealing the mechanism, how the voiceless body of the spectator, who is entertained and consumes, functions (as was said of Benjamin – as is said today of Meneghetti). Nothing strange here, instead, if we consider the nineteenth century imagination which gave birth to the language of the metropolis: if we think of theatre make up and phantasmagoria, narrative illustrations, entertainment games, the earliest silent movies and from these to the first cartoons from the Disney workshop. Here the skeleton is full of rhythm and happiness, fear of the development of progress, death dancing with life.
Let us return to the image by Mazza and see what the product is that it is advertising: it is “Science for all”, a magazine published by Sonzogno editors and sold at 25 cents on the mass culture market. This is the reason behind an image which allowed itself to be a radiographic vision of the human body well in advance of Meneghetti's day. It refers to the wonders of progress, the possibility of seeing beyond the skin. Being a good poster designer Mazza, responsive to the spectator's sensibility, has softened, made more bearable, the contrast between the skeleton and the naked-dressed body, the difference between fashion and the structure that carries the dress, living, being in the world. To understand this caution we need to reconstruct the mediaisation process of the human body from its mechanical phase through to its immaterial phase. The immaterial comes into play through the world of masks. In describing this process we can pinpoint the depth of Meneghetti's work, motivate his choices and understand how it fits and how others - with another subjectivity or in the name of some other - could fit.

Let us try to start from anatomy lessons given in public, before an audience, that is to say given both as science and entertainment. Suggestive documentary examples would be the covers of early manuals and prints of anatomy: the corpse is on the stage and with the guidance of the doctor and traditional medical writings, a “performer” – at that time much closer to the butcher than the surgeon – opens up the corpse, explores and displays muscles, veins and bowels, he unveils the bones. The profanation and study of the dead opened the way to curing the living. Science followed a clear path along matters that in the future would be hidden and removed: superstition, magic and crime. The anatomy scene lies at the basis of modern surgery, all the elements of metropolitan phantasmagoria are there. London between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Mina – in the film by Francis Ford Coppola based on Dracula by Stoker – answers the Prince of Darkness, who asks here where Cinema is, by comparing it to the bourgeois legitimacy of the Museum and she soon has to laugh about the fact that Dracula sees these spectral and seductive images as extraordinary progress made by science. Dracula and Jack the ripper, the best known surgeon known to the collective imagination under the mediation of the mass culture industry; the artist who disembowels the bodies of prostitutes instead of thinking about museums and “without knowing” that he himself would obtain the right to a place in the privileged houses of collective memory. Cinema has been and is especially today a great school of anatomy. Finally art too returned to corpses, when the degenerating process caused by television streams provoked a generalised loss of sense (a repetition of the feeling of dissipation experienced by the arts, experienced by the avant-garde at the outset of the twentieth century).
Nevertheless, to understand the sensation that seeing-feeling Meneghetti’s work can provoke today, we have to distinguish some of the specific steps on the road between the renaissance anatomist and today’s spectacular medial butchery entertainments: these are the intersections where the human body underwent unheard-of expansions and intensifications as compared to ancient times (through mythologically they had all been expressed from the most Apollonian to the most Dionysian). It has to do with the skin and with every human prosthesis. The theme that Meneghetti tackles under the heading-programme “phagocytes” is a very relevant (and revealing) instance. But, while the idea of humanity phagocytised is open to the risk of humanistic nostalgia, always an instrument of power in the hands of those we feel are guilty of dehumanising the world, the scenarios presented by the “x-rays” seem to be able to overcome every regime and etiquette for both the world of art and society.

Le us return to photography (a modern “classic” language very well known to our author who is familiar with every side of its application): it represents the first clear passing of the human body into the inhuman dimension of the mechanical shutter which takes what is real (the myth of this opening to non-human bodies was seen in hybrid figures of Centaurs and Satires and Jove’s seductions in animal form). On what is real or on reality then? At one and the same time the action of the photographer was an expression of the way that the human being saw-built society and the way the world that surrounded him – that part that was not socially perceived and legitimated by the environment - automatically belonged to that being. It was present yet not expressed, active yet absent. A meaningful background, endowed with the ability of speaking even though it still lacked a language (it was to be the digital language that delivered it at least on a virtual level).
McLuhan has given us a lead towards tracing the transformations of the body from how it was perceived in the sphere of humanism to how it began to be perceived under the neo-tribalism of the new media. This indication is not historical or sequential it is substantial. It consists in the contrast between feeling and seeing, between the expansion of the corporeal network of senses thanks to their technological prostheses and the “pre-established order” of writing. The forms of cinema, radio and television have long worked at mediating between this “political” opposition between inclusive and exclusive forms of human language. In the culture of words and screens, human bodies fight against their very extensions and the grounds of this conflict are directly on the skin and always less on clothing. It is only with the extreme phase of stream communication – the maximum interweaving between representative forms and the world – and the beginnings of digital communication that the skin is no longer a boundary but a passage between inside and outside, a relational area which slips beyond being a social actor like a star or a testimonial. Like the artist and his model.

The word – having become an organised collective thought – has confined the modern image to itself because it could count on the power of the written word. This is why the pataphysicl lightness Baudrillard speaks about is linked to Meneghetti, whatever intention he believes he is giving to his radiographic representations (a desire, at the time, already implicit in the first photographs of ghosts and which, being desire, the sex appeal of positioned bodies, assimilated the phantasmal nature of the “lens”). Let us take a look at an essay by René Daumal on the “limits of philosophical thought”. Daumal was the theorist of “pataphysics”. An essay written in 1935 by a key member of that magical intellectual predisposition to “contradict oneself” which drew together hyper-men such as Bataille (Meneghetti has also worked on pornography, the description par excellence of the object of desire, desire as merchandise, the backstage of products and works, their mystery and implicit obscenity). This was a period when, already from the “policies” of Bréton, it remained substantially ignored. And it is still: being distracted to the full from the sense of the community of non-knowledge, today it is precisely those who accuse the people of being distracted by the “great game” of technology and consumerism, who are torn away themselves – from their souls, from their truth – by the seduction of artifice.
We read: “whatever the myth we are emerged in, general philosophy, the quest for being, will manage to make use of it only if it exceeds its verbal limits; but then it would have to be fulfilled in a direct work of human culture, a real new adjustment, between nature, economic organisation, the institutions, the different bodies of doctrine, of technology and arts and the fundamental needs of humankind. If this is a dream, well, let us wake up!”
Listening to the word hinged on the world, the world is struck dumb except for those who posses it and can make it the object of language. Entering the body of the human being as a simulacrum of flesh, Meneghetti places before us the sense of intimacy, of self-awareness. The tradition by which the truth is in the remotest and most hidden place would like to endow this finally rediscovered intimacy with a sacred character of the community or the religious character of identity, where – by miracle – the Word becomes flesh and the flesh becomes word. Personally I do not believe that entering into intimacy – the intimacy of fashion and clothing which comes between skin and social mask and pretends to hide the scars of the body, its openings – means nearing the truth, it is rather accepting to finally detach oneself for once and for all (without further limits). Going out of the truth: abandoning the myth of an objective-subjective world taken as certain from the beginning. Once it has been penetrated the skin is defeated.

Leaving the limits of words (of the word-body). I like to think of Meneghetti’s images as belonging to a world which is still historically and socially without language: a world where it is not taken for granted that relations will occur, even when the possibility exists, as happens with human bodies are in a coma or brain damaged or in cases that the world of communication defines as ignorant, illiterate or disabled. I like to see it as “beauty by chance”: without civilisation, indeed without air to breathe, exactly like lunar or Martian landscapes. What is striking about its form of representation of the world’s physical interiority is the fact that he can give it a title and can often define it as a “portrait”. The word portrait stands at the meeting point of representation and contract. Meneghetti here is portraying the names of art, the possibility that art has of naming, the privileges that art has acquired or lost in this field. Today and artist portrays the conventions and the inconveniences of the arts but he is also portrayed beyond his will and beyond the will of art itself. It is not my task to decide the intentions and motivations that are instilled into Meneghetti’s images. Yet I do feel that it is profitable to offer a different critical viewpoint than that which the most authoritative critics have hitherto provided. Among today’s art critics, I much prefer the “totòs” and the “surly” critics of the present to the institutional politeness of many who, born of the avant-garde of the civilisation of the machine, living off the self-preservation of repetition, remaining exactly as they were even after the generalised TV culture and mass avant-garde à la Calvesi. But even behind the most barbarian, aggressive and spineless voices – where the bones of modernity appear to have been liquefied - the same “museum” model seems to lie hidden: after a systematic irreverence that has lasted too long some fragments of cultural reverence towards the tried and trusted historical figures are surfacing (perhaps out of necessity of interests, be it for tactical, strategic, professional or vocational reasons).
Behind Meneghetti’s forty-year journey which from decoupage has now arrived at the ultrasonography of living nature, it would be vile treason to see the reassuring return to a guarantee of artistic quality, a “trade-mark” of the art institutions, just slightly disturbed by the a shift in the wind. I feel that a different adventure would be more fascinating (fascinating in the charm and passion which encourages advertising to be ahead not because it overcomes conventional creativity but because it dwells in the entrails of the world, in its most fertile banality): the courage and daring not to rely on the safety of frames. Wanting to do without. To look, as x-rays do, elsewhere. An elsewhere of separation, of non-return and not of inclusion. The impulse which might drive this choice – where what is rarefied is not only human skin but also the painter’s canvass – is in what is repelling rather than what is familiar.

Alberto Abruzzese