THE SKELETON OF ART, ADVERTISEMENT OF LIVING
edit by Achille Bonito Oliva

A fitting epigraph for Renato Meneghetti’s exhibition of x-rays is the following: “Such is the credit that we extend to life, to what in life is most precarious – ‘real’ life, naturally – that the credit ends up being lost”. Thus, in 1924, André Breton began the First Surrealist manifesto, where a strategy of advancement was theorised on life, precisely to solve the “missing” realty, everyday, purely chronological reality, through the assertion of the surreal, created by the imagination, dreams, the “madness” that ordinary life can only suspect (an interior window, in other words, the unconscious).

This is because everyday affairs unfold safeguarded by bias and non-compliance, acts and gestures are anything but what Kris defined as “the service of the ego” but, by means of their stereotypy, they tend to lead humankind towards apparent movement, towards paralysis. Dadaism, particularly Cabaret Voltaire, had already underlined the actively liberating capacities of the imagination, a practical deterrent in re-establishing art on an anthropological level.

Only that this was undertaken with happy and determined cynicism, awareness that starting from the beginning also meant returning to the beginning (in a world where both everything and nothing has a meaning), without making a fetish of the creative moment, of the resulting artwork. Indeed, in asserting amusement and absurdity, Dadaism was interested in dismembering the artistic work, understood as a specific, privileged product of the imagination. In Dadaism therefore, art was truly at the service of the ego and, except for the Berlin group, it never served the collective: the social body which practices its freedom through artistic experience as a community. The political level here consists in the total assertion of the ego, withdrawn form everyday bias and embarking on a global plane, which continues to be of interest on an individual level. In Surrealism the gap and difference lies in the assertion of art as a liberating practice for both the ego and the collective. Here the process involves the restoration and privilege of the notion of artistic work: the ego functioning outside or through its own egotistical sphere thus reaching out to society and history.

In the neo-avant-garde movements artistic creation therefore becomes an attempt at repairing the sub-normality of reality, in the case of Meneghetti and his x-rays it is recreating the origins of creativity, the development of symbols and a sense of reality according to the concepts of Melanie Klein. “In reality each creation is the recreation of an object that was once loved and whole, subsequently lost and ruined, belonging to a whole world and a shattered self; if an artwork is, for the artist, the most complete and satisfying means of soothing the remorse and despair brought on by this depressing situation and a means of rebuilding on its ruins, it is nothing but one of the most humane means of reaching this objective” (H. Segal, Introduction to the works of Melanie Klein, 1968).

But Meneghetti does not tend to consider the artwork as interchangeable with other human activities; instead he favours the techniques of artistic creativity specifically, reaching the x-ray of the body. The artwork becomes the testimony, a lapse in his desire to relate, from the level of the visible sign, the ego to its skeletal entity. Unity stands as a transgression of structural partiality into which the world has been cast and lives and always endeavours to see such unity as impossibility. Thus the eccentric and the exemplary are reconstructed, it is a particular experience, not given to everyone, and which the artist tries, in some way, to hide, thus making his operative space clandestine, leading it back to common, didactic techniques. But repairing the object implies restoring function to the social object, the community, which lives, instead, separated by the stunned distance of contemplation. Communication therefore, becomes the opaque mirror where the artist can gauge his own diversity, though a process of accretion for the artist, it is paralysing in relation to society. “The artist’s success is derived from being fully aware of, and being able to recognise and express, his fantasies and depressive anxieties. Expressing these is a process similar to bereavement; internally he recreates a harmonious world projected in his artwork." (H. Segal, Introduction to the work of Melanie Klein, 1968). Consciousness of the artwork’s diversity in respect to the other objects of the world, the diversity of the artistic ego with respect to the horizontal anonymity of the collective is, in Meneghetti’s art, precisely, as the concept of grieving. Here, this idea is also asserted in the fact that the linguistic articulation - associating data drawn from different contexts - while creating original relations and new explosions of meaning, also creates their definitive pacific consistency.

The form blocks these original relations within a layout that answers to disorder with a new order. The concept of bereavement is put forward almost like a constitutive mentality of the very artistic language, inescapably offering a contemporary nostalgia for lost disorder. Negative ideology, I believe, is also the fundamental ideology of Surrealism in so much as it came from a consciousness of art and its contrary, the world of consciousness and its opposite: the unconscious. It was born, in other words, of an unhappy awareness of the duplicity lying within every gesture, of the impossibility to overturn the ego outside of the self. Assertion therefore comes about through negation; reconstruction is based on destruction. “Building oneself requires destroying the object in the unconscious. This means that rather than taking a fusional stance where object and subject are unified, the creative act stands in a position of alterity." (J. Chasseguet Smirgel, A psychoanalysis of creativity and art). In a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, a painter paints the portrait of a woman. As he proceeds with the creation of the image and the brushstrokes form the image on the canvass, the model becomes progressively paler and her life drains from her. When the painter has finished the portrait and the painting itself has captured the woman’s colours, she finally dies. The language of art always tends to underline the tension towards unity as impossibility, an assertion, instead, of alterity, the finished object with which the subject, the creating ego, cannot be united, indeed it can only be expelled from the self. In Meneghetti art becomes the threshold where the artist conforms his lost unity and at the same time, for this very reason, engenders a guilt.

The resulting object, the artwork, is not the undoing of the object, it is an act that, to be recognised, ultimately needs tangible proof, the skeleton, which is always a separate entity from the flesh, interrupted in its relationship with its creator. The artwork in Meneghetti is thus a concept of unresolved bereavement, what Chasseguet Smirgel defined as "the depressive position where the subject cannot expel the destroyed object with which it is obliged to identify". Artistic production, the impossibility to identify oneself with the object produced, creates a tension towards death in the artist. There is a work by Ernst where two children are threatened by a nightingale. Death is not represented here but, more malignantly, it is suspected. The artist inverts the relationship, putting the human elements under the threat of an animal that is usually connected with gracefulness and song. With this inversion of common sense the artist places reality under the sign of death and threat. This negative sign tends even more towards explosion since vision is sharp and neat. The idyllic situation is disturbed solely by the terrible intrusion of the work’s title, which describes the threat, this upturning of common sense implies placing the certain relationships of this world under the negative sign of destruction, and therefore death. Death here is not presented brutally with its terrifying trappings but in the guise of a threat, a warning.

René Magritte tends to lower the guard even more; indeed this theme is inclined to take on the form of absence.
In this exasperated analyticity of the image absence is glaring and the emptying of reality is true to life. Madame Récamier’s sofa is empty, it is de-functionalised since it does not have a human presence to standardise its meaning. Here, represented reality is put to death by setting all meanings to zero and placing any available data on the threshold of language. Everything becomes replaced by its own sign and every sign is no longer the same thing: the pipe is no longer a pipe.

In Meneghetti warning is conveyed through the representation of reality in all its visual integrity, the x-rayed skeleton, with a wholeness that can no longer be touched, nor even withdrawn, since it exists in the paralysed space of image allowing for no movement except for the fixed gaze of defined, definitive eye. In Balthus painting is not absence but rather the particular space of absence; the measure blunts its own tools against itself and is organised following the final orders of silence. Salvador Dalì makes use of the event as a baroque instrument for the description of the themes of death. If life is the incessant pulsation of each instant, death is the traumatised interruption of each beat. The iconography of the liquefied clock represents the infantile terror of time that leads every single thing to its own putrefaction and annihilation.
The obsession with death in Meneghetti becomes both monomaniacal and cordial due to the persistence of the x-rayed skeleton, it is reduced to an everyday description where every style is contaminated and every image is levelled. The metaphor of artistic language is capsized to the point of becoming contorted; reality exceeds its every limit and loses all sense of decency. Metaphor does not rescue its creator from mania or fear; indeed it asserts the impossibility of resolving, absolute gestures. Every symbol becomes its own contrary.

The epigraph on Duchamp’s tomb, his own words, reads: “Besides, it is always the others who die”. The paradox is evident; the words are of one who lies cold and decomposed in what is now an irreversible state. This proposition is a challenge to humanity or foolishness. A challenge to the biological order of life - always sealed by the arrival of death - from one who considered himself above the anthropological system and publicly announces this exceptional status. “Within our unconscious each one of us is convinced of his own immortality.” (S. Freud, Our way of looking on death, in Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, 1915). What lies at the base of declaring immortality? What weapons had Duchamp at hand to boast with such sureness? Photography shows us images of a small melancholic man, as J. J. Lebel tells us, possessing none of the attributes that would lead us to believe in a long life or immortality. The issue shifts therefore outside a physiological field into a more impalpable and volatile area: culture and artworks. Here Duchamp exhibits his wisdom and clarity, depth and substance, a complex ability in cross-references, a stratification of citations that qualify his position as an artist and a thinker, a spokesperson of critical consciousness.

Meneghetti understands that it is the intellectual who grasps the supreme order of the issue, but it is not actual sovereignty. He understands that knowledge, resting on pure logos, dries things out, reduces them to an ascetic catalogue of abstract events taking meaning away from their deeper motives.
On the other hand, Duchamp is entitled to sovereignty in so much as he has not held this lofty position, above daily events, but has crossed them to reach his own epigraph. He has crossed matter and the base state of things, leaving behind what is ready-made as the proof of an artistic course that is inverse and diverse from normal wise and supreme artistic discourse. He has applied the same judicial procedure to the object itself, relieving it of its useful duty and conferring it with a different type of economy: symbolist and mental (this is Duchamps great realism).

The object now dances suspended, lifted to another atmosphere, conquered by the exercise of whim, which gives it another function, according to a principle of authority that transforms things, giving them another statute and identity.
Duchamp has uttered his foolishness, but it has been made effective by the flow of life that cannot take its distance from death. It would be better for Meneghetti to establish his responsibility, which the artist may exercise in specific venues: artworks and thoughts. He performs his act, a double somersault, in a utopia beyond everyday life. This is what triggers wisdom and awareness, what goes beyond the limits of reason and authorises the artist to take the throne, the unthinkable seat of immortality. X-raying thought prompts regal investiture, at the same time it is postponed until such time as it can be directly evaluated in the work of art.
If initially Burri can state, with Nietzsche that "we grow like trees", if he uses his creativity
processes as a metaphor of biological growth and natural expansion, in the end the artwork, within its formal definition, becomes that traumatic instant marked by the point at which that growth was interrupted, when branches and roots become one, a closed circle that nostalgically recalls a movement that has occurred but is no longer possible.
When Meneghetti incorporates the times of time and its flow, it then becomes a pure question mark, a question mark that can lead to no final port of call; it leads to the site of the primary question, the question of matter being the birth of death.

In this sense Mneghetti’s painting reaches the threshold of form, in the irreversible conscience of such a state, the anthropological condition that allows for no replication as the terms and limits of all doing, including art, have already been set. Form here it is not death, nor is it life, it is the margin within which existence and pure doing are toned in such an intentionality as deprives material of inexactness. Nor is death anterior, nor is it part of the past life cycles of other men, it is given to the present, the destiny enclosed within the individual. The artwork has become the face of reality for man, as is the prospect of his own death.

His cosmic tension is the result of an ideology that puts the artist and his esoteric practices, always with a highly aware spirit of sensitivity, in a dynamic centrality, the transformation point of reality. Art is literally an immersion into the compound of phenomena so as to extract a sort of atmospheric, immaterial skin: sensitivity.

Only art is capable of undertaking the task of bringing it to light, only through this retrieval is it possible to grasp the sense of life that does not automatically belong to man alone. Anthropometry becomes the route, the remains, the artefact of a fluidity that finds its definition on the canvass.
Sensitivity is the primary state of matter that permeates the consistence and quality of things. An absolute, solar and monochrome state that permitted Klein to present himself as the creator of the universe and declare: "Il ne suffit pas de dire ou d'écrire; j'ai depassé la problématique de l'art. Il faut encore l'avoir fait. Et je l'ai fait. Pour moi la peinture n'est plus en fonction de l'oeil aujourd'hui; elle est en fonction de la seule chose qui ne nous appartienne pas en nous: notre Vie".
If the only final objective of hyperrealism is representation - the use of image as the involuntary opportunity for an archaeological retrieval of reality - it is precisely for this reason that there is no temporal dimension of the present on his output; indeed there is only a cynical adherence to his own effective reality.

Paralysis, the absence of life, is the product of Meneghetti’s x-ray sculpture, entirely formulated by citation. Citation fixes and freezes all motion; it cancels all vitality of its characters, which have been rendered emblematic in an empty, mortal theatre according to a coincidence between representation and what is represented. A geometric order, resplendent symmetry presides over composition, it eliminates difference and leads all that is represented to its own stereotype. Meneghetti operates this confrontation between reality and representation by means of mirror-like laminas.
The spectator is the dynamic image of mirroring, taking the twin role of object observed and observing subject. He is, at times, the mirror that spies on life, granting the right to exist by means of a reflection extracting from the complexity of worldly relations only what places itself before it. Reality establishes its own presence only in the acceptance of its own caesura, the possibility of placing itself in the paralysed state of inertia.

Meneghetti’s language is always subject to an intentness that is the convention of vision, the nature of an eye used to seeing the world through cultural memory. Memory is not only subjective experience but also the collective experience of culture: the crystalline, lucid eye does not bat an eyelid, literally, but organises its visual procedures along the lines of linguistic history, a self-contained history structured by specular parameters. Meneghetti practices his analysis of art as an autonomous, self-referential system. His research unfolds within the labyrinths of artistic language and history, following a path that unwinds within the confines of its own closed domain. Artifice and specularity are the qualities of representation, artifice as difference from reality, specularity as an interlocutory movement of language within the maze of art. If art moves within its own system and can find no other referent than the labyrinth, this implies that the production of its languages is governed by entropy. The entropy of art means the problem of the exhaustion of a language strained by infinite usage and wear. The consequent result is therefore tautology, a state where there is no more movement in connotations; indeed it is a peremptory, concrete assertion of the immobile reality of the language.

Meneghetti’s evocation of nature is tantamount to a magical reduction of history for personal and expressive functions. Each worldly substance relinquishes the value of its objective identity and bends to a novel usage devised for it by the artist: the x-rayed image of the skeleton.
All substances are thus levelled off by a primitive memory, which refuses to be defeated by categories of the natural or technological, but only follows the organizational strategy of its own fantasy.
Retrieval of the original matrix hardly implies establishing an alternative formula to automation, but it does offer the opportunity of locating nature within the present, beyond the distance of contemplative nostalgia. The artist establishes a relationship between the recovered fact and fact formulated through fantastical reason (form). Recovery is no archaeological operation but indicates the fitting survival of a natural element. It withstands this formal linking operated by fantasy since its vital structural principle is not corrupted: the progress to bodily dematerialisation, the skeleton.

This premise explains the artist’s position towards art that always follows a natural analogical procedure. Over time such a procedure has been degraded, from being analogical it has become substitutive during the long process of cultural alienation that has established interdiction and censure. Meneghetti operates within a concept of art that is a form of consciousness, where the material exhibition of an object prompts new formulations of thought. Thus art becomes the setting of notification (the issue of immortality), in so much as it accommodates and develops an obsessive theme that is common to all humanity: to overcome death. If all humankind were to pool their efforts to this end, rather than dispersion there would be a concentration and use of mental energy (thought) as the instrument of conservation and rescue of the body’s physical health.

Ultimately Meneghetti’s art upturns the notion of nature to anti-nature, through citation of violence, cruelty and death, and builds a precise series of oppositions and doubles to that which is the most common vitalistic concept of nature. Art responds to this with culture as an instrument of human perpetration in thought and consequently immortality, and through ideological quotation that transforms it and reintroduces it in broader and more complex models.

Therefore Meneghetti decides to operate no longer in opposing couples and instead practices a perversely polymorphic language. Positive and negative become the polarities along which to exercise emotional force in terms of simultaneity. Within art it is not possible to make practical decisions, to enter or exit, to open or close. Marcel Duchamp’s door is both metaphor and metonymy, it is the threshold of conjunction in which oppositions are silenced and decisions banished within the apparent inertia of an architecture that marks time, designates a double, simultaneous economy: entrance and exit. The door is set for functionality to stumble, the programmed indecision of a language that raises inferior everyday death to the status of a superior death. Meneghetti’s art places a definitive seal on the image, raising the iconography of the x-rayed skeleton to still life, raised to an advertisement of living.

Achille Bonito Oliva