FANTASY FIGURES, IDENTITY FIGURES
edit by Walter Guadagnini

In a path as coherent as that of Renato Meneghetti – notwithstanding the diverse modes of expression – the overlapping in 1981 of two significant moments in the artist’s professional life cannot be accidental. The photographic book “Insania” was published, and the first X-rays appeared, demonstrated by the large “Ritratto di Anna” and a kind of incunabula of a long theory of work to come. This coincidence cannot be accidental above all because both works, although having substantial linguistic autonomy and naturally a different image, have a common origin. It is the functional praxis codified in the mid 1850s when the series of experiments aimed at fixing images created by light on a prepared surface bore the hoped for results.

It was the work of scientists, of dilettantes of genius, before it was used by artists; it was research mid way between science and alchemy, where the discovery of the properties of a chemical substance was worth as much as the capacity to invent an image. It was research that transmuted into history and instruments, useful as much to Flaubert as to the judiciary, to the doctor as much as to the astronaut and the traveller. And when history is written, roles become confused: Marey next to Bragaglia, Rontgen next to Baraduc, the Henry Brothers next to August Strindberg – which are the scientists, which are the artists, which are the impostors?

It is not be chance then, the coincidence of the photographic book en travesti and a work that distorted the experiments of Rontgen in a purely artistic way. It is rather confirmation of the clear awareness Meneghetti has of the double function and nature of photography – of its various forms, in its nature of being testimony and untruth, supreme realism and total falsification and in its impossible innocence. It is this foundation of ambiguity that appeals to Meneghetti, and which has always been a part of his work. On the one hand there is the display of the image, its unveiling in a communicative way, and on the other hand its manipulation, the transformation of that same image into something else – not only, or so much, into a new image, but into a new tool of vision where that which is brought into question is the original value of the primogenial image, in substance the context and function for which it was born.

“Insania” is, substantially, a book of portraits, and of that particular form of representation that is the self-portrait. But the final result of that act deliberately betrays the expectations of the spectator: the faces of “Insania” say nothing about the author, about his psyche, or his role within society; they are, with respect to Meneghetti, mute faces. They are rather, an updated version of Rimbaud’s je est un autre, they are an opportunity for the other to have a face through the author, in a paradoxical communicative short-circuit whose noble origins are easily traceable.

A few years ago, a lovely show at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt set out to reconstruct a complex and fascinating episode such as the relationship of the “Okkultismus und Avantgarde” between 1900 and 1915. Among reflections dealing with the figure of Steiner and revisions of works of the great fathers of the historical-spiritual avant-garde, from Munch to Kandinsky and Mondrian to Malevic, much space was dedicated to scientific and para-scientific phenomena whose manifestations were connected to art. In this context a work such as Boccioni’s “Io-noi” was shown next to photographs of ghosts taken during séances, ghosts painted by Munch were alongside those appearing – one does not know how deliberately – in photographs taken by the artist himself.

And, in the same period, the Russian Rayonists introduced themselves with a painted face - yet again it was something mid way between shamanism and theatrical provocation. It was in this European melting pot – but with important developments in the United States also, if one thinks of the “Balzac” of Steichen – that the face, and together with this the body, becomes the location of change even before identity. There is an image of “Insania”, “Io, la società”, that explicitly reflects a celebrated superimposition of Wanda Wulz, “Io+gatto” of 1932. But it is the entire climate of Futurism that seems to emerge in Meneghetti’s work, and not only his photographic work, if one thinks of a phrase such as “the spectralisation of certain parts of the body” belonging to the autobiography of Tato published in 1940, of the photographs of the same author as “The perfect bourgeois. Camouflage of objects” of 1933 or even, to return to the origins of the episode, the dynamism photo of Bragaglia, ineluctable point of comparison for a poetic such as that of Meneghetti on the body.

On the other hand, it is difficult to deny the suggestion of a play on words, of the cross-reference of image and text so dear to the author himself, and not remember how Man Ray means, literally, “Man of Ray”, and deny as a result suggestions that derive from his rayographs and also, and perhaps even more, the suggestions that come from within the entire creative path of the author of “Emak Bakia”. An analogous contempt for specialisation in favour of work on the margins of disciplines, on transgression intended as the authentic cornerstone of poetics; the rejection of “experimentation” per se – as evidenced by the greater part of the rich biography dedicated to Meneghetti and summarised in one of the many incontrovertible sentences by Man Ray, “I do not search, I imagine”; the sliding between languages as natural and necessary praxes, and not as decoration and an updating of current affairs; the emphasis, in the end, on the figures coming from outside the studio, the search for immediate communication, however alienated, with the spectator.

But, at the same time, it is necessary to highlight the differences between the two, the first being that which can be observed in a parallel reading between the rayographs and Meneghetti’s X-rays. The rayograph corresponds, in extreme summary, to the principles of the ready made, it implies an added semantic value entrusted almost in its entirety to the spectator and a standard devaluation of a functional value. It is a logic that, at least in its basic suppositions, becomes the logic of procedural indifferences and indeterminacy. This is typical of a conspicuous part of the artistic work of the 1960s on the conceptual front, which aimed at the de-materialisation of the artistic object (as declared in a famous essay by Lucy Lippard).

For Meneghetti on the contrary, the X-ray does not exhaust itself, either from the conceptual or practical point of view. The X-ray is, firstly, the starting point of the work, and not the work itself (as could be, for example, in a work like “Dodici radiografie del miocorpo” by Eliseo Mattiacci). It is a detail, not the entire thing. It is the development process that gives the final value to the work, which accomplishes – literally – the image. And in this phase a decisive event occurs: the development changes the X-ray from the document of a reality – that of a specific human body – to the falsification of reality in view of the creation, the invention of “another” reality, of an image that no longer communicates the nature of the function of light on a plate, but the nature of the work of the artist in the studio. If, in relation to rayographs, Tzara could write that “les objets revent”, for Meneghetti one could write that bodies dream. It is dreaming a different fate that does not necessarily end with death and decomposition and that can go beyond the earthly existence of each fragment of body revealed by the X-ray. (Although no intention towards mysticism is readable in Meneghetti’s processes, it is curious to note how, faced with a theme so dear to sacred art as stained glass, the artist has decided to elect X-rays as the primary object, a type of divanitas in reverse, seeped in disillusioned and ironic optimism).

The X-ray means disclosure. However, it also undergoes the alienating process of colouring, and the apex of willing betrayal of the original lies in the titles of the work, which are rich in literary – and cultural in a broad sense – references, able to radically modify the meaning of the image itself from the beginning.

Thus one returns here to the fundamental theme in the history of photography earlier mentioned: and it is not accidental that an author such as Joan Fontcuberta — the man who perhaps with the greatest clarity theorised and practised in these last few years the “false” through photography, or rather, who founded his observations and practices on the impossibility of distinguishing real and fiction in the photographic sphere — as I was saying, it is not accidental that an author such as Fontcuberta followed all the techniques of so-called off camera photography, revealed the mechanisms of the structure of the image and, at the same time, exposed the fundamental importance of the context in which photography is laid down. If the gnats on the rear window of a car can become a celestial map, if the imprints left by two cocks on sensitive paper can give life to an abstract composition, then bones can also become the elements of an imaginary landscape, and a very real one if matched with a sufficiently misleading caption and a pictorial reworking with an analogous approach.

There is, however, another element within this process that cannot be forgotten, otherwise the works would be reduced to a purely linguistic and aesthetic exercise, and this deals with the ethical value, so to speak, conferred by Meneghetti on his choice of utilising X-rays. Indeed, for Meneghetti the basis of using X-rays is as a means of reaching the invisible (yet again, Okkultismus und Avantgarde ...), of that which lies beyond the surface, to an identity that, although manipulated, nonetheless remains the skeleton – in this case literally – of a presence in the world.

It is revealing that which is hidden, but more so discovering the entirety of an experience through an imprint, to the extremes of the self-portraits of 1989, to the “Ritratto intestino di Renato” of 1992 and the portraits “in the shape of a moon” of 1996. Je est un autre is no longer sufficient here: it is now about retracing a series of works as signs which has already seen Recalcati (Sgarbi) and Klein (Gualdoni) cited. Here it seems one can add the experience of Giovanni Manfredini and his “Tentativi di esistenza” (and indeed what else are Meneghetti’s works?) and that of Paolo Gioli, particularly of one of his recent cycles “Sconosciuti” (indeed, a comparison between the entire work of Gioli and that of Meneghetti could lead to quite a few observations). It is worthwhile re-reading the author’s note regarding these works: “I have been given as gifts many negatives of plates and films, from an old studio that closed. All the images are faces for identity cards. On the other side of the plate on gelatin I found the usual ‘touching up’ used once (even though we are already dealing with the 1950s).

They are all unknown faces, many of whom are probably already dead: woman, men, some children (…) I made exhausting macro-shots of a reflection of those ‘modified’ portraits on a 35mm film and then eliminated the perforations with scissors, thus reworking the form of the plate into a new personal plate. It was a struggle with this mysterious ... author whom I discovered and invented, defying him. On the one hand the image of the master-photographer, on the other, for me, the true image, the true identity mysterious to the other: a counter-identity. The front face unaware of being recto-verso, of aged qualities that may never be reached dissolved in the material of a reflection, and eyes which pass from my part on a face that has never existed, was never conceived, never photographed. The identity and fantasy figures of three authors in a single act in creative league”.

Here is the very reason why they are more real than the X-ray, and the reason for their ethical need too, beyond the creative process, beyond the accidents which cause their being and final configuration, beyond their historical origins: the will to be both figures of identity and fantasy, where one does not exclude the other, but on the contrary, one reflects itself, or recognises itself, in the other. In the depths of surface.

Walter Guadagnini