THE FLOW OF THE WORK
edit by Gabriele Perretta

‘The meaning of memory’s images depends on their truth content. As long as they remain connected to the uncontrolled life of the instincts, inherent in them is a demonic ambiguity. These images are, in such a case, opaque much as it is a crazy pane of glass through which any gleam penetrates. Their transparency increases in proportion to the degree to which consciousness clarifies the vegetation of the spirit, limiting its natural constrictiveness. The truth, in fact, can be discerned only by an emancipated consciousness, capable of controlling the demonism of the instincts.’

Siegfried Kracauer

In each of history’s epochs, the artist has been called upon to make his contribution, in the form of proposals, linguistic choices, and his commitment to the image. This task is different for each historical moment and can be more or less representative if the artist sticks to the signs of the time in which we live. Without a doubt, the postmodern artist is asked to take on a task — of research and of participation in the whole artistic thing — which is extremely arduous. If we are convinced that one cannot make plans for the work’s future life without conserving at least an impress, a trace of the past, we must also admit that the formula which would connect the inheritance of the past with the construction of a future work is very difficult to find.

As far as these possibilities for creative work are concerned, over the last few decades, two figures of the artist have mapped out the territory: one which looks ahead in a propulsive manner, and another which has preferred to unite itself to a form of disorientation, a sentiment which a multitude of aesthetic operators, wholly apart from their ideologies and habitual operative modes, have in common. The contemporary artist’s outlook comes out of this foundry of certainties and uncertainties.

Although it is never merely the result of a sum of half-measures, which cannot share the same center and the same point of intersection, the contemporary artist’s attitudes are devoted to a circular valency, to a communication which uses all the cards in the deck of visual knowledge and technique. All the techniques of linguistic transmission continually enter into his experiential baggage. In this latter-nineteenth century republic of letters and of arts, one would have to include, too, the life and work, the adventure, of Renato Meneghetti, a fearless artist from the Veneto region marked out by Fontana as a ‘positive young man’. From the first half of the Sixties up until the last days of this century, he has travelled over the entire territory of communication. He began his career with gestural painting (1962), he took on the implications of the dissolution of the image (monotypes), he went on to experiment with collage, fresco, the brush-strokes of materialistic painting, finally to hit upon what he baptized as (and what he also used to baptize himself) the Elementi fagocitanti and the Macrofagocitatrici.

It is significant that a large part of Meneghetti’s work takes as its springboard the notion of ‘phagocyting’. The scientific term which, in a figurative sense means to englobe or assorb, comes from the faculty which some animal organisms called phagocytes possess of being able to englobe and digest, by means of amoeboid movements in their protoplasma, micro-organisms, foreign bodies, cells of the same specie which are at the end of their life cycles. In small animals, phagocytosis has a nutritional function, in larger ones it is a part of the cellular defence system which the tissues and the organism use to protect themselves against infectious diseases. Meneghetti, in fact, somewhere between the beginning of the Seventies and 1977, after having extended his work to a more conceptual composition and having opened up the borders of his technique to include cinema and design, obsessively breaks down the Fagocitatrici in search of which he calls Elementi fagocitanti.

He signs himself, in 1980, ‘il fagocitato’, only to disavow this self-definition a few years later. The fact that Meneghetti uses all the baggage of the painter, the sculptor, the director, the photographer, and the musician more than explains what we referred to earlier as the process implied in the scientific notion of the phagocyte. Meneghetti, although his point of departure is painting, englobes himself in the other techniques and assorbs them. Just as, as Lucio Fontana says, ‘he thoroughly assimilates the experiences of the major exponents of contemporary art, integrating their work into his, in his incessant search for his own path’. In the work of this artist from the Veneto region, there are two alternative routes: one starts out from the linear method of painting and then opens itself to experiences of contamination of the most diverse kinds, and a second which, among the ‘parallel divergencies’ of music, photography, and cinema, arrives, nonetheless, at painting. Here painting is a point of departure and an unfurling of motive forces capable of trampling upon its unique attitude so as to realize synergies.

In fact the research on music from 1981-1982, which came out of the project Insania, done at the University of Padua’s Center for Sonological Research, and the book-record, both presented at the Biennale Musica di Venezia in 1982, the documentaries in 16 mm, the adaptation for theater contained in Patavanitas are all elements of a campaign to attack the surfaces of the arts from many contact points. It is just this period of work which unfolds around 1980 and which Meneghetti sums up with the formula ‘Having or Being’, borrowing from an extremely famous book by Erich Fromm, which makes it possible for us to gloss, transversally, his work’s potentialities.

Essentially, we can say that the value of man, according to the book, and here we follow more or less recollections and quotes of Lao-Tse, Meister Ekhart, and Marx which Fromm includes at the beginning of the volume, can be deduced, not from what he has, but from what he is. According to Fromm, the man of today tends to annihilate subjective experience and to establish an impersonal relation with things, a relation of having or not having.

As soon as he sees the world’s scenery as a grand constellation enriched by the motto do ut des, man becomes an alien to this stage and ends up accepting the reification within himself. Just as the external world seems to the human figure to owe its design to numbers which indicate possession or the lack of it, so, too, man’s inner life splits into monstrous fumes, which man discovers in himself, in the sense that he does not remember that it is his own actions which have produced them. And so man’s being ceases to exist, the person is contemporaneously emptied, the body which animates him contains nothing more than fragments of a solitude without depth, an unhappiness crowded with things which agitate the senses but which do not replenish the soul, or rather the emptiness, the deep and dark abyss into which he seems to plummet the minute he withdraws from the uproar of a reality which is both flat and banal.

This line of philosophical enquiry is useful because it makes us ask what better thing can art do than to rediscover being, or to make the other see that we are before we have. Art, too, must be the active result of what we are, rather than of what we have. To pinpoint the resonance of being in a work, does not mean, however, to avoid considering the instrumental potentiality which made the realization of the work possible. Structural potential is actualized thanks to the contribution of technique, to which Meneghetti has not disdained to give a great deal of attention.

Wholely apart from sterile mechanization, which could think of the realized work just as a technical achievement, let us say that whether he has availed himself of more lasting instruments, the instruments of memory, such as painting or architecture or music, or whether he is using more ephemeral media, such as cinema and video, Meneghetti always makes it very clear that the achievement of the image is made possible thanks to the inteplay of glances between the creator and the spectator, between he who invents and gives rise to relations and he who does not benefit passively, but rather, as an interlocutor, engaging in a dialogue with the work, realizes his own listening and his own work.

Exhortations such as these seem to me to have cut, like a torrent, across the sense of Meneghetti’s artistic work, seeing that he often had recourse to these categories during his career. Fromm asks himself and asks us what we can do to regain our beings, and, given that art is an expression of being itself (or, rather, this is what it ought to be), he permits art itself to ask of itself the same question. The first aim, prompted by this book printed in 1976, was that of not ‘exercing control over nature, but rather over technique and the irrational social forces and institutions which menace the existence of western society, if not of the entire human species’.

The second proposal which presupposed Fromm had to do with the construction of ‘the new humanistic science of man’, which made it possible to sort out phagocytic needs from those imposed by the the machine’s passive artifice, to distinguish between pathologies and psychic health. It seems that Meneghetti’s work, too, sets off on this same path of depuration; immediately after the exhortations of Having or Being, the work of the Radiografie begins and it indeed continues up to the present day. X-rays of painting, but also of introspection, of the human figure, of the communicative possibilities of the inner bone structure of art, and of the signs anatomy offers, are the result of the Meneghettian elaboration.

The pretext of taking as a metaphor the foundation of the new science of which Fromm speaks is not a gesture of presumption intended to intellectualize the painting, which is in fact an almost impossible thing, but to permit the human sign to free itself from the existential modality of having and to reappropriate the existential modality of being.

A utopia for the contemporary artistic gesture which needs this sort of astuteness to raise doubts about and question the world in which we are all obliged to live, but which is not really satisfactory, as it is now, to any of us, least of all to the artists who would like to transform it. In the context of Radiografie, the scrutinizing of internal organs is absolutely necessary, selecting out, with the Roentgen rays, an element of heat or colour or form which has never been explored, and which is inaccessible to the naked eye. Clearly something has been learned here from Fontana; after the fissuring of the canvas, the surface needed to be scrutinized in its silent two-dimensionality, transparent, radiant. Besides it is Meneghetti himself who draws our attention to the precariousness of his gesture. A gesture which is the rightful due of poets and painters.
It is enough to reconsider the words of Alberto Folin; they make us understand just how important the vehicles of poetry, of painting, and perhaps of ‘silence’ are to this career; or perhaps, it is enough to listen to Meneghetti’s own words: ‘but it is the medium of language which I took on and went ahead with which really characterizes me and about which I really care. I have also gotten beyond the individual mystification of the frame; I have left behind me technical interventions on the X-ray film itself or in direct relation to it, so as to obtain an aesthetic result both conceived of and desired, so as to create quite other sorts of mysteries […]’ (1987).

Gabriele Perretta