Roberta Bertozzi interno 38

The nimble factory of tragedy
Notes on the sculptures of Francesco Bocchini
in PLANETARISCH, Galleria Goethe2, Bolzano, 2006

abstract

Rembrandt, 1632, The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Tulp. The officiating surgeon lifts up the nerves of the corpse’s right arm with his scissors, in front of a crowd of colleagues, one of which is checking the medical text in order to verify the effectiveness of the surgical syntax. The painting does not respect the clinical orthodoxy of time, which would require, first of all, a dissection of both abdomen and brain – considered as the dens of all obscure evil as, inside them, both blood thickening and virulence are primarily originated. Orthodoxy is reintroduced in The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Deyman, in which the guinea pig is a disquieting, wan clone of Mantegna’s Dead Christ. The sacrifice has to be skilfully made in order to maintain itself, whether the principle is transmitted by the doctrine’s luminaries or by the divine law.
The surgical mechanism constantly reproduces that sacrifice, with the unprofessed aspiration of becoming an automatism. No more Doctor Tulp or Deyman, no more shears, lancets or stethoscope. No more tools, as the mechanism aspires to become nature. The machine longs for the sacrificial clinical perfection of nature, without any obstructions, senses of guilt or reserve, uncertainties or hindrances of any sort. It longs for a full productive desiring planning strategy. However, something inside the mechanism becomes a dysfunction, a deviation, a change of flux, a resistance. Something does not obey to the sacrificial law and shows its surrendering, its tendency to give up, its supreme exhaustion. It is a machine that, while producing nothing, does not consume, as it is deprived of all action, of all industrious or working force whatsoever. It is a machine characterised by interrupted coitus and by gestures that fall into the void with the typically dull sound of disconnected gears. Separated from the production chain of signifiers, such machine is amorphous and ridiculous: a bachelor-like machine, together with its post-industrial remains – the toy-machine, the self-erotic and partial device. These are magnificently vulnerable tricks, magnificently surrendered to their own impotence – masks of mechanics, weary machines that incessantly renovate nothingness and never aim at the core.
The organs swallow, fornicate, defecate. They relentlessly produce and assimilate, the banking practice of blood goes on with no breaks. Inside the world’s slaughterhouse organs surpass, cross and exchange each other. Within the surgical praxis, the object of vivisection becomes a pure ally. The small willing victims become, them, small willing executioners. Who does what to whom. This is a puppet theatre of cruelty, subtle, agile and disciplined; it is a cabaret of violence and fear of routine, a calm, decorous, greased fear.
It is a concluded sacrifice that has been offered to a socius where the body is dispossessed of someone else’s eyes, of the political and sanitary laws, thus turning into a mannequin for a representation of life.
In the works of Francesco Bocchini there is a kind of apology of prosthetics, which reaches its completion through decollation, the expropriation of the face and the deletion of physiognomy and, as a result, is the apology of any possibility of a recognition or acknowledgment of an identity.
The body-envelope is ready to put normality on stage. Instead of a face, we have alphanumerical indexes or tiny dreary-coloured, baptismal bubbles, similar to aureoles or fingerprints. The anxiety of classifying or naming, which is close to our best next nightmares of hygienic purge or bureaucratic exterminating efficiency, here becomes the powerful weapon of the illiterate pencil. Why those numbers? Why those names? Ultimately, history is confined within the borders of its own vacuous and gratuitous brutality; the accusing inscription, which nails it to its crimes, is a brand on the wrist, a bar code, a stroke of some childish handwriting – all this has happened, has been, has certainly happened. [...]