Lucio Fontana

Lucio Fontana. Concetto spaziale, La luna a Venezia, 1961. 54 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch ANTHONY WHITE Consumption as spectacle contains the promise that want will disappear . It is the desire for a new ecology, for a breaking down of environmental barriers, for an esthetic which is not limited to the sphere of “the artistic.” These desires . have physiological roots and can no longer be suppressed. Consumption as spectacle is—in parody form—the anticipation of a utopian situation. —Hans Magnus Enzensberger1 In late 1961 the Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana mounted his first North American solo exhibition at New York’s Martha Jackson Gallery. Titled “Ten Paintings of Venice,” the exhibition consisted of canvases that had been punctured with a knife and embellished with unorthodox materials. In these works, dedicated to the Byzantine splendors of Venice, dazzling layers of metallic gold or silver paint had been thickly troweled on with a spatula. Then, with the fingers of either hand, the wet paint was pockmarked with dabs, or raked into dense ridges that roughly formed squares, circles, or decorative swirls. Some works were also encrusted with shattered chips of polychrome Murano glass. In showing at Martha Jackson, Fontana was engaging in a dialogue with the most progressive art in New York of the time. The previous year the gallery had hosted “New Media—New Forms,” where the art of junk and industrial debris found its first uptown venue. In 1961 the gallery showed “Environments, Situations, Spaces,” which included Claes Oldenburg’s garish plaster reliefs of cheap com- modities; Allan Kaprow’s Yard, a courtyard filled with car tires; and George Brecht’s Chair Events, ordinary furniture considered as performance works. By incorpo- rating a heterogeneous range of materials, these American artists broke down the hierarchy of the aesthetic and nonaesthetic. They focused on the “everyday” quality of the artwork through a denial of elevated subject matter, a minimal artistic transformation of readymade or found material, and the physical projection of that material into the literal space of the viewer’s experience. In many respects, Fontana’s Venice paintings belonged within this range of work. Emphasizing the relief quality of the canvas with punctures, cuts, and glass Grey Room 05, Fall 2001, pp. 54–77. © 2001 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 55 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 chunks, Fontana disrupted the neutrality of easel painting’s illusionistic “window pane.” In its place was substituted a powerful awareness of the materiality of the canvas surface. Moreover, as Lawrence Alloway argued in his essay for the New York exhibition, “Man on the Border,” Some of the ways in which [Fontana] ignores the borders of painting and sculpture, and of the fine and the applied arts, are: . odd-shaped stretchers which explode or implode the customary rectangle; ceramic chips and metal paints which give the surface a sculptural solidity; and various punctures and cuts which create space literally, by opening up a painted surface.2 This last issue was often addressed in Fontana’s writings and statements from this period. In 1954 he argued that “Sculpture and painting are both things of the past. We need a new form. Art that’s movement. Art within space.”3 The ambi- tion to go beyond the art object in order to gain contact with the fluid space beyond was a constant preoccupation. Although Kaprow, Brecht, and Oldenburg were subjected to dismissive and ironic reviews, nothing quite matches the vitriolic attacks against Fontana’s New York show. Sidney Tillim, writing in Arts Magazine, identified with Fontana’s impulse to cut the canvas, to “smash your fist through this mirror of inhibition toying with a man’s illusion that he can be free (of the limits of time, space and death).” However, he then argued that the artist’s work suffered from “sheer mega- lomanic tastelessness,” because rather than destroying painting, Fontana continued to paint, becoming a “successful decorator.” As Tillim observed: The anarchic gash is still there, but . these gaping wounds are surrounded by fusillades of tiny punctures, rough chunks of Murano glass and a surf of gooey plastic paint gilding the anti-totem of the hole with a kind of palatial extravagance in gold and silver while purporting to evoke such facets of Venetian enchantment as its moon, its Baroque and its nights of love. But the hole is one kind of fetish, the window dressing another. The latter obviates the reason for having attacked the plane in the first place—as if he now refuses to accept the consequences of his own destructiveness.4 For Tillim it was acceptable to destroy painting, but not thereafter to return to the canvas and treat it as a surface to be richly ornamented. What the critic did not realize was that the two impulses are related, although he hinted at it when argu- ing that there is something fetishistic about both the hole and the window dressing, albeit of dif- ferent kinds. Lucio Fontana. Concetto spaziale, Venezia Barocca, 1961. (Original photo cropped at right.) 56 Grey Room 05 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 Indeed, Fontana’s willful savoring of garish materials did not contradict his destructive impulse, but rather went hand in hand with it. In order to understand the marriage between negation and kitsch in Fontana’s work properly, it is important first of all to appreciate the distance between these works and a paradigm of artistic practice still prevalent at the time. Although the holes and punctures convey the sense that an event of sheer physical impact has occurred, Fontana was averse to gestural painting and the types of psychologistic readings that were attached to it. “I am not informal,” he declared, opposing himself to the European Informal school of gestural painting. “[T]he informal seeks the result in the gesture . .; my nature is attracted rather to space.” While one cannot deny that Fontana’s works are the result of a certain kind of action, they were not intended as records of his own presence. As Fontana argued, “[T]he artist must have the courage to stop idolizing himself, to stop seeing himself at the center of the earth and of all things.”5 By drawing attention to the stubborn materiality of canvas with the puncture, Fontana ruptured the neutral “arena” upon which gestural painting relied in order to provide a coherent background for the artist’s marks. Furthermore, the puncture technique, with its repetitive, machine-gun appearance, does not allow for the kind of expressive effects common to gestural art. Rather, as contempo- rary viewers noted, it has more in common with the mechanical punches made in a tram ticket.6 In 1957 one reviewer even argued that “like holes in a punched card, like bullet holes in a wall, the holes carry information.”7 This informational quality of the holes is foreign to the deeper sense of authorial presence connoted by con- ventional artistic gesture. Moreover, the fact that the mark is a lack—an absence of canvas—in the pictorial field pointedly withdraws the fullness of the artist’s figure from the work in order to allow another dimension of painting to emerge. This dimension of Fontana’s paintings can be approached through the novel scenographic arrangements and photographs of his first punctured paintings from the early 1950s. In the most unusual of these photographs, published in the magazine Spazio in December 1952, a punctured painting is shown propped on a stool with a light placed directly behind it. Luminous images of the electric lamp’s glowing filament, focused by the holes as if by countless pinhole lenses, are projected onto a darkened wall.8 In an earlier photo, published in Domus in June 1952, three punctured canvases are shown in a loosely architectonic arrangement in Fontana’s studio. In the caption Lisa Ponti comments: [I]n these, which Fontana calls “Spatial Concepts,” punctured and illumi- nated paper mounted on canvas, there is a distance from the object true and White | Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch 57 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 58 Grey Room 05 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638101317127813 by guest on 27 September 2021 proper, from the art object to the art effect, a fantastic effect in which material counts little and doesn’t endure, and what is important is the enlargeable, three-dimensional spatial spectacle that is created.9 Here the paintings are explicitly connected both to the vision of an expanded environmental artwork and to the idea of an art of spectacle. Such a description begs the question of what it might mean to call these works a “spatial spectacle” and whether such a designation is accurate. Answering it will necessitate leaving behind the media of painting and photography to examine the environmental installations that Fontana produced over the course of the decades prior to 1961. The Early “Environments”: Events and Projects 1946–1948 Fontana spent the war years in Argentina where he acquainted himself with the writings of Umberto Boccioni and was exposed to the growing local Concrete Art movement in Buenos Aires, which, for the Argentine arts scene of that period, was relatively experimental, particularly in its use of modern technology and in its openness to innovative art forms.10 In 1946, the year before Fontana would return to Milan, he co-authored the Manifiesto Blanco, which signalled a major develop- ment in his thinking.

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