Criticism Volume 57 Article 11 Issue 4 The Avant-Garde at War 2015 Critical Fontana Howard Singerman University of Virginia - Main Campus, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism Recommended Citation Singerman, Howard (2015) "Critical Fontana," Criticism: Vol. 57 : Iss. 4 , Article 11. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol57/iss4/11 CRITICAL The subtitle of Anthony White’s monograph on the Italian artist FONTANA Lucio Fontana, Between Utopia Howard Singerman and Kitsch, lays out the terms of the book’s central—and oft-repeated— Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia argument: that Fontana’s art, a and Kitsch by Anthony White. “collision of avant-garde tech- Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, niques and a kitsch past redolent 2011. 336 pp. $29.95 cloth. with outmoded, even infantile desires possesses a critical force” (14). Both Fontana’s avant-garde techniques—the perforations and slashes of his Buchi (Holes, 1949– 68) and Tagli (Cuts, 1958–68), for example—and his embrace of kitsch’s shiny surfaces and ersatz construction worked to desubli- mate and degrade painting, and “only in its decrepitude did Fontana believe painting could have a uto- pian potential” (18). White’s book may well be, as he claims, the first to “systematically account” for the “puzzling paradoxes of the art- ist’s work” (6), but it is not the first English-language monograph on Fontana. There is a good deal of critical and historical writing on Fontana, most of it, particularly in English, has been, as White notes, in exhibition catalogs. The first English-language catalog, with a short, smart essay by Lawrence Alloway, accompanied Fontana’s first one-person show, at Martha Jackson Gallery, in New York City in 1961. And while White’s book covers the entirety of Fontana’s career from the 1920s forward, it is here—with the Jackson show and the reception of the artist’s Venice Criticism Fall 2015, Vol. 57, No. 4, pp. 697–704. ISSN 0011-1589. doi: 10.13110/criticism.57.4.0697 697 © 2016 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309 698 HOWARD SINGERMAN paintings in New York—that the any false reconciliation or mastery. book begins. In Fontana’s work, both avant- A series of ten five-foot-square garde and kitsch are riven by a Spatial Concepts bearing sub- radical incompleteness: a moder- titles like At Dawn Venice Was All nity rigorously opposed to that Golden or Sun in Piazza San Marco which exists in the present, and (both 1961)—“phrases likely to be grounded in a hopeful, forward- appended to mass-produced post- looking appreciation for what has cards for the Italian tourist market” seemingly passed into historical (9)—the Venice paintings enact the oblivion” (14). collision of avant-garde and kitsch White borrows the phrase that White’s system turns on. They “damaged goods” from Walter are, as befits avant-garde practice, Benjamin, and he links Fontana’s monochromes, or nearly so, and attraction to the outmoded punctured or slashed as Fontana’s (whether to the antiquated dreams paintings had been since the first of a past art, the unfulfilled dreams Buchi of 1949, but the paint is silver of an earlier avant-garde, or the and gold acrylic laid on like frosting, pleasure promised by objects de and Fontana crusted his surfaces luxe or their commodity knockoffs) with Murano glass. The paintings to Benjamin’s idea of the “dialecti- are at once at least ironically aspira- cal image”: “Benjamin’s argument tional and, as White’s chapter title that certain cultural products offer has it, “damaged goods.” While a critical image of modernity’s they evoke the breakthroughs of contradictions has immense sig- the avant-garde and even, in their nificance for Fontana’s work” (13). “lavishly ornament[ed]” surfaces, And over and over again, across “the antiquated luxuries of the four decades of work, White points medieval past” (6), their kitsch titles to Fontana’s “use of outmoded and elaborate surfaces—and their forms to draw pointed compari- empty, seemingly mechanical repe- sons between modernity’s utopian titions of a decade-old avant-garde dreams of fulfillment and their strategy—insist on painting’s fail- fatal obsolescence as kitsch within ure, its “decrepitude.” In White’s commodity culture” (271). While accounting, Fontana’s system is Benjamin’s concept is a fruitful far more complex than the simple, one for White, he acknowledges “Manichean” (11) opposition that that they are strange bedfellows; Clement Greenberg offered in Fontana was, after all, a member “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939).1 of Italian fascist movement and Rather, Fontana’s is doubly articu- “clearly had no ideological oppo- lated, each pole internally divided sition to the theme of Italian mili- against itself, “thereby disallowing tary victory” (96) when, in May ON LUCIO FONTANA 699 1936, authorities renamed the “He is the enemy of media purity, Hall of Honor—a commission he and chooses the ambiguous border shared with the critic and architect between the arts, where paintings Edoardo Persico and others at the look like sculpture and sculpture VI Triennale of Milan—the Hall meets painting halfway.”3 This, of Victory in celebration of Italy’s I should note, is the oldest theme invasion of Ethiopia. But White in Fontana criticism; it emerges draws on Benjamin for more than in Persico’s 1936 monograph, the his theorization of the dialectical first extended critical assessment image; he uses Benjamin to give of Fontana’s work, when the art- Fontana his sensibility: “It is no ist’s transgressions—his border coincidence, nevertheless, that in crossings—were those of a sculp- 1936 both the writer and the art- tor rather than a painter: Fontana’s ist were described independently aim was “to resolve sculpture and as being ‘touched by extremes.’ painting,” mustering “all of the The two men were fascinated by acquired taste of the sculptor and the most novel and shocking tech- all of his chromatic obsessions.”4 niques of the avant-garde, and yet White has little interest in pursuing both cherished objects and styles this categorical crossover directly, rendered obsolete by the myth of whether because of its obvious- progress” (14). ness or its formalism; his concern White’s discussion of Fontana instead is with Fontana’s engage- as a dialectician is nuanced and ment with the broader “project of complex, but the presentation of the historical avant-garde, critiqu- Fontana as an artist who works ing the traditional boundaries of the interestingly in between things is autonomous art object” (125)—not a long-standing motif in writing the boundaries between métier, but on the artist. The title of Erika those that separate the traditional Billeter’s lead essay in the catalog work of art from its surroundings, for Guggenheim Museum’s 1977 whether physical, spatial (hence Fontana retrospective, his first in Fontana’s “spatialism”), or the the United States, predicts the syn- broader life-world represented by tax, if not all the terms, for White’s applied art, mass culture, and the own work: “Lucio Fontana: kitsch of his title. Between Tradition and Avant- The Fontana that Alloway pres- Garde.”2 Lawrence Alloway’s essay ents in 1961 is already, as White’s for the 1961 Martha Jackson catalog will be, a more complicated artist is entitled “Man on the Border,” than the one Persico has drawn. and while it is quite brief, it plots His trespasses are doubled, and the a number of the strategies and boundaries he crosses have more oppositions that White will pursue: at stake: his work is troubled by “a 700 HOWARD SINGERMAN problem at the core.” According to of volume” (47)—as evidence not Alloway, of “all of the acquired taste of the sculptor and all of his chromatic Fontana’s ambiguity has obsessions gathered together in to do with the status of the the perfect unity of the work,”6 but work of art. Ever since Art of the work’s failure to cohere, of Nouveau artists have made Fontana’s conscious refusal of “any the decorative arts expressive false reconciliation or mastery.” and the expressive arts deco- Writing of Fontana’s large poly- rative. This transcendence chrome and gilded plaster sculp- of the traditional limits of tures—works such as Victory of the fine and applied arts is the Air and Seated Young Woman, Fontana’s theme. [H]e both 1934, and both of which fig- ignores the borders of paint- ure in White’s account—Persico ing and sculpture, and of the insists that “the sculptor’s most fine and the applied arts. recent works are neither . bizarre [Thus it] is a part of his bor- nor paradoxical but the attempt at der activity that his works extreme coherence [coerenza].”7 Or, often have a connection with perhaps, “extreme consistency.” the chic.5 This is not a passage that White cites—for obvious reasons—but Alloway’s spatial metaphor is I want to use the ambiguity avail- somewhat slippery; Fontana is both able in the Italian word coerenza to on the border and disdainful of it, underline the difference between but it is clear that he needs those Persico’s Fontana and White’s. categories to be felt as set: paint- Neither are interested in Fontana ing and sculpture, fine and applied as a maker of oddities or para- arts, avant-grade and tradition, doxes (accounting for such “puz- avant-garde and kitsch—or at least zling paradoxes” is, after all, the his critics do. Where White differs explicit purpose of White’s sys- from Alloway, and certainly from tematic approach), but where, for Persico, is around the question of Persico, Fontana’s value lies in the resolution, of success.