AnthonyWhite LucioFontana
AnthonyWhite LucioFontana
AnthonyWhite LucioFontana
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98
OCTOBER
Lucio
/
Fon
965-66.
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ANTHONY WHITE
the stakes: his new, monochrome paintings were sliced open in large g
with a Stanley knife. Over the following ten years up to his death in
Fontana would produce hundreds of these savagely minimal paintings,
monly known as the Cuts, the works that have brought the artist the
renown. Less well-known is the logic underpinning the artist's shift to the
canvas, which arose out of a critical response to key developments in postwa
in Italy during the late 1950s. This essay proposes that through his C
Fontana demonstrated that the dominant tendency of contemporary
toward the glorification of human gesture - amounted to that gestu
I.
acknowledging the artist's growing reputation. Fontana had for many years
been recognized as a highly accomplished sculptor and ceramicist. However, by
the late 1950s he was chiefly renowned for a series of works that, in fidelity to
the artist's theory of "Spatial art," questioned the boundary between the art
work and the space around it. In 1949 he had produced the Ambiente spaziale
OCTOBER 124, Spring 2008, pp. 98-124. 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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100
OCTOBER
Fontana. Ambiente
spaziale. 1949.
Courtesy Fondazione
Fontana.
(Spatial environment), an architectural installation of modern lighting technology in which the space around the sculptural object became part of the art work.
Subsequently, Fontana had exhibited a series of monochrome canvases punctured with holes, introducing an element of real space into the illusory space of
connection between the work and the space around it through radiating or
reflected light, also reminded the contemporary viewer of the worlds of fashion,
advertising, and commodity display and served to debunk the seriousness of the
conventional art work, bringing it down to earth.1
Throughout the 1950s, the radical nature of Fon tana's work and the sheer
unfamiliarity of his techniques had attracted its share of critical invective. At the
1954 Venice Biennale, for example, his punctured paintings were described as
1. The first substantial discussion of this aspect of Fontana's work appears in Yve-Alain Bois,
"Fontana's Base Materialism," Art in America 77, no. 4 (1989), pp. 238-49, 279.
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102
OCTOBER
Fontana.
Concetto
spaziale,
Attese. 1959.
Courtesy
Fondazione
Fontana.
cisms had now changed. Renato Barilli, who acknowledged the importance of
Fontana's earlier achievements, was disappointed by the later work: "The last
series of works dated 1958 is definitely unsuccessful, impressed with a pictorialism
in a surrealist key most unusual for the artist."3 In Fontana's most recent paint-
challenge to the cool reception given him that year at Venice. He abandoned the
2. For "intellectual masturbations," see F. Miele, "La XXVII Edizione della Biennale di Arti
Figurative," La Giust izia, June 20, 1954, quoted in Antonella Negri, "Fontana: indicazioni per una lettura della critica," in La donazione Lucio Fontana: Proposta per una sistemazione museografica (Milan:
Multipla edizioni, 1979), p. 49, n. =21; for "atrocities" see Nando Pavoni, "La Biennale," Arbiter,
( July-Aueust 1954), p. 39.
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104
OCTOBER
authentic
expr
cal
refusal
of
The
destiny
of
In
spite
of
be
Fontana
insiste
ment
that
had
the
informal
p
informal."8
Fr
the
machine-g
tle
differentia
work
from
th
tion
to
the
vir
is
extremely
a
betrays
almost
such
as
Moren
painting
proc
emerge,
in
Fon
neatly
split
th
inhibiting
the
retaining
the
operation,
un
machine-like
Fontana
propos
was
mechanica
Fontana
was
n
indulgent
expr
Yves
Klein
exh
and
format,
a
these
unusual
w
friendly
conta
interview,
whe
the
older
artis
time
that
I
we
port
for
Klein
monochrome,
paintings
begi
8.
Fontana,
(Milan)
9.
May
Lucio
Klein's
quot
9,
19
Fontana,
Milan
Fontana's
exhi
purcha
Fontana,
see
Nan
Retrospective
(Hou
p.
133,
n.
86.
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106
OCTOBER
blue
color
de
space,
the
allo
sides
of
the
p
ing
as
an
obj
however
mom
space
and
the
these
works,
unity
of
aesth
1940s. A further reason that Fontana took an interest in Klein is the irreverent
sense of inauthenticity the latter's work creates.10 The intense hue of artificial ultra
marine blue that Klein preferred belonged to a new spectrum of synthetic color
employed by the fashion and design industries in the 1950s. It impregnated his a
with a commodity character in a similar fashion to Fontana's earlier use of ultrav
let lignt, glitter, and
apparatus of chicanery
artist surrounded his work. These included the 1954 Yves Peintures, a book of re
by the overt trappings of art promotion and advertising; and an increasing emph
10. Details on Klein's materials are provided in Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro, "A Technical N
1KB," in Yves Klein 1928-1962: A Retrospective, pp. 258-59.
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108
OCTOBER
contemporary
were
to
some
painting
as
wi
one
way
of
in
negating
and
p
to
the
materia
of
pictorial
de
paradoxically,
painting
that
At
the
same
evacuation
of
paradigm
by
n
realm
of
docum
gular
quality
o
corporeal
enga
denly
render
expressive
pain
this
way,
he
g
the
hands
of
I
gesture
by
fia
the
seeming
in
intervention
o
come
to
play
i
Pollock's
1958
In
a
series
of
about
failed
prices
Jackson
to
"go
b
were
arti
Pollock's
reput
ous
and
dismis
the
1958
retros
example.17
Alt
reaction
to
th
demonstrates
sion,
which
painting
and
th
wa
Kl
15.
Fontana
also
untreated canvas, would allow the fabric texture to remain visible. See Barbara Ferriani, "Lucio
Fontana: Materials 1959-1961," in Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim
Foundation, 2006), p. 221.
16. See "The Last Interview Given by Fontana (1968)," Studio International 184, no. 949 (1972), p. 164;
and Carla Lonzi, Autoritmtto (Bari: De Donate editore, 1969), pp. 122-23.
17. Fontana had three separate exhibitions of his own work opening in Rome during 1958, including one at Rome's National Gallery of Modern Art.
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110
OCTOBER
Fontana:
Ijft>
Con
Right,
Concetto
painting,
with
time
enabling
h
dition
of
that
l
There
was
a
pr
guage
of
form
bourgeoisie
goe
Dorazio in 1956. Dorazio also noted that the curvaceous and attenuated forms of
canonical modernism had been warmly welcomed into the living rooms of the
middle class through furniture design:
This idiom, which by the late 1950s was looking shop-soiled, was precisely that
deployed in the excised forms in Out of the Web. As T. J. Clark has argued, these
forms are best described as a "glib, biomorphic comedy," just as the whimsical,
Klee-like quality of the related Cut Out series is "indistinguishable from a type of
21. Piero Dorazio, "Recent Italian Painting and Its Environment (1956)," in The World of Abstract Art,
ed. American Abstract Artists (New York: George Wittenbom, 1957), p. 45.
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II.
Where Twombly had burrowed into the subcultural characteristic of the graffito to objectify the mark and thereby fissure the image from below culture, Fontana
shows the gesture in the process of reification through culture as style. At the very
same moment in which his paintings were first used as backdrops in fashion shoots
for Elle magazine, Fontana adopted the position that no gesture is completely
immune to the kinds of reification introduced by the art market.23 Further empty-
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112
OCTOBER
sharpened
the
his
Stanley
Artists
knif
and
cri
ing
more
and
m
to
replace,
it
t
Nucleare
mov
addressed
thes
Manzoni,
amon
niques
were
ra
We
have
used
automatism
Painting,
gest
ism
Similarly, in 1958, in the pages of the Milan review Direzioni, Edouard Jaguer condemned Informel painting's "sacrosanct monotony of smears by the kilometer" as
the sign of a world that "confuses revolution with fashion."25
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114
OCTOBER
language
of
bi
possessions.
Ra
thetic
gle
value
Similarly,
Je
hold
objects
i
term
"gesture
the
user
of
ap
tures
requirin
connected
to
system
that
h
handles,
[and
Mon
Oncle,
w
fitting
furnitu
Kristin
Ross
appeared
to
u
ture
and
mov
supposedly
em
a
darker
side,
the
human
Speaking
of
t
functional
ob
the
"stylizatio
tion
of
the
h
style
of
such
lar
by
energy,
objects
of
fo
terminated
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116
OCTOBER
Fontana.
Courtesy
The
Concet
Fondazi
draining
potentially
th
rally
gifted
c
screen-printin
explain
why
h
build my work
Movie TV Secrets (June 1967), n.p. Quoted in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Andy Warhol's One-
38. See, for example, Buchloh 's discussion of Warhol's treatment of the tradition of participatory
39. The painting is Spatial Concept, Expectation, 1959. The work, which once belonged to Gallizio, is
inscribed on the back "Concetto spaziale-59 / All'amico Pinot." Reproduced in Lucio Fontana (Rome:
Palazzo delle Esposizioni; Milan: Electa, 1998), p. 261.
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Gallizio's exhibitions:
semantic depth. Gallizio's scissoring of the painting into separate elements for distribution at rock-bottom prices is especially significant. By being cut into fragments
at the request of the buyer, aesthetic largesse is converted into consumable pieces
of fabric for individual use.41 In this way the broader public could obtain the economically inaccessible, high-cultural monument of Informel painting.
Fontana's Cuts evince a similar devalorization of painting in several respects:
through pigments drawn from the realm of fashion and design, through their vio-
and garish industrial colors that strip painting of its aura of uniqueness,
Fontana's Cuts - which have become his most popular works - show how painting
might compete with the wide dissemination of the industrially designed object.
Now, in spite of this mass-produced quality, there is artistry in these works.
However, it is best described by the somewhat degraded term artiste that refers to
40. Mirella Bandini, Uestetico il politico (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1977), p. 140.
41. See Michele Bernstein, "In Praise of Pinot-Galhzio, October 79 (Winter 1997), pp. 93-95.
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118
OCTOBER
the
adept,
mu
slashes
has
all
appearance
of
agility.
Conne
in
proletarian
liberated
bodi
the
rhythmic
Thus
a
comp
and
circuses,
Fontana's
wor
nessed
in
Seur
His
immense
unrolls,
a
mo
dents
of
the
for bravura
42. Felix Feneon, "Le Neo-Impressionisme," UArt Moderne (May 1, 1887), pp. 138-39. Partially
reprinted in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism 1874-1904: Sources and Documents, ed. Linda Nochlin
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 109.
43. Meyer Schapiro, "Seurat and La Grande Jatte, " The Columbia Review 17 (1935), pp. 9-16. Partially
reprinted in Seurat in Perspective, ed. Norma Broude (Englewood Cliffs, N.T.: Prentice-Hall, 1978) p. 79.
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life-world on the basis of "a real transformation of the material conditions of exis-
tence, for a new life, for a new form of labor and of enjoyment."48
Rather than seeing works such as Seurat's and Fontana's as the repressive
industrialization of pleasure, we can read them as providing a space in which
mechanized and serial production is shown to be compatible with a joyous overcoming of the monotony and exhaustion produced by the brutal conditions of
industrial labor. The gravity-defying aerodynamism that Fontana's Cuts evoke is
one of the most persistent themes of postwar culture, evident in the countless
streamlined tailfins encountered in a wide variety of designed objects in this
period. When Reyner Banham argued that such designs "link the dreams that
money can buy to the ultimate dreams of popular culture," he strictly limited the
range of those dreams to the "world of sports-cars and aerodynamic research."49
However, more profound desires could be embodied in such forms. Hans Magnus
Enzensberger, noting that private car ownership and tourism both exploit and
answer mass needs for "nonmaterial variety and mobility," argues that the spectac-
1993), p. 143.
47. Herbert Marcuse, "The Affirmative Character of Culture (1965),** in Negations: Essays in Critical
Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 116-17.
48. Ibid., p. 100.
49. Reyner Banham, "Industrial Design and Popular Art (1955)," Industrial Design 7, no. 3 (1960), p. 63.
50. See Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory of the Media, in Raids and
Reconstructions: Essays on Politics, Crime and Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1976), pp. 36-37.
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120
OCTOBER
industrializati
part.
The
mat
ing's
capacity
either
side
of
tions
should
Nevertheless,
sion
to
read
t
figures.51
Thi
but
is
central
t
Since
1949,
th
modern
lightin
art
object.
In
a
things
of
the
space."52
For
h
proper
destiny
wish
to
integra
difficulties
of
installation,
du
time
in
his
car
rary
climate
of
new
form,
the
be
waged.
By
r
esty
of
itself,
F
full
of
nothing
tion
of
the
au
way
he
brough
But
what
was
between
Font
Although
the
c
it.
Fontana's
Cu
are
to
some
ex
wrote
enthusia
placing
objects
year
that
his
Fontana's
work
we
consider
hi
punctured
pain
51.
As
Gillo
Dorfl
project
in
front
o
Century:
The
52.
Quoted
in
53.
Lucio
delle
New
Hedy
Fontana
Esposizioni
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122
OCTOBER
it.57
In
spite
respects
the
ar
pher.
Instead
o
his
cutting
op
put
back
toget
vision
of
who
with
a
vision
o
radically
diffe
In
the
aforem
comparing
the
reality;
howev
member
could
the
film
already
by
stud
the
offers
a
vision
ment,
because
the
complete
editing
into
tha
The
presentat
cant
for
peop
reality
they
precisely
on
t
with
equipme
For
this
reason
nology."58
In
object
of
desir
the
grip
of
a
c
Benjamin's
pa
logically
advan
of
the
critic's
was
being
expl
that
certain
te
process,
were
sponded
to
cha
present
world
film
ema
57.
was
the
Walter
the
re
memb
Benjam
Benjamin:
Selected
Howard
Eiland,
et
58. Ibid.
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124
OCTOBER
Accordingly,
counting
it
as
radical
pain
Ultimately,
Fo
negation
that
f
ful
reading
bo
which
contain
nitely
deferred
to
demand,"
and
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