AnthonyWhite LucioFontana

Industrial Painting's Utopias: Lucio Fontana's "Expectations"
Author(s): Anthony White

Source: October, Vol. 124, Postwar Italian Art (Spring, 2008), pp. 98-124
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40368502
Accessed: 12-11-2016 13:16 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to October
This content downloaded from 145.94.104.230 on Sat, 12 Nov 2016 13:16:48 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
98
OCTOBER
Lucio
/
Fon
965-66.
Industrial Painting's Utopias:

Lucio Fontana's "Expectations"
ANTHONY WHITE
Lucio Fontana, an artist accustomed to notoriety, was frustrated by th

lukewarm reception given to his exhibition of punctured paintings at the
Venice Biennale. Whereas his perforated canvases of the early 1950s had
provoked controversy and outrage, at the 1958 Biennale several critics argu
that Fontana's most recent canvases had lost their power to shock. In respo
Fontana immediately launched a new series of works titled Concetto spa
Attese (Spatial concept: expectations) in which he answered his critics by r
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
eradication. By virtue of this insight, Fontana was able to develop an altern

visual language that memorialized the Utopian origins of modern painting.
I.
The organizers of the 1958 Venice Biennale dedicated an entire room to

Lucio Fontana, with space for forty works spanning his entire career, thereby
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.
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
painting. In both the installation and the paintings, he employed materials

drawn from the world beyond fine art. In Ambiente spaziale, he employed fluorescent paint and ultraviolet light; at times he installed colored lights behind his
paintings or sprinkled them with glitter. These materials, which enhanced the
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.
Industrial Painting s Utopias 101
Fontana. Concetto spa

Courtesy Fondazione
102
OCTOBER
Fontana.
Concetto
spaziale,
Attese. 1959.
Courtesy
Fondazione
Fontana.
"intellectual masturbations" and "atrocities."2 Although many commentators

remained disapproving about his 1958 Biennale exhibition, the tone of the criti-
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-
ings, rather than an absolute opposition between monochrome canvas and

patterns of holes, several compositional elements competed for the viewer's attention, including pieces of collaged canvas, highly worked surface texture, and fitful
drawing. The startling contravention of the medium caused by the punctures in
the canvas was lost in an elaborate pictorial schema.
By October 1958, Fontana had come up with a new type of painting: the cut
canvas. Notably, the first public appearance of these works was on the cover of La
Biennale, a periodical published by the Venice Biennale. With an ultramarine blue
monochrome canvas opened by several gashes, Fontana threw down the gauntlet in a
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.
3. Renato Barilli, "La XXIX Biennale," // Verri 2, no. 3 (1958), p. 149.
Industrial Painting's Utopias 103
more complex compositions of recent years an

tion between the lateral extension of the canva
Although the Cuts that the artist began in 195
ings, in the new series of works Fontana
developments in contemporary art that requir
re-iterate, his earlier practice. Among these

European Informel painting, Yves Klein's 1
paintings in Milan, and Jackson Pollock's retro
Informel painting was ascendant in 1950s
abstraction and tachisme, Italian Art Informel
techniques and emphasis on painting materials.

proponents sought to escape the constraints of
rational compositional techniques and emph

The transition that many Italian artists wen
by the work of Mattia Moreni, who shifted
planes to full-blown gestural painting durin
tion on the canvas was understood to defea
industrial society by emphasizing the uniqu
ative gesture.5 As the Italian critic Gillo D
painting, in spite of being superficially abstra

projected the "inner formative will of man" on
By the late 1950s, however, there were grow
ment's opposition to industrialization had b

Jaguer, in the 1957 issue of the Milanese a
Informel had surpassed neither Surrealism n
Today we are witnessing a reiterated org

more aleatory, as well as an assault of rep
are nothing more than "mechanical lib
which is ultimately obscured. The gestur

direct, emotional testimony, becomes more
these stains and scribbles have become not
Jaguer condemned what he saw as the incr

Informel movement, which was thereby d
4. See Maurizio Calvesi, "Informel and Abstraction in I

20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1900-1988 (London
1989), p. 289.
5. See Meyer Schapiro, "Recent Abstract Painting (

1957)," in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries, Selected
222. For an Italian example of this argument, see the

and Anna Costantini, eds., Roma-New York: 1948-1964
6. Gillo Dorfles, // divenire delle arti (Turin: Giulio E
7. Edouard Jaguer, "Cos! come vi furono un tempo de
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.
Fontana. Concetto spazi
/ 959. Courtesy Fondazio
work. This dialogue was grounded in the f

several similarities between Klein's work and
Klein had rejected several elements of
Through his use of highly saturated blue pig

vas in an even, allover technique, Klein unif
eliminated the distinction between figure a
ing depended to make physical artistic gestu
of Klein's blue monochromes were applied
painterly gesture and detaching his pain
authenticity of Informel painting. By comp

all evidence of manual intervention, Klein h
own monochrome pictures of the early 1

Klein's work would have greatly interested
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
fluorescent paint. Given

that in all these respects,
Klein had equaled or out-
done Fontana's mono-
chromes of the 1950s, it

is understandable that
Fontana would have
taken* great interest in
the French artist's work
and sought to respond to

it in his own practice.
However, there was
one direction in which
Klein had gone much further than Fontana, and

where the latter refused
to follow: the elaborate
apparatus of chicanery
Fontana. Concetto spaziale, Attese. 1959.

Courtesy Fondazione Fontana.
with which the French
artist surrounded his work. These included the 1954 Yves Peintures, a book of re
ductions of nonexistent monochrome paintings; patenting his ultramarine

pigment "1KB" (International Klein Blue); declaring that the varying prices a
to his virtually equivalent blue monochromes reflected profound differen
quality between them; Le Vide (1958), an empty gallery space lavishly supplem
by the overt trappings of art promotion and advertising; and an increasing emph
on the artist's public performance in the personae of judo master, medieval k
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.
and orchestra conductor. The significance of t

the subject of debate. Benjamin Buchloh has d
spectacularization," which relegated preexisting
to the status of pure commodity; Yve-Alain Bo
frauds were an attack on the pompous mythol
painting, reads it as demonstrating that "only
spectacle can contain a parcel of truth: as thei
never commented on this element of Klein's work
ing was close to that of Bois: after all, Fontan

metallic paint, glitter, and Murano glass chips
geously trash the high seriousness of Informel
of the Cut paintings demonstrates that the older

gesture from art and transplanting it to the supp
On the contrary, for Fontana, artistic gest

physical sense, and not Klein's more modern,
pensable. When Fontana faked his cutting tec
Mulas, this was no deliberate staging of fraud
his actual working process to the camera.12 In
as "concept," or "idea," Fontana remained resol
an artisanal element in his practice, which can
in Milan's Fine Art Academy and his father
Argentina.13 As Giulio Carlo Argan has arg
artist's postwar practice, Fontana "was the def
ation and even as beauty" who "demonstrated
had to be reduced in order to coexist with the
industrial culture."14 In 1958, there were sever
defense and reduction that the artist wanted to
Fontana's response to Klein, therefore, w
emboldened by the younger artist's work to
surfaces of his early punctured paintings.
spectrum of novel, water-based pigments - su

the work catalogued as 59 T 134 - which were
within the existing natural referents for colo
11. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Plenty or Nothing: From Y
Neo- Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and
Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), p. 269; Yve-Alain Bois, "Klein's R

2007), p. 86.
12. See Uco Mulas, La fotografia (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), p. 100.
13. "I called them 'spatial concepts' and this is because for me painting is all about the idea. I used
and still use the canvas to document an idea." D. Palazzoli, "Intervista con Lucio Fontana," in Bit, no. 5
(October-November 1967), quoted and translated in Lucio Fontana (Rome: Palazzo delle Esposizioni;
Milan: Electa, 1998), p. 257.
14. Giulio Carlo Argan, "Reconstruction in Postwar Italy," in Breakthroughs: Avant-Garde Artists in
Europe and America, 1950-1990 (Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts; Ohio State University New
York: Rizzoli, 1991), p. 27.
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.
One lesson in the Pollock retrospective f

acter of the American artist's drip techniq
Pollock's dripping technique evinces an ind
to the author's presence as at the scene of a
gestural mark is read as a sign of the auth
argued, that author is figured as radically a
was an indexical debasement of form, Krau
Twombly in terms of the graffito. The ma
peculiar character in that it marks an event by
porality of its own making."19 Vandalistic o

that can only be spoken in the language of
of the autographic gesture with an irreconc
Cuts Fontana attacked the fiction that the
presence. The vandalistic trace of Fontana's
tion of gesture in Klein's monochrome, ins
Indeed, the voids of the cut canvas are the
stock of its prior exclusion and internalized
between maker and mark, Fontana's indexic
of the gesture's deadening.
The most startling revelations for Fonta
however, would have been Out of the Web. Th
ing covered by the American artist's drippi

of canvas have been sliced away with a kni
While these excised areas were not strictly "
in Fontana's earlier pictures were, Pollock's
Fontana's work: both physically disrupted th
bition, a writer for the Socialist newspape
"The Presley of Painting"- argued that, "In
the crust of color to reveal the Masonite un
grasp a more profound reality beneath the
obsessive temperament gets entangled."20
Pollock was by no means attempting to g
this Italian left-wing critic, for whom the
neo-realism. Nevertheless, Pollock's Out of
the figure and negating it too, of retaining
gesture while demonstrating the necessity
Fontana find an artistic language through
18. In semiological terms, indexical marks, such as t

contiguity" between sign and object. Mieke Bal and No
Art Bulletin 73, no. 2 (1991), p. 190.
19. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Camb
20. Giovanni Galtieri, "II Presley della pittura," Ava
Saturday, March 22, 1958.
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:
The practicability (not to mention the simple aspect of the newest

industrial shapes) of lively colors and elegant contours have won the
Italian consumer completely. In these few years they would seem
already to have supplanted old tastes and the demand for traditional
handicraft forms . . . [and] modern shapes in useful objects and in
architecture have conquered our reactionary public.21
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.
Industrial Paintings Utopias 111
Fontana: Ijeji, Concetto spaziale, Attese, 1 962.

Right, Concetto spaziale, Attese, 1 963-64. Bot
modernist kitsch that was rampant in mid

Pollock's Out of the Web employs this mod
overdone manner, all the better to highlig
cism of the swooping and swaying forms,
Isamu Noguchi coffee tables, demonstratin
moment only appear under a Miro-esque s
aspect of Pollock's work was the most imp
Rome exhibition; and it is from here, par
took off in his Cuts.
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-
ing out the gesture by overtly stylizing it as an elegant, aerodynamic form, he

22. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1999), pp. 347, 350.
23. "Elle a la Biennale de Venise," Elle (October 13, 1958).
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
cal repetitions of a purely mercantile character, whi

begin a vigorous antistylistic action. . . . Wallpaper
must choose which to be.24
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
This tendency of Informel gesture toward an enervating mass production

was connected by critics to a flight into the frivolously decorative. This concern
was voiced in a 1959 review of Roberto Crippa's painting, where the critic hilariously condemned that artist's decadence:
Crippa works for the lovers of the superficial in his painting boutique,
where every type of fashion accessory is on show: the dripping technique of Pollock, feminized and reduced to pure calligraphy; the signs
of Sugai, cut away from their meaning; the incision-like mode of

Hartung, deprived of its urgency. Everything becomes so gracious! . . .
This incapacity to resist the temptation of arbitrary embellishments has
ruined many Italian artists . . . For them, beauty is something that is
measured off by the meter and applied, from a Capri sunset to the figure of Sophia Loren.26
The erstwhile Nucleare artist Piero Manzoni would react to this situation by following Klein's lead in radically denying painterly gesture. In his 1959 Achromes,
monochrome paintings assembled out of grids of gesso-soaked canvas squares,
24. Enrico Bay et al., Contro lo stile (Milan, September 1957), reprinted and translated in The Italian
Metamorphosis, 1943-1968 (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1995), p. 719.
25. Edouard Jaguer, "Stato d'urgenza," Direzioni , no. 1 (November-December 1958), p. 4.
26. Pierre Rouve, "Quartetto Italiano," Art News and Review 11, no. 1 (1959). For an example of the
work discussed in Rouve 's review, see Roberto Crippa, // sogno di Anna Bolena II, 1951-1952. Collezione
Boschi, Civico Museo d'Arte Contemporeanea, Milan.
Manzoni obliterated all signs of inspired cr

technique that treated painting as a kind o
response to the problem of style, unlike Kle
given and aggressively incorporate it into his o
This is evident in the overt stylization of

visible in an example from 1959. The organi
face certainly have the potential to manife
body. The slightly angled, tapering forms, w
lows each slash through its trajectory and t
the monochrome canvas, evoke the downwar
body of the author. An example from 1962,
shows how Fontana's slashes refer to the ha
ergonomic movement of drawing the right ha

the forms that gently slope as they descend th
have been formed in the canvas on either s

response of the material to the slicing action,
pulled back from the site of the rupture i

expect from a fleshy membrane. In a forma
the work of those European gestural painte
purported to record the physical trace of th
However, Fontana's slashes have none of the
spontaneity seen in the work of Informel pain
references to the body, in Fontana's hands the
of the organic that patently fails in its claim
mark is fissured from within due to its identi
outwards to the idea of style, a form of spe
have a lifeless quality comparable to the cutout
Willem de Kooning's women, remain discon
reifying the body's trace as a commodity.
This aspect of Fontana's Cuts parallels con
trial design. In an effort to make household pr
buyer, the industrial designer of the 1950s wa
organization of the object's function but rat
Sparke has documented, in the early 1950s It
new expressiveness, a sensuousness and an in
abstract sculpture of artists such as Henry M
this sensuousness was fatally connected to com
product design was moving away from satisfy
tus symbolism and stylishness." Designers
27. Penny Sparke, "Industrial Design or Industri
Emergence of the Italian Modern Design Movement,

Culture and Society 1948-1958, ed. Christopher Dug
Publishers, 1995), p. 163.
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
Referring to what he calls the new "ab

argues that whatever physical involveme
objects is mostly a matter of an abstract
signification of human gesture that is mer
essary to their functioning: "Today the
as the abstract justification for the finish
contoured form of the modernist design
to the organic body, Baudrillard sees th
tion of the object from any properly phy
28. Penny Sparke, *"A Home for Everybody?':
Italy, 1945-1972," in Modernism in Design, ed. Pa

29. lean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (1968),
30. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonizat
Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 5, 173.
31 . Baudrillard, The System of Objectivity, p. 47.
32. Ibid., pp. 49, 53.
The mechanical gestures of late Informel

contemporary disconnection from the body.
painting was to memorialize the idea of mus
the slash's violation of the canvas. At the same
ture's enervation through industrial design
human body is compelled to conform to the ra

ion cycle. By giving the trace a very specific f
repeating it across individual canvases and ac

that the gestural mark is highly susceptible
1962, while there was an "element of naked sen
success is not entirely to be trusted. These can

ern decor."33 The agent of that reification was
closeness to the artificial elegance of art nouve
temporary automobile tailfins, its conversio

frozen image of natural gesture. The highly
from 1963-64, wherein the slashes are part
uncanny elegance that alludes to bodily mov
time. Desiccated by the rapid consumption
gesture is exhumed by Fontana like a corpse
The body returns in the form of a grinning
the pictorial flesh, like the anamorphic skul
of status in Hans Holbein's The Ambassador
expressive painterly stroke only to empty tha

bearer of absence. By asserting the gesture in
ity of the genius creator, however, Fontana

of art could be. Insisting on the decrepitude
rise to an alternative that pointed to a drea
tence of artistic genius.
The mechanical repetition of Fontana's gestu
semantic depth and authenticity, can be alig
anonymous operator of machinery. As Anto
not embody the manual effort and know-how
appear to be able to be executed in little ti
knife, after all, is a mechanical implement nor
dane task of preparing lengths of canvas f
evocation of the marginalized but righteou
Cuts exploit the critical potential of a bruta
the ranks of disenfranchised people to who
33. Edwin Mullins, "Into Battle: Masson and Fontana

34. See Briony Fer, On Abstract Art (New Haven: Yale
of Holbein's painting and Pollock's Out of the Web, to w
35. Neerri, "Fontana: indicazioni per una lettura della critica," pp. 49-50.
36. I am indebted to Mary Alice Lee for this observation about the Stanley knife.
116
OCTOBER
Fontana.
Courtesy
The
Concet
Fondazi
draining
potentially
th
rally
gifted
c
screen-printin
explain
why
h
build my work
more people. Art should be for everyone."37 However, Warh
matched by works in which, to paraphrase Benjamin Buchloh onc

cipatory potential of desublimatory artistic techniques was reduc
of travesty through a process of trivialization.38 Fontana's wor
retained a more profoundly Utopian element. This element can
through a comparison not with Warhol but with the work of Pinot
of Fontana and to whom one of the earliest Cuts is dedicated.39
During 1958, Gallizio mounted exhibitions of Industrial Painting in Turin

and Milan. This unusual body of work grew out of the collaborative discussions
produced in the context of Asger Jorn's Movimento Internazionale per un Bauhaus
Immaginista, an early manifestation of the Situationist International that was
briefly associated with the Nucleare artists from Milan. Gallizio produced rolls of
canvas up to seventy meters long, covered in abstract blotches and stains applied
through various processes involving resins and spraying techniques. The rolls were
presented unwound in exhibition, and the artist cut off lengths of painting with a
large pair of scissors for the waiting clientele, as one might sell a length of cloth at
37. Interview with Andy Warhol by Douglas Arango, "Underground Films: Art or Naughty Movies,"
Movie TV Secrets (June 1967), n.p. Quoted in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Andy Warhol's One-
Dimensional Art: 1956-1966" in Neo-Avantearde and Culture Industry, pp. 466-67.
38. See, for example, Buchloh 's discussion of Warhol's treatment of the tradition of participatory
aesthetics, ibid., pp. 479-87.
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.
the haberdashery. A yardstick was even pr

point that painting was being sold by the m
tary on this work neatly sums up the U
Gallizio's exhibitions:
No longer paintings of centimeters, framed, under glass, preciously

exhibited and collected . . . but meters, tens of meters, kilometers of
painting for everyone, to cut in pieces, to wrap up, to make sofas, carpets, clothing, to decorate tables and environments; to be used, con-
sumed, lived and therefore destroyed in collective behavior . . .

"Industrial Painting," an artistic product banalized and devalorized
that everyone can acquire for subjective and imaginative use.40
Gallizio mimicked the techniques of industry in order to produce large quantities

of painting. Exploiting the increasingly mechanical nature of Informel gesture,
Gallizio undermined the artist's importance, devaluing traditional painting's
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-
lation of the pristine canvas surface - in many ways comparable to Gallizio's

painting "cut by the meter" - and in their repetitious production. Although the
number of Cut paintings reaches as high as 160 per year, compared with a maximum of 30 or 40 in previous years, there is no evidence that Fontana deliberately
increased his output to deflate the price of his work, and the price of his work
today (like that of Gallizio for that matter) is well beyond the reach of the average
person. Nevertheless, by calibrating his physical gestures to the rhythm of industry, and significantly expanding his output, Fontana, like Gallizio, eroded the
distinction between the unique artisanal artifact and the output of mass production. By producing dozens of substantially similar works, he demonstrated the
serial nature of his oeuvre, disconnecting it from the deep subjectivity normally
suggested by the painterly mark. This abdication of singularity through mechanical repetition is a Utopian element in his work. With their large production runs
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.
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
wave, or a rock, the handling of the brush remains th
Fontana's monochrome paintings, with their uniform

similar standardization of touch. We can imagine the
asking, like Seurat did, to be paid by the day, similar to
However, the comparison becomes even more per

Seurat's Chahut of 1890, to which Fontana's Cut canvases
ical similarities. This late work by the post-Impressio
expressing the debasement wrought on popular entertain
trialization. In an insightful analysis, Jean-Claude Le

painting records how a once scandalously erotic dance
reduced to a lifeless commodity:
Seurat painted the functionaries of dance, anonymous

smiles, in regulated steps, who are paid by the night t
geoisie who come to get an eyeful ... it represents a m
imbued with touristic exploitation, and an era whe
ture of the festival has been fixed in its mercantile simulacrum.44
Lebensztejn maintains that the painting's mechanization of joy extends so far as

to invade and annul any spontaneous pleasure viewers might take in the experience of the painting.45 However, there is another side to this work that can be
teased out by considering the argument of Max Horkheimer and Theodor
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.
44. Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Chahut (Paris: Hazan, 1989), p. 65.

45. Lebensztejn, Chahut, pp. 132-33.
Industrial Painting 's Utopias 119
Adorno, for whom the "mindless artistry" o

skill of riders, acrobats, and clowns" preserv
the only possible refuge from an otherwise
try.46 Similarly, Herbert Marcuse argued, "T
effortless agility and relaxation, which can b
vaudeville, and burlesque, herald the joy to w
ated from the ideal."47 For these writers, no
such forms of popular entertainment had a U
of what the body would look like if the dem
mally promised by idealist, autonomous a
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-
ular consumer festival of goods, shop windows, and traffic presented by

commodity culture should not be dismissed as merely false consciousness. Rather
it can be understood as based in desires that have a physiological basis, and as
"containing the promise that want will disappear."50 This is how the apparent
effortlessness of Fontana's Cuts can be compared to the streamlined design of
contemporary consumer goods: although they remain within the space of illusion
and even compensate for needs that hitherto have remained unsatisfied, they
embody a genuine desire for overcoming the drudgery and grind of industrialized
labor. The Cuts propose a Utopian moment of uplifted grace that nevertheless
remains entirely contained within the materiality of muscular energy.
Lastly, Fontana's exploitation of the gesture's debasement at the hands of

46. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum,
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.
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
behind it. Several luminous images of th
focused by an array of holes in the canvas t
jected onto a darkened wall as in a camer
became part of a photographic device for pr

ture, thereby directly linking his punctured
More importantly for the present argument
tograph of this work in the Italian architec
the title "Immagini luminose in moviment
he presented it as the prototype for a telev
the article to accompany Fontana's images, "
in television the language and arguments a
broadest strata of culture."54 This was the firs
ming in Italy, many years before viewers i

appreciate where television was actually he
Pier Paolo Pasolini's condemnation of it as "
communication medium in the world."55 In
Italy that television, a technology largely d
phy and film, could have genuine democrati
For early photography theorists such
Kracauer, it was the photograph's indexical
As Miriam Hansen argues, Kracauer view

moment of exposure, the moment of cha
nature at once alienated and released from t
was this anonymous, mechanical arbitrar
indexical trace of the photograph, through

side to objects, freed from the nightmare of
modity, and redolent with the memory of r
When he turns to discuss the radical p
"The Work of Art in the Age of Its Techn
extends this argument. In one section of t
the cinematographer by way of an analogy
cian and a surgeon. Whereas the magici
hands - keeps himself remote from the sick
to person" and assuming great authority

approach, physically penetrates the body
greatly increasing his or her proximity. E
painter remains removed from his subject,

the cinematographer penetrates into realit
54. Luigi Moretti, "Arte e televisione," Spazio, no. 7 (1

55. Pier Paolo Pasolini, "Sfida ai dirigenti della televisi
1973. Reprinted in Pasolini. Saggi sulla politico e suUa soci
56. Miriam Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Exp

Technology,'" New German Critique 40 (1987), p. 208.
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.
59. Ibid., pp. 113; 132, n. 33.
and therefore their class," an awareness lea

means of production.60
Fontana would not have agreed with many
artist's paintings of the 1960s increasingly
objects, Fontana did not set great store in th
duction. As he remarked in 1967, "Repro
copies ... to print a drawing a thousand tim

the wish to impose on the public a thing that
reason it is important to carefully distingui
tenor of Benjamin's writing on technological r
ence, I argue that Fontana's Cut paintin

concept of cinema as much as a highly m
could be described as resurrecting distant m

As Hansen notes in her brilliant analysis of
ema and experience, in his writing Benjam
the fetishistic illusion while preserving the
tain."62 By insisting equally on the liquida
through memory, as the key to an alternati
nology for understanding the doubleness w
Fontana's mechanically executed, index
repressed memory, the dream that the art

window to look through as in a daydream,
objectification and commodification of the a
view, Fontana proposed the advent of a new
nor a form
to a sellable object."63 In pursuit of this goal, the ope

examples with a single, vertical slash, promise the ec
work's integration with real space. At the same tim
which negative and positive space turn endless somer
ing a coherent position from which to view his
painting's capacity to suggest a beyond. A deep incoh

of this Utopian vision by Fontana's cutting operation
lowing Benjamin, its "intensive interpenetration of re
throws the constructedness of the illusion into high reli
the outmoded notion of painting as granting acce
divine, he retrieves painting's dream of a better wor

celing that dream's tendency to sublimate the art obj
To believe in the arrival at space that these canva
engage in the ersatz reconciliation of subject and ob
60. Ibid., p. 115.
61. Lonzi, Autoritratto, p. 336.
62. Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience," p. 214.

63. "Fontana," in Art et creation 1 (1968), p. 78.
124
OCTOBER
Accordingly,
counting
it
as
radical
pain
Ultimately,
Fo
negation
that
f
ful
reading
bo
which
contain
nitely
deferred
to
demand,"
and

AnthonyWhite LucioFontana

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

AnthonyWhite LucioFontana

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Industrial Painting's Utopias: Lucio Fontana's "Expectations"

Author(s): Anthony White

Industrial Painting's Utopias:

Lucio Fontana, an artist accustomed to notoriety, was frustrated by th

eradication. By virtue of this insight, Fontana was able to develop an altern

The organizers of the 1958 Venice Biennale dedicated an entire room to

painting. In both the installation and the paintings, he employed materials

Industrial Painting s Utopias 101

Fontana. Concetto spa

"intellectual masturbations" and "atrocities."2 Although many commentators

ings, rather than an absolute opposition between monochrome canvas and

3. Renato Barilli, "La XXIX Biennale," // Verri 2, no. 3 (1958), p. 149.

Industrial Painting's Utopias 103

more complex compositions of recent years an

Although the Cuts that the artist began in 195

ings, in the new series of works Fontana

developments in contemporary art that requir

re-iterate, his earlier practice. Among these

paintings in Milan, and Jackson Pollock's retro

Informel painting was ascendant in 1950s

abstraction and tachisme, Italian Art Informel

techniques and emphasis on painting materials.

rational compositional techniques and emph

painting, in spite of being superficially abstra

ment's opposition to industrialization had b

Today we are witnessing a reiterated org

are nothing more than "mechanical lib

which is ultimately obscured. The gestur

these stains and scribbles have become not

Jaguer condemned what he saw as the incr

4. See Maurizio Calvesi, "Informel and Abstraction in I

5. See Meyer Schapiro, "Recent Abstract Painting (

222. For an Italian example of this argument, see the

Industrial Painting's Utopias 105

Fontana. Concetto spazi

/ 959. Courtesy Fondazio

work. This dialogue was grounded in the f

Klein had rejected several elements of

Through his use of highly saturated blue pig

painterly gesture and detaching his pain

authenticity of Informel painting. By comp

own monochrome pictures of the early 1

fluorescent paint. Given

done Fontana's mono-

chromes of the 1950s, it

taken* great interest in

the French artist's work

and sought to respond to

Klein had gone much further than Fontana, and

Fontana. Concetto spaziale, Attese. 1959.

with which the French

ductions of nonexistent monochrome paintings; patenting his ultramarine

on the artist's public performance in the personae of judo master, medieval k

Industrial Painting's Utopias 107

and orchestra conductor. The significance of t

never commented on this element of Klein's work

ing was close to that of Bois: after all, Fontan

of the Cut paintings demonstrates that the older

On the contrary, for Fontana, artistic gest

surfaces of his early punctured paintings.

spectrum of novel, water-based pigments - su

11. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Plenty or Nothing: From Y

Neo- Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and