Critical Fontana

Abstract

Critical Fontana Howard Singerman (bio) Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch by Anthony White. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. 336 pp. $29.95 cloth. The subtitle of Anthony White’s monograph on the Italian artist Lucio Fontana, Between Utopia and Kitsch, lays out the terms of the book’s central—and oft-repeated—argument: that Fontana’s art, a “collision of avant-garde techniques and a kitsch past redolent 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 utopian potential” (18). White’s book may well be, as he claims, the first to “systematically account” for the “puzzling paradoxes of the artist’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 [End Page 697] paintings in New York—that the book begins. A series of ten five-foot-square Spatial Concepts bearing subtitles like At Dawn Venice Was All Golden or Sun in Piazza San Marco (both 1961)—”phrases likely to be appended to mass-produced postcards for the Italian tourist market” (9)—the Venice paintings enact the collision of avant-garde and kitsch that White’s system turns on. They are, as befits avant-garde practice, monochromes, or nearly so, and punctured or slashed as Fontana’s paintings had been since the first Buchi of 1949, but the paint is silver and gold acrylic laid on like frosting, and Fontana crusted his surfaces with Murano glass. The paintings are at once at least ironically aspirational and, as White’s chapter title has it, “damaged goods.” While they evoke the breakthroughs of the avant-garde and even, in their “lavishly ornament[ed]” surfaces, “the antiquated luxuries of the medieval past” (6), their kitsch titles and elaborate surfaces—and their empty, seemingly mechanical repetitions of a decade-old avant-garde strategy—insist on painting’s failure, its “decrepitude.” In White’s accounting, Fontana’s system is far more complex than the simple, “Manichean” (11) opposition that Clement Greenberg offered in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939).1 Rather, Fontana’s is doubly articulated, each pole internally divided against itself, “thereby disallowing any false reconciliation or mastery. In Fontana’s work, both avant-garde and kitsch are riven by a radical incompleteness: a modernity rigorously opposed to that which exists in the present, and grounded in a hopeful, forward-looking appreciation for what has seemingly passed into historical oblivion” (14). White borrows the phrase “damaged goods” from Walter Benjamin, and he links Fontana’s attraction to the outmoded (whether to the antiquated dreams of a past art, the unfulfilled dreams of an earlier avant-garde, or the pleasure promised by objects de luxe or their commodity knockoffs) to Benjamin’s idea of the “dialectical image”: “Benjamin’s argument that certain cultural products offer a critical image of modernity’s contradictions has immense significance for Fontana’s work” (13). And over and over again, across four decades of work, White points to Fontana’s “use of outmoded forms to draw pointed comparisons between modernity’s utopian dreams of fulfillment and their fatal obsolescence as kitsch within commodity culture” (271). While Benjamin’s concept is a fruitful one for White, he acknowledges that they are strange bedfellows; Fontana was, after all, a member of Italian fascist movement and “clearly had no ideological opposition to the theme of Italian military victory” (96) when, in May [End Page 698] 1936, authorities...