Wound Without End: Envisioning Permanence through Lucio Fontana’s Concetti Spaziali

Abstract

Wound Without EndEnvisioning Permanence through Lucio Fontana’s Concetti Spaziali Giulia Privitelli (bio) . . . for tho’ we sit down within The plowed furrow, listening to the weeping clods till we Contract or Expand Space at will: or if we raise ourselvesUpon the chariots of the morning, Contracting or Expanding Time! Everyone knows we are One Family! One Man blessed for ever. william blake, jerusalem, plate 55, v. 42–461 In response to Philippe Nemo’s question concerning the origin of man’s thought, Emmanuel Levinas tentatively proposes that it “probably begins through traumatisms or gropings [sic] to which one does not even know how to give a verbal form: a separation, a violent scene, a sudden consciousness of the monotony of time.”2 In other words, man’s thought—as a creative process—arises from the conflicted and limited scenario of the human condition. It embodies and reflects a need to transcend it, whereby the unified may emerge from distinction, creation from violence and destruction, and the liberating and transformative action of the eternal from the enslaving immutability of historical time. I will attempt to unpack this premise through a Christian theological understanding of the infinite and [End Page 25] eternal as expressed in a series of works by Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), who, in the decades following the Second World War, became singularly concerned with the creative possibilities of the hole or cut (taglio), a hallmark of his artistic career and with which he is almost exclusively and synonymously associated to this day. This crucial phase of Fontana’s artistic output coincides with a period of transition following the devastation of the war, a phase suspended between the reality of the threat of modernity to human freedom and fraternity and, on the other end, the promising yet alienating reach of technological and scientific development. The void that opens through the tension of Fontana’s destructive and creative gesture will be addressed in view of this enigmatic transition: from the trepidation and psychological anguish of man’s earthly existence before the unknown abyss to the radicalized and unprecedented perceptions of man’s relation to space. True to the words of Paul VI, where “only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light,”3 the implications of the cut as an ambivalent open space shall therefore be explored within a Christian framework of creational, soteriological, and eschatological doctrine. Furthermore, the cut as a pierced image that exhibits its own independent aesthetic reality, will be brought into dialogue with biblical representations of the wound, particularly, the implications of Christ’s wounds as permanent signs of God’s self-disclosure to man and, in turn, of man’s recovery and transformation of identity, meaning, and purpose. Thus, it shall be seen how both artist and beholder participate and tend to the creative act—in the essential transfiguration of the void from a site of emptiness, absence, and finality, to a “non-synthesizable” space of encounter which, as Levinas contends, opens the space for the infinite.4 Indeed, the emphasis on relation as a means of gauging the complexity of one’s being in the world—that is, where the ground of being and seeing infinity arises from the recognition of otherness—affords a promising edge by which to sharpen, on one side, Lucio Fontana’s artistic and environmental [End Page 26] experimentations with the “cut” and, on the other, our understanding of the notion of the permanent wound as the identifiable “face” of the risen Christ. The Call Towards Unity: the Gesture and the Image In the introduction to this article, I proposed to unpack the creative process on three levels based on Levinas’s conception of the origin of thought: separation, violence, and transformation. As shall be seen, these three “gestures” are related in an essential and teleological way, yet each will be explored in turn through Lucio Fontana’s treatment of the void or, rather, the “discovery of the hole” which he considered to be, in the last analysis, his single and most important contribution to contemporary art.5 It would therefore seem appropriate to first and foremost...