Lucio Fontana: Slashing the Slasher

If you’re going to mount a show revisiting an artist who has fallen off the artworld’s radar screen, the viewer had better come away convinced that the obscurity was undeserved.
This was emphatically not the case with Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, which opened Tuesday at the Guggenheim, New York.
The idea must have sounded good on paper: an array of works created by the avant-garde theoretician in two cities that are home to Guggenheim museums. I had looked forward to it as the institution’s return to prior form as a bastion for modern and contemporary European art—its unique New York niche under former director Tom Messer. Indeed, the last major Fontana exhibition was the Guggenheim’s 1977 retrospective.
But my favorable anticipation quickly retreated under the visual assault of gaudy, gawky works, more meretricious than meritorious. The experience was more rewarding in the introductory gallery (which, for those climbing up the museum’s ramp, will unfortunately be the last room visited, not the first). Here we are on more familiar Fontana ground, with two iconic Guggenheim-owned matte monochrome paintings, bearing the artist’s signature slashes that brashly violate the surfaces. (But why is the otherwise pristine white canvas unaccountably violated by someone’s black fingerprints along the right edge? Calling conservation!)
The introductory gallery also contains some of Fontana’s interesting, early experimental oeuvre, and provides some background on the theoretical basis for his work. We can read astute commentary by critic Lawrence Alloway, who noted that rather than accepting the flat surface as “implacably given,…Fontana puts things on the surface…; he opens up the surface by punched holes and, more recently, by slashes. The flatness of the picture is not an area into which the world must be sandwiched.”
Fair enough, but what Fontana does with those surfaces, in the Venice/New York oeuvre, is glitzy, clumsy and visually unalluring: Clunky chunks of colored Murano glass are artlessly affixed to the Venetian canvases. In the superficially flashy New Yorkers, large slabs of shiny copper are awkwardly and perfunctorily gashed and dramatically lit by the museum to project auburn reflections on the floor.
Notably absent are the works for which Fontana is perhaps best known: the notched metal orbs that were once so favored as public sculpture. One of their claims to fame is that they occasioned one of the first of Philippe de Montebello‘s several impolitic public comments evincing possible insensitivity to contemporary art: The day he arrived at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts (which he directed before becoming director of the Metropolitan Museum), Philippe told the Houston Chronicle that the Fontana orbs at the museum’s entrance “make good receptacles for chewing gum wrappers.”
Maybe the guy was onto something.