Special project for FIAC 2007, Paris, Booth A49 (Grand Palais)
Entropy of Abstraction: The Hole
Lucio Fontana 1899 b. – 1968d.
Andy Warhol 1928 b. – 1987d.
Donald Moffett 1955 b.
Two Birds in flight and a majestic women in blue: symbols of holy spirits, but not for Fontana. The bird forms are leaving their feathers behind to go into clay and fired pigments that lead to other possibilities, not yet thought. The woman in blue, Hospitality, moves forward towards us with one arm and leans back with the other, all the time decomposing in front of us, taking us towards the hole where the birds are flying.
"The hole is this dimension.
I say dimension because I cannot think what other word to use. I make a hole in the canvas in order
to leave behind me the old pictorial formulae, . . . and I escape symbolically, but also materially, from the prison of the flat surface."1
With the Warhol Piss and Oxidation paintings something similar, but opposite is happening. Instead of Birds moving through clay, or Hospitality tottering between welcome and flight, here bodies move towards the canvas. Pricks and pussies, leaning or squatting forward, piss onto the surfaces. The large mural, is a compilation of many moments, while the smaller ones are solitary, oxidized pieces where the canvas has been plied with gold or silver pigments, aimed at, and watched while piss and metals swim about and settle into abstraction. A trace is left of what comes from this willful alliance of an idea and physical bodies. This trace is a different dimension, not third or fourth, but beyond counting.
Fontana begins with birds and a female figure leaving into clay, while Warhol has bodies move towards canvases into abstraction. Moffett begins with abstraction that moves towards bodies. He uses holes, zippers, gesso, oil, rabbit skin glue, linen and canvas until bodies start to lurk on either side, first at front where our eyes begin and then the gravity of the hole brings us further. Inside and outside, flesh and image all tussle, only fully realized as they oscillate between each other. This series of works begins to have a hypnotic effect, luring us further towards its logic, teasing us, zipped and unzipped towards this other dimension through the hole. Can we play, are we welcome, do our holes lead someplace else as well? Through the sockets of our eyes and other orifices, will we too escape "symbolically" or "materially?" Enter.
1——Tommaso Trini: "Interview with Lucio Fontana, July 19, 1968."
Studio International, 1972
Text by Anna Blume
September, 2007