[Lucio Fontana in Milan, 1947. Via Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan.]
A photograph in the Seattle Art Musuem's exhibition catalog of Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78 that shows painter Lucio Fontana emerging from the bombed-out shell of a Milan apartment building is eerily similar to the series of slashed-canvas works he would soon (the late 1950s) become famous for. The target of massive allied strikes during WWII, Milan had received the "cleansing fire" that was hoped for by the previous generation of Italian artists—the Futurists—whose unfortunate allegiance to Fascism was fueled by a belief that war was the only power capable of freeing Italy from the living history museum of its illustrious past.
[Lucio Fontana. Concetto Spaziale (Spatial Concept), 1949. White paper mounted on canvas. Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan.]
It is no wonder that Target Practice, the Seattle Art Museum's ambitious international survey of artworks taking aim at the sanctity of painting, begins and ends with works by Lucio Fontana. The son of an Italian father and Argentine mother, Fontana forged his early career in Milan but moved to Argentina during WWII. When he returned to Milan, his studio had been destroyed. Fontana's subsequent works reveal, among other things, the frailty of the materials artists have at their disposal to embody that which transcends form. As the artist wrote in 1948, "Art is eternal but not immortal."
Like the works associated with Abstract Expressionism, many of the non-paintings in Target Practice respond passionately to the horrors of the twentieth century. However, unlike AbEx—which retained many of the formal considerations of European abstraction as well as the heroic notion of the painting as extension of the artist's genius—the work in Target Practice aims to obliterate both craft and artistic identity. This tendency is exemplified in the gesture of Robert Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning Drawing, 1953, in which the up-and-coming artist meticulously erased a work by the reigning king of Abstract Expressionism.
[Robert Rauschenberg. Erased De Kooning Drawing, 1953.]
Many of the exhibition's works employ a theme of violence against the act of painting itself. Niki de Saint Phalle's paintings invite viewers to throw darts at them, while Richard Pettibone's riotous Untitled, 1964, is a flattened tube of paint that was run over by a train. Brazilian iconoclast Hélio Oiticica's Consumitivo, 1960, consisted of setting a can of paint on fire. Yoko Ono's Painting to Hammer a Nail and Painting to be Stepped On entice her audience to participate in their desecration, while the nail-riddled surface of Günther Uecker's imposing Grosse Wolke creates a surprisingly mesmerizing field of shadow and light. And, of course, what critique of painting would be complete without one of Andy Warhol's piss paintings?
[Günther Uecker. Grosse Wolke (Large Cloud), 1965.]
As a cross-section of an historical moment, Target Practice provides a compelling microcosm of the broader history of anti-art from within the field of painting, traditionally the last bastion of artistic sanctity. "Any artist today who wields a brush must contend with the highly stratified history—and burden—of a tradition that has piled up to form a massive impasto of stroke and counterstroke" states curator Michael Darling in the exhibition's catalog.
The artists in this exhibition used everything from physical annihilation to self-deprecating irony to free themselves from the constraints they had inherited. That they remain materially and conceptually defined by that burdensome tradition even while providing a range of intellectual, visceral, and even beautiful possibilities that arise from the act of casting it off is nothing if not a testament to its strength.
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