Ted Pennings

Between the end of World War II and his death in 1968, the Italian conceptual artist Lucio Fontana attempted to realize a fundamentally new art form that presented art in a four-dimensional space that endured over time. At once liberated from the bounds of occupying space per se, this art also sought to domesticate space in—and with—a revolutionary new light, engaging with space both as absence and presence. His work ventured toward the Gesamtkunstwerk of visual art: at once painting, sculpture and architecture within one art object. Drawn to the emergent technologies of neon and fluorescent lighting, Fontana naturally pursued the promise of a technically similar medium, television, for its literal four-dimensionality as a pictorial representation of space occurring over a determinate length of time, with supposed global reach and permanency. This paper seeks to explicate Fontana’s work with spatialist environments and spatialist concepts—the buchi (holes) and tagli (cuts)—in his own terms and in terms of the promise of television as medium, aspiring to fill this gap in the present literature on Fontana.

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