The title Entropvisions is in homage to my mother, the poet and art critic, Harriet Zinnes. In 1990 New Directions published a collection of her poems titled Entropisms, a word she made-up combining entropy - the tendency toward disorder - and tropism - the growth towards or away from a stimulus. Similarly, my short reviews combine entropy and tropism by suggesting growth towards a vision of art from the chaos of the art world. Through the back door, my title also pays homage to my physicist father, Irving Zinnes, whose long discussions with my mom got her thinking about entropy and tropism in the first place.
The
Lucio Fontana exhibition at Hauser & Wirth uptown, up through Feb. 4, is a
must-see, museum-quality show. Spanning the artists’ entire artistic
career, in seemingly unending gallery rooms sprawling through at least
four floors with multiple rooms on each floor, it gives anyone (like
myself) who has not yet come to terms with Lucio Fontana a chance to do
so. Admittedly, I’d only thought of Fontana as a somewhat conceptual
artist who broke open the flat canvas, quite literally, with
his “Concetto spaziale” (Spatial Concept) of linen punctuated with
holes and “Tagli,” or slashes, series, but he was so much more. He was
interested in telluric forces – earth’s natural forces, such as the
electrical currents beneath earth’s surface – and he was interested in
intersections of space, substance and light, concepts he explored with a
strong sense of visual form, volume and rhythm. He was a constant
inventor and reinventor, changing the art world forever with his art and
manifestoes. He experimented in an unprecedented variety of materials,
from traditional terracotta used untraditionally, to plaster, concrete,
wrought-iron wire, stoneware, glass, lacquered wood, lacquered metal,
and of course canvas. He was flashy and he was quiet, creating Baroque
energies with garish color, and classical stabilities with subdued
grays. He created realistic figurative work, and completely abstract
work. This exhibition gives a taste of Fontana’s broad output from the
1920s–1960s, and though I can’t say he’s become one of my favorite
artists, he certainly has gained my deepest respect, and even awe.