#8

malevich “non-objective art and suprematism” (1919):

“I have ripped through the blue lampshade of the constraints of color. I have come out into the white. Follow me, comrade aviators. Swim into the abyss. I have set up the semaphores of
Suprematism.”

fontana: "[T]he artist must have the courage to stop idolizing himself, to stop seeing himself at the center of the earth and of all things."

The object and the painter divorced from one another; to make a painting is to divest oneself of the painting. The violence of a sundering or a dissociation. The painting as a site of action: an exalted violence -- exalted insofar as it becomes part of the normal procedure of Fontana's picture-making; the rending of the canvas surface is no longer an exceptional case.

In what sense does postwar society remain fascist? Fascism without nationalism or socialism: military corporatism. Corporate power aims to operate in an autonomous zone with total impunity - a zone of violent competition (action) inacessible from either the space of the nation or of society. Fontana points towards this: if the painter can't participate in this world of force, the painting can - or it can present itself as if it had.