8. His works even appeared on television
9 Things You May Not Know about Lucio Fontana
“It’s true that art is eternal, but it has always been tied to matter, whereas we want it to be unshackled, so that it can move through space for a millennium, even in the form of a minute-long broadcast” (Lucio Fontana, Manifesto del movimento spaziale per la televisione, 1952, in Lucio Fontana, Manifesti Scritti Interviste, ed. Angela Sanna [Milan: ABSCONDITA, 2015] 33)
Fontana grasped the importance of a far-reaching new technology like television, and here again, blazed new trails by employing it to show his work. In 1952, Fontana used some of his Concetti spaziali to generate “luminous images” in movement for one of the experimental programs broadcast by the state-owned RAI network. Fontana thus envisioned how artworks could enter the homes of TV viewers, to be seen in new and different ways. As he wrote in his manifesto, technological achievements are “at the service of the art we profess.”