Marco Fusinato: The Colour of the Sky Has Melted
‘All you could do with words’, declares a character in The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner’s 2013 novel about art, ideology and violence, ‘was turn them on their sides like furniture during a bombardment’. Here we see in literature what is already a distinct sensibility in contemporary art—the entrancing glamour of direct political action processed at a certain cool aesthetic distance.
Like the novelist, Melbourne artist Marco Fusinato came of age during the incendiary climate of 1970s social liberation struggles. And like the novel, his practice thematises this contemporary fascination with prior historical radicalism. As in the novel, revolutionary struggles function as a repository of creative source material: surveyed as rhetoric, radical activity is broken into systems of representation, as units to be reassembled, re-interpreted, redeployed. The result of this ‘turning things on their side’ is an aesthetic characterised by its highly cultivated ambivalence.
This is the logic behind Fusinato’s solo show, The Colour of the Sky Has Melted. The ‘Years of Lead’—that incendiary period of Italian political history animating Kushner’s book—is also at the heart of Fusinato’s Double Infinitives (2009). A series of large-scale panels emblazoned with images of anonymous protesters in precipitous action shots, Double Infinitives’ currency is the riot punctum: the body captured in the moment of imminent violence. The shirtless torso uncoiling like a spring to hurl a brick. The hands rising in triumphal salute amidst the haze and chaos of fleeing bodies and burning rubble. The bandanna’d face grimacing against the rolling onset of police tear gas. Armed insurrection and primal property violence: propaganda by the deed, depicted in the moment the deed is done. Though these are images from different struggles, different lifeworlds, they