Italian Futurism 1909–1944 Reconstructing the Universe February 21–September 1, 2014 Italian Futurism 1909–1944 Reconstructing the Universe
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ITALIAN FUTURISM 1909–1944 RECONSTRUCTING THE UNIVERSE FEBRUARY 21–SEPTEMBER 1, 2014 ITALIAN FUTURISM 1909–1944 RECONSTRUCTING THE UNIVERSE Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Teacher Resource Unit A NOTE TO TEACHERS Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe is the first comprehensive overview of Italian Futurism to be presented in the United States. This multidisciplinary exhibition examines the historical sweep of Futurism, one of Europe’s most important twentieth-century avant-garde movements. This Resource Unit focuses on several of the disciplines that Futurists explored and provides techniques for connecting with both the visual arts and other areas of the curriculum. This guide is also available on the museum’s website at www.guggenheim.org/artscurriculum with images that can be downloaded or projected for classroom use. The images may be used for education purposes only and are not licensed for commercial applications of any kind. Before bringing your class to the Guggenheim, we invite you to visit the exhibition and/or the exhibition website, read the guide, and decide which aspects of the exhibition are most relevant to your students. For more information and to schedule a visit for your class, please call 212 423 3637. This curriculum guide is made possible by The Robert Lehman Foundation. This exhibition is made possible by Support is provided in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the David Berg Foundation, with additional funding from the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts. The Leadership Committee for Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe is also gratefully acknowledged for its generosity, including the Hansjörg Wyss Charitable Endowment; Stefano and Carole Acunto; Giancarla and Luciano Berti; Ginevra Caltagirone; Massimo and Sonia Cirulli Archive; Daniela Memmo d’Amelio; Achim Moeller, Moeller Fine Art; Pellegrini Legacy Trust; and Alberto and Gioietta Vitale. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. EXHIBITION OVERVIEW Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe examines the historical sweep of Futurism, one of Europe’s most important twentieth-century avant-garde movements, from its inception with F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto in 1909 through the movement’s demise at the end of World War II. It encompasses not only painting and sculpture, but architecture, design, ceramics, fashion, film, photography, advertising, free-form poetry, music, theater, and performance. Rejecting stasis and tradition, the first generation of Futurists created works characterized by dynamic movement and fractured forms, aspiring to break with existing notions of space and time to place the viewer at the center of the artwork. Extending into all mediums, Futurism proposed to fashion a way of life and not solely an artistic idiom. Following World War I, Futurism assumed different formal qualities, including that of machine aesthetics orarte meccanica. In the 1930s, the popularity and nationalist importance of aviation in Italy led to the swirling abstracted aerial imagery of Futurism’s final incarnation,aeropittura . Investigations of “heroic” Futurism, which lasted through ca. 1916, when Umberto Boccioni— one of the central artists and theorists of the founding group—died, have predominated. However, comparatively few exhibitions have been realized on the subsequent life of the movement. The taint from Futurism’s sometime association with Fascism has been a cause for this, but these associations, which complicate the narrative of this avant-garde, make it all the more necessary to delve into and clarify the movement’s full history. This exhibition is organized by Vivien Greene, Senior Curator, 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art at the Guggenheim Museum. In addition, an eminent international advisory committee provided expertise and guidance. These weights thicknesses noises smells molecular whirlwinds chains webs corridors of analogies rivalries and synchronisms offered offered offered offered up as a gift to my Futurist friends poets painters musicians and noise intoners. —F. T. Marinetti, the closing verse of Zang Tumb Tuuum (1914)1 < WORDS-in-Freedom > While Futurism later expanded to include nearly all mediums, it was born as a literary I school. F. T. Marinetti (1876–1944), the FUTURISM TALIAN movement’s founder, was an Italian poet and WORDS-in-Freedom author who sought to revolutionize art to take advantage of the “typographical address the realities of modern life. The revolution” to use new fonts and arrangements movement began with his first manifesto, of words. published in 1909, which called for the glorification of everything new—speed, factories, In 1914, Marinetti wrote a book-length words- trains—and the destruction of everything old, in-freedom poem called Zang Tumb Tuuum even museums, and is considered to have that one scholar, Jeffrey Schnapp, has ended with his death in 1944. described as “a text on a mission: to carry out a wholesale demolition of existing literary In the beginning, the Futurist writers culture in the act of giving birth to a poetics experimented only with free verse and the consonant with the era of industry, wireless new themes of machinery and progress. But telegraphic networks, and mechanized mass by 1912, Marinetti had transitioned into a warfare.”2 Schnapp says the poem functioned revolution in not just content but style. He as the laboratory in which Marinetti carried called this new literature “words-in-freedom” out his experimentations with literature. (parole in libertà). Words-in-freedom Focusing on a pre–World War I battle in the destroyed syntax, used verbs in the infinitive, Balkans in which Marinetti had served as a abolished adjectives and adverbs, suppressed poet-war correspondent, the book punctuation, and employed mathematical and demonstrates Marinetti’s desire to fuse the musical symbols. Marinetti exhorted writers to roles of poet and reporter. The title derives “destroy the ‘i’ in literature: that is, all from mechanical noises: zang for the firing of psychology,” to give up on being understood an artillery shell, tumb for its explosion upon by the reader, and to abandon aesthetic impact, and tuuum for the resulting echo. concerns by creating the “ugly” in literature. Marinetti used onomatopoeia like this in part His prescription for Futurist writing was not to explore both the visual and performative only phonetic but also visual. He wanted to possibilities of poetry. F. T. Marinetti, Zang Tumb Tuuum: Adrianople October 1912; Words in Freedom (Zang Tumb Tuuum: Adrianopoli ottobre 1912; Parole in libertà). Book (Milan: Edizioni futuriste di Poesia, 1914), 20.2 x 14 cm. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome. Photo: Courtesy The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles VIEW + DISCUSS Show: Zang Tumb Tuuum: Adrianople FURTHER EXPLORATIONSEXPLORATIONS October 1912; Words in Freedom (1914) • Paradoxes exist throughout Futurist mediums and time periods. ▲ Look together at the cover of F. T. Within words-in-freedom, one fundamental tension is that the text is Marinetti’s book Zang Tumb Tuuum. presented as a score for a performance in which it is read or What do students notice about the “declaimed” out loud, but also has rich typography for the eye to see. Ask one student to read the closing verse of Zang Tumb Tuuum words? About the font and layout? How (note: this is the opening quote in this section of the guide) and the do these last elements compare to their class to repeat “zang, tumb, tuuum” several times together. Ask own reports or papers? students how the writing lends itself to performance. Now, ask students to write a poem that can appeal both to the eye and the ▲ These are selections from a book of voice—with typographical and performative elements. poetry written by the founder of an art movement called Futurism. The founder, To scaffold this, ask students to create a list of words that suggest sounds (or, onomatopoeia). Next, have them create their own fonts F. T. Marinetti, wanted to revolutionize to convey these sounds. Finally, they can cut and paste the words in literature for a new modern era. What an arrangement on paper that suggests how the poem should be can students guess about his ideas just read. Ask them to have another student read their poem aloud. Was based on this image? this the performance they intended? ▲ The title of the book is Zang Tumb As a higher-tech alternative, have students record the onomatopoeia poems. Students should then swap the audio recordings with Tuuum. These are mechanical noises: partners who have not seen their written poems and their partner zang for the firing of an artillery shell, should write or type what they hear. Compare the written poems. tumb for its explosion upon impact, and How has the partner reinterpreted the visual presentation of the tuuum for the resulting echo. The quote orally delivered poem? at the beginning of this section is the closing verse of the book and was • One scholar has described Marinetti as writing “like a man with a followed by a chorus of zangs, tumb- movie camera—zooming back and forth from the micro to the macro, from the molecular to the worm’s eye to the aerial view.”3 tumbs, and tuuums. Read it together and Discuss this idea and then challenge students to write about a topic think more about Marinetti’s ideas about (for example, a bad day) in this way. literature. • One of Marinetti’s techniques for Futurist writing foreshadowed the ▲ Marinetti wanted writers to give up on automatic writing of the Surrealists, artists and writers from the traditional narrative. He wanted writers to 1910s and ’20s who sought to access the subconscious this way. “The creative mind,” Marinetti wrote, could be “freed” by several hours of abandon syntax, punctuation, adjectives, writing, after which “the hand that writes seems to separate from the and adverbs and experiment with font body and freely leaves far behind the brain.”4 Ask students to and placement as well as the sound of experiment with this kind of automatic writing.