A Bonfire of Vanities: Futurism and the Second Reformation
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A Bonfire of Vanities: Futurism and the Second Reformation Why do so few books on twentieth century art history pay attention to futurism? Or to put it differently, why do so many books pay so little attention to futurism? Possibly because it was a short-lived movement, dying with the deaths of two of its main practitioners and theorists in WWI; possibly because the spokesperson who did not die became affiliated with Mussolini and so there has been a tendency to associate futurism with a type of pre-fascist mind-set, possibly because in the eyes of some critics and historians it appears to be derivative of cubism with nothing new to offer. If we go against the grain and decide to include futurism, what reasons do we have for doing this? Possibly because of the ways in which futurism is precisely unlike cubism: although cubism did not eliminate the real world from its content and Picasso did use his art as a form of social commentary, this moderately political use of his art has always been elusive and hard to perceive. In contrast, the futurists centralized the social-political thematic to such a degree, we have to see this movement as being a social revolution before being an aesthetic one. Umberto Boccioni: Development of a Bottle in Development of a Bottle (from a slightly different Space, 1912 angle) A cmparison between these two works may illuminate the differences between the movements and foreground the futurist experience. The Bottle has been cut open and the forms have been peeled off and juxtaposed in such a way that the viewer cannot logically put them together. Motion is implied as the viewer tries to experience the bottle from all sides in order to put it together again. Yet the bottle is still a frontal work, and this frontality denies movement and to some extent gives the bottle the sense of being a collage or relief. The bottle is frontal because the only position from which we can perceive the peeling away of conical forms is the front. From this position, the hollow center becomes an embodiment of stillness while the exterior begins to embody rotation and movement. The bottle also becomes a metaphor for our partial knowledge of things. Although this does connect to cubism, the difference between them lies in the fact that the cubists were more interested in the language of representation than the futurists were, while the futurists were more interested in the creation of movement. Picasso: Guitar, 1912 Picasso: Guitar, 1924 The cubist construction remains closer to a collage in its format and conceptualization; it is not, in the end, intended to be experienced as a guitar but as an experiment in the revelation of the language and grammar of a work of art, which in this case is visual and three- dimensional. Picasso has not really dissembled his guitar; he has taken the language he was developing in his collages and made it exist in three-dimensional space. If the bottle becomes a visual argument for a penetrating intelligence that sees through to inner essences, this is a very different message from that of Picasso's guitar. In the instrument, Picasso uses the marks and signs of shading and three-dimensionality, signs that are used in a drawing or painting and which are superfluous in a sculpture. These marks and signs therefore become the symbols of a language, but a language deprived of meaning in this context. Marinetti and the Futurist Manifesto, published in Le Figaro, Feb. 20, 1909 Cubism was a direct attack on Renaissance perspective. As such, it was also a direct provocation to some Italian artists, to Marinetti, in particular. Historically, Italy had once been the dominant force in the world of art but by the 19th century, if not before, it had ceded its importance to Paris. Although they could at first ignore this change, by the early 20th century, Italian artists felt the need to reclaim their position at the center of the art world but they had to do this without resorting to the classical Italian tradition. The challenge, then, is to find some reconciliation with the French avant-garde while nevertheless asserting an Italian identity but an identity which is free of tradition. That’s quite a challenge and the first response would appear to be made in print in an article or manifesto published in a Parisian newspaper, Le Figaro, on Feb. 20, 1909. The manifesto calls on artists to reject the old and embrace the new: artists should find inspiration in contemporary life they should rebel against tradition and bourgeois values they should celebrate the worker, speed, and the "art" of war The goal of glorifying war is certainly difficult to understand or accept. The problem, however, may lie in how literally we interpret war. Just as the goal of returning to the primitive was more important as a metaphor, the goal of celebrating war was significant in terms of metaphor. War in this manifesto not only stands for the destruction of the past and of mundane values and norms. War is also a spectacle, an art form in itself, as worthy a subject for art as the machine or the café. This is perhaps one of the most radical features of futurism: that futurism is an art which essentially makes the representation of war its primary subject and technique without necessarily depicting battle scenes. Ultimately, we might consider this a war on previous styles, especially when we note the ways in which the futurists subverted most of the styles which formed their artistic inheritance. Carlos Carra Carra: Interventionist Manifesto (Free Carra: The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, 1911 Words), 1914 The Interventionist Manifesto is a poster of words. Unlike Picasso, who used words as one element of his collages, this work is nothing but words. The pinwheel swirling of these words, some of which can be read and some of which cannot be, may replicate the experience of being drowned in a flood of words in print and spoken voices at the same time that it may replicate the opposite: the experience of how words lose their meaning and become inaudible the farther away you get from them and as they are endlessly repeated by other people. Galli, referred to in the second painting, was killed in 1904 in a strike in Milan. Carra witnessed the riot at his funeral. the painting, a tumultuous rendering of violence and combat, is dominated by the networks of sweeping diagonal lines of color. Galli is clearly not the real subject in this painting. We might want to consider, then, that just as the Funeral of the Anarchist Galli is more about velocity and movement than it is about war or a funeral, maybe the Interventionist Manifesto is likewise about movement and not about words. Yet we don't want to ignore the fact that many of the words in the poster were real pronounceable words, and the viewer of this poster might literally speak it aloud. We really can't experience its effect in a visual image. Boccioni would undoubtedly have been the best of the futurist painters, if he hadn't died in WWI. He wrote The Futurist Manifesto of Painting in 1910. He was also a sculptor, in fact, the only futurist sculptor. He addressed sculpture in another manifesto. Indeed, after Marinetti wrote the first one, all the futurists began to write manifestos, generally addressing technique in addition to the grand, sweeping goals of the movement. Boccioni: Riot in the Galleria, 1910 Boccioni: The City Rises, 1910 The fundamental premise of Boccioni's painting manifesto was the idea that painting had to render the sensation of movement or a universal dynamism. In addition, he said, the futurist artist wanted to thrust the viewer into the center of the painting because only in this way could the artist’s vision be seen as emanating from the center of society, and only in this way could the artist be an agent- provacateur. We see him beginning to do this in the transition from the more sedate, neo-impressionist Riot to the greater agitation and more dynamic composition of the City Rises. Boccioni's States of Mind triptych, 1911 States of Mind: Those Who Stay, 1911 States of Mind: Those Who Go, 1911 States of Mind: The Farewells, 1911 Increasingly, Boccioni was less interested in depicting anecdotal scenes of paintings about riots and more intereted in the interior subjective states of emotional experience. By 1911 he was working on a triptych depicting “states of mind” or the inner experiences associated with people traveling and the people who are left behind. When he started the series, he was working in a more expressionist style. Before he completed it, he went to Paris and after his return, he began to replace the expressionistic qualities with what he thought of as an emotional architecture. Boccioni's triptych makes reference to cubist qualities--the use of numbers, the architectonic "scaffolding"--but he consistently uses these references for reasons that are opposite to their use in cubist paintings. If his technique can be seen as a rejection of cubism, then so can his subject (emotional states). But in fact, there might be said to be two subjects to this triptych–the emotional states experienced by people during a leave-taking and the experience of movement. The futurists considered their particular contribution to modern painting to be the idea of “lines of force,” or lines radiating from the depicted object to the spectator’s intuition, lines revealing the “vibrations” emitted by an object into its surroundings, and lines revealing the decomposition of an object, with decomposition referring the way an object’s impact diminishes over time and space.