Futurism
05 May 1997 17:41
No, no, not mumbo-jumbo like Toffler; I mean the modernist artistic movement founded in 1909 by F. T. Marinetti in friends; the first artists to really, consciously and with immense self-promotion embrace technology and constant change and shock and all that good stuff. They were also, at least in the first wave before World War I, really good artists. It is sad, but not actually a coincidence, that those who survived the war went on to become some of the first Fascists.
Many years ago now, I wrote a fragment arguing that "we are all Futurists now" --- all of us on the Net, anyhow. That now seems clearly false, through sheer over-statement, though there might be something to it. (Re-reading stuff I wrote when I was 20, though, is like listening to a recording of my own voice: I'm too busy cringing to consider the performance with any critical distance.)
- Recommended, primary:
- F. T. Marinetti
- The painters: to my taste, the best were Giacomo Balla, Federigo Severini and (especially) Umberto Boccioni; some monographs/exhibition catalogues:
- Ester Coen (ed.), Umberto Boccioni
- Maurizio Fogiolo dell'Arco, Balla the Futurist
- Luciano Caramel and Alberto Longatti (ed.), Antonio Sant'Elia: The Complete Works [the great unbuilt Futurist architect]
- Kim Scarborough, Futurism Index has a wider selection of manifestoes, and links to such other Futurist pages as can be found.
- J. C. Taylor, Futurism [Very good catalog of a show at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1961]
- Recommended, secondary:
- Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age
- Igor Golomshtok, Totalitarian Art
- James Joll, Three Intellectuals in Politics: Blum, Rathenau, Marinetti
- Jane Rye, Futurism
- Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism
- Recommended, tertiary:
- The Futurist Programmers, especially the Manifesto of the Futurist Programmers [Those links are dead now, but I'll try to find archived versions somewhere]
- The Neo-Futurists are a Chicago group which put on a damn fine show, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, which tends to blow the minds of those who aren't prepared for, say, thirty plays in sixty minutes; I wasn't.
- Bruce Sterling
- Not recommended, primary:
- F. T. Marinetti, The Untameables
- To read, primary:
- L. Russolo, Art of Noises
- To read, secondary:
- Walter L. Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism's Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe [Chapter on Marinetti.]
- Günter Berghaus
- Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909--1944 [Looks like pure apologetics, along the lines of "they collaborated, but they had private objections." As Kolakowski says somewhere about the analogous position under Stalin, the rulers ask for no more.]
- "New Research on Futurism and Its Relations with the Fascist Regime", Journal of Contemporary History 42 (2007): 149
- Cinzia Sartini Blum, The Other Modernism: F. T. Marinetti's Futurist Fiction of Power
- Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods
- Vivien Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909--1944 reconstructing the universe
- John London (ed.), One Hundred Years of Futurism: Aesthetics, Politics and Performance
- Marianne Martin, Futurist Art and Theory
- Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-garde, avant guerre, and the language of rupture
- Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism
- Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes
