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Futurist Manifestos

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_Futurist Manifestos_ is an extremely important and useful book, a must for anyone interested in early-twentieth-century avant-garde. In Italian Futurism, theory and practice went hand-in-hand rather like they once did in physics, with the artists considering their, say, painting as an experimental ground for testing and developing their theories not just about painting, but about the world. Understanding the ontologies and desires of the movement completely changes the way you look at Futurist art, gives you the keys to it, as it were. Actually, it changes the way you look at all of early-twentieth-century avant-garde practice, the whole fifth floor of the MoMA. It's not the first book on Futurism that I read, but it certainly packs the most punch, despite the fact that some of the artists' prose can frustrate, bore, etc.; and it takes an effort to grasp what they're talking about.

And what they're talking about is the nature of reality. The reality that the Futurists want to portray is not the visual reality that is usually incriminated by the term "realism," but reality that is a) scientific and b) phenomenological. Thus, for example, instead of regarding painting as a representation of a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface, Futurist painting wishes to express all dimensions--sounds, smell, brightness, etc. Instead of representing a moment of the world flux or, as they say, universal dynamism, they wish to express "the dynamic sensation itself"--basically, the world flux as it appears in the mind--and world objects as subjects of motion. "A horse in movement," writes Boccioni, "is not a motionless horse which is moving, but a horse in movement, which makes it another sort of thing altogether." Since Futurists deny absolute rest, this means that, as Severini notes, "individual objects do not exist anymore." Objects in Futurist paintings are deformed by speed; broken into planes by perception; interpenetrating with respect each other; superimposed by their environment (ie other objects and sensations). The influence of the discovery of X-rays is enthusiastically admitted by the Futurists themselves; also clear are representations of the Doppler effect; one wonders about relativity, but it seems as if artists didn't catch on to relativity until the end of WWI.

Superheavy is the influence of Bergson, especially in Boccioni. Boccioni's distinction between absolute and relative movement, the role he allots to intuition as an epistemological tool that entails identification with object of knowledge, etc., position him as a very intelligent interpreter of the French philosopher. In paintings such as the Soccer Player (in the MoMA) Boccioni seeks to synthesize--by intuition--the absolute and relative motion of an object into a single intuited visual formula providing the continuity of the object in space. Balla, on the other hand, prefers analytic solutions to synthetic ones, and therefore represents the one moving object as a multiplicity. (My favorite example of such "analytic" portrayals of motion is his study of the flight of swifts, also at the MoMA; but the Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, at Buffalo, illustrates the more primitive form of the same tendency).

There is a huge amount of overlap here with other avant-garde movements, not least of all the Russian absurdist group OBERIU that I work on. The Futurist idea of the world as "universal vibration," and their thesis that art should focus on that ontology (in addition to abolishing distinctions between subject and object, as well as between object and object), underlies a great deal of OBERIU thinking. One wonders to what extent the connection is typological and to what extent it is genetic. In any case--READ THIS BOOK! But don't look at the pictures--the reproduction quality is awful. A very cheap, good-looking collection of Italian Futurist pictures is Sylvia Martin's Futurism (Basic Art), published by Taschen. The best background reading, which contextualizes Futurist ideas in early twentieth-century culture, is Stephen Kern's _The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918: With a New Preface.

This book completely leaves out their political writings. If you want to learn about their artistic beliefs it's a good book, but it has none of their (important) political writings.