Futurism

05 May 1997 17:41

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No, no, not mumbo-jumbo like Toffler or Spengler; 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 the first cyberpunks, the first Discordians, and (perhaps not coincidentally) some of the first Fascists. The original (pre-WWI) Futurists were also good artists. Years ago, I wrote a fragment arguing that "we are all Futurists now" --- all of us on the Net, anyhow --- which now seems clearly false, through over-statement, but perhaps worth re-examining at some point...

Recommended:
• Giacomo Balla was a good painter, but his pupils, Federigo Severini and (especially) Umberto Boccioni were even better.
• Reyner Banham has some good chapters on both the general character of the movement, and its influence on modern architecture, in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age
• Igor Golomshtok, Totalitarian Art
• The Futurist Programmers, especially the Manifesto of the Futurist Programmers.
• James Joll, Three Intellectuals in Politics [Marinetti is the last of the three, preceeed by Leon Blum and Walther Rathenau, who were respectively the Premier of France and in charge of the German economy during the Great War.]
• F. T. Marinetti
  • The Futurist Manifesto
  • The Futurist Cookbook
• 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, The Manifesto of January 3, 2000
• J. C. Taylor, Futurism is the very good catalog of a show at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1961.
• Kim Scarborough's Futurism Index has a wider selection of manifestoes, and links to such other Futurist pages as can be found.

To read:
• Walter L. Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism's Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe [Blurb. 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
• Richard Humphreys, Futurism [Blurb]
• Marinetti, The Untameables
• Marianne Martin, Futurist Art and Theory
• Perloff, The Futurist Movement
• Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes [Blurb, intro]
• Russolo, Art of Noises