I have an irrational fear of Antonin Artaud.
It’s not because of Artaud himself, a twentieth-century French avant-garde actor and writer. It’s because of the ideas his face evokes in my brain: the uncanny stuttering of a dying lamp, that ethical problem called the repugnant conclusion, and the first-year student stress of finding a lab that I was experiencing when I first saw his face. Maybe this vortex of emotions is what he wanted his spectators to feel in his Theatre of Cruelty, a play in which his main goal is to overwhelm the audience.
Or maybe my mind is doing a rendition of one of Filippo Marinetti’s poems, because, funnily enough, that was the same night I first stumbled upon Italian Futurism.
The human race has depicted movement since it has been able to depict things. But movement itself as an end goal—and, in particular, movement as a celebration of the industrial age—is a Futurist concept. Born in the 1910s via Filippo Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto and a subsequent deluge of related texts, this artistic current idolizes youth, speed, dynamism, violence, and the ever-changing flow of modernity. The old must be discarded, as is self-consciously expressed by Marinetti in his manifesto: “When we are forty, let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts!”
The intentions of Futurists in each branch of the arts they touched can be ascertained from that aforementioned deluge of manifestos. Marinetti himself intended poetry to become less systematic, less strict, and less formulaic. A glance at one of his poems, Battle: Weight + Odour, is telling of this: “ . . . mosaic carrion stingers cobblingmachineguns = gravel + backwash + frogs Clanking back-packs rifles cannons rusty-iron atmosphere = lead + lava + 300 stenches + 50 perfumes pavement-mattress debris horse-manure carrion flic-flac piling camels donkeys racket sewer . . . ”
To comprehend such a mosaic, it’s instrumental to refer to his 1912 Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, in which, during a flight over Milan, Marinetti’s plane’s propeller tells him: “One must destroy syntax and scatter one’s nouns at random, just as they are born.” He (or the propeller, who knows) goes on to disdain punctuation, adverbs, adjectives, and even simple analogies, in favor of making poetry an evocation of spontaneous images of objects, represented as nouns and vibrant analogies. A line from a later text, 1913’s Destruction of Syntax—Imagination without strings—Words-in-Freedom, speaks to this point: “Acceleration of life to today’s swift pace. Physical, intellectual, and sentimental equilibration on the cord of speed stretched between contrary magnetisms. Multiple and simultaneous awareness in a single individual.”
The idea of the individual and his environment flowing into one another as parts of the same entity, is, in my opinion, one of the main motifs of the most famous Italian Futurist piece: Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, created in 1913 and now part of the MoMA’s collection. In his 1912 Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, Boccioni states: “By means of the sculptor’s clay, the Futurist today can at last model the atmosphere which surrounds things.” In that regard, the human in the sculpture can be understood not so much as a body, but the shape of a body as defined by its aerodynamics—that is, the environment (in this case, air) surrounding it. It has been proposed that the figure’s struggle to move forward against clashing gusts of air is a metaphor for progress battling against tradition.
Futurist painting followed similar motifs of dynamism and simultaneity, which could sometimes be conjoined with depictions of this struggle between new and old. The City Rises, painted in 1910 by Boccioni and also held by MoMA, concerns the construction of a power plant in Milan. Of particular notice is the horse struggling forward from the right of the canvas towards the center, while three men try to control him. The whole scene is depicted with vivid colors, showing a maelstrom of movement in which progress, associated with the power plant and the horse, strives forward.
Other futurists focused on a maelstrom of noise. In The Art of Noises (1913), futurist painter Luigi Russolo states: “Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men.” His 1913 work Awakening of a City employs the intonarumori, an instrument designed by Russuolo and his brother Antonio to expand the range of sounds available to the musician. This work tries to emulate—uncannily, if I may say—the melange of noises associated with city life.
Finally, it would be obtuse not to highlight Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, painted in 1912 by Giacomo Balla. Here, the intention to render movement in the canvas is evident, with all bodies in the piece composed of a series of blurred and superimposed traces. This work can be seen upstate in Buffalo, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.
It would also be obtuse not to deal with the elephant in the room before closing. For me, The Futurist Manifesto evokes grim images as well. Speed and youth are idolized, but also violence. The glorification of the Italian State and of war to further its advancement cannot be disjoined from some of the Futurists’ ideals. Boccioni and Futurist architect Antonio Sant’Elia died in 1916 while fighting in World War I, while Marinetti went on to support Mussolini’s fascist party, authoring the Fascist Manifesto. Futurism, in this light, can be called a celebration of movement, but movement and youth co-opted for nefarious purposes.
I try to see Italian Futurism more as Balla’s joy at watching a dog walk by than as Boccioni’s struggle to contain a spirited horse. At the end of the day, dynamism can be a pleasure in itself, and one we have to live with anyway in our machine age.