On February 20, 1909, the readers of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro were
treated to an ecstatically positive account of a car crash.
The writer described how he and his friends had talked late into the night,
then decided to go for a drive at dawn.
First, they admired their cars with sensual passion: “We went up to the three
snorting machines to caress their breasts.” Then they drove off wildly into
the streets, shouting: “Let us leave good sense behind like a hideous husk!”
At that point, two bicycles tottered into the writer’s path, and to avoid them
he swerved into a ditch. But as he raised himself, mud-spattered and smelly,
he felt “the red-hot poker of joy deliciously pierce” his heart.
This tongue-in-cheek anecdote served as introduction to one of the most
influential utterances in the history of modern art, the first Futurist
Manifesto. The writer was a 32-year-old Italian poet, ideologue and
self-publicist named Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944).
Born and raised in Alexandria, where the family fortune allegedly came from
running brothels, he was a powerful personality in search of a cause.
Marinetti emerged from that ditch, it seems, believing that he had found it:
he would be the apostle of a new age of velocity and aggression.
So, appropriately in some ways, a road accident served to launch the most
grandiloquent, silly, funny and self-conscious of artistic movements:
Futurism. It is the subject of a comprehensive exhibition at Tate Modern
this summer.
Futurism was especially innovative as a movement in painting and sculpture,
though not in the profound way of its Parisian contemporary, Cubism. But
Futurism really did show the way to the artistic future in one prescient
way.
Half a century before Andy Warhol, 80 years before Damien Hirst and Tracey
Emin, the Futurists, such as Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini
and, particularly, their maestro, Marinetti, showed a mastery of the art of
publicity.
In particular, they understood how to achieve fame through calculated outrage.
In that way Futurism fits well with the autumn show at Tate Modern, Pop
Life: Art in a Material World, dedicated to the use of spin in the
contemporary art world.
Futurism was, as its name suggests, all about the future (Marinetti had toyed
with “Dynamism” as an alternative, but found it less exciting to declaim).
It was an expression of unqualified approval of every aspect of the modern
world — as it appeared a century ago — though in their young male Italian
way the Futurists loved their cars. “With its bonnet adorned with great
tubes like serpents with explosive breath,” the manifesto famously insisted,
“a roaring motor car which seems to run on machinegun fire, is more
beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”
But they also adored noise, violence, bright lights and movement. Conversely,
they hated the past altogether, the whole thing — museums, archaeology,
classical music, peace, anybody over 40, all of which they classified as the
opposite of Futurist, “passéist”.
Their native Italy was “to be delivered from its smelly gangrene of
professors, archaeologists, ciceroni, and antiquarians”. As for
Venice, most passéist of places: blow it up, urged the Futurists. An early
Futurist outrage consisted of climbing the campanile of St Mark’s in Venice
to shout abuse at the worshippers below as they trailed out of Mass.
In London, Marinetti admired the speed of the buses and the Underground. As an
arts movement, Futurism’s unique feature is that, in most cases, the actual
conception and making of the works followed the initial publicity.
It was the idea of Futurism, the violently passionate love of the modern
world, that proved infectious, leading to offshoots as far away as Russia,
where Cubo-Futurism was launched as a catch-all movement of the avant-garde.
London had a breakaway movement, Vorticism, which was keen to separate
itself from the Italian original.
There were manifestos about cinema, sculpture, architecture — about almost
everything — the detailed application of which was often worked out later.
There was no such thing as Futurist painting, for example, when The
Manifesto of the Futurist Painters was printed on February 11, 1910.
The Cubist painters Boccioni, Carrà and Giacomo Balla had to be sent to Paris
at Marinetti’s expense in October 1911 to find out what was going on in the
Parisian avant-garde. The French poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire,
a friend of Picasso, was more impressed by the Futurists’ dress than by
their art, especially Severini’s habit of wearing odd socks.
In the first place Futurism was a literary affair, although it quickly
proliferated into painting, sculpture, photography, music and all the arts.
Marinetti has not lasted well as a writer, except of explosive manifestos.
But as a performer he was evidently quite something. He appeared in the
capital cities of Europe, London particularly. At the Bernstein Hall on
March 19, 1912, he congratulated England on “her brutality and arrogance”,
admirable qualities in the eyes of Futurism, but on the other hand attacked
the nation for being “sycophants and snobs enslaved by old, worm-eaten
traditions, social conventions and romanticism”.
According to a report in The Times, “on the receiving end of this
impassioned torrent of words . . . some of the audience begged for mercy”.
Appearances by Marinetti and his confrères often resulted in riots. In Italy
they were usually surrounded by police and would begin — and sometimes end —
a performance with abuse from the stage, a tactic that certainly generated
headlines and grabbed attention.
In person Marinetti was evidently quite an act. At the Dore Gallery in London
on April 28, 1914, he performed his Dynamic and Synoptic Declamation,
including his free-verse epic entitled Zang Tumb Tumb.
A reporter described how Marinetti “marched through the hall with dynamic
gestures”, pausing to scribble diagrams and equations on three blackboards.
He ended by berating the audience for failing to join in. “This was a very
imperfect rendering. There should be no passive listeners.”
This was not the most spectacular of Futurist performances, however. Typically The
Art of Noises, a manifesto by the painter Luigi Russolo, predated his
invention of the instruments that were to make this new Futurist music: the Intonarumori
(or noise intoners).
These were boxes, like early loudspeakers, divided into a whole orchestra of
noisy instruments. Eventually these were presented in concerts, including
ten at the Coliseum in London, a process described by Marinetti as “like
showing the first steam engine to a herd of cows”.
The resulting noises apparently impressed Stravinsky, though they struck Ezra
Pound as “a mimetic representation of dead cats in fog horns”.
In the 1930s the remaining Futurists launched a gastronomic crusade,
beginning, as usual, with what their countrymen held most dear: in this
case, pasta, which was derided as an “absurd” Italian religion, heavy and
bloating, discouraging to virile aggression and enthusiasm for women. This
upset the Mayor of Naples, who averred that the angels in paradise ate pasta
with tomato sauce.
The furore was picked up by the international press (Chicago Tribune:
Italians May Down Spaghetti). Marinetti published a cookery book of
whimsically inedible recipes such as Chickenfiat (the chicken, stuffed with
ball-bearings, emerges from the oven flavoured with mild steel).
In addition there was a Futurist Manifesto of Lust. Another manifesto
by Marinetti on avant-garde poetry extolled the “Destruction of
Syntax-Imagination without Strings-Words-in-Freedom”.
Their titles are often appealing, for example Carrà’s The
Painting of Sounds, Noises, and Smells (1913), and sometimes appalling — War,
the World’s Only Hygiene (1915) Futurism, of course, seems like an
old-fashioned idea of the new. Often, indeed, its practioners picked on
precisely the aspects of modernity that in the early 21st century are often
vilified: the noise, traffic, crowding and danger of accidents.
In a world attuned to the doctrines of environmentalism, feminism and
political correctness, many Futurist pronouncements seem hopelessly . . .
well, passéist.
That certainly applies to the ninth item on the first manifesto: “We want to
glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the
destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and
contempt for woman.”
In retrospect, the Futurists’ enthusiasm for the First World War — in which
Boccioni was killed — seems, at best, tragically stupid, at worst criminal.
On the other hand, that love of everything new is still alive and well.
The Futurists were not the last to believe that only youth is worth paying
attention to: “When we are 40, let younger and stronger men than we throw us
in the wastepaper basket like useless manuscripts!” We haven’t lost our
taste for speed and violence: consider any James Bond film.
The craziest ideas of the Futurists were often the most prophetic. Futurist
food, an elaborate practical joke at the time, is only a step or two away
from the cuisine of the Fat Duck and El Bulli. The noise machines were a
prediction of many aspects of music in the past 50 years.
One suspects that the Futurists would have loved rock festivals, techno and
the experiments of Stockhausen and John Cage. And, of course, artists have
not ceased, like Marinetti and Co, to use outrage as a vital tool of
publicity.
Futurism is at Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 (www.tate.org.uk/modern,
020-7887 8888), June 12-Sept 20
