Back to the Futurists: The avant-garde and its legacy

Introduction

Elza Adamowicz and Simona Storchi

In 1909 the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Founding Manifesto of Futurism was published on the front page of Le Figaro. Between 1909 and 1912 the Futurists published over thirty manifestos, celebrating speed and danger, glorifying war and technology, and advocating political and artistic revolution. In Italy, France, England and Russia, this avant-garde movement was active in the field of painting and sculpture, theatre, photography and politics.

After decades of neglect, essentially for ideological reasons, Futurism has become a major object of critical attention both in Europe and in North America, as evidenced by the large number of publications and exhibitions in the field, particularly during the last decade. Scholarly publications exploit a range of methodological approaches, including gender studies, literary theory, intellectual history and word-and-image studies. Anthologies of Futurist texts, published in new translations, have expanded the range of documents available in English (W. Bohn, ed., Italian Futurist Poetry, 2005; G. Berghaus, ed., Critical Writings: F. T. Marinetti, 2006; L. Rainey, C. Poggi and L. Wittman, eds, Futurism: An Anthology, 2009). The significance of Futurism has been reassessed, notably by M. Perloff (The Futurist Moment, 2004); G. Berghaus (ed., Futurism and the Technological Imagination, 2009), and G. Buelens, H. Hendrix and M. Jansen (eds, The History of Futurism. The Precursors, Protagonists, and Legacies, 2012). Recent scholarly publications of the key figures of the movement include biographies of Marinetti (G. B. Guerri, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Invenzioni, avventure e passioni di un rivoluzionario, 2009) and Umberto Boccioni (G. Agnese, Boccioni da vicino. Pensieri e passioni del grande futurista, 2008), as well as new editions of the work of Giacomo Balla (Scritti futuristi, ed. G. Lista, 2010) and Marinetti (Teatro, ed. J. Schnapp, 2004). Recent studies have also revealed the important role of women in the movement (F. Zoccoli, Benedetta Cappa Marinetti. L’incantesimo della luce, 2000; S. Contarini, La femme futuriste (mythes, modèles et représentations de la femme dans la théorie et la littérature futuristes), 2006; M. Bentivoglio and F. Zoccoli, Le futuriste italiane nelle arti visive, 2008; V. Mosco and S. Rogari, Le amazzoni del futurismo, 2009). Following Günter Berghaus’s study Futurism and Politics (1996), the politics of the movement has been the object of a number of studies, situating Futurism within the broader European avant-garde context (E. Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism, 2003; S. Bru and G. Martens, The Invention of Politics in the European Avant-Garde, 2006; W. Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe, 2007; S. Bru, Democracy, Law, and the Modernist Avant-Gardes: Writing in the State of Exception, 2009; E. Gentile, La nostra sfida alle stelle. Futuristi in politica, 2009; F. Perfetti, Futurismo e politica, 2009). Recent publications have also offered new readings of the Futurists’ position in relation to modernity, arguing that, far from enthusiastically embracing technological progress, their position was complex and ambivalent (L. Somigli, Legitimizing the Artist. Manifesto Writing and European Modernism 1885–1915, 2003; G. Berghaus, ed., Futurism and the Technological Imagination, 2009; C. Poggi, Inventing Futurism. The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism, 2009). Scholarly research has focused on lesser-known aspects of the movement, such as Futurism and the esoteric (S. Cigliana, Futurismo esoterico. Contributi per una storia dell’irrazionalismo italiano tra Otto e Novecento, 2002); and Futurism in regional centres (W. Bohn, The Other Futurism. Futurist Activity in Venice, Padua and Verona, 2004; A. Castronuovo, Avanguardia Balneare. Figure e vicende del Futurismo a Rimini, 2009; V. Cappelli, ed., Calabria futurista. 1909–1943, 2009; M. Gazzotti and A. Villari, eds, Futurismo dada. Da Marinetti a Tzara. Mantova e l’Europa nel segno dell’avanguardia, 2010; C. Giuliani, ed., Futurismi a Ravenna, 2010). Finally, studies linking historical Futurism with contemporary developments in art and design include: Futurism and sport (M. Mancin, ed., Futurism & Sport Design, 2006); Futurism, cinema and performance art (G. Davico Bonino, ed., Teatro futurista sintetico. Manifesti teatrali del futurismo, 2009; G. Lista, Il cinema futurista, 2010); Futurist photography (G. Lista, Futurism and Photography, 2001); fashion and Futurism (L. F. Garavaglia, Il futurismo e la moda, 2009); and Futurism and multimedia art (G. Celant and G. Maraniello, Vertigo: A Century of Multimedia Art, from Futurism to the Web, 2008). The recent surge in scholarly interest in Futurism on a global level has resulted in the launch of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, edited by Günter Berghaus for de Gruyter.

Recent interest in Futurism is also evidenced by the large number of exhibitions in the field. Since it opened in 1998 the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London has hosted a number of exhibitions on Futurism, including artists such as Balla, Severini, Depero, Carrà, Russolo and Boccioni, as well as aeropainting, Vorticism, and Russian Futurism. The recent Futurism exhibition, held first in Paris at the Centre Pompidou (15 October 2008–26 January 2009), then reconfigured in Rome at the Scuderie del Quirinale (20 February–24 May 2009) and London’s Tate Modern (12 June–20 September 2009), focused on the confrontation between Futurist and Paris avant-garde artists, as well as Futurism in Britain (Vorticism) and Russia (Cubo-Futurism). It was accompanied by an extensive catalogue with contributions by curators D. Ottinger, E. Coen and M. Gale, as well as G. Lista and J.-C. Marcade. The centenary of the first Futurist manifesto was celebrated by a number of other exhibitions in Italy, among which it is worth mentioning the exhibition held at the MART (Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea) in Rovereto entitled Futurismo 100. Illuminazioni. Avanguardie a confronto: Italia, Germania, Russia (17 January–7 June 2007), with a catalogue edited by Ester Coen (2009) which focused on the relationship between Futurism and early twentieth-century European avant-gardes; the Milanese exhibition Futurismo 1909–2009. Velocità + arte + azione (5 February–7 June 2009), hosting a wide range of Futurist exhibits, from paintings and sculptures to examples of stage sets, architecture, decorative art, advertising and fashion, accompanied by a catalogue edited by G. Lista and A. Masoero; the Venetian exhibition Futurismo. L’avanguardia delle avanguardie (12 June–4 October 2009), with a catalogue by C. Salaris; the exhibition Futurismo Manifesto 100 X 100. 100 anni per 100 manifesti (Rome, 21 February–17 May 2009; Naples, 3 September–3 November 2009), with a catalogue edited by A. B. Oliva, focusing on the manifestos; the Milanese exhibition F. T Marinetti = Futurismo (12 February–June 2009), accompanied by a catalogue edited by L. Sansone (2009).¹

A series of special journal issues devoted to Futurism has also marked the centenary of the Founding Manifesto of Futurism. Of note are the special issue of Annali d’Italianistica (vol. 27, 2009) entitled A Century of Futurism 1909–2009, edited by F. Luisetti and L. Somigli; Future Imperfect – Italian Futurism between Tradition and Modernity, a special issue of The European Legacy, 14:7, edited by M. Härmänmaa and P. Antonello; and an issue of L’Illuminista, 25, entitled Futurismo e letteratura (2009).

In the 2011 volume of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies Günter Berghaus highlights the importance acquired by Futurism Studies in the past twenty years, particularly since the 2009 centenary. As he points out, more than 300 exhibitions, over fifty international conferences and a vast number of theatre and musical performances, radio and TV broadcasts have given Futurism an unprecedented prominence in the cultural calendar (Berghaus 2011: XI). Yet, he observes, Futurism studies are still strongly compartimentalised, not only in terms of artistic media but also, and especially, along national borders. He argues that the debate on Futurism should become globalised and less centred on Italy: ‘Futurism had a world-wide impact and generated many international Futurisms, despite the fact that their agendas only partially overlapped with Marinetti’s aesthetic and political programme’ (Berghaus 2011: XI). This argument is partly echoed by Geert Buelens, Harald Hendrix and Monica Jansen’s claim that ‘there is no such thing as Futurism’ and that any definition of Futurism should take into account its diverse goals and results in space and time (2012: 1). The need to look more comprehensively at the fortunes of Futurism outside Italy has been stressed by Giorgio Di Genova (2011: 9). The extent of the intersections between Italian Futurism and the international avant-garde is one of the main features of Berghaus’s Yearbook, and features prominently in the catalogue for the Tate 2009 exhibition Futurism (see Ottinger 2009 and Gale 2009).

The innovative character of Futurism is still widely acknowledged. As Federico Luisetti and Luca Somigli point out, ‘the Futurist movement marked a crucial rupture within European literature and art … it called into question all aspects of literary and artistic production, from the sacrality and eternalness of the work of art to the privileged role of the artist and the passivity of the reader and the spectator’ (2009: 14). Pierpaolo Antonello and Marja Härmänmaa, as well as Günter Berghaus, remind us that Futurism was the ‘-ism’ of the future, dedicated to the glorification of modernity in all its phenomena: from the metropolis and city life to the advancement of science and technology; from the excitement and beauty of speed and machines to the new means of communication. Futurism embraced twentieth-century technology as a key element of its aesthetics (Antonello and Härmänmaa 2009: 778; Berghaus 2009a: 19–27). Yet Futurism is still considered an enigmatic and uncanny movement, as well as a ‘curiously misunderstood’ one, as Marjorie Perloff has recently put it (2012: 9): because of the cultural context from which it sprang, its praise of modernisation and technology was marred with ambiguities and contradictions (Antonello and Härmänmaa 2009: 778). Its eschewal of mainstream literary communication and stylistic practices, its cult of war, Marinetti’s sexism and his alliance with Fascism ‘have not helped to disseminate or even garner sympathy for the artistic methods of this pioneering avant-garde movement’ (Luisetti and Somigli 2009: 14). The founding father himself of Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, is still considered an enigma: his all-embracing work is at times discomforting – especially in its glorification of war – and his writing blurs the boundaries between literature and politics (Bru 2009: 41). Politics features pre-eminently in all recent reassessment of Futurist work: after his seminal book Futurism and Politics (1996), Marinetti and Futurism’s political trajectory have recently been re-examined by Berghaus, both through the formation of the Futurist political party (2006) and in the light of Marinetti’s ideology of war and violence (2009b). Sascha Bru has also reassessed Marinetti’s relationship with politics up until 1922, the year of Fascism’s rise to power and of Marinetti’s novel Gli indomabili, which he reads as a political allegory (2009: 41–86). One of the preferred Futurist textual practices, the manifesto, has been described by Luca Somigli as ‘a textual space ambiguously poised between the aesthetic and the political, between the work of art and propaganda, between practice and theory’ (2003: 4). Bru reminds us of the intrinsically political character of the avant-garde: not only at the level of making practical decisions concerning patronage, policy and education but also through its response to mass culture, which challenged the avant-garde to acquire visibility and create its own space in the public arena. Bru demonstrates how the avant-garde artist was part of a class of intellectual labourers that had been forming since the late nineeteenth century, who engaged from time to time with political debates and produced ways to perceive and discuss social and other issues (Bru 2006: 15–16). Marinetti’s politics has been read by Walter Adamson as ‘a new and unique mode of fusing cultural activity with political action’. By manipulating press and publicity in an effort to marshal ‘symbolic capital’ on an international scale, Marinetti aimed not merely to advance himself or his movement but to confront a crisis of civilisation and ‘to contribute to its resolution by competing for influence in the public sphere with traditional elites whose capital was economic and political’ (2007: 77). More recently Adamson has suggested that we should see Futurism as ‘an integrated social movement which moves from a mythic phase in which Futurism functions as a harbinger of an alternative form of capitalist mass culture into a utopian phase in which it transmutes into an alternative party politics coupled with a supportive aesthetics’ (2012: 309).

Emilio Gentile has re-examined Futurism’s involvement in politics as linked to its project for an ‘anthropological revolution’, which would create the new man of a modernity identified with the triumph of machine and technology. Futurism’s politics, according to Gentile, was a manifestation of ‘modernist nationalism’, that is a cultural position characterised by an enthusiasm for modernity bound up with a nationalistic ideology. Futurism’s obsession with industrial and technological modernity and the imperialist outlook resulted in a rejection of democracy, a warmongering attitude and an aesthetics of speed, technology and the machine (Gentile 2009: 4–16). Modernist nationalism is seen by Gentile as one of the cultural roots of Fascism (Gentile 1996: 32–45). However, while Gentile argues that Marinetti and his followers subordinated themselves to Mussolini and Fascism after 1920, and accepted to renounce their status as an autonomous social and political movement, abandoning the stances of modernist nationalism (Gentile 2009: 129–30), Adamson maintains that they continued to pursue a Futurist cultural politics well into the 1920s and 1930s (2012: 310).

In his reassessment of the well-known Futurist obsession with the machine, Berghaus identifies a sense of unease transpiring from Futurist texts, stemming precisely from the machine they exalt. According to Berghaus, ‘the Futurist machine had a Janus face, one side divine and positive, the other obscure and frightening, and too painful to admit to the conscious mind. The experience of chaos and alienation led to the incorporation of the external threat into the internal world and a transformation of the enemy into a friendly object’ (Berghaus 2009a: 27). The machine aesthetics would function as a means of controlling and imposing order on anxiety-producing energies, of exorcising the dark side of modernity. Interestingly, Berghaus stresses Futurism’s multifaceted character and its heterogenous response to machine aesthetics: the technophilia and macchinolatria which characterised the first phase of the movement were gradually countered by dissenting or critical voices from within Futurism itself. As Italy became more technologically advanced, idealised images of the Mechanical Age became mitigated with more contradictory, complex and faceted attitudes Futurists developed towards technology: as Berghaus puts it, ‘a basically positive attitude towards the Machine Age went hand in hand with an increasing awareness of the flipside of the coin. Macchinolatria was tempered by machine angst’ (2009a: 31).

A nuanced interpretation of Futurism’s meccanolatria, which also takes into account Marinetti’s relationship with nature, has been put forward by Marja Härmänmaa, who argues that Futurism’s glorification of technology was predicated on the one hand on the abandonment of the ‘myth of Pan’ – symbolising the cult of nature and a cyclical concept of time – to pursue that of Prometheus and Ulysses – representing civilising power and heroic force. The replacement of the natural landscape with a landscape of steel and concrete represented the human ability to tame a nature seen as hostile, an enemy to conquer and dominate (Härmänmaa 2009). According to Roger Griffin, developing at the beginning of the twentieth century – a time when the West had entered a point of ‘high modernity’ and hence high anomie – Futurism promoted technolatry as the product of three main cultural attitudes: firstly, a revitalising attitude according to which the root cause of contemporary decadence is the loss of a unifying, energising nomos resulting in a fixation with past achievements to conceal the moribund state of present culture. Secondly the Futurist attempt to combine aesthetics with technophilia was the result of the desire to ‘precipitate society’s total palingenesis through an art capturing the essence of modern dynamism’ (Griffin 2009: 92). Art would have the role of shocking a declining culture into a healthier, more powerful condition. In this context, and as distinct from other forms of Modernism, technology was seen not as the source of society’s decadence but as its salvation, on condition that human creativity overcame technology’s tendency to enslave and robotise. Futurism did not want to combat the ‘storm of progress’ by taking refuge from it, but by ‘harnessing its energy in the shaping of a technocratic future’ (2009: 92). Thirdly, Griffin argues, Futurism’s variant of Modernism represents an example of ‘mazeway resynthesis’, which operated by ‘hybridizing elements of old and new values into a temporalized Utopia in which the membranes that separate art, philosophy, culture, society, and politics in times of stability had become porous’ (2009: 92). Griffin identifies the main flaws of the Futurist project in its utopian nature (which eventually turned dystopian), in the selective amnesia of collective memory and tradition entailed by Futurism’s rejection of the past and in its celebration of ruthless violence directed against demonised Others as integral to its project of regeneration (2009: 93).

Nonetheless, despite its inconsistencies, its successes and failures, both in culture and politics, Marinetti’s (and Futurism’s) greatest significance, according to Adamson

lay rather in his prescient intuition … that the future of modern art and culture lay in some creative fusion of artistic talent and imagination with the popular energies and forms of expression bound up with the dynamism of modern urban life. Modern art and culture, [Marinetti] understood, could hope to preserve itself as a tradition or professional practice independent of the world of newspapers, films, cameras, telephones, railroads, and machine technologies more generally, but would have to take full advantage of what modern, industrial, technological, and commercial institutions and practices had created – and would continue to create at an ever-increasing speed. Art would have to abandon its pretension to be ‘Art with a capital A’, attune itself to the intensified visuality and clipped syntax of modern life, and make itself anew. (Adamson 2007: 108–9)

As Antonello and Härmänmaa conclude, ‘despite the many theoretical inconsistencies, artistic shortcomings, political contradictions and faux pas, it has become evident that Futurism holds a significant position in the cultural history of the twentieth century’ (2009: 781). Futurist experimentation anticipated many of the ideas that would later be developed by leading twentieth-century artists. For better or worse, as Didier Ottinger reiterates, Futurism was the first of the twentieth-century avant-garde movements (2009: 20). The Futurists’ vision and their drive to extend their reach to all artistic and social domains became a foundational experience for many art forms, from poetry to music, from theatre to painting, leaving an indelible mark on modern culture (Antonello and Härmänmaa 2009: 781; Adamson 2007: 109). Finally, Adamson argues that the most important legacy of Futurism is its trajectory which he sees as a ‘natural’ trajectory for avant-gardism in general, for ‘the problem for avant-gardes after World War II and for those seeking to operate in contemporary, liberal-democratic cultures is how to be critical without either falling off into an unrealizable stance as an opposition or betraying themselves by becoming fully integrated movements whose messages simply circulate without any disconcerting, practical effect’ (2012: 314–15).

The majority of these chapters were originally given as papers at an international conference, ‘Back to the Futurists: avant-gardes 1909–2009’, co-organised by the University of Swansea, Royal Holloway University of London and Queen Mary University of London, with the collaboration of the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, and hosted by Queen Mary in July 2009. The chapters, written by international specialists as well as by younger researchers in the field, reassess the activities and legacies of Futurism.

Summary of chapters

The first three chapters reassess Futurist manifestos. Matthew McLendon links Marinetti’s techniques of self and group promotion in his Manifestos with practices in the expanding realm of commercial advertising. The theory of crowd psychology (Gustave Le Bon, Giuseppe Prezzolini, Walter Dill Scott), it is argued, facilitates an understanding of the Futurists’ portrayal of their own audience or crowd. Jennifer Griffiths’s ‘Heroes/Heroines of Futurist Culture: Oltreuomo/oltredonne’ explores the question of how Futurist manifestos address notions of genius and gender and in particular how Futurist women addressed these issues in their texts and art. She argues that the concept of ultradonna allowed a philosophical entrance point for women artists to become active participants within Futurism despite its anti-feminist declamations. Finally Pierpaolo Antonello reconstructs the historical, cultural and ideological background of Marinetti’s Manifesto del tattilismo (1921) as one of the key texts which inaugurated the second wave of Futurism. He maps the scientific and philosophical references on which Marinetti’s text is grounded and situates the Manifesto within the wider context of the mainly French anti-ocular discourse as historically reconstructed by Martin Jay in his Downcast eyes. Marinetti’s text is considered in the light of the general ‘critique of separation’ espoused by the European avant-garde movements.

Dafydd Jones opens the next group of chapters, on Futurism and the contemporary avant-gardes, with a chapter exploring Futurism’s complex relationship with Dada. In spite of the Dadaists’ rejection of any cultural precedent, Jones argues that the Zurich Dadaists adopted cultural stances heavily indebted to the terms of critical engagement and cultural visibility initiated within the Futurist circle, in particular in their manifestos and in their strategic use of cabaret as political action. The relations between Futurism and Dada are also explored by Maria Elena Versari in an analysis of the avant-garde’s examination of its internal strategies of identity and canonisation. She re-assesses Huelsenbeck’s and Hausmann’s accounts of the originality of Dada’s aesthetic and theoretical positions by arguing that they shaped their own theoretical and aesthetic stances in relation to the foundational role played by Futurism in establishing the codes of the avant-garde. Developing further the links between Futurism and contemporary avant-gardes, Debra Kelly analyses the importance of Futurism for the French poet and painter Pierre Albert-Birot. She argues that his meeting with Severini in 1915 was the catalyst for his advent to modernism. Futurist painting, poetry and theatre design inform the early issues of Albert-Birot’s avant-garde review SIC. However, far from being a Futurist publication, SIC is critical of the movement.

The following four chapters explore some of the dialogues and conflicts within Futurism. Delphine Bière charts the details of the argument on simultaneity between Boccioni and Delaunay, showng how their differing interpretations of Chevreul’s ideas on simultaneous contrasts, as well as Bergson’s ideas on simultaneity, informed quite divergent aesthetics and pictorial practice. Convergence and divergence are also the subject of Elza Adamowicz’s analysis of critical readings of Léger’s La noce. The painting is considered as the site of a battle between Cubist and Futurist aesthetics; as a place where the two movements intersect and dialogue; and as a pictorial space of convergence between Léger’s practice and the broader avant-garde. The dialogue between Occultism and Futurism is the subject of Paola Sica’s exploration of the theme of night in the works of the Florentine Futurists. Finally, Jonathan Black examines the reasons why Wyndham Lewis and his colleagues, who had enthusiastically embraced Futurism in 1913, rejected it in early 1914, questioning its revolutionary credentials and its failure to integrate avant-garde abstraction.

In ‘Futurist performance’, Günter Berghaus reassesses Futurist theatre as the most effective medium for polemics and propaganda in an evolving mass society. He shows how the Futurists, through the serate, Futurist Variety Theatre, and Theatre of Essential Brevity, used theatre as a weapon in the battle for a renewal of Italian public life. For Marinetti and the Futurists, theatre constituted a natural progression from politics: performances were a demonstration of the Futurist concept of art-action, a form of art that had the power to invade society and provoke active responses from the spectators, rather than serving as an object of consumption. Berghaus also stresses the importance of theatre for the Futurists as an effective propaganda medium in an age increasingly dominated by mass society. More than any other artistic form, the serate (Futurist performances) challenged the autonomous position of art in bourgeois society. The performative element in the work of art was therefore conceived of as key in the reclaiming of the integration of art and life-praxis.

Performance is also the subject of Selena Daly’s analysis of Marinetti’s 1905 play Le Roi Bombance as a precursor to his 1932 La cucina futurista, which, more than a book of recipes, should be considered as a piece of performance art, in which food is separated from its nutrional function and the act of eating is related to notions of creativity and identity.

The next two chapters examine Futurist poetics. John White considers a series of unique examples of innovative expressivity in Italian Futurists’ free-word poems and dipinti paroliberi. He chooses examples which were a product of the political phase of literary Futurism at a time when eye-catching propaganda content – politics ‘expressively’ mediated – was a central concern. As a consequence, these texts demand a bolder – at times heuristic – new reading strategy than was usually required in the case of horizontal-linear words-in-freedom. The poems are analysed in terms of their contribution to the political campaigns that were a feature of Futurist activity in the second decade of the twentieth century. Willard Bohn examines a later group of poems, Futurist aeropoetry, which celebrates the triumph of modern aviation. His meticulous textual analyses focus on the Futurists’ experimentation with aerial aesthetics in their hybrid verbal-visual poems.

Sascha Bru, re-evaluating the politics of Futurist poetics, argues that Gramsci’s philosophy of language coincides with Futurist language experimentation. He focuses in particular on Marinetti’s manifestos and his allegorical novel Gli indomabili (1922) and argues that Gramsci may have taken an interest in Futurism because he realised the political potential of Futurism’s linguistic experimentation. According to Bru, Futurism’s use of language may have resonated with Gramsci’s reflections on the need to construe a counter-hegemonic language with which a wide variety of social groups could identify and which could collectively attain a single cultural climate. Indeed, Gramsci probably saw Futurism as a significant counter-hegemonic voice. It is Bru’s argument that Marinetti’s poetics to an extent formalised tactics which were also found in Gramsci’s writings, tactics according to which traditional meanings of words in political representations could be eased off from their signifiers and replaced with new connotations.

Marja Härmänmaa’s discussion of war in Marinetti’s texts and worldview explores the ideological reasons for his glorification of war and the rhetorical means used to exalt war and represent the enemy. She argues that the glorification of violence and war in Marinetti’s work is not for its own sake, but rather as propaganda for the formation of a ‘heroic citizen’. Technological war was also at the centre of the Futurist modernolatry, and Futurist aesthetics and stylistic innovations were born and developed in relation to the notion of ‘aesthetic war’.

In her chapter on interdisciplinarity and intermediality, Carolina Fernández Castrillo explores cinema’s contribution as a metamedium to an understanding of the interconnections between old and new art forms, in order to create a common language suitable to the new times. Adopting a ‘cinemacentrist’ perspective, Castrillo’s chapter focuses on the relationships established between art, literature and theatre with the new medium to achieve a ‘total spectacle’. It reviews the main Futurist manifestos, articles and manuscripts in the light of theories developed by Mario Verdone, Michael Kirby or Giovanni Lista. It argues that the Futurist movement contributed to a blurring of disciplinary borders in Europe at the beginning of the last century

Finally, Elisa Sai’s chapter, on Futurism’s legacies, opens with Marinetti’s words: ‘A very beautiful day after tomorrow’, addressed to his daughter at the end of his life. These words were adopted by the artist Luca Buvoli for the title of his project presented at the Venice Biennale of 2007, a vibrant multimedia work which incorporates Futurist themes. Buvoli explores the concepts of power, velocity and flight, recalling Futurism’s enthusiasm for aviation while simultaneously encouraging the spectator to engage with the deconstruction of Futurist myths. Buvoli’s work intends to be a re-contextualisation of Futurism, which, in Buvoli’s words, ‘questions the authoritarian and threatening side of our fascination with the future, velocity and power’.

Notes

All translations are authors’ own, unless otherwise stated.

1  Several of these exhibitions are reviewed in Di Genova (2011) and Michaelides (2011).

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1

Engaging the crowd: the Futurist manifesto as avant-garde advertisement

Matthew McLendon

In April 1912 Umberto Boccioni, writing to Carlo Carrà from Berlin and the travelling Futurist exhibition, expressed his concerns about the lack of publicity surrounding the event. He complained: ‘I fear that there is not the tremendous interest of Paris and London, because the publicity has been badly organised. Marinetti should be here, it is necessary. I am neither a journalist nor a writer, nor do I have his name, or the experience of publishing’ (Gambillo and Fiori 1958: 239). Boccioni’s anxiety and his insistence that ‘Marinetti should be here’ demonstrates the Futurists’ consciousness of the importance of publicity to their movement. Marinetti was the one with the ‘name’, and it was he who had the ‘experience of publishing’. Without Marinetti the Futurist publicity machine – of which the manifesto was the primary component – obviously did not run smoothly.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was undoubtedly the primary momentum behind Futurism, though some may argue that his tight-fisted control over all aspects of the movement did more harm than good in the end; he is often depicted as a type of one-man public relations firm. Underlying this acceptance of Marinetti’s gift for public relations is a kind of awe that inspires an uncritical acceptance of his powers of persuasion. There has been no attempt to compare Marinetti’s practices of self and group promotion with those practices in the expanding realm of commercial advertising.¹ While there may be no direct evidence that Marinetti systematically studied the emerging techniques of publicity, it can be argued that there is circumstantial evidence that he did have some knowledge and understanding of the latest ideas in advertising – ideas that were firmly rooted in the emerging science of psychology. Yet it is not my intention to set up a cause and effect relationship between Marinetti and advertising theory. Rather, I shall argue that Marinetti’s practice, especially as maker and instigator of manifestos, was remarkably in tune with the latest developments in both advertising practice and theory.

Futurism has long been noted for its vigorous engagement with the mass culture of its day, and almost every study concerned with the movement references its use of early twentieth-century European ephemera in its art, both visual and literary. To demonstrate this, an examination of Futurist publications in light of popular theories of ‘the crowd’ and of ‘suggestive advertising’ will highlight the similarities in practice.

The crucial difference between the established advertising practices of the nineteenth century and the new techniques emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century is the concept of suggestion. It is no longer enough for an advertisement simply to state the specifications of the product; the new advertisement must convince the consumer – through suggestion – that the product is a necessity. As advertising is pitched at the largest audience possible, its affinity with a theory of the mind of the crowd is obvious. The theories employed by the proponents of suggestive advertising in both America and France share a view of the audience that is strikingly similar to the theory of the crowd put forth by the French psychologist Gustave Le Bon. By studying key points in Le Bon’s text of 1895, Psychologie des foules, and then comparing these ideas with works by the American psychologist and proponent of suggestive advertising, Walter Dill Scott, as well as a little-known text by the young Giuseppe Prezzolini, a clear affinity between Futurist practice and the latest advertising theory emerges.

Gustave Le Bon was not the first to develop a theory of ‘crowd psychology’ though today he remains one of the best-known forefathers of what is now called social psychology.² In 1895 when he first published Psychologie des foules, recent moments in history seemed to be at the forefront of his mind – the not too distant memory of the Revolution (in particular the Reign of Terror that ensued), the rise and fall of Napoleon, and the Commune. The importance of these events cannot be overstated when considering Le Bon’s theories. How did these moments happen and how could they be prevented from happening again? In the new modern age, the age of mass-production and literacy in this era of the domination of the broadsheet and the emerging ‘proletariat’, how could the ‘right people’ shape the opinions of the majority? Moreover, how could the propensity to riot be curtailed? These questions, for Le Bon and his followers, seemed best answered through the new understanding of the mind and its limitations.

While it can be argued that the Futurists were more often interested in inciting riot than in suppressing it, it is the control of the masses that Le Bon’s theories promise, and this is where the interest to advertisers lay. For Le Bon, the crowd exhibits ‘impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of the sentiments’, characteristics that ‘are almost always observed in beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution – in women, savages, and children, for instance’ (1982: 40). Le Bon first gives this statement:

A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself immediately calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first … a crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the image evoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the