Lo Stato dell’arte. Fascismo e legittimazione culturale’, Scienza & Politica, 48 (2013), 135-148 (original) (raw)
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2017
This dissertation examines a building program for Fascist headquarters, or Case del Fascio, established by the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) during the years of Italian Fascism, from 1922 to 1943. The PNF planned over 11,000 buildings by 1943 on the Italian mainland and in their colonial territories. This examination is a chronological study of these buildings demonstrating that the PNF expressed its political messages in built-form. Between 1919 and 1943, the PNF developed its political ideology, documented in the Statute of 1921, and its modifications in 1926, 1929, 1932, and 1938. The PNF building program mirrored their constantly modified political goals, as well as the PNF's decisions in areas of culture, religion, and foreign policy. The physical form of the Casa del Fascio embodied the PNF's evolving character that changed from fringe to progressive, to dominant, to authoritarian and militaristic. While the politicians developed programmatic needs for the PNF headquarters building, many architects developed their own consensus about its design from articles in their professional periodicals. Journalists featured PNF sponsored competitions for Case del Fascio, Palazzi del Littorio, and Torri Littorieall versions or components of the developing headquarters building. Wide spread participation of architects in national competitions for fascist headquarters allowed architects to observe other solutions and offer their interpretations. Articles and newsreels of building inaugurations aided the architect's view of the PNF's preferred examples. What began as a clandestine meeting space evolved into a building that could be identified at a distance as a Casa del Fascioa symbol of the PNF, if not Mussolini, himself. However, no one model stood as the template for the new political building. Variations in form, plan configuration, and aesthetics continued until the PNF's 1943 demise, despite the 1936 "Declaration of the Empire" and the PNF's association with Germany-which would have suggested a government-sanctioned "monumental Roman" model. The outcome reveals that architects had unusually strong design control. My study is a chronological analysis, using over 4,000 architectural examples, overlaid with the changing ideology of the PNF, which reveals the reactive design interpretations by professional architects during the Ventennio.
Architecture and the Novel under the Italian Fascist Regime, 2019
Fascism and Architecture There has never been an epoch that did not feel itself to be 'modern' in the sense of eccentric, and did not believe itself to be standing directly before the abyss.-Benjamin (Arcades, [S1a, 4], 545
The State of the Art. Fascism and Cultural Legitimation
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2013
Abbiamo rivolto una serie di domande a Monica Cioli e David Rifkind autori di due importanti volumi sul modo in cui rispettivamente l'arte e l'architettura hanno assunto uno specifico significato politico sotto il fascismo. Ne è uscito un dialogo che mostra come il rapporto tra fascismo e arte non è caratterizzato da una mera appropriazione o da uno sfruttamento reciprocamente funzionale tra artista o architetto e regime fascista. L'arte prepara un'appropriazione specifica della tecnica e introduce all'antropologia politica dell'uomo fascista. Allo stesso modo l'architettura appronta un ordinamento degli spazi urbani coerente e necessaria per la gerarchia dell'ordine della società corporata. PAROLE CHIAVE: Fascismo; arti figurative; architettura; Stato; corporativismo Lo Stato dell'arte. Fascismo e legittimazione culturale The State of the Art. Fascism and Cultural Legitimation
To answer whether there is such a thing as a “fascist aesthetic”, we can turn to the clearest manifestations highlighted by Walter Benjamin, such as the totalitarian symptoms of an aestheticisation of politics, or the mechanised rituals of a “Mass Ornament” that organise a multiplicity of fragments under the image of a homogenized mass reflecting the cult of rationalist efficiency (Kracauer 1995, 75-88). As is frequently stated in the literature, these aesthetic ideas were materialised in mass entertainment and on the stage and ultimately became the defining symbol of dictatorial regimes. However, these forms of “mass reproduction” cannot be ascribed exclusively to fascist ideological rituals of affirmation. Mass expression also forms part of contemporary rituals of national affirmation, such as the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, military parades in democratic nations, or the Dionysian immersion of a Rammstein concert (a band often criticised for its flirtations with neo-Nazi aesthetics). Slavoj Zizek (2010, 373-386) examines this aestheticisation of mass joy as a ritual in which the jouissance is expressed as a neutral substance and only in a second instance is it instrumentalised for political purposes, leaving behind the pleasure in itself. The fascist imaginary not only fuelled the cult of efficiency derived from a rationalist modern mass society but also alluded to the primitive joy of belonging. It is here that we find the link between the fascist aesthetic tradition and the irrationalist tendencies of nineteenth-century Romanticism and the fin-de-siècle imaginary. The affirmative aesthetic of belonging, though shared with ideologies other than the radical right, was easily transferred between the different ideological factions of the early twentieth century thanks to its powerful criticism of the excesses of rationalism. In this sense, considering that anti-liberalism was not a “parenthesis in European history” (Benedetto Croce 1943) but a common parameter in ideologies critical of the failure of modernity (Mazower 2001; Sternhell, Sznajder and Asheri 1994), we will analyse the genealogy of the fascist aesthetic through the German case and the reworking of the community myth. This study will attempt to chart the continuity between various periods of German history, built around a belief in aesthetic and artistic redemption and the notion of culture as a political project. To analyse the network of discourses that construct the concept of community as a pre-rational impulse, we explore those discourses that are crystallised in artistic and cultural expressions close to the Romantic programme and its preoccupations with the return to the lost community and the refounding of unifying myths (Nietzsche, Böcklin). Through this analysis we establish links with the later neo-pagan and regenerative ideals of völkish movements (Fidus) and the mysticism of the Konservative Revolution. Ultimately, we highlight the inherent contradictions in the underlying notion of modernity in European fascism. Consequently, leaving to one side the question of whether there is such a thing as a purely fascist aesthetic, the aim of this study is to determine how some of the aesthetic ideas assimilated and refined by the Third Reich were configured, focusing on their belonging to a tradition forged in the late eighteenth century as a critical response to the Enlightenment. In our analysis we shall endeavour to shed light on the inherent contradictions within those processes that, as in any totalitarian regime, establish relationships of affirmation-rejection and exaltation-regression with Modernity.