Futurism and Propaganda: Manifestos, Theatres, and Magazines (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Italian Futurist movement has come back into vogue with its centenary in 2009 and the landmark exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York that ran through 2014. The cultural influence of this movement on the modern era is undisputed, whether we look at paintings, literature, poetry, sculpture, architecture, music, or advertising. It is also undisputed that this avant-garde movement was deeply involved in the politics of both liberal and Fascist Italy. Futurist politics were characterized by a pronounced nationalism and imperialism, and were known for the mantra that war was the 'world's only hygiene' .
The Futurist movement presents a perfect example of the way politics come into play in a work of art and how those ideas can influence the style and content. In the present day Futurism is unequivocally associated with Benito Mussolini’s fascist rule due to the marrying of Marinetti’s ambition to spread his views with Mussolini’s recognition of the Futurists as allies and their ability to produce propaganda in his favour. However, Futurism is not explicitly a right-wing, fascist movement as it contained many left-wing artists also – as shown significantly by the emergence of Futurism in Russia in relation to Lenin.
"Le Futurisme mondial": Reception and Adaptation in International Futurism
Revista de história da arte 10 (April 2014): 182-189. F.T. Marinetti’s manifesto of 1924, Le Futurisme mondial, contained a list of 172 supposed members of an “international Futurist movement”. Undoubtedly, Futurism acted as a stimulant and exerted a fertilizing function in the lives of many artists outside Italy. But Marinetti’s notion of “influence” does not hold up in the light of a critical examination. This paper presents a broadly based picture of how Futurism operated in a worldwide network of the avant-garde. Rather than focussing on straightforward cases, where an artist would embrace the Futurist programme as outlined in the movement’s manifestos, I shall present examples, where Futurism was absorbed in a complex process of osmosis and creative adaptation. I will also discuss several artists and writers, who overtly rejected Futurism or took a detached attitude towards it, but still allowed significant aspects of Futurist aesthetics to filter through into their oeuvres. Thus, an image of Futurism emerges that is very different from Marinetti’s concept of a worldwide Futurism. At the same time, it reveals how the movement influenced the development of the historical avant-garde and how the inspiration received from Futurist aesthetics could give rise to a diverse and highly original range of modernist works of art.
Il Giocattolo Futurista': Futurism and Fumetti
Romance Studies, 2003
Abstract: This essay explores the relationship between Futurism and that sub-universe of the graphic and visual arts represented by comic strips and comic books during the 1930s and the 1940s. I use the Manifesto della ricostruzione futurista dell'universo (1915) by Balla ...
Militant Politics and Avant-garde Performance Art in the Early Futurist Movement
Militant Politics and Avant-garde Performance Art in the Early Futurist Movement. In: Arcadia 41:2 (2006), pp. 245-259. Documents in Italian archives reveal how Marinetti sought to fuse art and life in order to foster an action-oriented (rather than reflective) artistic practice. Of particular interest is the Futurist political engagement with Anarchist and Syndicalist circles, and the impact of this on Futurist artistic practices in the 1910s. Selected examples from the theatrical genres of Serate and Public Actions and their relation to the beaux gestes libertaires of the Anarchist movement illustrate why the self-proclaimed Anarchist avant-garde and Futurism could not join forces in order to activate a country deeply steeped in traditional-ism. Paradoxically, Futurism dealt more successfully with the bourgeoisie than with the revolutionary Left.
Futurismo: Linking Past and Present through an Artistic Aesthetic
Theatre Topics
Ah Futurismo" shouts the recorded voice of F. T. Marinetti as the performers' stark, uplifted gestures arrest the descending light at the conclusion of Futurismo, a dance theatre production at Santa Clara University collaboratively created in 2013 by theatre artist Jeffrey Bracco and choreographer David Popalisky. This collaboration grew out of a mutual interest in the ideas, strategies, and values articulated in the pre-World War I foundational Futurist manifestos by F. T. Marinetti and how he and his collaborators implemented them through performance. Recognizing that the early Italian Futurists' embrace of speed through glorification of machines resonates with our present reliance upon technological innovation, we chose to use performance to critically investigate our relationship with speed and technology in the twenty-first century. This essay considers the implications for undergraduate students and ourselves as teaching artists of the creative choices employed in Futurismo. Our process, with its strengths and challenges, may prove useful for other artist-educators working in academic settings. What follows is a rationale for why the early avant-garde period of Futurism prior to World War I was most relevant to Futurismo's creation and thematic development. Next, we discuss how early Italian Futurist strategies and specific historical artifacts influenced the conceptualization of
From symbolism to futurism: Poupées électriques and Elettricità (2010)
Rivista di Studi Italiani, 2010
In this paper I examine how Filippo Tommaso Marinetti transformed his three-act drama Poupées Électriques (1909) into a one-act Futurist sintesi Elettricità (1913). Through the analysis of draft versions of Elettricità and of Futurist manifestos, both the process by which Marinetti enacted this textual transformation and the reasons behind the changes made to the French play in its passage to becoming an Italian playlet will be explored. A series of drafts for Elettricità, which are held at the F. T. Marinetti Papers Collection at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, uncover the progression from French original to Italian translation. Close textual analysis of the two plays will demonstrate how Marinetti sought to change elements of Poupées Électriques so that Elettricità would reflect his new Futurist world vision. The significance of many of the changes Marinetti made only becomes clear when Elettricità is contextualised within other developments in the Futurist ideology and to Marinetti’s manifesto output.
This essay summarizes the main features of Futurist books, by accounting for their complex originality. Since the early stages of their careers, Futurists employed books as a privileged means of experimentation both in terms of graphics and contents. Authors like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Francesco Cangiullo, Carlo Carrà, Fortunato Depero and Ardengo Soffici explored the visual, graphic and onomatopoeic possibilities of written words in parolibere. These authors put into practice a typographic revolution, which aimed to subvert the usual order within a page, through the use of different characters and colours. In particular, Marinetti announced the birth of this peculiar expressive form in his manifests and set the grounds for a renewal of written expression.
Futurist Conditions: Imagining Time in Italian Futurism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020)
ISBN 9781501343124, 2020
Mather's scholarship demonstrates it was the camera--not the engine--that was the key invention against which many futurist ideas and practices were measured. Overturning some misconceptions about Italian futurism's interest in the disruptive and destructive effects of technology, _Futurist Conditions_ argues that the formal and conceptual approaches by futurist visual artists reoriented the possibly dehumanizing effects of mechanized imagery toward more humanizing and spiritual aims. Through its sustained analysis of the artworks and writings of Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, and the Bragaglia brothers, dating to the first decade after the movement's founding in 1909, Mather's account of their obsession with motion pivots around a 1913 debate on the role of photography among more traditional artistic mediums, a debate culminating in the expulsion of the Bragaglias, but one that also prompted productive responses by other futurist artists to world-changing social, political, and economic conditions.