Futurism is 100 years old today. The World's Alex Gallafent tells us what it is and how it began.
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MARCO WERMAN: This might sound like a contradiction in terms, but Futurism is 100 years old today. Here's The World's Alex Gallafent.
ALEX GALLAFENT: The origin of artistic movements can't always be traced to specific events. Futurism can. On the 20th of February, 1909, an Italian named Filipo Tommaso Marinetti published his Futurist manifesto in newspapers across Europe, the most prominent being Le Figaro in Paris. In this recording, Marinetti rejects philosophy and culture as guiding principles for society. So before Surrealists, Dada-ists or Situationists, there were the Futurists. And they were intent on abandoning the past.
GERMANO CELANT: This movement was the first one to break the boundary of the traditional language which was, you know, modern painting and sculpture, going to use any possible media, from photography to the radio.
GALLAFENT: That's Germano Celant, an Italian curator currently based at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. He says the Futurists, led by Marinetti, saw the apparatus of the modern world – machines, speed, and technology – as means for artistic expression.
CELANT: You know, we are talking on the radio and the Futurists start to communicate also with alteration of the voice. Let's say, you know, they want to communicate the war, so they were doing “ta ta ta ta ta ta ta boom!â€
GALLAFENT: Marinetti was a millionaire, a poet with a taste for fast cars. His character defined the values of Futurism contained in the manifesto. Love of danger, audacity, revolt--but also aggressive action. The destruction of museums and libraries. Scorn for women. And war was glorified as “the world's only hygiene.†All this Marinetti viewed as means to shake up Italy, to drag it into his vision of the new century -- a century that was about to experience its first world war. Art critic William Feaver.
WILLIAM FEAVER: Futurism came at a very good moment for getting excited about the 20th Century. Bang at the beginning and say that we love war, just in time to avoid the start of the war, by which time it became rather too bad taste.
GALLAFENT: One of Marinetti's followers, the Futurist composer Luigi Russolo, declared in 1913 that “Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibilities of men.†But the sensibilities of men eventually took the future away from the Futurists. The movement became associated with Italian fascism, and when Marinetti died in 1944, formal futurism died with him. But not before he had completed many more manifestos in keeping with his beliefs. One even called for the abolition of pasta. Doesn't sound like much of a future to me. For The World, I'm Alex Gallafent.
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