thoughts on the Italian futurists?
Carlo Carrà Funeral of the Anarchist Galli 1910-11 (personal favorite)
Their sensible suggestions for the improvement of Italian cuisine seem to have been entirely ignored, unfortunately. Reasonably sided with the fascists and, like Benn in Germany, were inevitably disappointed.
They were quite self-consciously an extension of symbolism/aestheticism/decadence, or rather one mood of the same personality (it would be easy and funny to draw a straight line from the Wilde of “The Decay of Lying” to D’Annunzio to Mussolini to Hitler):
We have sacrificed everything to the triumph of this Futurist conception of life. You will also easily understand why, after having loved them so much, today we hate our glorious intellectual fathers: the great Symbolist geniuses, Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Verlaine.
We despise them now for having swum the river of time with their heads always turned back toward the far blue spring of the past, toward the ciel antérieur où fleurit la beauté.
F. T. Marinetti, “We Abjure our Symbolist Masters, The Last Lovers of the Moon”
– and it’s not hard to find fits of this mood among their predecessors. Huysmans can dream of an aesthetic retreat whose master
was resolved not to suffer the annoyance of seeing her [the unavoidable domestic servant’s] commonplace exterior, [so] he had a costume made for her of Flemish grogram, with a white mutch and a great black hood to muffle face and head, such as the Béguines still wear to this day at Ghent. The shadow of this mediaeval coif gliding by in the dusk gave him a conventual feeling, reminding him of those peaceful, pious settlements, those abodes of silence and solitude buried out of sight in a corner of the bustling, busy city.
– but is himself sometimes seized by the Futurist fever:
It’s like an oven! thought the young man, who sat down cross-legged and huddled himself up, trying to shelter his body under the circle of shade cast by the brim of his large straw hat. And as for ‘golden wheat’, what a joke that is, he said to himself, looking into the distance at the dirty orange bales piled up in a heap. However hard he tried, he couldn’t come round to seeing this picture of the harvest, so endlessly celebrated by painters and poets, as truly noble. Beneath a predictable blue sky, hairy, barechested men stinking of sweat were sawing in unison through rusty brushwood. How paltry this picture seemed next to a scene of a foundry or the belly of a steamer, lit by the flames of a forge!
After all, next to the horrible magnificence of machines, that one beauty the modern world has been able to create, what was this innocuous labour in the fields? What as an ordinary harvest, the natural fecundity of a benevolent earth, the painless birth of a soil fertilised by seed strewn from the hand of a brute, in comparison to the accouchement of cast iron inseminated by man, to those embryos of steel, born from the wombs of furnaces and taking shape, growing, expanding, crying out in raucous groans, and then flying along rails, raising mountains and smashing rocks!
The life-bread of these machines—hard anthracite, dark oil, the whole black harvest reaped from the very bowels of earth in pitch blackness—how much more grievous, how much more grand.
The calls to heap up the fire to the shelves of the libraries, divert the canals to flood the cellars of the museums, etc. should be properly understood as a program of national and cultural renewal, a revival of tradition, the way to the past. “If you want to find ICE, try thinking about what is blocking you out of the past. It certainly isn't a law of nature.”
We repudiate the ancient Venice extenuated by morbid secular voluptuousness, though we have loved it long and possessed it in the anguish of a great delightful dream.
We repudiate the ancient Venice of strangers, market to fraudulent antiquaries, magnetical pole for all the snobs and imbeciles of the world, the sunken bed of innumerable caravans of lovers, precious gemed tub of cosmopolitan adventuresses.
We want to cure and cicatrize this rotting town, magnificent wound of the past. We want to enliven and ennoble the Venetian people declined from its former grandeur [Make Venice Great Again], morphinised by a disgusting cowardice and abased by small dishonest traffic. We want to prepare the birth of a commercial and military Venice, able to brave and affront on the Adriatic Sea our eternal enemy: Austria.
Hasten to fill its small fetid canals with the ruins of its tumbling and leprous palaces.
Burn the gondolas, those swings for fools and erect up to the sky the rigid geometry of large metallic bridges and manufactories with waving hair of smoke, abolish everywhere the languishing curves of the old architectures!
May the dazzling reign of divine Electrical Light at last free Venice from her venal furnished room’s moonshine.
The past and the future allied against the eternal stagnant present and the conservative forces that would preserve it. The rebirth of ancient England, for example, greatly to be desired, will necessitate dynamiting the picturesque neo-gothic buildings and executing the royal family.
As for the edgy line I put in my bio about glorifying war, sole hygiene of the world – unfortunately, strictly speaking, they were wrong about that. Like the Victorian political economist who “feared the famine of 1848 in Ireland would not kill more than a million people and that would scarcely be enough to do much good”, I’m afraid modern war simply does not kill nearly enough civilians, whose lives are as a rule worth less than those of soldiers, to do much good. More accurate would be to say that political fragmentation, guarantied in the last instance by the threat of war, and the necessity to prepare for war as an ever present virtual danger, is the only thing preventing eternal command-control monkey-dominance-politics retardation/stasis.
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