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iii
FOREWORD
I dedicate this work to my beloved family, who always supported me, to my friends, which have contributed to this work directly or indirectly, and to my advisors, who have mentored dearly.
And finally, to that great hum in the universe. Without it, I wouldn’t be alarmed to write it.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOREWORD……………………………………………………………………….iii
LIST OF FIGURES………………………………………………………………...vi
ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………....vi
ÖZET……………………………………………………………………………….vii
INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………...1
CHAPTER 1: ORIGINS OF TWO TERMS: FUTURISM AND THE AVANT-GARDE…....................................................................................................................5
1.1. ABOUT THE TERM AVANT-GARDE…………………………..…………..8
1.2. TWO DEFINITIONS FOR ITALIAN AND RUSSIAN FUTURISMS...….10
1.3. CONTEMPORARY USES OF TWO TERMS……………………...............15
CHAPTER 2: NOT TO INTERPRET THE WORLD, BUT TO CHANGE IT: FUTURISM AND POLITICS…………………………………………………….18
2.1. A WAR NEVER-ENDING……………………………………………………20
2.2. ITALY'S SOCIO-POLITICAL BACKGROUND DURING FIN DE SIÉCLE…………………………………………………………………………….21
2.3. TZARIST RUSSIA'S SOCIO-POLITICAL SITUATION BETWEEN TWO REVOLUTIONS…………………………………………………………………...23
CHAPTER 3: EVOLUTION OF TWO CURRENTS: A SEQUENTIAL TRACKING………………………………………………………………………...28
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3.1. THE FIRST PHASE OF ITALIAN FUTURISM (1909 TO 1919)…………29
3.2. THE YEARS OF FASCISM: SECOND PHASE OF ITALIAN FUTURISM (1920-1944)…………………………………………….............................................31
3.3. THE RUSSIAN FUTURISM BETWEEN 1910 AND 1930………………...34
CHAPTER 4: TECHNOLOGY, LANGUAGE AND SEXUALITY IN FUTURISM…….......................................................................................................40
4.1. TECHNOLOGY………………………………………………………………41
4.2. LANGUAGE…………………………………………………………………..46
4.3. SEXUALITY…………………………………………………………………..50
4.4. WOMEN OF THE AVANT-GARDE………………………..........................52
CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………….58
REFERENCES….………………………………………………………………….61
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Friedrich Nietzsche, diagram in notebook from 1873…………………….12
Figure 2: Diagram from Umberto Boccioni, 1913…………………………………..14
Figure 3: Mikhail Bakunin by Korolev, 1919……………………………………….27
Figure 4: F.T. Marinetti, free-verse poem from “Canta giovinezza”………………..48
Figure 5: L.H.O.O.Q. by Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, 1919, originally published in 1920……………………………………………………………………53 Figure 6: Portrait of Edith von Haynau [a.k.a. Rosa Rosà], between circa 1930 and 1940………………………………………………………………………………….56
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ABSTRACT
This study will try to analyze the differences and similarities between two highly political art movements of the 20th century in Italy and Russia, which surprisingly sprouted under the same banner: futurism. The interaction and reciprocal relations between politics and arts also will be under the lens. I will try to answer these questions within a theoretical frame and in guidance of examples that how come the same aesthetic currency has cashed itself in one country, Italy, into fascism on the other hand in Russia took a more egalitarian turn, and is there any direct relationship between futurism and fascism at the core. This thesis tries to question how come an artistic and cultural practice is defined by the relations between cosmopolitan and national politics and to what extent the production of culture is determined by mainstream politics. By asking these questions, this work will also try to come to closer contact with the relationships between arts and technology, sexuality, and language.
Keywords: futurism, avant-garde, technology, modernism, cultural policies
viii
ÖZET
Bu çalışma İtalya ve Rusya’da şaşırtıcı bir biçimde aynı bayrak altında ortaya çıkmış (fütürizm) 20. yüzyıldaki yüksek derecede politik iki sanat akımı arasında farkları ve benzerlikleri analiz etmeye çalışacaktır. Politika ve sanat arasındaki etkileşimli ve karşılıklı ilişkiler de mercek altında olacaktır. Aynı estetik birimin İtalya’da kendisini nasıl olup da faşizme tahvil ettiğini oysa Rusya’da nasıl daha eşitlikçi bir yol tuttuğunu, yanı sıra fütürizm ile faşizm arasında doğrudan bir ilişki olup olmadığı sorularını teorik bir çerçevede, örnekler ışığında aydınlatmaya çalışacağım. Bu tez bir sanatsal ve kültürel pratiğin nasıl olup da kozmopolit ve ulusal politika tarafından tanımlandığı ve kültürün üretiminin ne ölçüde anaakım politika tarafından belirlendiğini soruşturuyor. Bu soruları sorarak çalışma aynı zamanda sanat ve teknoloji, cinsellik ve dil arasındaki ilişkilere daha yakından temas etmeyi umuyor.
Anahtar kelimeler: fütürizm, avangard, teknoloji, modernizm, kültür politikası
1
INTRODUCTION
“Our heads are round so our thoughts can change directions.”
Francis Picabia
As it might have been to most of us, the course of history often remarks on the very conclusions made by itself. "What if" proposal is not a legitimate question like it is in some utopian perspectives, thus. But we also know very well that it might have been the other way around, or there are numerous endings. The drive of happiness and madness are so close, that it might seem to us meddling with a simple pleasure is interfering with the deed of historical will, gods, etc.
But as it is well known, also, simple pleasures are made by, not catastrophes but most of the time with complex criminal exaltation. There is such thing as guilty and simple pleasures of daily life, and historical culmination.
Thus, being as simple as being practical the material necessities of human beings and their inventions seem to be ideological at the same time. Most complex endeavors are grasped with the basic material needs of the human deed, and vice versa. This becomes a frustrating struggle between the most common and the very rare, in exchange. The extravaganza of the European avant-garde exhausts its self-empowered culmination in the past century’s turn of age through ideas about not just art itself, but also about the realm of experience and life itself in general.
This is the will of the avant-garde to shape lives, and all creatures’ experience by shaping the most common in an extraordinary way, creating uncommon pleasures, both physical and intellectual.
2
In this thesis, I will try to investigate the commonly malevolent misunderstandings of a historical process between 1909-1945 in the cases of Italian and Russian futurism, to open credit for the most underestimated or cursed approaches in pioneering political and artistic endeavors of the 20th century societies.
My main purpose in asking these questions is to understand to what extent an artistic movement can be summed up as an equivalent of a political current, the inter-determining relations between politics and art, to problematize the historical narratives relating to the avant-garde regarding only artists and some major works and the interactive affinity of artistic production with culture and technology.
Through this research, my methodology to investigate will be a historical materialist and a comparative analysis will be followed between these avant-gardes in these two countries, revealing the material conditions of these two, having a closer look at the relations between the political arena and artists within the framework of the avant-garde scene, which will be defined in a good manner at the first chapter. Then analyze the micro-relations that form these movements in themselves.
Regarding the choice of historical materialism as a methodology, it is the most improved and to-the-point approach to a historical phenomenon within a certain framework on diverse topics such as geography, political economy, relations between genders and clash between generations without suppressing to the past as an “end work” but as something still going on. I think as a methodology it is the only way to understand a phenomenon such as futurism not as a past and failed project but regarding the present and the future, without any canonic prejudice as much as possible.
In relation to this methodology, I will also deploy the means and intuitions of contemporary philosophy to not to get stuck on the epoch that is subject to this thesis, to understand the relations that can reverse the feeling of linearity in historical narratives, to pluck the fruits of this movement that are still relevant for the problems
3
of present societies and to demonstrate that the present issues in culture are related to the subject period’s long-standing effects.
Another aim is to assign that what seems antiquarian and long-standing in contemporary culture is actually a relatively new phenomenon in human history. The comparison between these two countries will able the reader to understand the current borders between cultures and political agendas are more or less plastic, underlying similarities are so common and the outputs are so differing, that the cherishing of differences in culture is closely tied to the cherishing of the identical.
Thus, this work also tries to critique the fetishism of cultural difference in cultural studies faculty from within. By this intervention, which is not just exemplary but theoretical at the same time, it can be seen that the underlying currents and action-reaction, cause and effect relationships are so inter-determinant, that there is no way out in the paradigm of culture as an identity, but rather we should think it as a historical and living product.
Within this aim, in the first chapter, I discussed the history of the avant-garde and its philosophical and political precursors and gave examples of its contemporary criticism. In the second chapter, I tried to demonstrate the political dilemmas and relations regarding a highly influential artistic generation and their effects on 20th century politics and culture.
In the third chapter, I distributed this affectuous relationship of futurist movements with politics within a timeline and tried to demonstrate how the sequence of events came to conclude with certain results, political and artistic. Finally in the last chapter, there is a simultaneous theoretical analysis on the topics of language, technology and sexuality. I also tried to give credit to futurism in particular and avant-garde in general relating to women’s rights and LGBTI+ liberation struggles.
4
Although my study is limited to an artistic movement and its appearances in two well differing countries, I shall not limit my view to a national telos and try to reconstruct the image of that time, to show how it differed from what is to come and what has been gone. Another point in this thesis will be to understand the concurrent relations between two futurisms, one molding itself into fascist ideology and the other tying loosely with Bolshevism.
Since the justice of history is bleak and ill-defined most of the time, at least I can hope for a more sympathetic approach to be produced within this work in the case of the avant-garde as an art movement.
5
CHAPTER 1: ORIGINS OF TWO TERMS: FUTURISM AND THE AVANT-GARDE
Since these two terms have been used sometimes ambiguously, like every other term which belongs to the artistic scene it may be needed to clarify what we mean when we are using them. After more than a hundred years since these two terms are coined, the interchangeable nature of conceptions and exchange between other fields may give us new understandings of these two movements.
Although the introduction of the term avant-garde was at first on behalf of a political and a military cause, the utopian sense of the word has never disappeared. Henri de Saint-Simon, a forerunner of utopian socialist causes first used the term in a more moral sense, thinking of the artist of the future as at first a moral leader1. Since the modern days’ artists no longer relied upon the morality of modern societies’ self-appealed causes which were attained to arts, he needed to give a more ethical and political sense to the term.
Since the mid-19th century, artistic endeavors have found themselves in a position to question their basis, either in a moral or social aspect and sometimes both. Artist, as a person to equip the society, not just virtually but also by its soul, found himself in a position to question the very practice he has been taught by not just means but also by its consequences. Hence he found himself and his art not applicable to society’s present morality. According to Jochen Schulte-Sasse while writing the foreword of Peter Bürger’s “Theory of the avant-garde", "for him [Bürger] the turning point from aestheticism to the avant-garde is determined by the extent to which art
1 Henri de Saint-Simon, Opinions littéraires, philosophiques et industrielles, Kessinger Legacy Reprints, 1825
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comprehended the mode in which it functioned in bourgeois society, the comprehension of its social status."2 Mostly used interchangeably with the term 'modernism' in the Anglo-American tradition, although avant-garde had a currency in modernist aesthetics, it is also true that it transcended the modernist agenda by deploying a variety of aesthetic strategies. Bürger, while characterizing the modernist tradition with a sense of "skepticism towards language", which is a different attitude (he speaks his mind on a literary spectrum, especially) than the Enlightenment, he also gives a brief glimpse about the growingly fragile status of autonomy which had been attributed to Arts at the end of 18th century. He even argues that "the historical avant-garde of the twenties was the first movement in art history that turned against the institution "art" and the mode in which autonomy functions. In this, it differed from all previous art movements, whose mode of existence was determined precisely by an acceptance of autonomy."3
Arts as a by-product of class society, artistic equivalence to other occupations was not enough. The unrest among artists among other occupations has been raised, since they were one of the main columns of the unrest and poverties upsurging among the people and in society. They were not just producing the prevailing ideas and fantasies in the society, but also reproducing the prevailing relations among classes. Hence the euphoria of the French Revolution and its ideas of enlightenment got dimmer in the second quarter of the 1800s, following the defeat of the Napoleon Bonaparte, literary people and artists felt this disturbance in a sense that their autonomy and raison d’etre of the artistic practice was in danger.
Denis Diderot once wrote in his "letter on the book trade", on a very early date like 1763, "how many authors have not obtained the celebrity they deserved long after
2 Pg. XIV, Jochen Schulte-Sasse in Peter Bürger; Theory of the avant-garde; University of Minnesota; 1984
3 Ibid.
7
their death? This is the fate of nearly all men of genius. They write for the next generation."4 He further added with a serious tone, to punctuate the rights of the writer as a copyright owner “I repeat, the author is master of his work, or no one in society is master of his property”5.
Henceforth, it is not an unexpected outcome that the artists of the 19th century were becoming growingly conscious and protesting about the societal background of their occupation. They were mainly occupied with their profession not just professionally but also in a political and moral manner. That behavioral approach to their singular profession created a sense of universal protest in their handling of the medium. This approach of intellectual independence would make them unwanted in the eyes of the ruling class and the patrons since their autonomy was not granted but demanded.
So having an avant-garde approach to an artistic profession would mean having an approach that is aware of the power relations within the artistic medium and around the artist himself or herself. From the ashes and gas of the past society, a fresh and new approach was being brought for an up-and-coming one.
This makes futurism not just an avant-garde movement but also typical for its handling of the problems of the avant-garde itself. Renato Poggioli speaks of this tendency of being linked concretely to the future is typical for all the avant-garde as:
“As already observed, the futurist moment belongs to all the avant-gardes and not only to the one named for it; to generalize the term is not in the least arbitrary, even in view of Ortega y Gasset's and Arnold Toynbee's use of it as a historic and philosophically generic term to designate eternal psychological tendencies belonging to all periods and all phases of culture.”6
4 Pg. 49, Denis Diderot, Daedalus, Vol. 131, No. 2, On Intellectual Property, The MIT Press, Spring, 2002 5 Ibid, 54.
6 Pg. 68-69, Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-garde, Harvard University Press, 1968
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1.1. ABOUT THE TERM AVANT-GARDE
Initially a military term for the regiments in the front line of the Roman Army, the term came to be a hallmark for groundbreaking and seminal works in Arts, expanding the concept throughout disciplines and new practices.
In a work entitled in French as “The objective of art and the role of artists”, written by a less known Fourierist, Gabriel Désiré-Leverdant7acclaimed the attitude and connections between arts and utopian politics as such:
“Art, the expression of society, manifests, in its highest soaring, the most advanced social tendencies: it is the forerunner and the revealer. Therefore, to know whether art worthily fulfills its proper mission as initiator, whether the artist is true of the avant-garde, one must know where humanity is going, know what the destiny of the human race is ... Along with the hymn to happiness, the dolorous and despairing ode ... To lay bare with a brutal brush all the brutalities, all the filth, which are at the base of our society.”
Although this use of the term came to be coined in the mid-19th century, it wasn’t widely recognized until the 20th century’s breakthroughs in artistic endeavor. Until then, it was generally appointed to the literary people who were genuinely affiliated with the Left, mostly radical, to define their agenda in most cases as more or less ambiguously as in the sphere of “political avant-garde”. This was also a case of mockery by some of the writers, who were self-labeled as decadent, such as Baudelaire.8 There were also timid approaches towards Arts which came to define it again in a more modern sense. In the case of naturalism, like a fin de siécle literary movement, these two façets of the vanguard, being political and aesthetic, almost collided. The beginning of the 20th century hallmarked a whole new approach to artistic practice
7 Ibid, 9.
8 Ibid, 11.
9
and the concept. Since the collision between the political and artistic façets of the term, which came to be existent until the 1880s9, have started to dissolve during fin de sieclé, although there were attempts to repair the broken bonds between these two later, the term would never come to define the political and artistic at the same time again.
There are certain aspects of these movements, in the case of futurism at most, which have come to be defined by Renato Poggioli as moments of “activism, antagonism, nihilism and agonism”10. Poggioli cites the first two of them (activism and antagonism), as the logic behind the movements and the latter two (nihilism and agonism) as the superseding dialectical structure of every movement.
Poggioli quotes from the author and an advocate of the magical realism movement, Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960) to underline the motivation behind these concurrent complexes:
"In practice, the avant-gardes of the first fifteen years of the century have in general submitted to the fate of military avant-gardes, from whom the image is taken: men destined for the slaughter so that after them others may stop to build."11
The term was criticized for its military background by certain philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre12.Since then it happened to be concluded in a more modest understanding, depicting works more ‘flamboyant’ in their undertaking. The popular uses vary from classifying certain furniture models to pointing out the historical epoch.
9 Pg. 11, Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-garde, Harvard University Press, 1968
10 Ibid, 25-26.
11 Ibid, 67.
12 Pg. 56, Ferit Edgü, İlişki, Davranış, Sıkıntılara Övgü’den Arture’lere (1955-1970), YKY, 2016
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1.2. TWO DEFINITIONS FOR ITALIAN AND RUSSIAN FUTURISMS
The word futurus simply is the future tense of to be in Latin. Deriving from Latin, the term futurismo in Italian implies the spatial ground of being, in an aggravated sense. It implies the future space for being, thus opening a space for the experimental endeavor and political approach for adapting the present life to the demands of a new life.
In Russian (футуризм), the term applied from the Italian manifesto, dating 1909, yet coined just a year after, being a diverse topic among Russian literary people. Although being used in a whole different approach, being attached to the same banner a year after the Italians was an itchy subject for some of the writers of Sadok sudei13, is the first public encounter with the term in Russian. Echoing varying states, the term is sometimes used to define Russian artistic movements differing as Cosmism, Suprematism, Constructivism, Rayonism altogether. This means that the Russian treatment of the term happened to be not a mere adaptation, but also gave it a more loose but a whole new meaning.
But the real dilemma for the Italians was, as being a violent movement towards the haughtiness of the past, the relationship they have founded within the art history was crucially modernist, thus had a sense of progress and breaking the ties with the past within the same gesture. While at the same time giving a diagram [Figure 2] about the historical progress that futurism had sprung from, Umberto Boccioni cites, referring to the masters of the Renassaince era:
“For the necessity of energetically maintaining a violent artistic polemic my futurist painter friends and I will need detailed exposure to all the selected passages (naturally with precise bibliographic references) in the works of Vasari… that confirm our conviction that every great innovative and creative artistic period
13 Pg. 8, Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History, University of California Press, 1968
11
necessarily implicates a tendency to despise and destroy the masterpieces of the preceding periods.”14
Both currents applied the term not just on a formal, but also on a material basis. They wanted to invent the future on technological and artistic backgrounds. Although being a clearly nationalist distinction, Boccioni, depicting that he had a clear vision and a sense of history, cites:
"We declare that the true Italian tradition is never to have had any tradition, since the Italian race is a race of innovators and constructors. At no moment in the history of Italian art does one find a real return to the imitation of previous epochs. All the great Italian painters were absolutely original and innovative."15
These citations, having a bizarre sense of being tangled up with the past, which is represented by the founding artistic fathers of Italian national identity, also give a brief glimpse of how modernity, especially in Arts and literature came to be defined by an almost Greco-Roman athletic race with the French masters, though being a fair and "gentlemanly" one. Boccioni adds, in a just and proud manner: "In French painting, more equipped with genius than with plastic power, we find instead more than a few imitative returns. We have Giotto, Masaccio, Raphael; France has the Poussins, the Ingreses and the Davids."16
But, being the most well-equipped avant-garde movement with the knowledge and perspective on history, futurists were not just a loose group of artistic people who were advocating transition and progress. Their intellectual ties with the Nietzschean cyclical history approach were evident in their diagrams and manifestos. Friedrich Nietzsche's ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ (1874) had literally the first for this cyclical understanding of history that Boccioni was advocating.
14 Umberto Boccioni, ‘[letter to Gian Pietro Lucini from between 28 May and 30 August 1910]’, reprinted in Umberto Boccioni: Lettere futuriste, ed. Federica Rovati, Rovereto, 2009, 19.
15 Ibid.
16 Luigi Russolo, ‘Contro tutti i ritorni in pittura’, in Catalogo per la Esposizione Futurista, Galleria Subalpina, Torino, 27 Marzo al 27 Aprile, 1919, unpaginated.
12
Figure 1: Friedrich Nietzsche, diagram in notebook from 1873. Weimar: Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Goetheund Schiller-Archiv (GSA 71/107, page 44). Photo: Klassik Stiftung Weimar. [a diagram for Nietzsche’s conception of cyclical history]
Their interest in the conception of übermensch also can be thought of as an indirect contribution to the political arena via fascist ideology, through artistic means. “Boccioni’s complaint that Italy ‘hangs back cultivating the mold of the past’ ”17 is also characteristic of the movement's approach towards ‘collecting’ the ‘antiquity’,
17 Pg. 518, Rosalind McKever, On the Uses of Origins for Futurism, Association of Art Historians, Wiley Blackwell, 2016
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deemed as a banality. Futurism historian Rosalind McKever underlines thecomplex, mutualistic and sometimes contradictive relation between conceptions of history by Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche that might be interesting to understand the prevailing relationship between Italian and Russian futurisms:
“Numerous cyclical models of history were available to the futurists, including Giorgio Vasari’s analogy of the life cycle and Karl Marx’s reading of Hegel’s repeating history. Both can be seen as prioritizing the present over the past in a manner analogous to futurism.”18
These formal analyses are important for us to understand that the avant-garde in general and futurism, especially Italian futurism in focus which has grown far more enough to draw its genealogy and come to a conclusion about its meaning in history, are not just a different tradition, but a proposal for a new relation between content and form. This characteristic also determined its destiny, which is concluded at fierce agenda of the group’s attacks on classicism, which proposes a unity, not a dialectic or encountering relationship between these two.
Bürger speaks in this respectively new relation as a shift to the hegemony of form from content-dominated works in a more cleansing manner:
“Since the middle of the nineteenth century, that is, subsequent to the consolidation of political rule by the bourgeoisie, this development has taken a particular turn: the form content dialectic of artistic structures has increasingly shifted in favor of form. The content of the work of art, its ‘statement’, recedes ever more as compared with its formal aspect, which defines itself as the aesthetic in the narrower sense.”19
And he continues as “it is important to see the unity of the process: means become available as the category ‘content’ withers.”20
18 Ibid, 516.
19 Pg. 19, Peter Bürger; Theory of the avant-garde; University of Minnesota; 1984
20 Ibid, 20.
14
Figure 2: Diagram from Umberto Boccioni, ‘Sillabario Pittorico: Per L’ignoranza Italiana’, Lacerba, I: 16, 15 August 1913, page 179. Photo: Private collection.
1.3. CONTEMPORARY USES OF TWO TERMS
In the case of the avant-garde, like we already said, there are a couple of contemporary uses of the term. In daily use, avant-garde implies extraordinary handling of an aesthetic subject through the material, like in the industrial design of a
15
daily object. In art, the terms like neo-avant-garde*and such, it is an embankment of the term with a new approach, different than the historical process to which it's attributed but still, linked to that historical appearance.
The use of the term futurist is somehow a little bit complex. It can be applied to subjects that include utopianism, engineering, city-planning, and on a wholesome basis, a projection of living towards a future, possibly in a post-capitalist period. Contemporary use of the term futurist differs from the first coiningwith names like Ray Kurzweil (The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, 2008), Bertrand de Jouvenel (The Art of Conjecture, 2008), and Richard Slaughter (The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies, 2008). These names come to announce a strong and individualistic relationship between architecture, engineering, and sociology, somehow remaining linked to the past tense of the term.
Still, it can be seen that there is a close connection between present and past uses when it comes to industrial potentials, unconventional aesthetical representations, and a need to design an environment for human and animal inhabitants.
To underline these differences and to make a contemporary use, the department of future studies has been founded in Berlin, Germany, and Turku, Finland, to make people aware of the distractions between the present uses and the historical movements which have been bannered under this name. Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s book Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility is also a 2017 take on the situation of ‘future’ in contemporary societies with a more philosophical and psychological approach.
Berardi declares at the first chapter of his book After the Future, “the century that trusted the future”:
* For further information check: Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 2003, The MIT Press
16
“As far as we think of the avant-garde as a conscious movement devoted to revolution in society, in communication, and in the relationship between society and communication, Futurism, namely Italian Futurism, can be considered as the avant-garde’s first conscious declaration.”21
This trust soon to be exploited, embraced history critically, and equipped it for a certain agenda. This dead-end of the 20th century which was going to be exploded after the fall of the Berlin Wall, surfaced as a toxic frustration and loss of political ideals.
East Berliner art theoretician and media critic Boris Groys, writing from a more historical and not-so-individual perspective, attempts to define the post-Communist gaze on universalist artistic claims, only to find out that “the universality of the market is a hidden, nonexplicit, nonvisualized universality that is obscured by commodified diversity and difference.”22
He goes on to say, in his article about the contemporary rhetoric culminating in cultural studies faculties, “beyond diversity”:
“This notion of universality was linked to the concept of inner change, of inner rupture, of rejecting the past and embracing the future, to the notion of metanoia—of transition from an old identity to a new one. Today, however, to be universal means to be able to aestheticize one’s identity as it is—without any attempt to change it.”23
The defining power of futurist tendencies throughout the century is still haunting the post-Communist rhetoric about cultural diversity and the so-called progressive democratic institutions, as it can be read between the lines of Groys.
21 Pg. 12, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, After the Future, AK Press, 2011
22 Pg. 151, Boris Groys, in ‘Art Power’, Beyond Diversity: Cultural Studies and Its Post-Communist Other, The MIT Press, 2008, London
23 Ibid.
17
Thus, the contemporary take on the avant-garde is one without any danger, a slice of zero-grease meat. It deducts the powers of deduction of the avant-garde to “the zero-point”, on the other hand, this zero-point of the avant-garde is “also at the degree zero of diversity and difference”24. Groys exclaims “and that is why the postmodern taste is fundamentally an antiradical taste.”25
Futurism, being a modernist and with differing degrees of a holistic attitude towards the condition of men under the industrial society of yesterday and post-industrial society of today, demands an introspective gaze towards its deeds, aims, and means.
24 Ibid, 152.
25 Ibid.
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CHAPTER 2: NOT TO INTERPRET THE WORLD, BUT TO CHANGE IT: FUTURISM AND POLITICS
The political involvement of certain futurists has been a longly disputed issue. Since the main actors of the two movements have been politically active, Marinetti and Russians such as Tatlin, Rodchenko, Mayakovsky, Yesenin, and such, the movement has been seen and evaluated under a genuine political dilemma and involvement. Both movements have sprung at a time when radical changes needed to be outtaken to carry over as a prevailing social force, as a class, and as a national cultural compound. Interestingly, the most influential personalities of the futurist movement in Russia and Italy are poets, and not artists, though many artists have come out of this lively envision too.
Marinetti, the founder of Italian futurism has been politically very active. At the beginning of the 20th century, he became loosely connected to movements such as Suffragettes, which advocated the right to vote for women. He was even present in the protests in Britain.26 With the outbreak of the First World War, Marinetti and his group with artists like Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla rapidly came to be involved with Mussolini’s Fasci d'Azione Rivoluzionaria (1914), which would promote strong anti-clerical and republican ideas, with a program composed of confiscation of war profits, the eight-hour workday, and the right to vote for women.
Although the program of this group was seen as rather progressive at that time, they were strongly irredentist and aggressive in their politics, and in most cases, they were averting the rise of dissent in the ranks of Italy’s newly emerging industrial working class into more nationally ambitious and adventurous goals. 26 Pg. 439, Marta Sironi, Art and Anarchy: Futurists and Suffragettes in London, 1910–1915 in International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, Volume 5, De Gruyter, 2015
19
“The Futurists’ many activities in favor of Italian intervention in the First World War on the side of France and England included organizing prowar political demonstrations and serate, burning the Austrian flag, disrupting the university lectures of antiwar professors while dressed in ‘antineutral suits’, and creating interventionist works of art and poetry.”27
In 1918 Marinetti founded his own Futurist Political Party (Partito Politico Futurista) and ran for the 1919 elections. These kinds of ambition toward marking the political endeavor of arts and introducing politics into artistic vanguardism were definitive for the rescuing powers of heroic propaganda among Futurists. It certainly kept away the eyes of the working-class movement away from socialist and anarchist tendencies, creating almost erotically nuanced violence for the aestheticization of war propaganda.28 As Marinetti and his artistic fellows like Armando Mazza and Aldo Palazzeschi famously asserted in their seratas* “war” was “the world’s only hygiene”.
In 1920, after the First World War, Marinetti resigned from Mussolini’s Fasci di Combattimento, previously named as Fasci d’Azione Rivoluzionaria. These years also embarked a quantitative growth in Futurist agenda, thus busting towards more serious implementations which have been seen as necessary for Italy by Mussolini, Marinetti, and his fellow artists, and throughout almost twenty-five years revealing maybe the most violent political and surely, artistic rhetoric in human history that is still haunting.
27 Pg. 3, Christine Poggi; Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism; Princeton University Press; 2008
28Pg. 19, Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in: Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, from the 1935 essay, New York: Schocken Books, 1969 *A Serata is one of a series of events organized by the futurists. These events combined artistic and nationalist political agendas with the intention of implementing change. [source: https://www.definitions.net/definition/serata]
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2.1. A WAR NEVER-ENDING
On a sunny June day in 1914, archduke Franz Ferdinand and his morganatic wife Sophie were shot dead. With the beginning of the war, almost all the countries on the continent have become filled with outcries for war. Being two distinct fronts as Axis and Allies, Italy at first sided with Axis (Prussia, Austria-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empire), but then aligned with the Allies.
Since Russian Empire has aligned with the Allies, but being an Empire, couldn’t deem to survive as a Tsarist Regime. Vladimir Illich ‘Lenin’ and Bolsheviks who have been in his ranks put an end to longly quarreled political disturbances in Tsarist Russia with October Revolution.
But what was the 'meaning' of the First World War? First of all, it put an end to monarchies that were reigning all over Europe and Asia Minor. With this outcome of defeat, almost 400 hundred years of Ottoman dynasty rule ended in the Balkans and Mesopotamia, and a new, democratic Turkish Republic has been founded in 1922.
Within these war years, everything has been so drastically changed, that new generations have been born into a wholly new, compressed, and although with war, unified world. This can be seen as one reason why Italian Futurists have endowed war propaganda, which they have seen as a legitimate way to create the means and the environment for the future they envisioned. The same projection, but in a different manner can be applied to their Russian counterparts, who saw civil war as a means to deploy their up-and-coming ideas.
The pre-war avant-garde, which was mainly entitled by cubist rebellion towards bourgeois neo-classicism and its cultural heirdom, came to be exhausted and even recuperated during the War and in some cases dissolved into Dada and surrealist movements like in the case of poet Guillaume Apollinaire who came into a close
21
alliance with the surrealist group29, although never to find the same cheer in rebellion again. The war marked the end of 19thcentury European liberalism in thought, free market, and politics, as well as arts and the avant-garde, came to be tied and organized in closed and very selective groups. The end of the war was also a shift in organizational and artistic behavior.
The First World War, being the first war on a global scale, also ended the hope for a ‘permanent peace’ through international solidarity.
2.2. ITALY'S SOCIO-POLITICAL BACKGROUND DURING FIN DE SIÈCLE
After the Garibaldi Renaissance (Unification, 1861) in Italy, the now nationalized and ‘unified’ cultural arena had still enormous economic and social gaps between regions. The inequalities in working conditions among cities had a dire impact on Italy's political situation. The aristocrats and clergy still had an impact on the cultural arena and the newly emerging bourgeois-liberal political scene was accumulating its benefits only in northern cities like Turin, Milan, and Genoa30.
The inconsistent cultural and economic growth within the nation and the development of technology and mass production at a great scale was also a good nestle for the socialist rhetoric at first. But despite all these endowments, Italy was still in a dispute in the industrialization race, aiming to be the "sixth force" in Europe following the United Kingdom, Prussia, Austria-Hungarian Empire, France, and Russia.
29 Pg. 197-210, Willard Bohn, From Surrealism to Surrealism: Apollinaire and Breton, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 36, No. 2, Winter, 1977
30 Pg. 5, Willard Bohn, The Other Futurism – Futurist Activity in Venice, Padua, and Verona; University of Toronto Press, 2004
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Giovanni Giolitti, a prime minister between 1892-1921 who was elected five times consecutively, was mainly responsible for the political deeds during the modernization of Italy. In 1913 male universal suffrage was adopted as a right in the constitution. Italian involvement in the First World War is considered by some to be the Fourth Independence war of Italy, the first one being the military uprising during the 1848 revolutions.
Since being a modern nation cannot be thought of without the process of having colonial gains for the national market, Italian involvement in WWI, at first nominally siding with the Axis, turns into a pact with the British with a surprise package of territorial promises like Inner Carniola, parts of Austria, Dalmatia and not surprisingly, parts of the Ottoman Empire. This made the Italian army also involved in the occupation of Constantinople, which took place between 1918 and 192331, resulting in a retreat of the Italian Army from the Burdur-Isparta region32 in 1922 and the recognition of the new Turkish Republic. During WWI Italy lost approximately 650.000 soldiers, many civilians lost their lives and the country was in breach of bankruptcy33.
These dire economic and social results, although Italy was on the page of the victorious side, led Fascist propaganda to call this a "mutilated victory", no matter how fictitious this branding was, they were to adopt more violent rhetoric and replace the bourgeois-liberal political scene with a more militarily up-and-ready agenda, enforcing the Church and House of Savoy on the other hand.
Tensions caused by inequalities and poverty in a growing, and soon-to-be modest colonial market had their echoes also in the cultural scene. The artistically and culturally motivated inventions in the Parisian avant-garde and the changing meaning
31 Devrim Vardar, İstanbul'un İşgali 1918-1923, Doğu Kitabevi, 2011
32 Pg. 595, Ali Rıza Gönüllü, Burdur during the National Struggle, Türkiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi, 2010
33 https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/war_losses_italy
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of being an artist, which started to be more politically engaged and subjectively motivated had also its impact at the dawn of 20th century Italy. Artists started to banalize the “old museum culture” and geared up to invent new forms. This emancipatory repertoire in artistic forms also had sympathy from socialist politics at first, since the museum culture was a symbol of a dying monarchy. Antonio Gramsci, a renowned Marxist thinker, and revolutionary activist wrote on futurism before and during his prison years. He underlined and partially welcomed their romantic ambitions and criticized their failure to be nationally relevant.34
Thus being in limbo, Italy’s avant-garde mainly aimed a high-stake development and industrialization of the country in a short period. Deployment of aesthetic means was not just to make coverage for this ends, but to also develop a fully integrated scene for Italy's emerging modern artistic landscape. Socialists, who were aiming to achieve this via politically organized industry workers, were not able to cover attacks on the monarchy on its deathbed and were also timid towards its opponents while substantiating cultural hegemony.
2.3. TSARIST RUSSIA'S SOCIO-POLITICAL SITUATION BETWEEN TWO REVOLUTIONS (1905-1917)
The Russian Empire, being in the eastern hemisphere and yet open to the influences of continental Europe, has been a scene for literary debates and heightening class struggles since the French Revolution in 1789 and all throughout the 19th century. Hobsbawm speaks clearly in the case of Tsarist Russia's ache of modernization:
"Yet economically Russia was distinctly part of ‘the west’, inasmuch as her government was clearly engaged in a policy of massive industrialization on the western model. Politically the Tsarist Empire was colonizer rather than colony, and
34 Pg. 365-67, Nicole Gounalis, Antonio Gramsci on Italian Futurism: Politics and the Path to Modernism, Volume 73, 2018 - Issue 4: Cultural Studies, Italian Studies
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culturally the small educated minority within Russia was one of the glories of nineteenth-century western civilization."35
Since its problems concerning the progress in democratic rights (e. g. organization, assembly, and press rights) and civil liberties were more acute, the 1905 Revolution in Russia had a seminal impact as a turning point for emancipatory politics. The tsarist regime had been pushed for granting the rights to the working class and opened a People’s Assembly to hear the delegates of the people. This also paved the way for more freedom of expression and artists have found a space to act upon. As in Hobsbawm's account of this event:
“Even politically moderate opinion (unless it had diplomatic or financial interests to the contrary) looked forward to a Russian revolution, which was generally expected to turn a blot on European civilization into a decent bourgeois–liberal state, and indeed within Russia the 1905 revolution, unlike that of October 1917, was enthusiastically supported by middle classes and intellectuals.”36
With the constitution of 1906, the absolutist constitution of 1836 has been evolved into State Duma alongside with State Assembly, reminding a kind of constitutional monarchy that was specific to Britain, with the House of Lords as the upper legislative body and the House of Commons, being the household for public affairs. The new constitution came with an appraisal of the legal order, renewing the order of the tsar through his ministers because the Duma didn’t have any power to call them back, though “even in tsarist Russia the defeat of the 1905 revolution did not lead to the total abolition of elections and parliament (the Duma).”37
Although this kind of secularized, constitutional monarchy was a progress, it was also a step for assessing the deeds of the royal family, through a national assembly
35 Pg. 28, Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875-1914, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1987
36 Ibid, 120.
37 Ibid, 120.
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for the longly fought imperial war with Britain, which soon turned out to be an arena still available in the aftermath of the Second World War.
The main debates of interest in the cultural scene of Russia before the October Revolution were more or less deliberately tied with the Orient/Occident dichotomy. The literary scene of imperial Russia was a vibrant one throughout the 19th century, which had an open sense of the literary movements and emerging philosophical debates in the West, especially in France and Germany. Russian novelists like Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, being the hallmark and now canonized writers of late 19th century Russia, were influential upon European writers like Friedrich Nietzsche38 through neighboring countries like Austria, which was then the Austria-Hungarian Empire.
Russian-speaking press had its progressive columnists, ideologues, and novelists –mostly in the tradition of realism- and their political debates, which mostly stressed humanitarian and liberal rights, the dilemmas of the old and new morality, the situation of modernization regarding Europe and the newly emerging class conflict with symptoms of social issues such as the illiteracy among working-class and acute poverty of the working masses by writers like Turgeniev, Pushkin, and Gorky.
Writers like Gogol were mocking the tsarist bureaucracy, which was partially purged during the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 as an oppressive and military force of the ‘state apparatus’. Later on, though it came to be spawned under the Stalinist regime with a tragic turn of the Revolution, for the functioning of the state for military and economical purposes.
Turgeniev was representing the conflict of generations, social issues, and political polemics of the mid to late-19th century Russian Empire in his novels. Intellectuals of the Empire had a sense of social responsibility since as literary men they did not only 38 Dostoevsky, André Gide, Telegraph Books, 1981.
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want to impress the western intellectual public with their literary success but also strived to assert new and progressive ideas to the Russian working people, which were mostly proletarian and ill-educated, by using their visibility via social impetus.
The pioneer of Italian Futurism, Marinetti came to Russia to disseminate his views to the Russian public in January 1914. He insulted the Kremlin, Tolstoy, and Russian art since they symbolized the old and haughty culture of the 19th century. Not everybody was enthusiastic about this assault; painter Mikhail Larionov recommended that he should be granted rotten eggs.39 Though this was a bitter occasion between two diverging avant-garde circles, the provocative tone of Marinetti impressed some with its deliberate agitation.
The second visit of F. T. Marinetti, which took place in 1914 held a debate on the origin of the term “futurism”, which Livshits said that it was a coincidence for Russians in return. Marinetti proposed to join forces as a “united futurist front” but the Russian counterparts were not that interested in this proposal, and even held a seminar about the crisis of Western art after Marinetti’s visit. The heat of the artistic debates went so high at some point that Livshits asked “what futurism has anything to do with the invasion of Tripoli”, and continued that Italians invented a new kind of “beauty of speed” and they “spit on any kind of beauty”.40
The tsarist regime, which would be shaken at first in 1905 during the first Russian revolution and then in the February of 1917, would be overthrown once and for all in the November of 1917, would see until that time the rapid change and abundance in art movements. After the Revolution, many Futurists like Vladimir Mayakovski, Vladimir Tatlin, and Kazimir Malevich were to give support to the Bolsheviks to resurrect a new, wholly materialist culture. The first publicly elected monumental
39 Pg. 59, Richard Humphreys, Futurism, Cambridge University Press, 1999 40 Pg. 155-156, Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History, University of California Press, 1968
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sculpture contest in history have been held just after the revolution, to disseminate the ideals of the revolution by V. Tatlin and S. Dymshits-Tolstaia.41
Though Tatlin resigned from the Committee almost one year after the memorandum that announces the new taste of the Soviet Republic and the welcoming tone of the competition for new talents have diminished, there were still dazzling pieces among the sculptures that have been proposed for temporary erection (the list of historical personalities included Marx, Robespierre, Chopin and Herzen). One of them was the cubo-futurist piece by Korolev, which was erected in September 1919.42
Figure 3: Mikhail Bakunin by Korolev, 1919. Source: Unknown.
41 Pg. 70-74, V. Tatlin, S. Dymshits-Tolstaia, and John Bowlt, Memorandum from the Visual Arts Section of the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment to the Soviet of People's Commissars: Project for the Organization of Competitions for Monuments to Distinguished Persons (1918),Vol. 1, No. 2 (Autumn, 1984), The MIT Press.
Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953, Ukranian -Soviet painter and inventor) and S. Dymshits-Tolstaia (1884-1963, Russian painter and graphic designer) were two pioneers of the constructivist movement in Russia.
42 Ibid.
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CHAPTER 3: EVOLUTION OF TWO CURRENTS: A SEQUENTIAL TRACKING
Whilst the war has kept the ways clean for new ideas, the intersections were rather rare than common, between these two artistic movements, which had come to be summed up under the same label. The Italian part of the story was more vigilant towards aristocracy, while the Russian futurists never had that chance to challenge liberal democracy. The group of Marinetti would come so close to even scaring Mussolini for their untimely deeds against the "old culture", that they would be warned against these extremities. On one occasion, Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci even came to defend them, saying they are more brutal against the aristocratic culture than the socialists.43
This tendency in Italian futurism to bridge the national identity crisis with the crisis of aristocratic culture enabled them to link the two currents in the avant-garde movement as Poggioli remarked. First, agonism, which is the axiomatic behavior that assumes there is a strong and inescapable fault line in the culture, which divides it into two different camps. Classicists vs. modernists, enlightenment vs. romanticism, Plato vs. Homer, etc. all these divisions between conflicting cultural camps were orchestrated to destabilize the haughty past and overcome its tendency to destroy itself and probably give a way to a new level of contradiction, which means progress, and this cultural policy was definitive for Italian futurism.
On the other hand, though still relevant for futurism in Italy, Russian futurists were more adapted to the realities of the public, which was fractured by the up-tempo of the class conflict itself, which made them politically antagonistic. This antagonism, divided them not as schools of art but horizontally into socio-politically relevant
43 Pg. 73-75, ed. David Forgacs, The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935 (New York University Press, 2000)
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forces in Kulturkampf between the aristocracy, newly emerging bourgeoise and the working masses.
The fast pace of different movements being newly emerged in Russia between 1910 and 1930, which were organized by relative or close artistic circles, was also a symptom of the lack of a vertical agonism that would enable them to grow muscles, which would be represented by the culture of the declining classes. Since Italian artists among avant-garde circles were very aware and educated about the past, which is the cultural baggage of a dying aristocracy and clergy, were more fierce at their attacks, though being mostly negative to other emerging societal forces.
These weaknesses turned into a showcase of strength through manifestos and other artistic by-practices, determined their relationships within the political sphere of their environment.
3.1. THE FIRST PHASE OF ITALIAN FUTURISM (1909-1919)
The first phase, opening with a blatant attack on the lyricism of poetical vocabulary of the day’s poetry, unleashes itself within three manifestos. The first one, at first published as a preface to Marinetti’s collection of poems in January, then in Gazzetta dell’Emilia in Bologna on the 5th of February in 1909, and later quoted by Le Figaro on the 20th of February in French. The second manifesto, entitled "Let's murder the moonlight", was published the same year. On 27 April 1910, Marinetti penned a manifesto to crack down on the old Venetian Italy, "Against Venice mired in the past".44 This third manifesto was distributed just after an exhibition by Umberto
44 Pg. 8, Willard Bohn, The Other Futurism – Futurist Activity in Venice, Padua, and Verona; University of Toronto Press, 2004
30
Boccioni by Grand Canale, composed of forty-two pieces, is thought to be for the promotion of the exhibition. During the dinner after the exhibition, Marinetti made an exclamation that Venetians are "portraying the city as a prostitute and its inhabitants as pimps of the past."45
This openly discrediting attitude toward the past and its reminisces is a characteristic of Italian Futurism. But, it should not be understood as a simple rejection or a vague impulse for destroying the relics which belong to the past. Futurism discovered that intellectual violence towards the perception of the past, which is the by-product of an old regime, could make us available for a prospect and a possible rejuvenation. The new would-be shining through the shattering of the old. For an artistic movement that endeavors movement and speed, their haste can be understood. They've recognized the modern bliss, the wizardry that modernity gave to artists: speed as an aim in itself, as a testament for miracles.
Not everybody was as enthusiastic as the group about these rigorous attacks on classicism that were still lingering in newly industrializing Italy. Essayist Scipio Slataper, born in Trieste, was a fierce critic of futurist ambitions and openly declared his belittling distaste for the movements’ output:
“The futurists thought that they could produce spiritual awakening through commercial means, and they imagined they could ‘renew Italian poetry with an accumulation of manifestos and ridiculous theatrical productions.’ In reality, according to Slataper, the futurist movement lacked ‘a true spiritual content,’ an ‘intimate sense of vision,’ and authentic ‘interior dram,’ so that all the activity of the
45 Ibid, 10.
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Futurists was nothing more than ‘an empty fiction,’ the expression of a ‘Romantic decadence’ masked by ‘a professed love for modern reality.’”46
Pre-WWI futurism in Italy, mostly motivated by the sentimental relationship with the avant-garde in Parisian artistic circles, tried to convey its message through deliberate agitation and a vague appraisal of the future, that is on the brink. Until the June of 1914, it wasn’t an urgent need and a possibility to announce their ideas to the masses and they were still organizing themselves, not in close contact with fiercely fascist groups, but in terms of exhibitions, artists gatherings, manifestos and local activities. During and just after the War, the strong arousal in nationalistic sentiment made them aware of the possibilities of a fast-paced militaristic organization, before the group was at odds with the public.
3.2. THE YEARS OF FASCISM: SECOND PHASE OF ITALIAN FUTURISM (1920-1944)
In 1920, right after the First World War, as mentioned above Marinetti resigned from Mussolini's Fasci di Combattimento. The organization was founded in 1914 as Fasci d'Azione Rivoluzionaria, which would promote strong anti-clerical and republican ideas, with a program composed of confiscation of war profits, the eight-hour day, and the vote for women. No need to say, one of the reasons that they were founded is to agitate the Socialist Left, and show aggression and violence, including the burning of the headquarters of the newspaper “L’Avanti!”.47
46 Pg. 30-31, Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism and Fascism, Italian and Italian American Studies, 2003
47 https://www.britannica.com/place/Italy/The-Fascist-era#ref319025
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Not just the founder of L’Avanti, Antonio Gramsci* but many others were outraged by this cry for war from the frontiers of the fascist movement, which was going to bring only more rampage to worn-out Italy after WWI. Augusto Monti (1881-1966), was not just a prominent anti-fascist from the years that fascism as a movement newly sprouted, but also the literary mentor of many socialist or communist writers like Cesare Pavese and Leone Ginzburg since their high school years at the Liceo Massimo d’Azeglio in Turin. In the 1920s, he advocated on behalf of Giustizia e Libertà as a member, a group gathered for humanist and anti-fascist ideals and was jailed by the fascist movement and Mussolini for these popular actions. After the war years, he spoke out as a literary personage for peace.
The summary of the ambitions of the fascist movement in Italy can be found in the words of Benito Mussolini: "the difficult question of irredentism was posed and resolved in the ambit of ideals of socialism and liberty which do not, however, exclude the safeguarding of a positive national interest"48. The movement was raising demands in favor of the toiling classes, just to gain popular support for its fascist aims. The movement was irredentist and was claiming soil from Trieste and Dalmatia, through war. In Mussolini's words: "Trieste must be, and will be Italian through war against the Austrians and, if necessary, against the Slavs".49
The strange thing with the Italian Fascist movement and Party was that apart from the Nazi Party’s demands of confiscation and murder, although being inherently anti-bolshevik, it was not formatted with inherently anti-semitic views. In one instance,
* Antonio Gramsci [1891-1937]: Italian Marxist, politician, journalist, linguist and theoretician, also a founding member and once a leader of the Italian Communist Party.
48 Pg. 41, Paul O'Brien, Mussolini in the First World War: The Journalist, The Soldier, The Fascist, 2004
49 Ibid, 42.
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Marinetti stopped a planned attack with a direct protest against Mussolini, which was targeting the Jewish minority.50
Though the particular propaganda Futurists held was pro-Fascist during the pre-WWII years and they had close relationships with the party of Mussolini, they were not able to escape from the elegant selection of the National Socialist Party's 'degenerate art' exhibition. As Merriman&Winter dictionary writes on this occasion:
"When it opened on 19 July 1937 under the auspices of Joseph Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry, the Degenerate Art Exhibit (Entartete Kunstausstellung) marked a major escalation of the campaign the National Socialists had been waging against modern art since the 1920s. In his political tract Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) had condemned the ''Art Bolshevism'' of his age represented in cubism, dadaism, futurism, and the 'hallucinations' of 'insane and degenerate men.' "51
Following the 'degenerate art' exhibition in Germany, Futurism was officially declared decadent in 1937 in Italy.52
The second phase, lasting until the sudden death of Marinetti in 1944, witnessed dozens of exhibitions and theatre plays, which are meticulously attractive but remained unrecognized by the general audience.‘Mirth and hilarity prevailed in the audience. Some numbers were given serious attention, others were greeted with a shower of vegetables. The dances won unanimous applause (especially a Futurist foxtrot, a parody of the latest society dances, and a tango danced to Marinetti’s
50 Pg. 5, Willard Bohn, The Other Futurism – Futurist Activity in Venice, Padua, and Verona; University of Toronto Press, 2004
51 Pg. 803, John Merriman and Jay Winter, Europe since 1914-Encyclopedia of the Age of War and Reconstruction: Volume 2, Child care to futurism, Thomson Gale, 2006
52 Ibid, 1157.
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onomatopoeic battle poems), but a great many sintesi were drowned out by the general hubbub.’53
Being drowned in wartime ecstasy and exaltation turns into frustration, Marinetti evacuated himself to Venetia from the battleground of the Eastern frontier in 1942 and wrote Venezianella e Studentaccio in 1944, which was a piece only to be published posthumously, being a work of redemption dedicated to Venice.
3.3. THE RUSSIAN FUTURISM BETWEEN 1910-1930
As mentioned above the term futurist, in the sense that it is describing a group of artists or literary people, was first seen in the literary magazine Sadok sudei, literally meaning “a trap for judges” and “a hatchery of judges” at the same time, as a literary almanac in 1910, only one year after the futurist manifesto has been published in Le Figaro by F. T. Marinetti54. “[Vasily] Kamensky was one of the editors of Sadok sudei, and the book was prepared in his apartment in St. Petersburg in an atmosphere of youthful exuberance and fun.”55
Although the Russian avant-garde between 1910 and 1930 can not be wholly summarized as “futurist”, most of the time the whole range of groups and movements are dubbed under this banner. From artists ranging from Natalia Goncharova to Mikhail Larionov, from El Lissitzky to Alexander Rodchenko, painters and graphic artists had uniquely expressed the idea of a changing subjectivity, thus, rationality through various mediums.
53 Pg. 363–4, Günter Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909–1944 54 Pg. 8, Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History, University of California Press, 1968
55 Ibid, 9.
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In this period, we can see most of the artists’ attitudes towards their occupations are rapidly changing, from Futurism to Suprematism, from Rayonism to Constructivist forms. This can be taken as proof that there is no singular hegemonic mode of producing art that has lasted long enough in the Russian art scene. Also, it was politically more sheltered and less combatant than Italian Futurism. Bolsheviks, after being in power in 1917, at least at first applied a libertarian attitude towards the avant-garde artists. When they could not submit to it, they tried not to interfere with it.56
Leon Trotsky, being in commanding lines of the revolution with Lenin, tried to apply the doctrine of anarchic autonomism57, mostly under the influence of Kautsky58, when it came to cultural affairs of the newly emerging socialist state although it is vague that with central planning of the state, what kind of autonomy will this be. Lenin, known to be a classicist in taste, had Lunacharsky disregarding most of them, though appointing some important positions e. g. to Tatlin, as I mentioned above, a position in People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment; Mayakovsky, since he contributed to the October Revolution with his poetry and Rodchenko as the Director of the Museum Bureau59.
The most well-known figure among the Russian Futurists, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, was also an intellectual who dissipated Futurist ideas in front of the public. More than in Italy, literature was a more primary part of Russian Futurism. Although the artists in Italy employed more drastic means for carrying under their fascist agenda, for example, showed more interest in bourgeois politics (e. g. they run
56 Jean-Marc Lachaud, Olivier Neveux, “Arts et révolutions. Sur quelques éléments théoriques et pratiques, Actuel Marx 2009/I (no: 45) https://www.cairn.info/revue-actuel-marx-2009-1-page-12.htm#pa1 57 Pg. 202, L. Troçki, Edebiyat ve Devrim, tra. Hüsem Portakal, Köz, 1976 58Karl Kautsky, The Social Revolution. Volume 2, 1902
59 Pg. 28, Alexander Rodchenko: The Simple and the Commonplace, Hugh Adams, Artforum, Summer 1979.
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for the elections with their own party), in Russia, the artists had a brief period of priority and sovereignty among the public.
In 1912, the four literary figures, David Burliuk, Alexander Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and “Victor” Khlebnikov signed a manifesto, "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste", starting with the phrases:
“The past is crowded. The Academy and Pushkin are more incomprehensible
than hieroglyphics.
Throw Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, et al., et al., overboard from the
Ship of Modernity.
He who does not forget his first love will not recognize his last.”60
The manifesto "A Slap…" was a public sensation, recognized by the contemporaries and writers with actual fame, such as Gorky. Though this gratification did not repulse the writers of the manifesto as they claimed, it made the public aware of their tendencies and blast. The author, Mayakovksy, was later dubbed the poet of the Revolution.
While the October Revolution was defining a new public sphere, the everyday life that the working class acted upon turned into an experimental ground for artists, and the common workers also. Constructivists, being energetically aware of the possibilities that were being slotted by the Revolution, went to such extent to abolish the difference between body and mind labor, and made artistry and aesthetics an ordinary extension of everyday work, trying to dethrone the bourgeois-liberal "artist as the expressive individual" myth with their praktiki at the beginning of the 1920s.61
60 Pg. 46, Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History, University of California Press, 1968
61Pg. 8, Maria Gough, The Artist As Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution; University of California Press; 2005
37
Pre-Soviet Russian literature, especially poetry was unique in its conveying plural meanings and innovative forms. Their stress on the word, and the way they see themselves as heirs of Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, made Futurism more linked to the 19th century's European symbolist poetry more than the Russian symbolist movement via literary personas like Alexander Blok62. From Kamensky to Tretyakov, Futurism lived a truly long time with the Russian Imagists and Constructivists. Diverse commentary is made upon them, from diverse positions. For example, not all of the communists in Russia were in great favor of Futurist poetry:
“A rebellion of emotion against the old way of life” (Gorlov), “a child of the rotten bourgeois regime” (Serafimovich), and “a protest by a part of the Bohemian literati against traditional aesthetics” (Malakhov).”63
These accounts belong to writers and people who have accounts of the futurist movement in Russia when it was ripe. Nikolai Petrovich Gorlov wrote “Futurism and Revolution”, Sergey Malakhov worked with and on Russian futurists, and Alexander Serafimovich was highly critical of the movement as a novelist, later after the revolution in 1934 was elected as a member of the governing board of the Soviet Writers’ Union.
Futurists in Russia, seeing that their Italian counterparts affirming and aligned with fascist movements, founded the KomFut (Communists and Futurists) in 191964. Throughout war communism, which was introduced just before the end of WWI to fight the economic and administrative problems of the revolution between June of 1918-1921, the Futurists, aligned with Bolsheviks bent the material culture of the 62 Pg. 383, Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History, University of California Press, 1968
63 Ibid.
64Pg. 6, Maria Gough, The Artist As Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution; University of California Press; 2005
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Soviets in a more constructive manner to eliminate the devastating side-effects of civil war measures morally and culturally and tried to abolish traditional aesthetics and the cult of the artist as a god-gifted individual at the same time.
For these goals, the short-lived organization Proletkult (Proletarskaya kultura) has been founded which Alexander Bogdanov, a pre-eminent Bolshevik novelist and scientific was very influential on, who has been a rival to Lenin just after the failure of the 1905 revolution, a case that made this institution at odds with the state, since the organization was being funded by People’s Commissariat of Education with Anatoly Lunacharsky as head administrator. The main aim of the organization was to form and introduce a truly proletarian culture to mostly agrarian Russia, with almost 84.000 members in 1920, during its peak.65 Platon Kerzhentsev, one of the leaders of the organization describes the aim of Proletkult in 1919 as “the task of the 'Proletkults' is the development of an independent proletarian spiritual culture, including all areas of the human spirit — science, art, and everyday life”.66
After the war communism years, the Russian futurism dissolved into constructivism in spatial problematics and suprematism in surface experiments. The movement of the avant-garde came to a halt on 14 April 1930 with the sudden suicide of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. The attempts to eliminate the avant-garde by the newly emerging Stalinist bureaucracy to impose a state-organized aesthetic doctrine were being planned during the late 1920s and got so hasty in the 1930s, that even the efforts of Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Minister of Education of the Soviet Union, died in 1933 on a trip to Spain, who had appointed the avant-garde in important positions weren't enough.
65 Pg. 55-56, Lewis Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society Beetween Revolutions, 1918-1929, Cambridge University Press, 1992
66 Pg. 80, V. Kerzhentsev, Oktiabr'skii perevorot i diktatura proletariata (The October Overturn and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat). Moscow: 1919; pp. 154-161. Reprinted in William G. Rosenberg (ed.), Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia. Second Edition. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1990
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Leon Trotsky, the sole defendant of the movement in party cadres, because of his libertarian ideas on the production of culture in a socialist society, could not make it to see the aftermath of WWII, assassinated in Mexico by the Spanish Ramon Mercader who turned out to be an NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs in SSCB) agent.
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CHAPTER 4: TECHNOLOGY, LANGUAGE AND SEXUALITY IN FUTURISM
We know well that although it was an old ambition to land on the moon, it was first the Russians who were very clean about planting a new life in the outer space. Mayakovsky with Bogdanov were the two writers and political personas who deeply influenced the sci-fi and modernist culture, which were buried under the earth for so long, that they have devoted themselves to thinking of a land which was imaginary and real at the same time. Once, Mayakovsky wrote, "The skies have been visited both inside and out/and no gods or angels have been found."67 This strong atheist stance also characterized the devotion to scientific knowledge in both futurisms, in Russia moved along with an Enlightenment movement and in Italy with a Romantic, sometimes decadent approach. Bogdanov's utopian-communist novel Red Star was also a very high stake in the year 1908 for the delegation of anup-and-coming society on the planet Mars which was brought roughly outside of the present and predictable times.
This eagerness to be relevant not forthe period, but for the future times have characterized the movement so deeply, that they have come to tie themselves within the realm of possible utopian perspectives, bypassing the condition of politics, which was lagging behind their imagination. This mode of imagination kept them tied with the potentia of the events, rather than the obvious power relations forcing and suppressing the productivity on material grounds.
Combined with an appeal for productivity, the political sphere that was devoted by futurists can be summed up as filled with a desire for a potential Aufhebung, a sublationof the present in the future tense. The present that is thrown back to past
67 “The Flying Proletarian”, a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky.
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from an up-and-coming future, a desire to create a better condition for humankind that it can dispel the old and rotten tendencies for subjugation.
The 19th century expectations that factories can create less work and abundance, transferred to Russian futurism by vigor, soon to be butchered by NEP. New Economic Policy, preparing the Russian working-class for even more work, which is legitimized as “building socialism” and later on, under Stalin as contributing the military force of the ‘motherland’, soon to crush this envisions.
Still, I will try to demonstrate that even under great pressure, these images about the future kept on living and buried only to be sprouted later on.
4.1. TECHNOLOGY
The interest in techne for Italian Futurism, like it is well-known, mainly was a full regard for technological developments and the innovations of the Second Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century. Its adoration for this new technology and its new capabilities was like children adoring a new powerful toy, sincere and ignorant at the same time.
Modernity, always taking up its speed from technological developments, on the other hand, seeks a common language to convey the meaning of this new, fully adaptive era. Its control over the verbal and ecological in today's world is nowhere far away from the catastrophic. But in this epoch, in the world of the beginning of the 20th century, today's fetishistic relation with technology was not the common man's occupation.
Although not as commodified as smart telephones and other technological outcomes of 21th century, which have started to blink after 1980s as a future shock with mass
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over-production, the use and reception of technology was more rational and practical until WWII.
Technology, being disseminated all over the continent and across the Atlantic had become a regularity in modern days. The artists of the avant-garde, occupied with Futurism or not, showed a great tendency towards glorifying and acclaiming critically the achievements of man in this modernity. They were seeing a civilization as powerful as the Greeks and Romans, hence Marinetti who grew up in Egypt wrote the first Manifesto of Futurism in 1909:
‘We believe that this wonderful world has been further enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed. A racing car, its bonnet decked-out with exhaust pipes like serpents with galvanic breath... a roaring motor car, which seems to race on like machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.’
His metaphors, looking like a synthesis between Symbolist appeal for the mystical Ancient and modern appeal towards the industrial, was going to embark on Futurism with a dilemma over the modern situation: a full approval of technological and scientific progress no matter what, almost like an athletic race with the Ancient, a race to surpass the glory of paganic gods through technology.
Günter Berghaus, a renowned futurism scholar’s remarks on Italy's backwardness in the industrialization race throughout Europemake us understand the futurist fetishization of technological development in Italy:
"It is ironic that the peninsula, which in the early modern period had been economically at the forefront of European developments, had fallen far behind in the era of the Industrial Revolution. It was only after Unification (1861) that the industrialization of Italy began to take off, especially in Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, and the Veneto, i.e. those regions which had long been integrated into
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central Europe's economy and were, therefore, more able to adapt to the new realities of the Industrial Age."68
It is interesting to see that the mobilization of artistic means for supporting and gaining public support for speedy industrialization was a major conduct in futurist agenda and the country's lagging in the industrial race at the same time.
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi remarks on this issue as such:
“Not by chance the Futurist movement surfaced in Italy – and in Russia. These two countries shared a common social situation: scant development of industrial production, marginality of the bourgeois class, reliance on the cultural and religious models of the past, attraction of foreign culture (especially French) for the urban intellectuals.”69
When the leitmotif of racing with the glory of the Ancients -which was a reference back in the Renaissance days of Italy- and being backward in the industrialization race combined, the only way to promote development was to see it as matter of honor, glory and to carry on propaganda for the ideal of industrialization as a way to develop national pride.
This masculine relation with the technology and its will to eradicate a monumental culture was by no means catching up with its praxis. The group was, at least until the First World War seen as eccentric liberals. But after the outbreak of the war, they began to develop a concrete audiencefor their ideas. They may be not in great accord with the Fascist regime since avant-garde was generally seen by the political sphere
68 Pg. 2, in ‘Futurism and the Technological Imagination’, Futurism and the Technological Imagination Poised between Machine Cult and Machine Angst, Günter Berghaus, Rodopi, 2009, New York.
69Pg. 14, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, After the Future, AK Press, 2011
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as a supportive but marginal movement, their projects and program greatly influenced the intellectual spheres in Europe and how technology was understood.
On the other hand, Russian futurism, dealing with the problems of modernity, had a whole different undertaking of the issue. The problems of westernization and industrialization were benton a question of social order, which was a new take on the issue. After the first decade of the 20th century, the intellectuals of the tsarist empire were not discussing the prevailing problems in the society in terms of morality but terms of social and economic models.
This shift, mostly debited to the uprising of 1905 and the new developments in western thought and politics, has created a massive shift in the scale of questioning while dealing with the issues of the prevailing economic and political system. A well-put but historically too linear (and maybe way too culturalist) account on the issue is by George M. Young in the chapter of Thought as a Call for Actionin his book about Russian Cosmists, which was an intellectual and scientific movement in Russia, first seen in the late 19th century and then, at the beginning of 1900s. He speaks of this tendency in Russian thought, which have its echoes in Bolshevik and pre-Bolshevik socialist literature with works such as “What is to be done?” by Chernishevsky and Lenin:
“From the early exchange of philosophical letters between Ivan IV (the Terrible) and his renegade former friend and subject Prince Ivan Kurbsky, through Chaadaev's agonized meditations on Russia's mission, through the Slavophile-Westernizer debates on which direction Russia should follow, through Dostoevsky's dialectics on freedom and subjugation, through Tolstoy's search for a truth to live by, and up to Solzhenitsyn's philosophical letters ‘To the Rulers of Russia:' the focus has characteristically been not on the theoretical nature of this or that concept but on the
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actions required by this or that ideal-not the nature of reality but the consequences of any given model of reality”70
Dealing with the problems that have been created by the second industrialization race –i.e. poverty, uneducated masses, the problems of working women, child labor- the problem of practical solutions, hence the methodology, which was built up from the Marxist tradition was no coincidence:
“In the Russian tradition, it is not enough to ask ‘What is true?’; we must go on to ask ‘What must we do about it?’ Thus, long embedded in Russian philosophy, as we have seen in Fedorov's view of science, is a tendency to view every -ology as an opportunity for an -urgy, every discussion of ‘what is’ as an invitation to consider ‘how to accomplish what ought to be.’”71
While claiming this method for thepractical solutionswhich is required by the model hence the accent was on totality, not the individual like in European tradition of thought:
“Another feature of Russian thought relevant to Cosmism is its totalitarian cast, its tendency toward total, universal solutions (…) In Russian thought, as in Russian opera, the dominant sound is more often that of the mighty chorus than of one like Thoreau's solitary, independent American hero ‘marching to a different drummer.’”72
In this sense, Italian and Russian futurists in their undertaking the problems of the second industrialization while dealing with the problems of the macchina have put the solutions differently. But the main issue is that both have seen the industrialization race as an opportunity for renewal, cultural and political.
70 Pg. 24, George M. Young, The Russian Cosmists – The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Federov and His Followers, Oxford University Press, 2012
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid, 25.
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4.2. LANGUAGE
The mainly eccentric thing that made Futurist poetry so distant was not just its industrialized imagery, but also its almost primitive and child-like use of language in poetry. Although Mayakovsky stated that Futurist prose was a little bit underdeveloped in contrast with its poetry73, the Futurist allusion to machinery and its non-narrative use of language had a great impact on science-fiction literature. Its deployment of a fractured language had a great impact all over the literature, from Turkish poetry through Nazim Hikmet Ran, to comic book strips of the 1960s in US with its graphic language.
Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet Ran, educated in USSR between the years 1922-1924 when the tide was low for the Russian avant-gardes and learned all about the new artistic movements dwelling around the world at Eastern Workers’ Communist University in Moscow. Bringing this influence back to his homeland, Turkey, at first he was welcomed enthusiastically as a young talent but then slowly became a topic of discussion and semi-artistic political quarrels because of his political commitments.
Alexis Gritchenko’s work, being exhibited in 2020in Istanbul’s relatively new cultural center and gallery Meşher in 2020, also reveals a Ukranian painter’s interest, who has been born in Russian tsarist empire, in up-and-coming ideas in the newly emerging socialist society and his trip to “the East”. Gritchenko, fled from the civil war (or war communism years, in another sense) and told this story of adventure and his visit to Istanbul between 1919 and 1921 with a taste of exuberance in his diaries, illustrated with lots of watercolors. Turkish artists of the period learned the word futurism from him, although he was always at odds with them when it came to the 73 Pg. 383, Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History, University of California Press, 1968
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reception of the history of oil painting among Turkish artistic circles74. Thus sharing the faith of alienation, just like Hikmet among the Istanbulites.
After WWI, encouraged by a common enmity towards the aristocracy among the intellectuals, futurists in Italy were commonly acknowledged as the true heirs of Italian culture and the real investors in the future of modern man, being the proletarian.
“Again, in Gramsci’s defence of Futurism, which is in reality more of an apology for the desire to build culture anew, and specifically, to use Bogdanov’s terms, a proletarian culture, the myth of the modern epoch plays a significant role in justifying the urgency of the endeavour: ‘They [the Futurists] have grasped sharply that our age, the age of big industry, of the large proletarian city and of intense and tumultuous life, was in need of new forms of art, philosophy, behaviour and language’ (Gramsci 1921: 96).”75
This need for the new, not just by the futurists themselves but by the socialist political circles also, having collided with a common need to crush a dying and politically -and for socialists, also economically- parasitic class made this cultural frontier eligible for the most for some time.
The imagery in the Futurist poetry was often violent, aggressive, and rhetorical most of the time. Its appropriation of themes relating to femininity was most eloquent and sadistic at the same time. The depictions and glorification of war, and its bloodbath could also be seen and a sexualized relation with the machine could also be found. Machine, war, and sexual serenity were their rhetorical means to convey speed and artificial development for its own sake.
74 Alexis Gritchenko, İstanbul’da İki Yıl, 1919-1921, çev. Ali Berktay, YKY, 2020
75 Pg. 153, Maria Elena Versari, in ‘Futurism and the Technological Imagination’, Futurist Machine Art, Constructivism and the Modernity of Mechanization; ed: Günter Berghaus, Rodopi, 2009, New York.
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On the other hand, scholar Matteo d'Ambrosio evaluates the use of language with a hitherto quote from George P. Landow, as a breaking point towards a more complex technology:
"My starting point in this chapter is the theory of convergence put forward by George P. Landow, who sketched out three lines of development in Western civilization: 1. the achievements of the scientific discoveries; 2. the meta-languages of literary theory and criticism; 3. the experimentalism that has characterized the aesthetics of the avant-garde. According to Landow, the Personal Computer is not only a logical but also a rhetorical device that re-establishes and disseminates literary models already utilized by the historical avant-garde, from Futurism onwards. (Landow 1997)"76
Further on, he quotes Kovtun to address the changing habits in the usage of language is an alignment made possible by the last century's avant-garde artists, especially futurists in both countries.
“Yevgeny Kovtun tried to underline the pronounced differences between Words-in-Freedom and the zaum language of Russian Futurists:
Words-in-Freedom are a simplified technique of linguistic communication (the ‘telegraph style’) and do not touch upon the logic and foundations of human thinking. This principle of linguistic economy has anticipated the theory of semiotic systems. In the best of all cases, it may lead to (and it has already led to) the computer (Kovtun 1982: 238).”77
This semiotic inventions such as decentering the poetic language like in Italian futurism or recreating the birth of language artificially with verbal inventions like in Russian futurism has had long-lived effects not just on the culture but also on
76Pg. 264, Matteo d’Ambrosio, in ‘Futurism and the Technological Imagination’, From Words-in-Freedom to Electronic Literature: Futurism and the Neo-Avantgarde; ed: Günter Berghaus, Rodopi, 2009, New York.
77 Ibid, 267.
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technology and the mode that technology is being produced. Futurists have challenged the individual possession of scientific knowledge, though being framed by nationalities.
These examples show the ubiquitous relationship between the art made possible by the technological innovations of the two industrial revolutions, i. e. telegraph, radio, railways, and so on, and the not-so-common effects on technology made possible by the artists themselves. Interchanging influence, and after some point giving away to more developed and complex technologies via artistic experimentation was something possible within the realm of avant-garde imagination.
Figure 4: F.T. Marinetti, free-verse poem from Canta giovinezza.
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“And the poet Escodamè declared: ‘We look forward to seeing our poems being
written across the blue pages of the sky with the smoking tails of aeroplanes’.
(Escodamè 1933) In the manifesto, La radia (The Radio), signed together with Pino
Masnata, Marinetti proclaimed enthusiastically: ‘We already have television at a
resolution of 50,000 dots for every large image on a big screen’ (Marinetti 1933:
411).”78
A unique blend of experimentation and prophecy made possible the leap toward a
technology that made the capitalist societies possible to transmit information with a
speed that no society has witnessed before. Cybernetics and futurist experimentation
with language are so intertwined that we can experience its outcomes in our present,
more and more digitalized century.
4.3. SEXUALITY
“…
and you woman
you will forgive the slippery sap
of my close-cropped beard against your white skin
which I want to clutch
which I want to pinch with my pliers
if sharpening my thought
I didn’t manage to grasp the limit –
I want to see you naked
before an unhinged mirror ...”
78 Pg. 268, Matteo d’Ambrosio, in ‘Futurism and the Technological Imagination’, From Words-in-
Freedom to Electronic Literature: Futurism and the Neo-Avantgarde; ed: Günter Berghaus, Rodopi,
2009, New York.
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The last verses of a poem by Alberto Vianello explore a sadistic and amorous
relationship with a woman, which would give us a hint about the Futurist treatment
of sexuality and the phantasies it deploys. Beginning with the Marinetti’s Mafarka le
futuriste (1909), the machine thought to be the body, or a machine-body was the
nestle for the male empowerment phantasies. Those were invariably male, though
Vianello’s Donna-Macchina, possessing the same superhuman strength, this
Woman-Machine was, at last, a repository for a language, which makes her share the
same origin as the poet.79
“your odour
is of burnt, rotten fish
is of sulphuric acid
your mind is sandpaper on living flesh
like remorse
rock alum –
I am not speaking
I am trembling
you are speed
machine creator of pulverizing
syllables
thus I want you machine
and our children will be
precision devices.”
It is not hard to see that today's proposed new sci-fi envisions the machine and its
empowerment of human nature, its eroticism and human-like being was enveloped
first by the Futurist imagery. They had in mind that industrial imagery, in today's
world, should supersede traditional imagery. Thus, the sublimation of women as
79 Pg. 34, Willard Bohn, The Other Futurism – Futurist Activity in Venice, Padua, and Verona;
University of Toronto Press, 2004
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Virgin of the Rocks and Venus of the Sea turned into an ambivalent relationship with
the machine-like nature of New-Human.
Between 1918 and 1920, F. T. Marinetti had a shifting view against the "second sex",
deliberately caused by the wartime experience of women. Merrimen&Winter's
account on this issue is:
“The political futurism of 1918 through 1920 was anticipated by Marinetti’s jocular
pamphlet, Come si seducono le donne (1917; How to seduce women), which, noting
the transformations that had occurred in women’s lives during the war years, argued
that society was moving in the direction of universal free love and, toward that end,
that divorce should be made easy and women given the right to vote.”80
Occasions as such, marking the turns in futurist rhetoric underlines the differences
and similarities, impactful and passionate relationship between the group and the
fascist movement. The first time women went to vote in Italy was in 1924, and only
in local elections. After that, full suffragette was acknowledged only in 1945, and the
first woman was elected as secretary of the state only in 1951.
4.4. WOMEN OF THE AVANT-GARDE
As a cultural movement sparkled throughout the continent and Slavic-speaking
countries and jumped across the Atlantic in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War
(1936-1939) with Surrealists going to North America, the avant-garde had always a
critical and sometimes troubled relationship with hegemonic gender roles lingering
in the society. Dealing with literature and arts was not the occupation of women not
80 Pg. 1156-57, John Merriman and Jay Winter, Europe since 1914-Encyclopedia of the Age of War
and Reconstruction: Volume 2, Child care to futurism, Thomson Gale, 2006
53
coming from traditional-aristocratic backgrounds, and until the beginning of the 19th
century, not any women at all. The avant-garde movement not just turned another
page, but opened another chapter in the feminist struggle too.
This long-standing revolt against classicism also had its roots in contradicting the
oppressive nature of traditional gender roles and it was liberating not just for women
but also for LGBTI+ people, as it was openly addressed in artworks most of the
time*. Dadaists like Francis Picabia were advocating a non-theistic morality through
a harsh criticism of Christian morality in their works, such as Jesus Christ
Rastaquouére, which embodied the disgust of avant-garde artists against the
traditional values. This attack on Christianism, when it’s read with Nietzsche’s
lamentation on western culture’s loss of transcendental values, being sloganized as
“God is dead, we killed him”, was not just an act of nihilum, but also a call for a new
morality.
Surrealists, applying this provocative language of the dada movement to their agenda
and practice, have found new ways to conquer the classicist paradigm through
scandalous artworks, which also tried to provoke society on topics such as gender,
religion, politics, traditional aesthetics, and so on.
* Of course there were more performative acts, though one of the first accounts of gender issues are
the homo-erotic drawings of playwright, draughtsman and poet Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) dating back
to 1920s.
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Figure 5: L.H.O.O.Q. by Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, 1919, originally published in
1920, source: Unknown. [When its read in French letters, LHOOQ means “she is hot in her
arse”]
Due to close contact the surrealist movement had with Marxism through Communist
Party, mainly after the Bolshevik Revolution, the analysis of class and gender issues
in modern societies was probable.
The fruit ofreadings on hermeneutics and continental philosophy (e. g. Friedrich
Nietzsche and Henri Bergson) also manifested itself in interest and investment in
poetic language. In the case of Surrealism during the protest against the invasion of
France and the Spanish Civil War, the Freudian psychoanalysis turned out to be
functional not only for understanding the psyche of the individual but also for
political theories which would soon burnout and carry the burden of the Holocaust.
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Although in both of the futurist scenes, Italy and Russia, women were not the quite
sum, they were at work. Elena Guro, despite her untimely death, leaves an
unequivocally distant and important voice on the Russian literary scene. As a painter,
she has some remarkable supplies for her literary visions.
Natalia Goncharova was very influential during the 1910s of Russian futurism and
the avant-garde. She was a part of the group called Jack of Diamonds at first and then
after 1912, a more radical avant-garde group called Donkey’s Tail. Donkey's Tail
group's first exhibition was shut down due to blasphemy allegations since the group
was departing from European avant-garde with a blend of profane and religious
themes and partially due to prohibitions for women to paint icons.81
Among the Russian avant-garde scene, other notable women artists are Olga
Rozanova and Maria Siniakova, both contributed to and sparked the movement to
great extent.
In Italian futurist circles, Adriana Bisi Fabbri who deceased very early in 1918 was
an early influence, among many others like Valentine de Saint-Point and Alma
Fidora. Saint-Point, French, wrote the futurist manifesto entitled Manifesto of
Futurist Women in 1912, as a response to F. T. Marinetti’s manifesto, which was
deemed misogynist.82
Rosa Rosà (or with her birth name Edyth von Haynau) was also an influential
Austrian writer and draughtswoman in the first phase of Italian futurism. Although
81 Pg. 98, Camilla Gray, The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863–1922, London: Thames and
Hudson, 1962
82 For a detailed discussion on the subject, pg. 253-272, Lucia Re, Futurism and Feminism, Annali
d'Italianistica Vol. 7, Women's Voices in Italian Literature, 1989
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she was disillusioned with the movement after 1920 with the clearly fascist
alignment of F. T. Marinetti and others, she had a vivid feminist vision of the future
in her novel Una donna con tre anime (A Woman with Three Souls, 1918). She
continued to produce until her death in 1978.
Women artists and writers who were contributing to the Italian futurist magazine
L’Italia futurista between the years of 1916-1918 while the magazine was being
published can be counted as:
“Along with Ginanni, Valeria, Giuliani, Enif Robert, and Rosa Rosà (whose real
name was Edyth von Haynau: she was a native of Vienna), the women who
published in L’Italia futurista were Shara Marini, Magamal (Eva Khün Amendola,
from Lithuania), Mina Della Pergola, Enrica Piubellini, Fanny Dini, Emma
Marpillero, Maria D’Arezzo and Mary Carbonaro.”83
Figure 6: Portrait of Edith von Haynau [a.k.a. Rosa Rosà], between circa 1930 and 1940,
source: Unknown.
83 Pg. 105, Lucia Re, Maria Ginanni vs. F. T. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy.
Annali d’Italianistica, 2009
57
All these women writers and artists, contributing to L’Italia futurista were to adopt a
language that was to envision a future that would enable women to be artistically
more involved and diminish the inequalities between genders in Italy by advocating
democratic rights and universal suffragette in their columns, being a relatively new
phenomenon for Italy.84
Donna Haraway, a contemporary cultural critic and feminist, drew inspiration from
futurists while writing her well-known “A Cyborg Manifesto” which is published in
Socialist Review in 1985, for a critique of appraisal of identical gender roles in
feminist theory, a manifesto that promoted what is called today gender-fluidity.
Avant-garde, in general as a heterogenous and inclusive politics towards the
marginated practices has given a fruitful outcome for lots of artists with different
sexual orientations and racial backgrounds. Being the first artistic movement in
history that has been experimental artistically and as a lifestyle, it was a framework
to adopt and discover a multitude of orientation and romantic relationships, but not
identifying each practice like that is now being done in the US.
84 Pg. 103, Lucia Re, Maria Ginanni vs. F. T. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy.
Annali d’Italianistica, 2009
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CONCLUSION
Russian Futurists endeavored not just a "new way to perceive the world" with the
cliché maxim, but also a way to properly recognize the full potential of this world,
and make this already new world theirs, and all humankind's own. On the other hand
Italians, more occupied with time and history, wanted to embark on a new beginning
in human evolution, through fascist propaganda and agitation.
Either in literature or Fine Arts, futurists in Russia and in Italy challenged the
tradition in a way that no other avant-garde movement did: they have pursued not for
a basic renewal in form and content, but a new, dynamic relationship between these
two. It is exactly in this momentum they have arguably changed the route of arts. In
this thesis, I tried to culminate the idea of the avant-garde being well past, but at the
same time still beneficent and haunting in the way that it precursored many outcomes
of the post-industrial digital society and is an open source for more.
One point of investigation in this thesis was if artistic movements are inherently
fascist or socialist at the core, or they only adapt to the historical, material, and sociopolitical
conditions of their environment, and to what extent. On these lines I tried to
find out an answer to this question, through a comparison between futurist
movements in two different countries within almost the same period.
It seems possible for me to conclude after an inspection through a historical material
analysis that none of the artistic movements of the last century have a definitive
ideological core, but they are politically shaped by environmental and socio-political
milieu, demands and conditions, to galvanize the societal forces for changes that are
on a brink.
Whilst the cultural geography, economic and political relations and the historical
background that futurism has functioned in both of these countries are well59
described, we can come to a more or less sure conclusion that they were not just a
product of their conditions, but also actively involved in depicting and changing it,
though at the same time framed by these conditions itself. For works to come on this
subject, I can recommend focusing more on spatial aspects like architecture of
workspaces and public areas that futurism deployed in Italy and later on in Russia, to
understand the environmental paradigm of the period.
Although that most of the main sources can also be found in English language on this
vast topic, my lack of command in Russian and Italian languages was also an
inability to consume the primary sources to develop the thesis on a more firm basis.
This situation combined with a short time-span to conclude the work, made certain
limitations inevitable. Though I would rather hope this work to be a well-written and
detailed overview on this issue.
In the future of futurism, there is a lack of disposal and divergence as I see it. Future,
after the future shock that has been undergone since the neo-liberalism of the 1980s,
is not something man-made but something had already come, had been brought as a
service. The access to humankind’s prospect of future in the past has been shattered,
thus creating a lack of welcoming attitude in throughout the historical prospect, with
the same gesture to bring back the conventional.
Speed, in its own sense doesn’t have to be something favoured but to be caught, to be
drifted behind it. In this equivocally paradoxical sense of timeline and a lack of
common ground, I think the term futurism is already applied to capitalistic
procedures here and there, while selling hi-tech products that would last only 3 years.
Future, as a vision needs to be built again, or it is just another commodity to sell
more.
Maybe the main shortcoming of futurist movements was not recognizing the
capitalistic motivations that accumulate technological development's utilities and the
60
anti-ecological drives of their motivations, which made them less universal than they
thought themselves to be. But still, although their political devotions were diverse,
their efforts remain unchallenged to make the technological outcomes and
possibilities of the capitalist society more differentiated and comprehensible.
61
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