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| Image from here. |
The Tate link above has links many works of art to view online and it is worth clicking through and exploring a little. Here are two of my very favourite paintings: Bursting Shell by Christopher Nevinson, who was more of a Vorticist (a British cousin of Futurism); and Cyclist by Natalya Goncharova, a Russian Futurist.
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| Bursting Shell |
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| Cyclist |
The Futurists loved manifestos and wrote many of them. They are frequently magnificent. The introduction to Futurist Manifestos quotes the German Expressionist Franz Marc:
I cannot free myself from the strange contradiction that I find their ideas, at least for the most part, brilliant but am in no doubt whatsoever as to the mediocrity of their works.I believe it would also be reasonable to have the opposite opinion entirely! For myself, I love the joy and innovation in the Futurists' works, and their embrace of the future; on the other hand, some of the paintings we saw at the Tate were interesting only as experiments rather than because of what the painters actually achieved. Their manifestos are filled with a wonderful arrogance, energy and restlessness—which sometimes, however, gives rise to lines like this:
We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
—Marinetti, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, 1909
For a truly head-spinning, "Hmm, yes! Argh, no!" experience, I find Valentine de Saint Point's The Manifesto of Futurist Women incomparable. If I've whetted your appetite, here is a master list of Futurist manifestos available on the internet (and here is Readability, which you may find useful because several have been published in black text on a bright red background).
All of this is by way of an introduction to the chapter that convinced me to buy this book, the charming Futurist Manifesto of Men's Clothing, 1913.
We Futurists, in those brief gaps between our great struggles for renewal, have spent the time discussing, as is our wont, very many subjects. For quite some time now we have been convinced that today’s clothes, while they may be somewhat simplified to suit certain modern requirements, are still atrociously passéist.
WE MUST DESTROY ALL PASSÉIST CLOTHES, and everything about them which is tight-fitting, colourless, funereal, decadent, boring and unhygienic. As far as materials are concerned, we must abolish: wishywashy, pretty-pretty, gloomy, and neutral colours, along with patterns composed of lines, checks and spots. In cut and design: the abolition of static lines, all uniformities such as ridiculous turn-ups, vents, etc. Let us finish with the humiliating and hypocritical custom of wearing mourning. Our crowded streets, our theatres and cafés are all imbued with a depressingly funereal tonality, because clothes are made only to reflect the gloomy and dismal moods of today’s passéists.
WE MUST INVENT FUTURIST CLOTHES, hap-hap-hap-hap-happy clothes, daring clothes with brilliant colours and dynamic lines. They must be simple, and above all they must be made to last for a short time only in order to encourage industrial activity and to provide constant and novel enjoyment for our bodies. USE materials with forceful MUSCULAR colours - the reddest of reds, the most purple of purples, the greenest of greens, intense yellows, orange, vermilion — and SKELETON tones of white, grey and black. And we must invent dynamic designs to go with them and express them in equally dynamic shapes: triangles, cones, spirals, ellipses, circles, etc. The cut must incorporate dynamic and asymmetrical lines, with the left-hand sleeve and left side of a jacket in circles and the right in squares. And the same for waistcoats, stockings, topcoats, etc. The consequent merry dazzle produced by our clothes in the noisy streets, which we shall have transformed with our FUTURIST architecture, will mean that everything will begin to sparkle like the glorious prism of a jeweller’s gigantic glass-front, and all around us we shall find acrobatic blocks of colours set out like the following wordshapes:
Coffeecornhou Rosegreebastocap transpomotocar legcutshop blueblackwhitehouses aerocigarend skyroofliftyellight anomoviesphot barbebbenpurp.
Human beings, until now, have dressed (more or less) in black mourning.
We are fighting against:
(a) the timidity and symmetry of colours, colours which are arranged in wishy-washy patterns of idiotic spots and stripes;
(b) all forms of lifeless attire which make man feel tired, depressed, miserable and sad, and which restrict movement producing a triste wanness;
(c) so-called ‘good taste’ and harmony, which weaken the soul and take the spring out of the step.
We want Futurist clothes to be comfortable and practical
Dynamic
Aggressive
Shocking
Energetic
Violent
Flying (i.e. giving the idea of flying, rising and running)
Peppy
Joyful
Illuminating (in order to have light even in the rain)
Phosphorescent
Lit by electric lamps.
Pattern changes should be available by pneumatic dispatch; in this way anyone may change his clothes according to the needs of mood.
Available modifications will include:
Loving
Arrogant
Persuasive
Diplomatic
Unitonal
Multitonal
Shaded
Polychrome
Perfumed.
As a result we shall have the necessary variety of clothes, even if the people of a given city lack the imagination themselves.
The happiness of our Futurist clothes will help to spread the kind of good humour aimed at by my great friend Palazzeschi in his manifesto against sadness.
Shortly to appear: a Futurist manifesto on Women's Clothing.
All of this is by way of an introduction to the chapter that convinced me to buy this book, the charming Futurist Manifesto of Men's Clothing, 1913.
---
Futurist Manifesto of Men's Clothing, 1913
We Futurists, in those brief gaps between our great struggles for renewal, have spent the time discussing, as is our wont, very many subjects. For quite some time now we have been convinced that today’s clothes, while they may be somewhat simplified to suit certain modern requirements, are still atrociously passéist.
WE MUST DESTROY ALL PASSÉIST CLOTHES, and everything about them which is tight-fitting, colourless, funereal, decadent, boring and unhygienic. As far as materials are concerned, we must abolish: wishywashy, pretty-pretty, gloomy, and neutral colours, along with patterns composed of lines, checks and spots. In cut and design: the abolition of static lines, all uniformities such as ridiculous turn-ups, vents, etc. Let us finish with the humiliating and hypocritical custom of wearing mourning. Our crowded streets, our theatres and cafés are all imbued with a depressingly funereal tonality, because clothes are made only to reflect the gloomy and dismal moods of today’s passéists.
WE MUST INVENT FUTURIST CLOTHES, hap-hap-hap-hap-happy clothes, daring clothes with brilliant colours and dynamic lines. They must be simple, and above all they must be made to last for a short time only in order to encourage industrial activity and to provide constant and novel enjoyment for our bodies. USE materials with forceful MUSCULAR colours - the reddest of reds, the most purple of purples, the greenest of greens, intense yellows, orange, vermilion — and SKELETON tones of white, grey and black. And we must invent dynamic designs to go with them and express them in equally dynamic shapes: triangles, cones, spirals, ellipses, circles, etc. The cut must incorporate dynamic and asymmetrical lines, with the left-hand sleeve and left side of a jacket in circles and the right in squares. And the same for waistcoats, stockings, topcoats, etc. The consequent merry dazzle produced by our clothes in the noisy streets, which we shall have transformed with our FUTURIST architecture, will mean that everything will begin to sparkle like the glorious prism of a jeweller’s gigantic glass-front, and all around us we shall find acrobatic blocks of colours set out like the following wordshapes:
Coffeecornhou Rosegreebastocap transpomotocar legcutshop blueblackwhitehouses aerocigarend skyroofliftyellight anomoviesphot barbebbenpurp.
Human beings, until now, have dressed (more or less) in black mourning.
We are fighting against:
(a) the timidity and symmetry of colours, colours which are arranged in wishy-washy patterns of idiotic spots and stripes;
(b) all forms of lifeless attire which make man feel tired, depressed, miserable and sad, and which restrict movement producing a triste wanness;
(c) so-called ‘good taste’ and harmony, which weaken the soul and take the spring out of the step.
We want Futurist clothes to be comfortable and practical
Dynamic
Aggressive
Shocking
Energetic
Violent
Flying (i.e. giving the idea of flying, rising and running)
Peppy
Joyful
Illuminating (in order to have light even in the rain)
Phosphorescent
Lit by electric lamps.
Pattern changes should be available by pneumatic dispatch; in this way anyone may change his clothes according to the needs of mood.
Available modifications will include:
Loving
Arrogant
Persuasive
Diplomatic
Unitonal
Multitonal
Shaded
Polychrome
Perfumed.
As a result we shall have the necessary variety of clothes, even if the people of a given city lack the imagination themselves.
The happiness of our Futurist clothes will help to spread the kind of good humour aimed at by my great friend Palazzeschi in his manifesto against sadness.
Shortly to appear: a Futurist manifesto on Women's Clothing.
Giacomo Bella
Translation: Robert Brain
I think futurists are so strange and fascinating because they were (at least from a modern viewpoint) such a mass of contradictions. They were obsessed with form but inspired by function. They fetishized technology and projected into it a life or an intent it didn't actually have. They wanted chaos and the destruction of old order but simultaneously loved the military with its rules and its connection to the established power structures.
ReplyDeleteAnd while it's been dead as a movement for nearly a century, it seems to prefigure so many other things: whiffs of nazism and objectivism as well as healthier enthusiasms and every kind of avant-garde experiment with speed and smashing things.
There's even Futurist programming, with Alexia Massalin[1] as its prophet. Specifically, Massalin wrote an operating system kernel based on the concept of self-modifying code:
In normal operating systems, if module A wants to be notified when something happens in module B, it adds itself to a list of subscribers to be notified in due time. In Massalin's Synthesis kernel, module A just goes into the code for module B and patches it to add its subroutines. All the modules are hence constantly modifying themselves and each other, for maximum speed and minimum sanity.
1: When I last looked up this story, Massalin was Henry and not Alexia - add another to the list o' interesting trans people. :)