#revision - FUTURISM

One of the most aggressively nihilistic of the avant garde movements has to be Futurism. From the violent and assertive language in their manifestos through to their fascination with war, the Futurists put their hopes in a technological future that completely destroyed traditional Italian aesthetics that came before hand. The movement began with F.T Marinetti's 1909 Futurist Manifesto that featured in La Figaro, the first amongst hundreds of manifestos that came to define the movement. In Marinetti's writing, we see the artist being re-born from a ditch into a world where technology overrides tradition, where humans have 'electric hearts' and their nerves 'demand war and despise women'. These few quotes outline the sexist and fascist undertones that the Futurists have come to be defined by, whilst also attempting to 'naturise technology and technologise nature' as Hal Foster has recently posited.

Foster tells that this desire of the Futurists to 'technologise nature' was born out of the aftermath of the wars, which showed the human bodies last of resilience to weaponry. It was time to re-think the human body and to fuse it with technology such as auto mobiles and weapons which have shown to be advanced and powerful. Bruno Munari's And thus we should set about seeking an aeroplane woman from 1939 uses photomontage to create a woman/aeroplane hybrid, showing the extreme lengths that the Futurists went to to achieve a technologised human. Even more poignant is the fact that this is a woman, which Futurists had negative feelings towards - the female gender was intertwined with ideas of nature, and therefore went against the Futurists assertion that technology was the way forward. By creating a woman out of technology, she has become far removed from the stigma of being a female that carries notions of nature.

Ideas of speed and movement were also key to the work of the Futurists, who aimed to capture dynamism or sound in their works. Chronophotography by Anton Bragaglia presented to the Futurists a form of photodynamism, where movement and speed that would usually miss the eye are caught by a camera. In The Smoker from 1911, Bragaglia captures the slow and leisurely movements of a smokers hand moving up and down, the smoke create a haze around the face. The process of the action is caught, and it is more about this movement than the subject matter that made chronophotograpy popular within Fascism. Artists like Giacomo Balla tried to capture this speed and movement on the canvas. In The Car Has Passed from 1913, visceral swoops of white and blue fragment the canvas, symbolic of the fast movement of a car that is already out of frame. The representation of the car is too fast for classic painting to pick up, racing ahead of the traditional medium, and leaving behind a trail of waves.

Movement was also captured through painterly techniques. Umberto Boccioni used divisionism in his 1910 painting The City Rises, which consists of using little strokes or dots of colour to create a dissolved effect, which give the impression of movement. By titling the figures represented at strong angles, the sense of movement is heightened. The City Rises depicts a scene of construction, where workers and horses are seen to be in a flurry of movement, and scaffolding and cranes appear in the background. It can be seen as portraying the industrialisation and technologisation of Italy that the Futurists wanted, yet the use of horses is reminiscent of the old ways of construction.

The Futurists wanted to distance themselves from the past in much stronger ways than any of the other avant gardes. Marinetti calls of the destruction of libraries and museums, 'tombs' of bourgeois consumption in a bid to move forward and create works of art that focus not on Italian classicism but instead on a bright future. Even despite being tied up with fascist links, Marinetti began to distance himself from Mussolini when the dictator started focusing on Classical Italian art.

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