…throw the baby out with the bath water. Futurism and how to wipe out every vestige of the past. It was a passionate manifesto and a disastrous political counterpart…
With the launching of futurism, as R.W. Flint once observed, Marineti was to become, with Apollinaire and Picasso, one of “the three main fomentors of twentieth-century modernism.” Besides Apollinaire, he made converts of, among others, such towering talents as Vladimir Mayakovsky in Russia and D.H. Lawrence in England of all people. That so martial, machine-oriented, and anti-humanitarian a creed as futurism should have aroused enthusiasm in such quarters seems puzzling- until one recalls how things were in Europe in the years just before World War I.
Although Italy, with her countless reminders of departed glory, was a special case, the weight of the past, of tradition, was only relatively less oppressive in the industrialized countries to the north; established culture lay embalmed in glass cases or was carefully nurtured, in the universities, by a self-perpetuating mandarinate of scholar-curators; and popular taste everywhere tended toward the shallow, the sentimental, the mediocre. Kitsch. The age was also, paradoxically, one of extremely rapid technological change- more rapid than any period since- think Toffler’s “future shock” – with cars, planes,movies, phones, elevators, subways and trams, that transformed the lives of the urban masses; and kindled in the restless young the hope that technology might one day deliver them from the tedium of a social order whose most sacrosanct values were those of the counting house.
So pervasive among young intellectuals and artists was disenchantment with bourgeois institutions, including parliamentary democracy; so intense their yearning for heroic action; so total their ignorance of the realities of modern warfare, that large numbers of them openly wished that war might come. Marinetti’s exaltation of war, “the world’s only hygiene,” evoked,not shudders of horror, but nods of assent.
But it was in Italy that the central drama of futurism was played out, a drama which, often at the bidding of it irrepressible impresario-director, lapsed frequently into low farce. Futurism’s public manner owed much to promotional techniques pioneered by American hucksters: in Venice one Sunday afternoon in July, Marinetti sounded a trumpet blast from the loggia of the Clock Tower and then, with his confederates, flung down several thousand printed copies of a leaflet entitled “Against Past-loving Venice” as he bellowed the text through a megaphone.
Then there were the “futurist evenings” in hired theaters, which often provoked audiences to riot. When not declaiming his own poetry, Marinetti might get painter-composer Luigi Russolo to perform on his noisemakers. Marinetti’s highly onomatopoeic poems likewise bristled with verbal mimicry of, naturally, rifle fire, artillery barrages, and exploding shells. ….( to be continued)…