Futurism I
5/12/14 Dr. Susan Solomon
TAKE NOTES ON:
• Avant-garde historicity and aesthetics
• Manifesto form
• Originality, Repetition, Neoprimitivism
• Futurist Language
– Speed, Flight, and Language
– Rationality, Intuition, Zaum
– Materiality of Bodies, Images, and Sounds
Review: “Modernity”
Baudelaire’s modernity is an awareness of
history and change as such – what we might
call ‘historicity’
“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the
contingent; it is one half of art, the other
being the eternal and the immutable.”
Avant-garde
• in French, “front guard”
• in the English language as a military term for
the frontline since the 15th century (Oxford
English Dictionary)
• acquires its application to art movements in
the early 20th century.
• pioneering, innovating, following no one
Impermanent Art
“… expressionism, constructivism, futurism,
cubism, atonality, surrealism—as empty,
banal, and programmatic as they appear—
may remind you of that shock as it was
manifested at the time those artistic
tendencies were emerging”
• Theodor Adorno, “Why is the New Art So Hard
to Understand” 127
Review: “Modernity”
• For Baudelaire, art by definition arrests (‘stops’)
what it represents, even when it represents that
which moves or changes (i.e., ‘the modern’); a fully
modern art is impossible.
• For the avant-garde, art is redefined, a fully modern
art is attempted.
• Art’s subject, form, and informing principles are
unstable, indeterminate, and historically contingent
• There is nothing eternal about avant-garde art.
• For the avant-garde, there is nothing eternal about
traditional art either. It is outdated.
Founding Manifesto of Futurism, 1909
• “We intend to destroy musuems, libraries, academies
of every sort.”
• “we intend to free this nation from its fetid cancer of
professors, archaeologists, tour guides, and
antiquarians”
• “Museums: cemeteries!”
• “we intend to know nothing of it, nothing of the past”
• “Set fires to the shelves of the libraries!” “flood the
musuems” “Seize your pickaxes, axes, and hammer,
and tear down, pitilessly tear down the venerable
cities!”
Slap in the Face of Public Taste, 1912
“Academic art and Pushkin
are harder to
understand than
Egyptian hieroglyphs
Let us throw Pushkin,
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy,
etc., off the steamship
of modernity”
Car Trip, Papa at 80 km
Jacques-Henri Lartigue, 1913
Review: The Manifesto Form
• Historical Intervention
– “The manifesto is the genre of the break: it
announces and produces a rupture in the
historical continuum, guided by a belief in the
value of the future and the impossibility of
returning to the past” (Martin Puchner,
“Aftershocks” 47).
– directed at an historically specific audience in
response to historically specific conditions
Review: The Manifesto Form
• Performative
– It signifies the same thing that it intends to create
– God’s word in Genesis is performative and
immediate
– “a programmatic discourse of power because it aspires
to change reality with words” (Yanoshevsky 264)
– “It is about ... imposing the future by provoking
revolutions. ... The conception of knowledge that is at
stake is that of foundational, even epiphanic
knowledge” (Millot qtd in ibid 265).
Review: The Manifesto Form
• Partisan > Militant
– “Manifestos are violent acts, spectacular acts, a
way to sound your voice, whether the act is
artistic […] or political […]” (ibid 266)
– “aggressive rather than introverted; screaming
rather than reticent” (Puchner xxx 6)
• Political in Origin
– made aesthetic (can it escape its political origin?)
“We intend to glorify war – the only hygiene of
the world – militarism, patriotism, the
destructive gesture of the anarchism,
beautiful ideas worth dying for, and contempt
for women” (“Founding Manifesto”).
• “I want to seize [ideas] brutally and fling them
in the reader’s face” (“Destruction of Syntax”)
Founding Manifesto
• I spun my car as frantically as a dog trying to
bite its own tail, and there, suddenly, were
two bicyclists right in front of me, […]
wobbling like two lines of reasoning, equally
persuasive and yet contradictory. Their stupid
argument was being discussed right in my
path . . . What a bore! Damn! . . . I stopped
short, and to my disgust rolled over into a
ditch, with my wheels in the air. . . .
Christian Baptism
Futurist Baptism
• Oh! Maternal ditch, nearly full of muddy
water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your
bracing slime, which reminded me of the
sacred black breast of my Sudanese nurse. . . .
When I climbed out, a filth and stinking rag,
from underneath the capsized car, I felt my
heart—deliciously—being slashed with the
red-hot iron of joy! [50])
“Whatever it was that
drove him, Marinetti
now set out to rework a
modest traffic accident
into an event of mythic
stature, the birth-scene
of a traumatic yet
emancipating
modernity” (Lawrence
Rainey “Introduction”
Futurism 5).
Futurist Baptism
• “Oh! Maternal ditch, nearly full of muddy
water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your
bracing slime, which reminded me of the
sacred black breast of my Sudanese nurse. . . .
When I climbed out, a filth and stinking rag,
from underneath the capsized car, I felt my
heart—deliciously—being slashed with the
red-hot iron of joy!” (50)
Moses on Mount Sinai: 10
Commandments
The Airplane’s 10+1 Command(ment)s
• Sitting astride the fuel tank of an airplane, my
stomach warmed by the aviator’s head, I felt
the ridiculous inanity of the old syntax
inherited from Homer. A raging need to
liberate words, dragging them out from the
Latin period. Like all imbeciles, this period,
naturally, has a prudent head, a stomach, two
legs, and two flat feet: but it will never have
two wings. Just enough to walk, take a short
run, and come up short, panting! (Technical
Manifesto)
Slap in the Face of Public Taste
“To enlarge the scope of
the poet’s vocabulary
with arbitrary and
derivative words (WordNovelty)”
“To feel an insurmountable hatred for
the language existing
before their time”
The Word as Such, Kruchenykh and
Khlebnikov (1913)
“In these five lines there is
more Russian national
identity than all of the
poetry of Pushkin”:
Dir bul schchyl
ubeshshchur
skum
vy so bu
r l ez
Zaum’
• za-um: beyond mind/ beyond reason
• transrational, transmental language
• “Previously there was: the rational and the
irrational: we provide a third possibility: - the
transrational, - which creatively transforms
and overcomes them” (Kruchenyk, Ozrenie roz
1918)
Zaum’: New> Original> Origins
• “A major feature of the Russian ‘art of the future’
centers upon a strong proclivity toward the
primitive. This was not a retrospective regression
to the past; rather the artist sought the living
generative roots of art. Neo-primitivism, which
cut away the elegant but lifeless surface of
civilized culture, […] emphasis on intuition”
(Stepanian 20).
• the new to the very old, neo-primitive
•
Zaum’
• Zaum is “tracing language back to its
beginnings psychologically, in childhood
babble, and physiologically, in the body’s
rhythms and the organs of articulation”
(Cavagnaugh 291).
• “They were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and
began to speak with other tongues, as the
Spirit gave them utterance" (The Acts of the
Apostles, 2:3-4).
Zaum’
• “Artists until now had proceeded to the word
through thought, and we, we grasp immediacy
through the word”
• “We declare the word to be larger, wider than
meaning”
• (Kruchenykh: New Ways of the Word, 1913).
Студiя (Studia) …
• Velimer Khlebnikov:
“Incantation of/by
Laughter” in
Impressionist’s Studio,
1910.
• Bodies of Language
Pomada, 1913
• Poems by Aleksei
Kruchenykh
• One poem by child E.
Luniev
• Drawings by Mikhail
Larionov
Pomada: 3 poems/ Dir bul schchyl
Marinetti’s Metal Book
Further resources
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Recording of Dir byl Schyl
Recording of Battle of Adrianople by Marinetti
Italian Futurism
Guggenheim Museum’s Exhibit on Italian
Futurism
F. T. Marinetti (1876-1944)
• Born in Alexandria,
studied in Paris
• Notable works: Battle of
Tripoli, Zang Tumb
Tumb
• Joined Mussolini’s party
in 1918
• Promoted Futurism as
Italian State Art
unsuccessfully
David Burliuk (1882-1967)
• Primarily a visual artist
• Jack of Diamonds
Exhibition (1917)
• Latest Artistic Trends
(1927, Leningrad)
• Association of
Revolutionary Masters
of Ukraine
Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930)
• Poet, artist, playwright,
actor
• Politically engaged with
Marxism from at least
1908 (imprisoned
multiple times)
• Futurism, ROCTA
Agitprop, Komfuty, LEF
• His work thrived in early
Soviet Union
Aleksei Kruchenykh (1886-1968)
• Cubo-Futurism, Futurism,
Suprematism, 41°,
Constructivism/ LEF
• Published over 150 books in
lifetime
• Married to Olga Rozanova
• Collaborations with Mikhail
Larionov, Velimir Khlebnikov,
• Victory over the Sun
(libretto;the stage design by
Malevich, music by
Matiushin).
Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922)
• Futurism
• Theorist and poet of
zaum language
• Collected Works, 1928
• http://hlebnikov.com/
Works Cited
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Adorno, Theodor. “Why is the New Art So Hard to Understand?” Trans. Susan Gillespie. in Leppert Ed.
Essays on Music. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2002. 127-134.
Cavanaugh, Clare. “Pseudo-Revolution in Poetic Language.” Slavic Review 52.2 (1993): 283-297.
Puchner, Martin. “The Aftershocks of Blast: Manifestos, Satire, and the Rear-Guard of Modernism.” Bad
Modernisms. Eds. Rebecca Walkowitz 2006. 44-67.
---. Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006.
Rainey, Lawrence. “Introduction.” Futurism. Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, Eds. Futurism: An
Anthology. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2009. 1-39.
Victor Schlovsky. “On Poetry and Trans-Sense Language.” Trans. Gerald Janacek and Peter Mayer. October
34 (1985): 3-24.
Stepanian, Juliette. “Universal War and the Development of Zaum.” The Slavic and East European Journal
29.1 (1985):18-38.
Yanoshevsky, Galia. “Three Decades of Writing on Manifesto: The Making of Genre.” Poetics Today 30.2
(Summer 2009): 257-286.