By: Jonathan Jones / The Guardian (original title: 'We will glorify war – and scorn for women': Marinetti, the futuristic Mussolini sidekick who outdid Elon Musk)
Translation: Telegrafi.com
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was the Elon Musk of the early 20th century, who combined a fascination for technological innovation with an appetite for undemocratic politics. While Musk builds rockets, Marinetti adores the wonderful new inventions – the airplane and the car. The Futurist Manifesto, which he wrote when motion existed only in his mind, begins with an enthusiastic description of a high-speed ride that ends in an accident—an event that he felt was more satisfying than the Nika of Samothrace, the sculpture of famous Greek in the Louvre. Machines, he believed, rendered all previous arts irrelevant. Futurism, according to Marinetti, would exalt the new and rough beauty.
Marinetti's role in shaping the modern world has not been sufficiently appreciated, perhaps because he was so controversial and offensive to democratic values. Futurism is usually appreciated for the artists and architects it inspired, but not so much for its fiery leader, who incited debates, gave speeches and provoked crowds. However, an exhibition opening this month at the Estorick Collection in London focuses on Marinetti's own creative contribution to Futurism. With the title To break the rules [Breaking Lines], the exhibition focuses on what Marinetti called “words in freedom” – the formless, collage-like experimental poetry he invented in his sound and concrete poetry of 1912–13 – Zang Tumb Tuuum.
The exhibition is an opportunity to address this brilliant but troubling figure at a time when the kind of politics he represents may be making a comeback. In photographs, he looks like a cross between a dictator and a dandy, with a military-style moustache, as he poses as an orator or reclines at a café table, reflecting the bohemian he was. Born in Egypt in 1876 to Italian parents; educated in Paris and writing poetry in French. It was his close association with the Parisian avant-garde that enabled him to herald his cultural revolution.
Marinetti would have loved the platform X of Musk and would admire his provocative posts because, above all, he was a great communicator. He managed to publish the full Futurist Manifesto – his announcement of an unknown avant-garde group – on the front page of the paper. Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. This publicity success set the tone for the advertised "futurist evenings" he and his followers staged across Europe, including a performance at the London Coliseum, where they scandalized the Edwardian world and deliberately provoked riots.
But Marinetti surpassed Musk politically. While the founder of Tesla-s supports irresponsible right-wing individuals, Marinetti collaborated with the original: the self-proclaimed fascist, his fellow Milanese, Benito Mussolini – dictator of Italy from 1922 to 1943. In 1915, Marinetti and Mussolini were among the most powerful voices that demanded that neutral Italy enter the First World War, on the "modern" Franco-British side, against the empire rotten Austro-Hungarian. They were arrested together for this incitement, but managed to win the argument.
The deaths of the Futurists in the war that Marinetti so longed for, including the movement's greatest artist, Umberto Boccioni, did not disappoint him at all. After a nationalist act, he and Mussolini were imprisoned together. Futurism became increasingly political, forming its own fighting corps. In 1919, the Futurists were among the anti-liberal forces that united in Milan to found Fascism. Marinetti was one of the first electoral candidates of this movement.
Futurism and fascism were dissociated only because Marinetti was too radical for Mussolini's middle-class supporters. Hating the church's control over Italy, he gave a speech attacking the papacy at the First Fascist Congress. This was not what Mussolini needed as he built his conservative hegemony. Instead, Marinetti became a sage artistic icon of the dictatorship, appointed to the Academy of Italy by Mussolini in 1929. He remained loyal and died among hard-line fascists in Mussolini's Socialist Republic in 1944.
Fascism was not a monolithic structure and there were differences, as well as connections, between Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany and, for example, Admiral Miklós Horthy's "National Conservatives" in Hungary. However, one thing that all fascists in the early 20th century had in common was the glorification of violence that began with Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto.
To understand this remarkable document of the modern world, you have to imagine how things were in 1909. Human flight was still less than a decade old. Titanic it had not yet sunk. As for modern art, it was still in its infancy, with Picasso and Braque working in secret to perfect Cubism.
Marinetti himself invented the artistic manifesto, a rhetorical form that was later appropriated by Surrealism, the Fluxus movement, and others. As an extension, he also created the idea of the artistic movement as a quasi-ideological grouping. Unlike earlier "isms," which usually got their derisive names from critics, Futurism announced itself.
War is at the heart of the new aesthetics announced by his manifesto. "We aim to elevate aggressive action ... the punch and the slap," he says early on, suggesting an avant-garde appetite for comic violence akin to the Dadaists and Surrealists. But this is different: "No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece". Then comes the killer phrase: "We will glorify war - the only hygiene of the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of those who bring freedom, beautiful ideas worth dying for and contempt for woman."
So, not comic slapstick, but actual war, plus militarism, nationalism and misogyny. Marinetti articulated the bloodlust that haunted Europe at the beginning of the 1914th century and that expressed itself widely when crowds of young and enthusiastic men greeted the outbreak of war in XNUMX. How could his fusion of modernist dissonance with fervent nationalism and admiration for the armies, was it so premature?
It is easy to minimize the connection between Futurism and Fascism by focusing on Marinetti's complicated relationship with Mussolini or the small place Futurism occupied in Fascist Italy. But the fact is that Marinetti's manifesto is the first chilling expression of the love of war and the irrational cult of nationalism that fueled fascism. Perhaps fascism is a futuristic work of art.
For the sake of truth, Marinetti did not limit himself to standing in a cafe to glorify the war. His thrilling battle of words, Zang Tumb Tuuum, describes the siege of Adrianople, a battle of 1912-13 during the First Balkan War, which he witnessed with his own eyes. He even managed to convince a London newspaper to publish his reports on the war. Zang Tumb Tuuum it is a messy text that includes borrowed elements from newspaper reports to poster lettering. It's like the textual dissonance practiced by James Joyce or William Burroughs—except, of course, that Marinetti was the first.
Is the poem tragic? Marinetti gives voice to both sides – the Turks and Bulgarians, as well as the Serbs who attacked them – and records the casualties. His poetry shares the human quality of Boccioni's paintings, as State of Mind II: Those who go. Marinetti never separated form from content. His poetry is about war and prophesies war as a modern condition – and he does so accurately.
During World War II, the elder Marinetti took a trip to Italian troops fighting alongside Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front. Did he still see the beauty in that hell? Was this the "hygiene of the world"? Of course, it "cleaned" millions of lives.
Marinetti is one of the greatest modernists. Those boisterous futuristic evenings are often seen as the birth of performance art. The expanded idea of art that he proclaimed, as an action in the world, is the source of so many works today. Jeremy Deller, Marina Abramović and Gilbert & George owe a lot to Marinetti.
But his most brilliant knowledge remains his most terrifying. Marinetti realized that a technologically empowered world does not necessarily mean a more rational world. Today, his words sound frightening with the mixture of technological optimism and political mischief. It tells us something unpleasant about modern progress: it doesn't have to be democratic or liberal. Futurists make great fascists. /Telegraph/
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