(benedetta, "speeding motorboat")
By Crispin Sartwell
Avant-garde art is a battle for the visible future. Modern art movements always tried to show what art would look like next, but also what the world would be like in a transformed tomorrow, in which we would see things differently and hence be ourselves remade.
This is one thing that makes art a political battleground, and nowhere has the combat been more excruciating than with regard to the Futurists, a group of poets, painters, sculptors, and designers active in Italy especially in the 1910s and '20s, currently getting blockbuster treatment at the Guggenheim. For a hundred years, their artistic achievement has been obscured by their politics, because figures such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Giacomo Balla, Luigi Russolo, and Umberto Boccioni were connected to one extent or another with the fascism of Mussolini.
Italian Futurism: Reconstructing the Universe provides an occasion to consider again the relations between apparently distinct dimensions of value - the aesthetic and the political, beauty and justice, painting and war.
Vitruvius designed buildings for Augustus, and wrote fawning tributes to him. Michelangelo worked for the papacy at perhaps its most corrupt moment. Jacques-Louis David painted for Napoleon. Kazimir Malevich made art for a time in the mode approved by Stalin, with the patronage of the Soviet state. Critics and casual appreciators of art are constantly confronted by the question of whether an artist's politics is relevant to the assessment of the work, and, if so, how.
These days, we have little at stake in the political battles of the early Roman Emperors or the Borgia popes, but the charge of fascism still packs a wallop. Indeed, Vladimir Putin is lobbing it at the new government of Ukraine like a concussion grenade, while Hillary Clinton and many others compare Russia's actions in Crimea to Hitler's approach in the lead-up to World War II. And perhaps the fascism of the Futurists - a very complicated matter - still affects assessment of their work.
"There is not a single painting in the Guggenheim exhibition that I find entirely satisfying" Jed Perl writes in the New Republic (February 24). Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker (March 3) asserts that Futurism is "the most neglected canonical movement in modern art - because it is also the most embarrassing."
I think these critics undervalue the aesthetic quality and the historical significance of the work. Futurism yielded some of the first abstract paintings and sculptures in the Western tradition, and some of the most beautiful and challenging; the paintings of Balla and Russolo compare favorably in many respects to the images produced by their contemporaries the Cubists, for example. Where Cubist works are static, muted, contemplative, the Futurists worked with intense colors and extremely dynamic and unstable compositions. And their self-consciousness as a movement, their claim to represent the future, their relentless innovation, and their quasi-political manifestos were imitated by the cohorts that followed, such as the Dadaists, Suprematists, and Surrealists.
In this and other ways, the Futurists are an essence of modernism, and they presented themselves as the champions of every aspect of their own present: the industrial factory, the machine, rapid transport, flight, and, most notoriously, war. As Marinetti famously said in 1909 in the first Futurist manifesto (included in the <website of the Guggenheim show>), "a roaring automobile . . . is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace".
(russolo, "dynamism of a car", 1912)
The Guggenheim show is full of work that has held up extremely well in terms of visual pleasure and aesthetic challenge, and also as absorbing commentary on the emerging modern world. Works such as Balla's hilarious and disturbing "Numbers in Love" (1920-23) and Benedetta's "Speeding Motorboat" (1923-24) are as various and as radical as contemporary work by Matisse or Picasso, and are at least as successful in developing new abstract vocabularies. And appreciating them in a museum does not indoctrinate the average viewer into fascist ideology. Paintings, even good ones, are not capitulation machines. Unlike most dictators, they don't club you over the head or throw you into an internment facility; they invite you to interpret. What mix of skepticism and appreciation you bring to bear, that's up to you. Paintings present a minimal threat profile.
(balla, "numbers in love")
The Futurist project was, putting it mildly, politically problematic, but the politics also had an element of over-the-top comedy that has featured in the avant-garde ever since. It crystallized one response to the radical changes occurring early in the twentieth century by trying in spite of everything to affirm them. The Futurists wanted to learn to love the machine. That's one reason why the images, as in "Speeding Motorboat", are often beautiful, with a sort of beauty not seen in art before. At a moment when artists were still trying to escape to Tahiti or paint water lilies and bowls of fruit, Futurism made people reflect on the aesthetic possibilities of the technological landscape, and hence changed the way people experienced their world.
The boldness of the Futurists' art was matched by the carelessness and of their politics. As Marinetti wrote: "We intend to glorify war - the only hygiene of the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and contempt for woman."
Repulsive, but also a mere hyperbolic provocation. The audience was supposed to be outraged, and, remarkably, it is outraged still. Marinetti's politics is a theatrical gesture, like a lyric by death metal band. He had no coherent political position, just a strategy of transgression and provocation that artists have been employing in one form or another ever since. It is not so far from Marinetti to Damien Hirst's diamond skulls and quartered animals.
But perhaps Marinetti's poetry of steel, speed, and death also shows something about one of the ways Europe slid into the world wars, a sort of moral unseriousness and aestheticism that led some people into real evil. It shows something, too, about the terrible alienation from modernity that the artists tried to erase by affirmation; the work is a measure of what it tried to overcome.
We are no longer so distracted by the politics of the 17th century Spanish court that we cannot appreciate the power of Velázquez's paintings of it. That the political positions have become historical artifacts has enabled us to detect aesthetic qualities that might have been concealed when war was raging. We cannot fail to see the Futurists through the lens of the world wars and the Holocaust. But the totalitarian ideologies of the era have faded into history. We confront new, post-modern totalitarianisms.
Many avant-garde movements were roughly connected with Marxism or "international socialism" (for example, the Mexican muralist tradition of Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros), and modern art ended up being associated primarily with the left, though there were many tendencies throughout. In art criticism, the left was dominant, and its critics tended to delete the Futurists even as their own heroes often emulated them. But though people are still, for propaganda purposes, calling each other fascists or communists, I'm not sure there are any real fascists or communists left except among historical re-enactors, any more than there are any Whigs or Blanquists.
We live in the actual, as opposed to the Futurist, future. The way of thinking about European politics characteristic of the era of the Futurists, from fascism on the right to communism on the left, didn't make it into the time we now inhabit.
Every work of art, every artist, every movement, is a place where aesthetics and politics intersect and interact. But neither dimension of value is reducible to the other. Beautiful injustice, if there is such a thing, isn't any more just than ugly injustice. Perhaps we should detach the Futurists (and for that matter the Mexican muralists) from their political positions to some extent, in order to experience the quality of the things they made and the ways they crystallized their situation.
On the other hand, perhaps the works of Michelangelo or Velázquez have been too de-politicized. We see the Sistine Ceiling as a sort of eternal form of beauty, without always being sufficiently attentive to the ways that politics, among other factors, affected how it looks and what it meant, to the artist, his patrons, and the audience. Some greeted it as the greatest of human achievements. Others reviled it as a symbol of idolatry, oppression, and institutional corruption.
Like a Futurist masterpiece, the Sistine ceiling is a political thing. And like the Sistine ceiling, a Futurist masterpiece is also quite a bit more than that.
(piece i couldn't sell)
