One Hundred Years Of Futurism

One hundred years after the publication of the founding manifesto of Futurism, there is a need to reassess the whole movement from its Italian roots to its international ramifications. In wide-ranging essays based on original research, John London's edited collection examines both the original context and the cultural legacy of Futurism. Areas covered include Futurism and Fascism, the geopolitics of Futurism, translating Futurist texts and Futurism, feminism and the motorcar, meanwhile one section of the volume analyses attempts to perform Futurist ideas on stage. The book has a significant international relevance because of the wide-reaching nature of Futurism and diverse backgrounds of the contributing scholars. Offering unique new scholarship, all the contributions comprise new research on the Futurist movement and its legacy--Publisher.

The artists’ books made in Russia between 1910 and 1915 are like no others. Unique in their fusion of the verbal, visual, and sonic, these books are meant to be read, looked at, and listened to. Painters and poets—including Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Mayakovsky— collaborated to fabricate hand-lithographed books, for which they invented a new language called zaum (a neologism meaning “beyond the mind”), which was distinctive in its emphasis on “sound as such” and its rejection of definite logical meaning. At the heart of this volume are close analyses of two of the most significant and experimental futurist books: Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards) and Vzorval’ (Explodity). In addition, Nancy Perloff examines the profound differences between the Russian avant-garde and Western art movements, including futurism, and she uncovers a wide-ranging legacy in the midcentury global movement of sound and concrete poetry (the Brazilian Noigandres group, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Henri Chopin), contemporary Western conceptual art, and the artist’s book. Sound recordings of zaum poems featured in the book are available at www.getty.edu.

In this remarkable collection of 100 manifestos from the last 100 years, Alex Danchev presents the cacophony of voices of such diverse movements as Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Feminism, Communism, Destructivism, Vorticism, Stridentism, Cannibalism and Stuckism, taking in along the way film, architecture, fashion, and cookery. Artists' manifestos are nothing if not revolutionary. They are outlandish, outrageous, and frequently offensive. They combine wit, wisdom, and world-shaking demands. This collection gathers together an international array of artists of every stripe, including Kandinsky, Mayakovsky, Rodchenko, Le Corbusier, Picabia, Dalí, Oldenburg, Vertov, Baselitz, Kitaj, Murakami, Gilbert and George, together with their allies and collaborators - such figures as Marinetti, Apollinaire, Breton, Trotsky, Guy Debord and Rem Koolhaas. Edited with an Introduction by Alex Danchev

Cubism and futurism were closely related movements that vied with each other in the economy of renown. Perception, dynamism, and the dynamism of perception—these were the issues that passed back and forth between the two. Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect shows how movement became, in the traditional visual arts, a central factor with the advent of the cinema: gone were the days when an artwork strived merely to lift experience out the realm of change and flow. The cinema at this time was understood as an electric art, akin to X-rays, coloured light, and sonic energy. In this book, celebrated filmmaker and author Bruce Elder connects the dynamism that the cinema made an essential feature of the new artwork to the new science of electromagnetism. Cubism is a movement on the cusp of the transition from the Cartesian world of standardized Cartesian coordinates and interchangeable machine parts to a Galvanic world of continuities and flows. In contrast, futurism embraced completely the emerging electromagnetic view of reality. Cubism and Futurism examines the similarity and differences between the two movements’ engagement with the new science of energy and shows that the notion of energy made central to the new artwork by the cinema assumed a spiritual dimension, as the cinema itself came to be seen as a pneumatic machine.

Futurism Studies in its canonical form has followed in the steps of Marinetti's concept of Futurisme mondial, according to which Futurism had its centre in Italy and a large number of satellites around Europe and the rest of the globe. Consequently, authors of textbook histories of Futurism focus their attention on Italy, add a chapter or two on Russia and dedicate next to no attention to developments in other parts of the world. Futurism Studies tends to sees in Marinetti's movement the font and mother of all subsequent avant-gardes and deprecates the non-European variants as mere 'derivatives'. Vol. 7 of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies will focus on one of these regions outside Europe and demonstrate that the heuristic model of centre – periphery is faulty and misleading, as it ignores the originality and inventiveness of art and literature in Latin America. Futurist tendencies in both Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries may have been, in part, 'influenced' by Italian Futurism, but they certainly did no 'derive' from it. The shift towards modernity took place in Latin America more or less in parallel to the economic progress made in the underdeveloped countries of Europe. Italy and Russia have often been described as having originated Futurism because of their backwardness compared to the industrial powerhouses England, Germany and France. According to this narrative, Spain and Portugal occupied a position of semi-periphery. They had channelled dominant cultural discourses from the centre nations into the colonies. However, with the rise of modernity and the emergence of independence movements, cultural discourses in the colonies undertook a major shift. The revolt of the European avant-garde against academic art found much sympathy amongst Latin American artists, as they were engaged in a similar battle against the canonical discourses of colonial rule. One can therefore detect many parallels between the European and Latin American avant-garde movements. This includes the varieties of Futurism, to which Yearbook 2017 will be dedicated. In Europe, the avant-garde had a complex relationship to tradition, especially its 'primitivist' varieties. In Latin America, the avant-garde also sought to uncover and incorporate alternative, i.e. indigenous traditions. The result was a hybrid form of art and literature that showed many parallels to the European avant-garde, but also had other sources of inspiration. Given the large variety of indigenous cultures on the American continent, it was only natural that many heterogeneous mixtures of Futurism emerged there. Yearbook 2017 explores this plurality of Futurisms and the cultural traditions that influenced them. Contributions focus on the intertextual character of Latin American Futurisms, interpret works of literature and fine arts within their local setting, consider modes of production and consumption within each culture as well as the forms of interaction with other Latin American and European centres. 14 essays locate Futurism within the complex network of cultural exchange, unravel the Futurist contribution to the complex interrelations between local and the global cultures in Latin America and reveal the dynamic dialogue as well as the multiple forms of cross-fertilization that existed amongst them.

This volume explores the fraught relationship between Futurism and the Sacred. Like many fin-de-siècle intellectuals, the Futurists were fascinated by various forms of esotericism such as theosophy and spiritualism and saw art as a privileged means to access states of being beyond the surface of the mundane world. At the same time, they viewed with suspicion organized religions as social institutions hindering modernization and ironically used their symbols. In Italy, the theorization of "Futurist Sacred Art" in the 1930s began a new period of dialogue between Futurism and the Catholic Church. The essays in the volume span the history of Futurism from 1909 to 1944 and consider its different configurations across different disciplines and geographical locations, from Polish and Spanish literature to Italian art and American music.

This thirteenth volume of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies explores some of the many facets of Neo-Futurism from the second half of the twentieth century to the present day. It looks both at the revival and the continuation of Futurist aesthetics, whether in explicit or palimpsest form, in a variety of media: literature, visual art, design, music, architecture, theatre and photography. The essays delve into the broad spectrum of artistic research and offer a good dozen case studies that document, with a transnational and interdisciplinary orientation, the manifold forms of Neo-Futurism in various parts of the world. They investigate how historical Futurism's intellectual and artistic perspective was appropriated and developed further in a more or less conscious, faithful and original way, all the while confronting its progenitor's cultural, social and political misconceptions. Interdisciplinary contributions to neo-futurism as a global phenomenon