From
its very beginning, Futurist artists seemed to glorify the violent antagonism that
rose out of public unrest in Italy at the turn of the 20th century.
Goldberg portrays Marinetti and his followers as detractors against “the cult
of tradition and commercialization of art (13),” including the complacency
intrinsic to spectatorship of the arts. (14) Marinetti devised specific
performative methods in subsequent manifestoes to attain these means, including
declamation and the ‘mechanization’ of performers. These markedly defined and
explosive acts became vehicles to much murkier ends, which was no doubt
Marinetti’s intention. Goldberg describes “Marinetti’s dream” to make art into
‘an alcohol, not a balm,’ in which to “[characterize] the rising circles of art
groups who were turning to performance as a means of spreading their radical
art propositions.” (30) In my mind, Italian Futurism had developed into an
open-ended philosophical question that became highly susceptible to political
propagandistic contamination.
Goldberg highlights
Futurist artists’ evolving tendency toward the politically propagandistic in
the second chapter: “The early Revolutionary collaborations saw the gradual
adaptation of Futurist and Constructivist ideas to theatre in the name of
‘production art.’ … Each [artist] suggested possibilities for arriving at
popular entertainment models which would appeal to large and not necessarily
educated audiences. Liberally laced with news of social and political events,
ideology and the new spirit of Communism, they seemed the perfect vehicles for
communicating the new art as much as
the new ideology to a wide public.” (38) Mayakovsky and his colleagues’ pronounced
involvement with ROSTA and agitprop, further leading to the reenactment of ‘The
Storming of the Winter Palace,’ might have helped to pigeonhole the
representation of Futurism’s legacy in Russia as a propagandistic vehicle for the
Communist agenda.
Marinetti’s
originating idyllic conception of “universal dynamism” was an attempt to
disregard the traditional, preconceived discourse of the past. Performance
became an effective way to prompt the call for change and the means of looking
to the future. However, in the process, I believe the Futurists were unwilling
to acknowledge the dangers of their open-ended position as well as the bias
involved in “declaiming” universality of their cause. Even though they had
scorned the influence of the past, they were still the product of it.
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