Futurism as 'an alcohol, not a balm'

            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 20^th 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.