Italian Futurism and the Machine 0719097096, 9780719097096

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Pizzi

MACHINE

Katia Pizzi is Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London

ITALIAN FUTURISM

AND THE

The machine emerges here as an archaeology of technology in modernity: the time machine of futurismo. Building on this insight, the book makes a highly original contribution both to the study of Italian futurism and modernism more generally. It is essential reading for students and scholars in art history and theory.

AND ITALIAN FUTURISM THE MACHINE

This book offers the first interdisciplinary exploration of the machine in Italian futurism after the First World War. Examining literature, the visual and performing arts, photography, music and film, it uses the lens of machine culture to elucidate the work of a broad set of artists and practitioners, including Giannina Censi, Fortunato Depero, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Bruno Munari and Enrico Prampolini. In doing so, it addresses a range of fascinating questions: what is arte meccanica? What are the underpinnings of the conceptual shift from human to mechanical in performance and the visual arts? How do machines intersect the dynamics of industrial and commercial diasporas across Europe and globally? And how does traditional mechanics gain traction in an age of relativity and indeterminacy?

Cover image: Tullio Crali, Città, 1926

ISBN 978-0-7190-9709-6

9 780719 097096

Katia Pizzi

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

9780719097096_CVR.indd 1

04/04/2019 14:55

Italian futurism and the machine

Italian futurism and the machine Katia Pizzi

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Katia Pizzi 2019 The right of Katia Pizzi to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7190 9709 6 hardback First published 2019 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

This book is dedicated to Ivan and Lauro, to their mastery of machines

Contents List of figures and plates Acknowledgments Abbreviations Note on style and translations

ix xi xii xiii

Introduction: the rape of Europa 1 Futurismo and the machine 1.1 The machine: science and technics 1.2 A philosophy of praxis 1.3 Questions concerning technology 1.4 Pathways to modernity 1.5 Migratory modernism 1.6 Futurismo and the machine 2 Mechanical mach(in)ismo: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti 2.1 Constructing the futurist machine 2.2 Imaginary capital 2.3 The First World War and technology 2.4 The cyborg 2.5 ‘The phosphorescent idiot’ 2.6 Machines and materials 3 Style of steel: Fortunato Depero in ‘dynamoland’ 3.1 The lathe and the loom 3.2 The natural artificial 3.3 Acciaio: prince of metals 3.4 A futurist in New York 3.4a Skyscrapers 4 At the frontier of futurismo 4.1 Frontier futurism: Avgust Cernigoj 4.2 Vinicio Paladini 4.2a Replacing the cross with technology 4.2b The drift towards immaginismo

1 20 20 25 30 34 39 42 48 48 53 55 64 71 82 89 93 97 107 113 121 125 129 132 132 138

Contents

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4.3 Mechanical ballets and the demise of the machine 4.3a Balletto meccanico futurista 4.3b The swan song of the machine 4.4 Music machines Between technodialogism and cosmic idealism 5.1 Arte meccanica 5.1a Arte meccanica and polimaterici 5.1b Mechanical theatre and film 5.2 Cultural operations and logistics 5.3 Fillia: the spiritual as posthuman 5.4 Inroads into aerofuturism From aerodancing technobodies to dysfunctional machines 6.1 Aerofuturismo 6.2 Aeromania, the aviation industry and fascismo 6.3 Aeropoetry and aeropainting 6.3a Aeropoesia 6.3b Aeropittura 6.3c Aeropainting: a woman’s practice? 6.4 Aerodance 6.4a Futurist dance 6.4b Giannina Censi 6.4c Simultanina 6.4d Aerodancing the technological body 6.5 Quantum levities 6.5a Dematerialising bodies in motion: fotodinamica and futurist photography 6.5b Bruno Munari: futurist beginnings 6.5c A machine counterculture: ‘my useless machines’

Conclusion: Ex machina Select bibliography Index of names

141 144 152 161 170 172 172 181 197 203 210 219 219 222 225 225 226 230 232 232 234 237 238 245 245 251 254 258 267 297

List of figures and plates 0.1 Ivo Pannaggi, Il ratto d’Europa (The rape of Europa), 1963–68. Oil on canvas and mixed media. Macerata, Musei Civici di Palazzo Buonaccorsi, Pannaggi Heirs (Fototeca Musei Civici Palazzo Buonaccorsi Macerata). 2.1 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti on a tractor. Undated photograph. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Papers. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 3.1 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, Fortunato Depero (on ottoman), Rome, 1926. Photograph. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Papers. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 3.2 Fortunato Depero, Tornio e telaio (Lathe and loom), 1949. Oil on panel, 84.5x105 cm, with frame 95.5x115x6 cm. Inv. n. 1100. Forlì, Palazzo Romagnoli, Collection Verzocchi. 3.3 Fortunato Depero, Grattacieli e tunnel (Skyscrapers and tunnel), 1930. Guache on cardboard, 68x102 cm. MD 0086-b. Mart, Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, fondo Depero © DACS 2018. 5.1 Enrico Prampolini, Autoritratto simultaneo (Simultaneous self-portrait), c. 1923. Oil on canvas, 100.6x100.6 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection 46.1020. Courtesy of Massimo Prampolini. 5.2 Enrico Prampolini, Cocktail, 1927. B/W photograph. Courtesy of Massimo Prampolini and Hekman Digital Archive, Hekman Library, Calvin College. 6.1 Fot. Santacroce, Milano. Aerodanze 6 (Aerodance 6), 1931. B/W photograph, 175x125 mm. Mart, Archivio del ‘900, fondo Giannina Censi, Cen. 1.73. Courtesy of the Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto. 6.2 Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni), Pastore con somarello (camuffamento d’oggetti) (Shepherd with donkey (camouflage of objects)), 1930. B/W

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90

93

123

174

192

243

List of figures and plates

x

photograph. Courtesy of Massimo Carpi, Futur-ism Associazione Culturale.

249

Plates The plates are located between pages 124 and 125. 1

2

Ivo Pannaggi, Il ratto d’Europa (The rape of Europa), 1963–68. Oil on canvas and mixed media. Macerata, Musei Civici di Palazzo Buonaccorsi, Pannaggi Heirs (Fototeca Musei Civici Palazzo Buonaccorsi Macerata). Enrico Prampolini, Autoritratto simultaneo (Simultaneous self-portrait), c. 1923. Oil on canvas, 100.6x100.6 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection 46.1020. Courtesy of Massimo Prampolini.

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material, and the publisher will be pleased to be informed of any errors and omissions for correction in future editions.

Acknowledgments Several people and institutions enabled and facilitated my research. I am particularly indebted to Ben Thomas, who supported this project all round: thank you Ben for the books, art gallery visits and insights into art history. Thanks are due to the British Academy for awarding me a Small Research Grant to fund library visits in and outside the UK and to the School of Advanced Study, University of London for allowing me to take research leave. Special thanks go to Tito Pannaggi, Massimo Prampolini and Gianluca Riccio for conversations, feedback and books not available in the public domain. Librarians, archivists and curators provided invaluable insider knowledge and handled permissions: Anna Maria Di Stefano and Maria Rita Boni, CRDAV; Alessandro Taddei, Archivio900, La Sapienza University; the staff of the John Paul Getty Research Library; Paola Pettenella, Carlo Prosser, Attilio Begher, Federico Zanoner and Serena Aldi, Mart; Roberta Cremoncini and Chris Adams, Estorick collection; Giuliana Pascucci and Alessandra Sfrappini, Macerata Musei; Anna Franz and June Can, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Cristina Ambrosini, Servizio Cultura e Musei in Forlì; Kim Bush, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Hekman Digital Archive at Calvin College; Massimo Carpi, Futur-ism Associazione Culturale; Colin Homiski, Senate House Library. Other friends and colleagues who supplied pertinent comments and bibliographic suggestions include Günter Berghaus, Colette Castermans, Frances Guerin, Derek Keene, Ravel Kodric, Andreas Kramer, Martin Liebscher, Simona Storchi, Patricia Taborda Silva, Klaus Tragbar, Maria Elena Versari and Shirley Vinall. Any errors or misgivings are, however, entirely my own. Last but not least, special thanks to the staff at Manchester University Press for their patience, support and assistance in bringing this project to completion.

Abbreviations A900 BOD BRBML CRDAV JPGRIL MART TECHE

Archivio900, La Sapienza University (Rome) Bodleian Library, Oxford University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Centro Ricerca e Documentazione Arti Visive, Galleria comunale d’arte moderna e contemporanea (Rome) John Paul Getty Research Institute Library Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (Rovereto) Biblioteca centrale RAI Paolo Giuntella (Rome)

Note on style and translations Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. Unless otherwise stated, emphasis in the main text and notes is in the original.

Introduction: the rape of Europa

1

Introduction: the rape of Europa The machine has become more than a mere adjunct to life. It is really part of human life – perhaps the very soul. (F. Picabia, cit. in ‘French artists spur on American art’, The New York Tribune, 1915)

0.1 Ivo Pannaggi, Il ratto d’Europa (The rape of Europa), 1963–68

The dynamic image in Figure 0.1, projecting energetically forward, is a modern representation of a classical theme: the rape of Europa. The artist is Ivo Pannaggi, the Bauhaus-trained painter, metalworker and architect. This mixed media oil on canvas was completed in the course of five years, drawing on several reworkings, e.g. Centaur (1931) and an etching of 1959. Europa, the beautiful, naked nymph, is cruelly abducted and transported westwards, as is related in the classical myth by Apollodorus. Her rapist, a lusty, tribal Zeus, assaulting his victim in the archaic guise of a bull, undergoes here a modern metamorphosis into a helmet-clad, gogglewearing centaur, riding a powerful, roaring motorcycle – ‘I motorised Zeus’, Pannaggi proudly declared. Mechanical features and details are on display, from the prominent wheels to handlebars and headlights. Thick fumes exhale from a visible exhaust pipe.

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Italian futurism and the machine

Pannaggi’s polemic against neoclassical figurative painting, betrayed by this parody, is framed within a representational space dominated by an arresting motorcycle, magnified in its dazzling mechanical appearance. This is more than a motorcycle. Kidnapping and ensconcing a symbolic Europa, it is modernity itself hurling towards the viewer at infernal speed. This irresistible piece of machinery, glorified in its constructive mechanical beauty, is foregrounded as a means to consigning a recalcitrant, traditional, ‘organic’ and yet irresistible Europa, traditionally typified by her naked body, full breasts and long and flowing mane of hair, to the circuits and corridors of modernity. In the spatial and temporal expansion of Empire and modernity, suggests Arjun Appadurai, the world is re-written, re-encoded as ‘Europe’s tomorrow and Europe’s elsewhere’.1 I take the compellingly modern representational space constructed by Pannaggi here as a point of departure to explore the extent and manners in which postwar Italian futurist artists deployed the machine as a vehicle – quite literally as in this particular case – of modernity. Dynamic engines of social and constructive engagement, pistons and carburettors of displacement, of re-envisioned times and spaces, machines are lodged at the core of the futurist belief in a totalitarian and utilitarian art. Especially after the First World War, machines become the very syntax and architecture of futurist aesthetics and ideology.2 Machines are objects in motion. The field of mechanics studies objects set in motion by the influence of internal or external forces, including serial or automatic. In the modern age, the machine’s mobility is underpinned by a ‘postulate of automatism’, blurring the boundary between animate and inanimate.3 The modern machine is a social construct, locked in a binary with us humans. Machines are motors and engines. Symbolically, and by extension, they signify traffic and circulation, elision of distance: fast means of transport and communication connecting together the furthermost corners of the world, compressing time and space. The futuristi translated the tension between nationalism and internationalism entrenched in the avant-guerre into the postwar via the machine, in tandem with a broader semantics.4 Futurismo was first and foremost a movement of the now, of the here and of the elsewhere. Originally labelled ‘dynamism’ (dinamismo), with reference to ‘dispersion

1 A. Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (London and New York: Verso, 2013), 225. 2 M. Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 228. 3 T. Veblen cit. in M. Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 144. 4 Perloff, Futurist Moment, 207.

Introduction: the rape of Europa

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of dynamic energy from inert matter’5 and the flow of kinetic forces it aimed to tap into, the movement was quickly re-branded ‘futurism’, reoriented towards a measure of time and forward direction on the temporal line. The new appellation implies a rupture in the fabric of present time, a leap forward. In fact, the futurists aimed to compress space and time, reconfiguring them so that ‘heterogeneity and homogeneity, decentralization and centralization occur simultaneously’.6 The futurist machine re-envisions Kantian space and time, pursuing novel and globalised politics and economics. Encompassing the spatial lust for an undivided, pluralist, constructive, expansive modernity, embodying the temporalities embedded in the denomination ‘futurism’, the machine is, quite literally, futurismo’s time machine. The new mobility pursued by futurism both reflected and propagated altered perceptions of time and space. Space in modernity became ‘dynamically, historically significant’, as Andrew Hewitt puts it.7 Proximity generated anxiety. Simultaneity acquired broad cultural signification in its capacity to foster ‘a growing sense of unity among people formerly isolated by distance and lack of communication’.8 If modernity is characterised by ‘totalising temporalities’,9 this politics of time is particularly pertinent to futurism and its overlapping root notions: ‘dynamism’ and ‘simultaneity’. Since 1914, Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916), arguably the most prominent exponent of the original futurist group, had sought to infuse his art with energy and ‘force lines’ (possibly inspired by Michael Faraday’s ‘lines of force’). Boccioni underscored the inevitable evolutionary convergence of human and machine.10 Awareness of the ‘plastic’ status of reality must naturally lead to an appreciation of machines and mechanisms, Boccioni further argued. Drawing on a romantic, anti-classical legacy, Boccioni’s pronouncements on the inextricable bond between dynamism and machines constitute in embryo a manifesto of mechanical intent grafted in futurismo from the word go. From then onwards, mechanical notions including dynamism, simultaneity, speed, velocity, acceleration, vibration, states of matter began to populate futurist discourse, progressively becoming constituent parts of its grammar. Dynamism and simultaneity govern duration and temporality, as well as travel across space. This is 5 E. Braun, ‘Vulgarians at the gate’, in L. Mattioli Rossi (ed.), Boccioni’s Materia: A Futurist Masterpiece and the Avantgarde in Milan and Paris (New York: Guggenheim, 2004), 7. 6 F. Loriggio, ‘Introduction’, in Social Pluralism and Literary History: The Literature of the Italian Emigration (Toronto, New York and Lancaster: Guernica, 1996), 8. 7 A. Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 37. 8 S. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1983), 88. 9 P. Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London and New York: Verso, 1995), x. 10 U. Boccioni, Pittura e scultura futuriste (dinamismo plastico) (Milan: SE, 1997), 21–2: ‘man evolves into machine and machine into man’.

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exemplified in Boccioni’s work. Boccioni’s paintings and sculptures sought a new plasticity predicated on movement, with a view to capturing moving mechanisms, their speed and energy. Boccioni pursued a ‘plastic dynamism’ predicated upon de-hierarchisation and decomposition of the constituent building blocks of space, as in the sketch Bottle Evolving in Space (1911–12), cast into a bronze sculpture in 1913. The body of the bottle sheds its inherent opacity while subject and background become merged in a continuum traversed by force lines and the ghostly traces left by past and future trajectories.11 For Boccioni, in other words, the footprints of past and future coexist dynamically and simultaneously in space. His original focus on the underlying forces holding together matter and their mutual interactions, dynamism and simultaneity constitute an archaeology of machine art. Thrown off course by a skittish mare during a cavalry training exercise in 1916, Boccioni did not live to see the consolidation of a futurist style. His legacy, however, was vivid and widely influential. Dinamismo, in particular, held sway in the early futurist worldview. Drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, conversant with Taylorist tempo and Henry Ford’s mass-produced economy, references to accelerated time punctuated early futurist manifestos, most notably Boccioni’s Manifesto of futurist sculpture (1913). Dynamism was posited as an axiomatic mechanical force engendering agency and mobility, permeating the manners in which reality speaks and becomes known to us, the engine of an art where ‘bodies and objects are no longer opaque, no longer immobile [but where] light penetrates objects, emanates from them or constructs them’.12 Emphasis on dynamism and simultaneity are also a testament to the extent and depth of Bergson’s influence on Italian futurism. A diffusive, pantheist view of speed correlated with duration modulated the early futurist experience. Chiming in with Bergson’s theories, the constant flux of thoughts, sensations and memories which constitutes our experience was perceived as moving backwards and forwards, shifted by power of cognition and analogy, complicating and collapsing time. Simultaneity and its relative mechanical of movement found aesthetic application particularly in the visual arts, where simultaneity translated into a form of visual fragmentation consisting of disembodied, discrete realities reassembled on the canvas. Momentous scientific developments correlate with these theories. Albert Einstein’s special relativity theory (1905) was premised on motion’s relativity to a specific system of reference and multiple observation stations. Simultaneity and dynamism, from this perspective, underpin mechanics at the fundamental level of universal energy.13 Homing in onto matter’s relational properties and interactive 11 See also Kern, Culture of Time and Space, 163–4 and 185. 12 U. Apollonio, ‘Introduction’, in Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 16. 13 See also J. Stubbs, ‘Futurism and surrealism: a two-speed avant-garde’, in G. Berghaus (ed.), International

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strategies in the dynamic, fuzzy environment it inhabits, the futurist cult of dynamism is therefore hardly an exercise in ‘gladiatorial futility’.14 While the cubists focused on spatial representation, the futurists explored the deeper fabric of reality and underpinnings of space-time ‘through research into movement’, relying on the discovery that ‘objects in motion multiply and distort themselves, just as do vibrations, which indeed they are, in passing through space’.15 If there is no such thing as objective simultaneity, as Einstein postulated, the futurists represented motion on the canvas as sequences of simultaneous occurrences. In collapsing space and time, congealing motion into pictorial engineering, pursuing agency through assemblage, construction and modularity, mechanics and the machine are implicated and intertwined with the foundational paradigm of futurismo. Not impermeable to popularisations of electromagnetism, relativity theory, quantum physics and radio transmission, Italian futurism remained nonetheless explicitly conversant with the legacy of positivist culture and the specific mechanical technologies forged within the framework of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. While the scientific debate concerning matter at the sub-atomic level was raging on, between Copenhagen, Germany and the Cambridge Cavendish Laboratory (see section 1.1), the futurists regarded the large and visible machines of production and power, e.g. the bulky, grubby industrial machine, the steam engine and the locomotive, the power station and the airplane, as more compelling markers of ‘mechanics’. The futurists rarely spoke of ‘technology’, always relying on more reassuring terminology, e.g. ‘machine’. The seminal futurist machine was the product of traditional engineering rather than speculative physics. While there is little evidence that the futurists steered public reflection and debate over the newly found cultural role of science and applied technology in society, they aimed, however, to embrace a broader conceptual and representational field that had the machine at its core. Stemming from a technologically progressive, positive nineteenth century, the industrial machine and the factory engaged and enthused the futurists beginning with the official Founding and manifesto of futurism in 1909. William Blake’s ‘dark Satanic Futurism in Arts and Literature (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2000), 319: ‘the machine breaks down the human self and inserts it into the network of analogies that is the world. The machine’s very essence is […] an immediate, spontaneous transfer of energy’. 14 A. Gramsci, cit. in Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (eds and trans), Selection from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2007), 307. 15 S. Giedion, ‘The research into movement: futurism’, in Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 444. Cf. also Marinetti’s Second technical manifesto of futurist painting (1912), cit. in ibid. See also A. Broeckmann, Machine Art in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2016), 18: ‘technology is the abstract form in which people think about technics, and it is the ideological form that makes people think about their world in technical terms’.

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mills’ had little traction in the Italian collective consciousness: machines and the first tangible evidence of industrialisation were largely associated with progress, dynamism and emancipation. Together with swift and uneven, if robust, industrial development, novel interactions between humans and machines began to hold sway over social, political and labour relations, bringing about a nuanced set of expectations. Selfconscious artisanal, commercial and industrial practices, informed and backed up by the industrial machine, increasingly turned traditional modes of production towards serial and standardised practices at the turn of the century. Machine-lust and a technologically determinist view of art in modern society rendered the futuristi uniquely placed to recognise and exploit the aesthetic possibilities of scientific, technological and industrial progress. One of the main drivers was social embedding of machines in Italy via industrial relations, market, labour, consumption and commodity culture. Beginning with systematic applications of industrial military technology in the First World War, through to the Bolshevik revolution, two moments in time when industrial production in the service of the war and the revolutionary cause reached a pinnacle, up to and including the global market crash of 1929, brought to the fore the irresistible social and political agency of machines. Machines marched forcefully into social and political arenas, in and beyond Italy, embodying the promise of utopian technological futures and, on the other hand, prospecting dystopian catastrophes encoded in increasingly complex and intimate human–machine interactions. This book does not focus on ruination and machine archaeology. My aim here is to interrogate as broad as possible a set of artists and their trade with a view to exploring the machine’s enduring signification, empirical as well as symbolic, its politics and economics, with special attention for the 1920s and 1930s. I contend that the machine needs to be placed firmly at the core of the futurists’ strategy of modernity, including their contribution to a Fascist cultural modernity predicated on a mechanical epistemology and a metallic anthropology. Artistic practices examined here pursue a new classicism predicated upon clean, streamlined, engineered forms, functional and automatic, frequently cradled in sleek, metallised, shiny containers, and conversant with human flesh and blood. In many cases artists cherished a political agenda, whether utopian or dystopian, frequently underpinned by, or laced with, Marxist undertones, centred on labour relations within the factory, and, later, as is the case with aerofuturism, enmeshed in the industrial and cultural strategies of the Fascist regime to which it lent reputation, as well as content and material. The relationship between futurism and Fascism is a long-drawn, vexed question. There is little doubt that marginalisation of Italy in debates around modernism has contributed to an ‘oversimplification of the discursive field operating during Fascism

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and the ideologies and practices constituting it’.16 Sandwiched between Walter Benjamin’s ‘aesthetisation of politics’ and Edoardo Sanguineti’s ‘cynical moment’ of the avant-garde, futurismo has been dismissed all too easily as the product of a reactionary involution of politics and mouthpiece of totalitarian propaganda. As a result, ‘because the futurists supported the Fascist government, few critics have studied the second phase at all’.17 The issue, however, has been addressed and by now thrashed out. Beginning from the 1990s, Benjamin’s largely misused equation between aesthetics and Fascist politics was debunked in numerous welcome reappraisals and is now largely regarded as reductive.18 While it is broadly acknowledged that in Italy ‘the avant-garde [was] employed in the shaping of a Fascist “new man” and a new “style of life” throughout the duration of the regime’,19 it is also recognised that ‘postwar futurism maintained an uneasy relationship with the regime, defending its artistic independence while demanding recognition as the founding spirit of Fascism itself’.20 At no point, however, did postwar futurismo seek unreserved association with the regime, unlike its sister school novecento, whose major exponents, Mario Sironi first and foremost, applied themselves to developing an art entirely consistent with the style and political agenda of the Fascist regime.21 Furthermore, the futurist proposal to form a political party predated the earliest manifestations of fascismo (1919). At the end of the First World War, the futurist leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (see Chapter 2) became attuned to contemporary democratic, national and secular discourses. On 30 November 1918 he formally joined the political arena founding a Futurist Political Party, seeking close alliance with the veteran storm trooper corps arditi. Later, on 23 March 1919, Marinetti took part in the foundation of Benito Mussolini’s fasci di combattimento in Milan. In April,

16 R. Pickering-Iazzi, Politics of the Visible: Writing Women, Culture and Fascism (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 21. 17 W. Bohn, The Other Futurism. Futurist Activity in Venice, Padua, and Verona (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 6. See also E. Crispolti, ‘The dynamics of futurism’s historiography’, in V. Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909–44: Reconstructing the Universe (New York: Guggenheim, 2014), 54: ‘In the abruptly anti-Fascist atmosphere that followed World War II […] futurist politics were oversimplified into the undiscriminating cliché of a protracted collusion with Fascism, from the party’s revolutionary beginnings through to its seizure and consolidation of power. This issue stubbornly became the foundational pretext, in Italy and beyond, for a summary, shallow, and dismissive equation of futurism and Fascism.’ 18 A useful outline of this debate is provided by Pickering-Iazzi, Politics of the Visible, 129. 19 E. Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 8. 20 Ibid., 9. 21 Ibid., 114. See also 90–112.

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futuristi and arditi carried out the first major round of Fascist violence, culminating with the thrashing of the premises of the Socialist daily Avanti! By May 1919 Marinetti had rejected Karl Marx’s historical materialism and economic determinism.22 In an article published two months later,23 he clamoured for a ‘technical government’ made up of representatives of the unions, as well as agricultural, industrial and manual workers. He further argued in favour of a ‘Council of the young’, to expedite new legislation held back by the ‘gerontocracy’ ruling the Senate. However, the Fascist’s crushing defeat in the general elections of November 1919 resulted in Mussolini’s marked swing to the right, in a bid to win over the middle classes alarmed by the rising success of Socialism. This decisive right-wing turn of fascismo is the point at which Marinetti and Mussolini parted ways.24 Following the Fiume enterprise,25 and watching with interest the artistic vitality of the Soviet Union, Marinetti was once more attracted by left-wing politics. In the pamphlet ‘Al di là del comunismo’ (‘Beyond Communism’; 15 August 1920) he borrowed Paul Lafargue’s argument whereby machines are a means to free humankind from the oppression of salaried labour.26 The pamphlet may have been expedited through the press in order to predate the radical democratic Constitution of the free State of Fiume, or Charter of Carnaro, co-authored by Gabriele D’Annunzio and the syndicalist Alceste De Ambris, proclaimed on 8 September 1920, which addressed comparable political and aesthetic concerns.27 Marinetti’s pamphlet provides further evidence of his parting company with Mussolini. In incendiary articles published in the official newspaper of the anarchic command of Fiume, La Testa di Ferro (Iron head), both the editor, the futurist Mario Carli, and Marinetti advocated a rapprochement with the left, including anarchist and extreme-left fringes. They also emphasised all along their divergence 22 F. T. Marinetti, ‘Sintesi della concezione marxista’, orig. Roma Futurista, 11 May 1919, in Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. L. De Maria (Milan: Mondadori, 1996), 419–20. 23 F. T. Marinetti, ‘Governo tecnico senza parlamento, senza senato e con un eccitatorio’, orig. L’Ardito, 13 and 20 July 1919, in Teoria e invenzione futurista, 410–17. 24 A. Lyttelton, ‘Futurism, politics, and society’, in Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909–44, 64–5; E. Gentile, ‘Political futurism and the myth of the Italian revolution’, in Berghaus (ed.), International Futurism in Arts and Literature, 10. 25 On 12 September 1919, after the Wilson Line split Istria into Italian and Yugoslavian sovereignty, a group of demobilised soldiers, led by the charismatic poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, marched on the Istrian port city of Fiume and settled there, establishing a short-lived Italian Regency of Carnaro. The Fiume experience became a laboratory of radical constitutional politics, corporatist State governance, as well as futurist, anarchist and left-wing politics, unconventional cultures and eccentric lifestyles. 26 See P. Lafargue’s influential Le droit à la paresse (1880; trans. 1883 as The Right to Be Lazy). 27 C. Salaris, Alla festa della rivoluzione: artisti e libertari con D’Annunzio a Fiume (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), 84. Salaris concedes that echoes of Marinetti’s pamphlet may be affecting D’Annunzio’s revision of the Carta, suggesting a common filiation between the two texts.

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from Fascism.28 Mussolini’s Party had swiftly liquidated the Fiume cause, sanctioning the violent repression that followed around Christmas 1920, known as ‘Bloody Christmas’ (Natale di sangue), when the Italian military stormed Fiume. By the end of the Fiume fiasco, futurism and Fascism had parted ways. Following from these traumatic vicissitudes, postwar futurism welcomed in its midst a constellation of specific and independent identities. The movement acquired stature and notoriety ahead of Mussolini’s March on Rome (28 October 1922) and the authoritarian turn taken by the regime in 1924. Marinetti did seek Mussolini’s patronage in a manifesto of April 1923, working to fill in a void in cultural policy redressed only after 1926. The schism, however, was made clear in 1924, when Marinetti advocated a dynamic role in the cultural sphere, unbound from the ‘imposing dictating constraining forbidding’ yoke of Fascist politics.29 Once it overcame the crisis and secured a monopoly on political power in 1926, fascismo applied itself to devise and strengthen a coherent cultural policy, resorting to ‘aesthetic hyper-productivity’ in order to redress its unstable, inconsistent ideological baggage’.30 The Fascists aimed to bring independent cultural institutions under their control and forge ahead with a Fascist cultural revolution. They engaged Emilio Gentile to draft a Manifesto of Fascist intellectuals and the futurists undersigned it, though it was distinctively not futurist in content and form. Beginning in 1926, Fascism focused on instituting a corporate State. In the same year, Marinetti was classified as an ‘anti-Fascist’ in police records. In 1927 Fascism turned away from its urban premises, embracing a distinctively non-futurist, ruralist ideology propagated by the image of the Duce as a bare-chested harvester. Nostalgic attachments to the rural and agricultural legacy of Italy came to the fore: a push towards ‘ultravillage’ (‘strapaese’) attempted to resist the tidal force of ‘ultracity’ (‘stracittà’), its evil twin. An aggressive pro-natalist campaign in national expansionist function followed suit (see section 6.4d). The merger of the Federation of Intellectual Unions with the unions of the free professions in 1928 ushered in a powerful tool of State control on cultural activities including a register of professional cultural operators.31 Artists continued to enjoy freedom of debate within these constraints and Mussolini declared there would be no official State art.32 Giuseppe Bottai, who led the Ministry of Corporations between 1929 and 1932, was one of the voices 28 Cf., for example, M. Carli, ‘Polemiche di anarchismo’, La Testa di Ferro, I:30 (30 October 1920), cit. in Salaris, Alla festa della rivoluzione, 229, fn. 63. 29 Marinetti, ‘Marinetti e il futurismo’, in Teoria e invenzione futurista, 616: ‘che esige impone limita vieta’. 30 J. T. Schnapp, 18BL: Mussolini e l’opera d’arte di massa (Milan: Garzanti, 1996), 14. 31 Lyttelton, ‘Futurism, politics and society’, 68–9. 32 P. Fossati, ‘Pittura e scultura fra le due guerre’, in Storia dell’arte italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), III, 230.

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raised to openly oppose the notion of a single Fascist style. Bottai actively encouraged artistic innovation, the latter emerging as a winner in these culture wars, and, in 1940, created a new Office for Contemporary Art within the Ministry of Education, which he held at that time. The novecento group found favour, while the futurists competed for State patronage more fiercely after the Fascist State brought under public ownership swathes of private enterprises under the stranglehold of the on-going economic crisis. Fragmentation was enhanced, if not directly encouraged, by a State-driven articulation of exhibition policies. Emily Braun puts it eloquently: a series of administrative controls […] aimed to discourage opposition with an insidious combination of coercion and tolerance. As a result, the Fascist period was marked by pluralism in the visual arts, which permitted the avantgarde and the retrograde, abstraction and neoclassicism, to be deftly absorbed by the State’s eclectic patronage. […] Intentionally or not, Mussolini’s hands-off policy had the effect of dividing and conquering the intellectual community. […] the strategy of allowing a margin of creative freedom while rewarding capitulation led the majority of artists to coexist with, if not openly support, the regime.33

Marinetti was anointed Royal Academician in 1929. Still at the helm of futurismo and unrepentantly anti-clerical, he rejected the Lateran Pacts of 1929 that sanctioned the newly forged alliance between the Catholic Church and the State, preparing an opportunistic response in the 1931 Manifesto of futurist sacred art, penned with Fillia. The international crisis of 1929 fuelled anti-modern debates as applied technology and machines began to be regarded in less favourable light. While Fascism increasingly found identity and legitimacy in a particular style borne out of a set of myths, rhetoric, symbols and ideologies, an endorsement of late capitalism within a totalitarian framework, as convincingly discussed by Ernst Cassirer,34 its aesthetics became more carefully crafted and integrated in sophisticated and identifiable manners. The Venice Biennale, showcasing Italian art on the international scene, was revamped in 1930. A comparably large-scale operation, the Quadriennale, was established in Rome in 1931. The rise of National Socialism in Germany in 1933 was watched with interest by Mussolini and his Press and Propaganda office, later to be re-entitled Ministry of Popular Culture (Minculpop; 1937). Although the futurists played a role in Fascism’s attempt to prove its superiority to National Socialism, Marinetti actively protested against Hitler’s degenerate art campaign of 1937. Fascism was on a trajectory that

33 Braun, Mario Sironi, 1–2. For Marinetti’s relationship with fascismo, see also E. Ialongo, ‘Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: the futurist as Fascist, 1929–37’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 18:4 (2013), 393–418. See also G. Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista europeo (Rome: Carocci, 2013), 259. 34 E. Cassirer, ‘The myth of the State’, Fortune, 29:6 (1944), 165.

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would bring it closer to its German counterpart, sanctioning this convergence at a later stage with a Pact of Steel (May 1939). A formal cultural agreement between the two regimes dated November 1938 persuaded fascismo to repudiate modernism, anti-traditional art and internationalism in favour of a homegrown ‘autarchy’. In the same year, Mussolini issued a set of anti-Semitic laws. A new periodical entitled La Difesa della Razza (Racial manifesto) led a campaign against modern ‘Judaised’ art but avoided direct references to futurism. Marinetti opposed the anti-Semitic campaign with soirées and debates in the name of creativity and intellectual freedom. However, ‘this would be the final occasion on which the futurists exercised a real and positive influence on cultural policy’.35 The futurist leadership seemed ultimately uncommitted and disenfranchised,36 despite its further aesthetic contribution to Fascist ideology via the aerofuturist rubric (see Chapter 6).37 Cast at the margins in an intensely volatile environment, the futurists made ‘uneasy and contradictory Fascists, swaying between consensus and anti-conformism’.38 They obtained little benefit from their alliance with Fascism: the regime ultimately co-opted them in order to emasculate them.39 Poised uncomfortably between a traditional culture increasingly growing apart from the regime, and Fascist support with exploitative intent, futurismo ultimately became antagonised by both.40 Fascism borrowed extensively from futurist psychology and behaviours, e.g. the energetic, anti-conformist, anarchic and belligerent ethos of futurismo, the dynamic lifestyle and sporting practices.41 It borrowed futurist politics, in part at least, and with notable exceptions (e.g. futurist anti-monarchism and anti-clericalism). Aesthetic and cultural borrowings coagulate into the convergence between technology and modernity. The futurist mechanical agenda contributed to shaping the Fascist project of cultural modernity. In particular, Marinetti’s emphasis on the performing arts, which he considered a priority, fed into the cultural policies of the regime in the 1920s and 1930s when theatre began to encompass national culture to a greater degree than ever before in Italian history. Futurist mechanical theatre emerged in the wake of Fascist initiatives such as the Carri di Tespi, e.g. modular and mechanical theatres travelling across Italy, disseminating approved values. Exploiting Taylorist and scientific 35 Lyttelton, ‘Futurism, politics, and society’, 74. 36 See articles published in 1935 in La Forza (nn. 3–4 and 5–6), cit. in M. Härmänmaa, Un patriota che sfidò la decadenza: F. T. Marinetti e l’idea dell’uomo nuovo fascista, 1929–1944 (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2000), 126. 37 M. S. Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 52. See also Härmänmaa, Un patriota che sfidò la decadenza, 129. 38 Gentile, ‘Political futurism and the myth of the Italian revolution’, 11. 39 M. Verdone, Il futurismo (Rome: Newton & Compton, 2003), 105. 40 Ibid., 106–7. 41 Ibid., 104.

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methods, drawing on the Soviet coupling of collectivisation and mechanisation, the Carri upheld a mechanical–human totality easily construed as a national and aesthetic totality and, as such, easily subsumed under a Fascist agenda, as is productively explored by J. T. Schnapp.42 The very same mechanical agenda, on the other hand, drove the international vocation and outward spread of postwar futurismo in the face of the increasingly centripetal trajectory of the regime. Numerous futurists in the postwar cultivated ‘disillusionment with the Fascist project of modernisation, or observations of alternative developments in the Soviet Union, or the discovery of American models of modernity in economics and culture’.43 They embraced the technological angle of real Socialism, from chain of capital and coercive power structure through to redemptive instrument of social and class emancipation (see Chapter 4). In postrevolutionary Russia, futurism became, in Sergei Tretyakov’s words, ‘the left front of art’.44 Industrial art and production were regarded as the mainstays of contemporary Russian futurism. The technological underpinnings of the Bolshevik revolution were largely admired by the Italian futurists, including Marinetti. The reductive binary that construes ‘techno-Communism’ in opposition to ‘spiritual futurism-Fascism’ evaporates when considered in the light of an international machine politics (see also section 1.2). Based on the industrial machine, technology was celebrated as a productive force, and also as ‘model of organisation’,45 a figure of functionality, binding and constraint. While others venerated the machine as a fetish, investing it with sexual or mystical signification, the futurist machine needs to be approached as a plural, composite and diverse phenomenon, a system underpinning social, political and economic values, encompassing bio-politics, gender politics, perception and cognition through new and old media. Mediated through its futurist champions, the machine is the portal to a novel culture. My monograph focuses in particular on the lesser-known ‘phases’ purported to comprise the futurist experience, e.g. the mechanical (early 1920s) and the aerial (1930s–1940s).46 More recent work has reappraised this chronological span, redress42 Schnapp, 18BL, 31–5. 18BL was an itinerant truck conveying the new mechanical aesthetics via avantgarde theatre. Resonant of Soviet internationalism, the project also attracted criticism from the ranks of Fascist intelligentsia; Schnapp, 18BL, 124–5. Schnapp’s volume provides a useful exploration of the manners in which futurist aesthetics and political commitment to the machine as agent of emancipation and modernisation was aligned with the totalitarian project of fascismo. 43 G. Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009), 30. 44 S. Tretyakov, ‘Whence and whither (perspectives on futurism)’, Lef, 1 (1923), 193–203. 45 Hewitt, Fascist Modernism, 147. 46 The earlier ‘phases’ are denominated ‘analytical’ (1910–13) and ‘synthetic’ (1914–15) – see E. Crispolti,

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ing, directly or tangentially, a body of previously neglected work.47 This body of work intersected major cultural, scientific and technological developments and paradigm shifts that transformed modern societies: the end of the First World War, the Bolshevik revolution, the installation of totalitarian regimes in Central and Southern Europe, the rise of the aviation industry, the Second World War, the development of media societies. These sat alongside momentous scientific advancements including Werner Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle, Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and the development of quantum mechanics. The shifting of cultural centres of gravity from Paris to the capitals of Middle, Northern and Eastern Europe (Berlin, Oslo, Moscow, Prague) and a re-orienting of western capitalism outside Europe in the aftermath of the First World War, reinvigorated cultural discourses centred on the machine. The internationalism of the avant-guerre may have been ‘as precarious as it was shortlived’.48 This book argues that it was precisely through the conduit of the machine, especially the industrial machine, that the culture of Italian futurism remained part and parcel of a modern cosmopolitan avant-garde after the First World War. With Frederic Jameson, I note that the paradox that aligns dictatorial regimes with intense bouts of modernisation is only partially resolved by the ‘missed’ emergence, to use Habermas’s formulation, of proper theoretical and ideological apparatuses of modernism.49 While I fully acknowledge the futurist contribution to Fascist cultural modernity, as I elucidate above, I am equally aware that this question not merely ‘polarised’ but also bedazzled and monopolised scholarship for a long while.50 The paradigm of a straight dissolution of postwar futurism into Fascist ranks is both

47

48 49 50

‘Come premessa’, in Futurismo 1909–44: arte, architettura, spettacolo, grafica, letteratura (Milan: Mazzotta, 2001), 15–16. Notable recent titles include monographs: G. Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista europeo (2013) and P. Sica, Futurist Women (2016); edited collections: G. Berghaus, Futurism and the Technological Imagination (2009), E. Adamowicz and S. Storchi (eds), Back to the Futurists (2013), V. Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909–44 (2014) and P. Antonello, M. Nardelli and M. Zanoletti (eds), Bruno Munari (2017); journal articles: M. E. Versari, ‘Enlisting and updating’ (2011) and C. Adams, ‘Historiographical perspectives on 1940s futurism’ (2013). This book relates to this body of work by addressing a lesser-known chronological span and set of artists, as well as approaching this theme from new angles. Its original contribution lies in its primary focus on the machine and mechanical practices underpinning postwar futurism. Perloff, Futurist Moment, xxxvii. F. Jameson, A Singular Modernity (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 102–3. W. Adamson, ‘Fascinating futurism: the historiographical politics of an historical avant-garde’, Modern Italy, 13 (February 2008), 75. Adamson usefully refers to scholarship addressing Futurist politics, reductive or not, including works by G. Mosse, R. S. Dombroski, G. B. Nazzaro and, more recently, A. D’Orsi, G. Berghaus, C. Salaris and M. Härmänmaa. Lista further claims that Marinetti’s ideals collapsed when his former acolytes abandoned futurism to join the Fascist ranks, as his pièce Tamburo di fuoco (1921–22) vividly illustrates – G. Lista, F. T. Marinetti: l’anarchiste du futurisme (Paris: Séguier, 1995), 180.

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reductive and superseded and should be abandoned. My principal aim here is to broaden the vista, gaze beyond the constraints of State cultural politics to discuss a broad range of supra-national intersections and epoch-changing developments that have the machine at its core. The scope of my investigation is broader by virtue of including new material, as well as a previously examined corpus interrogated from novel critical angles. New interpretive and methodological protocols are deployed here to investigate a field previously examined only in term of a handful of established artists. Undeniable political tensions underlying this production will emerge with reference to the individual artists discussed in the chapters below. Overall, my goal is to transcend critical pigeonholing of the futurist experience into ‘orthodox’ or ‘heterodox’, ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’, ‘Fascist’ or ‘Communist’, ‘official’ or ‘heretic’, as may be the case.51 Containing and circumscribing a vast field, I take into account a set of approaches, for example, both the sustained interest in mechanics traversing the European avant-garde as well as specific subsets, such as Prampolini’s ‘arte meccanica’ (mechanical art). The primary object of my investigation is the material machine of the long Industrial Revolution. The product of engineering, object of consumption and vehicle of massification, the machine inhabits a symbolic, representational and ideological space within futurism. It is integrated in modern workplaces (e.g. the artisan workshop, the factory, the studio), deployed in conflict and rituals of entertainment and socialisation. Engineering, industry, market and manufacture, the energy wielded by mechanical technology in bringing together and sustaining groups and individuals are key hermeneutic sites here. The legacy of proto-industrial and early industrial cultures, particularly important in Italy, will be ancillary areas of enquiry to the evolutionary strategy of the machine in futurismo. My book examines a large body of work straddling heterogeneous practices and disciplines, from the visual arts to dance, literature, music and performance. The constructive, mechanical grammar of theatre plays a prominent role, based on the premise that futurismo was a ‘dramatic movement by definition’.52 At least since the French Revolution, theatre constituted a revolutionary art form par excellence. Marrying utopia and utilitarianism, anti-bourgeois drama typified the activism of Proletkult, offering new forms of mass organisation including a ‘mass theatre for the masses’ close to the heart of the Fascist cultural revolution,53 as mentioned above. Futurism perceived theatre as a quintessentially mechanical, highly technological art 51 These distinctions were introduced by M. Calvesi and G. Lista: see G. Lista, Arte e politica: il futurismo di sinistra in Italia (Milan: Mudima, 2009), 14–15. 52 W. Strauven, Marinetti e il cinema tra attrazione e sperimentazione (Udine: Campanotto, 2006), 57. See also M. Verdone, ‘Music-hall, cinéma, radio du futurisme’, cit. in Strauven, Marinetti e il cinema, 57. 53 Schnapp, 18BL, 45.

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form, even more so than cinema, whose status remained ambiguous and paradoxically competitive with respect to drama. Mechanical devices serving ‘historicising’ purposes, and whose outcomes were perceived as static and anti-dynamic, arresting the flow of life and prompting questions on their mechanical vocation – film and photography are a case in point – were assigned a subaltern status to theatre. These contemporary technologies, including communication (e.g. radio and TV), transportation (e.g. cars and planes) and image and sound reproduction (e.g. photography, cinema and audio-recording), are included in my discussion in so far as they mediated or translated a mechanical idiom into aesthetic expression. At first glance, fast and simultaneous cinema would appear to be an ideal medium to expand and contract atomised time. The conundrum of why the futurists failed to engage with it more robustly, leading to the paradox of a futurist ‘cinema without films’, is discussed here across several chapters.54 Fully conversant with mechanical technology too, architecture and town planning, on the other hand, will not be addressed at length here. Futurist architecture achieved a conceptual pinnacle before the First World War, thanks to the forceful and original architectural visions of Antonio Sant’Elia (1888–1916). Sant’Elia’s projects, however, failed to materialise on the ground, remaining largely on paper. My reflections on futurist architectural innovation and urban re-envisioning saturated with technology will coalesce in a separate publication. My overarching approach is cultural-historical, paying particular attention to cultural, aesthetic and media-related practices. Joel Dinerstein’s ‘technodialogism’, a notion integrating the politics and aesthetics of modern industrial machines and Taylorist practices with cultural production, will prove particularly useful here.55 Careful attention will be given to individual artists and the broad contexts of their production, including the transnational scope of their activities, cross-overs and translatability with the international avant-garde. Marxist critiques (e.g. Gramsci, Raymond Williams and Jameson) where modernity is seen as coterminous with the spread of capital in industrial societies, will be productive in shedding light on the ideological and aesthetic goals of postwar futuristi in tandem with their spatial orientation towards Central and Eastern Europe. I will take Jameson’s arguments further by highlighting and exploring the tension between the ‘singular modernism’ engendered by Imperialist spread of capital and the diasporic and exilic experience of individual artists in postwar Italy, leading to capillary and rhizomatic fragmentation,

54 This paradox is addressed by Strauven, in ‘Futurist poetics and the cinematic imagination: Marinetti’s cinema without films’, in Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination, 202. 55 J. Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 126 and passim.

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both personal and professional, within a mutually intersected, international modernist framework (see especially Chapter 4).56 A broad spectrum is considered here: industrial machines and their social and economic agency first and foremost. The machine as anthropological universal myth, archetype, metaphor and pathos formula, a particularly relevant heuristic in late futurist years, is also elucidated in Chapters 5 and 6. Conversely, the cultural semantics of technologies of abstraction, underpinned by conceptual shifts and extraterritorialities of writing that open up new verbal and visual fields, what Tichi aptly called ‘machines made of words’,57 are not addressed here. Formulations that fall beyond the scope of this monograph include translations of mechanical protocols into neural networks or into specific abstract practices, e.g. automatic language, words-in-freedom, kinetic poetics, analogy and figurative speech, montage and photomontage, consciousness as graft or citation, structured frameworks of causality and cognition. My book considers instead material machines situated in cities, factories, theatres, cinemas, squares and in the open sky. My aim is to investigate the contexts of production and consumption, the entanglements of the machine in postwar futurismo: industrial, migratory, social, political and aesthetic, in touch with material cultures and the everyday. From this it follows that critiques as diverse as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s desiring machines, Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminism, Michel Carrouges’s celibate machines, Paul Virilio’s military logistics, all the way up to Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster’s Lacanian and Freudian prosthetic and fetishist phallic and castration frameworks will be engaged with sparingly and only where appropriate, namely in Chapter 2 as concerns Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (for a summative discussion, see also the Conclusion: Ex machina). That there is scope for alternative approaches and readings of machines is clear from the numerous theories developed during and after the period under scrutiny here, some of which have been largely neglected so far. Cassirer’s theory of symbolic forms, where technology’s ‘mechanical function’ finds a corresponding ‘purely spiritual function’, which develops from and is ‘indissolubly’ correlated with it, is one case in point.58 I shall address this spiritual turn when considering aerofuturism in Chapters 5 and 6. Fuelled by the Fascist regime’s investment in the aviation industry, aerofuturismo encompassed a broad range of mechanics including explorations of the cognitive and sensual outcomes of visions from top down, cosmic idealism aimed at capturing the material and dynamic origin 56 Jameson, Singular Modernity, 13 and passim. 57 C. Tichi, Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 267. Tichi coins the phrase ‘machines made of words’ with reference to W. C. William’s poems. 58 E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, II, Mythical Thought (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1955), 215.

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of matter, macroscopic and microscopic projections in the infinity of the cosmos, the documentary realism of real-time views from an airplane. The set of mechanical practices under investigation here engaged numerous women: poets, painters, dancers and aviatrixes. My approach is not informed by implicit agreement with provocative misogynist pronouncements that were also part of futurism’s political and agitational agenda. Far from concluding that ‘different as they were from one another, one thing all the women artists of futurism shared was the destiny of being forgotten, sometimes totally obliterated from history’,59 I concur with the reassessment voiced by more recent scholarship, whereby ‘permeable frontiers’60 existed. If it is true that futurist artists crossed over into feminine territories and, conversely, that futurist women ‘felt masculinised’ by futurism, women associates were forcefully, if, to some extent, also piecemeal and contradictorily, drawn to feminist politics and the woman question.61 It is also now generally accepted that women found a platform within futurism specifically in the postwar period.62 Both factory workers and affluent upper-class women who encountered futurismo experienced a degree of socioeconomic mobility and emancipation, especially after the First World War.63 The Litolatta metal workers, the poet Maria Goretti and the dancer Giannina Censi are examined in detail. Censi’s original aerodances, in particular, stand out as original mechanical reconfigurations of the body underpinned by ‘the purest product of the machine age’:64 the airplane. Censi’s mechanical aerodances are celebrated here as a pinnacle of modern kinetics and one of the most enduring examples to date of the marriage between the body, technology and aesthetic practice. Chapter 1 is largely contextual, elucidating and exploring the background and chronology of futurismo. A summative discussion of the semantics and culture of the machine will pave the way to an overview of conceptual discourses about machines in modernity. Taking Marxism as a point of departure, this chapter explores the migratory and industrial contexts of Italian modernities. It further outlines background and trajectory of the machine in futurismo from the official inception of the movement in 59 M. Bentivoglio and F. Zoccoli, The Women Artists of Italian Futurism – Almost Lost to History (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1997), 84. 60 Pickering-Iazzi, Politics of the Visible, 207. 61 L. Re, ‘Mina Loy and the quest for a futurist feminist woman’, The European Legacy, 7 (2009), 808–11. 62 F. Zoccoli, ‘Futurist women painters in Italy’, in Berghaus (ed.), International Futurism in Arts and Literature, 373. 63 See also Pickering-Iazzi, Politics of the Visible, 210. E. Larkin recently highlighted the key role played by Benedetta in (re)‘inventing’ futurism after the war, see Larkin, ‘Benedetta and the creation of “second futurism”’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 18:4 (2013), 445–65. 64 R. Wohl, The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination 1920–50 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 313.

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1909. Chapters that follow illustrate and discuss individual and group practices. My aim is to integrate critique with an exploration of contexts, tranche de vie and in-depth analysis of better-known and lesser-known artists and the manners in which their thinking and practice were informed by the machine. The financial assets and entrepreneurial acumen of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) underpin much of the mechanical orientation of futurismo, from the early days through to the demise of the movement (see Chapter 2). Marinetti’s iconoclasm disguises an awe of the machine understood as a trope of industrial modernity as well as a positivist investment in the imaginary capital of machines. Charged with erotic and sexual power, the machine is inextricably braided with flesh and metal. Cyborglike couplings of human and machine, spanning technological conflict, electricity, film and new materials, give rise to a particular brand of mechanical ‘machismo’, or mach(in)ismo: a hyper-virile posturing laced with psychoanalytical undertones. Closer to the seminal work of Giacomo Balla, Fortunato Depero (1892–1960) developed a pragmatic yet complex and multi-layered, if polarised, approach to the machine. Oscillating between artisanal and industrial practice, traditional craftsmanship and the appeal of radically modern modalities of production and consumption, Depero’s conceptual duality is forcefully encapsulated in the late canvas Tornio e telaio (Lathe and loom; 1949). In Chapter 3 Depero’s machine aesthetics is discussed as spanning a vast field, from mechanised fairy-tales and robotic puppets in plastic merry-go-rounds to a distinctively metallised machine form. The latter resulted in an original ‘style of steel’ hewn during Depero’s expatriations away from the periphery of his home town, Rovereto in north-eastern Italy, to the hub of technological capitalism, New York. Conversant with standardisation, engineering and industry, Depero encodes New York’s new urbanism in the emblematic icon of the skyscraper. The ranks of postwar futurismo welcomed numerous Anarchists and Socialists, such as the Moscow-born Vinicio Paladini (1902–71). Chapter 4 scrutinises the manner in which radical artists favoured the machine as a conduit of proletarian redemption and harbinger of new social orders. Austere and ascetic, an emblem of rigour and discipline to engage with in the factory, the machine is instrumental in exploding social hierarchies. Voluntarily or forcibly exiled, migrating to the ideologically compatible technological societies of Northern and Eastern Europe and in tension with the reactionary officialdom back home, left-wing futurists are marked by a perpetual displacement and dislocated, frontier identities. Through an examination of arte meccanica and ‘spiritual’ machines, Chapter 5 marks a transition to a later development: aerofuturismo. In concert with Mussolini’s postwar investment in the aviation industry, aerofuturism further aimed to transcend the materiality of machines, leading to disembodied, ‘spiritual’ devices. Artists of transnational calibre discussed here (e.g. Enrico Prampolini (1894–1956) and Fillia

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(Luigi Colombo; 1904–36) regarded the machine and flying machines as vehicles of cosmic states of being, elevating humankind to mystical heavens and tapping into long-lost symbolic values in the manner of Warburg’s pathos formulas. Aerofuturism’s most original developments are explored in Chapter 6, namely Censi’s technological aerodances and Munari’s ‘dysfunctional’ machines. Before falling under the rubric of the demographic policies of the Fascist regime, Giannina Censi (1913–93) infused her original practice of aerodanza with the power to transform her own technologised body into an airplane. Drawing on Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s fotodinamica, an early form of experimental photography leading to dematerialisation of bodies in motion, and resonating with the atomisation of reality underpinning quantum mechanics, Bruno Munari (1907–98) devised ‘useless’ machines. Munari conceived a counterculture which payed homage at the same time as it debunked the functional and ideological bias of the 1920s machine. The concluding chapter, Ex machina, outlines the tensions and trajectories that mark the transition of the futurist machine from the machine age to the current digital age. Borrowing from Munari’s ‘useless’ machines, the contemporary machine is dematerialised and abstracted. As such it both stems from and mirrors a radically altered technological paradigm: post-mechanical, postindustrial and digital. In a final twist, the machine of our own age is no longer the object of aesthetic or ideological worship or the demon of Taylorist dystopias. Rather, the contemporary machine acts with its own agency, supplying itself the subjectivity to compose and visualise art in sophisticated, if increasingly worrisome, entanglements with us humans.

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1 Futurismo and the machine During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. (M. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964) The historian is but a captain in the war of time. (P. Virilio, Speed and Politics, 1977)

This chapter explores a range of cultural, geographical and technological contexts of Italian modernity. I begin by outlining the shifting semantics of the term ‘machine’ and its development across time and follow through with a concise overview of conceptual positions and debates concerning machine technology in modernity, beginning with Marxist critiques of machines in capitalism. The relation between futurismo and the machine will finally be set against the Italian industrial backdrop and the migratory underpinnings of Italian modernism. 1.1 The machine: science and technics What do we understand by machine? Is it an unchanging nomenclature? When, how and why did machines acquire cultural status? What importance do we attribute to cultures imbued with technology? Which cultural and intellectual responses does technology elicit in its turn? Carrouges puts it most simply: a machine is a device producing and/or transmitting movement.1 From the high ground of our current postindustrial, posthuman age, Andreas Broeckmann persuasively contends that ‘the machine is a technical appliance that assumes a form of autonomy from its human creator’.2 Definitions that are chronologically coterminous with postwar futurism will prove especially productive. In 1929 Stuart Chase elucidated the development and shifting meaning of the object called ‘machine’ across history. The noun ‘machine’, he explained, originally comes from ‘man kina’, meaning power applied to a cylinder of wood, e.g. a rolling log used for the purpose of shifting heavy loads.3 If we understand the machine as a tool, humans can be said to have used and become 1 M. Carrouges, Les machines célibataires (Paris: Chêne, 1976), 152. 2 Broeckmann, Machine Art, 18. 3 S. Chase, Men and Machines (New York: MacMillan, 1930), 22.

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biologically adapted to the tool-machine for the past one hundred thousand years. In his exposition, Chase concluded that the machine was a ‘non-living contrivance to extend or modify the power of the body, or to refine the perception of the senses. Its commonest function is to transform random energy into disciplined energy.’4 At once more general and more specific, Pontus Hultén regarded machines as ‘tools composed of several parts working together’,5 alluding to their bifurcated genealogy: both technical and applied experience and, alternatively, abstract thinking, invention and pure science. A brief cultural-historical outline will shed light on these semantic shifts. Even though they were not yet acquainted with iron, in 3000 bc Egyptians deployed a wide range of machines. It was the Greeks, however, who first developed mechanics, even though they did not adapt machines for production. The Greek term ‘techné’ tellingly encompasses both art and technics. Aristotle mentions a raft of machines including levers, balance-weights, beam scales, tongs, wedges, cranks and axles, rollers, wheels and pulleys, pulley blocks, potter’s wheels, catapults and toothed wheels.6 It is believed that Strato, one of Aristotle’s pupils, wrote the oldest engineering text book: Mechanica (Mechanics).7 Both Plato and Aristotle deprecated technicians and mechanical workers, regarding mechanics to be an inferior epistemology and practice (see section 1.3). The Romans systematised Greek knowledge in treatises and deployed machines extensively with emphasis on practical applications. In the tenth book of De Architectura, entirely dedicated to mechanics, Vitruvius put forward a mechanical view of the world encompassing both natural phenomena and human beings. In the ensuing Hellenistic period (c. 10–c. 70 ad) the geometer, engineer and physicist Hero (or Heron) of Alexandria devised a raft of ingenious machines and automated devices including automata and the first vending machine. Influenced by Archimedes, Hero laid out his theories in three books gathered together under the title Mechanica, handed down in altered form in Arabic translation and cited by Pappus (third century ad) in fragmentary form. Book One dealt with general geometry and mechanics, Book Two with simple machines (e.g. the lever, the axis) and Book Three with practicalities such as how to lift and transport weights in building. Hero 4 Ibid., 24. Note Chase’s ‘non-living’ notation, which is aligned with both the technological and cultural standards and preoccupations of the time. 5 K. G. Pontus Hultén, ‘Introduction’, in The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 6. 6 Chase, Men and Machines, 49. 7 According to M. L. Desclos and W. W. Fortenbaugh (eds), Strato of Lampsacus: Text, Translation and Discussion (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011), 444, the peripatetic philosopher Athenaeus, author of a text entitled On Machines (or On Siege Machines; first century bc), knew of two works on mechanics, one by Strato and one by Aristotle.

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lay down the groundwork for cybernetics. His influence was profound and enduring, inspiring, among others, the young René Descartes’ lost treatise on artificial optical marvels Thaumantis Regia (Palace of miracles; 1620s). Hero wrote further treatises, such as a Pneumatica, featuring a steam-powered engine or aeolipile and precursor of James Watt’s engine. Both Byzantine and Arab science in the ninth century ad developed Hero’s automata, mechanical vessels and water clocks, introducing new measuring instruments and injecting algebraic and astronomic knowledge in the study of mechanics. The Middle Ages witnessed incremental deployment of animal-, water- and wind-powers, metal and masonry work and mechanical instruments for sailing. By the thirteenth century, the term machine had acquired technical meaning.8 It was, however, in the princely courts of Europe, especially in Italy, that mechanical knowledge and practice were systematised in technical treatises. Filippo Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti and Albrecht Dürer wrote manuals. Leon Battista Alberti, in particular, was the first to acknowledge that mathematics was the common ground of painters and scientists. Contemporary systematisation and theoretical flourishing attest to a reprisal and popularisation of mechanical procedures outside traditional academic centres of knowledge. New mechanisms such as the internal-combustion engine, the clock and the printing press began to challenge old orders. In the sixteenth century Bernard Palissy revolutionised hydraulic engineering, as well as committing theory to the test of empirical experience, speaking against the detractors of mechanical arts and manual labour. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries Giordano Bruno, followed by Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei and Descartes, fuelled discussions in defence of the mechanical arts within a framework of magic-hermetic thinking. Beginning in the fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci’s and Galileo’s accomplished engineering lay the groundwork of modern mechanics. The eclectic and unsystematic, yet profoundly innovative, activities of Leonardo led to prototypes of flying machines and mechanistic anatomies. Leonardo’s practice came to symbolise the interlocking of the liberal and mechanical arts and the marriage between science and technics which typifies the modern age.9 With the aid of mechanical optical instruments Galileo debunked the Aristotelian heaven of fixed stars, while Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler deployed mechanical instruments and theories to redraw the map of the sky.

8 See also G. Raunig, A Thousand Machines (Cambridge, MA and London: Semiotext(e) / MIT Press, 2010), 19–20. 9 P. Rossi, I filosofi e le macchine 1400–1700 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2002), 54.

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In his Treatise of Man (1648) René Descartes contended that the human body was constitutionally mechanical, comparable to clocks and automata. The beginning of a modern discourse on machines may be traced to Descartes’ identification of humans with machines and assimilation of anthropomorphism (machines taking on human form) with mechanomorphism (humans taking on mechanical form).10 Through Descartes’ vision of a mechanistic cosmos ordained by an engineer God, the machine took on further signification as emblem of the absolutist monarchy: the universe was a vast self-running machine pullulating with individual mechanisms, organic and inorganic, ticking in unison, dancing to the tune of mathematics. The manufacture of complex automata and androids followed suit.11 Automata embodied Descartes’ mechanistic thinking and a universe newly conceived as an immense time machine: a precise and hierarchical clockwork. Following Descartes, the machine triumphed during the Enlightenment. Replacing Descartes’ dualism with a mechanical monism, Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s L’homme machine (1747–48) drew analogies for both human and animal beings from the increasingly accurate timepieces of his time. Descartes paved the way for Newtonian physics, where mechanics becomes the structural fabric of the universe. Isaac Newton posited mechanics, science, mathematics and geometry as means to draw the architecture of reality anew. Newton’s and Descartes’ mechanical cosmos will not be systematically challenged until 1900, when Max Planck will advance the notion of a discrete nature of matter made up by particles called quanta. Newton’s mechanical physics fuelled the appetite for ‘mechanical order and power’12 underpinning the English Industrial Revolution. Propelled by steam power and machines servicing mining, manufacture and transport,13 the Industrial Revolution established forceful mechanical practices with global thrust and appeal. The machines of the First Industrial Revolution typically comprised three parts: an engine to capture raw natural power, convert it into motion and deliver it to a shaft; an end tool performing the required work (e.g. digging, weaving, cutting, pounding) and the devices yoking the shaft to the end tool (e.g. gears, levers, belts). Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, whose one wheel alone operated eight spindles, drove manufacture beginning in 1764. The Industrial Revolution began in earnest in 1785, when James Watt’s steam engine, launched ten years previously, was yoked to cotton mill machinery. The advent of power maximised the machine’s potential, increasing 10 H. Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (1998), cit. in Broeckmann, Machine Art, 22. 11 See also G. Canguilhem, ‘Machine and organism’ (1952), 49, cit. in Broeckmann, Machine Art, 22–3. 12 M. McLuhan, ‘Freedom to listen’, in The Mechanical Bride: Folklore and the Industrial Man (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), 22. 13 Hultén, ‘Introduction’, 6–9; P. Rossi, La nascita della scienza moderna in Europa (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2007), 13–44.

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the effectiveness of engines, introducing new tools and refining the devices linking the engine to the working tools.14 Power engines relied on iron and coal. Following Faraday’s conversion of mechanical power into electric, engines ran on electricity. Development and exploitation of mechanical apparatuses began to serve the sole purpose of increasing economic productivity. The Machine Age, or Power Age, was born. In the course of the nineteenth century technology became a primary agent of progress and machines, the pillars of a flourishing Industrial Revolution, were locked in an ambiguous embrace with Imperial resources and exploitation. While western culture became permeated with a ‘technocratic utopianism’,15 the enthusiasm over the accelerated pace of mechanisation also began to give way to some concern. In 1818 Mary Shelley bio-engineered a nightmare companion for her literary creation Dr Victor Frankenstein, a man-made creature capable of spawning ‘a race of devils [that] might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror’.16 In the seminal essay ‘Signs of the times’ (1829) Thomas Carlyle demonised the ‘age of machinery’, referring to contemporary industrial arts and prevailing mechanical, rationalist and utilitarian dogmas stemming from Locke and Descartes, scourging the creation of hierarchies and systematic regimentation by machines.17 Sledge-hammered and fire-throated, Carlyle’s infernal machine is the textile machine, subjugator of iron and cotton, Stygian driver of a coercive industrialism subsequently reverberating in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) all the way up to Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony (1919). The machine encompassed craft and industry. Walt Whitman regarded the machine as an embodiment of the soul of wholesome, democratic America. Industrialism was perceived as energy (Carlyle, Whitman and Paul Adam) or discipline (Dickens, John Ruskin and Adam), a ‘massive power wielded against massive materials’,18 part and parcel of human evolution. In ‘Darwin among the machines’ (1863) Samuel Butler advocated the immediate destruction of all machines, introducing a line of thinking which would prove widely influential. Butler pointed the finger at machine technology, regarded as a superior evolutionary stage destined to emascu14 Chase, Men and Machines, 26. 15 L. Marx, ‘The idea of “technology” and postmodern pessimism’, in Y. Ezrahi, E. Mendelsohn and H. Segal (eds), Technology, Pessimism, and Postmodernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 21. 16 M. Wollestonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometeus, ed. S. J. Wolfson (New York: Longman, 2003), 135. 17 T. Carlyle’s ‘Signs of the times’ (1929), in The Works of Thomas Carlyle (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898–1901), XXIX, 185. 18 T. R. West, Flesh of Steel: Literature and the Machine in American Culture (Charlotte: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969), 20.

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late humans, prophesising that ‘the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants […] we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy’.19 John Ruskin was also hostile to the social and aesthetic ignominy embodied by the machine. Ruskin’s ‘The nature of gothic’ (in The Stones of Venice; 1853) deemed modern workmanship to be impersonal and reifying, influencing William Morris among others. In sum, ‘the “industrial” dimension of so-called industrial capitalism – seems to have an autonomy and an inner logic of its own which is abundantly registered in the art and thinking of the period’.20 Einstein’s work on photons (1905) inaugurated the twentieth century. Einstein perfected the above-mentioned Planck paradigm, helping explode the view of a cosmos governed by mechanical forces. From then on, classical mechanics would no longer be an adequate descriptor of physical reality. The building blocks of the real were now revealed to be infinitesimal units at the atomic level. Quantum mechanics transformed the traditional model of physical reality by exposing its constituent parts as portions of matter itself at the infinitesimal scale. Niels Bohr’s sub-atomic structures, Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy and Erwin Schrödinger’s mathematical quanta further led to advanced theories of quantum mechanics in the following decades. Even though Einstein never became fully persuaded by quantum mechanics, the theory received such resounding endorsement at the Solvay conference of October 1927 to transform the very theory of matter as we understand it today, e.g. a theory of ‘complementarity’ encompassing both the corpuscular and wave-like nature of physical matter. While these principles may not have been widely accessible, the practices discussed in this book demonstrate some conceptual familiarity with the dissolution of tangible constituents of reality in a multitude of force fields (see especially section 6.5).21 1.2 A philosophy of praxis After relegating machines to the realm of utopia, concern over the increasing material demands of manufacture, recklessly sourced via depletion of vast geographical areas and populations, began to rise. In a speech given in London in 1856, Karl Marx (1818–83) emphatically declared: ‘Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of 19 S. Butler, ‘Darwin among the machines [To the editor of the Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 13 June, 1863]’, in A First Year in Canterbury Settlement with Other Early Essays (London: New Zealand Texts Collection, 1914), http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-ButFir-t1-g1-t1-g1-t4-body.html (accessed 1 December 2017), 185. 20 Jameson, Singular Modernity, 143. 21 In 1936, Mumford established a convincing parallel between cubism and Einstein’s general relativity theory – see ‘“The art galleries: the course of abstraction”’ (orig. The New Yorker, 12, 21 March 1936), cit. in B. Altshuler, Salon to Biennial – Exhibitions that made Art History (New York and London: Phaidon, 2008), Volume I: 1863–1959, 253–4.

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shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it.’22 In Das Kapital (1867), he noted that the realm of freedom began where labour was no longer determined by necessity. In the Grundrisse (unfinished 1858; published 1939) Marx elaborated on this point, postulating a cooperation between a productive, rather than exploitative, set of science and technics. Associating the machine with fixed capital, Marx further introduced the notion of ‘systems of machinery’: machines are inextricably bound up with capital in a historical pact, re-engineering the labour force, reifying it and rendering it adequate and compliant to capital. Incorporating the skill and know-how of labour, as well as the technical and cognitive skill of engineers, economists and managers in a machinery automaton, on the other hand, the machine can elicit and encompass social and intellectual connections beyond the constraints of fixed capital. Marx contended that ‘nature builds no machines, no locomotives, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; […] organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified.’23 In its capacity to objectify knowledge, the machine activates and materialises the power of the human brain: the ingenuity of the engineer as well as the individualism of the capitalist.24 Capital employs machinery in order to reduce human energy and labour to a minimum. In its capacity to bypass the logic of commodity fetishism, the machine is the locus of labour’s agency, a force holding an emancipatory promise for labour. The alliance of factory work with machines realised Marx’s vision of a connection between workers and the means of production, potentially freeing labour from the commodification inherent in its saleable status.25 Marx importantly further argued in favour of a metabolic overlap between the human body and the machine, an integration of the human body and the body of the machine.26 Although it is still a matter of dispute whether the human – machine convergence signalled de-humanisation, de-skilling and alienation, or, rather, an organic and felicitous intimacy, Marx’s views were widely influential on the ‘frontier futurists’ discussed in Chapter 4. The mutually beneficial convergence between the machine and the working class, drawing on Marx’s exegesis and tested out in social revolutions in Eastern Europe, 22 Cit. in Hultén, ‘Introduction’, 10. 23 K. Marx, ‘The fragment on machines from the Grundrisse’, http://thenewobjectivity.com/pdf/marx.pdf (accessed 23 December 2017), 706; see also 694 and 701. 24 Ibid., 706 and 708–9. 25 See also P. S. Adler, ‘Marx, machines, and skill’, Technology and Culture, 31:4 (1990), 783 and 789: Marx may be construing technology broadly here, possibly ‘anticipating a skill-upgrading trend under capitalism’. 26 Broeckmann, Machine Art, 24. See also Alexei Gastev’s post-revolutionary Institute for the Scientific Organization of Work and the Mechanisation of Man. The Institute ran tests to ergonomically improve the human body, optimising it to the need of machines (see also Chapter 4).

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was also critiqued. The anti-capitalist positions of Max Weber, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno focused instead on the anaesthetising, ruinous impact of machine-produced and mass-produced culture on the working classes. Georg Lukács pointed out the evils engendered by capitalism, e.g. widespread reification and allpervasive status of commodity fetishism in modernity, leading to a spectralisation of reality, as further argued by Benjamin and the Frankfurt School.27 In Italy, Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) kept his eyes wide open for developments in the USSR as well as in western industrial capitalism. Gramsci used the terms ‘machine’ or ‘machinery’ sparingly, contextual to language, education and training.28 Gramsci’s machine is frequently a figure of speech, e.g. the industrial ‘machine’ of capitalism, the bourgeois State ‘machine’ or peasants in the south of Italy as ‘machines’ for work. Envisaging an infinite chain of mechanisation, Gramsci posited that the country with the greatest capacity to produce machine-making machines will be the most technically civilised and industrially advanced. Gramsci’s discussion of standardised production in his Prison Notebooks (e.g. ‘Americanism and Fordism’ in Notebooks n. 1 (1929) and n. 22 (1932)) is especially pertinent here. Gramsci follows the lead of the Marxist appraisal of Taylor’s scientific management of labour productivity and the impact of new productive methods in societies unencumbered with the legacy of feudalism and parasitic classes. Frederick W. Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) had advocated discreet units of a whole operating in correct sequence of timing and motion. These base units were hierarchical and individually supervised, rationally and scientifically deployed for the purpose of best performing a task with the most economic utility. Taylor’s principles were famously put to use in Ford’s motorcar production. In 1913 Ford installed the first moving assembly line for the manufacture of cars in Detroit, reducing the time it took to put together a T Model from twelve to two and a half hours. Training workers to specialise in one of the eighty-four steps it took to put a car together, and hiring Taylor to further optimise production, Ford massified the car commodity, rendering it affordable. Crucially, he also changed the relationship between workers and their labour, subordinating the former to the machines they unthinkingly operated. ‘Production, consumption, culture and thereby what it was to be human’29 were never to be the same again.

27 See S. Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (London and New York: Verso, 2016), 87. 28 Cf., for example, Anon [A. Gramsci], ‘Men or machines?’, Avanti!, 24 December 1916, cit. in D. Forgacs (ed.), The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–35 (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 62–4. 29 Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss, 82.

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Gramsci, however, argued that human ‘mechanisation’ does not coincide with the spiritual death of the labourer: once the process of adaptation is completed, the brain of manual workers, far from becoming reified and ossified in repetition, reaches a state of mindful freedom. In other words, only physical gesture can be completely mechanised and enslaved to a machine, while the mind remains free.30 For Gramsci, in short, the working classes could count on the machine as tangible leverage on production and, as such, powerful instrument of change for society as a whole. In the US, further argued Gramsci, hegemony is born in the factory and high wages were the ideological means by which the worker’s loyalty was retained and cultivated. Gramsci’s take on Taylorism (or Americanism) is especially significant in the light of futurist machines in postwar Italy. This was a time of social and political fluidity whose social and political contingencies lead to the rise of Fascism, including a resistance of the rural bourgeoisie and reactionary intelligentsia and a Concordat pact with the Catholic Church (see section 1.4). Gramsci had previously spoken in favour of futurismo in the wake of the Soviet enthusiasm for the cultural avant-garde, futurism’s detachment from Fascism following the electoral debacle of 1919 and the pro-Lenin positions voiced by Marinetti in ‘Al di là del comunismo’ (15 August 1920). Despite later specifications and corrections,31 Gramsci and the Communist International saw enormous revolutionary potential in machine culture and regarded the Italian futurists as its custodians. Since his alliance with Mussolini fell through in the 1919 general elections, Marinetti had shown genuine interest in Soviet cultural initiatives. In turn, the Soviet left approved of Marinetti’s onslaught of traditional culture. Speaking at the second congress of the Communist International in 1921, Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first People’s Commissar of Education, hailed Marinetti as the one and only ‘revolutionary intellectual’ in Italy. This prompted Gramsci’s article ‘Marinetti the revolutionary?’, published in L’Ordine Nuovo of the same year, arguing for futurism’s revolutionary and ‘absolutely Marxist’ force.32 Gramsci reasserted the revolutionary credential of futurismo, further observing that, when the futurists demonstrated against bourgeois 30 Gramsci, in Hoare and Nowell Smith (eds and trans), Selection from the Prison Notebooks, 309. 31 See, in particular, the caveats Gramsci introduced in ‘Literary criticism’, suggesting that literature needs to plunge its roots in popular culture, history, politics and society, in polemic with futurism’s own intellectual premises – cit. in Forgacs (ed.), The Gramsci Reader, 385–7. See also Gramsci’s ‘A letter to Trotsky on futurism’ (8 September 1922), first published in Russian in the Soviet journal Literatura i revolutsiya, reproduced in Leon Trotsky’s volume Literatura i revolutsiya (1923). The text of Gramsci’s letter was omitted from the English translation when it was first published in New York as Literature and Revolution (1957), but subsequently reprinted in various sources, e.g. cit. in R. Miracco, A. Masoero and F. Poli (eds), L’estetica della macchina: da Balla al futurismo torinese. (Milan: Mazzotta, 2004), 41. 32 Gramsci, ‘Marinetti the revolutionary?’, in Forgacs (ed.), The Gramsci Reader, 74; orig. unsigned, L’Ordine Nuovo, 5 January 1921.

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institutions before the war, the workers had come out in their defence. Manual workers trusted the futurist’s determination to ‘destroy, destroy, destroy’ ossified cultures and traditions, spiritual hierarchies, idols and prejudices. They: grasped sharply and clearly that our age, the age of big industry, of the large proletarian city and of intense and tumultuous life, was in need of new forms of art, philosophy, behaviour and language. This sharply revolutionary and absolutely Marxist idea came to them when the Socialists were not even vaguely interested in such a question, when the Socialists certainly did not have as precise an idea in politics and economics, when the Socialists would have been frightened […] by the thought that it was necessary to shatter the machine of bourgeois power in the State and in the factory.33

Echoing Soviet advocacy and Vladimir Lenin’s views on the acculturation of the new worker, Gramsci regarded the cultural agitation of futurismo as the conduit of a genuinely proletarian culture. The opening of a futurist exhibition in Turin in May 1922 was hailed as a joint effort of futurists and Communists. Curated by Franco RampaRossi, the show brought together left-leaning futurists and Gramsci’s Turin branch of Proletkult (see Chapter 4). In a letter to Leon Trotsky dated 8 September 1922, Gramsci commented with satisfaction that Marinetti had been round the exhibition in the company of workers on the night of the opening. Marinetti, however, was shortly to draw an unequivocal line of distinction between futurism and Communism. In the same month, Marinetti alluded to his leaning towards Mussolini’s fasci di combattimento. Marinetti began to articulate more explicitly his thoughts against cultural radicalisation aligning machines with the class struggle. In a manifesto of April 1923, he highlighted the futurist germination of Fascism, asking for political patronage of the arts. As I pointed out in the Introduction, by the mid-1920s futurismo had successfully wedged itself into the cultural policy gap of fascismo. Not accidentally, Gramsci was to make an important distinction in the Prison Notebooks between prewar and postwar futurism as he grew progressively disillusioned with futurism’s rapprochement with fascismo. Despite the vexed relationship between the futurist leadership and the Italian left, the Marxist notion of a fraternal engagement of human and machine in the factory and the democratising potential of technological innovation, including in Taylorist form, proved profoundly influential on numerous futurists in the postwar era (see especially Chapters 3, 4 and 6). The new status acquired by machines in industrialising societies drew conceptual maps anew, reoriented modes of production and consumption and prompted a new set of aesthetic practices and tastes. A few other pertinent 33 Ibid., 74.

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contemporary reflections, positing alternative readings and questions concerning technology, need to be mentioned here. 1.3 Questions concerning technology As mentioned in section 1.1, anti-mechanical opinions are recorded in antiquity. Plato, in an eloquent passage of Gorgias, relates an argument between Socrates and Callicles. In his disputation with Callicles, Socrates addresses the theme of the dignity and utility of the human arts and professions, namely the inferiority of the engineering professions in Athens, especially when compared with the art of rhetoric. Gorgias probably provides the first textual instance of a polarisation between ‘high’ culture and technology where practical arts are viewed as subordinate to abstract pursuits.34 Despite the new status acquired by mechanical arts and practices after Bacon, Campanella, Boyle, Leibniz, and Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, the dispute between art and technics continues to run through modern and contemporary times (see also Conclusion: Ex machina). This section succinctly outlines the main terms of the debate on technology in modernity. Machines were a pervasive presence in modern European culture and art. Futurism was conversant with the literary works of Whitman, Mario Morasso, Émile Verhaeren, Adam, as well as the international culture of marionettes, mechanical puppets and androids running high in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century drama.35 The machine of the vorticists was a severe, bland and metallic object of ‘bareness and hardness’,36 the locus of a modern industrial civilisation. While Francis Picabia suggested to ‘de-mechanise’ machines, Max Ernst invested them with a sinister and alarming side. Dada approached machines ironically, especially Alfred 34 Plato, Gorgias 512 (London: Penguin, 1960), 124: ‘the skipper, although he saves our lives, is not in the habit of magnifying his office; and the same may be said, […], of the engineer, whose ability to save is as great as that of a general or any other class of person, […]; for an engineer sometimes saves whole cities. You wouldn’t think of putting him on the same level as the advocate, would you? Yet if he chose to use big words about his function, like you and your friends, Callicles, he could make out a strong case and overwhelm you with reasons why everybody ought to be an engineer and no other profession is of the smallest importance. All the same you despise him and his art and use the term “mechanic” as a term of contempt, and you would not hear of marrying your daughter to his son or taking his daughter to wife yourself. Yet, […], what right have you to despise the engineer […]? […] it is simply absurd for you to cast aspersions on engineering and medicine and the other professions which exist in order to ensure men’s safety.’ 35 For details, see K. Pizzi, ‘Introduction’, in Pinocchio, Puppets and Modernity: The Mechanical Body (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), 1–15. 36 G. Cianci, ‘La catalizzazione futurista: la poetica del vorticismo’, in Modernismo/Modernismi: dall’avanguardia storica agli anni trenta e oltre (Milan: Principato, 2005), 161; ‘bareness and hardness’ is a citation from BLAST, I, 41.

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Jarry and Raymond Roussel, while Marcel Duchamp ironically anthropomorphised machines and mechanised humans.37 The mechanical enthusiasm of the futuristi stimulated, in turn, the Russian futurists, especially Natalia Gončarova, leading to constructivism. Both Italian and Russian futurism overlapped with Fernand Léger, the cubist-futurists, Kazimir Malevich and Alexander Archipenko. The functionalism of Le Corbusier’s purist style and El Lissitsky and László Moholy-Nagy’s focus on industrial relations and materials further intersected Italian futurism. A shift occurred in the transition from the prewar to the postwar. Futurism’s original orientation around speed, dynamism and automobiles gave way to a call towards the material machine within social, political, industrial and commercial contexts. The machine acquired a new and nuanced semantics and set of values, including arcane, malevolent and dystopian (see also section 1.6). In 1914 Franz Kafka translated the fascination inspired by technologies of war into a compelling narrative: In the Penal Colony (1919). Kafka’s correctional machine is not an aseptic device designed to administer justice swiftly, hygienically and efficiently. Rather, it is a bulky, nuts-and-bolts instrument of mechanical torture described in the meticulous detail that only the author’s competence in commercial insurance could supply. Grafting punishment permanently on the human body, Kafka’s machine is akin to the ‘spinning jenny’ which propelled the First Industrial Revolution. The ghostly shadow of Kafka’s Apparate looms large on the threshold of the age of technological barbarism and surveillance, as Carrouges has it.38 The European intelligentsia grappled too with the dark side of the machine and attempted to understand the role and agency of machine technology in industrial capitalist societies. A new form of alienation confronted workers in the era of massproduced goods and the Taylorist rationalisation of labour, argued Lukács in History and Class Consciousness (1923). Lukács exposed the cracks in the changing face of advanced capitalism and its logic of the commodity. Marx had already developed a theory of alienation, reification and commodity fetishism in capitalism. Lukács went further, maintaining that, under capitalism, the Taylorist economy of labour had become systemic and that ‘rational mechanisation extends right into the worker’s “soul”’.39 The automatic machine, in particular, became the emblem of the structure of the capitalist mentality and Taylorism part of capitalism’s attempt to fragment and reify the worker’s body and psyche. For Lukács the worker passively conforms to a totalising system which externalises work into an autonomous mechanical system.

37 See E. Crispolti, La macchina mito futurista (Rome: Editalia, 1986), [n.p.]. 38 Carrouges, Les machines célibataires, 24. 39 G. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 88, cit. in Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss, 92.

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The worker, he contended, was not meant to be passive, but, rather, ‘an active subject engaged in the production of the world in which it could flourish’.40 In the same year, 1923, Aby Warburg indicted the telephone and the telegraph. Their mechanical capacity, he argued, entailed ‘destruction of distance’. Warburg understood science as intellectual knowledge and discursive logic. New technology, on the other hand, could all too easily be assimilated to an anti-science or new idolatry, as Edgar Wind put it in 1952.41 The speed of electro-technical information threatened to shatter the humanistic ‘chance for reflection’, destroying Denkraum.42 In the machine age, in other words, intense dynamism, rapid exchanges and fast modes of travelling are achieved at the expense of reflection, analysis and contemplation. Developed and perfected in the course of various decades, Warburg’s pathos formula (Pathosformel) can further throw light on the extent and manners of the machine’s persistence in recognisable form in modern times (see Chapters 5 and 6). Reiterated visually, gesturally and conceptually, and also transformed and re-envisioned in the process, the machine is one of the most enduring symbols in history. In its capacity as myth, the machine became a fetish in modernity. In 1926 (in Paris Peasant) Luis Aragon proclaimed its totemic status and the new mythology arising from technological beauty.43 The machine as ‘symbolic form’, glossed Ernst Cassirer, correlates its mechanical function with a ‘purely spiritual function’, which conditions it from the beginning.44 Austin Freeman’s compendium Social Decay and Regeneration (1921) was described as ‘the most authoritative, complete and devastating’45 indictment of machines yet. The veritable ‘Frankenstein chorus’ of machine deniers that followed in its wake includes Henry P. Frost and Oswald Spengler. In Decline of the West (1918–22) and especially Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life (1931), Spengler homed in on the crisis of positive values that lead to the demise of western civilisation, an inferno inhabited by hostile and exploitative machines. Re-elaborating the Faustian theme, he maintained that instrumental employment of technology broke down the Euclidean, a-temporal space of the polis. Mechanisation

40 Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss, 81. 41 See BOD, Oxford, Edgar Wind Papers, MS Wind 10, folder 2, letter from Lowell M. Clucas Jr to EW from United States Department of State, 19 June 1952. In the transcript of a ‘Voice of America’ broadcast, Wind remarks on the extent to which ‘the machine has become some kind of idol’. I am grateful to Ben Thomas for drawing my attention to this quotation. 42 A. Warburg, ‘Recovery and synthesis (1918–23), the lecture on serpent ritual’, cit. in E. H. Gombrich (ed.), Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: The Warburg Institute, 1970), 224. 43 L. Aragon, Paris Peasant (Boston, MA: Exact Change, 1994), 117–18. 44 Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, II, Mythical Thought, 215. 45 Cit. in Chase, Men and Machines, 12 and 14.

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on a global scale is nothing but a plunder of nature, contended Spengler, replacing organic space with inflexible time. Taking his cue from Spengler, Ernst Jünger understood technology as modern human ontology and subsumed it to the will power of his ‘Worker’ (Der Arbeiter, Herrschaft und Gestalt, 1932). A militant and ascetic master of manual labour, the Worker’s mechanical skills are instrumental to the erection of the new society.46 Jünger remained, however, ambivalent. His machine oscillated between brutality and splendour. In his 1930 essay ‘The rationalization of anthropology and administration’, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski advanced a comparably negative outlook, launching ‘into a pithy diatribe against men turned into robots, the frantic pace of life of western societies, and the “aimless drive of modern mechanisation”’.47 In ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ (1936) Walter Benjamin posited technology as an agent of freedom, enfranchising the work of art from its ‘auratic’ premises. Aesthetic production would be democratised via a range of novel mechanically reproductive technologies such as film, and, especially, photography. Benjamin acknowledged that a de-historicised, technological and ‘objective’ art, was increasingly available to mass audiences. The distancing apparatus of technology enabled a more critical stance towards reality, shrinking ‘the spatial-temporal frame through which we understand the world’.48 Not too dissimilarly from Benjamin, in his 1955 lecture ‘The question concerning technology’, Martin Heidegger contends that human beings are no longer deploying technology as a tool but have become fully integrated in its discourse. He foregrounds  technology’s mediation between the individual and the world, attributing special significance to space and time. Technology is no longer separate and auxiliary, but, rather, entangled with human activity, psyche and body. In other words, far from being inert, technology reconstitutes human modes of engagement with the world. In his Nietzsche lecture on European nihilism of 1940, Heidegger prefaced this with a discourse of ‘total mobilisation’ and technological adjustment of the individual and society, a feat accomplished by Nazi Germany. Here the ‘metaphysical truth’ of modern technology and ‘absolute machine economy’ was accomplished via Nietzsche’s Superman.49 Heidegger’s reflections on emergent technology include a

46 See also S. Cooper, Technoculture and Critical Theory: In the Service of the Machine? (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 50. 47 Cit. in M. Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), 392. 48 Cooper, Technoculture and Critical Theory, 47. 49 M. Heidegger, Nietzsche (1987), 165–6, cit. in R. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 327–8.

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curious, if unoriginal, dig at futurism seemingly modelled on the vorticists’ condescending opinions: in the Italy of the futurists, precisely the familiarity of […] underdevelopment, confers on the violence of the new its capacity for arousing fear or excitement; […] what matters is […] the aesthetic epistemology of the shock itself, which could not be registered against a background in which machinery had already become familiar and domesticated.50

In Technics and Civilization (1934) and, later, The Myth of the Machine (1967–70), Lewis Mumford argues that abstract art revolutionises our sense of form, encapsulating the new synchronicities of space-time of an environment transformed by machines. While endorsing the mechanical city, he cautions against a narrow-minded, utilitarian money-economy of the machine age, calling it a lifeless, indeed ‘bastard’ ‘mechanocentric religion’.51 Mumford proposed the notion of a ‘mega-machine’, a regime encompassing political, economic and bureaucratic power and subordinating humans while remaining invisible as a structure in its totality.52 Charting the shifting coordinates of a complex discourse, Mumford regarded machines as mediators within larger systems: the lubricant of social construction and interaction, tempting us ‘with the possibilities beyond the open door’.53 Even though the futuristi were at home with the workshop, the stage and the factory rather than the rarefied arenas of abstract thinking, the positions outlined in this section find distinct echoes in the work of the postwar futuristi as I shall investigate in the following chapters. Recent and contemporary speculations on technology will find their way in the Conclusion (Ex machina). The following sections 1.4, 1.5 and 1.6 will shed light respectively on Italy’s industrial modernity, its migratory and diasporic thrust and the context, span and underpinnings of the special relationship between futurismo and the machine. 1.4 Pathways to modernity ‘Futurism arose against the background of profound economic, social and cultural upheavals that marked the advent of modern, industrialised, urbanised society’.54 The Cit. in Jameson, Singular Modernity, 144–5. L. Mumford, The Culture of Cities (London: Routledge, 1997), 445. See also Broeckmann, Machine Art, 19–20. S. Lubar, ‘Machine politics: the political construction of technological artifacts’, in S. Lubar and W. D. Kingery (eds), History from Things: Essays in Material Culture (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 208. 54 C. Salaris, ‘The invention of the programmatic avant-garde’, in Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909–44, 22. 50 51 52 53

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standardisation of time at the end of the nineteenth century brought about the globalisation of the system of time and its subordination to the requirements of industry and communication, especially transport. Between 1870 and 1913 the international economy boomed. Industrial output per capita expanded more rapidly than ever before. Britain, France and Germany commanded 60 per cent of the world market in manufactured goods. Electricity and petroleum became new sources of power. New developments included the internal combustion and diesel engines and the steam turbine, automobiles, tractors, motorbuses, airplanes, telephones, typewriters tape machines, and the development of chemical synthetic materials, including plastic. Urban populations flourished alongside these industries. By the year 1900, eleven metropolises emerged in the industrial west, each counting more than one million residents.55 Revolutionary scientific theories acquired status and visibility in the public domain and brought science closer to practical and industrial applications. According to Trotsky, futurism reflected the historical development of capitalism to new standards of prosperity and power.56 Italy was characterised by the coexistence of ‘paradoxical experiences of transformation’ and ‘realities from radically different moments of history’.57 Uneven and contradictory amalgamations of archaic and modern, a phenomenon which marked capitalism’s spread into non-capitalist societies in the early years of the twentieth century, underpinned the country’s transition towards modernity. Italy was one of the ‘peripheries’ or ‘semi-peripheries of core capitalism’ existing ‘in an asymmetrical relationship to the older Imperialist centres which had pursued capitalism’s unilateral intrusion into pre-capitalist worlds’.58 Unified between 1861 and 1870 after a long series of Risorgimento wars, the Italian nation had, at this stage, yet to experience the economic and social impact of technology on a wide scale. The country’s shortage in natural resources, e.g. coal and iron, cornerstones of the Industrial Revolution, was a further disadvantage, fuelling Imperialist ambitions.59 After the economic depressions of the late nineteenth century, however, Italy encountered a period of sustained growth culminating with industrial production exceeding 5 per cent each year from 1896 to 1908 and the fastest growing gross national product per capita in Western Europe. While the origin and

55 See also A. Bullock, ‘The double image’, in M. Bradbury and J. McFarlane (eds), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930 (London: Penguin, 1991), 59–61. 56 L. Trotsky, ‘Futurism’, in Literature and Revolution (Chicago, IL: Haymarket, 2005), 112. 57 Trotsky, ‘Futurism’, 112–13. See also Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (London: Gollanz, 1965), VI, Appendix 1, 476, cit. in B. Parry, ‘Aspects of peripheral modernism’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 40:1 (2009), 30; and F. Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 307. 58 Parry, ‘Aspects of peripheral modernism’, 28 and 27 respectively. 59 Chase, Men and Machines, 87.

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spread of industrialism went hand in hand with nation building, machines came to be regarded as the building blocks of a modern and united nation. The accession of Giovanni Giolitti to Prime Minister in 1900 resulted in an embryonic setup of industry and infrastructure. Giolitti’s expansionist drives in the colonies of Africa and at Italy’s eastern borders further contributed to the project of modernity. Although the country remained widely agricultural (57 per cent of the population worked in agriculture in 1911), by the middle of the first decade of the century investment in industry had risen by 300 per cent with clear geographical spread in the north-western region comprising Lombardy, Piedmont, Liguria and, to some extent, the Veneto. Milan, in particular, led the way with industrial development and application of electric energy acting as project leaders. New technologies were imported from outside Italy, especially France, disconnecting with local facilities.60 The spread of philosophies of utility rendered sophisticated instruments of production appealing. However, the convergence of science and applied technology within a community of scientists sustained by public or private funding and aimed at systematic industrial or commercial applications was virtually unknown in Italy. After suffering a crushing defeat in Ethiopia in the late 1890s, the country received a colonial boost in the Italian-Turkish war of 1911–12, beginning the occupation of Libya and hailing a welcome economic expansion in the Balkans and Asia Minor. Colonial expansion and a tumultuous growth built on the exploitation of masses of peasants exacerbated social disparities, generating associations of organised proletariat. The first labour clubs (founded in 1900 and 1901 respectively) counted rail workers and mechanical workers. A general federation of labour (Confederazione Generale del Lavoro) first convened in 1906.61 Nationalism was on the rise too. Marinetti attended the first congress of the Nationalist Association in 1910, looking with interest at the alliance with revolutionary syndicalism upheld by Enrico Corradini and other contributors of the periodical Il Regno, but eventually distanced himself from their conservative clericalism. Meanwhile, a young revolutionary, Benito Mussolini, emerged within the Socialist Party congress of 1912. His political star rose rapidly. When the First World War broke out, Italy initially committed to neutrality on the grounds that no territorial compensation had been offered it within the Triple Alliance. The Austro-Hungarian Empire’s reluctance to forego the cities Trento and Trieste at Italy’s north-eastern borders strengthened the interventionist cause, which was unitarian, libertarian and

60 See also Hultén, ‘Profezie futuriste’, in Futurismo & Futurismi (Milan: Bompiani, 1986), 15. 61 These figures are in G. Borri, ‘Una contrapposizione “ideologica” d’inizio secolo: Gli ammonitori di Giovanni Cena (1904) e La nuova arma (la macchina) di Mario Morasso (1905)’, in G. Bàrberi Squarotti and C. Ossola (eds), Letteratura e industria ([Florence]: Olschki, 1997), I, 561–2.

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left-wing. In November 1914 Mussolini resigned as editor of the Socialist daily Avanti! in order to create his own newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia. Since the Socialists remained committed neutralists, Mussolini gathered together a group of ‘fasci of revolutionary action’ designed to bring together left-wing interventionists and working-class revolutionaries. The futurists clamoured too against Austria-Hungary and advocated intervention. With the intervention of secret diplomacy, the interventionist thrust prevailed and a Treaty of London signed on 24 April 1915 impelled Italy to declare war on Austria-Hungary. The war experience brought together the masses. Men from different regions of Italy shared the experience of war at the front, cementing the common national goal. However, ‘the idea that the war would act as a solvent for traditional, even archaic, mentalities proved an illusion’.62 The Church retained a pivotal role, politically, culturally and symbolically, while the Socialist party at home remained firmly internationalist. The surge in industrial production and capacity that went hand in hand with the war left behind a substantial legacy. Shortly to divorce from armament manufacture, the Italian industrial sector began to aggressively pursue new avenues of mechanical production. The vigorous surge and consolidation of industrial capacity, however, was accompanied by an era of social and labour unrest: in 1900 there were 410 strikes involving 43,000 workers; by 1907, following the international economic crisis, 575,600 workers had been on strike 1,042 times. Conflicts were violent: in Parma, one of the cities where the futurists attempted to reach out to the working classes,63 the agrarian associations evicted peasants from their farms following a strike led by Alceste De Ambris as early as 1908. Tensions also sharpened following the news of the Bolshevik revolution. A strike called in Turin in August 1917 tested the revolutionary muscles of the industrial working class sending shock waves through Italy. The news coincided with Italy’s disastrous military defeat at Caporetto (now Cobarid) in October of the same year, leading Mussolini to seek funds from prominent war industrialists and Marinetti’s pronouncement of an independent futurist political party (see Introduction). Taylorist production methods, tried out in the industrial enclaves of Turin and Milan, began to spread in the 1920s, facilitated by a fragmentation and weakening of the unions. Taylorist and Fordist production methods were systematically implemented in the early Fascist era, alternating with corporatist approaches: in 1926, FIAT, Olivetti, the Employer’s Federation (Confindustria), engineering associations and the Ministry of National Economy established a National Institute for the Scientific 62 Lyttelton, ‘Futurism, politics, and society’, 63. 63 Ibid., 60ff.

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Organisation of Labour (ENIOS). ENIOS’s remit was to modernise Italian industry through Taylorist and Fordist ‘scientific’ systematisation of labour. Ford spoke highly of the Fascist push to consolidate industrialisation in Italy. Long-standing feudal, parasitic privileges, as well as doubts over the effectiveness of an emergent corporative social structure, however, militated against full implementation of ‘Americanisation’ in Italy.64 At this stage, the futurists remained conversant with international innovation in industry in the face of the defence of national land and genius loci mounted by ‘ultravillage’, a nostalgic attempt to turn Italy back to a wholesome ruralism in the face of the mechanistic and Babel-like metropolis (see also Introduction). Characterised by a ‘strident contrast, between modern and traditional, urban and rural, north and south, international and provincial’,65 Italy was locked in an old versus new dualism, as Trotsky observed. Technology was shortly to become an overwhelming presence. On the other hand, the rural and protectionist economies of large portions of the country did not welcome machines and worked against their spread. The proliferation of machines remained stunted and uneven. In an article entitled ‘Workers and peasants’ (1919), Gramsci argued that the crisis brought about by the First World War had transformed agriculture and the introduction of machines replaced labour and livestock. Industrial workers, Gramsci contended, need to take the lead in introducing machinery in agrarian economies, a task facilitated by the bonds of trust forged between urban factory workers and the rural workforce in the fields of war.66 Cautioning against machine-driven labour, especially the impact of mechanisation on employment, Gramsci upheld a technological revolution subsumed under the dictatorship of the proletariat, hailing factory workers in big industrial cities in the north of Italy as the engines of this revolution. Not until 1938, well into the second half of the Fascist era, however, would productivity of industrial employment exceed the productivity of rural employment overall (34.2 per cent, against 30 per cent of agrarian production).67 This reflected the new co-dependence of mechanical and industrial interests with the military and corporate requirements of the Fascist State. The failure, or near-failure, of Fascism’s agrarian and rural ideologies and policies, including reclaiming drained land, boosted industry and urbanisation. In 1911, two years after the publication of the Founding and manifesto of futurism, 38 per cent of the population was illiterate and less than 30 per cent lived in cities 64 See also M. Schapiro, ‘Abstract art’, in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries. Selected Papers (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978), II, 208, and Lyttelton ‘Futurism, politics, and society’, 58–9. 65 Lyttelton, ‘Futurism, politics, and society’, 59. 66 Gramsci, ‘Workers and peasants’, in Forgacs (ed.), The Gramsci Reader, 113–18; orig. Anon, L’Ordine Nuovo, 2 August 1919. 67 Figures provided by V. Castronovo, cit. in A. Pennacchi, Fascio e martello: viaggio per le città del Duce (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2009), 251.

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of 20,000 or more. Sustained migration of labour became a prominent feature of the Italian industrial age, a phenomenon accompanied by urbanisation and proletarianisation on a scale unmatched since the Renaissance.68 The largest migratory wave was to the Americas: approximately ten million individuals migrated between 1876 and 1924. Between 1900 and 1910, more than two million Italians attempted to migrate to the US. In the ‘Dictionary of Races or Peoples’, issued in 1911 by the US Immigration Commission, Italians were ranked at the bottom of the list of ‘desirable’ migrants, due to their ‘violent, undisciplined and unassimilable’ character. The trend began to wane only after restrictions were imposed, becoming especially harsh beginning in 1924.69 The futurists were well aware that Italy occupied second-rate position in the global contest: the last among the great industrial powers, the first among peripheral ones.70 Perceptions of the country’s technological backwardness and relative fetishisation of technology were further drivers of expatriation. More broadly, migrations engendered by the Industrial Revolutions encompassed a flow of exiles and shrinking of the planet traversed by ever-faster technologies of transport. In modernity, ‘lines of communication and transportation […] extended over unprecedented distances’71 bringing about a new sense of distance. Porous national boundaries were crossed ‘with exceptional ease’.72 Mediated by technology, urbanism and Imperialism, a new sense of distance took hold. If ‘futurism is a European phenomenon’,73 its pursuit of the machine needs to be assessed within the diasporic framework of a ‘migratory modernism’. 1.5 Migratory modernism The machine was one of the most notable ideological and aesthetic frames of reference of European modernism.74 A material object, but also a myth, discipline, imagery, 68 Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos, 15–16. 69 Cit. in A. Meda, Al di là del mito: scrittori italiani in viaggio negli Stati Uniti (Florence: Vallecchi, 2011), 275. 70 P. Valesio, ‘“The most enduring and most honoured name” Marinetti as poet’, in F. T. Marinetti, Selected Poems and Related Prose (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 150. 71 Kern, Culture of Time and Space, 240. 72 Ibid., 194. 73 Trotsky, ‘Futurism’, 112. 74 E.g. despite their dismissal of futurist machine fetishism, the vorticists relied heavily on the machine. Ezra Pound made no secret of his affinity with, and admiration for, Taylorist efficiency and the controlling engineer. See W. Lewis, ‘Automobilism’ (New Weekly, 20 June 1914), cit. by R. Ceserani, ‘La modernolatria, la macchina, la polemica antimacchinista’, in Cianci (ed.), Modernismo/Modernismi, 243: ‘the extraordinary childishness of the Latins over mechanical inventions, aeroplanes, machinery & c., is familiar to anyone who has lived in France or Italy. […] Now, England practically invented this civilisation that Signor Marinetti has come to preach to us about. While Italy was still a Borgia-haunted

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symbol, fetish, totem, posture, pathos formula and ‘synecdoche for the process of industrial modernisation’,75 the machine encompassed a broad semantics. This field fed into modern art and imagination in plural, diverse and contradictory manners, including scientific and pseudo-scientific, as I shall elucidate in the chapters that follow. The machine discourse needs to be situated within the framework of an international, interpenetrated modernism. Echoing Raymond Williams (The Politics of Modernism; 1989), James McFarlane acknowledges that the experience of modernism was one of epochal change and transition characterised by new mobilities, migrations, cosmopolitanism and the rise of the metropolis. McFarlane observes that the pan-European spread of modernism was ‘the product of an era of artistic migration and internationalism […] a time when willing and unwilling expatriations and exiles were common’.76 More recently, geomodernist and postcolonial approaches have nuanced and enriched the study of the global avant-gardes.77 Without a doubt, modernism is a transnational phenomenon and the futurists part and parcel of the transnational avant-garde. Global modernism was a ‘travelling culture’ whose centres of gravity were multiple and located often widely apart, a broad chessboard where individual pieces were both moving and rooted, at once international and local. Borrowing from James Clifford, one could argue that in modernism ‘cultural action, the making and remaking of identities, takes place in the contact zones, along the political and even transgressive intercultural frontiers of nations, peoples, locales’ where location is ‘an itinerary rather than a bounded site – a series of encounters and translations’.78 The challenge to modernism, ‘becomes one of including heterogeneity and global regions in its categories’,79 in line with the reconfigured times and spaces of Imperial capitalism.80 The futuristi embraced the avant-garde’s ‘turn to space’. From early on, they sought international collaborations, joining the flow of mass migration redrafting the social geographies of the industrial age. Their diaspora, of course, correlates with

75 76 77

78 79 80

swamp of intrigue, England was buckling on the brilliant and electric armour of the modern world and sending out her inventions and new spirit across Europe and America.’ Hewitt, Fascist Modernism, 146. J. McFarlane, ‘Preface to the 1991 reprint’, in Bradbury and McFarlane (eds), Modernism, 13. See, to cite but a few, B. Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004); H. Harootunian, Problems of Comparability/Possibilities for Comparative Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); L. Doyle and L. Winkiel, Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005). J. Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 7 and 11 respectively. Cit. in M. Pryse, ‘Afterword: Regional modernism and transnational regionalism’, Modern Fiction Studies, 55:1 (2009), 189. See also Hewitt, Fascist Modernism, 41. Jameson’s interlocking of uneven development of global capitalism and ‘singular’, site-specific modernities offers a further interpretive framework here – see Jameson, Singular Modernity, 12–13.

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wider social and economic factors and forces. The tidal force of global Imperialism engendered social fragmentation and controlled circulation of people and goods in a framework of aggressive annexations. The colonial experience acquired by Italy in the course of the African Campaign of 1911, collapse of the Ottoman Empire and acquisition of Tripoli, Libya and the Dodecanese Islands in 1912 engaged Marinetti and the futurists. Further down the line, the authoritarian turn taken by the Fascists in the mid-1920s prompted further exile and expatriation (see Chapter 4). The notion of ‘travel memory’ was familiar to the futurists, who deployed it as early as at one of their debut exhibitions in Paris at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in February 1912 to illustrate Boccioni’s triptych States of Mind (1911) and Gino Severini’s Souvenirs de voyage (1910–11).81 In the postwar years, futurist artists spilled out into the streets and cities of the wide world. Their exchanges encompass Pannaggi’s at the Bauhaus and De Stijl in Germany and Norway (see section 4.3), Fillia with Léger and Esprit Nouveau (section 5.3), Prampolini’s relations across Western and Eastern Europe (section 5.2), Depero’s pursuit of new markets in the US (section 3.4). The futurists performed, exhibited and established studios and workshops in the capitals of Europe, in tandem with local artists, maintaining extensive international networks, flowing out of studios into factories, bottegas and kitchens. This new mobility followed in the wake of notable precedents, e.g. Picabia and Duchamp, who relocated to the US on the eve of the First World War. The futurist mechanical and urban orientation acted as a trigger to acquire or hone mechanical skills in the highly industrial centres of western capitalism. Depero is a case in point: as in Kafka’s America (1927), Depero’s New York becomes symbolic of utopian technological modernity, a realm populated with cold, utilitarian machines powered by an alien logic of efficiency and waste (see section 3.4). Following extensive first-hand engagement with technology in the First World War, the appeal of a hypertechnological ‘elsewhere’ became compelling. ‘Profound uncertainty’ is a significant marker of mobility.82 Migrations induce, or amplify, loss of identity, decentralisation, delocalisation and rupture. A technological drive fuelled futurist expatriation to industrially advanced societies. The rootlessness of exile was accompanied by a psychological need for control, rigour and regimentation. In its capacity as ‘natural embodiment of energies turned outwards’,83 the machine may be symbolically best placed to redress this uncertainty. Suggesting control and relying on the authority of gesture and material, the machine may well

81 Braun, ‘Vulgarians at the gate’, 16. 82 P. Zanini, Significati del confine (limiti naturali, storici, mentali) (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2000), 70–1. 83 West, Flesh of Steel, 49.

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diffuse chaos, entropy and displacement. An ambivalence typifies the postwar futurist machine: dissipation, fragmentation, splintering, dispersion, deterritorialisation on the one hand, and, on the other, bedrock of discipline and rigorous politics, nationalist or Marxist as the case may be.84 The machine emerges as both dynamic agent of transformation, eliding national boundaries, as well as instrument of coercion, death and destruction. Machine technology is both effusive and liberating and, at once, shrouded in a military and masculine power tainted with destruction (see especially section 2.3). In sum, futurismo needs to be reassessed on the horizontal line. In particular, the mechanical orientation of postwar futurism needs to be regarded in the context of ‘intensive current[s] of mutual exchanges’85 within the international avant-garde (see section 1.6). Futurists’ love of foreign lands (‘esterofilia’) was self-aware, motivated and politically expedient. It extended the gaze forward towards new horizons in an era of epoch-changing shifts and identitarian mergers. Expatriation became a familiar dynamic, consolidating simultaneity and dynamism into spatial trajectories. Ideologically motivated exile brought on further dimensions: risk, urgency, compulsion and a welcome contamination of postwar futurism with constructive, Socialist and revolutionary modernities in Germany, Russia and Eastern Europe (see Chapter 4). 1.6 Futurismo and the machine In this section I shall complete the discussion introduced in ‘The rape of Europa’ concerning the foundations of futurismo. This requires additional consideration since the coordinates of the special relationship between futurism and the machine shifted in the transition to the postwar. This section further prepares the ground for an in-depth discussion of individual and group practices in the chapters that follow. Italian futurism is a complex, polyvalent and networked phenomenon. It was an existential belief system that aimed to rethink artistic practice and revolutionise the nature, scope and import of aesthetic production. Not a ‘monolithic body’,86 it rather encompassed performing, visual and textual art forms, in their own right or amalgamated together, embedding them in the social, industrial and commercial fabric.87 It began with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: instigator, leader and trait d’union between the languages and cultures of Italy and France. Bilingual by birth and transnational by 84 Hewitt, Fascist Modernism, 30. 85 Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 126–7. 86 C. Adams, ‘Historiographical perspectives on 1940s futurism’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 18:4 (2013), 434. 87 See also Apollonio, ‘Introduction’, in Futurist Manifestos, 8.

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instinct, he conceived futurismo first and foremost as a reactive to the past (see Chapter 2). Marinetti constructed his leadership on solid financial and logistical grounds: his lavish injections of cash supported publications, exhibitions, soirées, public speaking and travelling, helping consolidate the European stature of his dynamic group. Marinetti’s talent for drafting incendiary manifestos lies at the roots of futurismo, as is evidenced by his aggressive and iconoclastic Founding and manifesto published in the Parisian daily Le Figaro on 20 February 1909 (see section 2.1). Timely and influential, this pronouncement precipitated our own modern ‘neurosis’.88 The 1909 starting date is convenient but artificial. The chronological boundaries of futurismo are, in fact, notoriously far from easy to pin down. Traditional scholarship considered the futurist experience concluded by the end of the First World War and dismissed activities after 1918,89 following important war casualties such as Boccioni and Sant’Elia, both tragically killed in 1916. In the late 1950s, however, historiography began to question these boundaries, breaking down the walls of the previous ‘picture-centrist’ and ‘Boccioni-centrist’ approach.90 Marinetti himself had disputed the idea of a 1918 terminus and, after his death in 1944, his wife and fellow futurist Benedetta Cappa undertook a campaign to dismantle this received wisdom.91 The terminus remains ill-defined to this day too: Willard Bohn cites Marinetti’s death in 1944 as futurismo’s end-date in a longue durée of futurist style.92 However, Prampolini continued to declare himself a futurista in 1947 and Korompay curated a futurist retrospective in Bologna in 1951 with the determinate purpose to demonstrate the vitality of futurism.93 In recent years Mario Verdone, Enrico Crispolti and Luciano De Maria, among other scholars, have reinvigorated the study of postwar futurism focusing on performance and aerofuturism, with a view to recontextualising it in its capacity as catalyst of the international avant-garde, including Russian futurism, surrealism and dada.94 In particular, the reductive notion that postwar futurism merely fulfilled a rappel à l’ordre needs to be challenged.95 88 Cit. in Lista, F. T. Marinetti: l’anarchiste, 197; orig. in N. Gosling, ‘Birth of a neurosis’, The Observer, 22 February 1959, [n.p.]. 89 E.g. Hultén, Futurismo & Futurismi, 14, and The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, 11; G. de Marchis, Futurismo da ripensare (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2007), 9. 90 Crispolti, ‘The dynamics of futurism’s historiography’, 52. 91 MART, Fondo Depero, letter by Benedetta, 22 August 1954, [n.p. but 3]. See also Larkin, ‘Benedetta and the creation of “second futurism”’, 445–65. 92 Ibid. See also Adams, ‘Historiographical perspectives’, 420. 93 Both in letters to Benedetta: Prampolini’s letter to Benedetta is discussed in Chapter 5. See JPGRIL, Marinetti correspondence and papers, series I, box 4, 4–6, miscellaneous correspondence Korompay/ Benedetta, 9 February 1948, 10 April 1950 and esp. 23 April 1951. 94 See Verdone, Il futurismo, 96 and De Maria, ‘Introduzione’, in Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, LXXX–I. 95 Adamson, ‘Fascinating futurism’, 82: ‘more research will be necessary before we can establish with

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Futurism continued, of course, to display ambiguities and contradictions. While it embraced technology as a locus of progress and imagination, it also invested the machine with the power of a fetish, or, alternatively, harbinger of new social orders and discipline in society. More bohemian than proletarian, and yet ‘a necessary link’ between ‘the creative intelligentsia and the people’,96 futurism never fully resolved the tension between technology and humanism. Its mechanical vision and capacity to address the demands of new and rapidly evolving media, however, administered transformative blows to a lethargic postunitarian culture. Its intellectual novelty needs to be measured against the hegemony of Benedetto Croce’s post-Hegelian idealist philosophy in Italy. Grounded in Vico’s dichotomy between ‘technology’ and ‘culture’, Croce’s theoretical apparatus upheld aesthetics and history to the detriment of science and its applications, relegating scientific knowledge to an extra-cultural sphere and depriving it of conceptual and critical validation. Prior to futurismo, technology had featured sparsely in modern Italian literature. Vincenzo Monti’s poetic ode ‘To Mr. Montgolfier’ (1783) and a sonnet of 1794 by Giuseppe Parini marvelled at the hot-air balloon. Giosuè Carducci’s hymn to ‘Satan’ (first published 1865) and especially ‘Alla stazione in una mattina d’autunno’ (in Odi barbare; 1877) ambivalently welcomed and dreaded the introduction of the ‘satanic’ steam train and locomotive, taken at face value as heralds of industrial modernity. In this environment, the futurist commitment to applied technology was tantamount to a terrorist attack on the cultural establishment of Italy. Investing technology with transformative power and the machine with new dignity, the futurists broke the monopoly of Croce’s idealism, introducing a line of thinking leading to fertile ramifications (e.g. Carlo Bernari, Tre operai (1934), Romano Bilenchi, Il capofabbrica (1935), Leonardo Sinisgalli’s Civiltà delle macchine (1953) and Paolo Volponi, Memoriale (1962). Before the war, the futurist machine emerged in verse and narrative prose – Marinetti’s ‘automobilism’ and eagerness for electricity (see sections 2.1 and 2.5) were matched with the pedestrian poetry of Folgore’s Il canto dei motori (1912). Luciano Folgore (1888–1966) was a machine fanatic described as a man ‘attached to the machine as to an inexhaustible teat [sic]’.97 The machine and its arsenal of pistons, gears, cogwheels and visibly interconnected components emerge in Folgore’s forgettable verses as a vacuous legacy of a positivist culture, symbolic of a modernity as formulaic as it is generic.98 Marinetti toyed with a view of machines as political agents confidence how much the futurism of the 1930s should be seen as regime propaganda and how much as a continuing effort at creating a futurist mass culture.’ 96 Trotsky, ‘Futurism’, 137. 97 L. De Libero, cit. in C. Salaris, Luciano Folgore e le avanguardie con lettere e inediti futuristi (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1997), 370. 98 See also G. Papini, ‘Il significato del futurismo’, Lacerba, I:3 (1 February 1913), 7.

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releasing individuals from the obligation of labour borrowed from Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law.99 Even though cloaked in conceptual naiveté and vacuous hyperbolic imagery, however, the industrial machine and the social and political implications of mechanisation entered the Italian literary arena for the first time here.100 Acting as a symbolic watershed, though far from killing off futurismo, the war prompted Marinetti to cast his net wider. The circle who had gathered around the review Lacerba before the war was replaced by a new group attached to the periodical Italia Futurista edited by Bruno Corra and Emilio Settimelli, who broadened the initial interest in the visual arts to the performing arts. Corra and Settimelli issued the manifestos Teatro sintetico (1915), Cinematografia futurista (1916) and a Dance manifesto (1917). Occultist and theosophical theories and practices rushed in, hoping to eradicate outdated science and inspiring, to some extent, surrealist outcomes (e.g. the manifesto La scienza futurista).101 Public politics remained an arena of vociferous intervention and confrontation: the first manifesto of the futurist political party came out in 1918 (see Introduction). Art was tasked with the mission of provoking and sustaining social and political change, precipitating ‘a futurist reconstruction of the universe’. Aesthetic and ethical values were re-forged alongside radical technological, scientific and economic developments.102 A ‘popular’ postwar provided continuity with a ‘heroic’ prewar, as Bohn suggests.103 Challenges to the integrity of the original group persuaded Marinetti to reach out to a diverse, even eclectic and eccentric, constituency. Gravitating more loosely around its creator, futurismo witnessed the emergence of numerous independents,104 some of whom worked on-and-off under futurist banners. Both novices and veterans dispersed. Many were attracted by technologically advanced centres of power. Together with the war casualties mentioned above, prominent defections caused a rupture. Gino Severini and Carlo Carra moved to Paris, working within or alongside cubism. Others, such as Giacomo Balla (1871–1958), straddled the futurist experience maintaining independent status, dipping in and out at will. Not only did Balla train some of the most significant exponents of the postwar group (e.g. Depero, Pannaggi and Paladini), under his steering, the machine’s visual and kinetic logic became 99 See P. Lafargue’s influential Le droit à la paresse (1880; trans. 1883 as The Right to Be Lazy). 100 Meda, Al di là del mito, 201. 101 See S. Cigliana, Futurismo esoterico: contributi per una storia dell’irrazionalismo italiano tra Otto e Novecento (Naples: Liguori, 2002), 273–82. 102 Cf. also Braun, ‘Vulgarians at the gate’, 1. 103 Bohn, The Other Futurism, 5: a ‘heroic’ prewar phase (1909–19) and a ‘popular’ postwar period (1920–44). 104 See also Adamson, ‘Fascinating futurism’, 83.

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paramount. Balla importantly linked the machine’s movement with manufacture and production (see also Chapter 3).105 Perfecting its mechanical orientation, postwar futurismo disseminated the machine in a wide range of figurative and discursive practices.106 Convincing articulations began to emerge in theatre, music, the visual arts and architecture, cinema and photography. The machine’s appearance, function and productive regimes came prominently to the fore, over and beyond ‘automobilism’.107 The First World War had witnessed sustained interactions between humans and war machinery in the battlefield (see section 2.3), a compelling testimony to the lethal import of largescale technologies of conflict. The postwar machine embodied the thrust of reconstruction predicated on industrial production. Science and technology stimulated new reflections on the social and political compromise between machines and capitalism and related issues of power relations, hierarchy, ownership and control. Operating on an unprecedented global scale, machines and humans found pathways of mutual exchange and dialogue. The 1920s in particular witnessed a dispersion: Marinetti’s relocation of operations from Milan to non-sectarian Rome in 1925 accelerated the centrifugal trend. Tributaries and distributaries began to flow in and out of futurismo. Alternative and polemical voices emerged. Theatre, in particular, became both a site of continuity and, via biomechanics, of radical rupture too (see sections 4.3 and 5.1b). Positions spanned worship with ideological overtones to outright demonisation of the machine. Some practitioners turned towards constructivism (see Paladini in section 4.2), others sought the lesson of purism (see Prampolini and Fillia in sections 5.1 and 5.3), others still gravitated towards the Bauhaus (see Pannaggi in section 4.3), dada and the metaphysical school (see the late Paladini in section 4.2b and Munari in section 6.5). German impressionism, Italian novecento and French purism were influential, repositioning art towards a neoclassical rigour and discipline predicated on metallic 105 Printing giant letters on the backdrop and wings and lining up actors who represented parts of a typesetting machine, performing a series of mechanised movements in imitation of a typesetter in motion, Balla’s play Printing Press (1914) may have been the first example of mechanical theatre – cf. C. J. Taylor, Futurism: Politics, Painting and Performance (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1974, 1979), 39. See also Balla’s abstract production of Diaghilev’s ballet Feu d’artifice of 1917 featuring pre-programmed lights and luminous, crystal-like forms on stage. A piano was literally ‘playing the light’ as Balla had replaced piano keys with electric switches/transformers in order that the performance consist of variations of light – see M. Fagiolo Dell’Arco, La scenografia dalle sacre rappresentazioni al futurismo (Florence: Sansoni, 1973), 30. 106 G. Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre 1909–44 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 403. 107 Ibid., 407–8: ‘The idealized images of the Mechanical Age, which had been presented in the manifestos of the 1910s […], became mitigated by a far more complex and contradictory attitude towards technology.’ See also S. Vinall, ‘The emergence of the machine imagery in Marinetti’s poetry’, Romance Studies, 6 (1985), 92.

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and geometric clarity, abstraction, symmetry and automatism.108 The ‘astonishing incidence of random encounter’109 regarded by McFarlane as one of the markers of modernism is clearly also the compass of futurist mechanical aesthetic.110 Aware of contemporary innovations and eager to cast their net beyond national confines, the futurists brought their mechanical practices to visual and constructive fruition engaging first-hand with the machine as architects, engineers, factory workers, foremen, stage managers, photographers and dancers. Mass communication, consumerism, new forms of art sales and marketing were consistent with these practices.111 In the ‘roaring years of mechanical art’ (1922–25)112 futurismo consolidated its connections, registering a peak of membership and diffusion between the 1920s and 1930s, becoming an ‘institution which functioned better than any other artistic network of the period’.113 Unabated sponsor and leader, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti remained at the helm of futurismo.

108 In the essay ‘Aprés le cubisme’ (1918), Ozenfant and Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) argued that the machine governed artistic endeavour. In the first issues of the review L’Esprit Nouveau (1920), they further contended that the machine’s logic could be unlocked in a search for order embedded in human endeavour. Under new formal and compositional rules, the purist canvas was held together by an armature of balanced and harmonious proportions. Human beings were regarded as perfected and adapted machines stemming from natural selection – see J. Golding and C. Green (eds), Léger and Purist Paris (London: Tate Gallery, 1970), 50–1. 109 McFarlane, ‘The mind of modernism’, in Bradbury and McFarlane (eds), Modernism, 78. 110 G. Lista, Futurisme – abstraction et modernité (Paris: trans / form, 1982), 34–8. 111 See also Lista, Arte e politica, 21–2. 112 G. Lista, Dal futurismo all’immaginismo: Vinicio Paladini ([n.p.]: Il cavaliere azzurro, 1988), 33. See also Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 125. 113 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 526.

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2 Mechanical mach(in)ismo: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Under the skin, the body is an overheated factory. (A. Artaud, ‘Van Gogh, the man suicided by society’, 1947)

2.1 Constructing the futurist machine Filippo Tommaso Emilio Angelo Carlo Marinetti (1876–1944) was the founder, sponsor and primum mobile of futurismo. Futurism was his creature: intellectually, structurally and financially. Marinetti was an indefatigable traveller and the product of a modern cosmopolitan upbringing. A hypnotic and effusive orator, deftly seizing opportunities when they arose, Marinetti was also an agitator, situationist, accountant, publisher and writer. He was a polyglot with rarefied tastes leading a swanky lifestyle. His ambition was totalitarian on a global scale.1 Marinetti’s transatlantic connections afforded him ubiquity, flair and authority: his was a global household name. His personal fortune, amassed by his father, an Italian civil engineer who had worked for the commercial office of the Suez Canal and as personal attorney of Muhammad Tawfīq Pasha, funded a travelling lifestyle for himself and his group. Alone in the position to sustain the financial viability of his enterprise, Marinetti periodically protected it from financial dips, fluctuations and loss. Not only did Marinetti sponsor events and initiatives. His loans and gifts to fellow futurists were generous, on occasion extending to their families. This funding structure, extending well into the 1940s (see Chapters 3 and 5), lies at the root of a network of protections (material in the JPGRIL testifies to the extent and ramifications of Marinetti’s cash-in-hand gift giving, even in the face of implausible motivations)2 and may be further echoed in his sexual politics (see sections 2.3 and 2.4).

1 C. Salaris, Marinetti editore (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 9–10, and H. B. Samueli, ‘The future of futurism’, Fortnightly Review, April 1913, 731. 2 JPGRIL, F. T. Marinetti, special collections, correspondence, papers and student notebooks, series I and III.

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In 1893 Marinetti left his native Alexandria in Egypt and moved to Paris to complete his Baccalaureate. In the ville lumière he ‘welcomed the entropy and dizzying pace of modern life’,3 swiftly publishing his first collection of free verse, Les vieux marins (The Old Sailors; 1898). His assiduous attendance at avant-garde literary circles and energetic networking led him to secure a prestigious platform for his Founding and manifesto of futurism, first published in the prominent Parisian daily Le Figaro on 20 February 1909.4 Paris was an ideal location for initiatives aspiring to international status and circulation. Combined with Marinetti’s personal fortune, Paris and its theatres were instrumental in throwing the first futurist initiatives into relief. A first exhibition of futurist painting went up at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in 1912. Futurismo was preparing to challenge cubism. In 1913, together with the painter Umberto Boccioni, Marinetti proceeded to London. He footed the bill at the Savoy hotel on the Strand, gave a lecture, exhibited and sold paintings at the Sackville gallery, and clamoured on the streets of London alongside the suffragettes. In the same year Marinetti also returned to Berlin, previously visited in 1912, where Boccioni exhibited at the gallery Der Sturm. The two futurists mingled with the avant-garde in the long evenings at the Café Des Westens. In January 1914 Marinetti visited St Petersburg, then Moscow, where he met Vladimir Mayakovski and the cubist-futurist circle, vociferously arguing with them. In a handful of years following from futurism’s tumultuous coming into being, Marinetti’s presentism cemented its international reputation. The velocity and spread of futurismo’s success shocked intellectual circles in Italy.5 Having advocated Italy’s ‘intervention’ in the First World War, Marinetti reached the front on 21 July 2015. Together with five fellow futurists (Boccioni, Luigi Russolo, Sant’Elia, Sironi and Piatti) he joined the only volunteer corps officially recognised by the high command of the Italian Army: the Lombard Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists and Motorcyclists (see section 2.3).6 Shortly after the end of the war, on 16 September 1919, Marinetti and a further futurist group (Guido Keller, Mino Somenzi, Carli and Drago) were in Fiume (now Rijeka), supporting the Italian Regency of Carnaro. A collection of Anarchists, revolutionary syndicalists and militant nationalists followed the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio who had seized the city on 12 September 1919. ‘Fiume

3 Adamson, ‘Fascinating futurism’, 81. 4 The manifesto had appeared in Gazzetta dell’Emilia on 5 February 1909. Only after its publication in Le Figaro, however, did it circulate internationally – see B. Buscaroli (ed.), 5 febbraio 1909 Bologna avanguardia futurista (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2009). 5 G. Agnese, Marinetti una vita esplosiva (Milan: Camunia, 1990), 148. 6 S. Daly, Italian Futurism and the First World War (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 50.

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became the capital of a national revolution.’7 Marinetti spent two weeks watching developments in the contended city and the dissident military and legionnaires who practised alternative politics, as well as erotically charged and drug-fuelled naturist lifestyles (see also Introduction). The heady mix of technology, vitalism and counter politics practised in Fiume proved fascinating for Marinetti who admired, if ambivalently, D’Annunzio’s charisma and familiarity with machinery.8 Marinetti emerged to the reconfigured geography of postwar Europe with renewed faith in futurismo. More than ever before, he stressed the international vocation of his project and reoriented operations from France to Central and Eastern Europe. Having previously rejected a number of would-be acolytes, he proceeded to recover and regroup them in the aftermath of the war. Marinetti ensured that futurismo would achieve federal status and become home to a set of forward-thinking artists gathered together under a more capacious umbrella. He rebranded it ‘global futurism’ (see also section 1.6).9 In 1926 Marinetti travelled to Romania, followed by Brazil and Argentina. Futurism was gathering momentum in these countries and he was eager to support local branches and initiatives. He was welcomed with public acclaim, especially in Buenos Aires, thanks to the efforts of Piero Illari, the former general editor of the futurist weekly Rovente who had settled in Argentina in 1924.10 Futurism’s success in Central and Latin America through the 1920s is largely ascribable to the mechanical evolution of futurismo after the war. Japan, Portugal, Latin America and Hungary were also receptive to Marinetti’s credentials, welcoming his visits with fanfare.11 Later trips included tours of Ethiopia (1935) and Russia (1940). Marinetti understood the dislocated migrant identity that characterises industrial societies, both as an Egypt-born Italian, albeit from a privileged background, and as an organiser and promoter always on tour. Marinetti’s cosmopolitan mindset reflected his social background and aspirations but futurism functioned as a corrective. His tours were national and global at once, marking the end of an era of squandering

7 Lyttelton, ‘Futurism, politics, and society’, 64. 8 The complexities of Marinetti’s rivalry with D’Annunzio emerge in a batch of letters penned by Mario Carli in JPGRIL, Marinetti, student notebooks, series I, box 1, n. 32. See also Salaris, Alla festa della rivoluzione, 77. 9 Marinetti introduced ‘global futurism’ (orig. futurismo mondiale) in a conference of 1924 in Paris; see M. E. Versari, ‘Enlisting and updating: Ruggero Vasari and the shifting coordinates of futurism in Eastern and Central Europe’, International Yearbook of Futurism Studies – Futurism in Eastern and Central Europe, I:1 (2011), n. 7, 280. 10 Agnese, Marinetti, 238; Salaris, Marinetti editore, 262–3. 11 R. Paris, ‘L’Italia fuori d’Italia’, in R. Romano and C. Vivanti (eds), Storia d’Italia: dall’Unità a oggi (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), IV, 509–818.

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the proceeds of exploitative industrial labour.12 The affluent Marinetti ‘embodied the cosmopolitan spirit of modernism (the crossing of cultural boundaries and national frontiers) in his life experience’.13 Underneath the glistening surface of the mechanical means of transport he idealised, however, lies Marinetti’s attempt to engage with the morphing paradigm of modernity itself.14 The shiny automobile embodied Marinetti’s belief that technology was set out to radically change the way we live. Machines were the bedrock of a new heuristic. The flip side of Marinetti’s machine, an outwardly projected locus of aesthetic expression, was its ‘paradigmatic expression of control’ nurturing an embryonic totalitarian gender politics (see section 2.4).15 Furthermore, if the machine is typified by uniformity, automatism and seriality, Marinetti’s modus operandi was anything but, favouring instead exclusivity, the bout of genius and the irrational life principle. Tasking machines with ‘dramatising his own ego’,16 he invested them with sacred powers. Like his rival D’Annunzio, Marinetti attempted to decipher the machine’s symbolic and metaphysical grammar.17 He anthropomorphised, eroticised and fetishised modern technology in escapist function. As Carlo Emilio Gadda observed, Marinetti enjoyed the din of machines and added vacuously to their clamour.18 Marinetti’s techno-enthusiasm was seeded in the nineteenth century, when mechanical means of transportation meant progress. Machines embodied velocity, furnishing humans with wheels to run and wings to fly. The car Marinetti famously crashed into a ditch, describing the experience in detail in his Founding and manifesto, became vehicle of the allegorical journey of the pilgrim through life. The man of reason must drown in the murky water of an industrial Lethe in order to resurface to the futurist mechanical life. The demise of the poet staged here is a necessary transition to a cyborg human. After the crash, in real life, Marinetti’s transport needs were taken care of by a professional chauffeur. Behind his macho posturing, Marinetti remained reluctant to operate machines in person. In Figure 2.1, portraying Marinetti astride an agricultural machine, the stiff stance and stunned expression of the sitter betray lack of confidence, suspicion and alarm. 12 A. M. Ludovici, ‘The Italian futurists and their traditionalism’, Oxford and Cambridge Review, July 1912, 122. 13 C. Sartini Blum, The Other Modernism: F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), 7. 14 A. Frattini, ‘F. T. Marinetti: l’industria e le macchine nella sua invenzione poetica’, Lettere Italiane, LI:3 (1999), 434–48. 15 Hewitt, Fascist Modernism, 148. See also 137. 16 Vinall, ‘The emergence of machine imagery’, 92–3. 17 A. Asor Rosa, La cultura, in R. Romano and C. Vivanti (eds), Storia d’Italia, IV (II) (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 1296. 18 C. E. Gadda, ‘L’uomo e la macchina’, in Opere III: saggi giornali favole. 1 (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), 256.

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2.1 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti on a tractor, date unknown

A contemporary of the Founding and manifesto, E. M. Forster’s short story ‘The machine stops’ (1909) looked beyond technologies of utility and transport to focus instead on a complex technocratic network, a central power station mediating between humans through the bloodless arteries of an immaterial power.19 Forster’s sophisticated apprehension of the machine as instrument of alteration, simulation and manipulation of reality, was alien to the circumspect Marinetti. Marinetti had, in sum, limited conceptual investment in the social, political and economic agency of material machines. His approach was largely on the abstract level and determined by personal motivation: the symbolist imprint of his French college education and the family legacy of the First Industrial Revolution from whence his father’s personal wealth hailed. In the following sections I shall discuss Marinetti’s first-hand engagement with tanks and machine guns in the course of two World Wars (section 2.3) and the sexual-political underpinnings of these associations (section 2.4). In a post-romantic ‘world where machinery was part and parcel of human life’20 technology was construed as a ‘vital machine’, a hybrid of organic and mechanic. I examine the porous boundaries between mechanical and electrical technologies, leading to experimental radio broadcasts (section 2.5) and Marinetti’s enduring interest in the chemical composition of matter (section 2.6). First and foremost, I shall explore the imaginary capital accrued by machines after the First Industrial Revolution and its enduring call on Marinetti’s vision (section 2.2). 19 E. M. Forster, ‘The machine stops’, in Collected Short Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 109–46. 20 R. Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1980), 102.

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2.2 Imaginary capital French literary culture underpinned and modulated Marinetti’s apprehension of machines. Marinetti was a ‘gallicised Italian’21 educated at the François-Xavier college run by French Jesuit priests in his native Alexandria. His precocious literary interests homed in on the nineteenth-century novel, including Socialist sensationalist narratives by Eugène Sue.22 Early influences encompass decadent and symbolist fiction where the machine was a notable feature. Marinetti’s collection Destruction (1904) and, especially, the poem ‘To the automobile’ (1905), marking his transition from symbolism to futurism, delineated the ‘voluptuous fusion of the passengers’ bodies with the powerful metal monster’.23 His verses resonate of Paul Adam’s novel Le troupeau de Clarisse (1897) which describes a car journey. Unlike Adam’s car, however, Marinetti’s vehicle has no social consequence.24 The Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren, who vividly captured modern urban nightmares in Les villes tentaculaires (The Tentacular Cities; 1895) was a further influence.25 Last but not least, Baudelaire’s visions of chaotic metropolitan life, traffic speeding down large boulevards, crowds in fast motion and lurid neon streetlights provided much inspiration. Transport machines feature prominently in Marinetti’s Founding and manifesto and traverse his entire oeuvre. Marinetti borrowed Carducci’s ambivalent stance on the ‘satanic, monstrous steam train’ (see section 1.6): hostile incision on the natural and social landscape and, at once, irresistible conduit of modernity.26 The most enduring influence, however, was Émile Zola (1840–1902). Marinetti was especially drawn to Zola’s entanglement of transport (especially railways), communication (telegraph), intelligence and policing (the judiciary), and ‘the violent erotics these crossings generate’.27 In 1878, two years after Marinetti’s birth, the idioms ‘fonctionner’ (to function) and ‘fonctionnement’ (running or working) gained access to the dictionary of the 21 G. Apollinaire, ‘Art news: the futurists’, 201, cit. in Braun, ‘Vulgarians at the gate’, 10. 22 In a letter to his elder brother, written in a mix of French and Italian, Marinetti compiles his wish reading list: ‘Je voudrai que tu m’achetes ou tu fasse acheter par Papà les ouvrages suivant: Eugenie Grandet de Balzac; Corinne de Madame de Stael; Les memoirès de Judas de F. Petruccelli della Gattinara; L’adolescenza de Achille Mauri; Les proletaires de Eugene Sue.’ JPGRIL, F. T. Marinetti student notebooks and other papers, series I, box 1, n. 3, letter to Leone, 26 August 1891, [2]. 23 Vinall, ‘The emergence of machine imagery’, 81. 24 Ibid., 81; see also 78. 25 Vinall, ‘Marinetti, Soffici and French literature’, in Berghaus (ed.), International Futurism in Arts and Literature, 26. Later renditions may also be attributed to Verhaeren’s influence, e.g. Les visages de la vie (1899). 26 Maurice Renard’s sci-fi novel Dr Lerne – Undergod (1908), featuring a mad scientist who successfully installs a human brain on an automobile, may also have fed into Marinetti’s ardour for cars. Further influences include Ghil, Beauduin, Huysmans, Cendrars and Mallarmé. 27 Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, 18.

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Académie Française. The nomenclature reflected the increasing reliance on machines in French industry. By then, Zola had brought out disenchanted and meticulous portraits of the social and individual impact of the Industrial Revolution in France. His novel La bête humaine (The Beast Within; 1890), in particular, constructs a mythical template to the modern imaginary of the machine.28 The erotic dimension was key. Erotic machines were familiar to French culture at least since the eighteenth century, when the Marquis de Sade devised mechanical contraptions in the service of erotic exchanges within coercive power structures. Zola’s personification of the machine, in animal and human form, breathing heavily and belching smoke and soot from its clanging, excreting metallic belly, a triumph of constructive and sexual mechanics, captured Marinetti’s imagination. This is evidenced by the Oedipal car crash described in the Founding and manifesto as well as later writings, e.g. the play Locomotives (1926–27). Eleven engine drivers, each one in charge of a locomotive, feature in this divertissement, including a character named ‘the seducer of trains’.29 As the plot unfolds, human and mechanical bodies engage in repeated to-ings and fro-ings, mergers and detachments. Sexual encounters between humans and machines mirror the mechanical exchanges of trains and locomotives on rail tracks. Marinetti’s conceptual trajectory further follows Zola’s progressive move towards abstraction, where the machine becomes a synecdoche for movement and functionality.30 This shift led Zola to devise a renewed figurative and semantic set: no longer clunky towering engines, but clean, silent, bright, luminous objects. Smaller and self-contained, Zola’s machine stands for redeemed technology.31 Marinetti followed suit. His focus on electricity and accompanying glowing imagery will eventually instigate a new metaphysics of technology: disengaged, dematerialised and heavenly (see section 2.5). Abstract and programmatic, sentimental and erotic,32 a hologram projected against the bombastic languor of his prose, the machine is the protagonist. Marinetti’s automobile is supple, smooth and readily steered: a motor machine surcharged with erotic overtones. Marinetti deploys the nouns ‘machine’ and ‘automobile’ inter28 J. Noiray, Le romancier et la machine: l’image de la machine dans le roman français (1850–1900) (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1981), I, 184 and 233. 29 Marinetti, Locomotive, in Teatro, ed. J. T. Schnapp (Milan: Oscar Mondadori, 2004), 456. Samuel Butler’s ‘fertile union between two steam engines’ may also be at work here – see Butler, ‘Darwin among the machines’, 185. Depero’s ballet Anihccam del 3000 (1924), featuring a sensual locomotive in love with a stationmaster, is a further antecedent. 30 Noiray, Le romancier et la machine, 474. 31 Ibid., 477–90. 32 See also a 1931 letter of Vasari to Jannelli, cit. in M. E. Versari, ‘Per una mitologia macchinista’, in R. Vasari, L’angoscia delle macchine e altre sintesi futuriste (Palermo: :duepunti, 2009), 143.

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changeably, based on the semantic overlap in the Italian noun ‘macchina’, and also as an expedient to translate classical myth into modern language (e.g. the car is a ‘new Pegasus’; Mafarka’s mechanical son Gazurmah is a ‘new Icarus’). Switching from the masculine employed in the Founding and manifesto to the feminine pronoun in 1923, Marinetti’s machine looms large prompting ambivalent cyborg-like figurations where the female body is a pleasure machine poised between Eros and Thanatos (see sections 2.3 and 2.4).33 If the body in modernity is seduced by mechanical power, the motorcar will paradoxically double up as a womb and a phallic power symbol.34 2.3 The First World War and technology The body of war is both the product and commodity of serial industrial production. The war environment is saturated with technology and mechanical prostheses, automatic and destructive, reconfiguring the human sensorium mechanically. Marinetti regarded the war as an energised arena where human soldiers and war machines become conflated, including erotically, a platform of fraught sexual politics. The technologised battlefields of the First World War complicated Marinetti’s outlook. The machine became aligned with a patriarchal machismo eventually borrowed by the Fascist leader in his virile discourse and posturing. This section elucidates Marinetti’s trajectory from war machine to macho. Mechanics, machines and military engineering have historically been integral to conflict and warfare. One of the first mentions of a ‘machina’ as war implement is in Quintus Ennius (second century bc). One century later, Vitruvius described war machines as assemblages of composition (‘compositio’) and movement (‘motus’). The anonymous treatise De Rebus Bellicis (fourth century ad) offered a technical and economic rationalisation of the art of war, including standardised deployment of war machines in place of troops. It was not, however, until the First World War that mechanical technology played a pivotal role, so much so that it would acquire bellicist status in its own right and become inherent to conflict from then onwards. For the first time in human history, systematic, controlled and professional employment of technology both characterised and legitimised human warfare and slaughter. In the First World War, a battle between machines and nature was staged on a landscape pockmarked by roads, tunnels, telegraph wires, railways, waterpipes, cable cars.35 The front ‘artificialised’ nature and reconstructed it mechanically. Soldiers

33 Noiray, Le romancier et la machine, 387–404. 34 M. McLuhan, ‘Husband’s choice’, in The Mechanical Bride, 84: ‘there is widespread acceptance of the car as a womb symbol and, paradoxically enough, as a phallic power symbol’. 35 Daly, Italian Futurism and the First World War, 67.

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became mechanised in a Darwinian bid to inflict death so as to avert their own demise. The war: altered sensory regimes principally by redefining distance and proximity, […] assaulting the senses through the speed and spectacle of devastation with effects that lingered long after demobilisation. With the increased acceleration of projectiles, planes and vehicles, the war created a perceptual field in which messages and images invaded the senses, pushing human capacity for registering events to its limits. […] the First World War also dramatically lessened the distance between events and their perception/registration by making them almost instantaneous.36

Visual prostheses and optical devices altered Gestalt, turning the Renaissance perceptive logic upside down.37 The tank, in particular, was the protagonist of this altered visual field. Tanks were ‘automotive forts’ redrafting the spatial extension of the battlefield, ensconcing the animal body of the soldier under a metallic body whose superhuman performativity annihilated space and time.38 The tank’s mechanical-erotic implications were not lost on Marinetti, as will be elucidated below. War became the theatre of dynamism, a spectacular force captured by artists in visual and textual flashes, fragments of a reality in the throes of perpetual motion and change: ‘the simultaneous drama of the age of simultaneity’.39 While time became homogenised, ticking by the synchronic movement of wrist watches set to the shared time of battle, soldiers were enslaved to machines big and small. Soldiers became machines: their bodies were prosthetically melded with machines which increased human capability.40 A deafening and chaotic battlefield forcibly reduced the human body itself to a battlefield. The incessant racket of war machinery all but silenced human voice. Whole armies were made up of human cogs in a mechanical apparatus. Reified, de-individualised, robotised soldiers connected with machines as workers did on the Taylorist moving conveyor belt. Anthony Giddens argues that the systematisation of military techniques, especially as concerns the deskilled rank and file, was a form of Taylorism ante litteram. Soldiers were grouped together by technical skills and tasked with repeating sequences 36 T. C. Campbell, ‘“Infinite remoteness”: Marinetti, Bontempelli, and the emergence of modern Italian visual culture’, MLN Italian Issue, 120:1 (2005), 114. 37 Campbell sees a three-pronged strategy in the alteration of visual culture, through enhancements or alterations in the technologies of sighting, communication and reproduction – ibid., 116. 38 P. Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology [1977] (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006), 78–9 and 84. 39 Kern, Culture of Time and Space, 295; see also 288–9. 40 See also Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men, 369; I. Bartsch, ‘L’uomo meccanizzato nell’ideologia del futurismo’, in Crispolti (ed.), Futurismo 1909–44, 25–31.

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of single activities at regular intervals, responding simultaneously to preordained command instructions.41 Synchronised with scientific precision, Engels’ and Babeuf’s mechanised proletarian military were a telluric force propelled forward like projectiles in a landscape thick with industrial artillery.42 Rather than reflecting solely the social and class struggle, however, the war machine ‘ontologises struggle itself’.43 The externally controlled body of war itself was a colossal machine, propelled forward by the unstoppable rhythm of technology. The First World War provided Dos Passos with lessons in social regimentation. For Stearns, it was a lens through which an industrial nation could be observed descending into inhumanity.44 For Marinetti, instead, the First World War was a stimulating social and personal compass, raw nerve and self-discipline, and instrument of aggressive Imperialism. Steering futurismo, Marinetti regarded war as the ultimate field of agitational and situationist politics, ‘earthly paradise’,45 a temple where collective initiation rituals into mechanical modernity were played out. War was, literally, industrial modernity in action. The ultimate site of metamorphosis of human into mechanical, warfare translated the governance of speed into military industrial logistics.46 Marinetti omitted to acknowledge the extent of his intellectual debt to the popular journalist Mario Morasso (1871–1938).47 In La nuova guerra: armi, combattenti, battaglie (1914) Morasso had eloquently spoken in favour of the industrial prowess of the war machine. Morasso entertained an organic notion of the roboticised soldier, agent of global mechanised war within a colossal and well-oiled war machine.48 The symbolic marriage of war with machine technology propagated by Morasso and influential journalists of the time left a profound impression on Marinetti and fellow futurists. Incited by Morasso’s vision, Marinetti became dazzled with mechanical prosthetics, metallic shine, glamour and virility. The glamour of Morasso’s industrial machine, engine of historical and social progress, seduced the futurists further with the lure of economic and Imperial primacy in the strife between competing nations, reinforcing the notion of a civilising mission of western technology. Marinetti’s war A. Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 113–14. Virilio, Speed and Politics, 57. Hewitt, Fascist Modernism, 142. See West, Flesh of Steel, 112. C. Wagstaff, ‘Dead man erect: F. T. Marinetti, L’alcova d’acciaio’, in H. Klein (ed.), The First World War in Fiction (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1976), 156. 46 Virilio, Speed and Politics, 158 and passim. 47 Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination, 16. 48 M. Morasso, La nuova guerra: armi, combattenti, battaglie (Milan: Treves, 1914), 169 and 159. Morasso prefigured here contemporary warfare where technologised humans control drones and ground robots via secure web portals. 41 42 43 44 45

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carried none of the disillusions haunting the generation of 1914, for whom the dehumanising horrors of trench warfare undermined an ‘acceptance of machines as the measure of men’.49 Borrowing from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique (Zoological Philosophy; 1809), Marinetti’s Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine (1910–11) had argued that the mechanical was a conduit of human multiplication. In the 1915 manifesto War sole hygiene of the world, Marinetti had further visualised a metallic environment inhabited by men with flesh made of steel. A correlation between the inevitability of war and metallisation of human flesh with regressive erotic overtones was already at work in these early works and re-surfaced later, as we shall see below (section 2.4).50 In the manifesto La guerra elettrica (orig. 1910; repub. 1917) the synesthetic war triggered a unified vision of human experience where the senses interpenetrate, prefiguring a ‘Total theatre’.51 In a country ruled by machines, organic bodies are replaced with metal, beginning with the female body. Cendrars’s simultaneous poem Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France (1913) collapsed sexual appetite and warfare in a triumph of technology, urbanism and war.52 Other notable precedents were Duchamp and Picabia who aligned technology with allusions to human morphology and sexuality. In Duchamp’s work Large Glass or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (orig. 1915) and Picabia’s Paroxism of Suffering (1915) and The Fiancée (1916–18), cogs and wheels became symbolic of a joyless and mechanistic sexual act (see also section 2.4). European wartime literature was prone to eroticise the war – German expressionism is a case in point. The war travelogue L’Alcova d’acciaio (Steel Alcove; 1921) best articulates Marinetti’s investment in war machinery as a ‘vehicle of liberation on both the macro-(national) and micro-(biological) levels’.53 The tank, in particular, is posited here as a symbol of unlimited erotics, sexual prowess and desire. Haunted by ‘the spectre of the damaged body of the worker-soldier’,54 Marinetti focuses on the 49 Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men, 401. The reliability of Marinetti’s war reports, however, has been questioned by recent scholarship – see S. Bragato, ‘F. T. Marinetti’s construction of World War I narratives (1915)’, Annali di italianistica: The Great War & the Modernist Imagination in Italy, 33 (2015), 115–30. 50 See De Maria, ‘Introduzione’, XLVI. For ‘metallisation’ see also Schnapp, 18BL, 124–39. 51 M. Kirkby and V. Nes Kirkby, Futurist Performance (New York: PAJ, 1986), 90; Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre 539–40; Berghaus, ‘The futurist conception of Gesamtkunstwerk and Marinetti’s total theatre’, Italogramma, 4 (2012), http://italogramma.elte.hu/sites/default/files/cikkek/letoltheto/pdf/ Italogramma_Sul%20fil_283–302_Berghaus (accessed 28 July 2018), 294. 52 Perloff, Futurist Moment, 29. 53 Hewitt, Fascist Modernism, 146–7. 54 H. Foster, Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2004), 114.

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‘doubly-unable body of the proletarian soldier. Deprived, as he has always been, of will, he now requires physical assistance from a vehicular prosthesis in order to accomplish his historical mission.’55 The tank is this prosthesis or ‘steel alcove’: a metallic carapace and mechanical cocoon offering ensconcement and protection. Part coffin, part site of erotic encounters, this war machine revolutionised the art of war forever. The tank was introduced in 1916 to break the stalemate of immobilised trench warfare. It was compact and self-contained. Its mechanical apparatus protected rather than threatened men’s vulnerable bodies in battle, making one body with the crew inside, limbs and tentacles of an articulated mechanical creature.56 Although a limited number of soldiers actually saw tanks in action, civilians became familiar with them from screenings of tank films beginning in 1917,57 and we know from the Taccuini (Notebooks) that Marinetti went to the cinema regularly during the war years.58 Perceived as a mechanical dinosaur emerging from the primeval mud of the trenches, a species simultaneously old and new pushing the boundaries of modern technology, the tank reignited ancestral terrors. The press contributed to anthropomorphising the tank, a tame yet forbidding presence reminiscent of colossal animal bodies, helping domesticate the relationship with war and its material manifestations.59 Marinetti’s four-seater tank is fast and fitted with a machine-gun over the back wheels: a heady concoction of mechanised humanity, self-sufficiency and pleasure fantasy.60 The driver’s field of vision is both contained and loaded. Obstacles are targeted the instant they are registered by the tank’s mechanical eye: the cinematic field of vision blurs the boundaries between camera and machine gun. ‘With the machine-gunner behind and above him, the A-74 offers Marinetti’s eye a targeting apparatus that fires where he drives. […] the “occhio orizzontale” [horizontal eye] functions as an indirect sighting device supplemented by the targeting of the machine gun.’61 Deprived of a subjective referential field, technology becomes the soldier’s indispensable intermediary. 55 Virilio, Speed and Politics, 84. 56 T. Tate, ‘The culture of the tank, 1916–18’, Modernism/Modernity, 4:1 (1997), 77–8. 57 Ibid., 72–3. Tate estimates that an audience of approximately twenty million watched tank films while others would have been exposed to tanks through cameo appearances in war films. Merchandise such as tank handbags, teapots, moneyboxes and napkins retailed in Britain. 58 Strauven, Marinetti e il cinema, 137. The reliability of information fed into the Notebooks needs, however, to be scrutinised carefully, as notes Bragato, ‘F. T. Marinetti’s construction’. 59 Tate, ‘Culture of the tank’, 77: this fantasy produced ‘a fantasmatic, infantile, and pleasurable relationship to the war and its objects’. Virilio, Speed and Politics, 114: ‘from the metabolic vehicle to the technological vehicle, spilling its smoke like a last breath, a final symbolic manifestation of the motorpower of living bodies’. 60 Campbell, ‘“Infinite remoteness”’, 117. 61 Ibid., 119.

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Marinetti’s Steel Alcove was provocative. The original book cover featured a tank enwrapped in the Italian three-coloured flag penetrating a naked woman lying in the missionary position whose breasts were clearly visible.62 The tank promised ‘new kinds of agency – enabling the human body to enter zones which were previously impenetrable’.63 Marinetti’s tank is an exoskeleton and phallic armour. It is a means to externalise the poet’s sexual politics.64 L’alcova d’acciaio is ‘all sex: there is not a cloud, not a hill, not a machine that is not described in sexual terms’.65 It is a fantasy of masculine and technological domination over nature, conveyed via the narrative representation of a physical relationship between the author, a mechanised man and soldier, and the tank, a machine of war and symbol of the war machine. Marinetti’s approach is fetishist: nature as locus of the feminine and of a cyclical temporality cannot but propel the poet towards the future. The feminine and the maternal must therefore be displaced by the machine, albeit contradictorily, ‘hence the sexual ambiguity that structures Marinetti’s desire for, and identity with, the machine’66 (see also section 2.4). Language provides a further clue to Marinetti’s exploitation of the tank in sexual-political terms. Tanks came in female and male form and were distinguished by minor morphological variants. Larger models of early tanks were designated as ‘Mothers’. As Trudi Tate observes, ‘the language of Willie and Mother, male and female, and hermaphrodite is scattered throughout the early tank writings’ in war memoirs, literature and the press.67 The framework is still nationalistic, demanding ‘a corresponding transformation of the earth itself, from an unmarked, deterritorialised feminine ground, to the delimited and embodied territory of the nation’.68 The penetration of Italy of the armoured car number 74 articulates a dual identity, both civilised and barbaric, postulating Marinetti’s vision for postwar futurism in terms of subjection to the authority of State. Virile and ‘invincible like machines’,69 Marinetti’s soldiers are transfigured by their mastery of technology. The Arditi are like cogs in the overarching machine of battle, ‘industrial fodder’.70 Ideologically, according to Wagstaff, the industrial age 62 The original image was censored on publication and is not extant – M. Scudiero, public lecture, Bologna Artbook Fair, 21 September 2007. 63 Tate, ‘Culture of the tank’, 83. 64 Foster, Prosthetic Gods, 108–49. 65 Wagstaff, ‘Dead man erect’, 157. 66 C. Poggi, ‘Dreams of metallized flesh: futurism and the masculine body’, Modernism/Modernity, 4:3 (1997), 24. 67 Tate, ‘Culture of the tank’, 78–9. 68 Poggi, ‘Dreams of metallized flesh’, 31. 69 Wagstaff, ‘Dead man erect’, 153. See also Braun, ‘Vulgarians at the gate’, 11: ‘hypermasculine vision of armoured bodies’. 70 Wagstaff, ‘Dead man erect’, 155.

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engendered an expectation that the machine act as an agent of liberation, including individual enfranchisement from sexual inhibition. Through the mechanical theme, Marinetti’s Steel Alcove provides a fantasy of transcendence and apotheosis: both dead and alive in his metallised shell and armoury, the superman is truly undead. He cannot die as he is already reified. He is therefore truly immortal.71 A decade on, Steel Alcove will both join in and feed into the fantasies of ‘metallisation’ of fascismo, becoming a locus of ultimately chaste mass identity.72 Grotesque erotic couplings of soldiers with infernal conveyor-belt war machinery will be subsumed under a Fascist aesthetics.73 The relationship between art and industrial production predicated on a comparable heuristic of mechanical wombs is also at work in Marinetti’s ‘African novel’ Gli Indomabili (The Untameables; 1922). Drawing on Wells, Hugo and Rimbaud, prefiguring a class struggle which may have inspired Bernari’s industrial novel Tre operai,74 Marinetti prefigures here an industrial city of the future erected on strict hierarchical principles. ‘The apocalyptic description of working class conditions in the entrails of the future city – realm of spiritual freedom, but only for the privileged intellectual elite – is an emotion-laden critique of industrial civilisation.’75 The novel features distinct character sets: the ‘untameables’ and the ‘black men’, to symbolise ‘instinct’; the ‘paper people’, standing for ‘ideas’;76 the ‘river people’, signifying ‘labour’ and, as such, a platform for ‘ideas’. 71 Ibid., 159. 72 Schapp, 18BL, 130–1. The truck named Mother Giberna in A. Blasetti’s mass spectacle 18BL (1934) resonates of Marinetti’s ‘steel alcove’. See also R. Micheloni’s Il romanzo della superspecie o la psicosintesi (1935), a rambling narrative delving into minute mechanical aspects of modern warfare. Micheloni posits the First World War here as the origin of a human-mechanical identity – JPGRIL, Marinetti’s special collections, Correspondence and papers, series I, box 2, n. 25, typescript R. Micheloni, Il romanzo della superspecie o la psicosintesi. 73 This manner will be ridiculed, among others, by Gadda in Eros and Priapus (1945). Marinetti’s erotic fantasy of war may have influenced: F. Léger’s Ballet mécanique (1924; fragments of human body acquiring equal status as abstract geometry); A. Vianello’s ‘Lights whistles pins carbon dioxide’ (1925) and Escodamè’s ‘Fast in the rain’ (1925; a nocturnal speeding feat in a Lancia Lambda under pelting rain is juxtaposed to ‘feminine intimacy in this warm travelling alcove’. Woman is mechanised along the lines of the flashy racing car – see B. Sica, ‘Time and space in the writings of Marinetti, Palazzeschi, the group of L’Italia futurista and other futurist writers’, in G. Buelens, H. Hendrix and M. Jansen (eds) The History of Futurism: The Precursors, Protagonists and Legacies (Plymouth: Lexington, 2012), 163). Echoes may also have propagated to the experimental film Impatience (1928) by the Belgian C. Dekeukeleire. The film associates the mechanical body of a motorcycle with the female body. 74 L. Ballerini, ‘La legge dell’ingratitudine: letteratura e industria tra le due guerre’, in Bàrberi Squarotti and Ossola (eds), Letteratura e industria, II, 585. 75 Sartini Blum, Other Modernism, 128 and 127 respectively. 76 ‘Paper people’ (cartacei) may be a progeny of Julius Evola’s solar (hyperboreal)/lunar (telluric) races. Luminous and glowing, they resemble the ‘actor gases’ of coeval futurist theatre (see section 5.1b).

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De Maria suggests that this dystopian contemplation of the failure of machines, probably inspired by Proudhon, coincided with Marinetti’s disappointment with Mussolini’s politics and withdrawal from the fasci – the opportunistic revolutionary Mah is, in fact, reputed to portray the Duce. As noted by Sascha Bru, Marinetti’s work was watched closely by Gramsci at this point in time. Gramsci admired the ‘farreaching practical political ramifications’77 of futurismo’s linguistic experimentalism. In a final twist, however, machines morph into a vision of mechanical wombs, with strong echoes of Alcove’s sexualised machines of war (see also section 2.4).78 Marinetti’s fetishist enthusiasm for war technology resurfaced in the 1929 article ‘La guerra futura’ (The future war). Here, he presciently imagined future wars relying on the ‘mechanical capacity’ of aeronautics and chemistry. Future warriors, he argued, will survive only if they acquire mechanical skills which must become part and parcel of military training.79 That future conflict must be predicated on mechanical knowhow is reiterated in L’Aeropoema del Golfo della Spezia (The Aeropoem of the Gulf of La Spezia; 1935). Italy’s colonial wars threw Marinetti’s machines of war into further relief. The aggressive African campaign was perceived as mechanical and organic at once, a conflict where the primitive, mythical overtones of the colonised land, portrayed as a parched landscape sweltering under the yoke of an implacable sun, are bound up with erotic mechanisation. Declaiming comparable aero-verse on Italian radio on 29 July 1939, Marinetti feminised and sexualised the engine of the flying machine.80 Mechanical war machines continued to provide paradigms of aggressive Imperialist and masculine identity, providing the opportunity to reconstitute the poet’s body and psyche in phallic terms, imagistic and energistic rather than utilitarian and productive.81 In the postwar period, technology became fractious and divisive rather than unifying, leading to collision, splintering and fragmentation evidenced, among others, by the dissolution of colonial Empires and, at the subjective level, exile and migration. Conflict was still widely hailed as an arena of mechanisation, e.g. in Augusto Platone’s L’uomo e la macchina (Man and the Machine; 1941).82 Deprived of daily contact with war machinery, the ‘phallic’ self was subsumed under the consensus-building agenda 77 S. Bru, ‘The Untameables: language and politics in Gramsci and Marinetti’, in E. Adamowicz and S. Storchi (eds), Back to the Futurists: The Avant-garde and its Legacy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 244. 78 Marinetti, Gli Indomabili – con un’antologia di scritti futuristi sull’arte meccanica e d’avanguardia, ed. L. Ballerini (Milan: Mondadori, 2000), 76.. 79 Marinetti, ‘La guerra futura’, Gazzetta [?], 20 January 1929, [n.p.]. 80 JPGRIL, Marinetti special collections, correspondence and papers, series I, box 15, n. 2, poem by Marinetti, ‘L’aerocanzone delle Parole Nuove’, 1939, 1. 81 Foster, Prosthetic Gods, 118–20. 82 A. Platone, L’uomo e la macchina (Rome: Edizioni Futuriste di ‘Poesia’, 1941).

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of the regime. Marinetti’s article ‘Nuova estetica della guerra’ (‘New war aesthetics’; 1940) provides a comprehensive, if rhetorical, compendium of this aesthetics. Consistent with previous pronouncements, Marinetti emphasised the transitive relationship between aeropoetry, aeropainting and aeromusic and Fascist aeronautics (see sections 6.1 and 6.2). Marinetti was by then an institutional figurehead, but ‘there were clear costs to such a close connection to the regime. In […] championing the Fascist dictatorship, Marinetti ultimately lost much of the lustre associated with his leadership of a modern art movement, and by the 1930s was generally viewed as simply a mouthpiece for the regime and its repellent policies of repression at home and genocide conquest abroad.’83 Marinetti’s awe for the power and complexity of war technology continued through to the early 1940s.84 However, in the last major work published in his lifetime, Canto eroi e macchine della guerra Mussoliniana (Song heroes and machines of Mussolini’s war; 1942), Marinetti spelled out the ‘agony of the machine’. Here, a metallised hero is pictured dying in a submarine wreck. Marinetti describes the rupture as the mouth of a lugubrious womb. In a consistently negative view of the feminine, Marinetti contrasts this high-tech uterus to the nurturing Nature ready to embrace the hero at the bottom of the ocean. ‘The macabre vision of the submarine sinking into bottomless abysses is mitigated by the association of the “molli tombe” [soft tombs] with the swinging movement of the cradle, reinforced by the assonance between “nulla” [nothing] and “culla” [cradle].’85 Once more, the technological macabre is redeemed by a Resurrection: a secular redemption to traditional, Christian, institutional values. Symbolic of the modern and of the new, the mechanical has come full circle: from futurist utopian to industrial, normative, institutional and reinvigorated for the purpose of endorsing the Imperial wars of the Fascist regime. As the Fascist regime pursued a downward trajectory, a tireless sixty-six-year-old Marinetti volunteered to fight on the Russian front. It was 1942 and the Second World War was reaching its tragic epilogue. In 1944, just before he died, Marinetti spoke out in support of Mussolini’s return at the helm of a puppet State, the Social Republic of Salò. Theatres of violent exchanges framed by technology, both World Wars fulfilled Marinetti’s aspiration to integrate the flesh and the machine. Coming full circle from the ‘mechanical man with interchangeable parts’ hailed in his Technical manifesto of futurist literature (1912), through to the prosthetics and mechanical decompositions of the human body advocated in the Manifesto of futurist cinema (1916), Marinetti consistently pursued conflations of human biology with mechanical technology. Both 83 Ialongo, ‘Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’, 396. 84 See, in particular, JPGRIL, Marinetti’s special collections, series V Newspaper clippings, passim. 85 Sartini Blum, Other Modernism, 153.

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the female and the male bodies are posited as demi-human and demi-technological: the sites of a cyborg identity. The female body, in particular, is variously treated as subordinate, nefarious, predatory and/or animal-like, posing a threat to the hero’s impervious masculinity.86 The section below explores the intertwining of sexual bodies and machines, and their sexual, political undertones. 2.4 The cyborg The previous section explored Marinetti’s view of soldiers as both hard operatives of war machinery and soft technological beings encased in metallic carapaces. The tank, frightening embodiment of the alien, seductive power of technology, was often constructed as female. The machine played a pivotal role in complicating identities during wartime, exposing their manufactured artificiality. The soldier’s body underwent a massified metamorphosis aimed at amalgamating mechanical and biological components together: nerves to electric circuits, muscles and cells to mechanical parts.87 Following the First World War, a ‘symbiont’, ‘man-machine matrix’ or cyborg identity prevailed.88 Even though Marinetti did not speak of a ‘cyborg’, his focus on the anthropomorphic end products of the coupling of human and machine in multiple scenarios render this term apposite here. Marinetti’s cyborg is multiple and complex. It is ambivalent and ambiguous. Its identity is shifting. On occasion, a cyborg is a metonymy of the human male, typically the poet himself, portrayed in the act of appropriating and penetrating a machine identified as the female ‘other’, as is the case in Steel Alcove. A cyborg (or ‘centaur’) male may sexually penetrate an entity symbolic of the ‘natural’ feminine. Alternatively, the pairing of the human male with the material machine may lead to parthenogenetic procreations that elide the female altogether. While the first example subsumes the machine under female garb, nurturing fantasies of domesticating technology, the alternative primal scene entails that a conflation has already taken place, 86 Donna Haraway argues that ‘a cyborg world is about […] the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war’ – see D. J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association, 1991), 154. Seen in this light, Marinetti’s sexual politics may be equated to a form of ‘masculine hysteria’ – see G. Celant, ‘Erotismo e lussuria’, in Hultén (ed.), Futurismo & Futurismi, 473. 87 JPGRIL, Marinetti and Benedetta Cappa Marinetti papers, 1902–65, series V Newspaper clippings, box 18, n. 2, article by Marinetti, ‘A Roma una vibrante orazione di Marinetti per la celebrazione del volo transatlantico’, [n.p.], [n.d.]. 88 For the ‘symbiont’, see G. O. Longo, Il simbionte: prove di umanità futura (Milan: Mimesis, 2013); for the ‘man-machine matrix’, see W. Self, ‘A field trip to Heathrow via Harmondsworth Great Barn’, New Statesman, 20 March 2014, www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/03/will-self-field-trip-heathrowharmondsworth-great-barn (accessed 28 July 2018).

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and that a cyborg male, enhanced by technology, is ready to possess a non-mechanical, primitive and ‘earthy’ female. This section considers Marinetti’s techno-sexual stage with particular focus on his invention of a hetero-directed cyborg identity located in the female body and in the machine qua female. Contradictions will emerge, not least in the patent tension between his biological essentialism and active support of women writers and artists, many of whom also engaged with this theme. I shall take the work of Maria Goretti as a case in point.89 The Pistoia-born, award-winning poet Maria Goretti (1907–2001) is renowned for revamping futurismo in Bologna in the 1940s and for founding a Marconi futurist group.90 Together with fellow poets Dina Cucini and Franca Maria Corneli, Goretti toured Italy giving recitals – her ‘Quarto d’ora di poesia’ (Quarter hour of poetry) may have inspired Marinetti’s last poem ‘Quarto d’ora della Decima Mas’ (‘Quarter hour of poetry of the Xth MAS’; 1944). Goretti’s work carried the seal of approval of the futurist central and Marinetti wrote Introductions to be published in her collections. Goretti’s La donna e il futurismo (Woman and futurism; 1941) intertwines the themes of motherhood and war, equating the exhilaration of flying with sexual intercourse and orgasmic elation. The opening poem ‘Colloquio col motore’ (Conversation with an engine) describes the poet’s self-offering to the flying machine. Her heart beats in synch with the mechanical engine, ‘a spatio-temporal Don Juan throbbing with desire’,91 repeatedly copulating and shuddering in orgasm ‘inside you’: ‘I love you / ardent mechanical soul / mechanic metallic electric: / the reflections all the reflections / of my iridescent dreams / dreams of impossible conquests / and of impossible victories / all the reflections of my most audacious dreams / are all lit up by the sun / shining on your steel coverings / exquisite body of solid shimmer!’92 Goretti enthuses about sexually charged machines. However, she is far from passive. Reclaiming ‘the technology of aviation and the horizons as sites for female agency and self-generation’,93 Goretti’s poetry brings added value. While she largely courts Marinetti’s sexual politics, her most persuasive work does not borrow uncritically. Goretti’s original notion of a generatrix, for example, expands the meaning of motherhood to include both creation and procreation, implying a symbolic and social refashioning of woman.94 Goretti originally posits the machine as a matrix of female self-invention, as Robin Pickering-Iazzi observed. The poet’s refashioning 89 Braun, ‘Vulgarians at the gate’, 11: ‘[Marinetti was] one of the most serious patrons of women writers in either mainstream or avant-garde publishing’; Pickering-Iazzi, Politics of the Visible, 21ff. 90 In 1939 Goretti was awarded the ‘Poeta Originale’ poetry prize, which consisted of a demijohn of wine. 91 Bohn, The Other Futurism, 180. 92 Goretti cit. in Pickering-Iazzi, Politics of the Visible, 211. 93 Pickering-Iazzi, Politics of the Visible, 214. 94 Ibid., 202 and 205.

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of the machine is consistent with ‘avant-garde women’s two-pronged endeavour to critique the outmoded ideology of femininity and to reinvent female subjectivity in the imbricating social and artistic spheres’.95 In this respect Goretti echoes discourses of women’s mobility and emancipation predicated on the motorcar, captured, among others, by Tamara de Lempicka’s iconic self-portrait at the wheel of an emerald Bugatti in 1929 (see also section 6.3c).96 Goretti’s Poesia della macchina: saggio di filosofia del futurismo (Poetry of the machine: essay on the philosophy of futurism; 1942) delves into the contemporary cult of technology. Far from being inert objects, machines are brought to life by injections of human genius and willpower. Designed to challenge the conundrum of time, they are the building blocks of the future. Goretti embraces Marinetti’s hackneyed view of the machine as an artificial assemblage animated by the breath of a demiurge, rejecting both the materialist, collectivist approach and the liberal reification of machines.97 Her ‘synthesis’, as she puts it, is far more ambitious as she grapples with the challenge to construct a new ‘humanism of the machine’ underpinned by an integration of human and mechanic whose intellectual ambition dwarfs Marinetti’s patriarchal sexual politics.98 Goretti eventually criticised Marinetti’s inability to perceive machines other than through the lens of his own sexuality, lamenting that these senseless sexual acts were nothing but vehicles of a sterile ‘machinism’. Though not stated in so many words, Goretti’s critique exposes the pedestrian patriarchal background of the cyborg.99 Marinetti sexualised the machine since early on, beginning with the poem ‘Destruction’ (1904).100 The play Roi Bombance (The Feasting King; 1905) featured a double human–robot. In Poupées electriques (Electric Dolls; 1909), later renamed Sexual Electricity (see section 2.5) he staged the simulation of two robotic prostheses: Monsieur Prudent and Mère Prunelle. Marinetti’s mechanised androids, female puppets, dolls and marionettes drew on a distinguished lineage of puppets and automata on the European stage.101 In the novel Mafarka le futuriste (Mafarka the Futurist; 95 Ibid., 212. 96 See also A. Brilli, La vita che corre: mitologia dell’automobile (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999). 97 M. Goretti, Poesia della macchina: saggio di filosofia del Futurismo (Rome: Edizioni Futuriste di ‘Poesia’, [1942]), 31. 98 Ibid., 36. See also Rosa Rosà’s novel Una donna con tre anime (1918) featuring a woman who is disembodied and mechanised in a cyborg-like evolutionary trajectory. 99 JPGRIL, Marinetti correspondence and papers, series I, box 2, n. 29, manuscript by M. Goretti, ‘Marinetti narratore’, 1938, 7. 100 Vinall, ‘The emergence of machine imagery’, 83–6. 101 See also Folgore’s pantomimes: ‘L’ora del fantoccio’ (Time of the puppet), featuring two automatic female and male puppets in sexual interdependence; the fragmentary ‘Des ombres + des Fantoches + des hommes’ (Shadows + puppets + men); and the unfinished ‘L’Isola del Robot’ (Robot island) –

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1909–10) Mafarka’s son, Gazurmah, is a winged anthropomorphic machine, the offspring of man, not of woman. Gazurmah is a cyborg conceived without a ‘vulva’.102 As ‘a caricature of [the] masculinist reproductive dream’,103 Gazurmah belongs to a pre-cybernetic universe of alchemic ‘homunculi’, where the machine is not autonomous, and natural and artificial are markedly distinct. This novel prepares the ground for Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine (1910), where, following a novel evolutionary genealogy, enhanced humans become superhuman hybrids ‘adapted to the demands of speed and violence’ and ‘machines, in an inverse movement, become the locus of all rejected human capabilities and drives, including libidinal desire and procreation’.104 In 1913 an anonymous author writing under the pseudonym ‘cascodalluminio’ (steel helmet; Marinetti?) penned an article entitled ‘Macchinolatria’ (Idolatry of the machine). Steel helmet argues that machines have not enslaved men, but, rather, that men ardently desire machines, whose seduction ‘bends them to their will power’.105 The noun ‘Machine’ is capitalised throughout. ‘Steel helmet’s female machine, daughter and wife of the industrial worker, primitive Goddess transcending sexuality, transcending technology, is subjugated to the macho male.’106 Through the medium of familial, erotic and primitive metaphors, steel helmet promotes a sanguine erotic paternalism towards the machine, prefiguring Reich’s contemplation of machine landscapes deprived of genital satisfaction bursting into Fascist violence. A seed of the cult of the Fascist leader, reproduced in the 1930s as an axe, a missile, an impulse repeater, both ‘hyperfallic and hyperchaste’,107 may be at work here to reconcile the individual and the mass, the man and the machine. On occasion, the ‘man–machine matrix’ may be damaged, as in the mutilated body of the soldier. Here, reconstructive and prosthetic surgery expedites an evolution from human into machine. In a forceful text, Marinetti invites women to copulate with the ‘glorious mutilated soldiers’ whose ‘flesh is melted down with steel’.108 The

102 103 104 105 106 107 108

K. Pizzi, ‘Pinocchio and the mechanical body: Luciano Folgore’s papers at the Getty Research Institute Library’, in Pinocchio, Puppets and Modernity, 143. Poggi, ‘Dreams of metallized flesh’, 26–7. Recent reprisals include Blade Runner (1982) and The Terminator (1984). Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, 152. Poggi, ‘Dreams of metallized flesh’, 20. JPGRIL, Marinetti and Benedetta Cappa papers, series IX, Posters and oversized items, Reviews: Futurismo, Prima Linea, cascodalluminio, ‘Macchinolatria’, Prima Linea, I:7 (7 July 1913), 2. Ibid. Schnapp, 18BL, 133–4. The obscene cyborg featured in Ballard’s Crash, where man becomes metallised after coupling with a prosthetic car, may also be prefigured here (see Brilli, La vita che corre, 123–4). JPGRIL, Marinetti and Benedetta Cappa papers, series V, box 18, n. 1, clippings by Marinetti: ‘Donne, dovete preferire i gloriosi mutilati’, [n.p.], [n.d.], 148.

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collapsing of the distinction between production and processing, body and machine, is powerfully at work in the female body too, e.g. in the glittering chorus-line of the Ziegfeld Follies revue (1907–31) and the grid of ‘female powered dynamos’109 in Busby Berkeley’s musical The Machinery Ballet (1928). The life simulation of the chorines points to the twilight zone between life and its likeness, arousing pleasure. Modelled on the gestures of Ford’s semi-automatic production line, reflecting a ‘male cultural hunger for more pleasure within a Machine Age modern aesthetic’,110 the beckoning, faceless, mechanical bodies of the chorines evoke Marinetti’s frigid, automatic and gleaming machines: Ziegfeld’s chorus girls were reduced to automata in visual dramas of militaristic or machine aesthetics, corralled into geometric patterns and whirling tableaux modelled after rotating gearwheels. Achieving an impression of propulsive dynamism out of the controlled, successive workings of its component parts, the conjoined and recursive sequence of movements that composed the Follies’ girls skits produced the effect of collapsing body on body, segment into whole. The Follies girl was thus poised, cool and gleaming, at the interface between the singular and the multiple, the personal and the impersonal, and the animate and the inanimate.111

Rather like Kracauer’s transmogrification of ‘individual girls’ into ‘indissoluble girl clusters’, ‘the human figure enlisted in the mass ornament’ has begun its journey towards ‘the realm of anonymity’, the ‘abstract organisation hidden from those who toil within it’.112 As observed in section 2.2, Zola’s ‘monstrous alliance between flesh and iron’113 underpins Marinetti’s cyborgs. In Marinetti, the carnal encounter of the machine and its operative melds the two together in a single organism: a cyborg locked in an erotic self-embrace predicated on the abandonment of love. The erotic emphasis deflects attention from the social and political implications of the relationship between the worker and technological means and materials of production. Marinetti’s cyborg is framed within a predatory, pseudo-racial and patriarchal episteme.114 A long line of misogynist thinking and mechanistic view of sex in nineteenth-century French culture 109 Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, 159. 110 Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine, 184. For a robotic–erotic female body, see also F. Lang’s film Metropolis (1927). 111 A. Beeston, ‘A “Leg show dance” in a skyscraper: the sequenced mechanics of John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer’, PMLA, 131:3 (2016), 639. 112 S. Kracauer, ‘The mass ornament’ (1927), cit. in Beeston, ‘A “Leg show dance”’, 644. 113 Noiray, Le romancier et la machine, 418. 114 See also Sartini Blum, Other Modernism, 52.

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is at work here, including Léger, Picabia, Jarry, Roussel and Joris-Karl Huysmans (see also section 2.3). Duchamp’s commingling of mechanical and bodily apparatuses and lubricants in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even sexualises the machine primarily as interaction, hydraulics and synchronicity (or lack thereof) of mechanical body parts, bodily fluids and orifices, positing a hierarchical relationship between a top (= woman) and a bottom (= her bachelors).115 As a vehicle of sexualised machine aesthetics underpinned by fantasies of appropriation, coercion and domestication, Marinetti’s cyborg could not be further removed from women’s ‘cyborg’ identity as was later theorised by feminist thinking. In the 1980s Donna Haraway posited the ‘cyborg’ as symbolic of a transgressive and destabilising female identity, a social agent holding promises for women in a post-gender world.116 At the opposite end of the spectrum, Marinetti follows Fox Keller’s paradigm whereby science and, by extension, technology, are perceived as masculine, while nature is perceived as feminine.117 Marinetti reifies woman, ‘major locus of ambivalence: a catalyst of […] repugnance and fascination, disgust and desire’.118 Furthermore, if technology is always implicated with gender and, in particular, with the maternal body, as Haraway, Braidotti and Jardine argue, then it offers an alternative to the maternal within a male phantasm whereby ‘the machine is a woman in that phantasm’.119 Victim of a destabilising female identity, held back by backward ‘nature’, the mechanical male body seeks to annihilate, through sexual coercion, the primitive and animalistic female body, in order to replace it. The technologically equipped male aims to contain, control and harness the irrational overflow of the uncontrollable female. Psychoanalysis provides further insights. When the machine dons female garb, it triggers a sexual response laced with desire, fear, disgust and self-destruction. The 115 See also Picabia’s Girl Born Without a Mother (c. 1915) and The Child Carburetor (1919). Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s The Future Eve (1886), featuring a mechanical she-automaton covered in artificial flesh and animated by electrical forces, may also be echoed here. See also L. Pirandello’s Shoot!: The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator (1916). Here, the voracious sexuality of femme fatale Varia Nestoroff is both captured by, and mirrored in, a movie camera’s mechanical appetite (see section 4.3b). 116 Written between 1978 and 1989, Haraway’s influential essays were published as a volume: Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, see esp. 154 and 168–9. 117 E. Fox Keller, ‘Critical silences in scientific discourse: problems of form and re-form’, in Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender, and Science (New York: Routledge, 1992), 75. 118 Sartini Blum, Other Modernism, 28. For Marinetti’s disgust for woman, see also Poggi, ‘Dreams of metallized flesh’, 27. 119 A. Jardine, ‘Of bodies and technologies’, in H. Foster (ed.), DIA Art Foundation: Discussions in Contemporary Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), n. 1, 156. See also Haraway, Symians, Cyborgs and Women and R. Braidotti, ‘Affirming the affirmative: on nomadic affectivity’, Rhizomes, 11/12 (Fall 2005/Spring 2006).

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mythical and erotic charge ascribed to the machine may hide a regressive fantasy to exorcise what Jung calls ‘the “shadow” side of modernity’.120 Furthermore, the ‘darker side of technology […] is ultimately contained within the celebratory picture of unconstrained phallic power, which “naturalises” and domesticates technological progress by collapsing the distance between libidinal and mechanical forces’.121 In other words, identification with the machine and reification of the female body are necessary to domesticate a potentially sinister technology and render it familiar.122 Marinetti’s fantasies of sexual dominance may betray an anxiety over the mounting social presence of technology: both the female and the machine are perceived in terms of challenge and confrontation and may therefore be aligned. As Christine Poggi has shown, this association may stem from Marinetti’s early encounters with ‘the colonised other’. ‘Maternal functions are here conflated with those of the colonised other, and both are superseded by the technological. This deliberate confusion of identities serves both to feminise and to eroticise technology’.123 The colonial and the sexual are frequently entangled in Marinetti’s work. Women and racial others are comparable pawns in a game of belligerent sexual mastery.124 Nourished by a Sudanese wet nurse, whose breast milk he sucked avidly, as famously relayed in the Founding and manifesto, Marinetti interweaves a cluster of racial, sexual and political anxieties. The erotic machine becomes the very locus of this unresolved psychological knot. Providing escape, transcending the ‘natural’ female world to tap into a hyper-masculine, ‘macho’ bond, the machine reflects the physical domination of man over the environment. The machine, in other words, sublimates a transcendental transition to the primitive understood as sacred, an approach powerfully at work across the European avant-garde, coming to the fore, for example, in Picasso’s work. This way, technology is sacralised in a ‘naïve confusion between the beautiful and the divine’, as Aragon put it in 1926.125 A ‘totem animal’, ‘half slave, half god’,126 a conduit for reuniting with ‘the Great Mother’, the machine as site of an unresolved tension between the primitive and the technological permeates Marinetti’s work, drawing on his complicated personal experience as Imperial subject and agent at the same time.

120 Berghaus, ‘Futurism and the technological imagination poised between machine cult and machine Angst’, in Futurism and the Technological Imagination, 27. 121 Sartini Blum, Other Modernism, 43 and 52. 122 Ibid., 51. 123 Poggi, ‘Dreams of metallized flesh’, 25. 124 Foster, Prosthetic Gods, 17. 125 Aragon, Paris Peasant, 117. 126 L. Mumford, Art and Technics (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 16: ‘You might in fact call the machine modern man’s totem animal.’

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In sum, Marinetti’s cyborg machine encompasses the whole gamut of human experience, from mechanical parthenogenetic birth, through to adult sexuality and death. The manifesto ‘Il macchinesimo’ (Machinism; 1933), by Ignazio Scurto and Renato Di Bosso, and presented at the Milan convention ‘L’aldilà futurista’ (The futurist after-life) in June 1933, posits a posthuman ‘anti-cadaverous solution’ predicated on the machine. The ageing Marinetti was instantly captured – his machine idolatry was never far removed from necrophilia.127 Scurto and Di Bosso’s ‘solution to the problem of dying’ consisted of immortalising human beings through a cyborg interface, incorporating human remains into imperishable machines. First of all, a chemical-cum-alchemical process in a crucible would ‘metallise’ human remains. The resulting ‘alloy’ would be injected in the body of a machine, so that human life may ‘continue to beat’ for eternity in mechanical form. A lifeless ‘macchinantropo’ (anthropo-machine), or veritable cyborg, will thus be born.128 Scurto advanced this proposal once again in the essay ‘La nuova religione’ (The new religion) which posited ‘macchinesimo’ as a precondition of human perfection through mechanical means, ‘not a political program nor an aesthetic solution but rather a new ideology’.129 We would now call this ‘new ideology’ posthumanism (see Conclusion: Ex machina). While Marinetti pursued throughout a reconciliation between humans and the machine, a ‘geometric and mechanic splendour’ prevailed in the 1930s. The machine’s capacity to throw light, its brilliance and luminosity may be associated with archetypal representations of the feminine in psychoanalytic key – the light projected by a woman’s smile being a topos of Italian literature from Dante onwards.130 Marinetti’s emphasis on electricity is, however, more appropriately ascribed to what the constructivists referred to as ‘faktura’, e.g. a loyalty to worked materials and their use (‘tectonics’): texture, surface shine and reflectivity. These qualities are associated with electricity, as well as with metals and new materials. Sections 2.5 and 2.6 discuss electricity, radio and new materials in Marinetti’s work. 2.5 ‘The phosphorescent idiot’ D’Annunzio gave Marinetti the nickname ‘the phosphorescent idiot’. Even if unkind, it nonetheless captured something of Marinetti’s lifelong fascination with electricity, 127 E. Terzano, Futurismo: cinema, teatro, arte e propaganda (Lanciano: Carabba, 2011), 37–49. 128 MART, Fondo Tullio Crali, folder: Cra. 1, newspaper clipping by Anon, ‘Futuristi a convegno’, orig. in Corriere della Sera, 16 June 1933, [n.p.] Scurto’s ‘macchinantropo’ will resonate in the TV series Battlestar Galactica (1978–79 and 2004–09) where human regeneration through metal in a crucible will foster the making of new anthropomorphic machines. 129 Bohn, The Other Futurism, 123. 130 See C. Franco, La Beatrice di Dante: un’interpretazione psicanalitica (Poggibonsi: Lalli, 1981), 64.

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electromagnetism and energetic forces. Futurism was predicated on a complementarity of electricity, mechanics and magnetism, translating them as dynamism, simultaneity and vibration of quickened live energies (see Introduction). As I shall explore below, Marinetti perceived radio, the new electromagnetic medium, as fulfilling the requirements of speed and simultaneity and therefore as quintessentially futurist.131 On the other hand, his limited engagement with film, a ‘machine amongst machines’, points to the potential of a modern medium which never fully translated into extensive application. Electricity is fluid. It is pure energy, encompassing data and production.132 Marinetti regarded the machine as ‘geometrically and mechanically splendid’, an object of artificial luminosity loaded with immaterial power, enhanced by metallic gloss, shine and reflectivity. The radiance of electricity reconciled human endeavour with cosmic forces.133 The mercurial quality of light captured Marinetti’s imagination in the form of ‘splendore’ (splendour): a sudden blinding brilliance, as in a lightning bolt. A sexually connoted language conjoined machines and electricity.134 For Marinetti electricity was both erotic and supernatural: a semi-divine mechanical agent conducted through an electric fluid. A supernatural, ‘spiritual’ dimension will gain traction in the late 1920s and 1930s, pulverising machines into the upwardly mobile and mystical trajectories of aerofuturism (see sections 5.4 and 6). Energy is the power to operate machinery. Without power, machines would be unable to perform. Electricity runs through engines and rotates crankshafts. It surges through transformers, shaking them in sonorous claps of thunder. The rise of electric power enabled the Second Industrial Revolution and the development of mechanical applications to electric power in the late 1800s. Following on from Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetic induction, the Second Industrial Revolution was predicated on electricity and mutual exchanges between mechanical and electrical energy. Drawing on Faraday’s force fields, James Clerk Maxwell developed an electric fields theory in 1873. Maxwell was the first to postulate electromagnetic waves, where visible light is one type of electromagnetic radiation. His work eventually enabled one of the tenets of Einstein’s relativity laws, which work across the fields of mechanics, electrodynamics and optics. In 1869 Gramme had invented the dynamo which virtually brought the 131 JPGRIL, Marinetti special collections, correspondence and papers, 1886–1974, series I, box 1, n. 23, autograph text [Luigi Scrivo], ‘La radio futurista’, [n.p.], [n.d.], 1. 132 M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2001), 4, 8 and 9. 133 Echoes of the late Zola resonate here too: the machine is ‘unie au soleil par le torrent vital de l’électricité’ – Noiray, Le romancier et la machine, 499. 134 As observed by Parkinson with reference to Duchamp’s Large Glass, sparks, judderings, vibrations and oscillations reinforce the machine-like language of erotic encounter – G. Parkinson, ‘Alchemy and science’, in The Duchamp Book (London: Tate, 2008), 104.

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century of the steam engine to an end. Gramme’s innovation was propagated widely, e.g. in France at the Exposition internationale d’electricité (1881) and Expos universelles of 1889 and 1900. Hertz proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves theorised by Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory of light. The electron was discovered at the end of the nineteenth century. A ‘myth of electricity’ ensued, drawing on the seemingly magical, luminous, energetic properties of this fluid.135 The twentieth century was welcomed as the century of electricity. In the Soviet Union, Socialism was shortly to be hailed as the result of the equation: Soviet power + electrification. Mindful of the role played by the electric industry in Italy, influenced by Boccioni and Morasso, Marinetti was enthralled by the power station. A new commodity, the hydroelectric station circulated, transformed and sold energy. It drove industrial sites near cities, ports and axes of communication: textile mills in Milan and Turin and distribution via Porto Marghera and Bozen. The hydroelectric station of Paderno d’Adda, founded in 1895, became a meaningful site for Marinetti. Here, machines, energy and fluvial landscape mirrored and complemented one another, reinforcing the modernity of the natural landscape, holding the power to transform the land and modernise the classical landscape of Italy. Marinetti admired the station’s structural intricacies as an ‘engineer by proxy’ as Roland Barthes has it: the technical order of the hydroelectric station renders its visitors aware of its structural vividness and materiality well before being mobilised as a symbol.136 Marinetti overlays the symbolism of the power station with a veneer of spirituality. Drawing on a theoretical bundle made up of Bergsonianism, Darwinism, Steinerism and cosmic alchemy, Marinetti embraces electricity as a mystical force contiguous with the very force of life. Electricity is akin to the nervous Charcotian fluid, a conduit of ectoplasms and paranormal radioactive phenomena. According to Marinetti, the cosmos itself is an energy grid constantly intersecting with force and magnetic fields underpinned by human will power.137 Modulated by a mystical and morbid sensuality, fuelled by an enduring devotion for the figure of Jesus impressed upon him by his mother,138 Marinetti’s machine encompasses electric power. His focus on the reflexivity–reflectivity of electricity transported Marinetti beyond the Machine Age, landing him into the society of media. Radio especially and, to some extent, television and film emanate from Marinetti’s appreciation of electricity as the new cultural matrix from which new media arise and within which they operate.

135 Noiray, Le romancier et la machine, 485. 136 See also D. Bucsescu and S. Friedman, ‘Eiffel Tower revisited: a guided tour into the world of architectural meaning’, http://bucsescu.com/html/4writing/eiffel.html (accessed 30 July 2018). 137 Cigliana, Futurismo esoterico, 194 and 204. 138 Ibid., 175–6.

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In La nuova religione-morale della velocità (The New Ethical Religion of Speed)139 speed transcends the laws of gravity, evacuating time and space. Marinetti’s approach relies on contemporary occultist and esoteric pseudo-sciences. A Manifesto on futurist science (La scienza futurista; 1916) undersigned by Marinetti, Carli, Remo Chiti, Corra, Ginna, Mara and Settimelli, engaged in a polemical discussion with the methods of hard science, advocating instead a demiurgic inspiration whereby the poet’s chords are played by the hand of God.140 One of the most compelling expressions of Marinetti’s view on electric power, however, was in the play Poupées électriques (Electric Dolls; 1909), the first instance of robots deployed on the modern stage. Poupées generated a further play: Elettricità (Electricity; 1913), and overlapped with other cognate works, e.g. Elettricità sessuale (Sexual Electricity), first performed in Turin on 15 January 1909 as La donna è mobile (Women are fickle) and published in 1920, Elettricità (Electricity; 1925) and Fantocci elettrici (Electric Puppets; 1925). Electricity is clearly paramount here, both in material and metaphorical form, source of nervous tics and reflexes, and nervous discharge. The protagonists Monsieur Prudent and Mère Prunelle (Professor Matrimonio and Signora Famiglia, in the Italian version) are two electromagnetic automata. Electric and mechanical doubles of the human characters named Maria and Riccardo Marinetti (orig. John and Mary Wilson), Prudent and Prunelle project onto the stage the unconscious urges of their human counterparts. Supercharged by an impending electrical storm, ‘a concatenation of electric/nervous tensions feeding off each other’141 ensues, implicating the emotional and erotic relationship of the couple. Marinetti’s cyborg politics is at work here: Riccardo holds Maria down, pet-naming her ‘dynamo’ and equating her neurotic temperament to the electric disposition of the two automatic robots.142 Marinetti’s electrical plays echo the phantasmagorical Serpentine Dance of Loïe Fuller (1862–1928). Performed on dark stages, relying on magic lanterns, large veils, colour gels and chemical salts to achieve luminescent lighting, these evocative cinematic performances were well-known to Marinetti and European theatre-going audiences. In France, Fuller became a national icon of technology: the ‘fée de la lumière’ (the fairy of light). Her Dance d’acier (Dance of steel; 1914) featured dancers 139 In L’Italia futurista, I, 11 May 1916. 140 Cigliana, Futurismo esoterico, 235. This position reinvigorated Saint-Pol-Roux’s suggestion that ‘le poète corrige Dieu’ at the Paris occultist congress of 9 June 1908. 141 Schnapp, ‘Introduzione’, in Marinetti, Teatro, ed. Schnapp, I, XVI. See also XV–XVI and XVIII. 142 Marinetti, Elettricità sessuale, in Teatro, ed. Schnapp, I, 188. See also the poem ‘L’elettricità’, in L. Folgore, Il canto dei motori (Milan: Edizioni futuriste di ‘Poesia’, 1912), 65–6 and 68. Here, electricity is a force erupting from ‘dynamos’. Adjacent to ‘powerful mechanisms’ and ‘wide engines’, shimmering ‘metallic mystery’, electricity casts a bridge between space and time. Cf. also Zola’s disembodied technological visions in his late work, e.g. Travail (1901).

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cavorting under costumes covered in shiny metal sequins, against a canvas backdrop where abstract geometric shapes, fish skeletons and lab cells were projected. All was bathed in, and reflected off, blinding silver light. The Dance of steel was reprised in the sequence ‘Danza dello splendore geometrico’ (Dance of geometric splendour) featured in the film Vita futurista (see below). The intensity of light effects was augmented through experiments with sheaves of light and their intersecting reflections, achieving special effects that seemed to dissolve the materiality of moving bodies into dustings of pulverised light. The explosions, apparitions and dematerialisation of Fuller’s electrical dance carried important implications for futurism, not least for Prampolini’s Magnetic theatre (section 5.1b). They also inspired Marinetti, fuelling his enthusiasm for radio broadcasting. A ‘wondrous’ electromechanical medium,143 radio was introduced in Italy following the foundation of URI (Unione Radiofonica Italiana) in December 1924. This institution was the result of a merger between the Italian branch of Western Electric (SIRAC) and Guglielmo Marconi’s company Radiofono, which was modelled on the BBC. Radio stations were swiftly established in Rome (1924), Milan (1925) and Naples (1926), until URI was replaced by EIAR in 1928. Marinetti was immediately captivated. Having recorded his voice as early as 1914, Marinetti was not a novice. His name figured prominently in projects promoted by Italian radio from the word go.144 Like electric power, radio enthralled Marinetti due to its ethereal and otherworldly qualities, a mirror to simultaneity and dynamism.145 The rubric Radiorario, later renamed Radiocorriere, was aired in 1925–29, offering news in real time to its middle-class audience, including many children.146 On 23 April 1925, a broadcast of Marinetti’s words-in-freedom poem ‘Il bombardamento di Adrianopoli’ (The bombing of Adrianople) followed numerous others in February and March of the same year. In 1927, Arnaldo Mussolini, brother of the Duce, was appointed vice-president of the restructured company EIAR. Arnaldo aimed to emphasise the experimental, didactic and popularising possibilities of this medium. The futurists remained a notable presence, as can be gleaned from Radiocorriere’s records in the absence of a comprehensive list of broadcasts. In 1932 Marinetti provided a commentary on live radio of the transatlantic feat of Italo Balbo, who flew 143 G. Sommi Picenardi, ‘Sussurri dell’etere’, Radiocorriere, VIII:42 (1932), 11. 144 It remains an open question whether Marinetti gained quick and easy access to radio through his family relation Senator Innocenzo Cappa, uncle of his wife Benedetta, Guglielmo Marconi or the brothers Benito and Arnaldo Mussolini. 145 E.g. Marinetti’s ‘Miss radio’, a precursor of his manifesto on radio and later included in the collection Novelle colle labbra tinte, considers radio in tandem with paranormal phenomena. 146 Audiences of middle-class children played a pivotal role in early radio programming – see Pizzi, ‘Pinocchio and the mechanical body’, 135–62.

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from the US back to Italy (see section 6.2). For a decade, not without controversy, Marinetti had free rein to go on air for a full ten minutes once every month until he was ousted in 1939 by the Minister of Culture Alessandro Pavolini. By then, ‘Italian radio’s infatuation with international modernity [had] shifted to a national emphasis, but the foreign programme listing continued.’147 Institutional and governmental constraints, including censorship, help explain why the futurists did not explore and exploit radio and cinema more fully. Russolo and Francesco Ballilla Pratella’s music compositions were frequently aired, especially when playing the theremin, the ondes martenot and the noise intoners. Pratella’s pieces were performed two dozen times between 1925 and 1929, as well as several pieces by Silvio Mix (see section 4.4). The large Mostra nazionale della radio (National radio exhibition) of September 1932 held in Milan business district counted sixty exhibitors over two floors. In an enthusiastic report in the listings magazine Radiocorriere (17–24 September 1932) Camillo Boscia praised to the skies the first transmitter and receiver of televised and radio broadcasts. Perched at the perilous north-eastern borders of Italy, Trieste’s brand-new radio station was hailed as ‘a smouldering flame of “Italianness” at the borders of the Motherland’.148 Other contemporary issues of Radiocorriere brought radio a great deal of attention, especially its content and technical novelty, together with theoretical reflections on the medium itself. Rubrics and programming were also increasingly sophisticated, swiftly multiplying in number, frequency and variety. Between September and October 1932 Radiocorriere (issues 37 and 39) extensively covered Marinetti’s radio play Violetta e gli aeroplani. Promoted in bold block lettering in the 10–17 September 1932 issue, the premiere broadcast was scheduled on Wednesday 14 September, at 20.30 hours, airing simultaneously from stations in Milan, Turin, Genoa, Trieste and Florence.149 EIAR must have invested heavily as no other broadcast at this time seems to have been promoted quite as vigorously. A competition for the best commentary was also released in issue 39, hardly a fortnight following the first broadcast.150 The time was ripe for a radio manifesto, which Marinetti penned together with Pino Masnata intending to publish in Turin’s daily Gazzetta del Popolo of 22 September 1933. Two versions appeared in print: Manifesto della radio (Radio manifesto; in Futurismo, 1 October 1933) and La radia: manifesto futurista dell’ottobre 1933 (The radio: futurist manifesto of October 1933; in Autori e Scrittori, August 1941). The feminine term ‘radia’ was the preferred nomenclature in Italian at the time, 147 148 149 150

M. Fisher, ‘Futurism and radio’, in Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination, 237. C. Boscia, ‘La mostra nazionale della radio’, Radiocorriere, VIII:38 (1932), 3–9. Radiocorriere, VIII:37 (1932), 13. Anon, ‘Violetta e gli aeroplani’, Radiocorriere VIII:39 (1932), 15. Violetta was aired again in 1941 under the direction of Alberto Casella.

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due to the linguistic convention whereby the arts were designated with the feminine gender (e.g. ‘musica’ and ‘poesia’).151 Following its second national congress of May 1933, futurismo reflected on its mission and priorities, welcoming radio’s ‘spiritual transcendence’ as part of its remit. The explanatory notes later appended by Masnata help contextualise radio as both a technological priority and a conduit of ‘spiritual’ exchanges.152 Masnata regarded radio as ideally placed to capture the arcane forces of the universe, the instrument of a new science named ‘electro-radio-biology’ tapping into the radiations emitted and received by all living beings.153 Radio was ‘all about the immaterial – vibration, radiation, amplification and transfiguration – and closely linked to paranormal activities and magnetic forces, all of which were channelled through the critical and transcendent act of captare (to receive)’.154 Five short radio pieces, ‘sintesi per il teatro radiofonico’ (syntheses for radio theatre; 1932–33, first published 1941),155 were contemporary to the radio manifesto. Putting into practice earlier reflections, Marinetti constructed these pieces as audio collages deploying techniques such as aesthetic sabotage. Aiming straight at the neural system of radio listeners, leading to newly mediated modalities of fruition, he interpolated verbal scores with discrete units of silence, indicating type and duration of each portion of sound. Passages of noise were interleaved with silence in the individual pieces. For example, sintesi n. 1, entitled Un paesaggio udito (An acoustic landscape), was constructed from individual blocks of sound including a fire crackling, water lapping and the song of a blackbird. These blocks were modulated to various degrees of intensity, repetition and variation, rather than integrated in a continuous flow. In sintesi n. 2, Dramma di distanze (Drama of distances), a variety of soundscapes from urban and rural daily life, including military and religious practice, were repeated in sound segments of eleven seconds each. The most intricate, however, was sintesi n. 3, I silenzi parlano fra loro (Silences speak to one another). This was a complex media construction made up of a suite of interpenetrating interdialogical silences. Whether it was silence that interrupted sound or the other way round was left intentionally unclear.156 Static or ‘white noise’ was no longer a background, but rather the protag151 Fisher, ‘Futurism and radio’, 244. Others suggested that a feminine noun may point to the abstracted status of radio, as opposed to practical applications such as radio-theatre and broadcasting, which were designated with masculine terms. 152 M. Somenzi, Futurismo, 1:14 (1932), cit. in Fisher, ‘Futurism and radio’, 257. 153 ‘Elettro-radio-biologia’ held its first congress in Venice in 1934, chaired by Guglielmo Marconi – see Fisher, ‘Futurism and radio’, 257. 154 Ibid., 260. 155 F. T. Marinetti, ‘Sintesi radiofoniche di F. T. Marinetti’, Autori e Scrittori, 6:8 (1941), 7. 156 F. Luisetti, ‘A vitalist art: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s sintesi radiofoniche’, in Buelens, Hendrix and Jansen (eds), The History of Futurism, 289.

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onist of medial communication. In the last two syntheses, Battaglia di ritmi (Battle of rhythms) and La costruzione di un silenzio (Building a silence), ‘the ideal “infra-thin” artificial environment: silence’157 was underpinned by intensified exchange, intervals and interruptions, blurring the distinction between sound and silence. Three minutes of silence integrated in the piece, suggesting the existence of imagined space, was a completely new concept, predating both Pierre Schaeffer’s ‘musique concrète’ and John Cage’s silent composition 4’33”.158 Marinetti’s radio plays are original even by today’s standards. The interplay of sound segments leads to profound de-familiarising effects. Ruptures and interruptions heightened the interstices between acoustic fragments and silence. Mindful of Bergson’s temporal duration as a constant challenge to the illusion of representation and presence, Marinetti’s sintesi provide a compelling example of a liminal art leading to novel, almost postmodern, conceptions of radio mediality. ‘A fundamental mutation in medial interconnectivity reframes, together with the nature of radio broadcasting, the relation of speaker and listener, the exchange of inscription technologies and sound, the hierarchy of archival traces and spoken language.’159 Articles originally published in the rubric ‘Whispers from the ether’, now collected in JPGRIL, are heavily annotated on the margins. Marinetti’s enthusiastic marginalia elucidate the scope of radio, the ‘popular university’ of the future. This is a democratising medium reaching out to vast audiences, to inform and educate them. Like television, radio engenders a dislocated, displaced experiential sensorium in the listener.160 Marinetti, however, stopped short of taking radio’s arcane possibilities any further. More patchy and inconsistent, as has been observed, was Marinetti’s engagement with film, a technological medium elevating the machine to futurologist prosthesis and obscure agent of massification. Rooted in the synthetic and abstract projection of dynamic forms, cinema appeared second-rate when compared with the immediate, actualised dynamism of theatre.161 The mimetic, mechanically mediated underpin157 Ibid., 290. 158 D. Lombardi, in F. B. Pratella and L. Russolo, The Art of Noise: Destruction of Music by Futurist Machines ([n.p.]: Sun Vision Press, 2012), 16–17; M. D’Ambrosio, ‘From words in freedom to electronic literature’, in Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination, 270–2. 159 Luisetti, ‘Vitalist art’, 284. 160 JPGRIL, Marinetti special collections, Marinetti correspondence and papers, series I, box 2, n. 29, verses by G. Giardina, ‘Nel mondo della radio’ (1938), [n.p.] Giardina describes the imaginary journey taken by a comfortably seated futurist through a score of disconnected experiences through the medium of television, including Mount Vesuvius, a literary conference and a boxing match. See also Marinetti’s radio broadcast ‘L’aerocanzone delle Parole Nuove’, 29 July 1939. 161 E. Martera and P. Pietrogrande, Il mito della velocità: arte, motori e società nell’Italia del ‘900 (Florence: Giunti, 2008), 32.

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nings of cinema were perceived as static. Film froze movement in time, killing off the fluidity of the lived experience. A gnoseological, rather than technical, approach led to lack of full appreciation.162 Financial and logistic difficulties may have acted as a deterrent too.163 An excerpt from Marinetti’s 1933 radio manifesto throws useful light: a list of ‘weaknesses’ of cinema is set in contrast here with the ‘virtues’ of radio broadcasting. The former list includes agonising sentimentalism juxtaposed with realism, technical complexities, intrinsic banality and, most importantly, borrowed ‘luminosity’, or second-hand halo when compared with the self-generated and self-sufficient radiance of television and radio.164 Lack of colour may well have been a further stumbling block. The dance of spectral and fuzzy black-and-white images on the screen would have been perceived as shadowy and opaque, in painful contrast to the intense colourism of futurist painting. Photography and film mostly conveyed stillness, spectrality and rigor mortis. Variety theatre, e.g. Leopoldo Fregoli’s ‘Fregoligraph’,165 was widely appealing, together with Fuller’s dances and ‘primitive’ cinema, e.g. subversive, cheeky shows based on the fast, action-based adventures of comics such as André Deed (pseudonym André de Chapuis, also known as Cretinetti; Cretinetti e le donne, 1909), Marcel Fabre (also known as Robinet; e.g. Il prurito di Robinet, 1910 and Amor pedestre, 1914) and Ferdinand Guillaume (also known as Polidor). Footage of war actions and sporting feats was also broadly engaging. Popular full-immersion documentaries conveying the sensory surprises of combat and extreme sports include Giovanni Vitrotti’s Gare aeronautiche (Aeronautic competitions; 1909) and Luca Comerio’s A 3000 metri sull’Adamello (3000 metres on the mount Adamello; 1910) and Giro d’Italia (Tour of Italy; 1910). On the other hand, the immensely popular ‘monumental’ film, including pompous historical productions such as Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), failed to find favour among the futurists.166 The attraction towards early cinema of D’Annunzio and Luigi Pirandello, two writers who did not gravitate in the futurist orbit, may further have hindered the futurists.

Strauven, Marinetti e il cinema, 52. M. Verdone, Cinema e letteratura del futurismo (Rome: Bianco e Nero, 1968), 118–19. Marinetti and Masnata, ‘La radia’, in Teoria e invenzione futurista, 205–10 and 208. The ‘Fregoligraph’ was a repertoire of variety shows by the comic Leopoldo Fregoli dating before 1900. Fregoli deployed Mélies-style tricks including colour, substitution and fast and furious costume changes, which would have appealed to the futurists love of surprise and dynamism. In a manifesto of variety theatre Marinetti argued in favour of integrating cinema and variety theatre both in a literal sense, e.g. including short films in the fabric of variety theatre shows, and figuratively, e.g. deploying tricks, absurd twists, attraction and comicity – see Strauven, Marinetti e il cinema, 35–6 and 73–82. See also Verdone, Cinema e letteratura del futurismo, 124–8. 166 Strauven, Marinetti e il cinema, 23–4. 162 163 164 165

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Futurist cinema relied on work undertaken by the brothers Arnaldo and Bruno Ginanni Corradini (also known as Ginna and Corra, respectively) between 1907 and 1908. Marinetti’s first explicit mention of film was in the Technical manifesto of futurist literature (1912). His first fully-fledged statement of intent and Manifesto of futurist cinema (1916) described film as inferior to theatre. Attracting a conventional and unnecessarily complicated repertoire, basking in the reflected light of dynamic life, cinema failed to ‘augment’ theatre. Cinema was derivative, painterly and infected with a languorous ‘plague’. Marinetti’s manifesto is comprised of fourteen propositions, a comprehensive list of existing motifs and techniques deployed by avant-garde cinema, with special regard for montage.167 In true futurist spirit the first futurist film came out before its corresponding manifesto. Entitled Vita futurista (Futurist life; 1916), it was a ‘multifaceted and innovative film, which offered a matrix for nearly all successive experiments in avantgarde cinema’.168 Vita futurista was directed by Ginna with the assistance of Lucio Venna. The shooting took place in Florence, part in a theatre, part outside, in 1916 with a Pathé camera with a crank sourced in Campo de’ Fiori in Rome and payed for by Ginna. The film starred the futurists Marinetti, Balla, Ginna, Corra, Venna, Settimelli, Carli and Nannetti, none of whom followed a script. Simultaneity, embedded in the montage and sequence of thematically discrete, but conjoined, individual episodes, attempted to translate theatrical sintesi into film form. Vita futurista showcased the life and pursuits of the futurists featured as a tribal people. Originally the film lasted 120 minutes but was cut down to 99 minutes by censors who removed all contentious anti-Austrian content. Even though the visual narration was documentary and mimetic, it experimented with convex and concave mirrors for special effect,169 as had Bragaglia’s fotodinamica (see section 6.5a). An array of cinematic styles, e.g. improvised candid-camera style shots, Balla’s iridescent ‘dance of geometric splendour’ and anti-logical ‘drills’, added to its novelty.170 The film, however, failed dismally at the box office. The first screening took place at the Niccolini Theatre in Florence on 28 January 1917, while the war was raging. Sales were respectable: 199 tickets for the matinée and 150 for the evening performance, fellow futurists and friends coming out in force to support the event. No particular reactions are recorded at this screening. However, subsequent projections were cancelled due to overly spirited audiences – in Rome spectators threw stones at the screen and virtually

167 Ibid., 94–110. 168 M. Verdone and G. Berghaus, ‘Vita futurista and early futurist cinema’, in Berghaus (ed.), International Futurism in Arts and Literature, 415. 169 Strauven, ‘Futurist poetics and the cinematic imagination’, 224. 170 Verdone, Cinema e letteratura del futurismo, 103–9 and ‘Il fim futurista’, in Il futurismo, 71–3.

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demolished the premises.171 Today eight stills alone from the first section and a partial script survive,172 notwithstanding several attempted reconstructions, securing the status of Vita futurista as a ‘lost cult movie’. Vita futurista influenced Velocità (Speed; c. 1917–18),173 a film comprised of eleven tableaux revolving around the central theme of speed. The script, now at BRBML, demonstrates Marinetti’s specific interest in special effects, ‘horror’ tricks, frames within frames and drama of objects.174 In showcasing industrial labour, human and artificial life, this film correlates with European avant-garde cinema. Despite the dearth in production, in fact, futurist film impressed a demonstrable, durable and multifarious (aesthetic, musical and performative) mark across Europe, seducing filmmakers working in Paris in the 1920s. These include French cubo-futurist cinema, e.g. Photogénie mécanique (Mechanical ‘photogenia’; 1924) by Jean Grémillon and Germaine Dulac’s Thèmes et variations (Themes and variations; 1928). Dulac’s film draws visual parallels between a classical ballet dancer and a set of complex mechanisms shot in slow motion. Abel Gance’s La roue (The Wheel; 1922), Fernand Léger’s Ballet mécanique (Mechanical Ballet; 1924) and Marcel L’Herbier’s L’inhumaine (The inhuman woman; 1924) also borrowed futurist themes and devices. Eugène Deslaw’s La marche des machines (March of machines; 1927) took the machine theme further, setting up a symphony of cranes, pistons and machines performed on Russolo’s new instrument, the rumorharmonium. The film was first screened on 15 November 1928, to coincide with the opening of an exhibition by Prampolini (see also section 5.1b).175 On 1 December 1926 Marinetti published the article ‘La cinematografia astratta è un’invenzione italiana’ (Abstract cinema is an Italian invention; in L’Impero). Here, he promoted an abstract, musical, architectural, purely visual cinema drawing for the first time on the chromatic, musical and synesthetic innovations advanced in 1916. This piece was reprised and reprinted in revised form in June 1927 under the title ‘Cinematografia futurista astratta e pura’ (Pure and abstract futurist cinema; 171 In Verdone and Berghaus, ‘Vita futurista’, 419–20. 172 Until the late 1980s critics believed that one of the two or three original copies had survived and would eventually resurface. The only extant copy, however, allegedly burst into flames when screened for the first time in 1960 – see Strauven, Marinetti e il cinema, 162 and 164; for a full discussion of the making and critical history of this film, see 166–88. 173 It is unclear whether Velocità bears any relation to the 1930 film by Oriani, Cordero and Martina of the same title. 174 Strauven, Marinetti e il cinema, 188–211. 175 G. Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista (Milan: Skira, 2001), 118. Deslaw continued his collaboration with Russolo in Vers les robots. Russolo contributed music to two further films, neither of which survives: Futuristi a Parigi, starring Russolo and Marinetti, and Montparnasse, starring Russolo, Marinetti and Prampolini. In 1930, during a screening of Luis Buñuel’s L’age d’or, Russolo’s rumorharmonium was smashed to pieces by an enraged group from the Ligue des patriotes – see Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista, 120.

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in Vetrina futurista). Marinetti cites an intervention on Vita futurista of the then Minister for Popular Culture Pavolini. In a bid to reclaim primacy to futurism, both Marinetti and Pavolini cite absurdist film rather than the abstract variety.176 In order to emphasise the virtues and longevity of radio, however, Marinetti announced the demise of cinema in a manifesto of 1933. In ‘Morale fascista del cinematografo’ (Fascist ethics of film; 1934; in Sant’Elia) he underscored the medium’s pedagogical function, in tandem with its predisposition to capture perspectives from above ground on board of flying machines, in the context of a consumerist Fascist cinema. Soviet revolutionary festivals and epic cinema focused on the interaction between human masses and machines circulating in Italy together with Sergei Eisenstein’s theoretical writings were also influential.177 In the manifesto La cinematografia (Cinematography; 1938) drafted together with Ginna and published twenty years later, Marinetti attempted to reform cinema. He recommended, in particular, that anthropomorphic, narrative and realist conventions be abandoned in favour of highly coloured, a-syntactical, abstracted forms and devices, a means to manipulate and scramble the normative space–time sequence. Lamenting its creative mediocrity and dismissing the technical perfectionism of contemporary French and American cinema, Marinetti continued to relegate film to a subordinate position with respect to his primary passion: theatre.178 Progressively institutionalised, cinema was no longer reclaimed as a futurist art form. This manifesto remained virtually unheeded. Too ambitious or simply frustrated not to have made better use of it, Marinetti may ultimately have regarded cinema as a discreet component of a wider, total work of art.179 2.6 Machines and materials In an increasingly massified and consumer society, a ‘society of spectacle’, Marinetti was dazzled by the glistening machine. The chemical and structural composition of raw matter intrigued him too. Even his reinvention of poetic language into a ‘technical language’ of words-in-freedom attempted to borrow the discoursive paradigms of science, chemistry especially, in order to subsume the language of materiality under the transforming influence of mechanical forces. Modernism ascribed political and poetic meaning to manufactured materials and fabric, such as Zola’s cast iron, Marinetti’s rayon, Scheerbart’s tempered glass, Walter

176 177 178 179

Strauven, Marinetti e il cinema, 112–14. See Schnapp, 18BL, 126. Benedetta and L. Clerici, cit. in Strauven, Marinetti e il cinema, 112. Strauven, ‘Futurist poetics’, 225 and Marinetti e il cinema, 117–21.

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Gropius and Depero’s steel (see section 3.3), through to Queneau’s polystyrene.180 Gramsci demonstrated awareness of new materials in mechanical function, especially petroleum.181 Bakelite, a formaldehyde-based material that could be moulded into shape while hot, was the first synthetic polymer to appear on the market. Bakelite was, in other words, the first proper plastic. It was patented in 1909, when futurismo came to light. Bakelite was the precursor of other polymers shortly to colonise the world such as nylon, polythene and Gore-Tex.182 Availability of plastic and other materials, new methods of fabrication and new construction techniques led to largescale production of objects in various shapes and scales. Fast economic growth rested on the development of new industries, e.g. electrical, chemical, automobile and real estate whose ‘economic impacts to a great extent were unchartered and uncertain’.183 In the early 1920s, Naum Gabo rejected traditional materials and began making sculptures out of transparent plastic. Gabo’s Construction through a Plane (c. 1937) was one of the first works to use the newly invented material Perspex. The futurists preferred tin. Tin was first employed in food preservation during the Napoleonic wars, when Peter Durand patented a method of enclosing food in iron containers coated with a thin film of tin. Soft, pliable and resistant to corrosion, pure tin is costly and therefore utilised mainly in the form of ‘tinplate’, e.g. layered on strips of mild steel by an electro-deposition process undertaken industrially.184 From the mid-1920s, Moholy-Nagy also began to experiment with new industrial materials, e.g. aluminium, plastic and celluloid. Moholy-Nagy painted on highly polished, highly reflective aluminium, or silberit, one of the new industrial materials attracting attention because of its shiny surface and stable structure. Painting on silberit achieved particular optical effects, e.g. Sil I (1933). Marinetti was also drawn towards the composition and qualitative attributes of matter, e.g. opacity, reflectivity, shine and translucency. His appreciation of metal, iron in particular, echoes the myth of Dr Faustus. Alchemic creations of human life from chemicals and metals emerge from a crucible, at once heavy and light.185 Beginning with the manifesto, Multiplied man and the reign of the machine (1910), Marinetti spoke of metals as core materials. His Technical manifesto of futurist literature (1912) singled out raw matter as a new literary paradigm. Its constituent parts, 180 J. T. Schnapp, ‘Rayon/Marinetti’, in P. Antonello and S. Gilson (eds), Science and Literature in Italian Culture from Dante to Calvino (Oxford: Legenda/MHRA/EHRC, 2004), 239–51. 181 Gramsci, ‘Some theoretical and practical aspects of “economism”’, cit. in Forgacs (ed.), The Gramsci Reader, 214. 182 J. Urquhart, ‘Chasing rainbows’, New Scientist, 12 March 2016, 37. 183 M. C. Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1983), 140. 184 A. Street and W. Alexander, Metals in the Service of Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 190–2. 185 Schnapp, 18BL, 153–6.

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he explained, are ‘crowds of massed molecules and whirling electrons’. Marinetti’s emphasis on ‘splendore’ (shine, polish, reflectivity) points to the surface qualities of metals, mirrors (both material and metaphorical), laminated surfaces and conductors. Literature, contends Marinetti, must shift its attention towards an alternative reality governed by base mechanical forces and crude materiality. Literary discourse must familiarise itself with the ‘incomprehensible and inhuman’ quality of the material real, at once rock-solid and mobilised by atomic constituent parts.186 In a Destruction of syntax manifesto (1913), Marinetti further called attention to a ‘molecular life’ where infinitely small particles constitute the building blocks of the contingent real. In ‘Geometric and mechanical splendour’ (1914) Marinetti finetuned his apprehension of tangible reality. Here, he called upon the cognate domains of speed, electricity, machines, the great city, discipline and controlled force, ‘the happy precision of gears and well-oiled thoughts’, ‘great humming central electric station that holds the hydraulic pressure of a mountain chain and the electric power of a vast horizon, synthesised in marble distribution panels bristling with dials, keyboards and shining commutators’.187 The ‘incomprehensible’ pliability of matter, at once resistant and flimsy, earthy and aerial, tangible and spiritual, reinforces the fragility of material things.188 The manifesto Il tattilismo (Tactilism; January 1921) sharpened the focus on the core multiplicity of matter. A plethora of both organic and inert materials are laid out here: metals, fabrics and objects, e.g. sponge, velvet, electric cable, sandpaper, mirror, marble, wool, silver, silk, water, feather, stone. This listing resonates with the systematic inventory devised by Balla and Depero in the Futurist reconstruction of the universe manifesto (1915; see Chapter 3), which mentioned materials, toys, artificial landscapes and metallic animals. A constructivist emphasis on ‘faktura’ may also be echoed here (see Moholy-Nagy’s already mentioned work with silberit). This engagement with raw materials will impress a mark on future activities leading to a futurist leadership in industrial design, graphic art and modular, prefabricated architecture (see especially Depero in section 3.3 and Munari in section 6.5b). Relying on the expertise of Fedele Azari (see section 3.2), Marinetti further composed a Primo dizionario aereo italiano (First Italian aerial dictionary; 1929), a rigorous instruction for the young aviation industry listing neologisms relating to materials, the mechanics of planes and logistics of the flying experience, reflecting the growing role of aero-

186 Marinetti, ‘Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista’, in Teoria e invenzione futurista, 50–1. 187 Marinetti, ‘Geometric and mechanical splendour and the numerical sensibility’, in Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos, 154. 188 See also the manifesto Destruction of syntax (11 May 1913), in Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, 73–4.

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nautics in Italy’s industrial reconstruction.189 A technical manual and a vocabulary for first-time flyers were also included. A material aesthetics laden with social implications is, however, more prominent in the book Parole in libertà futuriste tattili, termiche, olfattive (Tactile Thermal Olfactive Futurist Words in Freedom; 1931 or 1932). Following Depero and Azari’s libro imbullonato (see section 3.3) Parole was made up of lithe sheets of tin bound together with thick screws. Marinetti’s words-in-freedom were printed on the recto of each page, in linear continuity with the graphic interventions of Tullio d’Albisola (1899–1971), whose ‘coloured plastic syntheses’ accompanied each corresponding verso. ‘Six different models were devised for a binding that would allow the pages to rotate. This was achieved with the aid of ball-bearings held in place by parallel wires concealed in a tubular spine.’190 The sleek materiality, the metallic and polychromatic reflexes dancing around when leafing through it, rendered this book quintessentially industrial and modern. Experimenting with new materials, structures and forms, Parole is an ‘explicit initiation to the new values of contemporary mechanical aesthetics’.191 Half-a-metre long and weighing 852 grammes, Parole was lithographed on up to one-millimetre-thin sheets of tin in the Litolatta factory located in Savona’s industrial quarters, specifically in the Zinola area which was packed with metalwork industries. Litolatta was founded in 1924 by a former seaman, Vincenzo Nosenzo. Nosenzo had perfected and patented a special method of lithographing on paper-thin sheets of tin. He named the process ‘litolatta’ (litho-tin). The firm employed a handful of men in a managerial capacity and nearly 100 women as manual workers in what was a labour-intensive industry. Tin was a light, unassuming, almost domestic metal and deemed to be best handled by women’s slender hands. The Litolatta women workers decorated and coloured sheet-metal objects to make tickets, cards and calendars: everything was made of tin. The factory’s cultural activity began in 1931, with the lithography of a futurist poster celebrating the use of tin as a paperless support for words. The versatility of this soft alloy as a substitute for paper proved attractive. Depero and other futurists devised further mechanical books (see section 3.3).192 189 See also G. Lista, ‘Vue aérienne et aeropeinture futuriste: une métaphysique de l’espace’, in A. Mousseigne, C. Debray, G. Lista, A. Nakov and C. Desbordes (eds), La conquête de l’air: une aventure dans l’art du XX siècle (Toulouse-Milan: Les Abattoirs-5 Continents, 2002), 105. 190 M. Bentivoglio, ‘Innovative artist’s books of Italian futurism’, in Berghaus (ed.), International Futurism in Arts and Literature, 483. Tullio D’Albisola went on to publish a further, even nimbler tin book in 1934, L’anguria lirica, with an introduction by Marinetti. A third book made of tin, entitled Il miliardario della fantasia (1986) was designed and illustrated by Munari. Munari replaced the cylindrical spine with a thin metallic spiral. 191 Lista, F. T. Marinetti: l’anarchiste, 166–7. 192 Bentivoglio, ‘Innovative artist’s books’, 481–3.

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Marinetti’s book foregrounded the work of women in the Litolatta factory: their manual skill putting the book together, sitting on workbenches and handling industrial machinery. Marinetti’s interest in this group of women workers using utensils traditionally regarded as masculine may point to ‘an inversion of roles that seems, […], to suggest the age-old patriarchal dream of a technological maternity, a masculine maternity’.193 This seems corroborated by the poet’s syllabic repetition ‘UA UA UA’, an onomatopoeic translation of the thunderclaps produced by large metal sheets when shaken and reminiscent of baby wailings. The sonic contiguity of the Italian nouns ‘latta’ (tin) and ‘latte’ (milk) is also notable, implying a ‘subliminal suggestion of a metallised nursery’.194 Rather than articulating a ‘masculine mystique’ disparaging of woman and of the feminisation of mass culture,195 however, Marinetti seems to recalibrate his point of view about women, both as concerns traditional gender roles and fellow women artists, positing an ‘indeterminate field’196 where both a positive and a negative position hold true. Without foregoing his ‘cyborg’ gender politics, Marinetti looks up to the women workers of Litolatta as champions of new materials: a mix of experimentation, mechanics and continued development, with an eye to the convergence of commercial utilitarianism, commodification and artistic outcome. His priority is no longer a rarefied individual aesthetics but rather a collective of manual and intellectual forces. Marinetti revisited baby hydraulic flows in ‘Il poema del vestito di latte’ (‘The poem of the milk dress’; 1937), an ode to the new fibre lanital. ‘Il poema di Torre Viscosa’ (‘The poem of Torviscosa’; 1938) celebrated the foundation of the eponymous town where the SNIA Viscosa Corporation produced the artificial silk viscose. Both poems juxtapose ‘human digestive organs with industrial boilers, the flow of milk with the flow of tanks and aerial squadrons’.197 As such, they paved the way for ‘Il poema non umano dei tecnicismi’ (‘The non-human poem of technicalities’; 1940) which is considered to be the pinnacle of ‘spiritual’ mechanisation of late futurism.198 The title qualifies the poem as ‘non-human’ in an attempt to convince readers that technics and mechanics have superseded psychology as the origin and locus of human creativity. Section three of ‘Il poema non umano dei tecnicismi’ focuses on the ‘molecular drama of cellulose’. Mapping the chemical and molecular journey of the polysaccha193 Bentivoglio and Zoccoli, The Women Artists of Italian Futurism, 67. 194 Ibid. 195 A. Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Post-modernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986), 60–1. 196 Pickering-Iazzi, Politics of the Visible, 206. 197 Schnapp, ‘Rayon/Marinetti’, 234. Both poems are illustrated by Bruno Munari. 198 Härmänmaa, Un patriota che sfidò la decadenza, 131.

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ride cellulose into textile (e.g. rayon and viscose) this part describes in circumstantial detail the production process from wood pulp to chemically solidified filaments resulting in synthetic fibres of nearly pure substance. Section four considers milk’s capabilities in fabric production. Marinetti is a vocal advocate of rayon, a fibre manufactured from regenerated cellulose and with the smooth feeling of silk, which he regarded as the fabric of modernity. Grouped together with comparable artificial fibres, derived metals and materials, e.g. aluminium and stainless steel, reinforced concrete and plastics, rayon was the fabric of autarchic choice. Rayon became a bare necessity when Italy began to grapple with stringent economic sanctions after its invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. The metallic component of flying machines is also emphasised in ‘Il poema non umano dei tecnicismi’. Even though the relation between airplanes and the chemistry of new fabrics may appear implausible – after all, ‘unlike other emblems of modernity […] such as airplanes’ modern fabrics ‘bear a uniquely intimate and direct relation to the human body, surrounding as they do the epidermis in a secondary membrane’199 – Marinetti brings convincingly together here both the new optics and haptics embedded in metals and new materials as part and parcel of an anthropological paradigm shift. The modern ‘mechanical civilisation’ is underpinned by these amazing materials, posited as far more plausible and urgent topics than the ‘human dramas’ of yore.200 Coming full circle, from women’s metalwork in the Litolatta factory to rayon, Marinetti regards ‘the automation of production’ as a liberating agent ‘from the burdens of the old humanism’.201 In this new world, ‘workers and their tools have become “autopoeti” (self-poets) surging forth in a sea of sparks; a world in which the mingling of worker bodies and machines was giving rise to a “proletariat of geniuses”’.202 Technology and matter are paramount in this futurist new world and speak a language of their own. This is a world where only professional machine handlers, workers and chemists, can lay claim to poetry. Marinetti’s chemical and molecular approach led to the manifesto Matematica futurista (Manifesto of futurist mathematics; 1940 or 1941), co-authored with Marcello Puma and Pino Masnata. The manifesto explored non-Euclidean geometries, ‘qualitative’ (rather than quantitative) and asymmetrical algebra, tying in Einstein’s relativity theory. Locked in an ambivalent and unresolved gender politics, however, Marinetti is reluctant to let go of the symbolic power of mechanised cyborgs. His L’aeropoema di Gesù (The Aeropoem of Jesus; 1943–44) is a late, last hymn to the 199 Schnapp, ‘Rayon/Marinetti’, 230. 200 Marinetti, ‘Invito ai lettori spregiudicati’, in ‘Il poema non umano dei tecnicismi’ (1940), in Teoria e invenzione futurista, 1141–2. 201 Schnapp, ‘Rayon/Marinetti’, 236. 202 Ibid. See also Sartini Blum, Other Modernism, 143.

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mechanical civilisation. Portraying himself in a small factory, face to face with an engine, Marinetti engages in an intimate dialogue and erotic tug-of-war with a sexualised she-machine. Unrepentantly, Marinetti reinforces here his enduring loyalty to the human–mechanical binary encoded in the cyborg.

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3 Style of steel: Fortunato Depero in ‘dynamoland’ Man is a geometric animal, animated by a geometric spirit. (A. Ozenfant and C. E. Jeanneret, After Cubism, 1918) A work of art must bear comparison with a manufactured object. (F. Léger, 1924, cit. in M. Raynal, Modern French Painters, 1969)

On 24 August 1911, in a candid letter to Marinetti, Fortunato Depero (1892–1960) communicated his resolve to live and work as a futurist.1 Depero’s correspondence frequently attests to his loyalty to futurismo, as well as his grateful reliance on Marinetti’s ‘spiritual’, and financial, assistance during lean times.2 The photograph of a futurist group taken in 1926 in Marinetti’s apartment (Figure 3.1) foregrounds the artist kneeling down on an ottoman, putting hand on heart, frozen in a chivalric and subordinate stance before a looming Marinetti who looks down on him with an air of condescension. Is Depero obtaining an investiture? The pose may have been struck in jest. The unnatural gaze of the bystanders, however, seems to betray a less than jocular awareness of the economics of Marinetti’s circle. Despite following Marinetti’s managerial lead, however, Depero devised his own original, independent and process-oriented approach. Departing from Marinetti’s cyborg, Depero developed organic machines that incorporated natural human traits. His machines were companions rather than sexual antagonists. Governed by geometrical rules, they were contained in a parallel ‘mechanical’ universe clunking along the animal and vegetal worlds, carrying ‘organic’ overtones (see section 3.2). Depero’s practice spanned applications on stage and mechanised toys and puppets, dynamos and industrial materials and objects, in partnership with Fedele Azari, 1 JPGRIL, Marinetti, special collections, Marinetti correspondence and papers, 1886–1974, series I, box 1, n. 23, letter by Depero to Marinetti, Milan 24 August 1911. 2 BRBML, Marinetti papers, general collection, series III, box 10, folder 412, undated letter Depero to Marinetti, 1–2.

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3.1 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, Fortunato Depero (on ottoman), Rome, 1926

a ‘naturalisation’ of machines for the purpose of investigating the natural world, widening knowledge and providing concrete applications. This line of thinking was congruent with the practice of his advanced industrial–artistic workplace, both in his native Rovereto and in New York. Here, Depero developed an understanding of machines in terms of production, manufacture and marketing. This original method was seeded during Depero’s training under Giacomo Balla. Despite his loose connection with futurist ranks, Balla transformed Italian art in the postwar period. His pragmatic mastery rooted in the artisan workshop, engagement with industrial materials and techniques and attention for scientific developments were hugely influential. As Boccioni readily acknowledged, Balla was a precursor who laid out the grammar of a ‘mechanical language’.3 Balla and Depero’s manifesto Futurist reconstruction of the universe (1915) elucidated this language, paving the way for the abstract and mechanical turn informing futurist production through the 1920s and 1930s. Situating the machine at the very core of futurist activity this manifesto stimulated an important aesthetic and ideological shift predicated on 3 E. Crispolti, ‘Lettera futurista ad amici torinesi’, in Miracco, Masoero and Poli (eds), L’estetica della macchina, 12.

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the objectivity, rigour and ethics of the machine. After publishing this manifesto, Depero fully emerged as a futurist. Balla was a divisionist painter and an older, on-and-off futurist who had trained Boccioni and Severini.4 He was ‘the most photo-literate of the futurist painters’,5 having fruitfully studied the chronophotographic work of Étienne-Jules Marey at the Paris Universal Expo of 1900 through the recommendation of Anton Giulio Bragaglia (see section 6.5a). His first important oil paintings portraying bodies in motion include Le mani del violinista (The Hand of the Violinist; 1912), Dinamisno di un cane al guinzaglio (Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash; 1912) and Ragazza che corre sul balcone (Girl Running on a Balcony; 1912). These closely followed his first visit to Düsseldorf in July–August 1912 to oversee the decoration of Grethel Löwenstein’s house.6 Here, he was impressed by Peter Behrens’s AEG lamp (echoing his own Lampada ad arco/Street Light; 1909–11) and by the polychrome windows of the city’s rail station. Collected in a Taccuino di Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf’s notebook), Balla’s notes are crammed with scores of geometric modules in varying chromatic combinations and stylised sketches of bodies in motion. From then on, geometric and abstract forms found more favour than symbolist and divisionist techniques. As already mentioned, geometry, science and engineering established a new paradigm: a formal neoclassicism rooted in the machine. Modes of art production were transformed with the introduction of metals, alloys and new materials, including industrial and ‘poor’ materials of daily use – cardboard, wire, paper. A rule of mechanics and movement, embodying the futurist principle of ‘mechanical dynamism’, became one of the distinguishing features of Depero’s work.7 His revolutionary concept of ‘complessi plastici’ (plastic groupings) consisting of multi-media objects moving in space and time, replaced the inert stasis of traditional art works, sweeping away the frozen immobility of the classical manner.8 Set in motion by a mechanism, Depero’s ‘complessi’ were constitutionally mechanical objects moving across space and time. Depero’s worldview was rooted in the plasticity of forms in motion and the materiality of the physical world. Avoiding abstract conceptualisations, e.g. Boccioni’s 4 M. Vinardi (ed.), ‘La vita e l’arte’, in Boccioni (Milan: Rizzoli/Skira, 2004). 5 M. Braun, ‘Giacomo Balla, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, and Étienne-Jules Marey’, in Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909–44, 96. 6 de Marchis (ed.), Futurismo da ripensare, 18–20; F. Benzi, ‘Giacomo Balla: the conquest of speed’, in Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909–44, 103. 7 G. Lista (ed.), in Depero, Numero unico Futurista Campari 1931, Futurismo 1932, Dinamo Futurista 1933 (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1979), 7. 8 MART, Fondo Fortunato Depero, Corrispondenza, Bra-C, typed review now ‘Giudizio di Christian Brinton (uno dei più noti critici di New-York)’, [n.d.], [n.p.]; A. Masoero (ed.), Universo meccanico: il futurismo attorno a Balla, Depero, Prampolini (Milan: Mazzotta, 2003), 9.

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‘energy shards’ and ‘force lines’, he transformed mechanical aesthetics, melding geometry and physics and translating abstract art into a natural world governed by physical laws. Depero reconfigured fauna and flora into structures and machines, a modern version of Del Monte’s intertwining of ‘speculation’ and ‘manufacture’.9 Depero thus needs to be reassessed as an inbetweener straddling across a variety of modes of production, both outmoded and new. Balibar’s assertion that ‘periods of transition are […] characterised by the coexistence of several modes of production’10 rings particularly true here. Depero was, in fact, an anti-intellectual, ‘a kind of chameleon’ whose reconciliation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art in his own style suggests a skilful repackaging of the legitimised ‘modernism’ of futurism.11 His pronouncements on the subject of the machine are not systematic but pulverised in journal articles, manifestos and extemporary interventions. Individual and self-sufficient, he was at the forefront of futurist modernity in his ready embrace of machine culture. At the same time, however, he championed the traditional Alpine style. His appreciation of vernacular styles, both in his native Trentino and in Capri, coexisted with an equally sincere appreciation of urban and industrial technologies. His art pursued in equal measure the modern and the primitive, high-tech and low-tech, the manual and mechanical, reconfiguring the dialogue between craftsmanship and the new style. Far from being lured by the collective utopianism which other fellow futurists embedded in factory work (see Chapter 4), far from renegotiating and reinventing the interface between fine art, industry and craft as practised by the Bauhaus, Depero’s original style was hewn in a coexistence and mutual tension of two modes of production: the traditional-artisanal and the modern-industrial. The harmony, and also the strain, between craft and industry remains unresolved throughout, constituting the core of Depero’s modus operandi and one of the most specific markers of his work (see section 3.1). Juxtaposing New York’s machines with the ‘slow’ folkloric art of the Alps, Depero devised an original style with instant popular flavour. His awareness of massification, industrial production and commodity culture, his introduction of futurismo in the US in an attempt to immerse his goods in a large-scale chain of commodification, however, did not yield the desired result. Depero struggled to sell his artefacts in the brutal US art market. The homogenisation of taste which lured Depero to New York ended up disagreeing with his loyalty to traditional aesthetics and practices. The marriage of industrial and artisanal, global and local is not stable and secure. 9 See G. Del Monte, Le Mecaniche (1581), cit. in Rossi, I filosofi e le macchine, 76. 10 L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital, cit. in Jameson, Singular Modernity, 78. 11 D. Leiber, ‘The socialization of art’, in M. Scudiero and D. Leiber, Depero futurista & New York. Il futurismo e l’arte pubblicitaria. Futurism and the Art of Advertising (Rovereto: Longo, 1986), 112 and 116.

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3.2 Fortunato Depero, Tornio e telaio (Lathe and loom), 1949

As Appadurai reminds us, commodities are socialised things, their value lies in their exchange value.12 Depero’s repeated attempt to win over the US market and ride the wake of its standardised, consumer-oriented style ultimately exposed both the strengths and limitations of his approach, constrained by the urge to reconcile the vernacular with the international style and grisly economics of Great Depression New York (see section 3.4). 3.1 The lathe and the loom In 1949, Depero entered an art competition to best represent manual labour with an oil painting entitled Tornio e telaio (Lathe and loom; Figure 3.2).13 He elaborated 12 Appadurai, Future as Cultural Fact, esp. 9–13. 13 Born in Forlì, Giuseppe Verzocchi was a self-made man who ran a successful business in refractory fire bricks. In 1949 he launched a national competition to crown the best art work representing manual labour. Seventy-two renowned Italian visual artists, including Prampolini, de Chirico, Guttuso and Severini, entered this competition alongside Depero. Their entries now comprise a collection permanently housed in Forlì’s civic art galleries.

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the competition’s theme featuring two production machines that best embody the polarities of his art: a lathe and a loom. Depero represents labour as both a steel and a textile industry, echoing the binary of the Industrial Revolution. Two faceless, modular workers are brought into sharp relief by the stark contrast of incandescent reds and blues. The worker tending to the lathe and the worker tending to the loom perform their tasks separately, in mutual isolation. Depersonalised, anonymised, they appear to toil in robotic servitude, tending to the tools of their respective trades. This painting seems to bring to life Depero’s mechanical worldview. The polar opposites of use value and art value, artisan craftsmanship, including the nostalgia it might entail, and assimilation to industrial and commercial processes and production coexist here in reciprocal bonding. Depero never resolved the conundrum between artisanal and industrial technology, positing it as a foundational paradigm of his own practice. Depero’s work revolved around a workshop, laboratory and art house he nicknamed Casa del Mago, a ‘magician’s lair’ and mystic cauldron of arcane tools and practices. Born in 1893, his wife Rosetta (née Amadori) was the engine behind Depero’s fertile production line. Her work ranged from managing the large floor to choosing fabrics and colours, book-keeping, minute handicraft work (e.g. sewing cushions, tapestry and lampshades), making and decorating, cooking elaborate meals for business associates, patrons and fellow artists (her ‘ravioli’ were legendary). Regrettably, Rosetta’s work was unsigned and remains to this day largely uncredited.14 Her manual dexterity and creativity must have enhanced the appeal of Depero’s art at the crossroads between the avant-garde and popular folklore. With the support of Rosetta’s work, aspiring to a visionary modernity predicated on the handmade, at once contemporary and primitive, Depero maintained a romantic loyalty unusual among fellow futurists to the artisan’s ability to slowly fashion unique, beautiful objects from raw materials. Traditional Alpine craftsmanship, with emphasis on material and technics, was the backbone of his work. Depero was probably the most ‘technical’ of the postwar futurists, a ‘magus’ whose sorcery lay in his ability to make objects. His modus operandi was predicated on simplicity, stylisation and material: glass, rubber, metal, alloys and raw materials. Despite his emphasis on craftsmanship, however, Depero was no follower of Ruskin and Morris. He did not believe that industrial production was detrimental to craftsmanship, nor that it lacked ‘soul’, even in the face of the visual and psychological fatigue engendered by New York’s colossal and intimidating urban machines. Nostalgic romanticism went

14 Bentivoglio and Zoccoli, The Women Artists of Italian Futurism, 140: ‘besides being an outstanding manager, Rosetta was a first-class artisan and probably more than that. […] Though she did not care to sign them, we know that Rosetta also created tapestries, lamps and other items among the heterogeneous objects produced in the “magician’s workshop”’.

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hand in hand with machine-age engineering. Depero was simultaneously enthralled by functional, efficient and commodity-oriented markets cynically given over to the unremitting Fordist credo. As was the case with the Bauhaus, Depero was caught between commodity production and craft in a war waged on the ornament and the fetish, aiming for objectivity of technique, versatility of activity and collectivity of reception.15 His artisanship aimed to ‘understand and exploit the machine’s potential in an artistically sensitive fashion’16 not unlike the architect and art critic Gottfried Semper and the painter, architect and interior designer Henry van de Velde, who believed the artist, the industrialist and the artisan should work in unison. Conversely, Depero did not approach the dilemma between skill and craft in a Marxian framework of commodity economics, as contingent upon capitalism’s disruption of ‘organic’ societies predicated on the loss of the workers’ immediate access to the natural modes of production.17 Antonio Gramsci was also grappling with the dilemma between qualified and corporate artisanry and the ‘progressive’ and ‘liberating’ Fordist industry in the Prison Notebooks: Does a technique have to be learnt ‘systematically’? In practice, the technique of the village artisan has been set against that of Ford. Think of the variety of ways in which ‘industrial technique’ is learnt: artisan-like, during factory work itself, watching how others work (and hence wasting more time and energy and learning only partially); in professional schools (where the whole trade is systematically learned, even though some of the notions one learns will be applied very rarely in one’s lifetime, if ever); by combining various methods, with the Taylor-Ford system which created a new kind of qualification and a skill limited to certain factories, or even to specific machines and stages of the production process.18

Depero did not embrace a Marxian emancipatory view of machines. He was aware that, to paraphrase Adorno, the process of commodification is inherent in the art work. However, Depero chose not to dwell on the agency of manual workers as machine operators, their feeding into an infinite chain of capital and the redemptive agency of machines, as did the ‘frontier futurists’ (see Chapter 4). To put it with Gramsci, he remained caught between the ‘Fordist fanfare’ and a ruralist ‘exaltation of the

15 16 17 18

Cf. H. Foster’s discussion on Adolf Loos, ‘A proper subject’, in Prosthetic Gods, 54–107. F. Whitford, Bauhaus (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 16. Appadurai, Future as Cultural Fact, 13. A. Gramsci, ‘Americanism and Fordism’, in Hoare and Nowell Smith (eds and trans), Selection from the Prison Notebooks, 286A. The citation is from Gramsci, ‘Grammar and technique’, in Forgacs (ed.), The Gramsci Reader, 359.

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artisanat’.19 Depero did not accept that machines inevitably supersede craftsmanship. Equally, he was not preoccupied by the privatising narrowness of craftsmanship nor by the alienating capacity of automated technologies to strip labour of its romance. Rather, he viewed industrial production organically as a natural development.20 The individual artist, detached from the collective endeavour of the production line in the factory, remained at the centre of his practice.21 Thorstein Veblen may help shed light on Depero’s strategy. Veblen contends that: machine technology is a mechanical or material process and requires the attention to be centred upon this process. […] Because the process operates as a continuous flow […] the technologist ‘learns to think in terms of the process,’ […]. Continuous sequence and quantitative measurement become the new terms and devices of technological and scientific inquiry.22

Translated into Depero’s practice, the mechanical becomes a ‘total unfolding act’, a flexible technique adaptable to circumstances as required. A further useful notion may be ‘intersticial adjustment’.23 This refers to a space where the artist explores the gap between the technical and the economic spheres to his advantage, bridging the gap between beauty and usefulness, with an eye to the ethnography of the production process rather than its social and political implications. Depero worked towards a comparable goal, harmonising craftsmanship and industrial production, attempting to bridge the gap between commercial work and the public. This is especially in evidence in his advertising work which openly interrogates notions such as manufacture, disposability, consumption, mass taste, in other words some of the antinomies lodged at the core of modernism and mass culture. The product to be advertised becomes ‘a source of subject matter for his [Depero’s] own iconography which will then inspire a new pictorial taste for the image’.24 The mass appeal of the product, what Kurt Schwitters called Merz (short for ‘Kommerz’, trade), enables new forms of productivity, commodification and consumption, and new interactivities between the artist and the public. A strategy of reconciling ‘high’ and ‘low’ art epitomises the desire of the avant-garde to grapple with popular culture from the premises of its constitutive Cit. in Hoare and Nowell Smith (eds and trans), Selection from the Prison Notebooks, 287. C. A. Felice, Arti industriali d’oggi (Milan: Quaderni della Triennale/Hoepli, 1937), 11. See also Adler, ‘Marx, machines, and skills’, 795–7. T. Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), 367–8, cit. in West, Flesh of Steel, 80–1. West employs the idiom ‘intersticial adjustment’ with reference to Veblen. The analogy is pertinent since ‘in Veblen’s description, the discipline of business is a complex of values and methods of conduct founded in part in the condition of the handicraft period’ – West, Flesh of Steel, 84–5. 24 Leiber, ‘The socialization of art’, 92. 19 20 21 22 23

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purveyance of the new, in a process of mass-cultural recuperation and brokerage between high and low culture.25 Depero’s tension between the lathe and the loom is vividly thrown into relief when he encounters the productive modes of developed capitalism in New York. The sheer amount of objects on sale and the standardisation of taste seem utterly unfamiliar. Labour relations come across as deeply alien too. His first visit began in the autumn of 1928, immediately before the stock exchange crash of 1929 and the onset of the economic depression. The majority of Americans blamed the economic downturn on machines and widespread fears of automation (see section 3.4). The recession seemed to echo Depero’s own return in defeat to Italy. This demise may have played a part in taking his aesthetics further, as I shall discuss in the section below. Privy to the plight of an increasingly redundant human labour witnessed in his US exile, Depero’s proposal to ‘humanise machines’ and render them ‘organic’, rings like a last-ditch attempt to salvage a bedrock of humanism in economies increasingly driven by de-humanising technologies. 3.2 The natural artificial Representations of natural forms through artificial means and, conversely, natural repackaging of mechanical, manufactured, artificial objects are part and parcel of Depero’s method. ‘Depero’s natural kingdom is not in opposition to the machineoriented and artificial aspect of the industrial world. […] A landscape of ties or a forest of pencils implies that an awesome nature is totally compatible with a machine-oriented architectonic landscape.’26 The organic-natural and the inorganic-artificial are, in fact, reconciled in his work. Depero aims to ‘naturalise’ the machine rather than amalgamate it with nature, as Jack London, Frank Norris and William Carlos Williams had proposed at the turn of the nineteenth century.27 Unlikely to have been familiar with Mumford’s ‘organic machine civilisation’, Depero was nonetheless mindful of an organic society and the functionalist canon according to which ‘the aesthetic form of a useful object should be consistent with the purpose and expressive of it’.28 The dialogue between natural and artificial underpins Depero’s craftwork, pitting productively the utilitarian world of ‘gear-and-girder technology’ against the world of manual capability, where the former is posited as rescuing the latter from obsolescence and ruination.

25 26 27 28

Ibid., 110. Ibid., 94. Tichi, Shifting Gears, 17–40. West, Flesh of Steel, 103.

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This paradox is no more effectively in evidence than in Depero’s mechanical artefacts for the puppet theatre. Puppets and marionettes are theatrical objects par excellence. Situated between the organic and the inorganic, the human and the non-human, at once immobile and mobile, still and kinetic, dead and alive, puppets embody a natural–artificial hybridity.29 Their liminal nature lies between naturalised machine and mechanised nature, leading to further futurists mergers of human and machine (e.g. the cyborg in section 2.4). Depero is attracted by the possibilities of automation, ‘welcoming the merging of bodies and machines’.30 This embryonic cybernetic strategy predicated on movement and ‘naturalness’ is already at work in a non-extant Complesso motorumorista di equivalenti in moto (Motor-rumorist plastic complex; 1914–15).31 This ‘plastic complex’ aimed to radically re-envision artistic production: from static, austere and bi-dimensional, the work of art must morph into a dynamic, plastic, modular and brightly coloured installation. Later iterations, e.g. the Complessi plastici motorumoristi (Plastic motor-rumorist groupings; 1924), rotated on their axes and emitted distinctive noises while in motion: the work of art, suggests Depero, is round and all around. It displays its full potential in time and space, engaging the viewer in a stunning, immersive, multi-sensorial experience. Depero’s artificial scenery and metallic animals attracted the attention of Sergei Diaghilev, impresario and founder of the Ballets russes. In 1916 Diaghilev met Balla, Depero and Prampolini in Rome. Shortly afterwards he commissioned Depero to design a plastic mise en scène and costumes described as ‘polychrome armours’, e.g. multi-coloured diving suits which were to facilitate the dancers’ movement. Visiting Depero’s studio and noticing a cardboard model of enormous flowers, Diaghilev suggested that the artist construct the whole scenery as an artificial landscape and kinetic sculpture. Diaghilev, however, eventually discarded Depero’s work for the ballet Le chant du rossignol (The Song of the Nightingale; 1925, with music by Igor Stravinsky) which featured both a live and a mechanical nightingale. Depero prepared ‘plastic-cubist’ works for Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso, fabricating the managers’ cuirasses for Parade, which was premiered in Paris at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 18 May 1917. A productive period spent working in Capri in the summer of 1917 yielded geometric and coloured manufacts made from wood and cardboard and inspired by popular craftsmanship. Depero’s enthusiasm for the challenging environment of the Mediterranean island, at once figural and abstract, extended to local dances 29 Pizzi, ‘Introduction’, in Pinocchio, Puppets and Modernity, 1–15. 30 Meda, Al di là del mito, 207. 31 N. Diulgheroff, cit. in Bartsch, ‘L’uomo meccanizzato nell’ideologia del futurismo’, 30.

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(e.g. ‘tarantella’), landscape, water and light. The ‘primordial machines’ of Capri endured as sources of formal inspiration.32 Depero’s layered cubo-futurist portrayals of the Alpine region became injected with the vivid colours and visual energy of the Mediterranean, merging vernacular architecture and natural landscape. Preindustrial machines, bold colours and peasant life are also integral to these ‘plastic’ inventions including wooden marionettes and puppets. This score of brightly coloured ‘theatrical robots’33 personified ballerinas, animals and clowns, moving machine-like within artificial backdrops made of metal and synthetic fibres, dancing to a mechanical rhythm. Depero had an intuition that colour applied to mechanical objects would increase their market value, as Léger also observed at a later stage in the essay ‘Esthétique de la machine’ (‘The machine aesthetics’; 1923). ‘The charm of colour’, Léger observed, ‘works commercially – and this cannot be disregarded – to facilitate the sale, as the manufacturer well knows.’ ‘The artisan […] is the real creator; […], every day he creates and invents the pretty knick-knacks and beautiful machines which bring some colour to our lives.’34 Depero’s Plastic ballets, a compendium of these intuitions, premiered at Podrecca’s Teatro dei piccoli in Rome’s Palazzo Odescalchi on 14 April 1918, the first of eleven planned runs. Four of these were the outcome of a collaboration with the Swiss poet Gilbert Clavel. Depero had worked side by side with Clavel in his house in Anacapri in the summer 1917 and was given free rein over material and production. The puppets were articulated, mechanically operated and lacquered in vibrant, block colours. They came in different sizes. The puppets performed in ballets consisting of five ‘mimic-musical actions’, each lasting no longer than a handful of minutes. The first ballet was entitled I Pagliacci (Clowns; music by Alfredo Casella) and featured bright red and yellow marionettes, a blue ballerina, a hen and a swarm of multi-coloured butterflies. The puppets danced to the rhythm of a Russian folklore tune, alongside a battery of animated white Pinocchios. The little Pinocchios marched in a straight line through a set encased in carmine red cloth and illuminated by mechanical electric flowers. The ballerina and the two red-and-yellow clad marionettes both stared at the hen while it laid an egg. The second ballet, L’uomo dai baffi (Man with a Moustache; music by Tyrwhitt (pseudonym of Lord Berners) entitled Quatre petites marches funèbres) featured figures wearing oversized moustaches and walking animatedly on a golden pavement. They multiplied over and over again, 32 Cit. in M. Sabatino, ‘Capri as the epicenter of “slow” futurism’, in Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909–44, 222. 33 Lista (ed.), in Depero, Numero unico, 9. 34 F. Léger, ‘The machine aesthetic’, in Golding and Green (eds), Léger and Purist Paris, 89 and 91 respectively; see also Léger’s ‘The polychromatic machine object is a new beginning, a kind of renaissance of the initial object’ (ibid., 89).

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varying in size. The show included a blue ballerina in a purple tutu, a black cat whose tinfoil eyes glistened in the dark chasing a white mouse, and the drunken dance of three moustachioed puppets while they were being pelted with cigarettes. Trying his hand at an exotic theme, Depero’s most successful ballet was n. 3: I selvaggi (The Savages; music by Francesco Malipiero). A chorus line of shielded, armed ‘savages’, painted red and black, fought one another against a painted backdrop in order to win the favours of a ‘selvaggia’ (she-savage). The belly of the ‘selvaggia’ opened to reveal a mini-stage where a tiny silver figure holding a red heart danced merrily. Emerging from this tiny stage, the silver dancer was quickly gobbled up by a mechanically operated giant snake, brightly lacquered in green and gold. The stage was engulfed in darkness, occasionally interrupted by piercing green lightning bolts. The following piece, Ombre (Shadows; music by Chemenov, pseudonym of Béla Bartók) was the most abstract. The action was performed entirely by shadows conjured up around multi-shaped volumes and lights, dancing to a tune on a completely bare stage. In n. 5, L’orso azzurro (Blue Bear; music by Chemenov), a blue bear and a monkey performed exhilarating dance moves. Simultaneously, all the puppets featured in the five sequences returned on stage for a final review. In the painting I miei balli plastici (My plastic ballets; 1918) Depero portrayed the eccentric characters described above. Aligning them on the flat plane of a large and multi-coloured canvas, he provided a visual summary of the entire cast. These are robot prototypes, precursors of the live dancers featured in later work for New York’s Roxy Theatre, e.g. New Babel (1929) and Mechanized Lamps (1930). Depero’s mechanical puppets are also genealogical to the robots shortly to sweep theatre (e.g. Pannaggi and Paladini’s Mechanical Ballet; 1922), film (e.g. Ernst Lubitsch’s Die puppe; 1919 and Deed’s L’uomo meccanico; 1921–22) and literature (e.g. Karel Čapek’s R.U.R.; 1920). His natural–artificial characters stand on the cusp of mechanical humanist theatre in 1920s and 1930s Europe (see section 4.3a).35 The demise of the Plastic ballets was a setback for Depero’s depleted finances – in correspondence with Marinetti, Depero expressed his sincere gratitude for the injections of cash he received at this difficult juncture.36 Following from this experimental experience, Depero conceived a Magic theatre, populating the stage with a new battery of puppets in motion. These puppets were no longer stiff, angular and mechanic, but rather rubbery, transparent and coated in tin, whose reflective surface was best suited 35 W. Strauven, ‘Le mécanoïde et l’androïde: deux faces du mythe futuriste dans le cinéma d’avant-garde des années vingt’, Cinémas/Cinélekta 4, 12:3 (2002), www.erudit.org/revue/cine/2002/v12/n3/000734ar. html (accessed 2 August 2018) [n.p.] Depero’s Balli may also have inspired Calder’s motorised and polymaterial mini circus animals, e.g. The Motorised Mobile that Duchamp Liked; 1932. 36 JPGRIL, Marinetti, special collections, Marinetti correspondence and papers, series 1, box 7, fragment of handwritten letter by Depero to Marinetti, [n.d.], [r /v ].

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to capture the game of intersecting light beams.37 Depero had hoped to inject trickery and magic into this new project, which, however, failed to come to fruition.38 As integrated systems of component parts designed to re-envision the natural world in a mechanical framework, both the Plastic ballets and Magic theatre embodied Depero’s artificial–natural worldview, which also permeated the mechanical ballet Anihccam del 3000. The ballet Anihccam del 3000 (Enihcam or the machine of the year 3000; ‘anihccam’ is a semi-palindrome or semordnilap, spelling ‘macchina’ backwards) premiered on 10 January 1924 at the Trianon Theatre in Milan as part of the new futurist theatre season. The performance subsequently toured Italy together with Marinetti’s Parole veloci (Swift words), Mix’s Bianco e nero (Black and white) and Censi’s Danza dell’elica (Dance of the propeller; see section 6.4). The backdrop of Anihccam featured a metallic and mechanical city, against which two locomotives danced their entrance into the rail station, pledging their love for the stationmaster. The stationmaster attempted to stop the locomotives with a hand-signal, but they ran after him instead. A heated discussion ensued, the spoken word breaking into song. Two dancers impersonated the locomotives: Paolo Azari and Wy Magito. They wore heavy, stiff and tubular diving suits, furnished with cylindrical tailcoats painted in metallic colour and further equipped with articulated joints. Rigid cardboard top hats covered their face and neck with two small funnels attached to enable vision. Hands remained invisible, while feet could be seen sticking out from underneath the rigid costumes. The locomotives danced mechanically to the tune of an onomatopoeic song devised by Franco Casavola. Instruments in the orchestra included a motorcycle engine and a piccolo.39 Ironically borrowing Samuel Butler’s humanistic cri de coeur concerning the evolutionary superiority of machines (‘there is nothing which our infatuated race would desire more than to see a fertile union between two steam engines’),40 Depero humanises the steam engine here. By virtue of overwhelmingly grotesque and comical overtones, Depero, however, further turns upon its head the potentially tragic premise, e.g. human inadequacy in the face of superior machines. The motif of the humanised mechanical locomotive recurs in Depero’s visual work at this time – see in particular the inlaid wool cloth on cotton canvas Modernità (Modernity; 1925), first exhibited in 37 H. B. Segel, Pinocchio’s Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons and Robots in Modernist and Avantgarde Drama (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 271. 38 See G. Belli, N. Boschiero and B. Passamani (eds), Depero Magic Theatre (Milan: Electa, 1989), passim. 39 Belli (ed.), La Casa del Mago: le arti applicate nell’opera di Fortunato Depero: 1920–42 (Milan and Florence: Charta, 1992), 428; P. Veroli, ‘The futurist aesthetic and dance’, in Berghaus (ed.), International Futurism in Arts and Literature, 441. 40 Butler, ‘Darwin among the machines’, 185.

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Venice under the title Velocità (Speed; 1926).41 At this juncture, Depero’s natural–artificial dialectic, his anthropomorphic and animistic machine, also owed a debt to Azari, his close collaborator and a competent engineer. Azari too approached the machine as the product of a living, Heimlich ontology, the creature of a new humanism engendering familiarity and a new anthropology predicated on the binary mechanical–human. Fedele Azari (1895–1930) was in the Italian air force during the First World War. Equipped with rigorous scientific and technical training, driven by a steely utilitarian conviction, Azari became a polymath who invested himself in numerous activities including painting, writing, typography and publishing. He set up his own firm, named Dinamo-Azari, to manufacture furniture and print books. Azari believed in the seriality of production typifying the US market.42 In the spring of 1918 Azari performed feats of aerial prowess in the sky above Busto Arsizio and issued the manifesto Teatro aereo futurista (Aerial futurist theatre) which theorised symbiont-like conflations between pilot and airplane, prefiguring aerodance (see section 6.4).43 Together with Mario Gastaldi, in 1921 Azari created S.I.A.C. (Società Italiana di Aviazione Civile; Italian Society for Civil Aviation), a firm designed to exploit the commercial potential of airplanes. Even though the society folded in 1923, Azari profited enormously from the trade he subsequently set up exporting Italian-made planes to South America, taken into pieces and re-assembled on location. In 1924 Azari was nominated first general secretary of futurismo. In the same year, together with Somenzi, he organised the first futurist convention in Milan. Azari is perhaps best remembered as one of the founders of aeropittura, a new trend in the visual arts focusing on optical perspectives from a plane which developed the premises laid down in the manifesto Futurist reconstruction of the universe.44 Azari inaugurated this style in 1926, exhibiting a painting entitled Prospettive di volo (Flying perspectives) at the Venice Biennale of the same year, which earned him the title of ‘creator of aeropainting’ (see also section 6.3b).45 41 This work was deemed so important that Depero chose to take it to New York. He exhibited it at the Guarino gallery in January 1929, where it was much admired in its capacity to encapsulate modern American values – see Anon, New York Sun, 12 January 1929, cit. in Belli, Casa del Mago, 208–10. 42 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 490. 43 S. Poleskie, ‘Art and flight: historical origins to contemporary works’, Leonardo, 18:2 (1985), 72. Azari also published La flora futurista ed equivalenti plastici di odori artificiali and Vita simultanea futurista (1925). He also co-authored Primo dizionario aereo italiano with Marinetti, published in 1929 (see section 2.6). 44 A. D’Alessandri, ‘La genesi del libro imbullonato dalle lettere di Fedele Azari a Fortunato Depero dall’archivio di Fortunato Depero’, in Libri taglienti esplosivi e luminosi. Avanguardie artistiche e libro fra futurismo e libro d’artista. Un percorso di lettura dall’Archivio Depero e dal Deposito Paolo della Grazia presso il MART (Trento: Nicolodi, 2005), 115. 45 Marinetti, ‘L’aeropittura e l’aeropoesia futuriste’, Le Vie dell’Aria, 7 June 1939, [n.p.]; M. Biancale, ‘Il futurismo e la pittura del volo’, Le Vie dell’Aria, 3 June 1938, [n.p.].

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A further initiative was a ‘Society for the protection of machines’ (1927), a forerunner of today’s museums of industrial civilisation.46 The ground was prepared in a Milan meeting of 14 April chaired by Marinetti, followed by a journal article penned by Azari and first published on 24 April 1927 in La Fiera Letteraria. Subsection titles in the ensuing documentation illustrate the society’s remit, as follows: ‘the futurists and the aesthetic value of machines’; ‘redemption from manual labour’; ‘machines are the children of our brain’; ‘machines: perfected and multiplied men’; ‘machines as living beings’; ‘the sensitivity of machines’; ‘let’s defend and protect machines’; ‘most common outrages’; ‘a society for the protection of machines’. The paradox between the natural and the artificial underpinning Depero’s work is both highlighted and complicated here.47 Azari’s text briefly outlines the background of the enduring futurist loyalty to the machine, highlighting the international reputation acquired by Marinetti’s mechanical aesthetics. The futurists pioneered both a machine aesthetics and a utilitarian semantics of the machine. Machines, further argues Azari, will redeem human beings from manual labour, abolishing poverty and the class struggle, borrowing from Lafargue and Marx but not elaborating this theme further. Human and natural blemishes, ‘imperfections of transference and translation in the natural world’ will be ‘harmonised’ by the ‘concentrated power, unfailing precision, constancy and authenticity’ of artificial mechanisms. Not only are machines capable of perfected and serially reproducible performances: their growing sophistication is beginning to give way to a refined humanistic sensitivity, a mutual solidarity, ‘instinctual life’ (‘vita-istinto’) and ‘mechanical intelligence’ (‘intelligenza meccanica’), in short to a mechanical–vital principle. This perceived ‘mechanical intelligence’ has social implications, since the machine will be flanking the working classes, eventually relieving them of manual labour, a further political point not elaborated on here.48 Drivers, pilots and engineers are becoming attuned to this novel mechanical instinct. They pay careful attention to the ‘feelings’ and demands of the machinery they operate – Azari borrows examples from his own personal experience here, quoting engines which ‘refused to operate’ under the hand of inept pilots, the mutual pride and solidarity manifested by technically advanced ignition mechanisms and the acts of vandalism that unthinking and brutal ‘torturers of machines’ (‘aguzzini delle macchine’) were wont to perpetrate on innocent engines and machine parts.49 46 47 48 49

L. Collarile cit. in Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 490. See JPGRIL, Papers of Marinetti and Benedetta Cappa, 1902–65, series V, box 18, n. 4. See also Frattini, ‘F. T. Marinetti: l’industria e le macchine’, 437. Cf. letter Azari to Depero, February 1927, reporting a noteworthy event: the engine of a motorcar was buried with pomp and circumstance in a New York cemetery. The tombstone read: ‘In loving memory of a good engine murdered by bad gas and cheap lubricant.’ The news item was in the periodical

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Azari idealises and anthropomorphises machines, equipping them with a heart and a soul. While his pronouncements are largely extemporaneous, drawing on his own empirical experience, his views are almost animistic. Azari blurs the boundaries between mechanical and human in a manner that subsumes mechanical specificity to psychology and the subjective experience of human beings facing up to a mechanical ‘other’, despite claims to the contrary. A formal proposal to establish a ‘Society for the protection of machines’ followed suit. The society aimed to look after all manner of machines, with special regard for engines, ‘who are the most sociable amongst machines’ [sic].50 Marinetti agreed to act as President and further signatories included Casavola, Catrizzi, Depero, Escodamè, Gerbino, Marinetti and Russolo. From the statutes we surmise that Azari utilised the statutes of the Society for the Protection of Animals as a blueprint. The progressive ousting of pets with machines was justified by the assumption that machines will gradually take over from animals, replacing their performance and function. In the final paragraph Azari took on a messianic tone to conjure up the utopian city of the future: concrete, crystal and steel need to replace less precious alloys.51 Azari’s vision of the manner in which machines will shape future living, labour and the built environment may be approximate and unstructured. Intellectual circles, however, showed appetite for this discourse as is testified by copious correspondence concerning the aims, scope and reach of this society. A huge wave of consensus and support, requests for subscriptions and expressions of solidarity, both at the recruiting stage and later, provide evidence of the raw urgency stimulated by Azari’s engagement with the machine. The scope and pace of Azari’s activities, aggravated by the venture of a ‘libro imbullonato’ (bolted book), were punishing: at the end of 1927 he suffered a nervous breakdown and never fully recovered. A 1929 talk at the Piemontesi association on the subject of aerial theatre, given jointly with the hero of the Fiume enterprise, Guido Keller, was not followed up.52 In 1930, in the course of a severe fit of nerves, Azari brandished a gun, staging a shoot-out in the courtyard of his home in Milan. As Berghaus puts it, his ‘self-image of padreterno, destined to supplant the entire natural and human world with a perfect mechanical construction, […] verged on mania and delusion’.53 Azari died shortly afterwards in the hospital Villa Fiorita, where he was admitted after this crisis. His influence on Depero’s work was significant, particu-

50 51 52 53

Domenica del Corriere (26 June 1927; 26:XXIX, 10) and is quoted in D’Alessandri, ‘Lettere inviate da Fedele Azari a Fortunato Depero’, fn. 23, 137. F. Azari, ‘Per una “Società di protezione delle macchine”’, La Fiera Letteraria, 24 April 1927, 3. Ibid. This is succinctly related in JPGRIL, Papers of Marinetti and Benedetta Cappa, series V, box 20, article by Krimer, ‘Guido Keller ed il teatro aereo’, [n.p.], [n.d.], 3. Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 492.

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larly as concerns the ‘libro imbullonato’, which stands as prototype and blueprint of Depero’s ‘style of steel’ (see section 3.3). Besides Azari’s influence, Depero’s Liriche radiofoniche (Radio-lyrics; 1934) shed further light on the interface between natural and artificial. This project relied on the creation of a new onomatopoeic language: ‘onomalingua’. This was a means of communication and mutual understanding between machines and natural elements devised in 1916, typified by intense physicality, tonality and expressiveness. Its purpose was to facilitate the interaction between the inorganic machine and the organic natural world. Depero’s own ‘voce dell’antenna’ (voice of an aerial), gushing forth in the guise of a fountain, is meant to stand as a distillation of the very medium of radio. An aerial is featured on the cover of the first edition of this book-cum-multi-media device: square pyramid irradiating circular sound waves, painted black to suggest the prowess of metallic structures, and red to convey the energy of fire. Twenty-two poems on the themes of nature, the machine or a combination of the two are included. Nature and the machine speak a common language here, a vernacular made up of vibrations, overwhelming, dazing sounds and fluorescent colours.54 Probably issued in the wake of Marinetti’s manifesto La radia (1933), Depero’s approach is, however, entirely his own. Radio, he contends, is a medium like no other in its capacity to dissolve the boundaries between space and time. Radio audiences vaporise too: only vibrations and waves of sound carried forward by an electricalmechanical cable exist, the vehicles of transmission between the voice of the speaker and the ear of listeners. Depero’s radio-lyrics both manifest and harmonise the two polarities of his worldview. By using a special language, these poems attempt to collapse nature and the machine together, transforming their sound in visual signs, bringing together the mechanical and the organic, the artificial and the natural. In other words, these poems: show metropolitan automatons and at the same time the colourful, sunny and rough world that Depero knew from Trentino Alto-Adige […]. The radio is able to serve like a megaphone for those landscapes he had collected in the big cities [Rome, Paris, New York] and also for those he knew from his childhood and he is able to melt them together creating something new.55

Depero’s natural–artificial binary, however, could not be more in evidence than in the most futurist city in the world: New York. A cyclopean megalopolis, or ‘mechanopolis’, 54 F. Bravi, ‘Fortunato Depero’s Radio-Lyrics’, in Buelens, Hendrix and Jansen (eds), The History of Futurism, 274. 55 Ibid., 276.

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a Babel-like, frenzied factory of madness in perpetual mechanical motion, New York astounded and inspired (see section 3.4).56 Beyond Liriche, the machine continued to be the site of ‘natural’ transformations and metamorphoses. In the article ‘Prospettive fiabesche di macchine rare’ (Fairy-tale perspectives on rare machines; 1935) Depero gazes at cars perceived as ‘metallic mollusks’, tortoises, igloos and mountains, even pumpkins. Like the beak and skull of a ‘stratospheric eagle’, the machine performs the function of iconic and smooth, ‘shiny, lacquered new baby’ of mechanical modernity. Ever the skilled craftsman, Depero finds particular agency in the machine’s constitutional and structural qualities: metal, shine, rubber, resilience and flexibility.57 The unpublished Cantiere (Building site; including ‘Muscoli nello spazio’ (Muscles in space) and the reworked version ‘Ingranaggi nelle officine’ (Mechanisms in workshops); [1936–43]) further overviews social domains transformed by industrial forces. Depero underscores once again his organic approach to machines, advocating a ‘genial understanding’ between humans and machines, reasserted in the sporting events promoted by fascismo.58 The machine pushes the boundaries of nature. It ‘metallises’ and ‘mechanises’ nature: ‘this is an immense landscape of mechanical flora and fauna, trunks, branches and tubular roots, bolted grids and header beams. Machines whistle and howl and roar like real, living cast-iron animals.’59 Depero’s machine, in other words, reaches out to the ‘natural’ and the ‘organic’. Toning down the sinister glint in the eye of dystopian mechanics, Cantiere returns the machine to a mechanical cosmic order consistent with Fascist rhetoric. In 1930 Michael Pupin proposed an organic view of machines designed to, in his own words, ‘romance the machine’. His was an attempt to naturalise the advent of the machine, both to reinforce the pivotal role it played in the mechanics of the cosmos and to render the ‘epoch-making’ machine, upon which the American nation rested, palatable and appealing. Depero’s approach is consonant with Pupin’s organic ‘spawning’ of machines, from one to innumerable others, an infinite regressive manifestation of the ‘shrinking of both space and time in our national activity’, and, importantly, ‘cultivating international friendships’, in recognition of the machine’s ability to elide distance and familiarise the ‘elsewhere’.60 Like Pupin’s, Depero’s machine aspires to be a modern icon of democracy through free market economics. This ‘machine 56 Depero, ‘Brindisi all’hotel fifth avenue’, in Liriche radiofoniche (Milan: Morreale, 1934), 70. See also Depero’s letter to Marinetti, 27 May 1929, cit. in Liriche radiofoniche, XIII. 57 Depero, ‘Prospettive fiabesche di macchine rare’, Natura, July 1935, 30, 33 and 34. 58 MART, Fondo Depero, unpublished draft manuscript by Depero entitled Cantiere, [1936–43], 1–5; ‘Muscoli nello spazio’ (1–6) and ‘Ingranaggi nelle officine’ (6–12). 59 Depero, ‘Ingranaggi nelle officine’, 7. 60 M. Pupin, Romance of the Machine (New York and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), 61 and 104.

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romance’ posits a new pastoral, where living nature and body parts become part and parcel of a manufactured, mechanistic real: functional, artificial, modular, aggregate, serial and self-sustaining. A structurally relevant and recreational engineering stuck in a looping, self-generating chain of repetitions in the service of market economics will be elucidated in the following section. 3.3 Acciaio: prince of metals ‘The iron-carbon alloy called steel is at the root of our material civilisation. Without iron and steel, there might have been no great liners, no skyscrapers, railways, motorcars, tanks, or tractors.’61 So crucial is steel for human civilisation that if proportional book space were given to each metal’s tonnage, the subject of steel would cover over three hundred pages, while only eighteen pages would be covering all other metals. A process introduced by Henry Bessemer in 1856 burned away impurities by blowing air through molten pig iron and by treating the latter and scrap steel with iron oxide,62 reducing the cost of steel considerably and thus enabling production in large quantities. Other treatments were developed and utilised subsequently, e.g. C. W. Siemens’s and the Martin brothers’ ‘heat regeneration’, employing gaseous fuels rather than coke and coal, the ‘L-D’, the ‘Kaldo’ and ‘Rotor’ processes. The hardness required in the final steel product depends on the quantity of carbon: the scale of iron–carbon alloys has no precise demarcation from mild steel (up to 0.25 per cent carbon) to cast iron (2.5–4.5 per cent carbon). Its versatility and durability help explain why, together with other alloys such as stainless steel and aluminium, steel became increasingly widespread and popular in the modern age. The addition of nickel and chromium to steel alloys of carbon and iron enabled the heat resisting, hardness and durability of stainless steel. Stainless steel was employed in industry, household appliances, architecture and components in power stations, including nuclear stations.63 Aluminium and its alloys (with silicon, copper and combinations of ‘wrought’ and ‘clad’ aluminium) are lighter metals, good conductors of heat, electricity and resistant to corrosion. They are extensively used in manufacture of means of transportation, especially the motorcar and the airplane, skyscrapers and household appliances, e.g. foil. In the early twentieth century experimental cars were built entirely in aluminium. Steel was the very bedrock of machine civilisation, a metonym of energy, free market economics and the discipline underpinning the Fordist assembly line. Steel machines incarnated ‘power, massiveness, 61 Street and Alexander, Metals in the Service of Man, 121. 62 Ibid., 123–4. 63 Ibid., 128, 145–6 and 159–61.

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multiplicity of social and technical institutions, extravagance of productivity […] crispness of line, an exactness and an intricacy of structure, and a cold brilliance of metallic surfaces’.64 Aluminium, in particular, underpinned the strategy of Italian Fascism to bolster the national identity of border areas. While the border city Trieste developed industrial capacity around oil refineries – Aquila, set up in 1937, was the largest refinery in the Mediterranean – Trentino, especially the Rovereto area where Depero was based, witnessed large-scale development in the production of aluminium, a pivotal industry before the war and growing in importance during wartime. The colossal aluminium plant of Mori, erected in 1927–28 near Rovereto in the heart of the rural Alps along the Adige river, was one of the most advanced and powerful aluminium plants-cum-power stations of the time. Set up by a partnership of Montecatini and Vereinigte Aluminium Werke, during wartime it employed up to 1,224 local workers, nicknamed ‘fornaioli dell’Apocalisse’ (stokers of the Apocalypse) due to their working conditions in close proximity with fusion ovens and aluminium baths. The workers would beat the crust formed inside the baths with a metal bar each time a blue bulb switched on, signalling that the bath required alumina. They worked in environments as hot as sixty degrees Celsius, inhaling noxious fumes and under constant risk of scalding.65 Materials like aluminium and steel appealed to the futurists because of their sturdiness, versatility and shine. Depero’s original ‘stile d’acciaio’ (style of steel) echoes the allure and powerful agency of this metal alloy. As I mentioned in sections 2.3 and 2.4, Marinetti proposed to ‘metallise’ the human body and ‘mechanise’ the battlefield, containing human form in a metal carapace to release regressive erotic impulses. Schnapp argues that ‘metallizzazione’ was the Fascist counterpart of theories and practices of mechanisation pursued by Communist societies.66 This notion is powerfully at work, for example, in the 1933 film Acciaio, scripted by Luigi Pirandello. Acciaio focuses entirely on machines and the activities of two workers in the Terni’s steelworks. The irony of a militant technophobe scripting a propaganda film under the Duce’s instruction for the purpose of relaunching national production should not be lost on the viewer. Uninterrupted sequences featuring machines in operation, the mechanical gestures of workers and close-ups of castings of incandescent steel permeate the visual space. Steel and the 64 West, Flesh of Steel, x. 65 I am grateful to Klaus Tragbar for bringing my attention to the Mori plant in his paper ‘Conquest by architecture? Strategies of appropriation of Italy in Alto Adige and the Trentino after 1920’, unpublished conference paper, Sites of Memory, Sites of Border (Koper, 25–26 May 2017). See also S. Albergoni, www.ambientetrentino.it/2015/02/15/montecatini-alumetal-storie-e-suggestioni/ (accessed 1 June 2017). 66 Schnapp, 18BL, esp. 124–39.

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machines employed in its manufacture are the undisputed protagonists here, a synecdoche of machine culture as a whole.67 Depero was aware of the powerful symbolism of steel in Fascist propaganda. Steel confounded him. Not at all soft and pliable in the caressing hand of the artisan, steel springs up with an automatic, aggressive, frenetic quality of its own, forcing the artist to develop strategies of defence, adaptation and adjustment. As shown in section 3.1, when confronted with this stalemate, Depero tended to retrench into the production modes of a craftsman embedded in his regional context. His ‘style of steel’ was ambivalent, pointing once again to the tension underpinning his artistic strategy, e.g. his difficulty in reconciling beautifully crafted versus standardised industrially produced goods. Depero’s Libro imbullonato (Bolted book; 1927), a joint project with Azari, embodied this tension to the full. The bolted book was designed as a promotional stunt and was the end product of long and careful preparatory work.68 Depero had free rein on the content, while Azari and his publishing house Dinamo Azari were in charge of the technical side of the production. The book measured 24 cm x 28 cm, counted 234 pages and was priced at 50 Italian lire. The intended print run was 2,000 copies, ten of which were entirely made of steel and meant for eminent recipients, such as Marinetti, Mussolini and Bottai. Due to escalating costs, fewer copies were actually printed, while the whole operation drained the already depleted resources of its editors.69 Made of steel, the cover was punched and held together by two large bolts. Finding the bolts, which were initially to be made of wood, was the first challenge. Depero and Azari eventually settled on bolts of aluminium, a more pliable alloy than pure metal. Steel was to be utilised for the bolts and cover in the ten luxury copies, with a view to highlighting the metallic-mechanical feel of the finished product. Bolts 67 M. Bontempelli, L’avventura novecentista (Florence: Vallecchi, 1974), 281. Acciaio was co-scripted with Pirandello’s son, writing under the pseudonym Stefano Landi. The musical accompaniment was a blend of industrial noises and music composed by Malipiero. The direction was by Walter Ruttmann, after being turned down by Eisenstein and Pabst – see an interview with W. Ruttmann in L’Impero, 31 December 1932, cit. in Verdone, Cinema e letteratura del futurismo, 156; F. Borin, ‘Acciaio: una fusione mancata tra letteratura, musica e cinema’, in Bàrberi Squarotti and Ossola (eds), Letteratura e industria, II, 679. 68 Azari’s correspondence with Depero sheds light on his pleading with Marinetti on his behalf for financial support and the technical and financial background of this enterprise. Other letters discuss type, size, price and quantity of the materials involved and possible firms to approach, e.g. Pirelli for tyres – MART, Fondo Depero, letters: [February 1927]; 3 August 1926; [11 July 1927]; 10 April [1928]; 13 May 1928; and other undated letters. 69 Although the book was put together in the autumn of 1927, by February 1928 the luxury copies destined for Mussolini, Bottai and Freddi were still in production. On the libro imbullonato, see Belli (ed.), Casa del Mago, 506–10 and D’Alessandri, ‘La genesi del libro imbullonato’, esp. 118, 121–3 and 126–7.

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made of metal, however, were extremely hard to find. The Milan firm Soc. Anonima G. Bologna eventually supplied the bolts, charging for material but not for labour. Depero repeatedly redesigned the cover under Azari’s suggestions for alterations and additions. Azari also insisted that the city names Paris, Berlin and New York be added to Milan as places of publication, to emphasise the international reach of the enterprise. This broad scope is further demonstrated by the design of individual pages: constructed as assemblages of words-in-freedom, they carried echoes of graphic work by Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitsky and Theo van Doesburg. In a letter to Depero, Azari described the libro as ‘mechanical’, ‘a projectile weapon’ unfit to sit in a library.70 Ultimately, it was meant to be a commercial venture, a strategic introduction to the US market. Azari paved the way for this conquest between April and June 1928, exploring the opportunity to set up a branch of his publishing business in New York. Disappointments ensued, ranging from failing to obtain the visas and authorisations from the Fascist authorities to despondency arising from the low-quality of US goods and an average taste perceived as dismal by comparison with his own. These frustrations were echoed in personal correspondence with Depero, whose own experience shortly to follow largely mirrored Azari’s stalemate (see section 3.4). Despite its commercial failure, Libro imbullonato stands, nonetheless, as ‘the most mature typographic experimentation of futurism’:71 a compelling testament to the significance of steel in the practice of a modern artist saturated with new materials and technologies. Two articles and a poem included in a book-length publication came out in 1934, fleshing out Depero’s worship of steel. The illustrated article ‘Linguaggio aerodinamico’ (‘Aerodynamic language’) promoted the ‘intense joy’ deriving from ‘fast cars’, ‘metals’, ‘machines, ‘lacquered splendors’, ‘engines and shiny mechanisms’.72 Machines, particularly cars, were appraised first and foremost as manufactured goods providing tangible evidence of the modern industrial genius. Depero dwelled lovingly and sensuously, as well as competently, on their design, technique and materials.73 Curvy, translucent surfaces and bright headlights reflect objects and details of the natural world, fragmenting and multiplying them with geometric precision.74 A sharper, elegant and aggressive reality moulded by human industry is recast here, twinkling like a diamond.75 The human–machine convergence is almost spontaneously achieved, gushing forth from human skill. Depero replaces Marinetti’s subordinate cyborg with a broth70 71 72 73 74 75

MART, Fondo Depero, letters, letter by Azari to Depero, [11 July 1927], [n.p.]. D’Alessandri, ‘Genesi del libro imbullonato’, 126. Depero, ‘Linguaggio aerodinamico’, Natura, December 1934, 33–8. Ibid., 34 and 36. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 38.

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erhood of man and machine: the machine is our own ‘metallic comrade’,76 if still devoid of political agency. The poem ‘Acciaio’, included in the collection Liriche radiofoniche and subtitled ‘ispiratami dal volto del DUCE’ (inspired by the face of the DUCE), juxtaposes Mussolini and a machine of war. The verses translate visual representations of the Duce into a hollow rhetoric of steel: ‘His [Mussolini’s] gaze is a cluster of tracks projected towards the future. Steel has square jaws operating on smooth, well-oiled hinges. […] His silence is blood curdling. His gaze vibrates like Hertzian waves.’77 The article ‘Stile di acciaio’ (‘Style of steel’; [1934]), first published in Giornale di Genova and reprinted in Il Brennero, provides more insightful commentary. The narrative is constructed on the counterpoint between natural and artificial, organic and inorganic, machine and man, steel and sky: Dear machines […] your glow comes forth, melting together with the sunshine. The light of your steel face radiates across the blue of sky and sea. […] The air today is like a […] dense, aerial, steely fluid pulverised in space, blended with oxygen and nitrogen. Leaves on tree branches are prickly, trunks are as solid as the pins in your wheels, the sun’s rays are brass reeds and poles, binding your power, your life, your style together with the power, the life and the style of the universe.78

Depero posits a style of steel understood as a discipline, a brand new, luminous and translucent human–machine interface, an effortless match of industrial and rural, of body and machine. The cosmos has human-mechanical values at its core. Appealing to a regime intent on forging social consensus around ‘strapaese’ and ‘stracittà’ (see Introduction), ‘style of steel’ encompasses the affective and the mechanical. A ‘style of steel’, admonished Depero, ‘is poised to swamp our skies, earths and seas, as well as penetrate our own individual hearts and brains’.79 From then on, it will become a permanent fixture in Depero’s aesthetics, right up to the Manifesto of nuclear painting and plastic (‘Manifesto della pittura e plastica nucleare’; 1951). The nuclear era may be poised to replace the vibrant futurist ‘era of steel’. This unremitting, irreducible ‘prince of metals’, however, will never die out, as the rhetorical coda implicitly suggests: ‘doesn’t steel have qualities that will continue to contribute to a particularly enduring style?’80 76 Ibid. 77 Depero, Liriche radiofoniche, 20. See also ‘La voce dell’antenna’ in the same collection, 24. 78 MART, Fondo Depero, Ritagli: eco della stampa, article by Depero, ‘Stile di acciaio’, Giornale di Genova [1934], then Il Brennero, 5 December 1934, [n.p.]. 79 Ibid. 80 Depero, ‘Manifesto della pittura e plastica nucleare’, in 88ma mostra Depero: pittura e arte applicata 1915–51 prima presentazione di pittura nucleare (Rovereto: [n.p.], [1951]), [n.p.].

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Before moving forward, it is necessary to mention a further dimension of his ‘style of steel’, which derives from witnessing the integration of African-American immigrant communities into the heightened tempo of advanced industrialism via the medium of popular culture, especially jazz. Watching African-American jazz dancers in New York, Depero is forcefully struck by the fusion of metal and machine which they seemingly embody, especially in their ‘metallic’ legs.81 Having observed performances on the Parisian stage, and familiar perhaps with Cocteau’s 1918 reflections on the mechanised rhythm of jazz, by the time Depero reaches New York he is already conversant with spatial notions of rhythm and the machinist and Taylorist tempo of jazz.82 Only in the new world, however, does life seem to pulsate with the hypersystolic, vertiginous tempo of unrelenting mechanised production, in daytime and nighttime alike, at work and at recreation. The energy of the city is rhythm and the rhythm of the city is metallic and mechanical, beating to the tune of electrified neon lights. The beat and tempo of jazz becomes the pace of change and development in the modern metropolis: ‘aligning the aesthetic parameters of value according to new rules of composition in which consumption […] is a key constituent’.83 The popularity of jazz in 1930s Italy defeated Fascist autarchy and attempts to stop foreign imports. Unable to reconcile jazz’s ideology, variously posited as ‘degenerate’, ‘Judeo-Negroid’, ‘irrational’ and ‘recreational’, the Ministry of Popular Culture was unable to stop its spread. Jazz and the international culture it epitomised continued to thrive, albeit in a semi-clandestine manner.84 The coupling jazz–metal, in particular, resonated widely across Italy in the 1930s. In the column ‘Sussurri dell’etere’ (Whispers from the ether), Guido Sommi Picenardi dwelled at length on the metallic and mechanical underpinnings of jazz music, drawing together brass and steel.85 Like Sommi Picenardi and other futurists, Depero regarded jazz not merely as 81 MART, Fondo Depero, draft manuscript by Depero, ‘New-York Nuova Babele del pittore e poeta Fortunato Depero’, 148. 82 See also Le Corbusier, who regarded Manhattan as ‘hot jazz in stone’ and ‘black music […] the equivalent of a beautiful turbine running in the midst of human conversations’ – cit. in McLuhan, ‘Magic that changes mood’, in The Mechanical Bride, 85. 83 R. A. Davidson, Jazz-Age Barcelona (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 84. 84 In Nazi Germany, Goebbels qualified jazz as Entartete Musik (degenerate music) and banned it. In a letter to his sister-in-law Tania dated 27 February 1928, Antonio Gramsci cautioned her against jazz. Its ‘irrationality’ and ‘over-energised’ rhythms may distract the working classes from achieving their goals. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, Julius Evola similarly cautioned Italians against the ‘delirious’, ‘epileptic’ quality of jazz dance, the expression of a dumb and ‘mechanised collective entity’ – cit. in Meda, Al di là del mito, 252–3. 85 Sommi Picenardi, ‘Sussurri dell’etere’, Radiocorriere, VIII:41 (1932), 6. In the same column Sommi Picenardi singles out similarly innovative musical feats in Soviet Russia, especially the opera Dniepreskoi, a celebration of a dam on the Ukrainian river Dnieper and the mighty energy of water to power turbines, generators and transformers.

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a vehicle of modernity, but also as a visually compelling display of gleaming metals: shimmering brass saxophones, polished trumpets and sparkling clarinets, a visual display and energetic actuation of his ‘style of steel’. Upon arriving in New York, Depero was struck by the mechanical, mournful rhythms of jazz. The gloomy beat of an unthinking, mechanised humanity dancing on the brink of financial collapse met a shell-shocked Depero as he disembarked in 1928. 3.4 A futurist in New York Marketing trends and mass consumer culture in modern America created opportunities for artists. Multinational advertising corporations preferred new marketing techniques and text at the expense of image, furthering the decline of poster art. Mass production threatened the role of the individual artist-designer.86 Depero attempted to apply his modus operandi to this new environment governed by alien economic forces. His ‘style of steel’ seemed anachronistic and ill-equipped to meet the challenges posed by serialised art production. Like other modernists, Depero had come to the US to admire this ‘epitome of the mass-producing and -consuming technocracy of the future’:87 a pinnacle of industrialisation and mechanical life. The urban environment of New York, in particular, embodied mechanisation, typified by the skyscraper, whose iconic image will shortly loom large over Depero’s visual and textual production. This section discusses New York as a metropolitan environment pervaded by mechanisation, a node of desire and fear, the site of a candid and spectacular elation, and, at once, of paralysing fear and dumb immobility. Depero first encountered New York in 1928. His move was carefully planned, following on from participating in a government-sponsored exhibition of Italian art in New York, Boston and Washington, where he received offers for further shows. Additionally, Depero’s acquaintance with Frederick Kiesler, who had organised the celebrated Viennese exhibition of Theatre Technology, led to thirty of his designs being included in a New York show in 1926. Depero leveraged these successes to obtain a travel grant from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.88 By 1928, he was itching to leave.89 His friend and collaborator Fedele Azari preceded him on 2 April 1928, setting out to live and work in New York for two months. In correspondence Azari vividly 86 87 88 89

Lyttelton, ‘Futurism, politics, and society’, 70–1. Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men, 381. Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 475. MART, Fondo Depero, Corrispondenza, interview with Depero in E. Roma’s ‘Arte e artisti europei in America: “Depero a New York”’, [n.d.], [n.p.]: ‘All of a sudden you feel exiled from your home. The bug telling you to leave begins to eat away at your brains.’

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relayed his first impressions, portraying a bleak and philistine new world where the logic of profit eclipsed good taste but also where the architecture of skyscrapers by day and illuminated billboards by night was ‘impressive!! [sic] beyond any imaginings’.90 A further lengthy letter dated one month later was expansive, aiming to equip Depero with specific guidelines to help him navigate the serialised production chain in New York city. Azari described an unfamiliar, structurally alien market where blinkered and stultifying massification of taste prevailed: ‘big firms’ are ‘crowded every day with people buying identical, common-taste objects’, and, further, ‘life is overly expensive’. ‘There are too many difficulties’, Azari concluded bitterly, ‘N.Y. turned out to be very different from what I had imagined!’91 Azari’s portrayal of serialised industrial production is at odds with an artistry modulated by traditional craftsmanship. Poised to return to Italy, however, Azari urged Depero to keep his mind open on the world of mass production: ‘I don’t like this place: it’s difficult, remote from our inclinations and capabilities … and yet it tempts me. See you very soon – and if I ever were to return here to strike a business deal, it will be with you, as I’m convinced the only way forward lies in industrialisation.’92 After weeks of febrile fundraising, relieved at the last minute by a generous donation of the Genoese industrialist Benvenuto Ottolenghi, Depero and his wife Rosetta boarded the ocean liner Augustus at Genoa harbour on 29 September 1928. They will not return to Italy until 9 October 1930, not until after they set up a Futurist House where Depero exhibited seven times between 8 January and 9 February 1929.93 Catching a first glimpse of the skyscrapers and the faint profile of Manhattan after eleven days of crossing, Depero contemplated a colossal stage punctuated with the towering silhouettes of skyscrapers, most of which were under construction at this time. Suddenly, he was seized with irrational enthusiasm, immediately tempered by foreboding and estrangement. The new environment enveloped him like a glove, a complex and arcane reality distorted by magnification, rendered chaotic by the hands of several customs officers rummaging through his belongings. The new world was 90 MART, Fondo Depero, Corrispondenza, three-page letter by Azari to Depero, on headed paper Hotel Manger – New York City, 10 April [1928], [n.p.]. 91 MART, Fondo Depero, Corrispondenza, four-page letter by Azari to Depero, headed paper Hotel Manger – New York City, 13 May 1928, [n.p.]. 92 Ibid. 93 MART, Fondo Depero, draft manuscript by Depero with original illustrations, ‘New York: film vissuto (primo romanzo sonoro)’ (1931), [n.p.]: 1. 464 West 23rd St, 15 December 1928–8 January 1929; 2. Galleria Arte Italiana Guarino, 8 January 1929–9 February 1929; 3. 18 West 33rd St, permanent collection Italian book, [n.d.]; 4. Arnold & Constable 5th Ave, April 1929; 5. Fascio Femminile Margherita di Savoia 210 Fifth Ave, [n.d.]; 6. Advertising Club 23 Park Ave, [n.d.]; 7. Piroscafo del Lloyd Sabaudo, 7 December 1929. Critics and general public alike admired his large tapestries and bold clashes of colour and materials.

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immediately marked by de-territorialisation, engulfed in construction fever and ruled by the iron fist of ruthlessly utilitarian forces. At once, it was an exhilarating and psychedelic space lit up by aggressive, multi-coloured posters and billboards, always switched on, galvanised by an ‘effervescence’ of electric bulbs and vivid lettering flashing, smearing and drenching the environment with colour and light from all sides.94 Manhattan appeared to be squashed between the vertical walls of skyscrapers and metallic perspectives of bridges and overground trains engulfing its immense anonymous crowds. Everything was electric, shiny and metallic: the city was in the hardness of concrete and steel and in the ethereal dream visions rising from the water. New York took centre stage. The metropolis was a mechanical centre of gravity where the rural and the industrial joined forces under the driving impetus of the machine,95 as Boccioni had intuited in Factories at Porta Romana (1909) and Riot in the Galleria (1910). As van Doesburg observed, the futuristi were the first to surmise that the metropolis was the kingdom of the machine and that modern aesthetics was located in the industrial metropolis.96 The futurist city was to function like a colossal machine, materially and structurally, a space redesigned according to new industrial technologies and new architectural and planning idioms. Infrastructure became a key feature of city life, replacing the hustle and bustle of traditional civic living with the soft clicking of mechanical connectivity. Elliptical and emotive lines were replaced with Cartesian perpendiculars, injecting utopia into a traditional monumental domain. The city as ‘technocratic paradise’ began to fulfil dreams of minimalism, self-sufficiency and control.97 Even though futurist architecture and town planning remained largely on paper, its visions must have been in Depero’s mind’s eye as he contemplated New York’s interconnected verticality. The artist was not naïve. He had previously experienced the metropolitan allure of Paris, where he spent one year from June 1925 exhibiting at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes and attending ultramodern shows, e.g. the Revues Nègres, Ballets Suédois and the music hall.98 Paris had 94 Depero, Un futurista a New York, ed C. Salaris (Montepulciano: Del Grifo, 1990), 54 and 40. 95 Mumford, Culture of Cities; see also S. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture. 96 T. Van Doesburg, ‘Kunst en Architectuurvernieuwing in Italië: Stad en Woning’, Het Bouwbedrijf, VI:13 (21 June 1929), cit. in E. Godoli, ‘I futuristi e la metropoli’, in La metropoli futurista progetti im-possibili (Florence: Art Media, 2006), 1. See also C. Melograni, Architettura italiana sotto il fascismo: l’orgoglio della modestia contro la retorica monumentale 1926–45 (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008), 42–3. 97 Marx, ‘The idea of “technology” and postmodern pessimism’, 21. 98 Lista in Cinema e fotografia futurista, 73 and 116. In Paris, Depero was in touch with the Romanian film director Henri Gad (but most probably Peter Urban Gad, a Danish director who collaborated

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impressed Depero, who described it as ‘ultra-luminous, ultra-coloured, infernally animated’,99 an overheated blacksmith’s workshop, a witches brew, bubbling, ever morphing, a city where the futurist influence was ubiquitous, from street corners to shop windows, theatres and museums. Depero was particularly engaged by colourful commercial fashion, the flashy silks, fabrics, buttons, shoes and wallpapers echoing futurist design, a dazzling wealth of artefacts draped on mannequins, gleaming luridly from shop windows. In his ‘Self interview’ Paris emerges as a futurist city through and through, down to the fabric of its daily commercial and industrial life, even though its intellectual circles purported to snub futurist aesthetics.100 His admiration goes to pulleys and cogwheels, mechanical clunking and factory-like spaces, its naked, shimmering architectures, translucent yet elastic, vitreous and crystal-clear, animated by reinforced concrete.101 If Paris was the stuff of dreams, New York was the site of erosion and urban instability. Disorienting and displacing, New York overwhelmed Depero like a city of uncontrollable raw force and entropic energy, corrosive of communitarian and societal ties, an unstable and tentacular workplace, a ruinous and precarious mechanism crushing nameless victims under the wheels of its perpetual and purposeless agitation. Depero repeats the adverb ‘in fretta’ (hurriedly) over and over again as if to underscore the surplus of frenzied mechanical energy supplementing human endeavour.102 Depero’s encounter with the city was during Herbert Hoover’s presidency (1928– 32) and in the wake of the Great Depression. An internationally respected mining engineer, Hoover’s professional vocation was little short of a divine calling. His candidature for the presidency had been constructed on a fictionalisation of the figure of the engineer as hero of the time, endlessly portrayed in film and narrative fiction alike. Since the early 1920s Hoover had energetically promoted ‘the successes of America, the attitude of the business man, of the engineer, and of the scientist’.103 Cracks were beginning to emerge in advanced capitalism: the logic of programmed obsolescence and of commodity, the creation of needs, the growing separation between uneven sectors of the economy, economic profit prevailing over social concerns were all reflected in urban life, eroding social ties, generating despair and discontent, fragmenting and

99 100 101 102

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with Alexandra Exter). Robert Gys borrowed Depero’s spikes to represent the underground fairyland featured in his 1926 film Voyage imaginaire. MART, Fondo Depero, Depero, ‘Autointervista’, [1925], [n.p.]. Ibid. Ibid. Depero, Un futurista a New York, 55 et al. As for his predecessor Athos Casarini, a Bolognese futurist and collaborator of Joseph Stella in 1907–15, Depero’s New York was a ‘vast, futurist city’: vibrant, busy and overflowing with ‘human activity’ – cit. in Meda, Al di là del mito, 80. For Casarini, see Buscaroli (ed.), 5 febbraio 1909, 21. See ‘H. Hoover’s agricultural policies, 1921–28’, cit. in Tichi, Shifting Gears, 170.

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disintegrating its culture. For critics such as Mumford and Chase megalopolis was on course to become chaotic and congested. As a blueprint for the modern city, New York reflected this ruthless industrial culture and related sacrifice of human values to the ‘steely jungles of commerce’.104 Zoning policies transformed the city into a ‘gigantic machine’ of modernity, where the most advanced construction technologies met Taylorist urban planning, hierarchy and segregation, not merely of function, but of economics, race and class as well.105 The mechanisation of New York in the 1920s displaced work and home locations, with ‘mechanical procedures invading everyday life and even the home’,106 raising widespread fears about mechanisation and standardisation. That Depero was captivated and disoriented in equal measure is palpably obvious from his book ‘New York: film vissuto (primo romanzo sonoro)’ (New York experienced in film (first audio novel); 1931). Composed shortly after his return to Italy at the end of 1930, this 145-page-long collection revolving around New York, his eyes still tingling from the colossal urban visions, was dedicated to Ottolenghi, his funder. Originally the text was to be integrated with a testimony recorded on an HMV disc. The disc, however, did not come to fruition. The manuscript itself remained unpublished and was published in fragmentary fashion in various journals and newspapers between 1931 and 1932. Here, Depero attempted to capture the rhythm and tempo of the metropolis via a string of still images beaded together by montage as in a filmic sequence. The literary strategy encompassed the collage, personal memoir, words-in-freedom, biography, segmented or telegraphic writing. The chapter entitled ‘Traversata atlantica’ (Atlantic crossing), for example, described a cluster of visually stark geometrical impressions of sharp metallic angles gleaned on the liner Augustus, a ‘sailing metallic city’ captured at the moment of leaving the port of Genoa on his departure.107 Depero attempts to convey the sheer cumulative effect of fast and furious metropolitan sensory stimulation: New York emerges as a syncopated metropolis where the visual and the textual become blurred together. The words-in-freedom poem in ‘Crossing New York’s 24th St’ attempts to seamlessly ‘compenetrate’ the physical environment with the writer’s ‘stato d’animo’ (mood) in futurist fashion. The obsessive repetition of the noun ‘travi’ (planks) conveys the arresting visual and architectural segmenting of the metropolitan space, slashed by constant visual obstacles. Compound nouns and visual perspectives from above emphasise the estranging

104 105 106 107

Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City, 177. Ibid., 166–9. Ibid., 175. Depero, ‘New York: film vissuto’, [n.p.].

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mechanical experience of the megalopolis, overflowing with ‘confetti-crowds’ or ‘antcrowds’ swarming under the brash light of lurid billboards. The section ‘Fuori di New York domenica Pasqua 20 aprile’ (Out of New York on Easter Sunday 20 April) focuses on the ubiquitous motorcar: ‘Humankind has little to do outside New York because it travels boxed into automobiles. Cars travel in the vast landscape, they breathe the air in, stop to have a drink, slow down and accelerate, only cars. Only, overwhelmingly cars.’108 This city is given over to the automatic life of the motorcar. Looking back on an organic, unitary worldview, while vividly projecting forward, Depero’s New York exposes the flip side of a universe encroached by mechanical technology: ruptured in shards hurling past and spewing forth, the city is constrained by the infernal tempo of its mechanical productivity. The highly kinetic urban environment is hard-surfaced, engulfed in the vulgarity of cheap artefacts, metals spikes piercing through the vault of heaven, human detritus advancing in synchronised, mindless flowing, a throbbing machine juddering spasmodically. The unforgiving urban machine becomes the ultimate mirror of Depero’s fragmented self, bringing him to the brink of spiritual and financial bankruptcy. New York is Depero’s personal ‘Babel’. A witness to the Great Depression tearing apart the fabric of American society, he was an outsider and survivor.109 Depero, in fact, experienced New York as an alien rather than a migrant. The city was a vast urban wasteland, ‘simultaneously a madhouse and a factory’,110 a hyper-reality made up of a ‘disembodied crowd, a collage of voices suspended in time and space. […] a barbaric soundscape, a world of accents and languages’.111 Language was a major stumbling block as Depero never fully mastered English. The cacophony of languages in the metropolis is impenetrable and dispiriting, ‘unimaginably brutal if you haven’t experienced it directly’,112 as he confessed to Marinetti in private correspondence. Depero’s lack of familiarity with the incomprehensible languages in the metropolis was an important psychological drawback, leading him to invent, as a coping strategy, his own onomatopoeic language. Depero’s so-called ‘onoma-language’ exploded phonemes within and between words, collating them 108 Ibid. 109 Other chapters published in the following years include ‘Numero unico futurista Campari 1931’. See also articles in La Sera (later in L’Illustrazione Italiana and Secolo Illustrato; 1931 and 1932), Liriche radiofoniche (1934) and, later, the autobiographical Fortunato Depero nelle opere e nella vita (1940) and So I Think So I Paint (1947). 110 Depero, article in La Sera (3 July 1931), cit. in Scudiero and Leiber (eds), Depero futurista, 16. 111 H. Wirth-Nesher, City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 151. 112 JPGRIL, Marinetti and Benedetta Cappa papers, 1902–65, assorted manuscripts and correspondence, series III, box 14, n. 13, autograph letter by Depero to Marinetti on headed paper Depero Futurist Art, [n.d.] See also the typescript ‘Discorso Fascista-Futurista-Depero a New-York-City’, 1–4, in ibid.

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back together in new phonetic and semantic combinations – see, for example, the poem ‘Brindisi all’Hotel Fifth Avenue’ (A toast at the 5th Ave Hotel), aired on radio on 23 November 1933, where language seems to model itself on architecture in the attempt to reconstruct linguistically the spatial environment of the metropolis, rendering it intelligible. In sum, Depero’s ‘exuberant impressions’ are tempered all the time by his realisation that the city is a ‘deceiving paradise’.113 His approach to this monumental theatre, where the cruellest and, at once, the grandest spectacle of modernity unfolds daily in well-choreographed acts repeated with serial and mechanical precision by ‘statistical persons’, is personal and emotive.114 Depero’s concern is palpable when he dwells on the squalid living conditions in the immigrant slums, where he also spent the first months of his stay (see ‘Albergo di transito’), ‘a thoroughly alien reality’ characterised by ‘transcendental proportions’ and ‘architectures climbing up to the clouds’.115 Bedazzled and frustrated, still not ready to throw in the towel, Depero turned to activities that were most familiar to him, e.g. theatre and advertising. He hired Dorothy Ernst Werle as his PA and agent who arranged commissions for scene settings with Leon Leonidoff, the artistic director of the Roxy Theatre. Depero’s work was febrile, spurred on by his enthusiasm for the technological prowess and engineering complexity of the Broadway stage.116 His ballet Motolampade (Motionlamps; 1929), a mechanical fantasy drawing on the Plastic ballets and featuring the goddess Lamp, probably belongs to his repertoire for the Roxy Theatre. Regrettably, however, it failed to come to fruition. Still in 1929, he designed a cover for the film magazine Movie Maker. Attempting to remedy the dwindling connections with the performing arts by engaging more assiduously with advertising work, Depero pushed his work as illustrator. His tables appeared in The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Movie Makers, Theatre Magazine, Sparks and others. A flourishing of advertising campaigns for the American Lead Pencil Company and Macy’s stores visually revisited his previous work for theatre, including characters from the Plastic ballets, Anihccam del 3000 and prior work for Campari. This production distracted Depero from painting but

113 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 476. 114 Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, 100. 115 L. Caruso and C. Wagstaff, ‘Postfazione’, in Depero, Liriche radiofoniche, VIII; and MART, Fondo Depero, draft manuscript by Depero, ‘New-York Nuova Babele del pittore e poeta Fortunato Depero’, 3. Depero’s predicament resonates of those million uprooted young Americans deserting rural communities and streaming into the large industrial metropolises in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries featured in the novels of Sherwood Anderson (e.g. Poor White, 1920). 116 MART, Fondo Depero, folder Corrispondenza, copy of interview with Depero in E. Roma, ‘Arte e artisti europei in America: “Depero a New York”’, [n.d.], [n.p. but 6].

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guaranteed a steady cash flow at a difficult economic juncture.117 In order to quickly grab any opportunity that might come his way, he left the Transit Hotel and moved his home to 70 West 11th Street and his study to 210 5th Avenue, in the heart of the advertising industry. Despite his efforts, however, he continued to struggle to sell his work in a metropolis he continued to experience as an arcane and enigmatic node of unremitting industrialisation. Depero finally made plans to return to Italy before the summer of 1930. At the last minute, he was persuaded to prolong his stay by a commission to redecorate Zucca’s restaurant. His prior restructuring job on the dining room in the Enrico & Paglieri restaurant on 48th Street, later demolished to make room for the Rockefeller Center, had impressed Mr Zucca who now sought out Depero’s talent. Shortly after completing this commission, however, on 9 October 1930, Depero and Rosetta embarked the motorboat Roma intending to repatriate. Shortly after his return to Italy, Depero tended to New York nuova Babele (New York new Babel; 1932 or 1933, published posthumously 1990). Depero cherished this project since he devised a ballet entitled The New Babel for the Roxy Theatre together with Massine, also not realised, but surviving in the sketches and maquettes re-utilised to illustrate ‘New York: film vissuto’. To juxtapose New York and Babel was by then a cliché, a title originally conferred on London by the nineteenth-century painter John Martin and transferred onto New York in the early years of the twentieth century. The Babel metaphor alludes to the multilingualism of the melting pot, the interlingual confusion of modernity and the hubris of its spectacular, vertical growth. It also points to the germs of its orientalist cosmopolitanism, a symbol of the constitutional decadence and fragility of modern mechanisation. On the eve of the Great Depression, New York’s extremist modernity, embodied in its unforgiving architecture, cast a ‘Babylonian’ shadow on the impending catastrophe.118 In Babylonian New York, Depero had enjoyed going to the cinema. His favourite films showcased skyscrapers framed by oblique camera angles as well as Broadway musicals featuring dancing skyscrapers, a theme later incorporated in his own painting and theatre scene settings.119 Epitome of monumentality and echo chambers of loneliness, complex machines made up of superimposed layers and crossing perspectives, and the vertigo of artificially constructed, unnatural heights, skyscrapers had Depero in their thrall. Their visceral mechanisation and vertiginous verticality will seep into Depero’s ascending, spiralling and vortex-like later work.

117 Meda, Al di là del mito, 247; Scudiero and Leiber, Depero futurista & New York, 72. See also Leiber, ‘The socialisation of art’, 114. 118 Meda, Al di là del mito, 183. 119 Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista, 75–6.

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3.4a Skyscrapers The skyscraper is where the architect and the engineer join hands. It is a quintessential machine: its construction relies on engineering; machines are embedded in its structure; its functioning is heavily reliant on machines, e.g. the all-important lift machine in its oesophagus.120 Both grounded and soaring, ‘a fixed form designed to feel like a kinetic one’,121 the skyscraper typifies New York. Skyscrapers began to dot the city’s skyline in the early 1920s, embodying the contemporary trends of speed, functionalism and Taylorist efficiency. Manhattan’s American Radiator Building (1924), the Chrysler Building (1930), the Empire State Building (1931) were built at or around the time when Depero arrived in the US. In 1929, of the 377 American skyscrapers standing, a staggering 188 were in New York City alone. Feats of cyclopean masonry made of steel, glass and mechanical parts, skyscrapers were under construction before Depero’s astonished eyes, their steel-frame structures and perpendicular shafts rising skywards daily. Their austerity and scale channelled a poetic of immensity, and of bleak fear: ‘tall, distant, black and grey, the infernal towers of skyscrapers are punctuated with lights’.122 The poem ‘Coney – Island’, in the collection ‘New York: film vissuto’, elaborates on the theme of the city as a ‘tentacular Babel’, a luminous metropolis erected on the crystalline floors of numerous skyscrapers. This is an electric coral reef luridly lit up by the exhilarating, electrified backdrop of the amusement park.123 The vertiginous surprises of Coney Island provide a visual echo of the rising, ubiquitous skyscraper. Depero’s advertising work for the Venus Pencil Company (1930) further mirrors the artist’s response to these alien architectures. David Leiber argues that, on first analysis, Depero’s colourless and austere design does not look much like the vertical forms prevailing in New York at the time, typified by an ‘Aztec-type of Deco’ consisting of ‘stepped back’ silhouettes inspired by Mayan or Aztec temples, e.g. the Chrysler Building. Depero’s skyscraper-like image features, instead, three leaning pencils rising out of a ‘modest seven-stories building, also tilted on its side. Like leaning towers, the pencils function as architectural elements which grow out of the ground; their roots are exposed within each vertical form’ showing us ‘the essential compatibility between natural and artificial forms’.124

120 Chase, Men and Machines, 245: ‘The structure [of the skyscraper] could neither be built nor lived in without a machine operating in its esophagus – the elevator.’ 121 Tichi, Shifting Gears, 293. See also Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City, 162. 122 Depero, ‘New York: film vissuto’, [n.p.]. 123 Ibid.. In his own ‘Coney Island’ (1918), Joseph Stella had already posited Coney Island as a microcosm of the dynamic and electric metropolis – see Godoli, ‘I futuristi e la metropoli’, 13. 124 Leiber, ‘The socialisation of art’, 98.

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Depero’s commercial work further begs formal and iconographic comparison with the machine-oriented aesthetics of Charles Sheeler who, from a purist and precisionist angle, evaluated the industrial world as a modern spiritual substitute for the wholeness and authenticity of the Gothic cathedral. Sheeler’s 1927 photograph of the Delmonico building, illustrating the ‘set-back’ building code which allowed light to strike the lower stories of the skyscraper, may be echoed in Depero’s twisted diagonals, possibly reinforcing the futurist notion of force lines. In one of his postcards advertising his ‘New York: film vissuto’, Depero appears superimposed against the background of an unspecified ‘set back’ style skyscraper.125 As in Joseph Stella (see New York Interpreted, III: The Skyscrapers, 1920–22), Depero’s skyscrapers are towering and imperative, steely refractions under the multiple vibrations of sound and light. Skyscrapers soar, while, in the lower part of the painting, the tunnels of the subway repeat their vertiginous rhythm on a smaller scale. Resting on colossal stone foundations, the city’s steely solidity rises. A vertical fugue of floors and the hard, angular, tortuous edges of the urban cauldron also typify Depero’s Grattacieli e tunnel (Skyscrapers and tunnels), an eye-hurting dystopian vision where spinning metal shafts and spikes collapse centripetally into a void underneath, folded into the uncontrollable tectonic shifts underpinning the technological metropolis (see Figure 3.3). Depero is captured between terror and delight, danger and exhilaration: skyscrapers remind him of ‘bayonets’, ‘irons’, ‘cages’, seen from down up. From top down, the perspective is lifted, not merely physically but also ‘spiritually’. Emphasis is on spectacle, enchantment and pathos. The spine of the viewer bends backwards, the whole body adapts, similarly to what it does when confronted with the vertiginous altitudes of Depero’s Alpine mountains.126 Unable to assimilate and delight in the pervasive flooding of technology in the external environment, both urban and rural, his sensory and psychological landscapes overstimulated, Depero’s vision is unsettled and traumatised by constant technological exposure and reverberation. For Depero, the skyscraper will always epitomise the volcanic modern urban machine. On 25 October 1947, Depero arrived in New York for the second time. His world, however, as well as the whole world, had changed. The Second World War left a trail of devastation, Marinetti had died, futurismo was by then largely disbanded and compromised by its proximity to fascismo. Lacking youthful enthusiasm, Depero found 125 Ibid., 108. Leiber speculates that Depero may have seen Sheeler’s drawing ‘New York ‘(1920) via Christian Brinton and Catherine Dreier and repeated its architectural motifs in his own late 1920s work. Alternatively, Depero may have become acquainted with these forms at the Paris Expo of 1925, where photographs of New York midtown skyscrapers were the only American contribution exhibited there. 126 Depero, Un futurista a New York, 38.

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3.3 Fortunato Depero, Grattacieli e tunnel (Skyscrapers and tunnel), 1930

this second American experience as disappointing and as bruising as the previous one. He began work in earnest in a little room inside a furniture factory on 71st Street until Rosetta joined him in the spring of 1948, when they both moved to 97 MacDougal Street, Greenwich Village. Shortly afterwards, however, they were forced to move again, to Marryhall, near New Milford in the Connecticut countryside, to a residence made available to them by Lina Sermolino. The sudden death of their benefactor, however, rendered their accommodation precarious, prompting the couple to pack their boxes, board the Saturnia motorboat in May 1949 and return to Rovereto. Depero will never return to the US again.127 Although we know little about this visit, a 1952 letter from his fellow futurist Farfa (pseudonym of Vittorio Osvaldo Tommasini) is evidence of Depero’s repeated frustration: ‘My dear Depero […] I hear you have returned from New York once again and, like the first time round, are bitterly disappointed.’128 Less romantically inclined, disappointed with the urban machine, Depero shifted his interest towards ethnography, collecting numerous Indian artefacts, fossils and curious biomorphic 127 Scudiero and Leiber, Depero & New York, 81–2. 128 MART, Fondo Depero, Corrispondenza, original letter by Farfa to Depero, 19 January 1952, ‘!depero depero!’, in Rovereto New-York 1928–29, 6.

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objects whose form will be captured in his art from then on. While it appears that unsettling working and living conditions left Depero ‘in an even more depressed state than the first time around’,129 further research is needed to throw light on Depero’s second visit to the US.

129 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 480–1.

1 Ivo Pannaggi, Il ratto d’Europa (The rape of Europa), 1963–68

2 Enrico Prampolini, Autoritratto simultaneo (Simultaneous self-portrait), c. 1923

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4 At the frontier of futurismo The body is a machine, the worker a machinist. (V. E. Meyerhold, ‘Principles of biomechanics’, 1922)

The promise of dynamism and national expansion in the early stages of capitalism contributed to the appeal of the machine. Social egalitarianism was significant too, especially for the ‘key architects of the futurist machine aesthetics of the 1920s’.1 I will call this group of artists ‘frontier futurists’ due to the transnational spread of their collaborative activities, fringe status within futurismo and ideological orientation towards Eastern Europe. The authoritarian turn of Fascist Italy prompted a spate of forcible exiles and voluntary migration.2 Collaborations extended beyond national confines, in some cases out of loyalty to the multilingual and multicultural Socialist International. The outward looking gaze of the ‘frontier futurists’, who regarded the machine as the ‘connective tissue’ between ideology and technology,3 contributed to reorienting the geographical axis of futurismo in the 1920s and 1930s. While Paris was the long-standing centre of gravity, the cultural compass now shifted towards Central and Eastern Europe.4 This was little short of a Copernican revolution: in an effort to bridge the gap between art and industry, this group of left-leaning young artists repositioned their activities in the hub of industrial production in Central Europe. The futurists rejoiced when they came to Germany, for they did not find ‘old masters and museums, no tourist industry, but real industry. The entire country was one big industry’.5 Technology had gained traction in Germany in the 1920s, 1 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 422. 2 In personal correspondence to Verdone, Ivo Pannaggi guiltily described his departure from Italy as a case of ‘throwing in the towel’ – letter cit. in E. Crispolti (ed.), Pannaggi e l’arte meccanica futurista (Milan: Mazzotta, 1995), 43–4. 3 V. Paladini, Arte d’avanguardia e futurismo (Rome: La Bilancia, 1923), 5–6. 4 M. E. Versari, ‘The Central European avant-garde of the 1920s: the battleground for futurist identity?’, in V. Lahoda (ed.), Local Strategies International Ambitions: Modern Art and Central Europe 1918–68 (Prague: ARTEFACTUM, 2006), 103. 5 A. Döblin, ‘Von einem Kaufmann und einem Yoghi’, in Kleine Schriften, I, 298–9, cit. in P. Demetz, Italian Futurism and the German Literary Avant-Garde (London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1987), 19.

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reorienting production towards industrial design and affordable quality products with mass appeal (see especially the Bauhaus). Taylorist and Fordist management models became widespread. If modernity coincides with capitalism, Germany stood at the hub of capitalist modernity: a techno-capitalist utopia predicated on industrial production. Hailing from the low-tech economies of Italy and Russia, many were caught in this ‘futurist moment’.6 The process of mechanisation had accelerated in Russia since the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, underpinned by Marx’s notion that the ‘machine presupposes a mass of workers’7 organised in a class of their own. Though initially opposed to the exploitative undertones of Taylorism, Lenin embraced ‘Communist Americanism’ on coming to power, having witnessed the boost to industrial productivity in Germany during the war.8 In Russia, after Lenin, Ford was the favourite patron saint.9 What it meant to be human was being radically transformed: a ‘transcendentally homeless’ lot, as Lukács had it in 1920,10 and a Fordist paradigm showing its brutal internal logic to Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and the Frankfurt School. The collective achievements of mechanisation were publicly celebrated, e.g. Tatlin’s Tower and Monument to the Third International (1919–20) and El Lissitzky’s Lenin Tribune (1920). Vladimir Tatlin’s grandiose Tower, in particular, was half a sculpture, half an architectural piece encasing four mechanical chambers each turning independently upon its respective axis. Even though the project never progressed further than the model stage, it was welcomed as a triumph of constructive engineering and ‘absolute mechanics’. Praised by Trotsky and Lunacharsky, influential on the Bauhaus, the Tower also inspired the futuristi who regarded it as a symbol of the new mechanical civilisation. For at least a decade Tatlin upheld the ‘art of the machine with its construction and logic, its rhythm, its constituent parts, its material’,11 a heuristic shortly to be taken on by the Berlin dadaists. Tatlinism became shorthand for the transfer of industrial technology and materials to the visual arts. Kom-Fut and Proletkult came together in the same period of time. In January 1919, Boris Kushner, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Osip and Lilya Brik, Nathan Altman and David Sterenberg founded an association of poets and painters: Kom-Fut 6 Perloff, Futurist Moment, 36. 7 Marx, ‘The fragment on machines’, 690. 8 Alexei Gastev became Chairman of the Central Committee of the All-Russian Union of Metalworkers (1917–18). In 1920, he founded and directed the Central Institute of Labour to develop Taylorist approaches to work management. Gastev advocated an intimacy between the worker and the machine. 9 Chase, Men and Machines, 331. 10 Cit. in Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss, 83. See also Brecht’s Man Equals Man (1926) and Reader for City Dwellers (1927), cit. in ibid., 84. 11 K. Umanskij, ‘Der Tatlinismus oder die Maschinenkunst’, Der Ararat 4 (January 1920), 12, cit. in Broeckmann, Machine Art, 11.

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(Kommunisty-Futuristy). Their programme, which rejected bourgeois values in favour of a new Communist art, was penned by Kushner and published in the magazine Iskusstvo Kommuny (The art of the commune). Its representatives, which also included Vladimir Mayakovsky and Alexander Bogdanov, supported Taylorism and standardisation, leading to constructivism in the 1920s. Proletkult was a shorthand term for ‘proletarskaya kultura’ (proletarian culture). It was a composite, federal arts institution and movement founded on the Marxist premise of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Its aim was to develop a working-class culture and aesthetics stemming from Russia’s mechanical modernisation. Proletkult’s intellectual leaders and founding fathers were three left-leaning Bolsheviks: Maxim Gorky, Bogdanov and Lunacharsky. At the height of its activities in 1920, Proletkult counted more than 80,000 active members and more than half a million followers and supporters. At the second congress of the Communist International in August 1920, Lunacharsky was invested with the task to branch out to disseminate Proletkult’s activities on the international stage. Even though its days were counted, especially since Lenin rapidly subsumed the movement under a rival People’s Commissariat of Education (Narkompros), a significant legacy was established, especially in theatre and performance under the steering of Sergei Eisenstein. Proletkult’s continuing activities found fertile ground internationally, if piecemeal. In Italy Proletkult coincided with the brief season Biennio Rosso, an intense twoyear period between 1921 and 1922 when economic crisis, factory occupation and worker’s strikes held Italy in thrall. Local branches of Proletkult thrived, clustered in the industrial areas of the north-west and north-east. The Turin branch, also known as the Istituto di Cultura Proletaria, was steeped in collectivist principles and included a trade union college and labour club. Firmly embedded in the industrial bedrock of the city, Turin’s Proletkult overlapped with the futurists, finding common ground in a shared interest in the machine. Gramsci, who had helped draft the cultural policy of the Communist International, maintained close links with this local branch. In 1922 he invited Marinetti to guide a group of factory workers through a futurist exhibition in Turin, as he relayed in correspondence to Trotsky. Critical of their bourgeois turn, Gramsci had initially praised the futurists for their clear and frank vistas on industrial dynamics, appraising their artistic, linguistic and behavioural radicalism (see also section 1.2). Antonio Gramsci aligned himself with the pro-Soviet avant-garde but remained aware of the exploitative underpinnings of techno-capitalism. He acknowledged the efficiency of productive techniques brought in by the ‘scientific method’ but questioned the forms that a society erected on a battery of efficient, well-oiled human machines might take under authoritarian regimes and exploitative economics. Gramsci suggested that the workers should appropriate Fordism in order to ‘internalise it’, work

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for the construction of a common good, rather than for the good of capitalists who parasitically depend on it. A liberating force despite its exploitative underpinnings, the Fordist machine may enslave the body, but not the worker’s mind.12 Mindful of the psycho-physical aspects of ‘Americanism’, he argued: American industrialists are concerned to maintain the continuity of the physical and muscular-nervous efficiency of the worker. It is in their interest to have a stable, skilled labour force, a permanently well-adjusted complex, because the human complex (the collective worker) of an enterprise is also a machine which cannot, without considerable loss, be taken to pieces too often and renewed with single new parts.13

The frontier futuristi understood too the ambivalence of Fordism and the encroaching power of technology on the workers unless they play an active role in politics and society (see also section 4.2a). In a society dominated by capital economics, life is hewn in the industrial plant with implacable metallurgical precision. Their ‘humanism of classical capitalism’ regards the individual as a relatively free agent in the labour market and the relationship between human and machine as one of reciprocal communication and control. The machine is the new social arbiter.14 All in all, the Bolshevik revolution resonated globally, capturing the imagination of many. The socially egalitarian machine culture echoed far and wide, tunnelling down in history. In the US, non-Marxist thinkers admired its technocratic premises and democratic goals. In 1919, Thorstein Veblen devised a ‘soviet of technicians’ investing engineers with the power to reverse the culture of predatory business.15 In 1952, Lewis Mumford observed that mechanisation brings about democratisation, ‘a true levelling off in both directions, upward and downward’.16 Marxist Fordism was also persuasive. Even Marinetti declared himself impressed with the Bolsheviks, after the demise of his own party in 1919 left him bereft of an arena of agitational politics.17 Unlike Marinetti, however, the frontier futuristi stressed the human–machine nexus. Machines do not exist in a vacuum. They are not a technical category, but, rather, a 12 A. Gramsci, Notebook n. 22, in Hoare and Nowell Smith (eds and trans), Selection from the Prison Notebooks. 13 Gramsci, ‘Rationalization of production and work’, in Forgacs (ed.), The Gramsci Reader, 291; also cit. in Hoare and Nowell Smith (eds), Selection from the Prison Notebooks, 303. 14 M. Feher, ‘Of bodies and technologies’, in Foster (ed.), DIA Art Foundation, I, 162. 15 Tichi, Shifting Gears, 133–7. 16 Mumford, Art and Technics, 101. 17 Marinetti’s re-orientation towards Eastern Europe, where new energies were fermenting, further allowed him to bypass the rivalries with dadaism and the art periodical Valori Plastici, as well as to explore a new art field which was independent of State patronage – see Versari, ‘Central European avant-garde’, 104.

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social one. They interact with human agents, individual and collective. Ivo Pannaggi, Vinicio Paladini, Avgust Cernigoj and Ruggero Vasari, in particular, engaged with this ideological and constructive machine aesthetics, coloured by utopian and dystopian undertones. Frontier futurists were aware that a novel machine aesthetics was being forged. The machine was totalising. Bloodless and ascetic, it was a law, a discipline consisting of the synchronous beauty of cogs, wheels, shafts, gears. They were technicians, workers, manual labourers. They were ‘practicals’ to use a term devised by Gadda, e.g. practitioners whose unmediated execution of labour is the building block of aesthetic fruition.18 Pannaggi and Paladini, in particular, conceptualised this new aesthetics clearly and convincingly in a manifesto predicated on the economic, social and political premises of factory work, which they experienced first-hand. This script encompassed the whole spectrum of labour, from workbench to assembly line, assessing the impact of machines on the social and political arenas of their time (see section 4.2a). The equation between proletarisation and industrialisation embodied in the Taylorist and Fordist systematisation of labour was an urgent, irrepressible call spreading like wildfire,19 rupturing the fabric of futurismo. 4.1 Frontier futurism: Avgust Cernigoj One of the most thriving branches of Proletkult was situated at the north-eastern borders, where Italy joins Slovenia and the Balkans. Avgust Cernigoj (1898–1985) was born in Austro-Hungarian Trieste, a busy and affluent commercial port, cross-roads of languages and civilisations. Cernigoj was a quintessential exponent of Trieste’s frontier identity. He was also a convinced internationalist and revolutionary.20 In 1922, he attended the Academy and Professional Art School in Münich, where he became acquainted with Karmela Kosovel, a music student and sister of the Slovenian poet Srečko. Srečko Kosovel and Cernigoj were to strike a fruitful friendship predicated on their shared passion for constructivism.21 The Slovenian avant-garde was fermenting in the capital Lubljana, at a remove from Cernigoj’s native Trieste, where aggressive 18 C. E. Gadda, ‘Le belle lettere e i contributi espressivi delle tecniche’, in I viaggi e la morte (Milan: Garzanti, 1958), 79. 19 See also K. Malevic, ‘Concerning the “ego” and the collective’, UNOVIS Almanac I (June 1920), cit. in T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes to a History of Modernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 226. 20 M. Verdone, Arti senza frontiere (Bologna: Bora, 1993), 79. 21 In a letter of 7 January 1924, Kosovel urged Cernigoj to ‘storm into Lubljana’ armed with an arsenal of paintings. Evidence suggests that Kosovel’s collages were influenced by Cernigoj’s work, even though the poet disagreed – see A. Bassin and P. Krečič, www.baunet-info.com/media/documents/ news/2014/04/09/Avgust_%C4%8Cernigoj.pdf (accessed 23 December 2017), [n.p.].

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nationalist discourses following Italy’s acquisition of the city after the First World War were taking hold. In 1924 Cernigoj attended Moholy-Nagy’s courses at the Bauhaus in Weimar, and followed the strand directed by Kandinsky albeit for one semester only due to financial penuries. Kandinsky and Moholy-Nagy proved influential, in concert with Russian constructivism, Italian futurism, encountered during a stint in Bologna while studying at the Academy of Fine Arts (1920–22), and Slovenian futurism, also known as zenithism. In the late spring of 1924, in Lubljana, Cernigoj prepared works and materials bearing in mind the lessons of the Bauhaus, utilising wood, coal, glass, chalk and metal scraps. His goal was to co-curate, together with Kosovel, the first Slovenian constructivist exhibition and exhibit architectural relief models and abstract sculptures interspersed with provocative, revolutionary slogans. He composed slogans made up of colossal letterings, reading: ‘capital is theft’, ‘the artist must become an engineer, the engineer an artist’ and ‘the progress of machinism is to share private property’. Other exhibits included pieces of machinery, a motorcycle, borrowed on occasion, a worker’s overalls and scrap industrial objects. The small exhibition opened on 15 August 1924 in the gymnasium of the Technical School, lasting a mere ten days. Despite being overlooked by official critics, its resonance and popularity were enormous, cementing Cernigoj’s constructivist credentials. The encounter with Ferdo Delak in 1925 and novi oder led Cernigoj to export his constructive language to theatre and literature. This is evidenced in Cernigoj and Delak’s 1926 manifesto, published in the periodical Mladina, followed by further collaborations, e.g. with the avant-garde review Tank (1927), whose first issue printed Cernigoj’s first manifesto, and an exhibition in Berlin in 1928. From February to August 1925 Cernigoj taught at the Technical School in Lubljana, working assiduously to put together a second exhibition scheduled between 5 and 19 July of the same year. Here, he began to conceive the review Konstrukter, whose title Kosovel proposed be shortened to Kons. After an anonymous informant reported Cernigoj’s Communist activities, however, the Royal police had him ousted from the school and he lost his teaching position. Cernigoj repatriated to Italian Trieste in the autumn and, together with Giorgio Carmelich and Emilio Mario Dolfi, attempted to establish an art school on the model of the Bauhaus in via Fornace. He also designed scenes for the Slovenian Theatre in S. Giacomo, Trieste’s predominantly Slovenian quarter, and co-authored with Delak a theatre manifesto in August 1926 published in Mladina. Cernigoj continued to publish journal articles to voice support for collectivism and constructivism. It was Cernigoj who introduced constructivism in Trieste, from whose receptive borders it circulated to Italy. His acolyte Giorgio Carmelich (1907–29), another incisive artist who looked up to Paladini (see section 4.2), imposed a constructivist direction on the review Aurora (founded by Sofronio Pocarini in 1923). Highlighting

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Trieste’s multicultural vocation, a legacy of its Imperial past, and pivotal positioning as cultural hub and site of international exchange, Cernigoj, Edvard Stepančič and a contingent of constructivist futurists looked up to the Russian revolutionary avantgarde as a beacon – Cernigoj signed his work ‘tovȃriš [comrade] Cernigoj’. Compared to other cultural movements, Triestine futurism was polarised along class, language, national and ethnic lines: headed by Bruno G. Sanzin, a local poet loyal to Marinetti, the Italian futurist group upheld Italian nationalism.22 On the other hand, Cernigoj and his large collective, including Carmelich, Dolfi, Nino Jablowsky, Giuseppe Vlah, Stepančič, Delak, Ivan Čargo, Milko Bambič, Veno Pilon, Kogoj and Kosovel, followed in the footsteps of the international Proletkult and the constructive left. Experimental craftsmanship was key, tested in small factory work and in the Epeo workshop (Bottega di Epeo), an international publishing house conceived by Carmelich, Dolfi and Jablowsky oriented towards radical cubo-futurism, constructivism and dada-impressionism.23 The Epeo workshop was characterised by an almost fanatic attention towards the European scene. The convergence with Čargo, Stepančič, Vlah, Bambič and, especially, with Cernigoj, reaffirmed their heretical positions and original anti-bourgeois militancy. Echoing Paladini, Léger and the Novembergruppe, Epeo cross-pollinated with a broad range of radical experiences straddling middle Europe: Malespine’s Manifeste du sur-idéalisme (1925), Max Jacob, Bambič’s proun, Pilon’s expressionism, Čargo’s cubo-futurism, to name but a few.24 An exhibition of abstract art in Trieste introduced as the collective enterprise of a ‘constructivist group’ in the autumn of 1927 stands as the pinnacle of Cernigoj’s work, between his commitment to radical politics and the drive to communicate abstract art to the general public. Constructive ideas were beginning to subside, however, in the wake of a crisis of the movement in Russia and under the increased pressure exerted by fascismo on the Slovenian community at the north-eastern Italian borders. Tank ceased publication and, despite attracting the attention of Herwarth Walden in the Berlin show of 1928, showcased in a special issue of Der Sturm, the movement splintered. Cernigoj’s work became fragmented: his last constructivist work, published on the front page of the eighth issue of the review Illustracije (1929), seemed to strike the death knell of Slovenian constructivism at the intersection of Italy, Russia and Central Europe.

22 See K. Pizzi, A City in Search of an Author: The Literary Identity of Trieste (London and New York: Sheffield Academic Press-Continuum, 2001), 124–8. 23 See also U. Carpi, ‘Personaggi e vicende della letteratura giuliana d’avanguardia negli anni Venti’, in M. Masau Dan, B. Passamani, U. Carpi et al. (eds), Frontiere d’avanguardia: gli anni del futurismo nella Venezia Giulia (Gorizia: Campestrini, 1985), 68–9. 24 Carpi, ‘Personaggi e vicende’, 81 and 82–3.

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The machine, however, continued to leave indelible marks in Cernigoj’s art. Pop-art collages and graphic work he brought out as late as the 1970s deployed industrial techniques and materials, still echoing constructivism. The photocollage, an assemblage of everyday materials, a fragmented and ephemeral art form with notable technological and mechanical overtones and ironical, political and educational aims, was a staple of the international avant-garde, from Man Ray to the Bauhaus, dada and constructivism (especially Alexander Rodchenko). Together with Tato (pseudonym of Guglielmo Sansoni), Prampolini, Pannaggi and Paladini, Cernigoj and other fringe futuristi devised photocollages which testify to the concreteness and ubiquity of the machine in people’s everyday life (see section 4.3). The difficult integration of the Bauhaus style with the predominantly consumerist agenda of the modern art market bedevilled Cernigoj’s late work. This is compellingly evidenced by the artist’s impulsive destruction in 1976, documented on film, of his own works in protest against the mercantilism of contemporary art.25 4.2 Vinicio Paladini 4.2a Replacing the cross with technology Vinicio Paladini (1902–71) was a thoroughly cosmopolitan artist whose activities traversed futurismo, constructivism, metaphysical painting, dada and the Neue Sachlichkeit.26 Paladini’s goal was to transform the visual and performing arts into instruments of social revolution. Simultaneously ‘converted’ to futurism and Communism, he especially admired the Bolshevik avant-garde,27 and straddled Anarchism and Bolshevism like his Russian counterparts, especially Malevich. Countering the conservative turn taken by official futurismo in the 1920s and 1930s, Paladini believed that futurism could act as a conduit of the Communist revolution.28 He articulated his machine aesthetics persuasively via a Manifesto of mechanical art, in tension with the pronouncements emanating from Marinetti’s camp (see below). Born in Moscow of a Russian mother, the young Paladini attended assiduously avant-garde circles and counter clubs in Rome, especially Bragaglia’s Art House. His 25 See Krečič, in Bassin and Krečič, www.baunet-info.com/media/documents/news/2014/04/09/ Avgust_%C4%8Cernigoj.pdf. 26 P. Baldacci, ‘Vinicio Paladini 1902–71. Dipinti collages, tempere e disegni di un protagonista dell’arte italiana tra le due guerre’, in Porro Art Consulting, www.porroartconsulting.it/pdf/Porro_asta_32.pdf (accessed 12 February 2007), 7. 27 Lista, Dal futurismo all’immaginismo, 16. 28 Ibid., 8. The futurists were often accused of crypto-Communism – e.g. G. Prezzolini, Il Secolo (3 July 1923), cit. in U. Carpi, Bolscevico immaginista: comunismo e avanguardie artistiche nell’Italia degli anni venti (Naples: Liguori, 1981), 52.

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father owned and managed several clubs and hotels, including the notorious Bal Tik Tak decorated with murals by Balla, his idolised maestro.29 Shaped by Balla’s influence, Paladini engaged enthusiastically with machines, in art work, design and industrial production. For Paladini the artist was a factory worker, architect and engineer first and foremost, the protagonist of a new society rebuilt on egalitarian foundations. Fernand Léger, who, like Paladini, trained as an architect, regarded the machine as a vehicle of social and political enfranchisement. In 1945, Léger joined the Communist party and painted factory workers, broken machinery and industrial junk piled up in US fields, exhibiting in Renault factories, e.g. Tree Trunk on Yellow Ground (1945) and The Constructors – the Team at Rest (1950). Paladini followed a comparable trajectory. Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) left a lasting impression on Paladini most of all. An intellectual, economist, writer, staunch advocate of technology and co-founder of Proletkult, Bogdanov aimed to destroy bourgeois culture and replace it with a technologised proletarian culture. In an article entitled ‘Poesia proletaria’ (‘Proletarian poetry’), published in Gramsci’s L’Ordine Nuovo on 26 October 1921, Bogdanov contended that the integration between the machine and the proletariat witnessed in modern factory work would bring about a new culture steered by the workers. The futurists were tasked with facilitating this process until such time as the proletariat was ready to take over.30 Paladini was introduced to futurist circles at this time, following an Exhibition of Italian futurist art coordinated by Tato in Bologna. When this exhibition moved to Turin, opening there on 27 March 1922, it stoked a debate in L’Ordine Nuovo among futurist sympathisers. Paladini’s commitment to a revolutionary machine culture was sealed at this juncture, as is especially testified by two articles he brought out in the same year in Avanguardia, the periodical of the young Italian Communist association: ‘La rivolta intellettuale’ (‘Intellectual revolt’; 23 April 1922) and ‘Appello agli intellettuali!’ (‘Appeal to the intellectuals!’; 16 July 1922). ‘The Christian faith, and any other idols that used to be the fount of artistic inspiration, are dead’, argued Paladini. ‘Futurismo alone survives. A wondrous new divinity is rising to assuage our troubled souls: the proletariat and the machine!’31 Machines are key: historically, ideologically 29 Balla painted the murals in 1921. Even though they are not extant, two reproductions can be seen in the reviews Il Futurismo (February 1922) and Noi (May 1923) – see de Marchis (ed.), Futurismo da ripensare, 24. 30 Carpi, Bolscevico immaginista, 49. Bogdanov was to fall shortly afterwards under purges instigated by Lenin, his former associate. 31 V. Paladini, ‘La rivolta intellettuale’, Avanguardia, 15 (23 April 1922), cit. in Lista, Arte e politica, 197; Paladini, ‘Appello agli intellettuali!’, Avanguardia, 27 (16 July 1922), cit. in Lista, Arte e politica, 226.

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and aesthetically, continued Paladini, reinforcing this argument in 1923 in the pages of Pagine Rosse.32 As Berghaus observes: Paladini’s attempt at integrating political and artistic revolution under the hegemony of the proletariat was meant to appeal to a young generation of artists, who had emerged from the postwar crisis drenched in revolutionary sentiment but without a clear direction. Paladini’s message to them was to seek inspiration from a new god, Il Dio Proletario (the Proletarian God) and to join forces with the working class under the sign of the machine.33

Paladini’s cult may echo the utopian Socialism of Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), whose theories of industrialism had celebrated the engineer as the new priest of human civilisation. For Paladini, however, this messianic investiture was conferred on the mechanical worker on the Fordist assembly line. As already mentioned, the opportunities and constraints of Fordism were integral to the teleological force and constructive appeal of the machine in Bolshevism and Communism. The Frankfurt School developed Marx’s theory of alienation, reification and commodity fetishism in capitalism at the same time as Paladini was grappling with these issues. Lukács, in particular, maintained that, under capitalism, ‘rational mechanisation extends right into the worker’s “soul”’.34 Like Gramsci, Lukács regarded Taylorism as an attempt to fragment and reify the worker’s body and psyche. The worker, on the other hand, was meant to be ‘an active subject engaged in the production of the world in which it could flourish’.35 In Paladini’s worldview, instead, the worker on the Fordist machine is both cog and King. Replacing the cross with technology, Paladini’s metal-mechanic worker is a missionary, a Christ-like figure spearheading universal redemption predicated on the unbreakable bond of the worker and the machine. This powerful redemptive drive stands powerfully behind Paladini’s first ‘mechanical construction’: a painting entitled Il proletario della III Internazionale (The Proletarian of the III International; [August] 1922, non-extant). Paladini represents a worker completely enmeshed with mechanical objects and mechanisms, e.g. gearwheels, rods, cylinders and measuring devices, stressing the overlap between the proletarian and the machine spearheading a social revolution.36 In further paintings entitled La nona ora (The Ninth Hour; 1922, non 32 Carpi, Bolscevico immaginista, 58. Under the leadership of Amadeo Bordiga, the Communist Party grew to disagree with Paladini’s views and he was subsequently denied further contributions to Avanguardia. 33 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 418–19. 34 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1923), 88, cit. in Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss, 92. 35 Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss, 81. 36 Carpi, Bolscevico immaginista, 92. In November 1922, this painting was reproduced in issue n. 13 of Het Overzicht, alongside Depero’s Tarantella, with Jozef Peeters’ commentary.

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extant), Ritmi meccanici (Mechanical Rhythms; 1922–23), La Partenza (Departure; 1926) and Equilibrismi (Acrobatics; 1926) Paladini reimagined the worker as a constructivist work-in-progress. Mechanics are imbued with the tools of their trade, not reified but rather replete with agency. The Ninth Hour, in particular, features a worker weighed down by manual work yet drawing strength and power from grasping a hammer and sickle. The sheer symbolic energy of this forceful representation seems to stem from carvings of Biblical subjects in Romanesque cathedrals.37 Similarly to The Proletarian, Paladini’s worker is a ‘man of steel’ in a symbiotic relationship with the machine, his energy radiating out to the surrounding environment saturated with technology.38 The worker is a figure of secular redemption, wielding a hammer and sickle symbolic of Christ’s passion, foretelling a secular resurrection.39 Paladini’s work came prominently to the fore in this period of time, while his ax`ctivities became centred on mechanical aesthetics, in collaboration with Pannaggi (section 4.3a). Paladini voiced his theories in numerous pronouncements and manifestos, e.g. ‘La rivolta intellettuale’ (‘The intellectual revolution’; Avanguardia, 23 April 1922). Here, Paladini rejected Marinetti’s machine, a source of individual energy and willpower, in favour of industrial machines contextualised in factory economics and production. The communion between aesthetics and politics driven by the ‘Proletarian’ will harness a new industrial civilisation under the aegis of Communism. A Manifesto dell’arte meccanica futurista (Manifesto of futurist mechanical art), co-authored wih Pannaggi, became more renowned and influential. It came out on 20 June 1922 in La Nuova Lacerba, an international review promoted by Bragaglia’s Art House which published in English, French and Italian. The manifesto took a ‘new, anti-Marinettian futurist direction’.40 Regarding the machine as the flagship of the proletarian revolution, it joined forces with constructivism whose tenets had been voiced only a few weeks earlier by van Doesburg at the Düsseldorf first international congress of Progressive Artists (29–31 May 1922).41 Pannaggi and Paladini’s manifesto was 37 I am thinking, for example, of Wiligelmo’s eleventh–twelfth century carvings on the west façade of the Romanesque cathedral in Modena, where Abel forcefully clasps a tree branch while being slain. 38 Lista, Dal futurismo all’immaginismo, 24. 39 Versari suggests ‘a more classically “Marxian”’ reading, e.g. the worker is a living subordinate of the machine, as is evidenced by his ‘disjointed shadows, almost autonomously rebelling against their merger in a mechanical assembly’ – Versari, ‘Futurist machine art, constructivism and the modernity of mechanisation’, in Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination, 159. 40 Baldacci, ‘Vinicio Paladini’, 9. 41 Ruggero Vasari attended this conference. The constructivists, however, refused to discuss the implementation of an international funding framework for avant-garde exhibitions, as the futuristi had hoped. According to Versari, this manifesto also carried echoes of Moholy-Nagy’s Aufruf zur Elementaren Kunst (1921), as well as Puni, Arp and Hausmann – Versari, ‘Central European avant-garde’, 107.

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positioned to reverberate across Europe, albeit in revised form, trailblazing a new era. Industrial technology was gushing forth as a transnational political force to be reckoned with. Aware of the rising international influence of mechanical aesthetics, Enrico Prampolini followed his paper at the Düsseldorf congress with an attribution of the ‘poetics of the machine’ to Marinetti in ‘spiritual’ function. Prampolini drafted the official futurist response to constructivism in disagreement with Pannaggi and Paladini.42 Paladini responded with a Léger-inspired ink drawing entitled Primo maggio (The First of May), which featured a Communist worker. He sent it to Avanguardia on 22 October 1922, while a power-hungry Mussolini was marching on Rome. The hiatus between the ‘fuoriusciti’ (outliers) and the official futurist group was growing wider. Ever the master of many a futurist transformation, Marinetti later presented the Fascist government with the manifesto Artistic rights endorsed by Italian futurists, a repackaged version of the Düsseldorf papers first published in Prampolini’s review Noi on 1 April 1923. Threatened by the unapologetically militant turn of international machine art, the futurist headquarters attempted to normalise and defuse Pannaggi’s and Paladini’s manifesto of June 1922. In 1923, they issued a shortened, censored and shorter-titled version, backdated to October 1922: Arte meccanica (Mechanical art). This ‘verbose washdown’ drafted by Prampolini, signed by Pannaggi, Paladini and Prampolini, and prefaced by Marinetti was published in Noi in May 1923.43 Prampolini toned down the material underpinnings of the machine in favour of a ‘spiritual approach’, reimagining the machine as an ‘escapist and decorative incitement’44 (see also section 5.4). Prampolini’s interventions, in other words, were designed to ‘neuter’ the radical original. They shifted emphasis to subjectivity in a postwar world engulfed in fragmented collectivities, no longer united in anti-capitalist struggle but splintered in broken individualities. Pannaggi and Paladini’s seminal text, however, shone through, especially where machines are implicated in the construction of identity, 42 See also Lista, Dal futurismo all’immaginismo, 25; Versari, ‘Central European avant-garde’, 108. 43 Carpi, Bolscevico immaginista, 88. According to Baldacci, Pannaggi agreed with this this redraft. Paladini, on the other hand, insisted that the new version should be followed by a short text reasserting the original radical pronouncement – Baldacci, ‘Vinicio Paladini’, 9. Prampolini had previously brought out a subdued, moderate and ‘purist’ manifesto: L’estetica meccanica e l’introspezione meccanica nell’arte (Mechanical aesthetics and mechanical introspection in art; De Stijl, July 1922 and L’Impero, 16 March 1923). 44 Carpi, Bolscevico immaginista, 89–90. According to Lista, it was Marinetti who persuaded Pannaggi, Paladini and Prampolini to co-sign the Manifesto of mechanical art – G. Lista, ‘Prampolini futurista europeo’, in G. Lista, F. Menna, N. Ponente, A. Perilli and E. Prampolini (eds), Continuità dell’avanguardia in Italia: Enrico Prampolini (1894–1956) (Modena: Comune di Modena, 1978), 16. See also Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 423.

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agency and subjectivity in the modern age. ‘A Diesel engine, a flywheel, a TSF device carry immense value in the construction of our “selves”’,45 argued Paladini. The severe metallic discipline of the machine is a bitter but necessary medicine, a welcome new classicism. Circulating in translation in several periodicals through the 1920s, Paladini’s manifesto was ‘widely regarded as the representative document of Italian machine aesthetics’.46 This manifesto caused Paladini to clash with the futurist establishment. He issued polemical statements in Rovente and Pagine Rosse, rejecting the recent alliance with Fascism and drafting the article ‘Estetica della macchina’ (‘Aesthetics of the machine’) where he reinstated his independence.47 In a note to the manifesto Diritti artistici propugnati dai futuristi italiani (Artists rights endorsed by the Italian futurists), published in Rovente on 20 March 1923, Paladini continued to protest: ‘I have no part in any of the political opinions expressed in the manifesto; I only belong to futurism as an aesthetic current aimed at artistic innovation.’48 Further articles, including ‘Arte d’avanguardia e futurismo’ (‘Avant-garde art and futurism’; La Bilancia, July 1923), endorsed constructivism and criticised Marinetti from a Bolshevik perspective (see also ‘Arte, comunismo e nazionalismo’ (‘Art, Communism and nationalism’; Pagine Rosse, 30 September 1923). Marinetti’s own machine aesthetics manifesto, published in L’Impero in 1925 after the authoritarian turn of Fascism, painfully demonstrated the irreconcilable hiatus between their positions. Already marginalised, Paladini was soon ostracised.49 Even though he obtained a handful of commissions, he became a pariah, both by the standards of the official futurist group, repelled by his radicalism, as well as by those of his comrades, who regarded his futurist affiliation as politically dubious. In the article ‘Proletari e intellettuali’ (‘Proletarians and intellectuals’; Fede!, 1 February 1925) Paladini repeated his loyalty to the Soviet Union, insisting that the convergence between proletariat and intellectuals had been achieved in the USSR alone. In 1925 Paladini published the short volume L’arte nella Russia dei Soviets (Art in Soviet Russia). This is a hymn to material culture, matrix of all arts: ‘matter must be loved’, recommends Paladini, ‘because, through our senses, matter provides consciousness to our life’.50 An impassioned, wide-ranging overview of contemporary Soviet art, informed by the author’s ardent project to combine ‘artistic left’ and ‘political left’, this book posits Soviet society as a model. Here, the working class 45 46 47 48 49 50

Paladini, ‘Estetica meccanica’, Noi, II:I, May 1923, 2; also cit. in Marinetti, Gli Indomabili, 162. Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 424. Lista, Dal futurismo all’immaginismo, 30. Cit. in Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 426. Carpi, Bolscevico immaginista, 91. Paladini, L’arte nella Russia dei Soviets; il padiglione dell’URSS a Venezia (Rome: La Bilancia, 1925), 9.

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is provided with the cultural skills to apprehend and enjoy avant-garde culture.51 In a few, well-chosen paragraphs, Paladini discusses contemporary Russian artists. He dwells on the conceptual and ideological distance between constructivism and suprematism, the latter aiming to turn the artistic experience into bourgeois ‘logical epistemology’.52 Conversant with the processes of industrial production, under the shelter of Tatlin’s grandiose tower, the constructivists, on the other hand, ‘promote art which emanates from the factory and manual labour, bringing the proletariat in direct contact with creative production’.53 Paladini concludes with an overview of decorative arts, between traditional Russian folklore and avant-garde creativity, lamenting the lack of social awareness demonstrated by vapid bourgeois drawing room interiors in stark contrast with the pragmatic and mechanical tastes of factory workers. These conclusions reinforce the argument that Soviet art is uniquely innovative, manifesting the rude vitality of the proletariat through both abstract and realist means.54 L’arte nella Russia dei Soviets was the first critical study of suprematism to appear in print in Italy and, probably, in Western Europe.55 4.2b The drift towards immaginismo On 10 February 1923 Paladini and Pannaggi exhibited their works at Bragaglia’s Art House. Paladini’s painting was entitled Ritmi meccanici (Mechanical Rhythms). For the first time Paladini did not feature a proletarian, but, rather, St Paul’s powerstation. In the same period of time he became interested in interior decoration, edging closer to purist aesthetics and contributing to the Milan review La Fiaccola. His set designs of 1924 continued to reference constructivism. Particularly notable was his use of Plexiglas, a material first deployed by Yakov Protazanov in the film Aelita: Queen of Mars in the same year. In May 1924, Paladini devised immaginismo, filtering his futurist mechanical aesthetics through surrealism, dada and Karel Teige’s poetism. André Breton founded surrealism in the same year and the two overlapped. Members of immaginismo include Umberto Barbaro, Dino Terra, Elena Ferrari (Russian Ambassador in Rome and ‘Red Army poet’), Aldo Ronco and Antonio Fornari.56 Under this new rubric Paladini pro51 Ibid., 24. 52 Ibid., 30. 53 Ibid., 31: ‘sono i fautori di un’arte che parta dall’officina e sia frutto di un lavoro manuale che porti direttamente il proletariato a contatto con il fatto creativo.’ 54 Ibid., 34. For other militant articles, see Paladini, ‘Arte comunista’, Avanguardia, n. 23, 18 June 1922 and ‘Necessità spirituali’, Vita libertaria, I:1, March 1925. 55 Lista, Dal futurismo all’immaginismo, 33. 56 According to other sources, Paladini launched the ‘imaginist movement’ in February 1927 as the Italian retort to dada and surrealism.

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duced dada-style photomontages featuring chaotic metropolises and brought forth the first and only issue of a dedicated periodical: La Ruota Dentata (The Cog-Wheel). As this title implies, Paladini was still engaged by gears, chains and factory grease. However, machines were no longer located in factories and other arenas of social conflict, but rather in escapist amusement parks. The amusement park synthesised the city as a site of modernity, inaugurating a fertile line in Paladini’s art. The machine’s seriality, fragmentation and neurotic disposition replaced the ideological machine of yore.57 Paladini’s machines were now ‘destined to be useless’, as Carpi has it,58 prefiguring the entropic quantum ‘useless machines’ of Bruno Munari (section 6.5c). Immaginismo became akin to metaphysical painting, as is evidenced by his canvas ‘La partenza’ (Departure; 1926). Featuring faceless mannequins in the manner of Giorgio de Chirico, however, was not a departure. Paladini’s iconography of manual workers included faceless dummies since early on. Paladini also began drafting a novel: Le strane operazioni del Dottor Wien tragico istrione (The strange operations of Dr Wien tragic ham) where he described his own forays into Paris in search of inspiration and featured a Dr Wien possibly modelled on Sigmund Freud. This novel was never completed. The painting Equilibrismi (Balancing Acts), first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1926, documents Paladini’s transition from constructivism to imaginism and metaphysical painting.59 In reviewing this exhibition in L’Impero, Prampolini exposed Paladini and Pannaggi, accusing them of operating under constructivist and suprematist influences. Paladini retorted in Fede! lamenting futurism’s ‘desperate monotony’, save for Balla, Depero and his fellow constructivist Pannaggi.60 Marinetti included Paladini in the listing Le futurisme mondial (Global futurism; 1924) but, in fact, the ‘imaginist’ artist remained largely independent and continued to pursue an agenda of radical politics. Paladini was ‘realistic enough to recognise that without them [the futurists] he would not be able to survive as an artist’, exploiting the hospitality of futurist exhibitions and using futurismo as a platform to disseminate his own work.61 However, even though he was allowed to exhibit Equilibrismi once again in Bologna on 5 February 1927, its reception was frosty.62 According to official futurismo, Paladini had irrevocably called himself out.63 Carpi, Bolscevico immaginista, 121. Ibid., 118. Lista, Dal futurismo all’immaginismo, 37. Carpi, Bolscevico immaginista, 95–6. Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 427. See also a confidential letter of 9 June 1926, cited in Berghaus; Carpi, Bolscevico immaginista, 97. 62 Carpi, Bolscevico immaginista, 97–8. 63 Lista, Dal futurismo all’immaginismo, 38. 57 58 59 60 61

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Against the advice of his father, who would have liked him to study civil engineering at university, Paladini took up architecture instead. On 21 October 1930 he was awarded a degree in Architecture by the University of Rome and became officially registered as a professional architect two years later. Paladini’s architectural pursuits remained firmly loyal to the machine, leading to ‘mathematically functional and geometric’ projects.64 Paladini’s architectural turn aligned with the revolutionary premises of his early work. Soviet architecture and its utopian social and technological strategy had a shaping influence on Paladini’s activities in this field. According to Paolo Sanzin, Paladini had supported Fascist rational architecture since 1928 and joined its association, MIAR (Movimento Italiano Architettura Razionale).65 However, by 1933 he had vocally turned against it, charging it with ‘imborghesimento’ (becoming bourgeois), vacuous monumentality and failure to fulfill the social and political vocation of architecture.66 At the first exhibition of rational architecture, Paladini exhibited a plan to build small, detached working-class houses in Ostia and Fregene. Clashing with industrial interests and unappealing to State commissions, his council housing estates never came to be realised. Unable to bring his utopian social housing to fruition, Paladini redirected his architectural skills towards the medium of film. In 1928 he boldly embarked in an exploration of Soviet cinema, travelling to Moscow where he met film functionaries, reviewed work by the anarchist Alexei Gan and brought out Estetica cinematografica (Film Aesthetics), arguing that documentary was preferable to surrealist film.67 At this time in Italy, Soviet film became a blueprint of realist cinema. Paladini’s own two imagininist films, Luna Park traumatico (Traumatic Amusement Park; 1927) and L’ultima nemica (The Last Enemy; mid-1930s), were ‘hypothetical’ projects, as he put it. Both set in Rome, they embodied on a smaller scale Paladini’s synthesis of utopian architecture, urbanism, film and politics. Possibly modelled on Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), Luna Park traumatico reconfigures the quintessentially surrealist space of the amusement arcade into a utopian architecture made up of vertiginous, electrified and electrifying, rapidly shifting constructive modules. Accenting acrobatics, mechanised bodies and the arsenal of circus trickery, the amusement park becomes a microcosm of the city of the future, resonating widely in postwar Italian futurism (e.g. Depero’s ‘New York: film vissuto’, in section 3.4). Architectural rationalism was, however, to mirror yet another social and professional setback for Paladini, marking a life-long ‘sentence to failure and uprootedness’ 64 Carpi, Bolscevico immaginista, 94. 65 P. Sanzin, ‘Vinicio Paladini architetto’, in P. Echaurren, G. Mughini and L. Olivetti (eds), Vinicio Paladini futurista immaginista. Un percorso tra le culture dell’avanguardia: metafisica dada costruttivismo surrealismo astrattismo (Gussago: L’Arengario, 1997), 11. 66 Paladini, ‘Imborghesimento del razionalismo’, Quadrante, 3 July 1933, 36. 67 See also Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista, 88–9.

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which will see him drift towards the United States of America.68 While his political loyalties were in the Soviet Union, his machine-lust magnetically attracted him towards the United States. Other prominent leftwing artists and intellectuals, e.g. Pannaggi and Ronco, had gone into exile or emigrated shortly after Fascism’s accession to power. In 1935, experiencing the sharp razor of Fascist censorship, Paladini took refuge in Moscow where he became ‘disillusioned by the reality of Stalin’s State in both the economic and artistic fields’.69 In the same year he exhibited in Brussels. While in Brussels, he took the decision to leave for New York rather than return to Italy as planned. Still unemployed, however, he left New York again a year later and moved to Paris where he became friends with Kandinsky. At the end of 1937 he returned to Rome where he had been offered work as a stage designer in Teatro delle Arti, supplementing his income designing a film directed by his friend Umberto Barbaro.70 Plagued once again by financial penury and with no prospects of employment in Fascist Italy, Paladini returned to New York in the summer of 1938 where he lived and worked as an interior decorator. Through the 1940s his projects for home, commercial furniture and fittings were published in several periodicals, e.g. The Architectural Forum, Interiors Design and Decoration and The Pencil Points. While in the US, Paladini also dabbled in stage design for both theatre and film. Always loyal to Communism, however, he was ousted in 1953 by McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch-hunt. Like Depero, Paladini’s work in New York encompassed design of interiors, commercial spaces and furniture. His expatriation too failed to bring the desired outcomes and Paladini returned to Rome where he pursued architectural projects and painted, revisiting his 1920s mechanical oeuvre.71 His Russian birth and uncompromisingly radical politics had made him an outcast. Fated to perpetual drift, inhabiting liminal spaces, Paladini eventually sought a compromise and a modus vivendi in Fascist and post-Fascist Italy. His unrepentant politics, social displacement, conceptual restlessness and peripatetic isolation are the ultimate markers of his frontier futurismo, of an artistry constantly pushed to the margins, yet never marginal. 4.3 Mechanical ballets and the demise of the machine 1922 was a momentous year for the mechanical avant-garde across Europe. Constructivism was inaugurated with a large exhibition in Berlin. Concomitantly, 68 69 70 71

Carpi, Bolscevico immaginista, 179. Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 427. Ibid. Further biographical information can be gleaned from Lista, Dal futurismo all’immaginismo, passim, esp. 56–60.

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van Doesburg founded the review Mecano. Kandinsky and Moholy-Nagy joined the Bauhaus. Čapek performed R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) in New York. In this annus mirabilis for modernism, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot published major works, Murnau directed the film Nosferatu and the Bauhaus opened their first exhibition outside Germany, in Calcutta. Kafka began writing The Castle, Proust died. Mechanical futurismo developed in concert with these arresting international developments, both borrowing from and contributing to them. A futurist Balletto meccanico futurista (Mechanical ballet) staged in the same year typifies the organic integration of Russian Proletkult theatre and the ‘technodialogical’ aesthetics seeping into immigrant cultures in the industrially advanced societies of the West.72 Built on Marxist foundations, the Balletto meccanico was underpinned by the merger of the human and the industrial machine, achieved through the class struggle and leading to the worker’s redemption in modern industrial societies. This ballet was devised by an artist ironically nicknamed the ‘Muscovite from the Marche’:73 Ivo Pannaggi (1901–81), in collaboration with Paladini. Pannaggi was probably the most consistently mechanical of the futuristi.74 His training acquired in close contact with the European mechanical avant-garde encompassed purism, constructivism and neoplasticism: together with Cernigoj, Pannaggi was the only other genuine constructivist in Italy.75 Not dissimilarly to Paladini, some of Pannaggi’s most innovative work was channelled into architecture, where he relied on his familiarity with a range of transnational innovations, disseminating them in Italy on the pages of the influential review Casabella.76 Born in Macerata, Pannaggi had first trained as an architect in Florence and Rome, fruitfully as he was to influence the rationalists via his contributions to L’Ambrosiano and Quadrante. Beginning from 1917, he began to publish caricatures under the pseudonym Pan. Officially affiliated to futurism from 1918, Pannaggi arrived in Rome in 1919 and was welcomed by Marinetti, Balla and Bragaglia. He was also immediately attracted by dada and its anarchic, international flair.77 In 1921 Pannaggi joined Rome’s School of Architecture and began to exhibit his work at Bragaglia’s Art House, with success as is testified by a sequence of exhibitions that followed suit: in Ravenna (1921), Bologna, Turin,

See Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine, passim. The nickname was assigned by Bragaglia. A. C. Toni, Futuristi nelle Marche (Rome: De Luca, 1982), 25. Crispolti (ed.), Pannaggi e l’arte meccanica futurista, 283. See, for example, Pannaggi’s articles on Mendelsohn and Gropius, respectively in Casabella, n. 45, September 1931 and n. 50, February 1932 – cit. in M. Drudi Gambillo and T. Fiori (eds), Archivi del futurismo (Rome: De Luca, 1986), II, 437. 77 Pannaggi’s early leanings towards dada are detailed in personal correspondence to Mario Verdone of 20 January 1971, cit. in Crispolti (ed.), Pannaggi e l’arte meccanica futurista, 50. 72 73 74 75 76

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Florence and Macerata (1922). Like Paladini, he became a pupil of Giacomo Balla in 1921.78 Pannaggi’s work stepped into the limelight with an exhibition in Prague (8 October–6 November 1921). The artist was hailed as the spiritual heir of Boccioni and sold two paintings. Painting, architecture and graphic design were not, however, his exclusive creative outlets: in 1920 Pannaggi devised an inventive practice of collage. Collage is a formal paradigm that, through de-contextualisation and re-contextualisation of disparate material, questions the structural features of visual and textual narrative. It is a quintessentially liminal, frontier art, shattering tradition and collapsing the boundaries between life and artistic practice (see also section 4.3a). Pannaggi’s method was called ‘collage postali’ (mail collages). It consisted of envelopes enhanced with assemblages of photographs, stamps, graphic intermissions, gauzes and multi-coloured tissues weaved and glued round the details of the addressee. Together with the franking and labelling provided by the post office, Pannaggi created random, ephemeral works of art, the first example of which was a letter posted to Marinetti in 1920. Paladini, whose own imaginist aesthetics came to fruition in collages, was struck by this novel art form.79 Loosely related to dada, Pannaggi’s collages are echoed in Kurt Schwitters’ Worden ist (1922) and Merz 133 (1924). Unlike Schwitters’, however, Pannaggi’s collages were conceived and framed in a rigorous constructive manner, leaving the space of franking alone open for the random interventions of the post office that happened to be handling the envelope on any given occasion. Turning to purism, Pannaggi worked assiduously in 1921 and 1922 and curated the first futurist exhibition in his native Macerata in June 1922 where paintings by Boccioni, Balla, Depero, Antonio Marasco, Paladini, Prampolini, Scirocco and Sironi were exhibited alongside samples of sound poetry and innovative typography. Pannaggi exhibited ten of his own works: paintings, collages and sculptures, all informed by the cult of the machine. According to Lista, this exhibition may have laid the foundations of a ‘myth of mechanical art’ introduced in Italy by the dada artist Aldo Fiozzi.80 While also decorating a wall for the American Bar of Bragaglia’s Art House, 1922 will be best remembered as the year when Pannaggi staged, together with Paladini, a groundbreaking Balletto meccanico futurista.

78 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 420; Drudi Gambillo and Fiori (eds), Archivi del futurismo, II, 437. 79 Paladini, ‘Fotomontage’, Italia Letteraria, V:45, 10 November 1929. The overlap is suggested by Toni, Futuristi nelle Marche, 32. Other examples are in a further letter to Marinetti of 30 [sic] February 1927 and in numerous letters to Katherine S. Dreyer dated 28 June, 11 and 26 October 1926, with whose Société Anonyme Pannaggi sought collaborations in the early 1930s – see Toni, Futuristi nelle Marche, 31–2; E. Crispolti, ‘Ivo Pannaggi’, in Hultén (ed.), Futurismo & Futurismi, 534. 80 Lista, Dal futurismo all’immaginismo, 18.

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4.3a Balletto meccanico futurista What is a mechanical ballet? Tamara Trodd convincingly describes it as ‘a form of bodily mimesis in which machinery is turned into dance, productive work repurposed into aesthetic form, and the routines and actions of industrial making made abstract and mined for their qualities of lightness, rapidity, and rhythm’.81 A ballo or balletto that fulfilled these criteria was performed at the American Bar in Bragaglia’s Art House (also known as Circolo delle Cronache d’Attualità) in Rome on 2 June 1922 to coincide with a futurist exhibition of Gerardo Dottori’s work. This juncture gave Pannaggi and Paladini the opportunity ‘to demonstrate to the Roman public how “formalist mechanic forces” could function as “sources of sublime aesthetic pleasures”’.82 It was the first mechanical ballet staged in Italy conceived and put together by Italian artists. One year earlier, on 9 May 1921, during one of Julius Evola’s dada soirées in Rome, Valentin Parnak had performed a geometric ballet inspired, in its turn, by Huszár’s Plastic mechanical theatre. Renowned for introducing solo machine dances in the Soviet Union, Parnak went on to inspire the Machine dances of Nikolai Foregger, a celebration of Taylorist tempo and Soviet harnessing of technology, as the author declared, presenting them in Vienna on 13 February 1923.83 Performed in Moscow on 25 February 1927, the play was accompanied by jazz rhythms and electric-acoustic noises by J. A. Kliun.84 In September 1922, Oskar Schlemmer’s geometrical, abstracted and architectural Triadisches ballet (Triadic ballet) premiered in Stuttgart with musical accompaniment by Paul Hindemith. The ballet was ‘triadic’ because it relied on three musical movements, a fusion of dance, costume and music involving three dancers. The background of Pannaggi and Paladini’s ballet may also comprise Pinocchio (1911), a film by Gant (also known as Giulio Antamoro) starring Ferdinand Guillaume 81 T. Trodd, The Art of Mechanical Reproduction: Technology and Aesthetics from Duchamp to the Digital (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 226. Trodd refers here to the work of the contemporary visual artist Tacita Dean. 82 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 424–5. 83 Ibid., 426 and 430. See also Edward Braun, ‘Futurism in the Russian theatre, 1913–23’, in Berghaus (ed.), International Futurism in Arts and Literature, 88–9: ‘a plastic exercise in constructivism’ designed to assist the masses in learning ‘the rhythm that is so essential in all labour processes’; and 90: ‘at the blast of a whistle the young actors, male and female, dressed in uniform overalls, rapidly formed a human pyramid resembling some huge machine, and at a second signal began to move like gears, pistons, and connecting rods, all in precise coordination and accompanied by “a noise orchestra” backstage rattling broken glass, bits of metal, and other assorted objects’. Cf. also with Meyerhold’s biomechanics. 84 D. Lombardi, ‘Mito della macchina’, in Nuova Enciclopedia del Futurismo musicale (Milan: Mudima, 2009), 188–201.

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who mimed Pinocchio as a robotic marionette on a stage;85 as well as Čapek’s R.U.R., first published in 1920 and performed at the National Theatre in Prague on 25 January 1921, from where it travelled to the Garrick Theatre in New York on 9 October 1922 and to London’s St Martin’s Theatre in April 1923. Etymologically derived from the Russian noun ‘rabòta’ – the inmate charged with the heaviest workload in Soviet camps was nicknamed ‘rabotjàga’ – the neologism ‘robot’ carries a semantic connection with labour. Čapek’s robots are creatures enslaved to automatic, non-sentient work.86 André Deed’s film L’uomo meccanico (The Mechanic Man; 1921) featured a colossal, remotely controlled metallic robot. First released in Rome on 25 October 1922, it is also probably dialogical with the Balletto meccanico futurista and Pannaggi’s costume designs. Last but not least, the Balletto meccanico futurista echoed contemporary Russian shows which marched the theatre out of theatres and into factories. As I already pointed out, mechanisation was a driving force of Soviet theatre. Varvara Stepanova’s machine apparatuses, including a mincing machine, were deployed in Meyerhold’s production of Tarelkins Death (1922). Liubov Popova littered the stage with rifles, cannons, machine guns. Motorcycles and cars driven into the auditorium and civil war slogans projected on screens filled the constructive mechanical stages of Meyerhold, Tretyakov and Eisenstein – Tretyakov’s Earth Rampant, premiered in February 1923, on the fifth anniversary of the Red Army. Shortly to follow, Gas Masks (1924), a collaboration between Tretyakov and Eisenstein, transformed the stage into a factory and was first performed to an audience of workers at the gas works of the train station in Minsk.87 Drawing on and feeding into this innovative productivity in equal measure, Pannaggi and Paladini’s Balletto meccanico futurista starred roboticised factory workers. However, workers were far from figures of suffering, alienation and dehumanisation. Rather than subordinate to a human creator, they danced instead a powerful fantasy of human brotherhood and collectivity embedded in the energies liberated in factory work. The factory was the blueprint of modern society. The stage was entirely mechanised, deconstructed as a workshop displaying its mechanisms in full view, a site of non-hierarchical interactivity between actors and factory workers, both economic agents and citizens of a classless society. Borrowing from the biomechanical metrics of Taylorism, Pannaggi and Paladini’s machines enfranchised workers from the burden of hard labour.88 85 For further details, see S. Consolo, ‘The myth of Pinocchio: metamorphosis of a puppet from Collodi’s pages to the screen’, in Pizzi (ed.), Pinocchio, Puppets and Modernity, 163–74. 86 J. Reichardt, Robots: Fact, Fiction + Prediction (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 31. 87 Raunig, Thousand Machines, 44–7. 88 See also Schnapp, 18BL, 127–8.

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According to Pannaggi’s notes, which appear to relegate Paladini to the role of a collaborator,89 the Balletto meccanico futurista featured a mechanised man portraying a machine. This man was impersonated by a dancer wearing a mechanical costume designed by Pannaggi. Tellingly, the name of this dancer was Ikar (Icarus). Ikar shared the stage with a second dancer, Ivanov, dressed as a cog-wheeled centaur and impersonating a proletarian worker whose costume was devised by Paladini. Paladini’s costume allowed Ivanov little space for manoeuvre other than a few mechanical gestures. Similarly, Pannaggi’s robotic costume was rigid, with joints at the neck, wrists and knees, allowing for slow, stunted motion. The dancers’ bodies acted as mere support for their mechanical costumes, in the manner of puppets whose mechanical movements stultifyingly repeat human gesturality.90 The Balletto meccanico futurista pioneered the so-called ‘space-plastic’ costume:91 taking Depero’s Balli plastici one step further, Pannaggi’s costumes consisted of fabric, coloured paper and cardboard. The colour palette was black, white, red and grey. Cylinders and cubes were screwed in together, assembled into a thick mechanical armour inside which the dancer’s body all but disappeared.92 The two performers danced to the tune of a ‘rhythmic polyphony of motor engines’ (‘polifonia ritmica di motori’) emanating from two motorcycles placed on the balcony, revving their engines up and down at some risk to suffocate the audience tightly packed together in the confined space of Bragaglia’s bar.93 Projectors beamed down white and coloured light shafts, highlighting and following the dancers’ moves. In the hall, the dancers ‘moved to the rhythm of the engines, disappeared, ran up the stairs to the foyer, returned, continued with the action, and finally disappeared head over heels down the little steps of the bar’.94 The robotic lineage of the dances was underscored by oversized images of jazz musicians, drawn in robotic style, with which Pannaggi had covered the walls of Bragaglia’s theatre. A photograph published by Anton Giulio Bragaglia in 1924 featured three dancers: Ivanov, Ikar and Jia Ruskaja. Ruskaja’s costume recalled the contemporary attire of American jazz dancing. Ivanov, following Paladini’s painting The Ninth Hour, performed a faceless proletarian donning a metal mask, his legs wedged by a cogwheel. He represented a de-individualised factory worker on the Taylorist conveyor belt, a cog in a collective mechanism enacting the Communist revolution.95 Surviving 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 425. Baldacci, ‘Vinicio Paladini’, 9. Lista, Dal futurismo all’immaginismo, 21. Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 426. See also F. Angelini, Teatro e spettacolo nel primo Novecento (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1996), 134. Cit. in Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 425. Lista, Dal futurismo all’immaginismo, 20.

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in photographic form alone, this snapshot of the performance shows ‘an extravagant nightclub outfit for the lady and a cogwheel cum conveyor-belt construction for the worker. This proletarian Man-Machine […] probably played the central role in the production and determined the ideological message of the ballet.’96 The Balletto meccanico futurista laid the groundwork for cutting-edge performances shortly to mushroom across the modern stage, in Germany and the Soviet Union especially. It also acted as a springboard for Pannaggi’s own exilic experience, underpinning the artist’s life-long search for mechanical elsewheres. After this seminal experience, Pannaggi continued to work for the stage. In 1923, he devised sketches for the first and second season of the Teatro degli Indipendenti (Independents’ Theatre). 1924 brought him the opportunity to exhibit in Austria and the Baltic States. The Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik in Vienna, a landmark of international constructivism conceived by Frederick Kiesler opening at the Konzerthaus on 19 September,97 saw Pannaggi exhibit photographs and photomontages. His Balletto meccanico futurista was also sanctioned by the international avant-garde.98 Pannaggi’s theatre work continued in 1925 with constructivist stage designs for Marinetti’s I prigionieri di Baia (The Prisoners of Baia), alongside further architectural and interiors designs. Pannaggi conceived structure, design, décor, sculpture, fabrics and textiles organically, in accordance with Bauhaus, constructivist and purist principles, as is evidenced by his refurbishment of Zampini house in Esanatoglia (Matelica).99 On 24 February, during a lecture on futurist stage architecture at Bragaglia’s Art House, Pannaggi demonstrated an innovative system of stage lighting: a magic lantern projecting giant shadows on the stage, an apparatus purported to facilitate a ‘cinematic’ theatre. Drawing on this innovation, Pannaggi devised an abstract film, but the project was not brought to completion.100 Exhibiting at the Venice Biennale of 1926 under the auspices of the Soviet pavillion, Pannaggi attracted severe criticism in Fascist Italy.101 He further played a small 96 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 426. Lista argues that the woman featured in this ballet stood for a reprehensible bourgeois society. He also claims that the ballet was Paladini’s creation with little intervention on the part of Pannaggi – Lista, Dal futurismo all’immaginismo, 21. 97 See also D. Arich de Finetti, ‘Venezia 1926: Pannaggi e compagni nel padiglione “soviettista”’, in Crispolti (ed.), Pannaggi e l’arte meccanica futurista, 70. 98 Lista, Dal futurismo all’immaginismo, 21–2. 99 BRBML, Katherine S. Dreier papers/Société Anonyme archive, series X, box 110, folder 2662, [Photograph of dining room textile, Casa Zampini], 1925–26. See also Pannaggi’s posters for the tannery F. Zampini & C. in BRBML, Katherine S. Dreier papers, series X, box 77, folder 1991 ([1923?]) and box 119, folder 2839 ([1924]). 100 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 422 and 429. 101 Margherita Sarfatti, cultural operator and close friend of the Duce, observed that Pannaggi’s ‘Germanic’ art: ‘becomes fervently Slavic and enslaved’ [a pun in Italian]. It further ‘takes the ugly and turns it into horrific’, M. Sarfatti, Nuova Antologia, 16 May 1926, cit. in Arich de Finetti, ‘Venezia 1926’, 82.

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acting role in Bragaglia’s production of Jarry’s Ubu Roi at the same time as he was designing scenes and costumes for Vasari’s plays L’angoscia delle macchine (The Anguish of Machines) and Raun (section 4.3b). For L’angoscia, Pannaggi imagined Vasari’s engineer’s workshop as a photomontage. Costumes were robotic, echoing costumes he previously designed for his Balletto meccanico futurista, as can be gleaned in a photograph now at the Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. In the verso, Pannaggi dates the photo to 1926 and provides a commentary: the costume was worn at the premiere of the show at the Independents’ Theatre on 28 April 1927.102 The artist deployed an original assemblage of diverse technological materials, e.g. wood, oilcloth and aluminium.103 A further sketch in the same collection, portraying the costume for a Condamné aux machines (Condemned to the machines), portrays an even more streamlined and robotic figure, rendered almost metaphysical by the abstracted symmetry of its economical straight lines. Pannaggi’s work continued to articulate the tenets of the constructivist international, leading him to formulate a left-leaning social programme that echoed Gropius’s ideals for the Bauhaus.104 In future, Pannaggi’s aesthetics continued its trajectory down the constructivist path. He reimagined the futurist proletarian as a builder-architect ‘working with beams, cylinders, cubes, three-dimensional letters, and measuring tools in a non-specific, otherworldly environment’,105 e.g. The Constructor. At this juncture, Pannaggi became increasingly eager to shed the burden of Fascist censorship and broaden his vistas in more congenial cultural landscapes. It is debated whether he relocated to Berlin in 1926 or 1927.106 Here, he worked as an illustrator, designer, journalist and curator. With his girlfriend Alice Wenglor, Pannaggi devised a film entitled Architetture meccaniche (Mechanic Architectures).107 The film had no narrative syntax, featuring instead fotomontage techniques and volumetric architectures, lines, superimpositions, rhythmic analogies and abstract compositions of three-dimensional solids, bearing close relation to the language of abstract constructivism.108 With Wenglor, he moved within dada circles, brushing shoulders with, 102 According to Crispolti, the soirée showcasing the costume for prisoner H2/G took place on 26, rather than 28 April; according to R. Luciani, on 27 April – see Crispolti (ed.), Pannaggi e l’arte meccanica, 264 and 448. 103 BRBML, Katherine S. Dreier papers, series X, box 110, folder 2662. [Photograph of costume model for L’Angoisse des Machines, by Vasari], c. 1926. 104 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 420. 105 C. Poggi, ‘Ivo Pannaggi: Meccano-Futurista, constructivist, proletarian’, in Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909–44, 236. 106 See Luciani, in Crispolti (ed.), Pannaggi e l’arte meccanica futurista, 123. 107 Crispolti (ed.), Pannaggi e l’arte meccanica, 380. See also L. Solaroli in Cinematografo, 3 April 1927 – cit. in ibid., 447. 108 Pannaggi described it in an article for L’Impero, 21 December 1926.

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among others, Leni Herzfeld, sister of the dada photographer, photmontagist and scene designer John Heartfield. The city provided a stimulating environment rich in photographic agencies (e.g. Dephot) and experimental news reporters (e.g. Otto Umbehr, also known as Umbo). In the exciting cultural scene of Weimar’s Berlin, working side by side with anti-capitalist activists, Pannaggi enjoyed the opportunity to develop photomontage, as well as designing the book cover for Vasari’s Raun and a scene for L’angoscia delle macchine. Eventually he was crowned by critics as ‘one of the main exponents of photomontage in Italy’.109 Even Walter Benjamin showed his appreciation of Pannaggi’s photomontages, which were due to be published in Müller-Lehning’s journal i10, were the journal not to end its run shortly before publication.110 The growing popularity of Pannaggi’s graphic and advertising work, drawing on the techniques experimented in his publications in Der Sturm and Der Futurismus of the early 1920s, is attested by the numerous industrial commissions he obtained both in Germany and Italy in 1928. Pannaggi’s advertising design for Helvia biscuits was lauded by Eugenio Giovannetti in ‘Posters’ (‘I cartelloni’, Giornale d’Italia, 1 September 1928). Giovannetti dwelled at length on the vertiginous mechanical rationale of Pannaggi’s advertising work. Giovannetti poetically lauded the compelling visual logic of Pannaggi’s machines and the artist’s ability to saturate the machine with titanic energy: Ivo Pannaggi is the poet of the machine. This youth from the Marche, as beautiful as an Assyrian Apollon, is ravingly popular in Germany where he is disseminating a new genre of mechanical posters, all angles, mechanisms and creakings. I saw one his poster for a biscuit factory reprinted in a German magazine. It’s a work of extreme modernity. […] Pannaggi constructed a superb, vertiginous tower of biscuits. On the cusp of this frozen Babel, he carefully balanced a little man rolling a biscuit. The onlooker cannot but feel those icy, colossal tin corners. Man and biscuit are irrelevant, what really matters is the obsessive cubism of that tower poking against our ribs. Pannaggi is the undisputed poet of mechanical architectures replete with dismal violence.111

In 1929 Pannaggi relocated to Italy, drafted by the army. In 1930 he returned to Germany, to work in industrial Düsseldorf. In an article tellingly entitled ‘Il funerale della pittura’ (‘The funeral of painting’; L’Ambrosiano, 1931), Pannaggi elucidated the

109 Crispolti (ed.), Pannaggi e l’arte meccanica, 337; see also Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 422 and 429. 110 Versari, ‘Futurist machine art’, 170. 111 E. Giovannetti, ‘I cartelloni’, cit. in Crispolti (ed.), Pannaggi e l’arte meccanica futurista, 446–7.

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demise of the traditional art of painting under the crushing blows administered by the modernising machine. His own painting Centauro (Centaur) was the closest yet to purism and Machinenstil, with echoes of Willi Baumeister and Schlemmer.112 In 1932 Pannaggi was back in Berlin, where he joined the Bauhaus and its regime of mechanical aesthetics. He lasted only one semester, due to termination of operations, rather than his inability to pay the school’s fees as was the case with Cernigoj. Regarded as a nest of cosmopolitan leftwingers, the Bauhaus had grown a robust Marxist reputation. Lessening its emphasis on craftsmanship and turning its interest to mechanised production and the manufacturing industry, Moholy Nagy had joined the school in 1923, integrating Gropius’s emphasis on functionality and mass production with his own attention for construction, industrial material and design. The radical reputation of the school increased especially after the directorship was passed on from Gropius to Hannes Meyer in the so-called Dessau phase (1925–28). Meyer encouraged political activism, forming a Communist cell made up of fifteen members, and, while strengthening the school’s links with industry, also emphasised functionalism, economics and mass production. Despite doubling its income and success in recruiting students, Meyer was ousted in 1930, ostensibly for donating money to striking miners in the name of the school, together with a group of Communist students who followed him to the USSR to join his collective. Mies van der Rohe was appointed to replace Meyer in August 1930, tasked with freeing the school from the taint of politics and virtually turning it into an architectural school to the detriment of the production workshops. This appointment was vocally opposed by the more radical students, whose riots led to a period of closure of several weeks leaving the school in a ‘precarious state’. Nonetheless, the reputation and authority of Bauhaus grew considerably in the Dessau years. When the Nazis took power in Dessau’s town council in 1931, it suffered a first blow until this symbol of ‘degenerate art’ was forcibly closed down by the police on 11 April 1933. In an ironic twist, the enforced termination of the school greatly enhanced its fame and reputation globally, drawing in international artists.113 The Bauhaus’s radical orientation must have played a large part in Pannaggi’s decision to join in. In spite of the short span of time he spent there, he became completely invested in Bauhaus style, e.g. functional, constructive, material and anti-decorative, a manner he frequently articulated polemically with respect to futurismo.114 Pannaggi’s 112 Crispolti (ed.), Pannaggi e l’arte meccanica, 387. Pannaggi was particularly drawn to ‘mural painting’, as is evidenced in his 1932 article in Casa Bella. 113 Whitford, Bauhaus, 179–201. 114 See MART, Fondo Mino Somenzi, Som. III. 1932 Corrispondenza, I, letter by Pannaggi dated 12 October 1932, 1 and 2. This letter may be in response to a defamatory editorial published in Somenzi’s review Futurismo under the cloak of anonymity and derogatorily entitled ‘iltedescopannaggi’

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caricatures for an Almanac of radio in Cologne, scheduled for 1933 together with works by Jewish and Marxist artists including Massary, Kuhn, Apel and Stein, as well as his ‘abstractions’ to Toscanini, Lubitsch, Pirandello and Buster Keaton, failed to come out due to Nazi censorship.115 Pannaggi’s sketch of Adolf Hitler synthetically captured glimpses of the tragic history that was shortly to unfold under the rule of the Nazi leader. At this juncture Pannaggi relocated once again, seeking more northern climes. His port of call was Oslo, on the suggestion of his friend and fellow Bauhauser Ola Sandvik.116 In Norway Pannaggi joined the Communist organisation Mot Dag and worked in close contact with the Socialist Association of Architects, with whom he prepared a bid under the supervision of Frode Rinnan to design a building for the Norwegian Radio company. From correspondence with Verdone we glean that Pannaggi was employed as an architect and, later, as a foreman and factory worker, tending ‘with pride, rather than humility, to factory work, working as a machinist. He kept machines clean and efficient, just as he had recommended earlier in the Manifesto.’117 He took jobs in hotels, publishing houses and several factories including the Norske Eggesentraler and Bakkelittfabrikken. He described his working day with exactitude, nine hours of uninterrupted labour because, as he explained, ‘the machine should not be stopped’.118 In the following decades, Pannaggi migrated time and time again. Faithful to the transnational imperative laid out by the Socialist International, he was ‘in constant movement’.119 While he continued to engage in architectural and painting work, he travelled to Lapland (1936), the Arctic and through the Atlantic touching Venezuela, Africa and South Georgia. He hunted whales in the Antarctic (1937), moved back to Berlin (1940), then to Stai (1942), Ulnes (1943) and Oslo (1949), to return to Macerata (1971), Oslo again (1974–75) and Macerata (1975), where he died in 1981.120 His loyalty to the machine was unbreakable, as is evidenced by its haunting presence in his work. Pannaggi revisited this theme time and time again through his career, e.g. under the title Rape of Europe (e.g. an aquatint of 1959, an oil painting dated

115 116

117 118 119 120

(‘pannaggithegerman’) – MART, Per Som 2 + 9 (Cass B / 5), Anon [Somenzi?], ‘iltedescopannaggi’, Futurismo I (2 October 1932), 2. Crispolti (ed.), Pannaggi e l’arte meccanica futurista, 365. It remains the subject of speculation whether Pannaggi moved to Oslo in 1933, 1934 or 1935. Berghaus suggests 1935 – Italian Futurist Theatre, 420; Crispolti, 1933–34 – Crispolti (ed.), Pannaggi e l’arte meccanica futurista, 457. Verdone cit. in Crispolti (ed.), Pannaggi e l’arte meccanica futurista, 55. Pannaggi in correspondence with Crispolti, cit. in Poggi, ‘Ivo Pannaggi’, 238. Poggi, ‘Ivo Pannaggi’, 238. I gather these details from Luciani’s notes in Crispolti (ed.), Pannaggi e l’arte meccanica futurista, 457 and ff.

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1965–68). Pannaggi’s mechanical classicism, predicated on the industrial machine and its global reach within a Socialist brotherhood, is compellingly conveyed here and in his entire production. Conceptually and ideologically remote from Marinetti’s ‘party discipline’ and flirtations with the Fascist regime, Pannaggi was a frontier futurist: an international ‘aesthetic operator’ whose machine art was consistently and coherently entangled with his social and political commitment.121 4.3b The swan song of the machine Pannaggi and Paladini’s most enduring legacy is the Balletto meccanico. Its emphasis on a robotic hyper-reality populated with machines intercepted the utopian thrust towards a technological future which was investing theatre across industrialised Europe, especially in the Soviet Union. More specifically, Paladini’s representation of a factory worker stood out as a compelling, quasi-sci-fi projection of technologised humans against the background of the cosmos. This figure may echo projections of proletarians in outer space advocated by Russian cosmism, a movement aiming to re-envision the cosmos as a novel, anti-autocratic and anti-authoritarian social space. The Russian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov believed that human life should be extended to outer space and that immortality and resurrection could be achieved by scientific means, instituting a cosmic idealism streaked with philosophical, ethical and religious knowledge. Fyodorov’s beliefs impressed Proletkult and the protagonists of the October revolution, appearing extensively in Marxist brochures. It was also widely disseminated by supporting artists, such as Malevich, and scientists, such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. A triangulation of technology, Marxist utopianism and Fyodorov’s cosmism projected the worker against the background of the universe, a spectral figure overcoming the gravitational force as a metaphor of proletarian escape from autocracy. A champion of technology, the cosmic proletarian would stride forth to conquer other worlds, exporting and replicating the revolution in a serial repetition of alternative universes.122 The universal brotherhood enabled by machines and framed in outer space reverberated in the plays of the futurist Ruggero Vasari, but with a twist: the future society devised by Vasari was no longer utopian but, rather, dystopian, dysfunctional and coercive. Vasari’s commingling of Marinetti121 Lista, Dal futurismo all’immaginismo, 22–3. 122 See also verses by Mikhail Gerasimov and Vladimir Kirillov. Protazanov’s film Aelita (1924) re-enacted the Bolshevik revolution on the planet Mars. The florid Russian production of sci-fi writing included the novels The Red Star (1908), set on Mars, and Engineer Menni (1913), both by Bogdanov. Tsiolkovsky was a supporter of the Bolshevik revolution and member of the Socialist Academy since 1918. A pioneer of the Russian space age, he designed manned spacecrafts, devising an archaeology of rocketry that influenced Verner von Braun.

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like cyborgs with a pessimist Marxist view of technology generated an ‘apocalyptic’ machine, betraying familiarity with expressionism and the cosmic orientation taken by revolutionary thinking in that period of time. Ruggero Vasari (1898–1968) too grappled with the tension between humanism and the machine. Better known by the nickname ‘the loudspeaker of futurism’,123 and similarly to other frontier futurists, Vasari was ‘far from being the gatekeeper of the movement’s European alliances’, implementing instead ‘a strategy of openness which he saw […] as the core of futurist distinctiveness itself’.124 One of the most prominent futuristi at the Central and Eastern European vanguard, Vasari acted as a trait d’union between futurismo, expressionism and constructivism in the pages of Prampolini’s review Noi, which he contributed to as a correspondent. Born in Messina, he moved to Berlin in 1919 where he joined the International Union of Expressionists, Cubists and Futurists. Here, inspired by expressionism, he wrote the play Tung-ci (written 1921, first published 1926). In Berlin, Vasari further created and ran Der Futurismus, a notable journal of the futurist diaspora and showcase of innovative international work, in concert with the Parisian Le futurisme and the Milanese Il futurismo. With a print-run of five thousand copies per month and a global distribution, including South America and East Asia, the journal folded at the end of 1922 due to a hike in printing costs. In the same year Vasari took part in the first congress of the Union of International and Progressive Artists in Düsseldorf, together with Prampolini. In 1923, in the fermenting climate of the Weimar Republic and with funding from Der Sturm’s director Herwarth Walden, Vasari established a modern art gallery in Kaiser Frederich Strasse: the Futurist House of Artists.125 This gallery was a laboratory of European futurism, a pivotal site in the reconfigured geography of postwar futurismo. The Italian avant-garde exhibited here, together with a wider circle of international artists: the Russians Ivan Puni, Vasari’s close friend and collaborator, and his wife Xenia Boguslavskaya; the Latvian Kārlis Zāle and Arnolds Dzirkals, as well as extra-European futurists, e.g. the Japanese Seiji Tōgō, Yoshimitsu Nagano and Tomoyoshi Murayama. Echoing the Dom Iskusstva, a ‘Noah’s Ark’ for emigré Russians in 1920s Berlin with which it entertained fruitful exchanges,126 Vasari’s

123 Alberto Spaini invented this nickname – cit. by Verdone, in B. G. Sanzin (ed.), Enrico Prampolini (Omaggio di Trieste a ... Enrico Prampolini) (Trieste: Moderna, 1973), 22. 124 Versari, ‘Enlisting and updating’, 279. 125 Walden’s Der Sturm voiced futurist loyalties: ‘in the years between 1921 and 1924 (shortly before he turned to the Communist Party), he [Walden] welcomed contributions by Ruggero Vasari, […], and with his help published a small anthology of Italian poetry which gathered futurists of the first and the second generation, from Corrado Govoni to Mario Carli, a former captain of the élite Arditi’ – Demetz, Italian Futurism, 5. 126 The epithet ‘Noah’s Ark’ is in Ehrenburg’s Memoirs, cit. in Versari, ‘Enlisting and updating’, 282.

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gallery was a dynamic and cosmopolitan hub, particularly for those who sought constructivist connections.127 If Vasari left Italy because of his anti-Fascist ideas, argues Berghaus, he would have been watching apprehensively Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. Vasari was certainly under the surveillance of the Fascist police when he visited Sicily during the summer holidays, especially after publishing the controversial volume Crisi del fascismo in Sicilia (Crisis of Fascism in Sicily) penned by his friend Guglielmo Jannelli in 1924. Vasari was also close to Walden, a Jewish proponent of ‘degenerate art’, as well as a vocal supporter of revolutionary art including Flugmalerei-Moderne Kunst und Reaktion.128 Vasari’s renewal of Italian futurism, his entanglements with constructivism and the Central European avant-garde played a pivotal role in the intellectual development of the postwar futuristi, Pannaggi and Paladini first and foremost.129 The geography of Vasari’s activities testifies to the new Central and Eastern European orientation of postwar futurismo. Berlin, in particular, became the new centre of ‘traumatic erosion of the movement’s unstable identity abroad’.130 In a letter from Santa Lucia del Mela (Messina) dated 19 August 1925, Vasari informed Michel Seuphor that he was about to leave for Berlin where he hoped to attend the premiere of his play L’angoscia delle macchine (The Anguish of Machines).131 Composed in 1923 and welcomed by Marinetti as the most significant futurist play yet, Anguish of Machines was a ‘tragic synthesis in three acts’. The play had a complex, troubled gestation. It was: conceived in 1921 […], written in 1923, published in 1925 (a fragmentary version of ‘Machinenangst’ came out in German in Der Sturm 16, n. 1 in January 1925, followed by an Italian version published in August in Teatro 3, n. 8) and performed in 1927 – though Vasari’s letter to Seuphor dated August 1925 […] suggests the first performance was scheduled in Berlin in the second half of 1925. As such it cut across, traversed the 1920s machine culture.132

Following the cancellation of the scheduled productions, the play finally premiered at the Théâtre Art et Action in Paris on 27 April 1927, performed by the company 127 128 129 130 131

Versari, ‘Central European avant-garde’, 106. Verdone, Il futurismo, 22. Versari, ‘Central European avant-garde’, 106–7. Versari, ‘Enlisting and updating’, 278. Vasari to Seuphor, cit. in R. Sauwen, G. Viatte and M. Seuphor, Seuphor (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, [n.d.]), 42: ‘J’attends que Het Overzicht parle (enfin!) de l’Angoisse des Machines – je ne suis pas du tout content de la publication du Poeme 827 car il devait être traduit en Néerlandais et pas en Français. Dans ce cas j’avais une traduction beaucoup meilleure.’ 132 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 506. For the complex history of the first production, see also M. E. Versari, ‘Il progettista’, in Vasari, L’angoscia delle macchine e altre sintesi futuriste, 156–8.

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L’Assault under the direction of Marie Louise van Veen. This production disappointed Vasari who disliked the minimalist settings. Silvio Mix’s original musical score (see section 4.4) was ignored in favour of a bruitist soundtrack which ‘emphasised the speech rhythms by cutting the text up into dynamic patterns of syllables, giving them precise cadences and repetitions, and attributing to each character a distinct vocal register and beat (based on, for example, a piston, crank-shaft, fly-wheel, steam engine, dynamo, etc.)’133 The orchestra comprised noise-intoners and metallic instruments, including a hammer, siren, whistle and chains. Autant directed a chorus of machines behind the set.134 Initially Vasari recruited Prampolini to design the scenes, in the wake of the success of the Magnetic theatre (see section 5.1b), but eventually opted for Vera Idelson who was more likely to lend his show an abstract, constructivist flavour. Using wood, cardboard, aluminium and textiles, Idelson was inspired by Bauhaus design (exhibited in New York in 1926) to streamline the costumes into bi-dimensional geometric shapes operated by hinges which compenetrated the environment. A ‘plane affixed to the thigh becomes an instant table when the Condemned sits – his body conflated with ordinary furniture.’135 These costumes ‘startled the spectators due to their extreme reduction to geometric shapes and colours and their angularity of movement’:136 the intention was to fully roboticise the human figure. Pannaggi further designed sketches for the costumes of characters designated as: Condannato alla macchina (Sentenced to the machine), Fattorino (Porter), Ingegnere (Engineer), as well as a tubular costume for a character named AH2G, worn by the dancer Mikhailov performing on a musical score by Stravinsky. Encased in carapace-like metallic forms, these cumbersome armour-like costumes conveyed a sense of ‘dark oppression’,137 beginning to erode the enthusiasm for machines. No surviving evidence, however, attests to the use of these costumes in the performance. L’angoscia was set in a ‘Realm of machines’ located on a planet closely resembling earth. Its characters were conceived according to a mechanical rationale and ranked accordingly as robots, androids, workers sentenced to machine work and supervising engineers. A Promethean inventor named Tonchir sat at the top of this pyramid, an 133 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 506: ‘Angoscia enjoyed a single production, in Paris, where it premiered on 27 April and five consecutive performances were staged in the final days of April 1927, by the company L’Assault directed by Marie Louise van Veen in the tiny Grenier Jaune theatre of Rue Lepic.’ For a detailed account of this production, see also Versari, ‘Enlisting and updating’, 292–5. 134 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 507. 135 Poggi, ‘Ivo Pannaggi’, 238. 136 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 506. 137 Miracco, Masoero and Poli (eds), L’estetica della macchina, 22; Angelini, Teatro e spettacolo, 197. Pannaggi’s costumes may have been previously exhibited in Paris on 28 April and subsequently in Rome at Bragaglia’s Indipendenti theatre on 26 April 1927.

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ambivalent scientist feeling ‘the distressing contrast between his mechanised and human souls’.138 Other characters include Singar, Tonchir’s commander, and the despotic ruler Bacal, who was intent on pursuing a ‘conquest of the sun’. This Trinitarian elite was meant to exercise complete control through the medium of a computerised Brain-machine, which communicated with its subordinates via brain waves.139 Referred to as those ‘Sentenced to the machine’, these robotic subordinates roamed about aimlessly, donning helmets and in the guise of swarming insects, in automatic and infinitely regressive motion. Vasari addressed the theme of human–machine copulation with clear reference to Marinetti’s ‘alcove of steel’ and sexual-mechanical armory (see section 2.3). ‘Catalysts of emancipation from the yoke of technology’, Vasari’s women are conceived in terms of the author’s own conceptual and aesthetic concern for psychology and sexuality, explored in depth in his student dissertation La personalità della prostituta (The prostitute’s character) as well as in early poetry and dramatic prose.140 Lipa’s yearning for coital encounters with the machine bears parentage with Marinetti’s sexual politics: a reified woman is caught here in a subordinate, sacrificial and sado-masochist embrace with a prevaricating machine (see section 2.4). Unlike Marinetti, however, Vasari does not certify the triumph of the machine, but, rather, humiliates and destroys the machine in the context of the erotic power struggle. Joined by sirens wailing and shrieking in the dismal finale, the machine begins to sing an ‘anguished, lugubrious, heartbreaking tune’. Posited as the ultimate conduit of a triumph of the flesh over the machine, woman is, nonetheless, subsumed under deterministic social and reproductive politics (see also section 6.4d). Vasari’s vision of an anguished and mutilated humankind suffering under the yoke of the machine is further resonant of Luigi Pirandello’s novel Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (Shoot!: The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator; 1916, first published in serial form in Nuova Antologia under the title Si gira in 1915). Quaderni is centred on the eponymous protagonist, Serafino Gubbio, a cameraman operating in the adventurous early milieu of cinema. Serafino’s symbiotic relationship with the camera he operates reifies him, reducing his anatomy to his right hand: a prosthesis locked in a perverse automatism operating the crank. The movie camera itself acts a prosthesis of Serafino’s eye: a mechanical medium recording and disseminating static reproductions of past moments.141 Engulfed by the voracious sensuality 138 Cit. in Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 499; orig. in ‘Il teatro della supermarionetta’, L’Impero, 10 March 1925. 139 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 495. 140 Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination, 29; Versari, ‘Il progettista’, 150–1. 141 L. Pirandello, Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore, in G. Macchia (ed.), Pirandello, Tutti i romanzi (Milan: Mondadori, 1973), II, 523.

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of Varia Nestoroff, a stereotypical femme fatale, Serafino becomes the unwitting and impassive spectator of a tragedy unfolding before his prosthetic eye. He is at once a victim and slave of a machine serially generating fragmented, phantasmatic records of life itself, a score of spectral and bloodless versions of the real. The machine is debased and despised. Pirandello situates it at the bottom of the humanistic evolutionary scale, a rutting beast serially repeating a handful of base gestures. Cynical, manipulative and equipped with a pulsating mechanical energy that grotesquely repeats the beating of the human heart, the movie camera is posited here as the dystopian template of the machine in modernity.142 Vasari also entangled technology and sexuality, postulating the machine as a modern alternative to natural sexuality.143 However, while Pirandello put forward an antinomy between art, understood Platonically as spirit, mystery and inspiration, versus the machine, understood as non-art, a brutish and unthinking mechanism hostile to humanity, Vasari, on the other hand, weaved a Marxist grammar into the machine. Not amicable, but, rather, an anti-industrial and anti-capitalist approach arguably resonating with Georges Sorel’s subordination of human labour to the yoke of a hegemonic technology. Departing from the felicitous convergence of labour and machine favoured by Pannaggi and Paladini, L’angoscia demonised both mechanised humans and robots, rather than the machine. Indeed, Vasari portrayed the machine as a victim, a subordinate just as much as the human hand that operates it. The optimistic, organic, utopian, redemptive machine was fading into the background. No longer a social equaliser, the machine was morphing into an operative of destruction in the hands of a techno-capitalist elite. The new industrial age became alienating and dehumanising. Machines were its malevolent and fanatic agents of torture, surveillance and oppression. Vasari’s play enacted the catastrophic dismantlement of the machine matrix. As Angelini observed, this show introduced an expressionist aesthetics into a futurist framework, marking the ‘beginning of the end’144 of a machine culture. On the expressionist model, L’angoscia seems to hold a distorted mirror before the mechanical civilisation, an ‘astonishing inversion of contemporary futurist eulogies’.145 Vasari’s 142 Pirandello, Quaderni, 524. In describing a monotype machine, Pirandello strikes a medium between Kafka’s grafting machine (In the Penal Colony) and Zola’s locomotive (La bête humaine) – see Pirandello, Quaderni, 535. Pirandello’s conclusions are particularly resonant of Kafka’s mechanic martyrdom: mutilated, dumbed and morphed into the camera machine he operates, Serafino reaches a repellent nirvana of mechanical perfection – Pirandello, Quaderni, 729. 143 Versari, ‘Per una mitologia macchinista’, 142. 144 Angelini, Teatro e spettacolo, 197. Berghaus finds no evidence of Vasari’s interaction with the Bauhaus argued by Angelini – Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 515. 145 Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination, 29; Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 500. Prampolini’s brother, Vittorio Orazi, read this play as a critique of the cult of the Übermensch, an

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play joined other notable modernist dystopias documenting the evolution of machine technology, first and foremost E. M. Forster’s ‘The machine stops’, a short story coterminous with the birth of futurismo (see section 2.1). Vasari’s play became internationally renowned and influential, leading to translations and spin-offs.146 Encouraged by the acclaim, Vasari planned to issue a machine trilogy. However, one follow-on play alone, entitled Raun (1932 or 1933; written 1926–27) came to be realised. Resonating with Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927), Raun articulated Vasari’s critique of techno-capitalism further. Vasari attempted to convey a totalising aesthetic experience, exercising strict control on his technological theatre and issuing exacting stage management instructions.147 Raun opened with a description of ‘the tower of Raun’, intellectual and material project of the protagonist, named Volan. Volan was set to represent an ‘Anti-Christ of the machine realm’ and the play was accordingly originally entitled L’Anticristo (the Anti-Christ). Two antagonists flanked Volan: Uomo Rosso (Red Man) and Sacar, who symbolised woman.148 Red Man was an allegory of the libertarian, democratic, socially egalitarian machine culture of Marxist lineage or, according to alternative views, a portrayal of Mussolini or Hitler.149 Sacar, usually referred to as ‘the female’ (‘la femmina’), was psychologically dominant. Borrowed from his previous L’angoscia, a fourth character named Tonchir was a repentant scientist on course to destroy the machine civilisation he had helped create. Vasari revisited here a trite futurist cliché, enmeshing it with a tower theme. A colossal, imposing and boundless construction where futurist interconnected architecture and Tatlin’s aesthetics joined hands, the tower of Raun symbolised the escape of the female character from her purported ‘earthy’ instinctuality. Vasari’s gender politics were clearly delineated in act III. Here he introduced a towering sexual machine, literally the mother of all machines: a Ginemacchina (Gynomachine). Symbolic of a womanhood predicated on production, reproduction and commodification of ‘useful female types’, it was imagined as a mechanism to cat-

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imbalance between technologised humans and the ‘great Everything’. Vasari agreed with Gino Gori’s interpretation, which highlighted instead a humanist message. One of the most interesting spin-offs was Antonio Marasco’s Panorami allo Zenith, first published in Il Romanzo della Domenica, III:30 (30 November–15 December 1934). Marasco had been part of Marinetti’s conference tour of Russia in 1914. In 1920–21 he collaborated with Vasari and Walden in Berlin, contributing to the review Noi in 1923 – see E. Crispolti and T. Sicoli (eds), Marasco: Anni Dieci-Settanta dal futurismo al concretismo (Milan: Mazzotta, 1995), 19. Tai Kambara translated Vasari’s play into Japanese. Versari, ‘Per una mitologia macchinista’, 146. Ibid., 147 and 158. Berghaus focuses on Volan’s ‘pseudo-religious dimension’, which Vasari had intended to elaborate on in the third part of his intended trilogy – Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 514. Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 512–13.

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egorise women on the basis of status, utility and function on reaching sexual maturity. Ginemacchina ranked women into reproductive types (type M) and sexually attractive types (type P), destining the remainder to hard labour (type L). While Kafka’s body-grafting machine may have lent body-punitive traits to Vasari’s Ginemacchina, the most obvious genealogy is in Marinetti’s The Alcove of Steel (section 2.3).150 Marinetti contemplated woman at the hub of a technological universe where she took on machine-like qualities. A decade on, Vasari repositioned the struggle of the sexes, turning it into a paradigm of erosion of futurist machine ideology. Vasari’s dystopic conclusions detailed a catastrophic incompatibility between woman and man and between human and machine quite unknown to Marinetti. Not accidentally Marinetti perceived a fundamental difference between his own effusive machi(ni)sm and Vasari’s dystopic body and machine politics, as he lamented in 1931 in a letter to Guglielmo Jannelli (see below).151 Historically, Vasari’s mechanical social engineering coincided with the demographic and reproductive policies of the Fascist regime (see section 6.4d). In act V, entitled ‘Il cantiere dei transplanetari’ (The building site of the transplanetaries) viewers took a journey to planet Mars, portrayed here as home to a hypermechanical civilisation successfully exported to earth ‘millions of years ago’ and by now extinct. The archaeology of a pre-eminent technology, the vestiges, fossils and debris of a superior mechanical civilisation were explored by human pioneers in search of a new epistemology to revitalise and expand the withered cognitive capabilities of the human race, drawing a new framework for creative human work. In act VI, suggestively entitled ‘La morte delle macchine’ (The death of machines) an important shift took place: a genealogy of mechanised humans gave way to a second generation of humanised machines. Departing from the cyborg, Vasari’s primary agent is not the human but, rather, the machine. The machine is infused with humanity and titanically rebels against the human genus, depriving its creators of meaning, political agency and future, consigning humankind to a labyrinth we call today ‘the uncanny valley’. In a frenzy of opposing forces, matter and anti-matter, the abstract, wilful and unstable machine collapses under the weight and vacuity of its own ‘mechanicity’.152 Vasari’s descent into a splintered and refracted subjectivity, indeterminate, fragmentary and entropic, blurs the boundaries between human and machine, eliding identity rather than replicating or reinforcing it. The grandiose utopia that built the tower of Raun and

150 A recent, best-known take on Vasari’s dystopian totalitarian reproductive politics is in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). 151 See Versari, ‘Per una mitologia macchinista’, 138 and 142–3. 152 See also ibid., 139.

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sustained the dominion of the Red Man collapses on itself with tidal force until only a colossal mechanical rubble remains. An explosion precipitated by Volan, in fact, re-materialised Raun as all debris, an inert deposit of ruins, machine wreckage and scrap metal, all of which are already, irremediably archaeological: ‘all that used to be machine is now nothing but a name’.153 In its ambivalent finale, Raun echoes L’angoscia: the technological arcane is broken and lies down in ruins. New, even more insidious forms of technological submission subsumed under a techno-capitalist rubric, however, may be rising from the ashes. Vasari regarded Raun as a candid outlook on contemporary machine culture.154 Despite its persisting dubious gender politics, the play is implicitly critical of the ‘machist’ approach of the leader of futurismo. Following his installation as Academician of Italy in 1929, Vasari regarded Marinetti as far too compromised with the Fascist regime, as he clarified on 12 March 1931 in personal correspondence with Jannelli: Let the academician Marinetti show me one work alone where he extols machines! Not only there are none, but I’d like to add that he is incapable of producing any. All his work is […] tantamount to passeist ‘simperings’, sentimental and romantic à la de Musset, absolutely hackneyed sensualism and eroticism! One cannot therefore critique Raun alongside the futurist manifestos […] who will always be programmatic. I extend my gaze beyond futurismo because, while I elevate machines on the one hand … they fill me with horror on the other!155

Falling out with Marinetti, who had sharply criticised Raun, Vasari remained loyal to his own ardent approach to the machine. His apocalyptic, end-of-history machine was more attuned to the nihilist dystopias of contemporary sci-fi fiction rather than to Marinetti’s fetishist encounters with the machine. Shortly after the Nazis came to power, Vasari became involved in art politics. In spring 1934, he organised an exhibition of aeropainting in Hamburg, including works by Prampolini and Benedetta. Patronised by Goebbels and Goering, attended by Schwitters and Moholy-Nagy, the Berlin opening carried political consequence.156 Vasari’s exile to Zurich was a further rupture. Here, between 1932 and 1949, he ran 153 Vasari, Raun, cit. in Marinetti, Gli Indomabili, 265. 154 In its capacity to critique techno-utopian societies, Raun is also resonant of sci-fi novels such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. Written in 1921 and published in 1924, We focused on technologies of mass surveillance in a totalitarian State. 155 Cit. in Marinetti, Gli Indomabili, XXXVII – orig. in Verdone, Teatro del tempo futurista (Rome: Lerici, 1968), 316–17. 156 Demetz, Italian Futurism, 7–8.

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a news agency, before retiring to his native Sicily, after ‘a short taste of the Italian postwar climate in Rome and Milan’.157 Similarly to Pannaggi, the breadth and scope of Vasari’s transnational and transcultural connections, from futurismo’s Central European foothold to the northern and eastern avant-garde, provide evidence of the vitality and relevance of futurist machine culture through the 1920s and 1930s, radiating out across Europe with renewed energy, especially towards the industrial north. In the wake of Metropolis, Vasari had contacted the Emelka consortium in Berlin with a view to raising funds to translate Raun and L’angoscia into film. The two plays were collated into a single script penned by Franco Ciarrocchi and with the musical accompaniment of Silvio Mix. It is not known whether this film came to fruition.158 Music, however, was the connective tissue of Vasari’s theatre productions, contributing in large measure to their mechanical theme, both in terms of quality, rhythm and tempo, as well as deploying musical instruments specifically designed to achieve mechanical sound. Mix’s was precisely the kind of frontier music that suited Vasari’s mechanical hallucinations on the stage. 4.4 Music machines Through the 1920s, both the sounds of material machines operating in the factory and mechanical noises emitted by specially designed music machines underpinned many a futurist performance. Reproducing and incorporating the sonic landscape of modern technological implements, music machines were an integral feature of the aesthetic and communicative strategy of futurismo. If it is true that futurist experimental music suffered from a lack of professionalism, the unconventional training of its main exponents (e.g. Russolo trained as a painter, Mix as an engineer)159 enhanced rather than hindered their attempts to embed a mechanical framework in contemporary music. Industrial and mechanical themes and suggestions inspired numerous compositions between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1846, Hector Berlioz performed a Chant des chemins de fer (Railway Cantata) to celebrate the launch of a French railway line. The railways had become an inspiration for some of his contemporaries, including Rossini and Morales. In 1912, Carol-Bérard began composing a Symphonie des forces mécaniques (Symphony of Mechanical Forces) where the sound of industrial engines and sirens were integrated into the orchestra. Arthur Honegger’s orchestral piece Pacific 231 (1923) included the sound of a steam locomotive. Further

157 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 502. 158 Versari, ‘Il progettista’, 158–9. 159 Lombardi, in Pratella and Russolo, The Art of Noise, 17. The futurist Casavola, one of the few genuine music professionals, destroyed his scores during a nervous crisis in 1927.

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examples include George Antheil’s score for piano orchestra, percussion and airplane engine for Léger’s Ballet mécanique, which premiered in 1926 in Paris as a concert piece, and the sound of steel foundries in the composition for orchestra Zavod (Iron Foundry; 1927) by Alexander Mosolov. Francesco Ballilla Pratella’s Manifesto of music (1910) helped re-envision musical aesthetics in Italy under the futurist rubric. In 1918–20, on Marinetti’s prompt, Pratella composed the opera L’aviatore Dro (The Aviator Dro). Pratella incorporated the noise of an airplane engine, but, essentially, he reworked Wagnerian and symbolist music, ‘an example of realism and popular entertainment’.160 Issuing an Art of noises manifesto on 11 June 1913, however, it was Luigi Russolo (1885–1947), an academically trained painter with no education in musicology or composition,161 who became tasked with representing futurist music. Russolo singled out the sounds emitted by the machine and the heterogeneous sonic spaces of modern, industrial societies, including technological warfare, as a point of departure. He amalgamated the noise of the modern machine with sound, achieving the effect of a ‘noise-sound’. ‘Ancient life was all silence’, mused Russolo. ‘In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme.’ ‘This musical evolution is paralleled by the multiplication of machines, which collaborate with man on every front.’162 Russolo did not seek imitation or pedestrian aural reproduction, but rather a multiple and complex association of different timbres in order to elicit new emotions. Russolo proceeded to devise his own music machines, rectangular crates painted in bright colours and equipped with amplifiers, levers and crank handles or switches to achieve the desired sound. Some were activated mechanically, others were electronic instruments powered by batteries.163 Russolo called them ‘intonarumori’ (noise intoners) and categorised them according to four broad sound types: rumbles, whistles, whispers and screeches. His orchestra eventually incorporated a plethora of noises playing alongside the music produced by these machines, e.g. human and animal song, as well as percussing materials such as metal, wood, skin, stone and terracotta.164 Russolo’s noise intoners were closely related to the experimental mechanisation of prewar futurism. 160 Lombardi, in Pratella and Russolo, The Art of Noise, 9. 161 Luigi Russolo was familiar with Helmholtz’s sound perception theory. He also hailed from a musical family: his father was an organist and his brother Antonio a professional musician. Luigi’s work would occasionally be mixed up with his brother’s. 162 L. Russolo, ‘The Art of Noises’, cit. in Pratella and Russolo, The Art of Noise, 55 and 57 respectively. 163 See also Lista, ‘Futurist music’, in Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909–44, 118. 164 See also E. Levi, ‘Futurist influences upon early twentieth-century music’, in Berghaus (ed.), International Futurism in Arts and Literature, 324.

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As Russolo himself relayed in the Futurist noise machines manifesto, the ‘scoppiatore’ (burster/exploder), one of his noise intoners, was first utilised on 2 June 1913 in a performance at Teatro Storchi in Modena, in front of a responsive audience of 2,000. ‘The perfect function of this apparatus or instrument (that has the special name of exploder), reproducing by a series of ten whole tones the characteristic noise of a motor starting up, provoked violent enthusiasm and, at the same time, […] infinite discussions, and, naturally, bursts of imbecile or superficial laughter.’165 This premiere was followed by a concert performed shortly afterwards at Marinetti’s Casa Rossa (Red House) in Milan. The recital consisted of four pieces or ‘noise networks’ – a ‘soundscape’ in today’s parlance – achieved through the medium of three noise intoners. Russolo further performed public concerts with eighteen noise intoners in Genoa and Milan. His compositions included ‘spirals of noises in tune’,166 or fluid and spiralling acoustic forms varying in pitch and intensity, evolving in space and time. After a successful season of twelve concerts in June 1914 at London’s Coliseum, the outbreak of the First World War put Russolo’s activities on hold. He continued experimenting in the postwar period, to some extent. Three 1921 concerts in Paris captured the attention of Maurice Ravel, Piet Mondrian and Louis Aragon and further inspired Alexei Gastev and Vladimir Mayakovski to pursue ‘proletarian music’ and urban-scale industrial symphonies in Nizhny Novgorod and Petrograd in 1923. Now working in Paris, Russolo invented other noise instruments: the noise harmonium (rumorharmonium or Russolophono; 1924), followed by an enharmonic bow (arco or archetto enarmonico; 1926), ‘a sort of mechanical saw that produces sounds’.167 Their reception was sensitised by the extreme, traumatic aural shock experienced in urban contexts, caused by new means of transport and communication and, especially, the disorienting soundscapes engulfing soldiers in the war. The turn towards traditionalism and revival of musical academicism favoured by the Fascist regime, however, ground down this experimentation – witness the foundation of a Corporation of New Music in 1923, directed by D’Annunzio, Malipiero and Alfredo Casella, under the ‘advice’ of Bernardino Molinari and Ildebrando Pizzetti. Molinari and Pizzetti argued that ‘Russolo’s decompositive attitude was an easy target for charges of dilettantism’.168 Musical taste drifted back to traditional forms and ‘Russolo strongly felt this involution, but saw no escape, and Casavola, after a lengthy interest in jazz, retreated in the face of censorship and actually destroyed his own futurist work’.169 Russolo’s Innovazioni nelle canne sonore per organo e strumenti a 165 166 167 168 169

Cit. in Lombardi, in Pratella and Russolo, The Art of Noise, 67. Lista, ‘Futurist music’, 118. Ibid., 119. Lombardi, in Pratella and Russolo, The Art of Noise, 19. Ibid., 16.

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fiato (Innovations in sound canes for organ and wind instruments; 1928) was followed by further creative production well into the 1930s, but the novelty factor, not to speak of the chance to secure funding, was a thing of the past.170 The noise intoners will be destroyed in the course of the Second World War. Even though these innovative instruments failed to produce consistent results, at the conceptual level they endured. Musique concrète (1948), to cite one for all, would not have been possible in the absence of Russolo’s creative machines.171 The only authentically mechanical score it inspired, however, was arguably the ‘mechanicavalcade’ featured in Cavalli + Acciaio (Horses + Steel), a page from a piece for large orchestra by Luigi Gral, a composer only known by name, whose piano transcription was published in 1935. ‘This composition, like Ravel’s Bolero, develops by means of a rhythmical structure, insistently repeats from start to finish and is made up of blocks of chords. The musical tempo indicated is matto (crazy).’172 The lesser-known Silvio Mix (1900–27; also known as Silvio De Re) was a further frontier futurist musician. Almost entirely overlooked today, and yet an innovative composer and conductor, Mix was born at the north-eastern borders of Italy, in the cosmopolitan, multicultural and exilic culture that typified Austro-Hungarian Trieste. Cernigoj’s Trieste was dialogical with respect to constructivist Slovenia (see section 4.1). Mix’s background was multicultural and multilingual, but of Italian sentiment: his father, Riccardo Micks, was a Trieste-born Hungarian, his mother, Erminia De Re, Italian. The couple married in Fiume (now Croatian Rijeka), where Riccardo taught at the Naval Academy before moving to Trieste in 1897. Born on 30 December 1900, Silvio was baptised on 9 March 1901 Silvius Aloysius Petrus. His family moved to Florence on the eve of the First World War, when Silvio was a teenager, following his elder brother Paolo who, like many middle-class, pro-Italian young men, had relocated to mainland Italy to avoid being drafted by the Austrian army. It was in Florence that Silvio experienced the first tumultuous futurist soirées. Since he was a teenager, Silvio had an overwhelming passion for machines. His sister Stella recalled:

170 See a letter from Russolo to Seuphor, Paris, 6 March 1931: ‘Cher ami, […]. J’avais beaucoup travaillé à la construction d’un modèle d’un nouvel instrument musical, basé sur un principe inconnu que je viens de découvrir. J’espère de trouver l’argent nécessaire pour la construction et l’exploitation de cet instrument, car j’ai l’impression qu’étant d’un grand avenir industriel et pratique il est facilment commerciable’ – cit. in Sauwen, Viatte and Seuphor, Seuphor, 104. See also Lombardi, ‘Mito della macchina’, 252–73. 171 See F. Casavola in Teatro, March–April 1927, cit. in Lombardi, ‘Mito della macchina’, 273. Casavola regrets that the enormous potential of Russolo’s achievement of a ‘total enharmony’ failed to come to fruition. 172 Lombardi, in Pratella and Russolo, The Art of Noise, 16.

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against the conventions of good bourgeois families, [Silvio] adored machines. He was a mechanic by hobby and, aged 13, put together motorcycles, combustion engines and similar machines. He travelled the world, here, there and everywhere. In embryo, his musical genius was burning inside him. Suddenly, without teachers or training, he composed and directed music for the soldiers mutilated in the war.173

It was precisely this precocious passion for machines that drove Mix to musical experimentation, which he approached boldly, entirely from scratch, as an autodidact inspired by American jazz. Mix’s passion for machines is powerfully reflected in the fabric, content and representation of his musical compositions, and, equally, in the constructive engineering framework of his practice. Of his hundred or so compositions, including two operas and two symphonies, only four pieces for piano, a quartet and a handful of orchestra scores have been published. The remainder remains publicly unknown.174 At the age of nineteen, Mix composed an Introduzione Sinfonica (Symphonic introduction) to the opera Sardanapalo and performed it, conducting the orchestra, on 16 April 1919 at Florence’s La Pergola Theatre. On 23 December, also at La Pergola, Mix conducted Intermezzo sinfonico del metàdramma ‘Astrale’ (Symphonic intermezzo of the metadrama Astrale). Published by Bratti in Florence, his notation ‘op. 32 II’ on the score suggests that Silvio had by then composed thirty odd operas, including an Omaggio a Strawinsky (Homage to Stravinsky) which displayed ‘obsessive’ rhythmic echoes of the Russian folksong employed by Stravinsky in the third of the Three Movements from ‘Pétrouschka’.175 Mechanics and engineering were prominent in Mix’s mind, as is evident from the several miniature models of engines and machines he put together in this period. On 14 February 1921, a concerto composed and conducted by Mix at the Sala Filarmonica in his native Trieste was received with a lukewarm review in the local daily Il Piccolo. In the course of just over one year, the young Mix was to add twenty more new compositions to his already substantial catalogue.176 In 1924, together with his brother Paolo, Silvio founded Rivista di Firenze (Florence review), where he published an article entitled ‘Armonici e dissonanze’ 173 Stella Micks, cit. in Lombardi, ‘Mix, Silvio’, in Nuova enciclopedia del futurismo musicale, 176. I draw most of the scant biographical information available on Mix from Lombardi’s chapter. 174 Lombardi, ‘Mix, Silvio’, 183–4. 175 Mix’s extant operas include a suite for harp and strings, op. 18; a Quinto quartetto, op. 23 and a Bozzetto funebre, op. 25 – S. Bianchi, ‘Silvio Mix: un autodidatta triestino sulle rotte del futurismo europeo’, in M. Girardi (ed.), Lungo il Novecento: la musica a Trieste e le interconnessioni tra le arti (Venice: Marsilio, 2003), 70. 176 For details, see Bianchi, ‘Silvio Mix’, 71.

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(Harmonics and dissonance) in the first of the few issues that came out in the course of just over a year. Mix’s contributions to modernist periodicals in Trieste and the north-eastern border was notable – for example, ‘Il bastone dinamico di Prampolini’ (Prampolini’s dynamic baton), published in Gorizia’s L’Aurora (II, 10 October 1924) and a further long article on the painter Marasco published by Energie Futuriste, also in October 1924 (see section 4.1). Little is known about the part he played in Cangiullo’s Theatre of surprise, which begun its tour in Naples on 30 September 1921 and concluded in Trieste on 4 February 1922. More information exists on Mix’s active participation in the tour of the New futurist theatre and his collaboration with Prampolini. In particular, Mix devised a mechanical ballet entitled Psicologia delle macchine (Psychology of machines; 1924; costumes and scenery designed by Prampolini), which was to form part of the première of the New futurist theatre. The set was a stylised house interior framed by trees and plants. Against this set, two dancers who wore black and silver costumes and donned horseshoe-shaped masks performed a rendition of the mechanics of pistons and gears. Mix also utilised a mechanical usher (maschera meccanica) in this ballet. The musical score was described as ‘loud, brassy’.177 An anonymous reviewer described the raucous amalgamation of ‘feisty music by Silvio Mix’ and an ‘impetuous sarabande of sounds’ with the ‘chromatic languor of Prampolini’s scenes’178 The tour took Mix and the company to Milan (10 January), Rome (20 January) and Trieste (21 January). The riotous outcome of the soirée in Trieste was highlighted in a further review in L’Osservatore Triestino of 22 January 1924, where Mix’s musical direction was described as ‘antiestetico’ (anti-aesthetic) and elided by the cacophonous racket.179 Between the end of 1925 through to 1926, Mix wrote regular columns for the daily L’Impero, including summaries of musical innovations first introduced at the First futurist congress. The column was entitled ‘Questioni musicali’ (Music issues). Mix had taken active part in this congress, impassionedly illustrating a radical theoretical framework for his Symphonic metadrama. Mix’s metàdramma hinged on a ‘polytonality’ or ‘harmonic counterpoint’, translating words-in-freedom into musical expression so that ‘literary text […], musical commentary […] and scene setting should carry equal importance’.180 Drawing on Pratella, Mix welded together music, text and scenes, originally brought together in a firm and non-hierarchical 177 Bohn, The Other Futurism, 41. 178 Cit. in Bianchi, ‘Silvio Mix’, 72; orig. Anon, ‘Il nuovo teatro futurista: dinamica e trionfale tournée’, L’Impero, 20 January 1924. See also Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 449; Lombardi, ‘Mix, Silvio’, 183. 179 Anon, ‘Teatri. Politeama’, L’Osservatore Triestino, 22 January 1924, cit. in Bianchi, ‘Silvio Mix’, 73. 180 P. L. F., article in L’Impero, cit. in Lombardi, ‘Mix, Silvio’, 184.

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‘artistic unit’.181 Originating from both Russolo and Pratella, Mix posited polytonality as one of the key traits of metàdramma, as is shown in the short piano passage entitled Profilo sintetico musicale di F. T. Marinetti (Synthetic musical profile of F. T. Marinetti; 1924) whose thirty-six bars are made up of ten different parts. ‘The execution’ argues Lombardi, ‘does not give a clear sense of the interaction of fragments, but rather, the impression of an alogical, surreal juxtaposition. The Profilo Sintetico Musicale is an example of the kind of improvisations Mix offered at futurist soirées.’182 Mix’s radically mechanical musical works caused widespread consternation and even offence, triggering heated polemics which thundered from the same column in L’Impero. In December 1926 Mix relocated to Paris, where he was welcomed by Seuphor, Idelson and Prampolini. In particular, he was due to prepare work for Prampolini’s futurist pantomimes (see section 5.1b). Mix’s piano improvisations during musical soirées chez the Duchess de La Salle were greatly admired. His composition for the ballet Cocktail was also performed in Paris (see section 5.1b). Mix worked assiduously: he composed music for Vittorio Orazi’s L’estasi di Santa Teresa (The ecstasy of St Theresa) and was due to supervise a performance of his own music for Vasari’s L’angoscia delle macchine, a score he had prepared one year earlier and is now widely credited for its transnational breadth.183 This was one of Mix’s most ambitious compositions, only forty-eight pages of which survive today. Vasari stressed the key role he assigned to music in bringing his text to the stage. Mix accordingly produced seven short ‘episodes’ bringing to the fore the mechanical theme of the play. Score n. 6 is arguably the most original. It deployed two siren alarms positioned in two separate locations on stage. Its ‘persisting, syncopated notes in the different families of instruments suggest the monotonous mechanical movement of the Condemned to machines’.184 Reinforced by Mix’s original notations, reading fortissimo, agitato, rallentando assai, largamente e grandioso, ffff and sforzatissimo, Bacal’s last lines marked the paroxysmal triumph of the soulless machines: all instruments come to a halt […] only the drums proceed, accompanying Bacal’s heartbreaking screams when he aimlessly throws himself on the machine, trying to stop it in its 181 S. Mix, ‘Questioni musicali I’, cit. in Bianchi, ‘Silvio Mix’, 73. 182 Lombardi, in Pratella and Russolo, The Art of Noise, 14–15. For Marinetti, Mix also composed a Quartet in three movements: Prelude, Nocturne and Scherzo; a Sinfonia as musical accompaniment to Marinetti’s novel Mafarka; a Sinfonia umana e fantastica and various Inni, including Corporazioni and Imperiale. Polyrhythms and musical collages were further employed by Milhaud and Antheil. 183 Bianchi, ‘Silvio Mix’, 74. 184 Ibid., 75.

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tracks. His last word is suspended half way through. Sirens begin to blast at this juncture and carry on fortissimo for the duration of the last comment (n. 7, Finale).185

The 27 April 1927 production of L’angoscia, however, did not include Mix’s music, unaccountably replaced with an onomatopoeic and bruitist score by Édouard AutantLara. Mix had, by then, already met a premature death. While in Paris at the beginning of 1927 Mix was taken ill suddenly and decided to return to Italy straight away. He died on his return journey, in a hospital in Gallarate, south of the French-Italian border, where he was taken on 1 February (or 2 February, according to other sources) before his train reached Florence, the final destination. Had Mix not met such an untimely demise, the Parisian stage would probably had acted as a springboard for his career, allowing for reverberations all over Europe.186 Mix left behind numerous unperformed, now largely forgotten compositions, including piano scores, e.g. aural translations of canvases by Prampolini and Marasco, and the already quoted Profilo sintetico musicale di F. T. Marinetti and Omaggio a Stravinsky. In memory of his friendship with Mix, Vasari wrote a valedictory poem highlighting his friend’s timid, child-like appearance, ability to improvise, hallucinated intuitions and precarious circumstances.187 Marinetti was also greatly moved and reminisced about Mix, celebrating his stunted achievements. Recalling a futurist tour starting in Milan, he mused: By day the eccentric Mix roamed around the city [Milan], buttoned up in his little black furcoat, looking for old, broken clocks and mechanisms without springs, guided in this stubborn pursuit by his mechanical instinct. He was obsessed with the desire to speed up, to divide time in minutes and seconds, that infinite space-time that his precarious state of health possibly feared. […] His will to resolve his own life musically was his imperative.188

The citizen of a mechanical world under the vault of heaven, Mix inhabited the cracks of time, according to Marinetti. The leader of futurism crowned him as a martyr of the machine, sacrificing his youth and good health in order to complete his ‘geometrical’ music scores, coasting along the rhythmic cadence of the train that took him back from France to Italy, re-enacting perhaps his own tragic version of the ‘prose of the 185 Ibid. 186 Ibid. 187 Vasari, ‘Mix, musico de L’angoscia delle macchine’, in the collection Venere sul Capricorno, 5 February 1927. 188 JPGRIL, Papers of F. T. Marinetti and Benedetta Cappa, series IV, box 16, typescript by F. T. Marinetti, ‘Mix dirige ora le orchestre dell’infinito’, [n.d.], 90.

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Trans-Siberian’.189 Time and space overlap in Marinetti’s obituary valediction. The vault of heaven will be the new playground of Mix and, shortly to come, of futurismo. Silvio Mix and other futurist artists discussed in this chapter are representatives of a ‘frontier futurism’: transcending national borders and the confines of culture and language. They all inhabited a frontier, either a geopolitical space or a politically radical and artistically innovative state of mind. Not accidentally, Cernigoj, Vasari, Paladini and Pannaggi loathed the aerofuturist turn of official futurism and steered clear of it. Their revulsion was conceptual and aesthetic and, especially, ideological. The flying machines looming on the horizon were no longer Marxist machines engaged with in the factory, machines that played a pivotal role within socioeconomic structures and class relations. The emerging aerofuturist brand concentrated instead on the transformative power of new technologies of flying on the sensory perception of individuals. Shifting away from the industrial machine that modulated artistic production in the 1920s, a new immaterial, mystic, ‘spiritual’ machine began to emerge as futurismo transitioned to negotiating a civil and belligerent society increasingly transformed by the aeronautical industry and its awe-inspiring flying machines.

189 Marinetti, ‘Mix dirige ora le orchestre dell’infinito’, 92. For futurist music, see also section 2.5.

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5 Between technodialogism and cosmic idealism The futurists were not the aeroplanes they wanted to be but they were at any rate a pack of very nice, noisy Vespas. (I. Stravinsky, in Craft and Stravinsky, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, 1958)

Born in Modena, Enrico Prampolini (1894–1956) was arguably the most networked Italian futurist operating in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, disseminating ‘mechanical art’ and its later developments through the 1930s and 1940s, at a time when many of his fellow futuristi, e.g. Marinetti and Depero, retrenched into mannerist or provincial folds. His ‘sustained European vocation’ was built on a broad technical and theoretical range ‘pursued in international arenas’.1 Crispolti hailed Prampolini as ‘the most robust theoretician’ of mechanical art,2 as well as one of the most vocal and vigorous international exponents of this practice in the visual arts, architecture and stage design. Relying on a stage emptied of the human presence, his emphasis on scenography suited perfectly the template of futurist synthetic theatre. Through the medium of machine art, Prampolini developed a version of futurism that was fully conversant with an emerging global culture.3 Like Depero, in 1913–15 Prampolini trained with Balla and in the applied arts.4 Intellectually, he was attracted by symbolism and Italian dada, together with Julius Evola, Lucio Venna and Bino Sanminiatelli. His training continued in 1921–23 in Bragaglia’s Art House, under the auspices of the latter’s German and Russian connections. Prampolini’s creative vein, however, flourished in the postwar, when he 1 Lista (ed.), Enrico Prampolini: carteggio futurista (Rome: Carte Segrete, 1992), 7 and Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 11, respectively. 2 E. Crispolti, ‘Prampolini a tutto campo’, in E. Crispolti et al., Prampolini: dal futurismo all’informale (Rome: Carte Segrete, 1992), 24. See also P. Bucarelli (ed.), Enrico Prampolini 1894–1956 (Rome: De Luca, 1961), 8. 3 Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 12 and 13. 4 R. Siligato, ‘La Casa d’Arte Italiana’, in Siligato (ed.), Prampolini: Carteggio 1916–56 (Rome: Carte Segrete, 1992), 21. Siligato notes especially Prampolini’s 1912 glazed terracotta pieces.

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expanded his horizons to the avant-garde scenes in Prague, Paris and Berlin, exhibiting in Paris (1921), London, Manchester and Amsterdam (1922), New York (1923), Vienna (1924), Paris (1925) and New York (1926), among many others.5 While he overlapped, among others, with Cercle et Carré in 1930, Novembergruppe in 1931 and Abstraction-Création in 1932, Prampolini maintained a clear futurist identity, breathing new life into a splintered and almost defunct postwar futurism.6 Prampolini’s international vocation had a point of departure in the International Free Futurist Exhibition organised in April 1914 by Balla at the Sprovieri gallery in Rome. Balla included works by Loy, Kulbin, Kandinsky, Exter and Archipenko, which helped broaden Prampolini’s creative range. A further seminal experience, if all for the wrong reasons, was Boccioni’s excommunication, banishing Prampolini from pursuing futurist activities and probably instigating his first experiences outside Italy. After a conversation with Boccioni, the then unchallenged intransigent leader of the ‘corporation’ of futurist painting,7 on 6 December 1913, at the opening of Boccioni’s sculpture exhibition, Prampolini boldly, hastily perhaps, brought out the first Manifesto of futurist architecture: ‘L’atmosfera-struttura: basi per un’architettura futurista’ (Atmosphere-structure: foundations of futurist architecture).8 This initiative appeared uncollegial to Boccioni, who demanded that Prampolini be ostracised from futurist circles.9 Taking offence, Prampolini published the further manifesto Scenografia futurista (Futurist scenography; January 1915) where he theorised a performative aesthetics underpinned by the moving machine. Here, Prampolini predated slightly the mechanical propositions articulated by Balla and Depero in their almost contemporary Futurist reconstruction of the universe manifesto (see sections 3.2 and 5.1b). In February 1915, Prampolini shared this script with both Marinetti and Boccioni, but remained persona non grata until well after Boccioni’s death in 1916. Repudiated and regarded as ‘controversial’, Prampolini relocated to Paris where he worked for twelve years, long enough to acquire a reputation as a French artist and for his family name to be truncated into a French-sounding Prampó. In Paris Prampolini perfected the cubist and surrealist lessons, which underpinned the three self-styled stages of his career: plastic abstraction of objective reality through a subjective and chromatic architecture of spaces (1912–24); machine aesthetics and mechanical introspection (1924–28); ‘spiritual architecture’ and universal synthesis of spiritual 5 E. Crispolti, Il mito della macchina e altri temi del futurismo (Trapani: Celebes, 1971), 299 and 259. 6 R. Paris, ‘Forme e fortuna della cultura italiana’, in Romano and Vivanti (eds), Storia d’Italia, IV (1975) 752; Lista, ‘Prampolini futurista europeo’, 11. 7 Lista (ed.), Enrico Prampolini: carteggio futurista, 13. 8 E. Prampolini, ‘L’atmosfera-struttura. Basi per un’architettura futurista’, Giornale d’Italia, III:29, 29–30 January 1914. 9 Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 33–5.

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movements materialised in space (1928–30).10 Prampolini’s reputation flourished slowly but steadily in the course of the 1920s. His acclaim, particularly in the field of theatre where he continued to traverse the international avant-garde, bounced back to Italy. The latitude of his activities gathered momentum in the postwar years, placing him at the core of several modernist moments in Eastern, Western and Central Europe. Ironically, given his irregular introduction, Prampolini remained loyal to futurismo well into the Second World War and beyond,11 as I shall discuss below. 5.1 Arte meccanica 5.1a Arte meccanica and polimaterici Prampolini posed the machine as a novel aesthetic and conceptual framework, a strategy elucidating the manners and means of artistic invention and production.12 A rethinking of classical art on the wake of Léger’s mechanical style, purism and L’Esprit Nouveau disseminated the machine far and wide throughout the 1920s. Prampolini’s mechanical art stemmed from these premises, pursuing a neoclassical manner predicated on geometry and abstraction, leading to a confluence of the technological with the primitive which was also at work in the cubists and Picasso. Informed by constructive and architectural principles, Prampolini’s mechanical art was constitutionally mechanical, spilling out to ‘inform almost every aspect of living’,13 with special regard for stage work. The mechanical rhythms and lifestyles of the labour class on the Fordist assembly line in the industrial capitals of Europe seeped into Prampolini’s figurative and performing art too. As for Depero, Prampolini’s work was premised by a focus on marionettes, whose artificiality and mimicry of human movement epitomised the ‘mimetic game’ of the machine age (see section 5.1b).14 Thinking back on his long career, Prampolini established a timeframe whereby this season, denominated ‘mechanical’ or ‘mechanical aesthetics’, began in 1921, sand10 CRDAV, Fondo Enrico Prampolini, Opere e scritti di Prampolini, ‘Les étapes de una [sic] évolution futuriste’, 1938, 2: ‘Abstraction plastique de la réalité objective à travers une architecture cromatique subjective des espaces’, ‘Esthétique de la machine et introspection mécanique’, ‘Architecture de l’esprit. Synthèse universelle des mouvements de l’esprit materialise dans l’espace’. 11 JPGRIL, F. T. Marinetti. Special Collections, series I, box 4, n. 2, letter Prampolini to Benedetta, 30 November 1947, [n.p., recto]. 12 Broeckmann, Machine Art, 12. 13 Prampolini, ‘Concezione dello spazio nelle arti plastiche’, in AAVV, Arte figurativa e arte astratta (Florence: Sansoni-Quaderni di San Giorgio, 1960), 95. See also Lista, ‘Prampolini futurista europeo’, 16. 14 A900, folder Scritti di Enrico Prampolini sul Teatro, newspaper cutting by Prampolini, ‘Evoluzione della danza’, La Provincia di Bolzano, 15 June 1933, [n.p.].

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wiched between ‘plastic-chromatic abstraction’ (from 1915) and ‘abstract realism or cosmic idealism’ (beginning in 1928–29).15 Prampolini’s second visit to Capri in August 1922, in the company of Marinetti and a group of futuristi to attend a ‘Convegno del paesaggio’ (Landscape conference), yielded further mechanical work. This conference was organised by Edwin Cerio, the charismatic Mayor of the Mediterranean island and a former engineer, whose intent was to challenge clichéd perceptions of Capri, inviting the avant-garde to reimagine its landscape. Marinetti’s introductory speech was full of praise for this most ‘futurist island’.16 Capri’s preindustrial, anti-metropolitan vernacular proved attractive to the futurists, especially Prampolini, Marinetti, Depero, Benedetta, Marchi, Alfredo Casella and Francesco Cangiullo, who continued to visit regularly in the interwar years. Capri became a favourite playing ground for much of the European avant-garde in the postwar years – Jean Cocteau and André Gide, for example, spent lengthy periods there. Depero had visited in 1917, on the invitation of the poet Gilbert Clavel (see section 3.2). Capri was hailed as a corrective to mechanics, an out of time template of organic, hybrid modernity where machines could be reconciled with the natural environment, the past with the future. In that period of time, Capri further forced artists and architects to confront Fascist identity and national politics in terms of neoclassical modernism, challenging their mechanical premises. Prampolini translated the high-noon colours of the island into cubist-style paintings, reimagining Capri’s ancestral landscape in the frame of mechanical art. The telluric energy of the rugged landscape seemed to echo powerful, innovative technologies. The geometric purity of volumes and surfaces under a relentlessly deep blue sky joined hands with the ‘titanic minimalism’ of machines.17 In the course of the summer, under the blazing sun, Prampolini prepared forty paintings, drawings and watercolours, reinventing Capri’s whitewashed, languid landscapes into geometrical abstractions scanned by neat chromatic blocs. Some are among the most convincing works in his entire oeuvre, twinkling like splinters of polished metal held up against a turquoise Mediterranean sky. Prampolini’s Autoritratto simultaneo (Simultaneous self-portrait; 1923) is informed by the same strategy (Figure 5.1). This canvas is made up of discrete, 15 Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 138 and 134–6. 16 F. T. Marinetti, ‘Discorso di Marinetti’, in E. Cerio (ed.), Il convegno del paesaggio (Naples: Casella, 1932), 38. The architect Virgilio Marchi vividly illustrated Capri’s sensory appeal focusing on a visit to the Blue Grotto under the influence of Benedetta’s wave interference, captured in her painting Scia di motoscafo (Motorboat trail) – see V. Marchi, ‘Scia di motoscafo. Gita alla Grotta Azzurra con Benedetta e F. T. Marinetti’, in E. Torelli Landini (ed.), Virgilio Marchi architetto e scenografo (Rome and Livorno: Galleria André and Galleria Peccolo, 2009), 49. 17 F. Durante, ‘La rivoluzione del pittoresco’, in G. Riccio, Prampolini: I taccuini capresi 1946–48 (Capri: La Conchiglia, 2013), 13.

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5.1 Enrico Prampolini, Autoritratto simultaneo (Simultaneous self-portrait), c. 1923

geometrical, reassembled units hanging together with the precision of a mechanism, recasting simultaneity in a rigorously mechanical architectural framework. The human figure is also remoulded in a constructivist manner: a mechanical portrayal of the painter as a worker tending to his trade, his body parts engaged in sequential and synchronic movements, a manner also in evidence in Paladini’s La nona ora (section 4.2a).18 After exhibiting at a retrospective at Venice Lido in 1923, in competition with Depero,19 Prampolini published the article ‘Het Esthetische der machien en het 18 See also Portrait of Marinetti (1924). 19 See private correspondence with Marinetti, cit. in Lista (ed.), Enrico Prampolini: carteggio futurista, 149.

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ingrijpen der mekanica in de Kunst’ (Het Overzicht, April 1924), where he outlined a history of the futurist mechanical concern. Prampolini mentioned Marinetti’s Founding and manifesto of futurism, Russolo’s noise intoners, Folgore’s Canto dei motori and Severini’s seminal article in Mercure de France (1916). The machine was acclaimed as a new symbol: ‘Dit niewe symbol, die machien’.20 A large exhibition in January 1925 in Turin presided over by Fillia reinvigorated mechanical art. A reprint of the Manifesto of futurist mechanical art, undersigned by ‘les peintres futuristes italiens’ (the Italian futurist painters), was strategically republished in Noi (1926) to provide conceptual underpinnings for the award-winning Magnetic theatre of the previous year (see section 5.1b).21 1925 saw Prampolini navigating the choppy waters of the Parisian art market, clamouring at the gates of the salons together with other Italian artists struggling to emerge into the limelight. After mentioning the names of Massimo Campigli, Filippo De Pisis, Alberto Savinio, de Chirico, Tozzi, Martinelli, Cappiello, Brunelleschi, Garretto, Sepo and Martini, Prampolini argued that Italian painters, from their Parisian vantage point, were able to produce more effective and authentic work compared with colleagues who stayed in Italy. Citing his own raw beginnings, Prampolini estimated that there were two hundred Italian painters out of a total 70,000 or so who ‘live, vegetate and suffer’ in Paris.22 In particular, he dwelled at length on Severini, who helped him navigate his first encounter with Paris, becoming a life-long friend. In March 1926 Prampolini published the article ‘L’architecture futuriste’ (Futurist architecture) in the Belgian constructivist review 7 Arts, opening a season of debate on modern architecture in Italy. Seuphor spent the first half of this year in Italy, coming into frequent contact with Prampolini. Also in 1926, the futuristi exhibited for the first time at the Biennale in Venice – the beautifully illustrated catalogue entitled I futuristi italiani alla XV Biennale veneziana (Italian futurist artists at the 15th Venice Biennale; ed. by Bertozzi) includes an essay by Prampolini. In a letter of 2 February 1926, Prampolini immodestly declared: ‘I sent my best work [to Venice]. […] At this time, I’m ahead of all other futurists.’23 Prampolini was aware of his unique international status, painstakingly acquired, braiding together disparate and minute contacts straddling different fields. The breadth, coverage and impact of his activities were unrivalled, even when compared with Marinetti’s cosmopolitan lifestyle. 20 Prampolini, ‘Het Esthetische der machien en het ingrijpen der mekanica in de Kunst’, Het Overzicht, 21 (April 1924), 145. 21 Lista, Dal futurismo all’immaginismo, 33. 22 CRDAV, Fondo Enrico Prampolini, Opere e scritti di Prampolini, typescript by Prampolini, ‘Artisti italiani a Parigi’, [n.d.], 2 and 5. 23 Cit. in Lista (ed.), Enrico Prampolini: carteggio futurista, 47.

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In Paris Prampolini assiduously attended Léonce Rosenberg’s pro-abstraction, anti-surrealist art gallery Galerie de L’Effort Moderne. He also joined UAM (Union des Artistes Modernes), which reignited debates on functionalism and antiornamental style. Prampolini’s presence is recorded at virtually all existing Parisian art circles: abstract, surrealist, gatherings of other Italian artists close to novecento and de Chirico’s metaphysical school. He was, however, to remain independent of them all.24 Leaving his studio in rue de Bourgogne and finding a new one, at 7 rue Antoine Chantin, meeting other artists at the Café Closerie des Lilas in Montparnasse, Prampolini mingled with Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Léopold Survage and the poet Jan Brzękowski. In the first months of 1930 he visited assiduously Mondrian’s studio, as well as Albert Gleizes, Léger and other abstract artists attached to the art gallery and bookshop La Cible, at 13 rue Bonaparte. Here, between 5 and 25 March 1930, Prampolini exhibited ‘cosmic-idealist’ aeropaintings including Il palombaro delle nuvole (The cloud’s frogman) and Maternità cosmica (Cosmic maternity). In this latter canvas, the acephalus body of a woman projected against the darkness of the deep cosmos holds a miniature version of planet earth in her womb. A surrealist echo of the ancestral archetype of the Great Mother, lodged deep in space and out of time, these abstract and symbolic themes will become increasingly part and parcel of Prampolini’s conceptual arsenal (see section 5.4).25 On 13 March, during a futurist soirée at the same gallery, Prampolini launched the aerodances (see section 6.4). Wy Magito danced Prampolini’s paintings accompanied by Russolo on rumorharmonio. In June, the painter exhibited at the second Salon des Surindépendants at 237 boulevard Raspail. Despite his crossovers with Circle et Carré, three of his paintings were not included in the exhibition at Galerie 23 from 18 April–1 May 1930, including a surrealist Itinerario plastico (Plastic itinerary; 1929), resonant of metaphysical painting, and Intervista con la materia (Interview with matter; 1930), where Prampolini revisited Jean Arp, Ernst and Joan Miró’s ‘organic surrealism’ from futurist and dada angles, deploying diverse material, e.g. lacquer, cork and metallised tinfoil.26 By 15 February 1931, Prampolini had joined Abstraction Création, rising from the ashes of Cercle et Carré. In the same year, he gave a lecture at the Conservatoire, illustrating aeropainting with samples of his own work. By then, he had refashioned his practice, asserting that he understood ‘aeropainting as a complete departure from the confines of the 24 Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 189. 25 The exhibition was reviewed by Marie-Antoinette de Helle who highlighted the paradoxical surrealist and anti-surrealist brand of Prampolini’s ‘idealism’, caught between a ‘spiritual conception’ and an anti-psychoanalytical attitude, cit. in Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 211. 26 Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 193. Works not exhibited were nonetheless included in the exhibition catalogue.

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tangible real, while we, unabated drivers of new plastic realities, are galvanised by an undercurrent of desire for the hidden forces of cosmic idealism’.27 In the article ‘L’esthéthique de la machine’ (Aesthetics of the machine), published in Cahier Jaune in 1932, Prampolini renounced his previous constructivist loyalties: ‘One needs to discriminate between external form and spirit of the machine. When we talked of nuts and bolts and cog-wheels, we were misunderstood.’28 ‘Enrico Prampolini et les aeropeintres futuristes italiens’ (Enrico Prampolini and the Italian aerofuturist painters) opened in March 1932 at the Galerie de la Renaissance in Paris. This was a watershed show that put Prampolini at the helm of aeropainting and the ‘spiritual’ turn of Italian futurism. The exhibition demonstrated the influence exerted by Prampolini on other aeropainters, e.g. Crali, Pippo Oriani, Dottori, Benedetta, and especially Fillia and Diulgheroff, who borrowed from him the motif of the sphere ‘to allude to a mystical and ascending spirituality’.29 It is perhaps ironical that this turn was coterminous with the emergence of a ‘machine art style’, following the exhibition ‘Machine art’ curated by Philip Johnson in the spring of 1934 at MOMA in New York. Although Alfred H. Barr, then director of MOMA and author of the catalogue, only mentioned Russian constructivism, the notion of machine art then entered the art historical vocabulary. Barr made extensive use of this new practice, praising the polish and clarity of machine-made objects and the beauty arising from industrial production divorced from subjectivity. For Barr, ‘the machine is not only a functional object, but a force that has direct impact on human life’.30 By then, Prampolini had taken a detour. In the article ‘La macchina naturista’ (The naturist machine; 15 July 1935) he praised the ‘analogical affinity between the machine and nature’.31 He further attempted to argue in favour of a mystical continuity between nature and the machine, where the latter was refashioned as an ‘energetic halo of humankind’.32 From 1938–39 onwards, Prampolini worked almost exclusively in aeropainting (see section 6.3b). His neo-organic, neo-romantic reformulation may echo Aby Warburg’s pathos formula (see section 5.4). The late Prampolini developed a ‘cosmic idealist’ and ‘polimaterica’ (polymaterial) version of machine art. ‘Polimaterismo’ was a novel technique of his 27 CRDAV, Fondo E. Prampolini, Opere e scritti di Prampolini, magazine article by Prampolini, ‘Aeropittura e superamento terrestre’, Oggi e domani, 30 November 1931, 5. 28 Prampolini, ‘L’esthétique de la machine et l’introspection mécanique’, Cahier Jaune (Paris: [n.p.], 1932), 11. 29 Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 223. 30 Broeckmann, Machine Art, 14. 31 Prampolini, ‘La macchina naturista’, La forza: mensile dei gruppi futuristi naturisti, I:1, 15 July 1935, [n.p.]. 32 Ibid.

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invention whereby incongruous materials, including industrial materials, were combined directly on the canvas to achieve tactile-mechanical results. In the early 1930s, while developing ‘cosmic idealism’, Prampolini began to work on a suite of canvases entitled ‘interviste con la materia’ (interviews with matter). He intended to explore the material and dynamic possibilities inherent in raw matter in an early futurist and surrealist framework, with reference to the works of Boccioni, and Arp, Ernst and Miró respectively.33 He repurposed matter for artistic aim, from objective to subjective, from real to symbolic and affective. These ‘interviews’ consisted of paper and fabric cuttings, fragments and threedimensional objects. They were assemblages of disparate material, of heterogeneous consistency, texture, appearance and touch. The materiality of the canvas itself was part of the desired effect. At the same time, this material was set against a visionary, symbolic and ‘cosmically idealist’ background.34 The first two ‘interviews’ were exhibited in early 1930 at the La Cible and at the XVII Venice Biennale. Both included parts of an airplane. Putting together unrelated materials and biomorphic forms, the first canvas alluded to planets and space travel against a background reminiscent of the earth’s crust; the second ‘intervista’ highlighted the shadow silhouette of a plane. Insertions of coloured material evoked earth and water as they would look like if contemplated from space.35 An ensuing debate on futurism’s ‘arte murale’ (mural art) versus novecento’s ‘pittura murale’ (mural painting) heated up in major dailies and reviews in the early 1930s (e.g. Quadrante, Gazzetta del Popolo, Quadrivio), offering Prampolini an opportunity to develop ‘polimaterismo’ further. In the article ‘Dalla pittura murale alle composizioni polimateriche’ (From mural painting to polymaterial compositions),36 he advocated ‘polymaterial expression’ as part of the contribution of fascismo to human progress. The futurist visionary synthesis between art and life, he continued, is best realised in ‘arte murale’, the social and aesthetic expression of the Italian nation working in concert. Mural art is not merely conversant with polymaterial art, both eschewing figurative representation in favour of ‘highly suggestive plastic abstractions’:37 its very raison d’être is inscribed in the constructive vernacular of polymaterial art. 33 Boccioni had theorised assemblages of different materials in his Manifesto tecnico della scultura futurista (1912). Miró, Ernst and Arp, in particular, had also sought surrealist transformations of nature and organic matter. 34 Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 227–8. 35 Ibid., 229–30. 36 Prampolini, ‘Dalla pittura murale alle composizioni polimateriche’, La Terra dei Vivi, 1:6 (10 September 1933), first published anonymously in Futurismo, 3 September 1933. 37 Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 234.

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Three months later, in December 1933, novecento issued a retort in the form of a Manifesto of mural painting, penned by Sironi, Campigli, Carra and Funi. Novecento dismissed Prampolini’s ‘materialist conception of life’, at odds with the great tradition of the Italian Renaissance. Stimulated by the competition between futurismo and novecento in acquiring State commissions, Prampolini issued a riposte in print a few months later.38 Here, he theorised ‘polimaterismo’, rejecting novecento’s canonical ways in favour of a novel approach, the more innovative the more it reoriented the canon towards primitive art, and the plasticity and social relevance of architecture, best suited to the needs of the mechanical civilisation.39 Polymaterial art was predicated entirely on materials and the evocative power embedded in their ontological materiality. The only Italian artist to join Abstraction-Creation, Prampolini exhibited on 2–14 February 1934 at 44 avenue de Wagram. By now, ‘polimaterismo’ and ‘cosmic idealism’ had joined forces. Prampolini integrated surreal and cosmic visions with collages, an array of different materials, e.g. stone, metal and cut-up paper, laid onto geographical and cartographic outlines, melding together organic and mechanical features. Prampolini toured Hamburg, Berlin and Nice between February and July 1934. His rebuttal of Hitler’s anti-avant-garde speech threw into relief his transnational loyalties. While lamenting diminishing interest and flagging sales,40 he became entangled in a disagreement with Marinetti, voicing his desire to emancipate himself from handouts.41 The First national exhibition of mural plastic and Fascist construction of 14 November 1934–11 January 1935 at Palazzo Ducale in Genova, was co-curated by Prampolini with Fillia, De Filippis and Marinetti. Prampolini exhibited large polymaterial murals designed for recreational spaces. These works are dialogical with contemporary mural art by Léger, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Socialist realist art in the USSR, in keeping with Prampolini’s international stature. Tensions that followed a year later in Paris exposed the futurist compromise with the Fascist regime. A futurist exhibition at Jeu de Paume (‘Les futuristes italiens’; 3–27 April 1935) revealed to the French public the extent of this alliance and related reliance of contemporary Italian art from State commissions. The collusion sent shock waves across the French and international intellectual scene, at the same time as surrealism and Communism were beginning to part ways. Abstraction-Creation ceased to list Prampolini among its members. Italian futurism was erased virtually overnight from all cultural undertakings in France.42 38 39 40 41 42

Prampolini, ‘Al di là della pittura, verso i polimaterici’, Stile Futurista, I:2 (August 1934). Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 235–6. Prampolini to Depero, 30 May 1934, cit. in Lista (ed.), Enrico Prampolini: carteggio futurista, 85. Cit. in Lista (ed.), Enrico Prampolini: carteggio futurista, 86. For further details, see Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 241–2.

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Prampolini continued to produce polymaterial art, including the collage Metamorfosi cosmica (Cosmic metamorphosis) made of sandpaper, iron-sand, tree bark and cork. Still based in Paris, where the Front Populaire ruled and Benjamin penned a rebuttal of Marinetti’s manifesto Futurist war aesthetics, Prampolini turned towards Italy.43 In 1937, he painted two panels for the Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques (International exhibition of arts and technics; 24 May–25 November) designed to reinvigorate interest for an industrial modernity. Prampolini’s polymaterial production continued all through the year. He filled a Stato d’animo plastico marino (Marine plastic state of being) with material insertions, e.g. a sea horse, a little lifebelt, a piece of rope, a splintered mother of pearl, intended as visual supports to stimulate the imagination and ‘spiritualise the life cycle’. Prampolini believed that the intrinsic value of polymaterial art stemmed from an authentic ontology of ‘living things’, their biological immanence and kinship with the cosmic cycle. Automatismo polimaterico ‘C’ (Polymaterial automatic ‘C’) hinted at these biological processes. Automatismo polimaterico ‘F’ was a recovered table furnished with an autumn leaf, the essiccated frame of a fruit, a fallen branch, a white mass of cotton wool, a bird feather and a blue object reminiscent of the carcass of an insect: the cluster resonated of the boxed-in assemblages of Joseph Cornell.44 Enmeshed with cosmic idealism and aeropainting, polymaterial art became the mark of Prampolini’s late style. From mechanical beginnings, through to cosmic-idealism and aerofuturism, Prampolini’s art acquired an exquisitely modern ‘bio-plastic’ manner. In the volume Arte polimaterica (verso un’arte collettiva?) (Polymaterial art (towards a collective art?); 1944) Prampolini reaffirmed both the continuity and originality of his polimaterici. He reproduced a seminal polymaterial piece: Béguinage (1914), a collection of feathers, lacework and everyday objects lying on the surface of a wooden table, a synaesthetic orchestration capable of ‘elevating the most unlikely materials to sensorial, emotional and artistic values’.45 New dynamics renegotiated the relationship between artistry and individual art work, allowing them to converge. The polymaterial artist needed to enter an automatic state in order to understand the ‘direct, elemental, primordial’ language of matter, a ‘secret resonance’ facilitating conversations with materials, ‘interviews’.46 In a montage of fragments of objects à la Cornell, Prampolini pursued the ‘symbolic and evocative power’ of matter, ‘its ability to become attuned with the human spirit’.47 43 44 45 46 47

Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 245. Ibid., 247. Cit. in Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 271. Ibid. Ibid., 273.

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Reconstituted through the conduit of raw matter, the machine continued to frame Prampolini’s work to the end, as is testified by the exhibition ‘Plastic arts and mechanical civilisation’ co-curated by Prampolini and Leonardo Sinisgalli in Rome at Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (20 May–20 June 1955), hardly one year before the artist died. The show showcased abstract paintings by Arp, Baumeister, Accardi, Munari, Bloc, Veronesi, Hewett, Gorin, Dorazio, Reggiani, juxtaposed with authentic industrial machines lent by car manufacturers Alfa Romeo, the Ansaldo steel works and the dockyards Cantieri dell’Adriatico, among others.48 Industrial technology was still an overriding concern, alongside a ‘spiritual’ drift in the new playground of deep metaphysical and cosmic spaces, where the machine becomes pulverised. I opened this monograph with Pannaggi’s paradigmatic representation of the Rape of Europe in mechanical key. Prampolini’s own Il ratto d’Europa, a painting dated 1948,49 stands as the opposite bookend of the mechanical culture of postwar futurismo: from industrial mechanical forms, informed with a poetics of social justice, to abstract, ossified and bloodless lines; from naked technology stripped bare of nostalgia, to a biomorphic ‘spiritual idealism’ yearning for the intangible heights of sky and cosmos; from raw ideology, to lyrical fideism; from the artificial, to the natural or, even, to the immaterial: a string of code, a bundle of data (see Conclusion: Ex machina). 5.1b Mechanical theatre and film Theatre was even more closely associated with machines and mechanics than visual work. It is precisely on the stage that Prampolini explored and pursued the conceptual extent of his international ‘macchinismo’, achieving results of compelling modernity. Historically, machines played a central role on the stage, typifying performing arts since antiquity. Borrowing from the Greek ‘mechané’, derived, in turn, from the Doric ‘machanà’, the Latin noun ‘machina’ described stage devices deployed in the second century bc by Plautus and Ennius. ‘Machinae’ described both material and metaphorical contraptions. The two meanings (e.g. material apparatus and artifice or trick) travelled in tandem through history, overlapping, for example, in the practice of the ‘deus ex machina’, favoured by Euripides, which referred to both a narrative device and a complex technical contraption. Even though Aristotle was the first, and by no means the last, to criticise expedient recourse to the ‘deus ex machina’, this device enjoyed renewed popularity in modern times. 48 Ibid., 279. 49 The painting is in Rome, at Galleria Giulia. It is reproduced in Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, fig n. 69.

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Theatre October in post-revolutionary Russia welcomed mechanical contraptions and machines on stage, in anti-bourgeois and anti-hierarchical function. Mechanisation encompassed stage construction and the bodies of the actors and the audience. Founded on an ‘idiosyncratic appropriation of Taylorism’,50 Meyehold’s biomechanics aimed to denaturalise drama and optimise the body movement of actors, replicating the automatic motion of mechanisms and machines. Meyerhold aspired to mirror contemporary labour environments, the factory and the industrial practices therein. His emphasis on the mechanisation of human bodies was designed to expose the social and political implications of machine technology in capitalist economies. Based on streamlined movement, careful coordination, gymnastics and acrobatics, biomechanics echoed in futurist experimental theatre, from Pannaggi and Paladini (section 4.3a) to Giannina Censi (section 6.4b). In his capacity as ‘futurism’s foremost theatre artist’,51 Prampolini was situated at the hub of the mechanical revolution sweeping European theatre. His innovations thoroughly transformed stage design in the 1920s, restoring the mechanical ‘soul’ of theatre and taking it further, as Anton Giulio Bragaglia put it.52 Prampolini’s stage revolution was rooted in early conceptual work. In the second half of March 1915, Prampolini learned that Balla and Depero were preparing a manifesto describing self-moving audio-visual assemblages, the ‘complessi plastici’ (plastic groupings), stemming from their work on objects in motion. Prampolini described his own research in an independent manifesto: Costruzioni assolute di moto-rumore (Absolute constructions of motor-noise). Following Marinetti’s urban bias, he advanced the notion of ‘protoplasmatic’ plastic assemblages, which could be adapted to larger scale, e.g. architecture and urban planning. Accompanied by a letter lamenting his isolation, Prampolini sent this manifesto to Boccioni. His hubris was quashed when the futurist headquarters ignored it in favour of Balla and Depero’s Futurist reconstruction of the universe manifesto. While the two approaches were divergent (Prampolini’s assemblages were meant to symbolise the underlying dynamism of the universe and his method was monomaterial whereas Balla and Depero’s strove towards abstracted simplification, upholding a playful pleasure principle), Prampolini claimed the right to primogeniture. He communicated his resentment to the futurist triumvirate (Marinetti, Boccioni, Carra) and engaged in repeated altercations with Balla. While recognising Balla’s 50 Raunig, Thousand Machines, 43. 51 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 443. See also 276–7 and 284. 52 A900, Archivio E. Prampolini, folder Materiale per studio su Prampolini scenografo, article by A. G. Bragaglia, ‘Variazioni sulla Regìa’, Ottobre (1936), 16: ‘the restitution of theatre to its traditional technical means, beginning with the machines, much abhorred by men of letters’ is the only means to ‘save theatre from its current paralysis, brought about by parasites’.

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‘magnificent conception’, Prampolini lamented the delay in publishing his manifesto in private correspondence with Jannelli. In a gauche attempt to strike a happy middle, Jannelli made matters worse: he brought out Prampolini’s manifesto but blotted out the date and inserted a paragraph suggesting that Prampolini’s ideas were inspired by Balla and Depero’s manifesto.53 Boccioni’s rage thundered down on Prampolini, adding to his removal from futurismo (see above).54 Notwithstanding these turbulent developments, 1915 proved a rich and productive year. At the end of the summer, Prampolini moved home from 133 via Principe Umberto to a new studio in 89 via Tanaro, where he worked until he relocated to Paris in the mid1920s. Shortly before his move, on 12 May 1915, he brought out Futurist scenography and choreography, the first manifesto in Italy to fully conceptualise the deployment of moving mechanisms and mechanical stages. Prampolini proposed to overhaul stage practice, shifting the focus entirely onto scene and stage architecture. Futurist scenography echoed both Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo, arising suspicion of plagiarism, and Depero’s Complessità plastica – gioco libero futurista (Plastic complexity – futurist free play), which was predicated on the search for ‘plastic’ dynamism and the binary light–colour. Both Depero and Prampolini relied on innovative ‘plastic groupings’. While Depero commingled organic and inorganic, natural and artificial, human and machine, however, Prampolini decidedly veered towards the machine: abstract, geometrical, artificial, automatic and excluding human intervention.55 Central to Prampolini’s theatre was, in fact, the requirement to elide the human element, and replace it with hydraulic, electrical, gaseous, metallic avatars, a roster of devices designed to mechanise the stage. Stripped of human presence, Prampolini’s theatre was silent, devoid of language and logos. It was architectural and formalist, hinged upon naked space and time.56 Consonant with innovations by Edward Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia, Prampolini’s call for a dehumanisation of the stage allowed him to develop a so-called atmospheric and three-dimensional theatre, placing new emphasis on moving scenery, which he viewed as fully integrated in the body of the performance. Dynamic lighting was a further novelty. Neon tubing irradiating light while in motion dematerialised the stage, the random dances of light shafts constructing its 53 Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 51–8. 54 These developments prompted Prampolini to undertake a serious reflection on the role and direction taken by the avant-garde, advocating ‘mestiere’ (mastery) and the binary artist–artisan, alongside emerging intellectual groups such as plastic values and the postwar reviews La Ronda, La Brigata and La Raccolta – Siligato, ‘La Casa d’Arte Italiana’, 19–20. 55 S. Sinisi, ‘Prampolini artista scenografo’, in F. Menna, S. Sinisi and M. Prampolini (eds), Prampolini scenografo (Rome: [n.p.], [1974]), 7. 56 F. Menna, ‘Il sistema scenico di Enrico Prampolini’, in Menna, Sinisi and Prampolini (eds), Prampolini scenografo, 4.

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confined space, self-illuminating and continuously transforming.57 The painted backdrop of the traditional theatre was replaced with electric and mechanical objects whose purpose was inscribed in their volume, plasticity, light and dynamism. The stage was no longer a shell or a container, but, rather, a constructive laboratory, traversed by beams of light and set in motion by solids and three-dimensional objects. Moving metallic backdrops and coloured gases further activated the stage, replacing natural human dynamism with artificial automatism. Prampolini’s innovations extended to films developed in the same period of time. Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s part-realist, part-surrealist film Perfido incanto (Perfidious charm; 1916) resorted to surreal scenography comprised of optical devices, e.g. concave and convex mirrors, prisms and lenses, which deformed images. The special effects elicited strong reactions in the audience, especially ‘scandal and myrth’.58 Both Prampolini and Pannaggi contributed to the set design, Prampolini above all, who also took on the art directorship, set and costume design of a further film scripted and directed by Anton Giulio Bragaglia in 1916: Thaïs. Thaïs is the only full-length futurist feature film surviving to this day. Aesthetically, it was entirely framed by Prampolini, using an abstract, graphic, stylised and geometrical style frozen in claustrophobic repetitions. The film premiered on 4 October 1917 in Rome and was greatly influential on European avant-garde film, e.g. Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920), L’Herbier’s L’inhumaine (The inhuman woman; 1924), Protazanov’s Aelita (1924) and Lang’s Metropolis (1927). In particular, surrealist film borrowed the appearance on screen of psychological figurations and phantoms.59 Hailed as an exponent of metacinema, almost postmodern in its parodical exposition of the tricks and mechanisms deployed to seduce viewers, Thaïs explodes the myth of the movie star. The empowered woman protagonist of the same name is unclassifiable by the standards of futurist gender binaries. Rather, she embodies ‘the elements of technology that remained uncanny for the futurists, something atavistically inhuman, dark and uncontrollable’.60 The surprising movements of the actress and her dialogical relationship with the director pose a continuous challenge, exploding the femme fatale cliché, bypassing the passive immobility of the camera and ultimately exposing the fundamental artificiality 57 A900, Archivio E. Prampolini, folder Materiale per studio su Prampolini scenografo, draft typescript with autograph alterations by Prampolini, ‘La scenografia nel Teatro del Colore’, Balza, 1915, [n.p.]. 58 Drudi Gambillo and Fiori (eds), Archivi del futurismo, II, 499. 59 L. Re, ‘Futurism, film and the return of the repressed: learning from Thaïs’, MLN, 123:1 (2008), 129–30: ‘Extremely modern and experimental’, the film re-elaborates the trite cliché of the femme fatale, a covert exposition of the ‘return of the repressed’, or the ‘unconscious, profound and ultimately ineradicable D’Annunzianism of futurism’. 60 Ibid., 143.

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of the medium.61 Prampolini returned to his passion for cinema in the late 1920s (see below). Besides the manifestos, Prampolini’s response to Depero’s Plastic ballets was a ‘drama of marionettes’ of his own: Drame pour marionettes Matoum et Tévibar, ou histoire édifiant et récréative du vrai et du faux poète (Drama of marionettes Matoum and Tévibar, or edifying and recreational story of the true and false poet; 1919) on a script by Albert-Birot and first performed at Odescalchi Theatre in Rome. Prampolini designed the costumes and stage settings, centring the show on alternating light and colour. In personal correspondence to Albert-Birot of 18 June 1919, Prampolini vividly described their ‘phantasmagoric illusion’, ‘Matoum’s luminous head, arising furious clappings each time it switched on’ and the ‘fantastic illumination flooding the stage’.62 Embodying dynamic chromatic forms, marionettes of various sizes interacting mechanically on the stage replaced human actors. ‘There were no indications as to the construction of the marionettes, except that their heads had to be made of transparent material so that they could be illuminated […]. By means of strings they had to be linked to a central mechanism, which allowed a narrow spectrum of movements when they were pulled.’63 The puppets were stylised, tubular and geometric: The ventriloquist doctor, for example, is dressed in rather normal street clothes, but his eyes are made of binoculars and add a certain parodistic touch. The Dame de la Cour is an entirely cubist-futurist construction, where utensils (e.g. the umbrella she uses to beat up Tévibar) are integrated into the costume. Much more anthropomorphic forms are employed for the two poets, except their heads are illuminated from within.64

The skull of Matoum was transparent and internally illuminated. All eyes converged on his blazing head, smouldering fierily on stage, transfixing the audience. The stage acquired depth and, through strategic use of colour, emotional relevance. Prampolini’s disarticulated figures, transparent luminous planes and the dynamic lights darting all over the stage echoed cubist-futurist productions, e.g. Malevich’s design for the opera Victory over the Sun (1913). A further inspiration was Vittorio Podrecca’s Teatro dei Piccoli (Theatre of the little ones), a Roman venture opening on 22 February 1914 and attracting vast audiences straight away. Podrecca’s marionettes moved mechanically alongside the orchestra, like musical instruments.65 A 61 Not surprisingly, Marinetti’s reception was ‘decidedly cool’ and he refused to promote Thaïs as an example of futurist film, leading to the demise of Bragaglia’s production company Novissima Film – ibid., 134. 62 Cit. in Lista (ed.), Enrico Prampolini: carteggio futurista, 26. 63 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 282. 64 Ibid.; see also Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 88–90. 65 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 280 and 272: Prampolini’s ‘Moto-rumoristic costumes for futurist dances’ aligned with Podrecca’s puppet theatre.

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further convergence was the optical and constructive experimentation of the Bauhaus, e.g. Moholy-Nagy’s Licht-Raum-Modulator, where coloured lights formed dynamic patterns and, in accordance with Gestalt, light superseded pigment. Prampolini’s production led to the multi-coloured illuminated architectures of Magnetic theatre (see below).66 Leaving Italy in search of contacts and a platform for his innovative theatre work, in 1921 Prampolini was in Dresden, where he familiarised himself with mechanical stage technologies, e.g. the revolving stage, the sky-dome equipped with sophisticated spotlight and arc-light, mobile cycloramas and hydraulic elevators.67 In October 1921, Prampolini relocated to Prague with the sponsorship of Marinetti. In Prague he acquired an insider knowledge of Czech, Russian and Eastern European theatre to add to his familiarity with French drama. He also took part in an exhibition of modern Italian art and celebrations of Dante Alighieri: Vystava Moderníno Umění Italského Koslavé Danteové. He also staged nine (or sixteen) pieces at the Svandovo Theatre, including Vengono (They are coming), in co-direction with Marinetti but designing single-handedly the scenes and the costumes. In these short plays, performed on a streamlined geometrical stage, Prampolini trialled a rotating stage. The action proceeded in rapid succession, almost simultaneously, by way of a mechanism speeding up pace and colour shifts, fulfilling the tenets of synthetic theatre. In particular, Prampolini described Vengono as an interacting ‘drama of objects’ and ‘synthesis of animated objects’, an interplay of lights and shadows snaking round the furniture in a dining room, ‘replete with life and individuality’ as if was performed by human actors.68 Beginning to earn him recognition in futurist circles, these projects were finessed between 1923 and 1925 in subsequent work at the National Theatre in Prague and in a 1924 manifesto, where he postulated a fully abstract theatre. ‘The international doors had opened for Prampolini’.69 In January 1922, he exhibited scenes and costumes for two ‘mechanical ballets’, La notte metallica (Metal night) and La rinascita dello spirito (Spirit’s rebirth), at the Tentoonstelling International Theatre in Amsterdam.70 A second successful season of futurist pantomimes was staged in Prague in 1922 where Prampolini designed costumes and 66 A. Nagel, ‘Instead of cathedrals, machines for living’, in Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time (London: Thames and Hudson, 2012), 255. 67 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 410. See also A900, Archivio E. Prampolini, folder Fascicolo miscellaneo Prampolini, draft by Prampolini, heavily annotated, ‘Discorso/lezione sulla scenotecnica’, [n.d.], 1–9, passim. The folder contains biographies of European stage designers. 68 Prampolini, ‘L’evoluzione della scenotecnica’, orig. in Lo Schermo, June 1936, now in Sinisi (ed.), ‘Varieté’: Prampolini e la scena (Turin: Martano, 1974), 119; Sinisi, ‘Prampolini artista scenografo’, 10. 69 Siligato, ‘La Casa d’Arte Italiana’, 31. 70 These may have been preparatory for dances to be performed in Berlin – see Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 447.

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sets for Marinetti’s play The Fire Drum. Towards the end of May 1922, Prampolini attended the International congress of artists in Düsseldorf, probably on the invitation of van Doesburg. The conference proved formative. Between 1922 and 1923, he prepared a Cappuccetto rosso (Red Riding Hood) for Podrecca’s puppet theatre. The twice-successful Prague show travelled to Berlin in 1923. Prampolini further produced stage designs for Pratella’s Three Dances of War, based on 1919 sketches, and music inspired by the poem ‘La guerra’ (War) by Valentine de Saint-Point, inspired, in turn, by an ancient French ballad. A new production with scenes, costumes and choreography by Prampolini, was eventually staged between 30 January and 20 February 1923 at Teatro degli Indipendenti as part of a programme of dances by Jia Ruskaja. Prampolini’s bold red and green lights and economic stage design were a hit. The production of a little known play, Night Drivers by Folgore and Bontempelli, was also thriving. Performed as a marionette show in April 1923 at Bottega del Diavolo, Prampolini replaced Podrecca’s anthropomorphic marionettes with robotic puppets. Prampolini designed costumes for Casavola’s Danza dell’elica (Dance of the Propeller) which premiered on 1 Apil 1923 at Teatro Verdi in Gorizia, starring Elena Ivanov. Casavola described it as a four-part composition: preparing and starting the engine; flying; elation of flying and frantic ending when the propeller was smashed to smithereens. ‘To increase the metallic sound of the orchestra, he [Prampolini] asked for a wind machine and a metal sheet to be incorporated. Some reviews indicated that real petrol fumes invaded the auditorium as the piece progressed.’71 These productions stressed Prampolini’s architectural and choreographic employment of colour on stage, a staple of his practice by now.72 In March 1924 Prampolini brought out a further, experimental, four-dimensional stage comprised of three spatial dimensions plus a fourth: movement.73 Drawing on Appia and Craig’s stage, Prampolini’s did away with human actors entirely. Prampolini contended that actors were not merely useless, but rather detrimental, reductive and redundant, emphasising their necessary subordination to stage architecture. The actor was replaced with ‘kinetic-chromatic-rumoristic’ mechanisms, whose ‘mechanical ritual’ was best suited to fulfil the vocation of modern drama. In the absence of the 71 Ibid., 447–9: the propeller’s costume was a prototype (see sections 6.4b and 6.4c). It ‘covered the whole body of the dancer and had as its main feature a gigantic, silver-coloured propeller with a red and black disc in the middle. The head was encased by a silver helmet and the arms had paddle-like wings attached to them. Concentric rings in vivid colours covered the aviator’s costume and made his chest look like a target.’ 72 Prampolini, ‘L’atmosfera scenica del teatro del colore rivive nel tempo e nello spazio’, L’Impero, 11 July 1923, cit. in Sinisi (ed.), ‘Varieté’, 71. 73 He described the four-dimensional stage in the technical manifesto L’atmosfera scenica futurista, published in Noi.

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human actor, the machine could triumph, leading to a new ‘individuality’: the ‘actorspace’.74 ‘Compenetrating’, the ‘human element’ with the ‘environmental element’, Prampolini replaced the stage with ‘electrodynamic polydimensional architecture of luminous plastic elements in movement in the centre of the theatrical concavity’.75 No less febrile were Prampolini’s activities in 1925, when he worked between Paris, Vienna and Rome, as he briefly related in correspondence to Kurek dated 10 September 1925.76 In Paris he had hoped to set up the Ballets italiens, a mime company to complement Diaghilev’s Ballets russes and Maré’s Ballets suédois (see below). His most notable achievement, however, revolved around a one-off prototype: a ‘teatro magnetico’ (Magnetic theatre). This was an articulated and modular architectural stage which brought together Prampolini’s decade-long experiments with architectural models and darting light shafts. It was ‘a huge and complicated stage machine […] a completely abstract or nonobjective composition of moving three-dimensional elements, light, and sound’.77 This complex construction consisted of ‘movable platforms, rotating discs, and other kinetic elements operating on different levels and planes. Parallel to the scenic action of these mechanical elements there unfolds a chromatic lightshow produced by an apparatus of projection, refraction, and diffusion.’78 And further, it was ‘a completely abstract machine which would use space and mass, movement, light and sound to create a performance. The performance created by the shifting and moving light which fell upon the parts of the machine was supposed to bring back “spiritual virginity to scenic matter”’.79 ‘Teatro magnetico’ was also equipped with a sound track: a suggestive counterpoint of human voices and metallic noises. Despite Prampolini’s desire to abolish the scenic arc, Magnetic theatre was designed to be viewed as a proscenium peephole stage, underpinned by a non-utilised but still predominant stage floor.80 The structure carried metaphysical and medianic suggestions, highlighted by the ectoplasmic beams of light traversing the stage, which echoed closely the illuminated globes through which renowned mediums of the time materialised ghosts in mesmerising seances.81 In a theatre stripped bare of material supports, the fluid vagaries of Prampolini’s aural luminous abstractions ruled the show. 74 Prampolini, ‘L’atmosfera scenica futurista’, cit. in G. Ballo (ed.), Prampolini verso i polimaterici (Modena: Galleria Fonte d’Abisso, 1989), 25. 75 Prampolini, ‘Futurist scenic atmosphere’, cit. in Kirkby and Kirkby, Futurist Performance, 226 and 229 respectively. 76 Cit. in Lista (ed.), Enrico Prampolini: carteggio futurista, 137. 77 Kirkby and Kirkby, Futurist Performance, 86 and 87. 78 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 445–6; Sinisi, ‘Prampolini artista scenografo’, 10. 79 Taylor, Futurism, 70. 80 Kirkby and Kirkby, Futurist Performance, 89. 81 Cigliana, Futurismo esoterico, 257–9.

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Magnetic theatre abolished the playful and the grotesque, joining the technological constructivism of Schmidt, Kiesler, Loew and Schlemmer.82 Exhibited in 1925 at the Expo in Paris, ‘teatro magnetico’ was there awarded the Grand Prix d’Art Théâtrale. Prampolini was praised for bringing his powerful re-envisioning of avant-garde theatre, a ‘radical and revolutionary proposition’,83 to lucid and persuasive conclusions. In stage design for O’Neill’s The Adding Machine, performed in 1926 at the Guild Theatre in New York, Prampolini focused on the depersonalisation engendered by machines.84 In November 1926, he founded a Compagnie de la pantomime italienne (Company of Italian pantomime) based at the Théâtre de la Madeleine in Paris. Scheduled to become operative in 12 May 1927, the company was to stage twelve pantomimes in Paris before touring Italy in the following year. Prampolini fronted the company and was responsible for recruiting cast, script writing, directing, costumes and stage design, in partnership with the dancer Maria Ricotti, who also acted as impresario, and the sponsor Hansy, Ricotti’s lover.85 Despite the violent altercations with Ricotti and other constraints, e.g. poor execution of costumes,86 Prampolini implemented his rules, rendering the action automatic and regulated entirely by visual rhythms, on the model of Diaghilev’s Russian ballets and the Swedish ballets of Rolf de Maré. Frequently performed in small clusters, the pantomimes were multi-media shows including music, film, puppet-like gesturing and movement. Action and settings were rigorously mechanical. All elements were controlled like perfectly oiled mechanisms,87 fulfilling a purist mechanical agenda.88 Prampolini’s pantomimes included film sequences, stills and décor: Prampolini worked closely together with the dancer and choreographer Vatslav Veltchek, who

82 Lista, ‘Prampolini scenografo’ and ‘La ricostruzione del modellino del teatro magnetico’, in Crispolti et al. (eds), Prampolini: dal futurismo all’informale, 128 and 196. Other sources may have been van de Velde’s 1914 Werkbundtheater in Cologne, Adolph Linnebach’s 1913 Staatsschauspielhaus in Dresden, Max Reinhardt’s 1919 Großes Schauspielhaus in Berlin, Alfred Roller’s 1921 Redoutensaal in Vienna, the plans for Oskar Strnad’s 1923 Ringbühne in Vienna and for Hans Poelzig’s 1921 Neues Festspielhaus in Salzburg – Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 444. 83 Sinisi, ‘Prampolini artista scenografo’, 11. Prampolini’s Magnetic theatre is likely to have inspired Marinetti’s Total theatre (see section 2.3). 84 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 449. Also notable are Prampolini’s designs for Marinetti’s play Vulcano, premiered on 31 March 1926 at Teatro Valle, especially his colourful lighting and lavaprocessing machinery. 85 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 449–50. Lista dwells on this turbulent collaboration in ‘Prampolini futurista europeo’, fn. 19, 19. 86 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 459–60 and 463; Kirkby and Kirby, Futurist Performance, 99–100. The pantomimes were frequently discussed in private correspondence, e.g. Prampolini’s letter to Pratella of 23 September 1926, cit. in Lista (ed.), Enrico Prampolini: carteggio futurista, 199. 87 Angelini, Teatro e spettacolo, 197. 88 Sinisi (ed.), ‘Varieté’, 35.

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went on to devise ballet sequences for the films of René Clair. In the original programme, Prampolini emphasised the mechanical inspiration of this ‘mimic play’, a ‘new type of spectacle’ resulting from ‘simultaneity between the art of time and that of space’, in short, ‘the creation of psychological synchronism through the simultaneous perception of music, design, and movement’.89 Dance was prioritised over the spoken word. Unlike Appia’s stage, space was shallow and two-dimensional here, as were the silhouette-like performers. Performers and setting became a single unit, intertwining along the mechanical arc of the performer’s movement.90 The principles of Magnetic theatre were adhered to more closely in Prampolini’s Les trois moments (Three moments), scripted by Folgore with music by Casavola. This ‘transition from the bucolic world of mythology to the electrified and mechanised modern age’ featured a nymph and satyr eventually ‘sucked into the hustle and bustle of the metropolis’.91 An unusual take on Nijinsky’s Après-midi d’un faune, choreographed for the Ballets russes in 1912, Prampolini’s mythological figures renounced ‘nature’ in order to ‘take a stroll in the mechanised civilisation’ as Vasari put it.92 The second part of the show was, in fact, performed entirely by machines. It consisted of a dialogue between machines against the backdrop of red lights emanating from a glowing red jukebox, magnesium flashes, a fan whirring and a lift going up and down. The neutral stage provided suitable background for a dance of coloured lights accompanied by double basses operated by Russolo’s ‘archetto enarmonico’. Prampolini devised choreography, lighting, costumes and sets, including décor filmed by Jacques-Bernard Brunius and Edmond T. Gréville. Regrettably, this production was not staged. The better-known Il mercante di cuori – Le marchand de coeurs (Merchant of hearts; 1927) ensued from another collaboration with Casavola. In ‘best futurist vein’,93 this multi-media show reinvigorated the poetics of the machine, hybridising mechanical theatre with the danses nègres and the syncopated rhythms and Taylorist tempo of jazz. Prampolini’s 1926 preparatory sketches ‘indicate hanging frames, screens, symbolic elements, and even abstract human figures that apparently moved during the performance’, e.g. lifesize, abstracted female silhouettes, articulated and hanging on cords, performing alongside human actors.94 Three marionettes were lowered on the stage, shaking their modular, disarticulated bodies and suddenly exploding for 89 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 450 and Kirkby and Kirkby, Futurist Performance, 101 respectively. Both Berghaus and M. and V. N. Kirkby provide circumstantial descriptions of individual shows. 90 See also Kirkby and Kirkby, Futurist Performance, 104. 91 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 451. 92 R. Vasari, ‘La pantomima futurista’, in L’Impero, 30 August 1927, cit. in Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 452–3 and 460; Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 165. 93 Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 169. 94 Kirkby and Kirkby, Futurist Performance, 80 and 110.

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effect, stunning the audience. Puppets and doubles emphasised human mechanisation and artificiality. Veltchek danced in the eponymous role of the merchant of hearts, wearing costumes designed by Prampolini. A black disc was placed on the costumes at the level of the heart, echoing El Lissitzky’s 1921 sketches for Victory of the Sun. Short films by Brunius and Gréville projected ‘dynamic arabesque’ on the walls.95 The sets were abstract and unadorned. The finale was an orgiastic crescendo that featured collective living in the metropolis entitled Cocktail (Figure 5.2). An homage to Léger’s painting Le Siphon (1924), it was inspired by Cocteau’s surrealist ballet Le boeuf sur le toit ou the nothing-happens bar (The ox on the roof: the nothing-doing bar; 1924) and, probably, Depero’s publicity posters for Campari drinks, which included a large siphon and glass. Marinetti wrote the script and Mix the music, a medley of jazzy tunes played on noise intoners to achieve a sound reminiscent of the ‘racket, buzzing and hissing’96 of moving machines. Humans merged with machines, the primitive with the contemporary, performing a mechanical dance to the tune of modern times. The mnemonic and cultural semantics of the bar in modernity, ‘where the bartender, one of the most important figures of the Age, performs his syncretic magic in the creation of cocktails, the metaphor par excellence for the form of cosmopolitan modernity that the city was experiencing’,97 are powerfully at work here. Prampolini laid out two enormous grey panels, a replica of the Parisian bar of the time made of zinc. The barman was equipped with a glossy, steel-like shaker. A screen placed above eye level projected images of urban electrical billboards. The stage further featured three large glasses made of coloured wood and a colossal metallic siphon, a ‘modern totem’ spraying coloured lights on the dancers in the end scene. Dancers who imitated bottles and wore colourful, label-like costumes and metallic top hats reminiscent of metal corks, a customer and a black barman, mixing liqueurs in a cocktail, danced a syncopated rhythm resulting in orgiastic chaos. The model was the frantic, mechanical jazzy style of the danses nègres. The performance was further energised by a ‘bombardment’ of coloured light shafts criss-crossing the stage and the black-tinted backdrop of the bar. ‘The execution of the piece was carried out with consummate skill. Lights, movements, and music worked in close harmony. The colourful costumes were made of waxed material so that they reflected the powerful light projections.’98 This remarkable show, however, lacked coherence due to the financial compromises plaguing the production. This extraordinary triumph of the machine in

95 96 97 98

Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 454 and 456; Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 167. Sinisi, ‘Prampolini artista scenografo’, 12. Davidson, Jazz-Age Barcelona, 186. Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 456–7.

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5.2 Enrico Prampolini, Cocktail, 1927

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a metropolitan setting failed to obtain the credit it deserved,99 arousing hostility in the surrealists who resented its constructivist underpinnings. In 1928 the pantomimes travelled to Italy, managed, choreographed, directed and designed entirely by Prampolini. Casavola was employed as music director and Wy Magito as prima ballerina. Trained in Berlin, Magito’s dancing style was ‘mechanical-grotesque’ in the manner of Parnak, consisting of automatic gestures, a blend of commedia dell’arte and the syncopated rhythms of jazz in parodic function. In Turin, on 6 and 7 March 1928, Prampolini performed a three-hour long show consisting of ten pieces: four of the performances that had been most successful in Paris, including Cocktail and Il mercante di cuori, and six additional ones including Folgore’s L’ora del fantoccio, where marionettes highlighted the bio-mechanic metamorphosis of human into robot. The reprisal of Cocktail, where mechanical figures were transfixed by electric shudders, constructed and deconstructed at will, and where humans were constrained and abstracted within a dummy identity, marked Prampolini’s turn towards a dystopian approach to technology.100 The notable evening was summarised on 7 March 1928, in a column of the Turin daily La Stampa: Magnetic lights, cubism, plastic syntheses and surprising music, and all dominated by a kind of mechanisation which distorted gestures and bodies, fixed them in suggestive geometric expressions, rearranged them all of a sudden in sharp and cutting movements as if impelled by a striding and frenzied machine or a shock from an electric discharge.101

The surprise with which this overwhelmingly mechanical show was received was repeated in two performances of the same year of selected excerpts in Milan, at Bossi Music Academy (16–22 March) and Teatro Lirico (21–22 March). Prampolini’s translation of the machine into the language of dance impressed the critic of the Milan daily Corriere della Sera.102 Prampolini’s pantomimes were beginning to wear thin in an age which witnessed increasingly sophisticated music-hall performance. The pantomime’s hyper-technological approach to stage design and architecture, lighting and music and their emphasis on silence, however, continued to push the boundaries of machine art, achieving embodied expression in the dances of Magito, Zdenka Podhajska and, especially, Censi’s ‘aerodances’ (see section 6.4).103 Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 173–4. Ibid., 178. Cit. in Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 459. Anon, ‘Ultime teatrali: “pantomima futurista” al Lirico’, Corriere della Sera, 22 March 1928, cit. in Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 459 and 461. 103 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 463. 99 100 101 102

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As evidenced in his heavily annotated archival papers, Prampolini continued to reflect on stage design, both as concerns theatre work and through the lens of film. In the late 1920s, in fact, Prampolini was to revisit his early passion for cinema. The futuristi had impressed a conceptual mark on cubo-futurist cinema, straddling a novel aesthetics centred on the machine (see section 2.5). Despite its scant output, futurist film seduced a score of 1920s filmmakers – in 1929 Antonin Artaud wrote to Marinetti offering his services to Italian cinema. In the wake of the credit acquired in this field, Prampolini was invited to speak alongside twenty-five other practitioners at the Congrès international du cinéma indipéndant (International conference of independent cinema) of 3–7 September 1929 at La Sarraz (Switzerland). In his paper, Prampolini lamented the monopoly of two commercial corporations which owned all three hundred or so cinemas in Italy, leading to a flattening of taste and anti-experimental bias. The avant-garde, he further complained, was pushed to the margins and survived in a handful of cineclubs in Rome, Naples and Milan. Prampolini stressed the sustained futurist engagement with film despite the drawbacks, announcing the release of three new features in November 1929: Tremila (Three-thousand) by Marinetti, and two of his own: Rivolta dello schermo (Rebellion of the screen) and La salamandra (The salamander), the latter scripted by Pirandello. None of these, regrettably, came to be realised. A year later, Prampolini attended the second congress of avant-garde cinema organised by Pierre and Victor Bourgeois in Brussels (27 November–1 December 1930) where he became acquainted with Hans Richter and Germaine Dulac. He also seized the opportunity to view the most prominent avant-garde films of the time of Man Ray, Léger, Richter, Caballero, Vigo, Dekeukeleire, Vertov and Ruttmann.104 Inspired by Cocteau, Prampolini maintained that film hinged on a ‘drama of objects in simultaneous compenetration with their abstract representation, leading to the spectroscopic and spectacular precision of scientific film’.105 Prampolini described his encounters round a camera with Eisenstein, Ruttmann, Cavalcanti, Balàzs and Richter. Engaging with technical precision on ‘transfigured light’, he lambasted the fad for papier-maché historical film, advocating instead architectural constructions and a melding of the abstract and the plastic in a novel ‘integral, totalitarian, polydimensional’ vision. Stage technicians and designers should work in close proximity with film directors.106 104 Lista, Cinema e fotografia, 76–7. 105 Prampolini, ‘Cinepoetica di un film di Jean Cocteau’, Futurismo II:1 (1 January 1933), cit. in Lista, Cinema e fotografia, 79. 106 Prampolini, ‘Evoluzione e avvenire della scenotecnica’, Lo Schermo, June 1936, cit. in Sinisi (ed.), ‘Varieté’, 88.

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Prampolini’s rapprochement with film in 1928–29 was under the influence of surrealism. In 1928, the surrealist movement witnessed two momentous experiences: the publication of André Breton’s Le surréalisme et la peinture (Surrealism and painting) and Giorgio de Chirico’s exhibition ‘Oeuvres anciennes’ (Ancient works) at Paris’s Galérie Surrealiste, 16 rue Jacques Callot. Between April and December, Prampolini exhibited sixty works, in Turin (April–October), then Paris (November–December) including four ‘atmospheric transpositions for film’ (trasposizioni di atmosfera per il cinema) closely related to his own experimental films, e.g. Mani (Hands), Processo (Trial), Match and Profondità (Depth). After the aerofuturist turn, film enabled him to continue exploring his purist mechanical roots. Prampolini’s commitment to film is further testified by his intention to create his own production company,107 as well as his guest appearance, together with Russolo, in a film entitled Montparnasse, directed by Deslaw and screened on 22 June at Studio 98.108 Based in Paris on and off between 1932 and 1937, Prampolini organised the first Roman exhibition of film sceno-technics (Mostra di scenotecnica cinematografica; opening on 27 January 1933) at the Galleria d’Arte. Renowned film practitioners, e.g. Gastone Medin, Tullio Aschieri, Marisa Mori, Giuseppe Capponi, Tullio Crali, Mario Rispoli, Fernando Raimondi and Domenico Belli exhibited their work on that occasion.109 Prampolini’s exhibits included three maquettes (plastici) he put together five years earlier for the film Mani (1932), a visionary tale centred on the love of an aviator for a woman’s hand, rich in symbolist and surrealist suggestions.110 This exhibition, however, disappointed directors and producers because of its focus on painting and scenography. Prampolini continued to reflect on stage design in both film and theatre until his last day. In 1932, he addressed the International Theatre congress, promoting an international institution gathering together transnational vocational and technical competences: an international institute of theatre art.111 In a play of the same year, L’alba di don Giovanni (Don Giovanni’s dawn), influenced by surrealism, he utilised hermetic symbols and suggestions, including geological fragments and organic forms floating in dreamlike atmospheres. No longer predominantly mechanical, but, rather, 107 Artaud wrote to Prampolini expressing his wish to be hired as an actor in this company, cit. in Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 257. 108 See private correspondence with Deslaw, cit. in Verdone, Cinema e letteratura del futurismo, 118. 109 Verdone, Cinema e letteratura del futurismo, 115–17. Medin collaborated with Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia in the film O la borsa o la vita (1933), from a radiodrama by De Stefani, which included avant-garde sequences and aerial acrobatics of the flying ace Mario De Bernardi – see also Sinisi ‘Prampolini artista scenografo’, 56; Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 267. 110 Only three stills are extant, reproduced in Verdone’s Cinema e letteratura del futurismo. 111 Prampolini, ‘Istituto Internazionale d’Arte Teatrale’, first published in L’Impero, 3 May 1932, now in Sinisi (ed.), ‘Varieté’, 83. The Istituto obtained the endorsement of both Marinetti and Pirandello.

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inspired by the monumental neoclassicism of de Chirico, Prampolini’s theatre took a new turn, working on commission for major theatres across Italy. On the occasion of the Triennale exhibition of scenotechnics in Milan of 1936, Prampolini lamented the decline in creativity of German theatre following the Nazi seizure of power, alluding to a comparable decline in Italy under Fascist censorship, and praised the enduring creativity of the futurist stage encapsulated in Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Teatro delle Arti.112 Prampolini impressed his mark on the renewal of postwar Italian theatre, injecting an eclectic mix of forms and styles straddling his long career. The 1940s witnessed a flourishing of new productions. These included an acclaimed performance of Béla Bartók’s Il mandarino meraviglioso (The Miraculous Mandarin; September 1942) where, echoing a strategy typical of film, Prampolini alternated two versions of the same metropolitan scene.113 Coming full circle with the traditional painted backdrops, in 1945 Prampolini founded Varieté, braiding together the radical experimentalism of his pantomimes with a clichéd repertoire including electric lights, luminous panels and seductive modernist metropolises. Stylised robotic actors, grotesque marionettes caught in dizzy carousels contributed to the display of his earlier mechanical work, but with a new awareness of Kitsch and the, by now, normative conventional strategies of variety theatre. Prampolini’s legacy was finally secured in 1950, when he published the volume Lineamenti di scenografia italiana (dal Rinascimento ad oggi) (Outline of Italian scenography (from the Renaissance to the present day)). This is a lucid, rigorous and comprehensive treatise on theatre design, aesthetics and technics from the late fifteenth century up to modern and contemporary styles, which is still relevant today. The history of scenography, Prampolini claimed, reached a pinnacle with the modern introduction of ‘scenotechnics’: ‘while the abstract Gods of mechanical civilisation transfigured all things, mechanical and electrical innovations took hold, transforming the stage and old scenography, preparing the coming of a new expressive means: scenotechnics’.114 The novelties mentioned by Prampolini include a ‘motorised stage’ consisting of a revolving mechanical platform artificially illuminated.115 Prampolini holds up futurismo as the prime mover, engine of a veritable revolution predicated on mechanical and electrical technologies and a new optics where light outlines ‘spatial planes and 112 Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 260. 113 Ibid., 263–4. For Prampolini’s contemporary Città delle Avanguardie, ‘a magnificent project, […] probably the most advanced theatre project of its time, moving beyond Gropius and Le Corbusier, and anticipating Niemeyer’s buildings by a decade’; see Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 536. 114 E. Prampolini, Lineamenti di scenografia italiana (dal Rinascimento ad oggi) (Rome: Bestetti-Edizioni d’Arte, 1950), 10. 115 Ibid., 10–11.

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polydimensional volumes’.116 This technological stage is at once constructivist, colourist and architectural. Scenography is situated between painting and architecture, between the third and fourth dimension (e.g. ‘movement’).117 The success of this key text, a compendium of theatrical knowledge, is evidence of Prampolini’s mechanical loyalty and of the transformative power of his own scenography on the global stage.118 5.2 Cultural operations and logistics Driven by his wide-ranging curiosity and interacting constantly with the European avant-garde, Prampolini developed an intricate and rhizomatic network of contacts, publications, committee work, memberships, co-editorships branching out in all directions, across national borders in the East and West of Europe, especially after he was reinstated to futurismo in 1919. His febrile promotions spanned languages, disciplines and styles: Prampolini quickly became one of the most important cultural operators in postwar Europe, steering innovation particularly on the stage. Ironically, given the initial frosty reception, it was Prampolini’s foresight that led to Boccioni and Modigliani’s prominence at the Expó in Geneva (26 December 1920–25 January 1921), securing their reputation. The extent and influence of his cultural promotion and organisation may even have superseded the value of his creative work.119 Early contacts with Meriano helped Prampolini display his work in the first dada exhibition in Zurich and his woodcuts appear in the journal Dada. Dada connections acted as a springboard for important international collaborations to follow, e.g. with Guillaume Apollinaire, who was to agree to edit the French edition of the journal Noi. Prampolini’s ‘capital’ exchanges with active members of the European avant-garde yielded shows in Geneva, Prague, Berlin and Düsseldorf, together with artists based in Geneva, Weimar, Berlin and Prague.120 From Geneva, he proceeded to Prague and Berlin (1921–22), where he met and worked with Arp, Kandinsky and Chagall – his legacy on Czech art is visible, for example, in Teige’s work. In 1922 he collaborated with the Czech review Veraykon and gradually built up and broadened the range of his collaborations to include important reviews, e.g. De Stijl, Het Overzicht, Der Sturm and Esprit Nouveau. Prampolini proceeded to work in Düsseldorf, Vienna (1924), Frankfurt, Münich, Dresden and Weimar, establishing collaborations with the Bauhaus. His 116 117 118 119 120

Ibid., 12. Ibid., 14. Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 267–8. Ibid., 95. D. Arich de Finetti, ‘Prampolini teorico e pubblicista’, in Crispolti et al. (eds), Prampolini: dal futurismo all’informale, 51.

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full ‘agreement’ with abstract art, Kandinsky and Mondrian was asserted in the same period of time.121 As already mentioned, Prampolini lived in Paris intermittently between 1925 and 1937, working assiduously ‘to win the support of Apollinaire’,122 collaborating with dada, building connections with the cubists, Picasso, Cocteau and Léger and perfecting his machine art. This was achieved both in tension with the subjectivity which premised surrealist art and his deep fascination for the biomorphic turn that abstract art was taking in the second half of the 1920s. In the 1930s Prampolini’s network included Cercle et Carré, De Stijl and the anti-surrealist association Abstraction Création. A ‘complex network of personal contacts’123 gave him access to the latest trends, allowing him to navigate it confidently, with latitude, without prejudice and stimulating, in turn, self-reflection and adjustment of his own practice. Noi (we), the periodical Prampolini co-founded in 1917 with Count Bino Sanminiatelli, a Florentine aristocratic born in 1896, was the catalyst and engine of this rich and elaborate transnational network. 1917 was a momentous year for Prampolini: he met Giovanni Papini, the leader of the Florentine dissident futurist group, Cocteau and Picasso, who had followed Diaghilev and his Ballets russes in Rome. Prampolini discussed the ‘new orientation’124 of the avant-garde with Picasso, who complimented his work and appreciated its growing notoriety and sales to savvy buyers.125 The periodical Noi stood at the hub of these initiatives. The title was neocollectivist. It referenced humanitarian Socialism and the democratic Arts and Crafts movement.126 Sanminiatelli, who provided financial backing, edited the first three issues (June 1917, February 1918 and January 1919), helping disseminate the journal via his association with dada. In 1920, in order to pursue his own writing career, Sanminiatelli left Prampolini solely responsible. Noi was quickly established as one of the most significant international reviews of the time, a ‘mirror of problems, possibilities and contradictions inherent in the Italian avant-garde within a larger European framework’.127 121 CRDAV, Fondo E. Prampolini, Opere e scritti di Prampolini, text by Prampolini, ‘Presenza nella pittura. Teorie ed esperienze. Dal futurismo all’astrattismo e oltre’, 5. 122 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 276–7. 123 Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 187. 124 Cit. in Siligato, ‘La Casa d’Arte Italiana’, 16. 125 While asking Pratella to write a piece for Noi, Prampolini took the opportunity to mention that his work was ‘very well thought of’ by Picasso’ – personal correspondence to Pratella, Viareggio, 11 September 1917, cit. in Lista (ed.), Enrico Prampolini: carteggio futurista, 185. Prampolini sold two paintings to the Duce’s cultural supremo Margherita Sarfatti and other canvases to Bino Sanminiatelli and a Venetian Marchioness, see Siligato, ‘La Casa d’Arte Italiana’, 15. 126 Siligato, ‘La Casa d’Arte Italiana’, 20. 127 B. Sani, ‘Nota critica’, in Prampolini (ed.), Noi, series I and II, 1917–25 (Florence: [n.p.], 1974), 18–19.

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Noi quickly relied on a roster of correspondents in and outside Italy, exchanging news and disseminating new trends. A successor of L’Italia Futurista (1916–18), Noi rejected, however, the ‘petty nationalism’ of the latter, promoting instead a robust international agenda reminiscent of the inclusivity of Bragaglia’s circle.128 The journal reflected and propagated ideas circulating at the time, including news on European theatre and scene design. Its compass was not exclusively European but global, including several extra-European avant-garde scenes which would otherwise have remained little known, e.g. Japanese futurist poetry (Tai Kambara) and painting (Yoshimitsu Nagano). Noi avidly pursued pathways across the global avant-garde, while enmeshing with existing networks and comparable publications, e.g. Veraykon, Der Futurismus, Dada, De Stijl and Broom.129 The extent of Prampolini’s network is evidenced in a postcard to Sanminiatelli (12 August 1917). Here, Prampolini enumerates his current correspondence with Reverdy, Albert-Birot, Cocteau, Picasso, Folgore, Moscardelli, Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Ardengo Soffici, among others.130 Encouragements, complimentary comments and promises of further contributions testify to the dynamic of mutual promotion between cognate avant-garde periodicals.131 Reviews of French, English, American and Spanish art and literature were commissioned locally. The French section was assigned to Apollinaire, but, due to his premature death on 8 November 1918, was reallocated to Blaise Cendrars.132 Arnudel [sic] del Re edited the UK section, Wallace Stevens the American one and Pérez-Jorba the Spanish part, publishing articles in English and French to maximise the journal’s readership. The significance of Noi derived from the renewed impetus it gave to ‘arte meccanica’, although this was viewed with disenchantment by Sanminiatelli.133 Noi was firmly situated ‘at the centre of the poetics of machine art’:134 it published the most notable theoretical pronouncements on machine aesthetics, drafted its timeline, republished the Manifesto dell’arte meccanica futurista and propagated Gleizes and Léger’s 128 Ibid., 4. 129 Arich de Finetti, ‘Prampolini teorico e pubblicista’, 51–2; Lista, ‘Prampolini e i gruppi dell’ “arte astratta” in Francia’, in Crispolti et al. (eds), Prampolini: dal futurismo all’informale, 301. 130 Postcard by Prampolini to Sanminiatelli, Naples 12 August 1917, cit. in Drudi Gambillo and Fiori (eds), Archivi del futurismo, II, 55. 131 Letters by Prampolini to Tzara, 4 August 1917, 19 October 1917, 10 January 1918 and [?] October 1918, cit. in Siligato (ed.), Prampolini: Carteggio, 286–92; letters by Theo van Doesburg to Prampolini, 1921 and one postcard by van Doesburg to Vittorio Orazi, Prampolini’s brother, 1924, in the same, 302–6. 132 Letter by Prampolini to Sanminiatelli, dated [by Orazi after November 1918-before January 1919], cit. in Siligato (ed.), Prampolini: Carteggio, 252. 133 B. Sanminiatelli, ‘Pattuglie letterarie’, Corriere della Sera, 23 June 1938, [n.p.]. 134 Sani, ‘Nota critica’, 17.

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pronouncements in regard to constructivism. Prampolini’s increasingly ‘spiritual’ approach was also included.135 The first of two series highlighted the machine, especially series II (1923–25). Coming out as a single issue in February 1918, issues 2, 3 and 4 included Gino Severini’s influential article ‘Il macchinismo nell’arte’ (originally in Mercure de France, April 1916). Severini drew a comparison between the machine and the work of art, arguing that, in the twentieth century, the awe for locomotives had been superseded by a ‘new realism’ precipitated by the machine’s ‘precision, rhythm and brutality’.136 Prampolini designed the covers of issues 5, 6 and 7 (January 1919), where illustrations of machines by Carra, Severini, Savinio, de Chirico, Archipenko, Storer and Tyrwitt were represented. In spite of Marinetti’s autarchic declarations opening series II, the original profile remained unaltered, especially as concerned its focus on the European avant-garde and contributions quoted in the original language. Issue 1 of series II (April 1923) included reviews of Objet, De Stijl and L’Esprit Nouveau by Prampolini’s brother, Vittorio Orazi. Orazi voiced his reservations on the constructivist tone of the first two reviews. Issue 2 (May 1923) opened with a reprint of the Manifesto of futurist mechanical art undersigned by Prampolini, Pannaggi and Paladini, dated October 1922 (see section 4.2a). Subject to a re-elaboration and followed by a clarification penned by Paladini, who reinstated the ideological epistemology of machines in social–identitarian function, the manifesto circulated far and wide in the pages of Noi. Issues 10, 11 and 12 opened with the manifesto L’art mécanique (Mechanical art; 1923), signed by ‘les peintres futuristes italiens’ (the Italian futurist painters). Both the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs at Paris’s Grand Palais of 1925 and mechanical theatre, e.g. Milhaud’s La creation du monde (The creation of the world) were given considerable space here. On 7 April 1924, in personal correspondence with the Polish poet Jalu Kurek, Prampolini mentioned the imminent publication of a special issue of Noi devoted to international avant-garde scenography.137 Printed on the back cover of this issue in aggressive, graphic layout, prominently displayed in block lettering, was a broad spectrum of titles of the prominent contemporary periodicals Der Sturm, Zenit, Het Overzicht and Bulletin de L’Effort Moderne. While making explicit its international connections, this table is also visually striking, attesting to Prampolini’s febrile, networked and cross-disciplinary activity.138 Two years on, Prampolini persuaded Seuphor to revive the review L’Esprit Nouveau, in abeyance since 1925, under the new title Documents de l’Esprit Nouveau. 135 136 137 138

Ibid. According to Sani, Prampolini neglected the ideological ardour of Léger’s machines. Severini, ‘Il macchinismo e l’arte’, Noi, 2–3–4 (1918), 15. Cit. in Lista (ed.), Enrico Prampolini: carteggio futurista, 136. BRBML, Eisenman collection, General collection, back cover by E. Prampolini, Numero speciale: Teatro e scena futurista (1924), Noi: Rivista d’arte futurista.

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Seuphor undertook this project with enthusiasm, preparing the first issue, but the funding initially promised by Prampolini quickly evaporated, probably due to Ricotti withdrawing her financial support while the journal was going through the press. Seuphor was forced to cover all costs of what became the one and only reissue.139 Seuphor managed nonetheless to put together the soirées d’esprit nouveau attracting a numerous and creative assembly including Russolo, Mondrian, Léger, Arp, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Cocteau, Tzara, Cendrars and, from time to time, Marinetti: ‘la poésie était dans l’air et dans la rue’ (poetry was in the air, and in the streets).140 The indefatigable Prampolini had since established in Rome an Art House of his own, a permanent collection and club open to professionals and intellectuals, a venue for debates, exhibitions and readings. He launched it in 1919, with the specific ambition to promote and ‘regenerate’ decorative arts. Its furniture was unpolished, slim, elegant, triangular and dynamic. In June 1919, the Art House promoted Prampolini’s Drame pour marionettes Matoum et Tévibar, flourishing in future years after relocating in 1920 to a permanent exhibition space in 4–12 via Francesco Crispi, a building on two floors including a theatre, reading room, bookshop and tearoom accessible to both members and the general public. The new premises were inaugurated on 18 February, with a lecture given by Marinetti.141 Its enthusiastic programme, only partially realised, included a long list of exhibitions, showcasing the work of Braque, Gleizes, Léger, Laurent, Metzinger, Picasso, Severini, the vorticists, dada, artists associated with the Belgian avant-garde, Der Sturm and many others.142 The Art House was another landmark of Prampolini’s multifarious international activities. Its reputation grew on the basis of his networks and reputation as cultural promoter, paving the way for future connections and initiatives.143 By 1921, however, the Art House was to fold due to financial difficulties. Following the futurist reorientation to Eastern Europe and its political project of rehousing futurismo closer to the revolution, in the same year Prampolini left for Prague, where he intercepted the avant-garde journals Stavba, Disk, Veraikon and Horizont. In Prague, he penetrated new intellectual circles and knitted together new contacts. These successful ventures, underpinned by constant relocations across Europe, threw the financial and logistical vulnerability of Prampolini’s work into relief. In a letter to Marinetti of 17 August 1943, Prampolini agonised over the future of futurismo, informing him that, despite his strenuous efforts, financial support ‘from 139 Cit. in Sauwen, Viatte and Seuphor, Seuphor, 314–15; Lista, ‘Prampolini futurista europeo’, fn. 21, 19. 140 Seuphor, ‘Le jeu de je – vingt tranches de vie racontée par Seuphor’, cit. in Sauwen, Viatte and Seuphor, Seuphor, 315. 141 Siligato, ‘La Casa d’Arte Italiana’, 27. 142 Ibid., 30. 143 Ibid., 30–1.

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two or three important industrialists’ was not forthcoming. The proposal he fundraised for included an Academy or ‘Centre’ entirely devoted to sustaining international exchanges and partnerships. Concluding dryly, as was his custom, Prampolini confessed that the only thing left to do was ‘to leg it once again, so as not to be overwhelmed by this poor contingency’.144 Prampolini’s mood darkened still, when, come autumn, he further confided: ‘I’m telling you honestly I am thoroughly disgusted, not to put it more strongly. […] I’m afraid there is little for us futurists to do, in spite of my unfaltering good will.’145 November found him waiting for remuneration for a large mural mosaic he composed on the external walls of the Museum of Popular Arts in Rome’s E. U. R. quarter, commissioned in 1941. On 8 March 1944 Prampolini was still pleading for handouts from Marinetti.146 His letters compellingly relay the progressive deterioration of Rome, a ruinous urban environment ravaged by the ongoing war: ‘It’s a very difficult, even heroic, job here trying to regain peace of mind in the terrorist chaos falling daily on Rome.’147 While Marinetti’s began to reply less regularly to these letters, Prampolini re-emerged undefeated. The range and bulk of his activities continued to be phenomenal.148 Prampolini was by then ready to meet his last challenge yet: Art Club. While Marinetti and other late futurists began to pen their ‘spiritual testaments’, Prampolini continued looking forward and carrying the avant-garde ticket into the postwar years. Joining the intense reconstruction effort in Rome after the Second World War, he conceived a new forum of dialogue and exchange to replace his defunct Art House. In March 1945, together with Gino Severini and Joseph Jarema, he established an Art Club. This was to be an independent forum and association calling upon all artists working in Rome, futurist or not. The orientation was firmly international. Art Club organised shows, auctions and open-air ballroom dancing, contributed actively to the debate on contemporary art and published an eponymous newsletter. Rapidly, it became a magnet for young artists, attracted by its transnational connections and leanings towards abstraction. The attraction of this dynamic and ecumenical institution was reinforced by the opportunity to be mentored by Severini in mastering the ‘international style’.149 In a ravaged Rome of the immediate postwar years – we almost picture him walking the dusty, desolate streets of Rome’s ‘open Cit. in Lista (ed.), Enrico Prampolini: carteggio futurista, 155. Cit. in ibid., 156. Cit. in ibid., 160. Letter by Prampolini to Marinetti dated 19 March 1944, cit. in ibid., 161. See further letters by Prampolini to Marinetti of 3 and 28 November and of 23 December 1943, cit. in ibid., 157–9. 149 See also P. Fossati, ‘L’arte in Italia dopo la seconda guerra mondiale’, in Storia dell’arte italiana, III, 560. 144 145 146 147 148

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city’ – Prampolini stood alone, continued working assiduously, organised exhibitions, initiated projects and gathered forces together in the name of futurismo, against the tide of an inevitable dissolution and dispersal of the group. Prampolini’s agenda remained unrepentantly international in the 1950s, as can be further gleaned in private correspondence with Depero dated 17 July 1950, where he confirmed that the bulk of his work was destined for the international markets.150 Prampolini’s physical health was deteriorating and he was forced to spend long, frustrating periods of rest and inactivity, as he lamented to Jannelli on 10 January 1948: ‘I am afflicted with ferocious attacks of arthritis, they are driving me mad, day and night. I haven’t slept a wink for two months. […] I cannot think, I cannot work. I can only read.’151 Still, on 2 January 1953, an indomitable Prampolini described his return from Argentina, on the ninth and last leg of the tour of his exhibition Moderne Italienische Bühnenbilder, first opened in Bern on 3 November 1946, in a letter to his old friend Severini. Fevered activity and constant travelling remained unchanged, even at this late stage in his life. A two-page letter to Benedetta dated 29 October 1955, requesting paintings and sculptures to exhibit in six major Australian cities, betrayed Prampolini’s nervous exhaustion – a prelude to his impending death.152 His creative and logistic genius across Europe were acknowledged only posthumously, with the award of the gold medal for ‘artistic merit’ in 1956.153 Before his last hour, Prampolini reviewed his aesthetic make-up, embracing ‘spiritual’ and ‘polymaterial’ approaches leading to the last significant manifestation of futurismo: aerofuturism. This was not merely a momentous turn for Prampolini, but also a widespread late change of direction, a novel paradigm predicated on the awe-inspiring flying machines which were beginning to populate the skies. This transition to aerofuturismo, elucidated in section 5.4, was reinforced by Fillia’s ‘sacred mechanical art’ and its posthuman implications, as I shall discuss in the following section. 5.3 Fillia: the spiritual as posthuman The activities of the visual artist Fillia (born Luigi Colombo; 1904–36) need to be situated in the context of the regional spread of futurismo in the postwar years. Turin, his 150 Cit. in Lista (ed.), Enrico Prampolini: carteggio futurista, 90. 151 Cit. in ibid., 133. 152 Prampolini’s short letter was typed, but he pleaded for help in an attached handwritten scribble – JPGRIL, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti correspondence and papers, 1886–1974, series I, box 4, n. 16. 153 JPGRIL, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti correspondence and papers, 1886–1974, series I, box 4, n. 17, typescript by Anon, ‘MEDAGLIA D’ORO ALLA MEMORIA DEL PITTORE ENRICO PRAMPOLINI’, 1956, [n.p.].

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native town, became one of the hubs of futurist operations at this time. Fillia’s activities fell into two distinct periods: a mechanical phase, until the late 1920s, followed by a ‘cosmic and visionary’ period, beginning in 1929. The second period was prompted by the artist’s increased awareness of the hegemonic spread of mechanisation and his ensuing refocusing on immaterial machines.154 His mechanical interest progressively shifted from constructivist to lyrical, then cosmic and ‘spiritual’, prompted by the metaphysical school, leading to the manifesto Arte sacra meccanica.155 The figure of the airplane became Fillia’s specific visual focus. The airplane embodied a compromise between technological secularism and a religious calling. The conflation of machines with sacred imagery was, at the very least, a questionable strategy, leading lesser artists to produce Kitsch re-workings of traditional religious iconography. Fillia, on the other hand, despite his short life and stunted career (he died before his thirty-second birthday), took an original approach. His machine aesthetics led to a seminal form of posthumanism predicated upon a posthuman integration of human and machine complicating and superseding Marinetti’s cyborg. Fillia was initially close to Gramsci and the binary of worker and machine of Marxist lineage. He too regarded the machine as a conduit of redemption rather than an instrument of capitalist exploitation. In 1922, at the age of eighteen, Fillia composed five anarchic poems under the aegis of Proletkult (see Chapter 4). A year later, when Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness embedded Marx’s alienation, reification and commodity fetishism in capitalism, Fillia was working under the auspices of the Turin group. At this time, he began to reroute his work towards a ‘spiritual alphabet’ and ‘spiritual painting’, purporting to respond to the call of the infinite cosmos. In the early 1920s Fillia began to travel extensively, dipping into Paris and more frequently still after 1928, living and working at 39 rue de Montparnasse. Paris attracted Fillia because of postcubist experimentations and the primacy that Gris, Gleizes and Léger were assigning to ‘optimistic’ machines.156 Fillia began to garner a reputation as one of the most internationally minded visual artists of late futurismo, alongside Prampolini.157 Prampolini was a mentor: his recommendations earned Fillia access to Seuphor’s Cercle et Carré. Magnetic theatre and the mechanical interests prevalent in Noi influenced the orientation of Fillia’s theatre towards abstraction, as is evidenced in Sensualità (Sensuality; 1923, published 1925).158 Pedestrian and derivative, Sensualità 154 Masoero (ed.), Universo meccanico, 17. 155 S. Evangelisti (ed.), Fillia e l’avanguardia futurista negli anni del fascismo (Milan: Mondadori-Daverio, 1986), 20. 156 Ibid., 19. 157 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 439. 158 See also Fillia’s Teatro di creazione and promotion of the Novatore stage, based on Bragaglia’s Teatro degli Indipendenti.

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grafted Marinetti’s sexual power politics onto a Socialist and technologically utopian agenda, e.g. speaking on behalf of all women, a character named DONNA (WOMAN; capitals in the original) declares: ‘tradition gave me a woman’s education; modernity gave me a masculine soul. […] I intend to work at your [man’s] side to erect the red scaffolding of tomorrow’.159 As Fox Keller observed, both the scientific and literary languages of modernity betray a deep intellectual cleavage between the so-called feminine categories, e.g. tradition, nature, the earth, and, conversely, technology, science, progress and modernity, which are envisioned as male categories.160 Portraying women as cumbersome ballast impeding the futurist run towards mechanical modernity, Fillia repeated Marinetti’s ambiguous cyborg paradigm here. Furthermore, the final Act 7 is a traditional pochade reinforcing erotic power ties in the trite battle of the sexes. The follow-up Sensualità meccanica (Mechanical sensuality; dated 1926 or 1927) stressed the mystical status of machines via deployment on stage of five planes of vibrating metal sheets seen in perspective: a red spiral (symbolic of ‘spirit’), a white cube (representing ‘matter’) and geometric figures representing a machine (a translation of ‘action’), all of which were given distinctive lines and voices. A complex, multi-layered mechanism constructed in erotic function, this machine recalls Duchamp’s The Bride, and the multi-levelled, hydraulic exchanges between bride and bachelors typifying Duchamp’s contraption. Both plays Sensualità meccanica and Sensualità were staged in collaboration with the Florence-born futurist Marisa Mori.161 In the article/manifesto ‘L’idolo meccanico’ (Mechanical idol), published in L’Impero in July 1925, Fillia laid out the foundations of his mechanical aesthetics in dialogue with Pannaggi and Paladini’s Manifesto of mechanical art. If the futurist machine is metonymic of a novel manner to inhabit the world, he argued, artists are tasked with embodying and propagating this new paradigm. Fillia dwelled on ‘la spiritualità della Macchina’ (the spirituality of the Machine) and ‘la Macchina intesa come simbolo’ (the Machine as symbol). The machine was posited as an objective 159 Fillia, Sensualità, cit. in Marinetti, Gli Indomabili, 176. 160 Fox Keller, ‘Critical silences in scientific discourse’, passim. 161 Marisa Mori (born Maria Luisa Lurini; 1900–85) was an aeropainter trained by Casorati, Fillia, Farfa and Tato and propagator of the culture of machines. Mori was invested in futurist film and devised silhouettes of factories and trolleys on rail tracks threatening alienated humans trapped in a machinist nightmare reminiscent of Lang’s Metropolis – see Mori’s drafts for Scenotecnica cinematografica. In 1933, Mori devised scenes for Act 5 of Fillia’s Sensualità: ‘L’altoparlante’, a shadow theatre heavily influenced by Pannaggi’s machines. She also built a theatre for Sensualità meccanica (1933–35) exhibited at the Milan Triennale of 1936. Mori disassociated herself from futurismo after Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler – Evangelisti (ed.), Fillia e l’avanguardia futurista, 25; Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 432.

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correlative and also the source of new moral codes: a ‘modern sacred art’.162 Fillia proceeded to outline a collection of modern ‘mechanical idols’: cars, airplanes, bicycles, turbines, skyscrapers, linotypes, loudspeakers and electric lights. These modern mechanical idols were plastic representations of the machine, a ‘hub of an infinity of objects and inter-related derivatives’ whose ‘function’ was clearly defined. The futuristi must stimulate collective and ‘spiritual constructions’.163 Something akin to a posthuman sensibility emerged further down. Here, Fillia maintained that the machine’s unique power to elide hierarchies and take away the pre-eminent status of humans will bring about a merger between us and the highly technologised environments we inhabit: ‘the MACHINE will void the old human, spiritual dimension and replace it with a superhuman, mechanical one, where MAN will shed his individual superiority in order to become one with the ENVIRONMENT’.164 Fillia’s proposed dematerialisation of the human body, achieved through technological means and contemplated within a technologised ecosystem, may be a precursor of today’s concerns over the ‘singularity’, e.g. the point of no return when the boundary between human and machine will escape detection, and the machine will appear to have developed a consciousness of its own. Human and machine will mutually integrate in inchoate, mechanical folds held together by the dynamic framework of speed. Appropriating a scientific idiom, and also echoing Prampolini, Fillia regarded the machine as a ‘fourth dimension’, complementing and rejuvenating the three traditional dimensions of space on canvas: height, width and depth. His novel pantheism scrambled the boundaries between human and machine too, leading him to develop a ‘modern sacred art’ predicated on this seminal form of posthumanism.165 Fillia’s project is beyond Darwinian. Rather, it is posthuman: ‘a vision of a “mechanical man”, a “man extended by a machine”, “fed with metal”, who develops new senses, new organs, new instincts, new languages and new, non-Aristotelian, logics’.166 These experiments in posthumanism are further echoed in Il sesso di metallo (Metallic sex; 1925), where a ‘new man’ reconstituted as the metallic robot SADA is weighed down by LEBE, a ‘flesh and blood woman’. Their sexual intercourse embodies the very paradigm shift of modernity: the encounter of the technological (SADA is made of

162 Cit. in Marinetti, Gli Indomabili, 166. According to Ballerini, this manifesto was first published in L’Antenna on 16 May 1926. It is also reprinted in Crispolti, Il mito della macchina (1971). 163 Cit. in M. Pinottini, ‘Fillia e l’estetica futurista’, in Evangelisti (ed.), Fillia e l’avanguardia futurista, 39–40. 164 Fillia, ‘L’idolo meccanico’, cit. in Marinetti, Gli Indomabili, p. XXI. Capitals are in the original. 165 Ibid. 166 S. Milan, ‘The futurist sensibility’, in Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination, 74.

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metal) and the organic (LEBE is made of wood) body. The sound of their copulation is described here as ‘an extremely sexy noise’.167 In the article ‘Fillia: lover of machines’ (Il Popolo di Trieste, 15 January 1926), the Triestine futurist Bruno G. Sanzin dwelled on Fillia’s ‘animistic theory’. Predicated on the machine’s transcendent ability to optimise and extend human life, this theory encouraged sexual intercourse as a means of mechanising humans and humanising machines at once.168 Unlike the cubists, and without losing sight of Marinetti’s cyborg, Fillia approached the machine intimately, welcoming it in the flesh and in the psyche of human beings. The powerful hold of the machine on the modern psyche was further attributed to an ‘acceleration of life’s rhythm’, referring back to the epistemology of diasporic futurismo comprised of dynamism, simultaneity and speed. Coming back full circle to sexualising machines, flesh-and-blood female bodies are portrayed copulating with mechanised, metallic men. Fillia’s animistic machine, however, aimed to transcend Marinetti’s totemic, fetishist machine in order to project the machine against the vast, azure canvas of the cosmos.169 Accordingly, Fillia’s manifesto Arte sacra meccanica (1926?) conceptualised a ‘mechanic spiritualisation’ predicated on the active ethical role played by machines in modernity above and beyond what could be mistakenly perceived as a shallow technological symbolism.170 Fillia strove to pin down a ‘mystical approach’ bubbling up from deep down in the psyche.171 By 1928–30 Fillia was based in Paris. He toned down the radical politics of his Turin gatherings with Gramsci and Proletkult. His art was transformed by his religious conversion influenced, in part, by Severini, who had been through a comparable experience under the influence of Jacques Maritain’s Thomistic Catholicism. Severini endeavoured to find commissions for his fellow futurists, stressing their need to leave Italy despite the stagnant art market and flagging global economy.172 It is imperative, contended Severini, that the Italian futurists achieve recognition in Paris, that they become interlocutors in current debates and navigate the ville tentaculaire and the callous logic of its art market. Fillia’s religious turn was also expedient to his need to attract State commissions, following a rapprochement between the Fascist State and the Church sanctioned by 167 Fillia, ‘Il sesso di metallo’, cit. in Marinetti, Gli Indomabili, 192. Capitals are in the original. Cf. also Fox Keller, ‘Critical silences in scientific discourse’, passim. 168 G. B. Sanzin, ‘Fillia: l’amante della macchina’ (1926), cit. in ‘L’estetica della macchina’, in Evangelisti (ed.), Fillia e l’avanguardia futurista, 82. 169 See also Pinottini, ‘Fillia e l’estetica futurista’, 39. 170 Evangelisti (ed.), Fillia e l’avanguardia futurista, 20. 171 Cit. in ibid., 22. 172 JPGRIL, Marinetti and Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, papers 1902–65, series III, box 15, n. 22, autograph letter by G. Severini to Marinetti, 15 February 1930, [recto and verso].

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the Lateran Treaty of 1929. Prior to 1926, Fillia had subsumed religious art under the machine. From 1928, he embraced a Christian art premised on a religion of the machine and material transcendentalism. Fillia tirelessly advocated the machine and new materials in order to achieve an evangelical approach to the divine. The Church, however, was not impressed and unequivocally condemned futurist sacred art.173 Fillia’s curious blend of the mystical and the technological was further articulated in ‘Spiritualità futurista’ (‘Futurist spirituality’; March 1931). Machines were approached not as objects or tools but, rather, as representative of the ‘bulk of scientific discoveries of recent times’.174 Machines are a fully-fledged technology poised to revolutionise the present age. The invention of the machine arose from a profound human ‘spiritual need’ in modernity: a new Covenant and Revelation.175 The machine thus articulates a modern religion and social utopia. It is a harbinger of Christian ‘mysteries’ rather than Marxist utopia, the custodian of a reverential force. Fillia further observed, pragmatically, that the presence of the machine in the art work is not sufficient. Representations of machines do not in themselves constitute machine art. What really matters is the ‘mechanical spirit’, the ‘absolute transformation’ and the ‘universal Law’ injected by machines into modern human living, in other words their mystique and quintessentially modern status.176 A Manifesto of futurist sacred art, co-authored with Marinetti, followed suit on 23 June 1931. In the article ‘Stile futurista’ (‘Futurist style’, in the first issue of the review Stile Futurista; 1934) Fillia drew a parallel between dynamism and the machine before attempting to conceptualise, if fairly flimsily, the tenets of a futurist style. Not devoid of references to the sporty heroics of Fascism, this style was underpinned by the cult of the machine, from the debates on war machinery voiced in the 1910s by Morasso, Oriani, Corradini and Marinetti to current discourses. While emphasising the importance of a modern industrial environment, Fillia purported to take an anti-technological, anti-scientific stance here in order to celebrate the machine as an entirely spiritual, disembodied, aerial entity: STILE FUTURISTA is an absolutely original style […] rooted in perpetual dynamism. This style is intimately connected with the phenomenon of the machine, […]. Invented by the

173 M. Duranti, ‘Spiritualità ed arte sacra futuriste’, in M. Duranti, R. Miracco, R. Cremoncini and C. Adams (eds), Piety and Pragmatism: Spiritualism in Futurist Art (Rome: Gangemi – Estorick, 2007), 35. See also S. Caldara and Pope Pius XII’s 1932 speech, cit. in C. Adams, ‘A leap of faith’, in ibid., 44 and 45. 174 Fillia, ‘Spiritualità futurista’, in Arte futurista pittura scultura, in Anon, Esposizioni futuriste II serie 1918–31 (Florence: Spes, 1977), [n.p.]. 175 Ibid. 176 Ibid.

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futuristi, machine aesthetics is the unmediated product of our art within the environment we live in. […] To have faith in the machine, for us futuristi, is to believe in the renewal of life: more human, hygienic, sporty and, above all, more heroic. Only a people enamoured with machines and familiar with war contraptions will be great fighters, […].177

The unsigned manifesto L’estetica della Macchina published in the same review in December 1935 is attributed to Fillia or Prampolini.178 The manifesto exudes religious awe of technology. The noun ‘machine’ is always capitalised, in line with its purportedly mystical attributes: ‘we need to render the spirit of the Machine, not the exterior form’, ‘the Machine beats the tempo of the great collective soul’, ‘the Machine is the new deity […] of our futurist time’.179 This manifesto echoed the short ‘civiltà meccanica’ (‘mechanical civilisation’, Stile Futurista, March 1935; signed ‘F.’) which advocated an integration between human and machine, praising the new horizons of human perception it brought about. Machines are posited as the governors of the one country of which we are all citizens.180 In fact, technology has become so necessary to both the human body and soul, that modern humans would become utterly ‘neurotic’ and ‘irresponsible’ if deprived of the mechanical civilisation. The integration between machine and the human body is none but a premise, followed by a more advanced stage when machines will commingle with human ‘spirit’, achieving posthuman entanglements. Mechanical bodies will splinter and fragment, ultimately disintegrate, until only a brain (or ‘spirit’), a technologically dematerialised and remastered singularity, remains. In the light of these assertions, it comes as no surprise that, in the course of the 1930s, Fillia’s paintings took on metaphysical qualities, increasingly resembling work by de Chirico and Savinio. Fillia’s premature death in 1936 prompted a crisis and eventual disbandment of the Turin futurist group. His legacy was sealed in the new aerial, ‘spiritual’ turn of futurismo in its last season, which he helped develop. Fillia was one of the first to assert that futurist art was informed by an ‘aerial inspiration’. Further stimulated by Prampolini and Depero, and carried forward by Tato, Corona, Duse, Andreoni Dottori, Marinetti and Somenzi, this ‘aerial inspiration’ translated into ‘a new spatial vision’ of flying machines.181 While still rooted in mechanics, Fillia’s new emphasis aimed to emancipate humans from a base mechanical nature, striving for a 177 Fillia, ‘Stile futurista’, Stile Futurista, I:1 (1934), 6. 178 The manifesto is backdated to October 1922 but is obviously later since it cites exhibitions of up to and including 1934. 179 Anon [Prampolini/Fillia], ‘L’estetica della Macchina’, Stile Futurista, II:6–7 (1935), 21–2. 180 F. [Fillia], ‘civiltà meccanica’, Stile Futurista, II:6–7 (1935), 7. 181 MART, Fondo Fortunato Depero, Corrispondenza, typescript by Fillia, ‘Spiritualità aerea’, [n.d.], 1.

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‘heightened’ form of ‘human feeling’. Correspondingly, art must act as a springboard to ‘overcome machine exploitation and approach them [machines] with spiritual intent’.182 Commenting on Fillia’s mystical temperament, Marinetti compared his flying machines with ‘optimistic flying crosses, not devoid of the rays and halos of the Catholic religion’.183 Stylised in a shape resembling the Christian cross, Fillia’s painted airplanes floated in a sacred atmosphere: thin, rarefied and abstracted.184 Pulverising the constructive, material machine, dilating psychic boundaries and diffusing them into phantasmatic projections in the cosmos became the distinctive features of Fillia’s late work: a set of practices responding to the mechanical appeal of aeronautics and shortly to become shorthand for a ‘cosmic idealist’ turn of futurismo.185 The pairing of flying and spirituality has, of course, a historical genealogy (see section 5.4). As a modern mystique, it was powerfully at work also in the general public. The idea of flying brought into play myths, relations and cultures predicated on up and down, heaven and earth, superior and inferior. While Prampolini’s aerofuturism was associated with European abstraction, as I shall explore below, Fillia took aerofuturism in the direction of a more radical perceptive and biometric paradigm. Predicated on the flying machine as a metaphor of modernity, if still tentative and generic,186 Fillia’s posthumanism was prescient of our current predicament: poised to be replicated by a pervasive technology. 5.4 Inroads into aerofuturism To understand the ‘spiritual turn’ of Fillia and Prampolini and the premises of aerofuturism, it is necessary to refer back to the cultural and philosophical debates that emerged around flying and related technologies in this period of time. While in the 1920s the futuristi had been drawn to constructivism and labour relations in the factory, in the 1930s new theories challenged constructivism, as well as Marinetti’s formulaic sexual take on the machine. These approaches correlated with commercial and industrial developments, especially in theatres of conflict, which became highly technological beginning with the First World War. Developments in art production, State patronage and art market economies were also important. While the futurists did not always position themselves at the heart of these intellectual debates, they 182 Ibid., 2. 183 Marinetti, ‘L’aeropittura e l’aeropoesia futuriste’, [n.p.]. 184 BRBML, General collection, Marinetti, ‘L’aeropeinture futuriste’, in Marinetti and Fillia, Salon d’automne de Lyon, 1935 (preface and selected pages), 29. 185 Cigliana, Futurismo esoterico, 244. 186 Fillia, ‘Spiritualità aerea’, 3.

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were often aware of them and continued to pursue the machine and an international connectedness of modern art practice underpinned by machine art. Aby Warburg’s pathos formula (Pathosformel) traced the persistence and the ‘afterlife’ of visual formulations of pathos. Warburg’s sixty-three panel Atlas of Memory – Mnemosyne, put together in the last three years of his life (1926–29), traces the descent of some of these formulations across time. Through the pathos formula, Warburg attempted to devise a methodology able to test and track the durability and periodic re-emergence of myths and symbols in the human psyche and their cultural re-envisioning. Warburg’s pathos formula will help throw some light on the enduring performative and political role ascribed to the machine beyond the First Industrial Revolution and the ‘machine age’. Developed in 1922 and correlating mechanical achievement directly with the development of spirit, Ernst Cassirer’s theory of symbolic forms lends further ammunition to the hermeneutic of machines in modernity. In the second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, entitled Mythical Thought, Cassirer argued that: the philosophy of symbolic forms is concerned with the totality of spiritual expressive functions. It regards them not as copies of being but as trends and modes of formation, as ‘organs’ less of mastery than of signification. And here again the operation of these organs takes at first a wholly unconscious form. Language, myth, art – each produces from itself its own world of forms which can be understood only as expressions of the spontaneity of the spirit.187

In Paris Peasant (1926), Louis Aragon posited the machine as totemic religion of the modern age, a tragic symbol of technology superseding its human maker, a myth arising from the current ‘naïve confusion between the beautiful and the divine’.188 Last but not least, a revival of Hegelism sweeping Europe in the 1930s reinvigorated Hegel’s Geist, putting back into circulation the notion of ‘spirit’ originally found in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). According to Hegel, spirit embodied the cosmos’s own consciousness. Hegelism was revived in Paris, where Alexander Kojève’s Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit (1933–39) became hugely popular. Not accidentally, the futurist focus on the forces of deep time (myth) and deep space (the cosmos), preparing the ground for dematerialising machines, was laid out in this period of time. Paolo Fossati talks instead of a ‘refusal of reality’. By the end of the 1920s, the materiality of the industrial machine, which had lent political ammunition to the early years of the decade, had decayed, ‘melted’ into abstraction and an emotive investment 187 Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, II, Mythical Thought, 216–17. 188 Aragon, Paris Peasant, 117.

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borne out of the machine’s ‘constitutive artificiality’. While the iconography of the machine persisted,189 a new perception arose viewing the machine as symbol, abstraction, pure and metaphysical geometry and conduit of a newly found classicism. Constructive rigour gave way to a depoliticised drift towards the metaphysical depths of the cosmos. Sitting at the hub of a significant epistemological shift, the machine now encompassed the existential, the personal, the psychological, projecting this new set of values against the vast backdrop of the cosmos. The return of the repressed may already have been at work in a handful of futuristi, most notably Vasari, but aerofuturismo aimed higher still: to make forays into the mystical and universal infinities of the individual psyche. Under this new rubric, the war machine and the industrial machine became distilled into ‘spiritual representations of technology’.190 The thrust towards this rarefied, ineffable experience was ambiguously underpinned by the technological and material means provided by the burgeoning aviation industry. The machine morphed from a concrete and tangible tool into myth and aesthetic vertigo, as is evidenced in Fillia and Prampolini’s new aesthetic idiom, predicated on a new religion of mechanical rigour and discipline. Crocean idealism, seeping through the cracks of the positivist culture embraced by the prewar generation,191 converged with the magical and mystical pull of the cosmos already at work in the constructivists (especially Tatlin) and tapped into the vast fabric of magical thinking woven by the surrealists. There is no consensus as to when precisely Prampolini’s spiritual turn occurred. Crispolti suggests it was as early as 1921, on the prompt of van Doesburg.192 Its neoclassical underpinnings, in fact, may be aligned with the rappel à l’ordre sweeping international modernist art. According to Berghaus, Prampolini’s mechanical emphasis was kept under control by his exchange with Kandinsky. A ‘spiritual’ and transcendental orientation transformed Prampolini into an ‘architect of spiritual spaces’, eventually persuading him to seek solace in ‘the cosmic escapism of aerofuturism’.193 The International Arts congress in Düsseldorf (29 May–11 June 1922) may also have acted as a catalyst. For Lista, the congress lent Prampolini a new articulation of machine aesthetics. In the key manifesto Machine aesthetics and mechanical introspective art (1922), Prampolini put machine and spirit on a par, arguing that the machine stood as an ‘absolute synthesis of the spiritual architecture of the human

189 190 191 192

Fossati, ‘Pittura e scultura fra le due guerre’, 216. Stone, The Patron State, 50. Crispolti, Il mito della macchina, 262. Crispolti, ‘L’arte meccanica’, in R. Siligato (ed.), Prampolini dal futurism all’informale (Rome: Carte Segrete, 1992), 194. 193 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 443.

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soul’.194 In the manifesto Arte meccanica (1923), Prampolini further signalled his commitment to the individual machine, projecting both inwards, in the realms of the human psyche, as well as outwards, not to society, but rather to the universe and the cosmos. Lista, however, dates Prampolini’s ‘spiritual turn’ after 1924, under the influence of expressionism (e.g. the machine as ‘paradigm of spiritual discipline’) and post-Wagnerian theatre (e.g. the machine as a temple of human spirituality).195 In 1924 Prampolini was in Germany. On 11 January 1924, his Dance of the Propeller premiered at the Trianon Theatre in Milan, under new choreography. Billie Maxwell, who wore an aviator’s costume, was the star of the show.196 With the article ‘Architetture spirituali’ (Spiritual architectures, L’Impero, 26 June 1924) Prampolini explicitly declared his loyalty to the aesthetic ‘religion’ of the machine. A trace of Albert Einstein’s relativity theories – special relativity (1905) and general relativity (1916), the former broadly accepted by the scientific community in the 1920s – may have seeped into the lyrical-cosmic aeropaintings of Prampolini and Fillia (see section 6.3b). Amédée Ozenfant’s Art: bilan des arts modernes en France (The Foundations of Modern Art; 1928) opened with a discussion of modern scientific inventions and discoveries. Published at a time when both Prampolini and Fillia were in Paris and undoubtedly well known to Fillia, this volume prompted a swerve in the direction of ‘cosmic lyricism’ in 1929. The discovery of the planet Pluto at the outer edges of the solar system, spotted by the astronomer Clyde Tombaugh in February 1930, may also have provided stimulation to the futurist ambition to delve into the mysteries of the deep cosmos, reorienting Prampolini’s visual art towards a cosmic idealism.197 Prampolini probably also heeded the lesson of his master Balla, whose own turn towards the motion of celestial bodies led to a series of cosmic visionary paintings: Mercury Passing Before the Sun (1914). Formal rigour and discipline, translucid actor-gases, constructive vertigo and neoclassicism, all of which typified Prampolini’s machine, were conducive to transcendent cosmological projections, dizzying heights, worlds colliding and fragmenting, refracted and multiplying infinities against the black 194 Cit. in Duranti et al., Piety and Pragmatism, 25 (orig. 105). See Prampolini, ‘L’estetica della macchina e l’introspezione meccanica dell’arte’, De Stijl, V:7, July 1922. Lista, ‘Prampolini futurista europeo’, in Lista et al., Continuità dell’avanguardia, 15. Lista points out that Prampolini’s manifesto was misunderstood in the confusion with Pannaggi and Paladini’s Manifesto of mechanical art. 195 Lista, ‘Prampolini scenografo’, 127. 196 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 449; Berghaus reports a stage description from an original review in Corriere della Sera of 12 January 1924. See also Bohn, The Other Futurism, 41: ‘This brief ballet consisted of four parts: 1) preparation for the flight, 2) the flight itself, 3) enjoyment at flying through the air, and 4) confusion when the propeller suddenly shatters. Special sound effects were achieved by adding a metal sheet and a wind machine to the orchestra. Some reviewers reported that gasoline fumes were introduced into the theatre.’ 197 Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 210.

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backdrop of the cosmos. ‘Any contact with the contingent real’ argued Prampolini ‘is excluded [and] the artist draws on the extreme latitudes of the inner self [and] of raw matter in its making. My aeropaintings are therefore geological [and] bio-chemical, expressions of stratospheric and interplanetary tragedies and metamorphoses.’198 The sky was transformed: an empirical reality, a scientific and remote super-structure, a cold three-dimensional space filled with solids governed by the laws of geometry. In this push towards the cosmos, metaphysics and abstraction coagulated with a mystical belief in the perfectible forms and abstract solids of Platonic memory, generating an uncontaminated realm of universals and ideas, translucent and hyper-real. In this cosmic framework, the airplane took centre stage. In the manner of a pathos formula, the cultural and visual repetition of a myth emerging from deep time rather than the factory, the airplane was a machine but ‘not simply a machine’. It was, rather, ‘a divine manifestation of the mechanical civilisation, transcending the real and reaching out to the realm of myth’.199 ‘Transcendental’ was the key word here: Prampolini and the aerofuturists translated the ‘otherness’ of the machine into a transcendental order whose ritual and cultural authority drew on classical myth and institutional religion. The circulation of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, underpinned by notions of ‘universal spiritual energy’, is also likely to have played a part in this turn to the transcendental machine.200 A range of artworks including installations, paintings, frescoes and mosaics devised in the 1930s for major Fascist exhibitions deployed this new vernacular.201 Prampolini’s name was frequently cited on the acquisition list of government and party, especially as concerned work exhibited at Rome’s Quadriennale (1931), the Exhibition of Fascist Revolution (1932), where his plastico futurista was praised by the radio scientist Guglielmo Marconi, and the Venice Biennale of 1934.202 Under 198 JPGRIL, Papers of Marinetti and Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, 1902–65, series I, box 1, n. 8, Prampolini’s ‘Trionfo dell’aeropittura di guerra sulle nature morte’, [undated], 1–2, cit. by Marinetti. In the preface to General Catalogue of the III National Quadriennale of Art of Rome Marinetti lists the qualifiers of this subset: ‘ascending’, ‘stratospheric’, ‘cosmic’ ‘biochemical’, ‘mystical’, ‘transfiguring’ – cit. in Toni, Futuristi nelle Marche, 44. 199 CRDAV, Opere e scritti di Prampolini, manuscript by E. Prampolini, ‘L’aeroplano’ [1941], [in L’Ala d’Italia: Gazzetta dell’aviazione], 1. 200 This is evidenced in Prampolini’s design for the futurist pavilion at the Decennale exhibition of victory (Turin, 1928) and the purist attraction for the mechanical possibilities of the landscape of Capri (1928–29) – see Crispolti, ‘L’“idealismo cosmico”’, in Siligato (ed.), Prampolini dal futurismo all’informale, 271; Lista, ‘Prampolini futurista europeo’, 16, and Enrico Prampolini futurista, 182. 201 Stone, The Patron State, 237. Prampolini and Fillia worked together on the mosaics decorating the ‘Palazzo delle Poste’ in Genoa. 202 See the illustrated article Anon, ‘Il genio futurista di Gugliemo Marconi esaltato da Prampolini’, in Futurismo, 1:I, 23 October 1932, [n.p.]. The article further relays that Marconi celebrated the tenth anniversary of Mussolini’s accession to power with a radio message reaching out to ‘the whole world’.

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the rubric of fascismo, Prampolini’s ‘arte meccanica’ was refigured in a controlled arena where a residual flavour of mechanical art survived like a spectral trace, purged of factory and labour, compliant instead with Fascism’s regimes of ‘sport, work and procreation’. Mechanical art was compared with the ‘city of the sun’ devised by the Dominican friar Tommaso Campanella (The City of the Sun; 1602). Prampolini’s ghostly reincarnation of the material machine bore a mere ‘scent of mechanical civilisation’:203 a mere olfactory aroma lingering over the utopian project of a new civitas solis. Prampolini’s part-organic, part-mystical rapprochement correlated with discourses arising from the contemporary Italian Imperialist expansion in Africa. These refigurations could accommodate the colonial pursuits of the Fascist regime and its rhetoric, as is evidenced, for example, in Prampolini’s 1930s theatre work. Here, the merger of machines and the primitive yielded imposing, monumental scenes literally dominated by hieratic stone idols. This strategy, however, was most visibly at work in the six panels entitled ‘The black continent at the conquest of mechanical civilisation’ put together for the Paris International Colonial Exposition (6 May–15 November 1931). Prampolini was the only representative of contemporary Italian art. Together with Marinetti, Prampolini planned the futurist presence strategically, including a banquet in the Italian marquee attended by the dancer Josephine Baker on 24 June. Prampolini’s panels generated a heated debate, leading to the polemics around ‘mural art’ (see section 5.1a). Described as ‘grotteschi’ (grotesque), each single one of these rectangular, 7 x 3 metre panels aimed to achieve a ‘visual paradox by drawing distant elements close together, such as matching a black dancer with a Radio or the simultaneous compenetration of a savage warrior with a televised image’.204 Prampolini’s visual juxtapositions of primitive and technological remind one of Warburg’s observations about modernity’s collapse of distance. In pursuit of the cultural and ethnographic roots of art and cultural history, Warburg had highlighted his concerns for the impact of technology in modernity by contrast with the Serpent ritual of the Pueblo Indians. The common ground shared by the symbolic forms of civilisation and science across time was visibly at work in Prampolini’s panels, e.g. panel n. 1, Il feticcio meccanizzato (Mechanised fetish) purported to ‘mechanise the atmosphere of a boundless desert’.205 Panel n. 4, entitled Il sole tatuato (The tattooed sun), highlighted ‘the geometric outline of a squad of airplanes, their silhouettes literally tattooing the synthetic disc of the sun. Seized by the fetishism of this new

203 A. Aniante, ‘Classicismo e futurismo’, Il Mattino, 12 July 1931, [n.p.]. The emphasis is my own. 204 ‘L’arte “negra” di Prampolini all’Esposizione Coloniale’, in M. Carli, ‘Appunti di un Fascista in cammino’, Il Popolo di Roma, 22 July 1931, 3. 205 Ibid.

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energy, black men and women follow this mechanical outline with their orgiastic muscular rhythm. High above, through mimetic vibration, a black woman morphs into a double helix.’206 Panel n. 5, Lo schermo del deserto (Shield of the desert), featured a tribal group of ‘black men and women’ caught in ecstatic contemplation of the silhouettes of a ‘mechanical workshop in full operation’. The sixth and last panel, La magia della perla nera (Black pearl’s magic) was a homage to Marinetti featuring the birth of a ‘mechanised Venus’ emerging out of a black pearl.207 In line with the technodialogical paradigm, Prampolini located the encounter between the primitive and technological in a colonial setting underpinned by syncopated, automatic, machine-like energies and physical movement. Hal Foster singles out two fetishes in modernism: the primitive and the technological. Often utilised in tandem, these fetishes ‘permitted intensive projections’,208 as Prampolini’s panels imply. Prampolini’s late primitive regime was not merely a foray into cubist art on the model of Picasso. He aimed to foreground Botticelli’s Venus, a masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance and compelling cultural precedent whose visual dynamics and symbolic import had travelled across time, intersecting the Imperialist project of fascismo. Identifying with this project, providing new instruments of domination and imposing new hierarchies in a geography of colonial oppression, the machine transcended both the architectural technology of metropolis and the ideological dynamics of industrial relations to find cultural interconnections in a globalised world. In combining the machine with the primitive, flirting with Marinetti’s fantasies of racial otherness, reaching out to cultural and visual repetitions where the boundary between the primitive and the technological are indeterminate, Prampolini’s panels epitomised a new idiom at the cusp of the industrial 1920s about to collapse into the aerial 1930s. To conclude, in 1938 and 1939 Prampolini focused on aeropainting, as is attested by his assiduous attendance of aeropainting exhibitions at this time. He now situated himself at the ‘final frontier of aeropainting’, appraising his own work in jargon peppered with theosophic and pseudo-scientific idioms.209 His goal became evoking a ‘psychic primitive space’ inhabited by a ‘bio-plastic’ matter rooted in biology and chemistry projected against a pantheistic cosmic backdrop.210 In the hour of a new cataclysmic turn in human history, a Second World War deafened by the din of Ibid. ‘L’arte “negra” di Prampolini’, 3. Foster, Prosthetic Gods, XI. Cit. in Marinetti, ‘untitled’, Meridiano di Roma: L’Italia letteraria artistica e scientifica, 26 March 1939, [n.p.]: ‘“This is a predominantly stratospheric and biochemical aeropainting. The infinitely small of ultra-microscopic investigation seduces my intuition and it is such fun to intuit and paint cosmic waves and colossal discharges of interplanetary electricity”.’ 210 Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 250.

206 207 208 209

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imploding Empires, Prampolini made an impassionate plea to revive and renew core futurist values.211 The onus is on us, he argued, as foremost international figures, to revive the ‘Mediterranean civilisation’ and use it as leverage. Prampolini completed his neoclassical parable here, braiding primitive and technological together in the new architectural possibilities of the rural environment of Capri. In a further letter to Marinetti dated 2 September 1942, he called himself out of history, out of time, his work thinning out in the hustle and bustle of a time weighed down by ‘apocalyptic’ warfare.212 The same warfare that an ageing Marinetti embraced with enthusiasm but with depleted energies, dying in December 1944 shortly after his farewell to arms. Approaching his own demise, on 16 January 1956 Prampolini informed Severini of his bed-ridden inactivity while recovering from a stroke. Despite his fragility, he nudged his friend to intervene in his favour to obtain some much-coveted recognition.213 Prampolini did not live to see his desire realised: on the eve of his last day, on 17 June 1956, a committee of French critics awarded him the Prix Paris at the VII Quadriennale in Rome, in recognition of a ‘futurist life vocated to the European avantgarde’.214 His aeropainting left an enduring mark on the futuristi, redirecting their investment in the machine. As Berghaus observed: ‘there had always been a tendency in Marinetti to see in the machine a metaphysical force and not just to regard it as a symbol of technological progress. This trend became dominant in the aero-futurists of the 1930s, when a transcendental machine cult with spiritual and cosmological overtones took shape.’215 Prampolini was the protagonist of this turn. The prime mover, however, was probably Fillia. Fillia’s machines were a modus vivendi, a communicative mode and a discursive practice within an Imperialist society seeking to tone down ideology and harmonise the tensions between capital, Church and government. Fillia’s aerofuturist trajectory led to the collapse of the revolutionary, materialist and collectivist machine upheld by the futurist heretics discussed in Chapter 4, and to the embrace of a new orthodoxy and new forms of ritual social gatherings. Fillia turned ‘machine aesthetics’ into ‘machine spirituality’, embedding the machine in the human psyche. From the greasy pulleys and cogwheels of the 1920s to the transcendental, ‘pure’, wireless, posthuman ‘mechanical spirituality’ of the 1930s, the aerofuturist machine fits the modus operandi of Warburg’s pathos formula, as I shall discuss in the 211 Prampolini, private correspondence with Marinetti (22 June 1940), cit. in Lista (ed.), Enrico Prampolini: carteggio futurista, 150. 212 Cit. in Lista (ed.), Enrico Prampolini: carteggio futurista, 152. 213 Cit. in ibid., 205. 214 Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 282. 215 Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination, 32.

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following chapter. ‘Eventually’, argues Versari, ‘the myth of the machine’s aesthetic efficacy to achieve a psychological conformity of human beings with modernity was to be reworked and used as a rhetorical weapon that sustained futurism itself in its constant battle to gain official recognition as the leading artistic ideology within the Fascist State.’216 Under the heading of aerofuturism, late futurismo was blazing the trail towards a powerful convergence between the technological and the symbolic, leading to an irrational, spectacular cult of aviation in national ritual function.

216 Versari, ‘Futurist machine art’, 167–8.

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6 From aerodancing technobodies to dysfunctional machines Modern technology […] collapsed the vault of heaven. (S. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1983) Everything is halo. (B. Cendrars, ‘Contrasts’, 1913)

6.1 Aerofuturismo Aerofuturismo attempted to re-humanise, ‘elevate’ the machine. The development of the aviation industry, the repetition of ancient myths of flying and symbolic pathos formulas, the immaterial suggestions of quantum mechanics prompted a return to human subjectivity prefigured in Fillia and Prampolini’s ‘soulful’ machine. Aerofuturismo developed in the late 1920s, underpinned by new flying technologies, reeled by vertical perspectives leading to heavenly heights. As the futurist group splintered and individual artists, no longer polemical with the hegemony of the centre, competed with one another for State commissions, connections with the headquarters became looser. New regional clusters mushroomed all over Italy, reinforcing the futurist ranks but, at the same time, decentring their efforts and activities. Expatriations still provided a thrill of discovery. However, after the wave of exiles during the Fascist rule, the ranks closed up again. Younger artists aligned their practices closer to home, contributing to the newly acquired prestige of Fascist aviation. Officially supporting the novecento school, fascismo continued to demonstrate benign ‘tolerance’ for futurist activities. The aerial turn was instrumental in showcasing the industrial investments and military pursuits of the regime.1 Aerofuturismo took off and thrived especially in the 1930s, overlapping with the boom of aviation pursued in earnest by the regime. 1 Duranti et al., Piety and Pragmatism, 22.

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Futurist trajectories were no longer drawn on a horizontal line, but, rather, a vertical one, via oblique and vertiginous new visual logics that established a connection between the earth and the heavens. The sky and the machine engaged in a new synthesis. De-historicised, no longer a bulky, clunky instrument of utilitarian oppression or collective enfranchisement, the machine morphed into a lightweight, aerial construction, suspended in mid-air, unbound by earth’s gravity. As such, it was a forceful advocate for both conformist religious values and the clout, mystique and investment of Fascist Italy in aviation. The aerofuturist machine left behind earlier forms of internationalism to inhabit the skies of the Italian nation. Mino Somenzi’s Futurist technical manifesto of aeropainting and aerosculpture (1928) provided conceptual grounding, ‘borrowing’ from Marinetti’s official launch manifesto. Articulated in a long list of distinct practices (aeropittura, aeroscultura, aeropoesia, aerodanza), the aerial variant of futurismo was introduced as a nebula of diverse individual experiences. The futurist mechanical framework was seen to hold these disparate pursuits together, albeit with a twist: the word of the day was ‘spirit’, and ‘spirit’ was to correlate effortlessly with the machine, enriching it with a new engagement with the immaterial fabric of the sky. Even though Marinetti continued to reclaim paternity over mechanical aesthetics, even a cursory glance at newspaper cuttings collected by Prampolini reveals a diminishing presence of industrial machines in futurist discourse in the second half of the 1930s. Prampolini tellingly observed that ‘the airplane is not simply a machine for us futurists; it is rather a divine product of mechanical civilisation. As such it transcends the real to become a myth.’2 Further down the line, Ginna’s manifesto Scienzarte, published in Futurismo on 1 January 1933, will advocate novel technological and spiritual paradigms arising from occult and para-normal rather than traditional science. Marinetti’s manifesto Matematica futurista (1940 or 1941; see section 2.6) draws on non-Euclidean geometry, as well as ‘qualitative’ and asymmetrical algebra. Lining up with ‘reactionary modernism’, the machine will shed its social and political undertones to become a vehicle of metaphysical and visionary elevation, ‘an almost magical force that counteracts the routinisation of modern life and labour’.3 Contemporary developments in philosophy, logic and the sciences may have reverberated through late futurist thinking. Einstein’s general relativity theory collapsed the Euclidean world of abstracted simultaneity and the fixed, mechanical cosmos of Newtonian memory, consigning reality to experimental evidence. If it is true that the real constitutes one and only one particular case of what is possible, the 2 Prampolini, ‘L’aeroplano’, 1. 3 S. Mentor, ‘Manifesto technologies: Marx, Marinetti, Haraway’, www.dvara.net/hk/technomanifest.asp (accessed 11 August 2018), [n.p.].

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possible becomes then, in turn, ‘homogène à l’Être’,4 acquiring pride of place in the organisation of experience. Additionally, the introduction of the principle of indeterminacy, following the formulation of quantum theory in 1923–27, postulated that materiality ceases to be absolute in a framework where experience and matter exist only in a correlation with each other. ‘The loss of a fixed, unitary description of the physical world’,5 the mutual exclusivity and complementarity of wave and particle in the description of physical matter as per Heisenberg’s principle and the undecidability introduced by Gödel in 1931 with his incompleteness theorem influenced Duchamp and the surrealists. Aby Warburg, who corresponded at length with Einstein, was eager to correlate new scientific hypotheses with the visual persistence of cultural figurations across time (pathos formula). Following the school of Warburg, Edgar Wind’s Habilitationschrift Experiment and Metaphysics (1930) posited a revolution in metaphysical thinking as a consequence of the discovery of quantum mechanics and the indeterminacy principle, proposing, in particular, to revisit the Kantian antinomies in the light of post-Newtonian physics.6 New combinations of technology and metaphysics exploded traditional modes of convergence between art, life and technology, not least novel optical and perceptive configurations advanced by Gestalt theory.7 These momentous debates stand behind the aerofuturist machine. As I shall explore below, the machine continued to be represented on the canvas, in immaterial form, as was the case, for example, in Fillia’s Natività-morte-eternità (Nativity-death-eternity; 1931–32), described by Marinetti as ‘a dematerialised large cross, composed of sky itself. This cross comes to the surface on the liquid body of the Virgin Mary, like a suave underwater phosphorescence.’8 It was also visibly at work in Bragaglia’s experimental photography, which dissolved the sitter, capturing her/his fuzzy indeterminacy (see section 6.5a), and Bruno Munari’s ‘useless’ or dysfunctional machines, conceived to explode the material fabric of the physical world (see sections 6.5b and 6.5c). Last but not least, Giannina Censi rerouted technology in society via her embodied aerodances (see sections 6.4b, 6.4c and 6.4d). Through the 1930s and 1940s the futurist machine agenda was promoted especially by aeropainting and aeropoetry. Consigning the trappings of nineteenth-century modernism to the realm of nostalgia, aeropainting and aeropoetry purported to do away with staid visual 4 G. Bachelard, ‘La mécanique non-newtonienne’, in Le nouvel esprit scientifique (Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), 60. 5 Parkinson, ‘Alchemy and science’, 108. 6 B. Thomas, ‘Freedom and exile: Edgar Wind and the congress for cultural freedom’, forthcoming in G. Johnson (ed.), Exile and Expatriate Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge). 7 Nagel, ‘Instead of cathedrals, machines for living’, 250–5. 8 Marinetti and Fillia, Manifesto dell’arte sacra futurista, in Teoria e invenzione futurista, 204.

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and textual legacies in favour of an ‘art without tradition, a field uncluttered by scaffoldings’.9 6.2 Aeromania, the aviation industry and fascismo The widespread appeal and glamour of flying machines began to flood poetry and prose, from Liala’s romances to Pratella’s opera L’aviatore Dro (1920; see section 4.4) and Saint-Exupéry’s L’Aviateur (The Aviator; 1926, leading to The Little Prince). The illustrious literary revival of flying by poet and agitator à la mode Gabriele D’Annunzio added ammunition to this trend. His neoclassical, mythical revisitations of sky were influential on the futurists. A war hero much admired and emulated by Mussolini and Marinetti alike, if begrudgingly, D’Annunzio plundered the repertoire of classical myth to aestheticise the flying experience. His manner was all the more incisive for intersecting with ‘aeromania’: the cultural and social phenomenon of the day. ‘Aeromania’ eloquently captured the glamourous iconicity acquired by flying machines, their awe-inspiring feats displayed in public shows in the first decades of the twentieth century, when aviation became, in the words of Schnapp, ‘one of the era’s defining forms of spectacle’.10 For Apollinaire, it was a modern version of parading Cimabue’s Madonna and Child Surrounded by Angels through the streets of thirteenth-century Florence: a portent of ‘craft and technology serving society, to sublime ends, and the celebratory recognition of that achievement by the populace’.11 In 1909, when Marinetti brought out his Founding and manifesto of futurism, Wilbur Wright completed the first extended run on a plane, equivalent to 124 kilometres of uninterrupted time on air. François Peyrey described the ‘religious grandeur’ of Wright’s flight. For Apollinaire, the airplane was the pinnacle of a millennial aspiration.12 In the same year, Louis Blériot accomplished the first flight across the English Channel, celebrated by Robert Delaunay in the painting Hommage à Blériot (Homage to Blériot; 1914) and welcomed by the press as a realisation of ‘the dream of Icarus’.13 Still in 1909, between 8 and 20 September, a spectacular airshow at Montichiari, near Brescia, became paradigmatic for the acclaim, enthusiasm, elegance and sophistication of the large crowds of admirers and wellwishers it gathered together. This rally brought 9 I. Scurto, ‘L’aviazione italiana e i suoi lirici interpreti’, Il Resto del Carlino, 18 November 1939, [n.p.]. 10 J. T. Schnapp, ‘Propeller talk’, Modernism/Modernity, 1:3 (1994), 157. 11 Apollinaire, ‘The cubist painters’ (1913). The parade of Cimabue’s painting to the glorious sound of trumpets, originally relayed by Vasari, became the subject of Leighton’s oil painting Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna Is Carried in Procession Through the Streets of Florence (1853–55) – A. Nagel, ‘Airplanes and altarpieces’, in Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time (London: Thames and Hudson, 2012), 37. 12 Nagel, ‘Airplanes and altarpieces’, 41–2. 13 Ibid.

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together an unprecedented number of European intellectuals: Kafka, Brod, Puccini, Marinetti, D’Annunzio and many others peered at the sky, applauded the prowess of flying machines, were awed by the heady technology on display, gawped at the skills of dashing pilots.14 The mystique of flying was swiftly captured in modern art.15 D’Annunzio was among the crowd. A year later, exploiting this fashion, he brought out Forse che sì, forse che no (Maybe yes, maybe no; 1910), his last novel. Here, the poet immaginifico outlined a history of aviation omitting to mention the recent French exploits, including Blériot’s Channel ride. D’Annunzio regarded flying as an aristocratic experience, site of elitist elevation, both actual and symbolic, and means of reasserting hierarchy in an increasingly massified society.16 His approach was antipodean to Kafka’s own. Kafka focused instead on the functional, technical, operational details of engines, propellers, wings and teams of mechanics.17 The diversity of approaches ensured that the airplane and the glamour of flying continued to resonate for years to come, travelling across the lines of class, age and gender. The first flight over the Alps and the first use of an airplane in combat followed suit. Italy blazed the trail testing out its capability in Libya. The country first deployed air bombing in the Italo-Turkish war (1911–12). On 7 August 1915 the pilot Giovanni Miraglia flew over the sky of Austro-Hungarian Trieste together with D’Annunzio in the passenger seat. The plane dropped bombs while D’Annunzio frantically threw out nationalist leaflets advocating the Italian cause. He repeated the exploit on 16 June 1916, receiving a serious wound to his right eye. On 9 August 1918, D’Annunzio took part in another air raid, over Vienna this time, and dropped patriotic flyers on the city. Elucidating the mystical thrills of flying, the poet addressed a group of aviators in an airfield at Centocelle in Rome on 9 July 1919, reminding ‘his audience that the shadow of the “winged machine” was similar to the shadow made by the wooden cross, symbol of sacrifice and salvation’.18 D’Annunzio’s two-pronged approach, e.g. mystical and mythical, went on to influence the aerofuturists. The Duce of fascismo was also a captive audience. Mussolini intuited the political effectiveness of flying stunts and the cultural capital accrued by flying. ‘The idea of the aviator as a natural leader was one that Benito Mussolini seems to have grasped 14 The rally is skilfully described by P. Demetz, Aeronauti: Kafka, Brod, D’Annunzio e Puccini al circuito aereo di Brescia del 1909 (Milan: Garzanti, 2004), passim. 15 Nagel, ‘Airplanes and altarpieces’, 42. 16 Demetz, Aeronauti, 132; P. Antonello, ‘On an airfield in Montichiari, near Brescia. Staging rivalry through technology: Marinetti and D’Annunzio’, Stanford Electronic Humanities Review, 7:1 (1999), https://web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/7–1/html/antonello.html, accessed 21 September 2017, [n.p.]. Marinetti lagged behind, publishing his first book about airplanes, Le monoplane du Pape (Paris: Sansot), in 1912, backdated to 1908 or 1907 in order to claim primacy over his rival. 17 Demetz, Aeronauti, 100–1. 18 Wohl, Spectacle of Flight, 59.

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intuitively at an early point’:19 he quickly tried to obtain a licence to fly, desisting only after a crash that cost him two weeks of bed-bound immobility. Eager to exploit flying’s symbolic cachet for propaganda purposes, he clearly understood the role aviation played for military and belligerent purposes. As Chase observed in 1930, the plane is infinitely deadlier, easier to assemble and cheaper to run than any other weapons. Unlike other weapons, it is a three-dimensional war machine operating on three planes: level, above and below. Against a flying machine, all resistance is futile.20 One of Mussolini’s first initiatives in government was to set up a committee to represent aviation interests. In March 1923, he installed a Ministry of Aeronautics arising from the merger of army and navy into Royal Aeronautics (Regia aeronautica), gathering together military, civilian and colonial aviation. With this bold visionary move, Italy became second to Great Britain as a major power to possess an independent air force.21 If in Germany nationalism was constructed upon Arian and earth-bound ideologies, in Italy and the Latin nations, instead, national identity pointed its gaze skywards, cementing national pride and technology in the skies.22 Italo Balbo (1896–1940) stood at the hub of the Fascist investment in aviation. One of the cornerstones of fascismo since the fateful March on Rome of October 1922, in 1926 Balbo was appointed vice-secretary for aviation, with the brief of putting together a Ministry of Air, inaugurated in 1931. Shortly afterwards, he was honoured as the hero of a Crociera aerea del decennale, after leading the first transatlantic round-trip flying cruise which left Orbetello in Puglia on 1 July 1933 comprised of twenty-four seaplanes. This feat was one of the first crossings from East to West. When the group reached Chicago on 15 July, the whole US industrial civilisation intent on celebrating the Century of Progress Exposition appeared to gather together to peer at the Chicago sky and cheer the Italian flying troop. The feat was a triumph of Mussolini’s decade-long investment on aeronautics, admiration for Fordist practices and symbolic legitimisation of a collectivist totalitarian ideology.23 Hardly four 19 Ibid., 51 and 61. 20 Chase, Men and Machines, 312–16. 21 Wohl, Spectacle of Flight, 63; M. Scudiero, M. Cirulli and G. Allegri (eds), Oggi si vola! Cent’anni di tecnica, sogni e cultura di massa: manifesti, pitture e sculture aeronautiche del Novecento italiano (Bologna: XX Secolo, 2003), 43. 22 J. Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 10: ‘Although technology exerted a fascination for fascist intellectuals all over Europe, it was only in Germany that it became part of the national identity.’ I am not entirely convinced that the German case was unique in this respect. For Germanic-earthly versus Latin-aerial nationalism, see P. Virilio, ‘L’aeromitologia futurista’, cit. in Strauven, Marinetti e il cinema, 53–4. 23 M. Riou, ‘Industria e sviluppo aeronautico nella letteratura italiana “ufficiale” degli anni 1930–1935: mito e realtà’, in Bàrberi Squarotti and Ossola (eds), Letteratura e industria, II, 728 and 723. Balbo described his feats in Stormi in volo sull’oceano (1931) and La centuria alata (1933).

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months after returning from the cruise, Mussolini marginalised the scene-stealing Balbo, appointing him Governor-General of Libya in the same year, at a time when aeronautical exploits were beginning to wane. Balbo died in 1940 when the Italian anti-aerial defence failed to recognise his plane and shot it down in friendly fire. Emulating Balbo, in 1934 Francesco Agello broke the world record when he flew a seaplane at over 700 km/hour. An Exhibition of Italian Aeronautics inaugurated in the same year showcased the remains of the airplane of the First World War fighter ace Francesco Baracca, hit by ground fire and shot down in 1918. It also displayed the SVA that flew D’Annunzio over Vienna in the same year and the SS.55X that Balbo took over the Atlantic. All exhibits were showcased as mystical relics of a new religion. The exhibition also featured the plane in which Mussolini had crashed in 1921: ‘the visual logic was inescapable. Like Icarus, Mussolini was a martyr to the cause of aviation, but one who had miraculously survived.’24 Aviation played an even more significant role in the Second World War, when war strategies were constructed around and deployed by more efficient and destructive technologies of conflict.25 Aerofuturismo borrowed their glamorous vision of the flying machine, while also lending these developments cultural and aesthetic legitimacy. Witnessing the striking enterprises of flying aces, from Laureati to de Pinedo, Balbo and Ferrarin, numerous futurists joined the ranks of the regime in an effort to construct an epic of flying.26 The flying machine became a site of convergence of Fascist and futurist interests. Plundering a premodern imagery of devotion and spirituality, the intersection of spiritual and technological values reconfigured the Fascist woman as the Virgin Mary, as Fillia’s work had powerfully prefigured. Paradoxically, this fusion also allowed ‘the female performer [Giannina Censi] to exist within and at the same time challenge the fascist ideal of “Woman”’.27 The new flying technology both challenged and was subsumed under conventional gender categories, as I shall discuss in section 6.4. 6.3 Aeropoetry and aeropainting 6.3a Aeropoesia To begin with, the flying machine was represented more frequently in textual form. Marinetti referred to mythical flying devices in his early writings, configuring the aviator as a novel Icarus, axis mundi and embodiment of a suggestive ancestral 24 25 26 27

Wohl, Spectacle of Flight, 105. Scudiero, Cirulli and Allegri (eds), Oggi si vola!, 63. Ibid., 44. A. Klöck, ‘Of cyborg technologies and fascistised mermaids: Giannina Censi’s Aerodanze in 1930s Italy’, Theatre Journal, 51 (1999), 407.

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mythology,28 echoing D’Annunzio’s neoclassical repertoire. Rooted in D’Annunzio and Marinetti’s neoclassical approach, aeropoetry strove to converge the ‘motion of the human spirit with the dynamics of the cosmic spheres’.29 Aeropoetry also germinated from Enrico Cavacchioli’s collection Cavalcando il sole (Riding the sun; 1914) and, especially, the poems ‘Sia maledetta la luna!’ (The moon be damned!) and ‘Fuga in aeroplano’ (Airplane run). Cavacchioli reimagined the sky as the heavens imbued with ‘spirituality’: the machine’s new playground. Bohn categorised the genre in four groups: poems in the first group describe the experience of flying. The poet takes on the identity of her or his flying machine and is ‘transformed into the machine itself’.30 A second cluster includes poems that describe what can be seen from an airplane, e.g. Marinetti’s ‘L’aeropoema del golfo della Spezia’ (Aeropoem of the gulf of La Spezia; 1935) and Gaetano Pattarozzi’s ‘Aeropoema futurista della Sardegna’ (Futurist aeropoem of Sardinia; 1939). Poems in the third category view the airplane as a metaphor, e.g. Pino Masnata’s ‘Fascismo: aeropoesia in parole in libertà’ (Fascism: aeropoetry of words in freedom; 1934) featuring a hydroplane. By then, the futurist love of machines ‘had been elevated to the status of a religion’.31 Poems belonging to the fourth category mention the airplane as a motif, a metonymy, rather than a metaphor, such as Marinetti’s ‘Ristorante di aeroporto: aeropoesia futurista’ (Airport restaurant: futurist aeropoem; [n.d.]). The belligerent posturing of Italy, culminating with the second colonial ItaloEthiopian War (1935–36), the Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War in aid of Franco (1936) and the Second World War (1939–45) reoriented aeropoetry in military directions, as is evidenced by Ignazio Scurto’s eulogies of heroic flying aces, e.g. the Gold Medal winner Corinto Bellotti and the top scoring pilot Mario Visintini. In 1931, a new literary movement branded ‘stracielo’ (ultrasky) joined forces with the existing ‘strapaese’ (ultravillage) and ‘stracittà’ (ultracity; see Introduction and section 1.4) in representation of the growing literary and cultural capital accrued by flying machines. 6.3b Aeropittura As a formal and aesthetic idiom, aeropittura predated the eponymous manifesto. It developed after aeropoetry, with the intent to celebrate and develop an aesthetics of 28 Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 199; Antonello, ‘On an airfield in Montichiari’, [n.p.]. 29 Prampolini, ‘L’aeroplano’, 2. 30 W. Bohn, ‘The poetics of flight: futurist “aeropoesia”’, MLN, 121 (2006), 212. Examples include ‘Decollaggio’ by Pina Bocci and ‘Sensazione di volo’ by Piero Anselmi. Maria Goretti’s Colloquio col motore (1941) could probably be included too (see also section 2.4). 31 Bohn, ‘The poetics of flight’, 218. Bohn indicates Giuseppe Lipparini as the author of ‘Aeropoema futurista della Sardegna’.

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flying in the era that witnessed the triumph of flying machines. Its politics, both overt and covert, were complex, since Marinetti attempted to strategically steer this new practice in order to find a compromise between the core cosmopolitanism of futurismo and the normative pressures of a ‘return to order’. An emblem of Fascist industry and its aspirations of modernity in alliance with the Catholic Church (Lateran Treaty; 1929), the flying machine seemed to effortlessly combine technology with spirituality, cosmic heavens and human reach, subsuming the new alliances under the mechanical identity of international futurismo. To begin with, futurist painting was not overly concerned with aerial perspectives from above, which were assumed to provide bi-dimensional, distant and reassuring visions of the real. This was redressed at a later stage. During the First World War, widely accessible photography attracted the attention of the futuristi and the European avant-garde due to its audacious and unstable visual expedients. The whole of Europe was exposed to photographs and bold images, including perspectives of and from warplanes. These compelling photographs are a significant precedent of aeropittura.32 Marinetti’s Le monoplan du Pape (1912) and especially Cocteau’s Dans le ciel de la patrie (In the Sky of the Homeland; 1918), illustrated with Eduardo García Benito’s cubist-futurist gouaches, were also influential. Both the cubists and the constructivists became fascinated by the airplane, as is evidenced in the works of Khlebnikov, Rodchenko and Tatlin. Between 1919 and 1932, Tatlin worked on a new concept glider that attempted to counter the geometry of modern engines and aircrafts.33 Gradually, aeropittura began to focus on the individual’s first-hand experience of flying and its visual, sensory and emotional impact. Immersed in a broad and dynamic field of vision characterised by multiple optical transformations and shifts of the horizon, the painter seemed to inhabit a new space: multiplied, polycentric, no longer constrained by the rules of perspective. Under the influence of new stimulations and a visual protocol which distorted perceptions of space and time, the ‘new plastic and extra-terrestrial spirituality’34 of the flying machine swiftly took hold. Marinetti confessed to his personal difficulty to harmonise the broad sensorium called up by the experience of flying with the need to get his hands dirty, the haptics and affect of flying with the competent skills required to steer the mechanical plane and the intensely ‘spiritual’ elation aroused by suspension in mid-air with ‘the familiarity with engines enjoyed by technicians’.35

32 33 34 35

Cf. Lista, ‘Vue aérienne’, 101–2. Poleskie, ‘Art and flight’, 73. Marinetti, ‘L’aeropittura e l’aeropoesia futuriste’, [n.p.]. Ibid.

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The new perspective was oblique and top-down, recreating the real within the constraints of a dynamic, layered, ever-changing visual field reeling in front of the pilot’s overstretched eyes. Aeropittura relied on biomorphic and geometric forms to convey the ‘quintessentially modernist perspective offered from the air’.36 Coming a long way away from Boccioni’s Faraday-inspired force lines, this novel approach reached out to a post-Einstein, fourth-dimensional universe. In this new universe Maxwell’s bi-dimensional plane was replaced by a revolving space–time continuum. Platonic solids no longer inhabited a neutralised environment or Ether, but impressed their gravitational, atmospheric and cosmological force on the weary eyes of the viewer. In focusing on a concrete, experimental experience, seeking ‘the physical materiality of flying’, the aeropainters did not turn to Malevitch and El Lissitzky, but, rather, attempted to align themselves with the codification of perspective rooted in Italian painting. At the same time, they challenged it, breaking its rules under the pressure of the intense dynamic forces, optic deformations and atmospheric influences experienced by the observer during a flight.37 The radicalism of a visual regime exploding the canons of ‘prospettiva’ cannot be emphasised enough in the context of painting in Italy. In order to remain aware of the rules of bi-dimensionality of Renaissance perspective, the aeropainters were obliged to rewrite its language entirely.38 Pythagorean and Platonic suggestions rooted in Renaissance culture probably played a part too, as is evidenced in the suggestion that space and time are ‘pure expressions of the intellect’.39 Prampolini introduced the figure of the sphere, symbolic of the cosmos, to signify a ‘spiritual mythology of flying’.40 The flying machine achieved transcendental and cosmic values through these routes as well. Prampolini and Fillia pioneered what Marinetti called a ‘mystique of aviation’. The first steerings of aeropainting, however, date to the Venice Biennale of 1926, when Fedele Azari exhibited an outline of visual perspectives from the air, premised by Balla and Depero’s mechanical manifesto Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo (see section 3.2).41 Together with Azari, Prampolini, Depero and Fillia contributed to opening up new vistas,42 allowing the flying machine to take centre stage on their canvases. Stone, The Patron State, 50–1. Lista, ‘Vue aérienne’, 104 and 107–8. See Prampolini, ‘L’aeroplano’, 2; Lista, ‘Vue aérienne’, 109. Lista, ‘Vue aérienne’, 109; see also 106. Ibid., 110–11. See, for example, Prampolini’s painting ‘Maternità cosmica’. Celestial space is a quintessentially human domain here, as it is in Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis. The drawn figure of the Egyptian goddess Nout, maternal personification of the celestial vault whose body embraces the earth, enables Prampolini to reference the cosmogony of an ancient Mediterranean civilisation. 41 Biancale, ‘Il futurismo e la pittura del volo’, [n.p.]. 42 These include Prampolini’s Convegno degli Dei (The Gods’s tryst), Depero’s Paesaggio magico (Magic landscape) and Fillia’s Sensibilità futuriste (Futurist sensibilities). 36 37 38 39 40

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Aeropainting, however, flourished only in 1931 after the official launch, especially in the works of Fillia, Benedetta, Crali and Prampolini. In a typical stunt, Marinetti dated the manifesto of aeropainting to September 1929. In fact, it came out in 1931, in the pages of the periodical Giornale della Domenica. The entry was entitled ‘The world premiere of a new Italian art’ and subtitled ‘a manifesto by Marinetti’. Benedetta, Dottori, Depero, Fillia, Marinetti and Prampolini were listed as co-signatories. The first exhibition of aeropainting was held in 1931 in Rome, thence travelling to Trieste and Paris. In October of the same year, an important exhibition at Milan’s Galleria Pesaro was accompanied by a lecture by Marinetti and a performance of aerodance. On the same occasion, a group of futuristi from Turin, including Oriani, Rosso, Diulgheroff, Pozzo, Saladin, Alimandi, Zucco and Vignazia and headed by Fillia, sanctioned the definitive abandonment of the utilitarian machine, stressing the ‘requirement to supersede the exploitation of machines and approach them instead with spiritual intent’.43 They resolved to transcend ‘objective insight’ and ‘traditional interpretation’ and paint original work ‘inspired by an aerial sensibility’. The ultimate goal was ‘to point to the mysteries of a new spirituality’ through artworks designed as ‘“spiritual aerial organisms”, plastic representations of new deities and mysteries evoked by “machines”’.44 By the mid-1930s, this mysticism of the sky had fully supplanted the 1920s faith in the factory as a catalyst of mechanical work. The new machine was, rather, a cultural fossil symbolising ancient cosmogonies. In 1935, Marinetti singled out four distinct strands: a documentary style, portraying flying machines when airborne and typified by canvases of ‘brutal simplicity’ (Tato, Ambrosi, Barbara); a lyrical, transfigurative strand, where landscapes become defined by and drenched in the atmosphere surrounding them (Benedetta, Dottori); an ‘essential, mystical, ascending, symbolic’ trend where the flying machine typifies mystical states of being (Fillia); and ‘stratospheric, cosmic, biochemical’ aeropainting, where cosmological material and evenemential phenomena are key (Prampolini). Marinetti tasked both aeropainting and aerosculpture with achieving ‘geometric splendor’, shiny metals and vertiginous ascending lines.45 Through the bonds braiding together mystical, scientific, technological and industrial values, aeropittura furthered the goals, both material and symbolic, of fascismo.46 43 Futuristi torinesi: Fillia, Oriani, Mino Rosso, Diulgheroff, Pozzo, Saladin, Alimandi, Zucco, Vignazia, ‘L’aeropittura futurista’, in 41 pittori futuristi, Galleria Pesaro, Milan, October–November 1931, cit. in Anon, Esposizioni futuriste II serie 1918–31, 15–16. 44 Futuristi torinesi, ‘L’aeropittura futurista’, 16–17. 45 BRBML, General collection, preface and selected pages by Marinetti and Fillia, Salon d’automne de Lyon, 1935, 28–30. 46 Ialongo, ‘Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’, 402.

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6.3c Aeropainting: a woman’s practice? Numerous women considered themselves to be part of the aerofuturist ranks. Even though the most original outcomes were perhaps achieved in the art of dance (see section 6.4), aeropainting was still an appealing and productive field for a group of audacious, forward-looking and acrobatic women determined to challenge conventional representations of passivity, inertia and nostalgia.47 This heterogeneous group included Maria Ginanni – I ponti delle cose (Bridges of things; 1917), Benedetta – Benedetta fra le donne (Benedetta / Blessed are you among women; 1919) and Maria D’Arezzo – Volata (Flight; 1920), all of whom acquired a reputation since early on. Scurto cited two women alone, Benedetta and Barbara (see below), as leading representatives of aeropainting, associating them with the categories ‘lyrical spatial’ and ‘synthetic and documentary’ respectively.48 Why were women so prominent in aeropainting compared with a relatively modest representation in futurismo overall? Numerous women acquired notoriety between the 1920s and 1930s in Italy, especially in the periodical press and literature, both lowbrow and highbrow.49 Women who drove rallies, most notably Camille du Gast, who raced for Ettore Bugatti in 1929 and described her exhilaration at merging with her automobile, became powerful role models.50 They were sophisticated and educated bourgeois women behind the steering wheel of fast cars, immortalised by Tamara de Lempicka, and in the cockpit of airplanes – the Fascist press devoted substantial attention to pioneering aviatrixes and the ‘flying fever’ infecting women, e.g. Clelia Ferla, Rosina Ferrario, the first woman to obtain a flying licence in Italy in 1913, and Caterina Negrone di Cambiaso, who won the women’s world record for altitude in a seaplane. Aviation became a locus of female achievement and liberation, epitomised by the immensely popular romances penned by Liala (see below). In this framework, the received wisdom whereby futurismo relegated women to a reproductive function in response to the demographic policies of Fascist Italy, needs to be challenged. In fact, the estimation, role and participation of women was sustained, complex and nuanced in this phase, notwithstanding the questionable politics. Benedetta Cappa Marinetti (1897–1977) contributed significantly to laying down the theoretical premises of aeropainting. Her networking skills and her ability as a cultural operator revamped futurismo in the postwar years.51 A pupil of Balla and follower Pickering-Iazzi, Politics of the Visible, 213. Scurto, ‘L’aviazione italiana e i suoi lirici interpreti’, [n.p.]. Pickering-Iazzi, Politics of the Visible, 13–14. For du Gast, see M. Seymour, The Bugatti Queen: In Search of a Motor-Racing Legend (London, Sydney, New York and Toronto: Pocket Books, 2004), esp. 103. 51 Larkin, ‘Benedetta and the creation of “second futurism”’, 445–65. 47 48 49 50

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of Prampolini, Benedetta’s vision was aerial but short of mechanic. The machine, in fact, was ‘marginal in her work, with its synthetic language, basically lyrical approach, and highly personal palette of soft, light-shedding colors’.52 Especially in the 1930s, Benedetta borrowed from Prampolini and Fillia’s transcendentalism, even though her ‘spiritualism’ was ‘supported by the myth of woman as creative power’.53 Benedetta remained an advocate of women’s artistic specificity throughout, even though in the 1940s she strategically encouraged a self-image as a traditional mother and spouse, in line with her status as the ‘first lady of futurismo’ (she married Marinetti in 1923). Barbara (pseudonym of Olga Biglieri; 1915–2002) was both an artist and an aviatrix who obtained the licence to fly at the age of sixteen. Described by Marinetti as a ‘documentary’ visual artist, her aeropaintings were inspired by the physical and visual sensations aroused by flying, including graphic and prosaic details, such as projectile vomit induced by altitude. One of her most renowned paintings, entitled Vomito dall’aereo (Vomit from an airplane; 1938), consisted of a pattern of houses and fields foreshortened into parallelepipeds and triangles and intersecting electrical wires. The diagonal wing of an airplane sharply cut by the edge of the painting and a protruding wheel contributed to constructing a dynamic scene conveying the air sickness experienced by the painter. Barbara joined the futuristi in 1938 and continued to exhibit with them in major events, e.g. Rome’s Quadriennale (1939) and the two Venice Biennales of 1940 and 1942. Other women affiliated to futurismo regarded the machine as carrier of erotic or maternal connotations, streaked with suggestions from the contemporary cult of virility promoted by the Duce and in line with Marinetti’s cyborg. Overlapping symbolically with the male member, the machine became the object of explicit erotic desire in Maria Goretti (see section 2.4). Goretti’s ‘Il sonno delle macchine’ (The sleep of machines) and Magamal’s (pseudonym of Eva Kühn Amendola; 1880–1961) ‘Canto d’amore della donna cosmica’ (Love song of the cosmic woman) declared without qualms: ‘I am a steel urn / In a desert under the scorching sun … / I stand up alone and proud, waiting for you. / Come and split me in half, oh Lightning bolt – my Male’.54 A Fascist cult of patriarchal masculinity clearly resonates behind these forgettable lyrics. If we focus instead on the bond between pilot and plane and the amalgamation of machine with woman, we begin to understand why women were attracted to the aeropainting agenda. The gendering of the flying machine, where both the experience 52 Bentivoglio and Zoccoli, The Women Artists of Italian Futurism, 111. 53 Ibid. 54 JPGRIL, Papers of F. T. Marinetti and Benedetta Cappa, 1902–65, series III, box 14, n. 27, draft by Goretti, ‘Aeropoema guerriero quasi romanzo: Nozze Futuriste: Campana [sic] di Guerra con Trimotore’, [n.p.]. See also box 9, n. 5, autograph poem by Magamal with dedication to Marinetti entitled ‘Il canto d’amore della donna cosmica’, [n.p.], August 1918.

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of flying and the relation between pilot and flying machine are thoroughly eroticised, was a staple of popular fiction at that time. Amalia Liana Negretti Odescalchi in Cambiasi (1897–1995), whom D’Annunzio evocatively nicknamed Liala, penned romantic narratives and swiftly became one of the most influential popularisers of the era, her romances selling more than ten million copies in a long career spanning almost one century. Liala’s sentimental plots were invariably constructed around dashing Royal Aviation officers, a field she was familiar with and could describe in competent detail. Her ‘aeroromances’ popularised aviation, repackaging romantic love to suit the age of mechanical flying, conveying female desire in evocative sensual images of flying, wings, airplanes, eagles and creatures of the air.55 Liala’s narratives testify to how far the erotic suggestiveness of the machine, appropriated by a writing woman, had travelled away from Zola’s locomotive. A more empowering and ‘realistic’ deployment of the female body as machine, however, was on the horizon,56 underpinned by a proactive role for women as both producers and consumers of culture, as the vast female readership following Goretti and especially Liala’s production clearly demonstrates. Aviatrixes were firmly atop of machines: they were pilots and drivers, and also influential producers of culture, e.g. writers, dancers and painters. Giannina Censi’s new dances emerged into the limelight. Predicated on a forceful and original integration of the female body with technology, Censi’s dances bypassed the limitations constraining 1920s mechanical ballets into stiff and unwieldy conjunctions of body and technology. Through her re-envisioning of body kinetics and development of a techno-body that tapped into the vast imaginative capital of aviation and its implications for women, Censi invented one of the most genuine forms of mechanical dance in modern times. 6.4 Aerodance 6.4a Futurist dance Dance had played a pivotal role in European culture at least since the Middle Ages. As a social arena and form of entertainment, it tied in with good taste and protocols of socially acceptable behaviour. Historically, popular and social dances remained by and large the same across class boundaries, differing in garb and setting. In the early 1900, Europe was saturated with waltz and polka. Waltz, in particular, mediated the light-heartedness, militarism and prostitution of the bourgeois culture the visual media associated it with, especially operetta. While waltz was socially acceptable, the 55 Pickering-Iazzi, Politics of the Visible, 11 and 96. Liala was not, however, attached to futurismo. 56 Bentivoglio and Zoccoli, The Women Artists of Italian Futurism, 46.

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newer and more sexually charged jazz, foxtrot and other dances imported from the US (e.g. Boston waltz, one-step, two-step and tango) were perceived as daring and exotic, attracting a less normative cut of society. When futurismo came into being, the only official language of dance was classical ballet, an almost exclusively female profession, where male roles were performed on stage en travesti, with the notable exception of Russia. Traditional classical ballet was challenged by avant-garde dance, e.g. mechanical ballet or seeking alternative expressions of movement. It was the popular music halls, rather than elitist and traditional theatres, however, that experimented with new forms of dance, breaking the barriers between performers and the audience.57 Forceful innovations that reverberated widely in Europe include the anti-balletic genius of Isadora Duncan and Diaghilev’s Ballets russes. Futurist dance developed relatively late. Marinetti may not have accorded dance the status of dynamic art initially because of the anti-psychological, anti-subjective agenda of futurismo.58 Most probably, the futurists lacked know-how in the practical field of bodies in motion and were unlikely to put forward genuinely new kinetic ideas.59 Futurismo initially focused on ballets of robotic figures operated mechanically, e.g. Diaghilev’s collaborations with Balla and Depero (1917), Depero’s Balli plastici (1918) and Prampolini’s Matoum et Tévibar (1919). Balla’s Macchina tipografica (Printing press, 1914) featured dancers mimicking the movements of a linotype machine on stage. Depero’s ballet for Le chant du rossignol and especially Balli plastici relied on geometrical and mechanical automata. With the only exception of Valentine de Saint-Point, however, no other futurist had seriously engaged with dance before Censi came along. On 8 July 1917 Marinetti brought out a Manifesto of futurist dance. Here, he advocated ‘human physicality in its capacity as expressive medium’, leading to both mechanical ballets and aerodances.60 He upheld a fusion between human and machine, leading to experimental theatre that incorporated puppet-like or robotic human figures in the manner of Balla’s Feu d’artifice (Firework, 1917). He also demonstrated some competence in contemporary dance, namely contemporary French ballet. While he criticised Valentine de Saint-Point’s Métachorie (1913), regarded as a cold and posing performance, Marinetti lauded Loïe Fuller’s Serpentine dance (1890) for its dynamism, imaginative use of electric power and overwhelming magic. Fuller’s dance was mechanical beyond the humanist and the anthropocentric (see section 2.5). 57 P. Veroli, ‘Futurism and dance’, in Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909–44, 227. 58 G. Lista, ‘La danza futurista’, in E. Vaccarino and R. Antolini (eds), Giannina Censi: Danzare il futurismo (Milan: Electa, 1998), 27–8. 59 Veroli, ‘Futurism and dance’, 227. 60 Lista, ‘La danza futurista’, 32.

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Enwrapped in a soft, flowing costume and dancing barefoot, de Saint-Point referenced innovative styles, especially Duncan’s. Fuller, on the other hand, danced enwrapped in large veils on a dark stage illuminated by magic lanterns, assimilating her own dancing body with the stage settings and décor. By the 1930s, however, Marinetti’s explicit preference for forms of dance that featured machines and electric light appeared outdated. ‘We futurists’, Marinetti proclaimed, ‘prefer Loie-Füller and the cake-walk of negroes [sic] (deploying electric light and mechanics) […] to prepare the merging of man with the machine, achieving a futurist metallic dance.’61 According to Veroli, the futurists ‘experienced the kinetic problematics of dance as the painters and literati they were, rather than as dancers; thus they tended to consider the performer’s body merely as a machine for producing certain types of signal on the stage’.62 This was shortly to change, after Censi introduced a competent and self-reliant machine dance of her own. 6.4b Giannina Censi Gianna, also known as Giannina, Censi (1913–93) emerged into the limelight at the height of aerofuturismo. She took on futurism’s dance brief and put the female body at the forefront of its aeromechanical agenda. Going further than her predecessors, Censi challenged the absence of a public voice for women, using her own body as a linguistic and aeromechanical instrument. In the Métachorie, the aristocratic de Saint-Point posited woman as complementary to the machi(ni)st superman in accordance with Marinetti’s theories. Fuller’s Serpentine Dance had literally electrified dance, deploying mechanical objects and injecting electro-mechanical glamour into her phantasmagorical dances. Censi went further. She delivered genuine and unadulterated gesture, striving towards a ‘natural’ mechanical gesturality underpinned by a gendered hybridisation of human body and machine. Censi did not borrow the syncopated rhythms of jazz, which reflected urban mechanisation of labour. Nor did she echo the crude Taylorist assembly-line protocols of Pannaggi and Paladini’s Balletto meccanico. As already mentioned in section 4.3a, both Gramsci and Marx reflected on the long-term impact of machines on the worker’s body and gesture. At this time Meyerhold’s biomechanics impressed a mark on European dance with their emphasis on synchronised, controlled gymnastics and movement in mechanical function. With an eye on variety theatre and popular forms of entertainment, Marinetti injected irony and humour on the dreaded subordination

61 Marinetti, Manifesto della danza futurista, cit. in Teoria e invenzione futurista, 147. 62 Veroli, ‘Futurism and dance’, 228.

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of humans to machines.63 Censi’s aerial dances eclipsed these mechanised ballets, transcending constructivist biomechanics and reaching for a fluid, holistic integration of body and technology. Departing from the mechanical-geometrical precision of the anonymous chorus line, Censi’s mechanical dance relied entirely on the female body and invested it with a powerful gendered iconicity. Marinetti had reworked the relationship between human body and the machine into a ‘cyborg’. The new technologies of combat inspired him to develop a dance of the shrapnel, a dance of the machine-gun and a dance of the aviatrix. All three dances were meant to be performed by women. Only one of them, however, the dance of the aviatrix, came to fruition, in collaboration with Censi and thanks to her painstaking research on the mechanics of flying. Marinetti imagined a dancer would wear ‘a celluloid propeller pinned onto her breast, wear a white monoplane-shaped hat, and trail behind her a mass of undulating veils (an idea clearly borrowed from Loïe Fuller). Her face is covered with white make-up to depersonalise her even further. Lying flat on the floor, she will move her hands to simulate flying.’64 Drawing on the variety and music-hall theatre, as well as Fuller’s prosthetics, Marinetti’s suggestion that the human–mechanical matrix was best embodied by women was no mere reflection of his ambiguous ‘cyborg’ politics. It further attests to the acculturation of women into the futurist structure, paving the way for the role Censi was shortly to play in resolving ‘the dichotomy between body and machine’.65 In line with the aim of modern dance to conceptualise corporeality as a mechanism, Censi’s performance did not need to be enhanced by heavy mechanical costumes, nor by electrical wires. Censi re-envisioned the relationship between human and machine by exploring the sculptural possibilities of the human body in space so that she achieved a sense of the mechanical by gesture alone. It was not until Censi appeared on the stage that futurist dance achieved thoroughly convincing expression.66 Censi was born on 25 January 1913 in Milan into a middle-class family – her father Carlo was a composer and taught at Milan’s music Conservatorio. Like Marinetti, she was tutored privately, expelled once from Liceo Parini for her antics, as she herself relays in the unpublished diary Storia della mia vita (Story of my life).67 Censi’s maternal grandmother, Antonina Ferrario, was born in England of an English mother and 63 Lista, ‘La danza futurista’, 36. 64 Veroli, ‘The futurist aesthetic and dance’, 436. 65 E. Bonfanti, ‘Appunti per un’estetica della danza futurista’, in Vaccarino and Antolini (eds), Giannina Censi, 61. 66 G. Berghaus, ‘Danza futurista: Giannina Censi’, Dance Theatre Journal, 8 (1990), 6 and 35. 67 MART, Fondo Giannina Censi, Cen. 9, Diario personale – Corrispondenza – Appunti di una conferenza, autograph manuscript by Censi, Storia della mia vita, 1913–92, 1–137. The chronology in this diary is not always accurate.

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Italian father, and grew up in Sydney, Australia. At the age of twenty, Antonina moved to Milan where she married and had three daughters: Carla, Giannina’s mother, who played the piano and sang, Rosina, who went on to become the first woman in Italy to receive a pilot’s licence on passing a test on 3 January 1913 – Giannina would later boast that the licence was obtained on the very day she was born –, and Ethel, ‘an important painter’.68 In 1926 Censi was admitted to the prestigious ballet school of La Scala Theatre in Milan. In 1928, allegedly at the age of fifteen, she left for Paris.69 Her diary eloquently conveys the starry-eyed enthusiasm of a young girl traipsing the busy boulevards of the ville lumière,70 echoing the sensory impact with Paris experienced by other fellow futurists (see section 3.4). Censi also relished the refreshingly alternative tutoring compared with the severe traditional training of La Scala. She mused: ‘in my Parisian days I learned so much and attended the best shows in the world. I met the most distinguished “vedettes” of the era including the fabulous Josephine Baker who regaled me with a pair of earrings I still have in my drawers. All this was instrumental to forge my personality and devise my personal style.’71 Censi joined the ballet school run by Lyubov Egorova (1880–1972), a star of classical dance of the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg who had also danced for Diaghilev in 1921–22. Exiled to Paris after the Russian revolution, Egorova ran a prestigious international dance school predicated on rigorous athletic exercise. Censi complemented the harsh physical training in this ‘Babylon of languages’ with lessons in Indian dance delivered by Uday Shankar and in Spanish flamenco, given by an unnamed ‘famous Argentinian’.72 She concentrated on the predicament of movement and how to best translate the motion associated with modern technological tools into body movement, as is evidenced by the cuttings she collected. These illustrations featured yoga positions, dancers of the Folies Bergères, voluptuous actresses wrapped up in thick theatrical settings, Indian, Chinese and Thai dances, Isadora Duncan: a multicultural representation that testifies to the broad scope of Censi’s search, her thirst for new expressive paradigms. The memory of Fuller and Duncan are also likely to have informed Censi’s brief but intense Parisian experience, allowing her

68 Censi declared in an interview cit. in Berghaus, ‘Danza futurista’, 34: ‘My aunt, Rosina Ferrari [sic], was the first woman pilot in Italy, and I was born on the day she received her flying licence.’ See also Censi, Storia della mia vita, 4. 69 The date was 1930, according to catalogue notes at MART. 70 MART, Fondo Censi 1930 – La Tancia – Le Danze della Jungla – Il cigno – Un sogno – Castello Sforzesco Censi. ‘Diario a Parigi per studiare danza’, 6 June–25 July 1930, [n.p. but 7]. 71 Censi, Storia della mia vita, 8. Cf. also Berghaus, ‘Danza futurista’, 7 and 34. 72 Cit. in Vaccarino and Antolini (eds), Giannina Censi, 14–15.

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to develop a style predicated on rigorous classical training and athletics that also embraced non-canonical, non-western expressive forms. This short experience proved crucial to the development of aerodances, as we glean from her diary. The freedom to live abroad, unattached and working, was not an option for many Italian women, even middle-class ones like Censi. Those affiliated to futurismo who had an international background were affluent and/or aristocratic (e.g. Barbara, de Saint-Point, Benedetta), travelled on the wake of highly mobile husbands (e.g. Benedetta) or were not born in Italy. As I shall elucidate below, as a single mother, Censi struggled to make a living in conformist wartime and postwar Italy. Yet, her body propelled her to the status of an emblem of Fascist demographic policies. Her geomodernity was ironically immortalised in the new canon of the dynamic and fertile female body, unwitting instrument of the State’s coercive policies. As her struggle to work became a matter of daily survival and evidence of her downward social trajectory, Censi danced her body against the tide of engulfing social mores, transforming her pliable body into propaganda. Her experimental aerodances traversed the space between a woman’s geomodern aspirations and the social engineering of women under fascismo. 6.4c Simultanina Marinetti’s play Simultanina: divertimento futurista in sedici sintesi (Simultanina: futurist scherzo in sixteen syntheses; 1931) aimed to braid together old and new: dynamism, simultaneity, the brilliance of new materials and electrified bodies with the new aerial agenda of futurism: ‘All is machine’ declared a character named the aviator. ‘The machine simplifies, […]. Shininess of bodies!’73 Between May and June 1931, Censi joined Marinetti and the futurist group on a tour by the same title. ‘We touched twenty-eight cities across Italy from North to South, ending up in Rome’, she wrote in her diary. ‘I was a seventeen-year-old girl and could not fully imagine what being on tour for one month was really like.’74 Censi was the only woman in the company of a dozen male actors, elated to work side by side with Marinetti, Escodamè and fellow futurists as is evidenced in personal correspondence with her parents.75 The tour, however, was forcibly cut short at the end of June, when raucous anti-futurist jibes and a shower of vegetables pelted on the Veneto stages prompted her to abandon the 73 Marinetti, Simultanina, in Teatro, ed. Schnapp, 440. 74 Censi, Storia della mia vita, 9. Censi declared that she first met Marinetti at her father’s, however it is more likely that Gioia and the poet Escodamè introduced the two. 75 MART, Fondo Giannina Censi, folder 1931. Corrispondenza alla famiglia dalla tournée di “Simultanina”. Letter by Censi to mother and father, Treviso, 25 May 1931, [n.p. but 4] and letter to parents, Udine, 27 May 1931, [n.p. but r/v].

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tour and return to Milan: ‘the theatre was pandemonium. Actors could not speak their lines: shouts, wolf-whistling and rotten vegetables accompanied their words. […] At the end of my dancing, a pelting of tomatoes drowned the proscenium. We were martyrs to put up with this outrage.’76 The ‘simultaneous’ dances showcased in Simultanina were, however, to be remembered as an original attempt to render simultaneity and the dynamism of the modern female body on stage. A review published on 31 May 1931 in Il Popolo di Trieste enthused: Have you seen Giannina Censi dance? Simultaneity calls for loud applause here. Those who did not applaud must be idiots. Marinetti’s simultaneity can from time to time appear […] to be compromised by the limitations of the stage. On the other hand, the dance of Simultanina, devised and executed by Giannina Censi, is one of the best things I’ve seen since 1914. […] Hurrah Giannina Censi!77

Suggestively enwrapped in a tight satin leotard, a glistening surface reminiscent of the shiny body of an airplane, Censi’s body was sexualised and technologised at once. Ostensibly drawing on Marinetti’s ‘cyborg’, Simultanina did not, however, seek to engulf the female body in a narrative of control and dominance. Censi originally strove to achieve a joyful, orgiastic, and also poised and controlled, eroticism, where body and technology coexisted in perfect balance, reinforcing each other, glistening bright teeth and electric light flashing in unison: ‘chin up did she laughed, teeth of electric bulbs, Simultanina!’,78 enthused an admiring Marinetti. 6.4d Aerodancing the technological body Tongue-in-cheek, Anton Giulio Bragaglia observed that aerodanza seemed to gloss over the elementary principles of the physics of bodies in space: alas, he concluded ironically, ‘the laws of physics do not allow bodies to fly!’79 Bragaglia attributed the paternity of these dances to Prampolini and his successful pantomimes. Prampolini did introduce the notion of aerodance at La Cible gallery in Paris, when he devised the choreographies for Wy Magito’s show accompanied by Russolo on rumorharmonium 76 Censi, Storia della mia vita, 9. See also MART, Fondo Censi, folder 1931, article by C. R., ‘Teatro Garibaldi “Simultanina” “Divertimento” … antifuturista’, Il Veneto, 3–4 June 1931, 3. 77 MART, Fondo Censi, review by Donatello D’Orazio, ‘La serata di “Simultanina”’, Il Popolo di Trieste, 31 May 1931, 6. 78 MART, Fondo Censi, review by Marinetti, ‘Simultanina e il pubblico: Analisi chimica delle serate futuriste’, [30 July 1931], 3. 79 A. G. Bragaglia, ‘Aerodanza’, Ala d’Italia, January 1933, 49.

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(see sections 5.1a and 5.1b). Censi followed from Prampolini’s rubric, devising an original biomechanics predicated upon the merger of her body with a flying machine. Censi outlined her vision in a 1931 interview: ‘I was always passionate about and familiar with flying: my aunt, Rosina Ferrari [sic] […] was the first Italian aviatrix’. ‘I thought long and hard about airborne planes and strove to interpret the identity of the airplane through a new aesthetics, to embody the soul of the plane and its strife with the elements in the sky.’80 Censi reflected rigorously and methodically on the materials, techniques, tools and movements of the flying machine. Her personal take on the futurist celebration of the technologised body was to blur the boundaries between the airplane and the female body. She explained in her diary: I sensed that dance could be executed any time of day or night, even in the absence of music, following a noise, a word, a beat. This noise, word or beat should convey meaning, giving me ammunition to construct movement over and above the spoken word. Prampolini was helpful since I was not familiar with futurist theatre. […] When I attended his exhibition of futurist painting in 1930, I suggested I could interpret his paintings though my dance. He embraced the project enthusiastically. All this [was executed] in the absence of music = in total silence. Research was painstaking: the paintings I had selected portrayed the experience of flying and I needed to get to know in depth the sensations of an airborne plane. I leaned on the flying ace Mario de Bernardi who took me on board of his plane where I experienced all possible acrobatics on air. This is how I did research for the memorable, famous soirée at the Pesaro Gallery in Milan.81

During a conference at the Pesaro gallery on 31 October 1931, Prampolini payed homage to the great modern dancers. He introduced a new futurist a dance to be performed in absolute silence, a pure ‘miming-plastic expression’ and dynamic interpretation of space based on a particular idea, image or feeling. Censi translated Prampolini’s ideas into the language of dance. Her body interpreted Prampolini’s five aeropaintings attempting to mirror them as closely as possible, without props with the sole exception of domestic gas tubes (plastic was not available at the time). While Censi danced, Prampolini worked the room holding his canvases in his hands one by one, following in the wake of Censi’s movements. Censi was barefoot. She wore a helmet and was clad in a skin-tight, satin-sleek costume designed by Prampolini which left one of her shoulders uncovered. Satin silk suggested the shiny aluminium alloy of flying machines as well as the immense azure 80 MART, Fondo Censi 1931, article by S. Pocarini, ‘Dieci minuti con la danzatrice Giannina Censi’, L’Eco dell’Isonzo, [n.d.], [n.p.]. 81 Censi, Storia della mia vita, 11.

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of a cloudless sky. The unadorned and clingy simplicity of this costume was risqué, suggesting both materiality and nakedness. Censi’s gestures mimed the physics of airplanes as they take off, are tossed in a storm, float airborne, lie with a broken wing, stall and land. Everything hinged on gesture and gesture alone. There was no musical accompaniment. The stage was silent, ‘empty as the sky itself’.82 This soirée was formidable: the whole city was in attendance, the show was covered in all newspapers, national and local. ‘The Scala ballet corp came to see my show, draped as I was in metal tubes and dancing barefoot … what a scandal! I was prepared for this feedback and enjoyed it as I knew exactly what I was doing.’83 In her notes entitled ‘Conferences on futurism’ Censi expanded: Painters, authors, poets were all there. Several aviators attended too and showed special enthusiasm for my aerial dances. The only detractors were a group of ballerinas from La Scala who could not abide my new dancing style. Journalists and critics approved with reservation, others were dead against. Audiences, however, sensed that these dances showcase the future of dance itself and they clapped away. I transformed the technique I had learned into aerial movement, turning my body into an airborne plane and, with my face, conveying what a pilot feels like while flying acrobatically. In these aerial dances the body not only takes on the shape and form of a flying machine, but conveys and transmits especially the natural vibration of all moving machines. This was the most challenging thing of all.84

Lending her body to a natural representation of technology, Censi explored countercultural anthropological and aesthetic paradigms, revisiting the relationship between the human being and the machine in terms of technologisation of the female body. Like Martha Graham, Censi aimed to convey the fast beat and tempo of modern life without resorting to the stiff and unnatural metallic moves of mechanical ballets.85 As Berghaus has it: 82 Bentivoglio and Zoccoli, The Women Artists, 47. Other costumes Censi wore to perform include a mesh of tubes and copper cables and a ‘bright red costume’ designed by Prampolini – see Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista, 256–7. In 1932, on the occasion of the exhibition Enrico Prampolini et les Aéropaintres futuristes italiens at the Galerie de la Renaissaince in Paris, Prampolini equipped Magito with a sturdy rope, wrapping it around her body and leg. Magito improvised a choreographic arabesque, her body interacting with the rope in tensive, extensive, twisting movements symbolising the human body’s inability to escape the force of earth’s gravity and reach towards heavenly heights. See also Vaccarino and Antolini (eds), Giannina Censi, 20. 83 Censi, Storia della mia vita, 11. 84 MART, Censi, folder Cen. 9, manuscript by Censi, ‘Conferenze sul futurismo’, [n.d.], 4. MART, Censi, folder Cen. 9., ‘Appunti autobiografici manoscritti’, [n.p.]. Extant photographs regrettably fail to show the wires and tubes attached to Censi’s costume, nor do they entirely render the complex, frantic, angular dynamism of these dances – see Censi’s interview with Berghaus, cit. in Berghaus, ‘Danza futurista’, 35. 85 For Graham, see Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine, 35.

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The plasticity of her movement, her treatment of space, the rhythmic quality of her gestures and the depersonalisation of her body gave a natural-abstract quality to her dance, for which no direct equivalent exists in the poems and paintings that inspired her work. Her concentrated movements employed every part of her body – a technique she may have developed internalising the intense dips and vibrations experienced when flying acrobatically in Mario de Bernardi’s plane. During the dancer’s travel in space there was a constantly changing and varying rhythm of gestures and movement. Her impulsive, energetic, jerky and uneven moves created an impression of aggressive dynamism. […] She still employed classical steps, jumps and turns, etc.; but to these moves she added or grafted on new elements, such as long runs, kicks, combinations of contraction/relaxation, etc.86

Censi’s is described as an extension of the experience of flying itself. According to professional pilots who attended her shows, it was an entirely acceptable rendition of their lived experience. When watching Censi’s aerodances, ‘pilots were happy’ she contended, ‘because they felt they were inside me’.87 Channelling the flying machine, Censi’s body acted as a reliable technological vessel: a uterine dwelling for a future technological humanism. A show of April 1932 brought her more positive affirmation. Censi performed aeropoems by Marinetti, Burrasca and Sanzin in Trieste. An anonymous review in the local daily Il Piccolo, published on 2 April 1932, put a spirited and emphatic seal on this memorable evening: ‘Her [Censi’s] flexible, elegant body enwrapped in satin gave the impression of the aluminium of a machine and the azure of the cosmos. She renders both the movement and the poetry of audacious flying through face, eyes, hands and the whole body.’88 Censi’s life was, however, shortly to take an unexpected turn. In an ironic twist for someone who strove to transform her body into a flying machine, her body was anchored firmly to the ground and to the harsh mores of Fascist Italy. What Censi’s art achieved, her life denied. In 1933, in the course of the Littoriali dances in Bologna, a hugely popular and largely choreographed event organised in celebration of fascismo, Censi had a casual affair and became pregnant. Her diary provides scant information: we glean that her lover was twenty years her senior, probably married and unwilling to admit paternity of her baby, who was born in 1934 – the selfish lover may have been an institutional figure, unwilling to allow his position to be compromised by this indiscretion. Censi’s diary does not dwell on what by all counts must have been a confusing time in her life. Reading between the lines 86 Berghaus, ‘Danza futurista’, 36. See also G. Carpi, Futuriste (Letteratura. Arte. Vita) (Rome: Castelvecchi, 2009), 559. 87 Censi, ‘Raccontandomi’, in Vaccarino and Antolini (eds), Giannina Censi, 121. 88 MART, Fondo Censi, folder Cen. 6., review by Anon, ‘Le Manifestazioni futuriste di ieri alla presenza di S. E. Marinetti’, Il Piccolo, 2 April 1932, 3.

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of this extraordinarily candid diary, she probably never married due to this ‘shameful secret’, rather than because of any unconventional futurist antics she may have been associated with. Having tried to elevate her body in the manner of a flying machine, Censi was forcibly brought back to earth. As a single mother, her body was abused, commodified, crushed under patriarchal macro-structures. Her status as a citizen became separated from the aesthetic identity she acquired through her aerodances: defamed and chasing work, her liberated technological body became symbolic of physical education policies in 1930s Italy and an instrument of Fascist propaganda, repeating Marinetti’s staid cyborg paradigm. Ambrosi’s ‘Aeronautic maternity’ compellingly illustrated this terminal point: ‘abstract synthesis of flesh and machine. Constructive fusion of woman–airplane. Solid nurturing breasts – capsules of shiny steel saturated with gaseous explosive mix. Fertile female womb – round bonnet of an aeromotor, custodian of shouting extrapowers. Spiral-vulva-propeller’s hub superb highest matrix creating universal life – ignition of energy speed in the prodigious adventure of the winged machine.’89 In a tragic irony, and yet consistent twist, Censi’s convincing totalising mechanical aerodances ended up typifying Fascist physical education, pronatalist demographic policy and the body politic (Figure 6.1). Censi’s poses were designated as the blueprint of physical education for girls in 1930s Italy. They were tasked with optimising and maximising the reproductive capacities of the female body in line with State policies. Ten close-up photographs portraying Censi in the flow of aerodancing, each one focusing on individual gesturing and with the accompaniment of titles and captions penned by Censi, were included in Poggi-Longostrevi’s popular primer Cultura fisica della donna ed estetica femminile (Physical culture for women and female aesthetics; 1933). These illustrations provided compelling examples of strong, healthy, fertile Italian female bodies. Reinforced at the first national congress of sports medicine in Rome in 1932, ‘the regime’s eugenic goals […] contributed to a felicitous ideological union between futurist dance, sports, and fascism’.90 Sport had a marked impact on ballet and modern dance across Europe in the early twentieth century. Fascist Italy enmeshed sport and the cult of healthy bodies with totalitarian goals of its own. Appropriating the powerful impact that Censi’s aerodances had on the society of the time, these illustrations served the ideological, social and hygienic goals of the regime. As the author Poggi-Longostrevi contended, ‘women were made to procreate not to fight’.91 The imaginative power unleashed 89 A. G. Ambrosi, ‘MATERNITÁ AERONAUTICA’, in 41 pittori futuristi, 19. 90 Veroli, ‘Futurism and dance’, 229. 91 G. Poggi-Longostrevi, Cultura fisica della donna ed estetica femminile (Milan: Hoepli, 1933), 226.

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6.1 Fot. Santacroce, Milano, Aerodanze 6 (Aerodance 6), 1931

by Censi’s body in mechanical motion collapsed into the construction of the Fascist body. It may seem surprising that Censi, the only representative of modern dance in Italy, had only one follower, Carla Ottolenghi, who danced in celebration of Caproni’s

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airplanes in 1933. The institutional appropriation of Censi’s technologised body helps explain why. As aerodance became institutionalised, her body became iconic and went on to influence contemporary visual art and popular culture. Plinio Verossi’s 1942 painting [L’Aviazione] (Aviation), exhibited at the XXIII Venice Biennale, foregrounded a colossal human figure of no specified gender. The feet rested on a paved plane while the eyes were lifted up towards the sky. The figure was clad in a helmet. The creature’s body was traversed by the trajectory of two flying planes, poised to dart flying machines into the air, spinning them round, evoking the aerodances.92 This figure clearly draws on Censi’s body aerodancing. Censi continued to perform briefly under the aegis of futurism, e.g. in June 1934 at Circolo del Convegno in Milan, interpreting Depero’s lyrics ‘Il vento’ (Wind) and ‘La macchina monella’ (The naughty machine). After the birth of her son Cristiano and suffering from a torn meniscus in 1935, however, she abandoned her career.93 Suffering financial strain, after the war Censi was offered to direct a classical dance school in San Remo and accepted the job. She taught there until 1953, when she launched her own school in Milan, opening branches in Genoa and Voghera. In the 1970s, after a return to classical ballet training and decades of teaching, Censi tried to reconstruct her aerodances, but with mixed outcomes, lacking the precise notations accompanying her original work: ‘too few original documents remain’ maintains Veroli ‘to give us a clear understanding of how – if at all – these contradictory elements and suggestions were shaped into a consistent whole’.94 Even though her school closed down in 1980, Censi continued teaching until the early 1990s, basking in the memory of her futurist triumphs. Her last diary entry is dated 12 December 1992. Censi lamented the indignity of spending Christmas day alone, in the sole company of a kitten. Loneliness was the price she had to pay for her unconventional lifestyle. Extrapolating the flying machine from her own body, Censi had created an entirely original modern art form. Attempting to mediate the totalitarian discourses of the society it stemmed from, however, she ended up promoting its patriarchal agenda. Technologised women’s bodies may have obtained the right of citizenship, both in the broader societal realm and in the sexually belligerent skies, but with ambiguous and ultimately self-defeating implications on women’s emancipation.

92 BRBML, F. T. Marinetti Papers, series VIII, box 52, folder 1968, P. Verossi, [L’Aviazione], [1942]. 93 Vaccarino and Antolini (eds), Giannina Censi, 11 and 22. 94 Veroli, ‘The futurist aesthetic and dance’, 448.

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6.5 Quantum levities 6.5a Dematerialising bodies in motion: fotodinamica and futurist photography Fotodinamica (photodynamics) was one of the most convincing innovations in the field of the moving image. It arose in 1910–12, before the First World War, attracting the attention of Marinetti because of its focus on the compenetrations of bodies in motion with the environment. The theoretical tenets were laid out in the volume Fotodinamismo futurista (Futurist photodynamism) first published in 1913 but circulating in draft form from 1911, illustrating in detail the experiments carried out by its inventors, the brothers Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia. Both were active in the flourishing Roman cultural circles: Anton Giulio eventually specialised in film while Arturo, in particular, became an accomplished photographer. The effort to emancipate photography from the yoke of realism, drawing especially on Étienne-Jules Marey’s chrono-photographies of 1882, was a point of departure. While Marey aimed to analyse movement by breaking it up in individual, consecutive frames, congealing movement in self-contained and instantaneous reproductions on a timeline, the Bragaglias operated differently. Their aim was to trace trajectories of unadulterated motion and reconstruct them on film. Velocity, trajectory and movement were meant to synthesise gesture across time, rather than multiplying individual frames that froze movement in discrete units. In other words, fotodinamica aimed to energise movement and translate it in dynamic form. From a technical viewpoint, Anton Giulio set to prolong the camera’s overexposure, illuminating film with a light source intensified by reducing shutter speed. Working with Arturo, he used an ordinary camera and slow film, probably a handoperated leaf or blade shutter. The result was the rendition of each single gesture as a blur. By adding a flash effect, produced with one, two or three lamps, placing a revolving shutter in front of the lens, the Bragaglias were able to tighten up the edges of the blur, resulting in a melding of staccato images and fuzzy trajectories. The images impressed on film were indistinct, translucid, utterly dynamic. The fragmentary units of Muybridge and Marey were replaced here with instantaneous, atmospheric, demechanised images suggestively capturing the opalescent ubiquity of moving objects, the fluid and ghostly apparitions of bodies in motion which bled their trajectories across time.95 Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s bodies evaporated, touching the confines of hyper-reality. 95 For a detailed technical discussion, see G. Regnani, ‘Futurism and photography: between scientific inquiry and aesthetic imagination’, in Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination, 177–97. See also A. G. Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista (Turin: Einaudi, 1980).

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This method relied on trajectory, e.g. the original impression, the precise and objective mark grafted by an arc of movement across time. Encompassing physics and metaphysics, trajectory evoked directly the ‘superb and blazing’ psychological mark left by movement on our senses.96 According to Bragaglia, this was evidence that movement dematerialises bodies and that photography was a better representation of reality than painting because it tapped into simultaneity and the fourth dimension via a set of modern, scientific and futurist techniques and technologies. These innovations allowed explorations in the meta-discourse of photography as a medium, testing its boundaries at the intersection with cognate arts. Introducing new visual dialectics and excavations in the deeper recesses of hidden reality, experimenting at the interface of science, pseudoscience and psychology, this practice further purported to capture glimpses of the occult, the invisible, the magical, exploring evanescent entities invested with spiritual and psychological relevance. As such, it called on contemporary speculations on invisible realities, both scientific (e.g. sub-molecular matter and electromagnetic energy, wireless telegraphy, spectroscopy, x-ray) and psychological and philosophical (e.g. spiritualism, theosophy and telepathy). The deployment of x-rays in the First World War had Marie Skłodowska Curie peering through flesh-and-blood bodies, revealing further dimensions of reality underlying opaque matter. In addition to this scientific practice, fotodinamica shared the same terrain with occult and esoteric apparitions including spirits, ghosts and fluctuations of energy within the human body, ectoplasmic manifestations leaving evanescent traces on sensitive matter such as wax, clay or, as is the case here, photographic film.97 The human medium and the photographic medium became specular conduits to a parallel universe inhabited by superhuman energies and forces. The ghost and the human image impressed on the film became mutually transitive images. Echoing these contemporary practices at the threshold of science and the occult, Anton Giulio Bragaglia ambitiously aimed to combine science and art, investing his photography with transcendental meaning.98 More persuasively, each photograph taken using the fotodinamica method acted as a screen against which dynamic and otherwise transient memories were projected, encapsulating a form of haunting, an activation of memory encoded in the fading trajectories impressed by the photographic subject on film. Fotodinamica, in short, stood as an activation of memory by another name.

96 Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, 36. 97 A similar conjunction of x-ray technology and spiritualism can be found in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924). 98 See also M. Braun, ‘Fantasmes des vivants et des morts’, Études photographiques, 1 (1996), http:// etudesphotographiques.revues.org/100 (accessed 4 July 2017), [2].

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Despite its experimentalism, fotodinamica was snubbed by the directorate of futurist painters, with Boccioni at its helm, who reclaimed the primacy of ‘plastic dynamism’ over photodynamics, rebutting Fotodinamica futurista on the pages of Lacerba on 1 October 1913, only a handful of months after the volume came out.99 According to Braun, Boccioni did not take issue with Bragaglia’s work as such, but with photography as a medium and its reliance on a mechanical camera whose technical exactitude was deemed to be inferior to the aristocratic imagination of painters, raising the ‘spectre of mass culture’.100 Boccioni and the futurist directorate disapproved of representations of dynamism through mechanical means, as well as the medium’s perceived transience and ephemerality.101 Like Proust, Boccioni objected to the cold, instantaneous, visually exclusive bias of photography, its Medusa gaze: a ‘death-like work, petrifying life’.102 The futurists may also have been put off by photography’s ability to freeze and immobilise, to vanquish the inherently dynamic nature of the real. Boccioni’s prejudice led Bragaglia to develop his practice independently. Photodynamic activities, however, continued to be dialogical with futurismo, leading to further experimentations with the occult and the supranatural, and two important articles: ‘I fantasmi dei vivi e dei morti’ (Ghosts of the living and the dead) and ‘La fotografia dell’invisibile’ (Photographing the invisible).103 Cut out from the futurist food chain, in 1914 Bragaglia abandoned experimental photography to focus instead on cinema and theatre. The ghostly dematerialisations utilised in the films Perfido incanto (Perfidious charm; 1916) and Thaïs (1917) testify to his enduring commitment to the mystery encapsulated in ghost photography and the spectrality of the human image reproduced in motion (see section 5.1b). The anxieties that blighted fotodinamica, however, haunted his approach to film too. The ghostly reproductions of human life which reeled Pirandello’s The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator (1916) showcased the spectrality of film, a perverse mechanism depriving the human body ‘of its reality, its breath, its voice, the noise it emits when it moves, to become nothing but a muted image, flickering for an instant on screen and quickly disappears in silence, like a tenuous shadow’ (see sections 2.4 and 4.3b).104 Like Pirandello, Bragaglia was concerned with 99 U. Boccioni, C. Carra, L. Russolo, G. Balla, G. Severini, A. Soffici, ‘Avviso’, Lacerba, 1 October 1913, 1, cit. in Braun, ‘Fantasmes des vivants’, fn. 6 [n.p.]. 100 Braun, ‘Fantasmes des vivants’, [p. 13]; Braun, ‘Giacomo Balla, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, and ÉtienneJules Marey’, 97–8. 101 L. Tallarico, ‘Fotografia futurista’ (1972), cit. in Toni, Futuristi nelle Marche, 32. 102 Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista, 138. 103 A. G. Bragaglia, ‘I fantasmi dei vivi e dei morti’, La Cultura Moderna, 1 November 1913; ‘La fotografia dell’invisibile’, Humanitas, 21 December 1913. See also Verdone, ‘Fotodinamica e fotomontaggio’, in Il futurismo, 74. 104 Pirandello, Quaderni, 586. For Kittler, this modern spectrality is engendered by electricity, a form of

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the artificial, inhuman reproduction of human life engendered by the mechanical medium. Marinetti’s reception to these films was ‘decidedly cool’. In fact, his refusal to promote Thaïs under the rubric of futurismo led to the demise of Bragaglia’s production company Novissima Film.105 Twenty years on Marinetti attempted to make amends, attempting to share credit for fotodinamica in a manifesto of futurist photography brought forth on 11 April 1930 and published in issue 22 of Futurismo on 11 January 1931. His co-author was Tato (pseudonym of Guglielmo Sansoni; 1896–1974). The times were ripe for a serious reassessment of film and photography, following Moholy-Nagy’s eighth Bauhaus book: Malerei, Fotografie, Film (1927), marking ‘a landmark moment in the debate around the interrelation between the media of painting, photography and film, and especially the recognition of the latter two as art forms on a par with the former’.106 Tato and Marinetti’s terse manifesto payed homage to fotodinamica straight away. Defensively, Marinetti underscored his intervention in ‘introducing’ fotodinamica to Rome in 1912. He proceeded to put forward sixteen ‘new possibilities in photography’, arguing that they were especially relevant in the fields of physics, chemistry and the art of war.107 These ‘possibilities’ were designed to lead to ‘dramas of shadows and objects’, as well as ‘spectralisation of parts of the human body’108 echoing the travelling units that brought x-ray provision to wounded soldiers. He also mentioned Balla’s self-portraits.109 This manifesto ‘conceived photography as a prototype for larger projects – a laboratory for graphic explorations with montage, darkroom manipulations, and fantastic metamorphoses’.110 In the context of this late futurist turn towards photography, Tato’s mechanical portraits emerge as particularly convincing. An autodidact painter, graphic artist and designer gifted with an eccentric personality – in 1920 he orchestrated his own funeral in his native Bologna – Tato became the impresario of a futurist photography group after moving to Rome in 1925. In April 1930 he took part in the first national

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magic emasculating the power of hallucination, rendering ‘memories and dreams, the dead and the ghost […] technically reproducible’ – see F. A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 10. Re, ‘Futurism, film and the return of the repressed’, 134. A. Borchardt-Hume (ed.), Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World (London: Tate, 2006), 73. Marinetti and Tato, ‘La fotografia futurista’, in Teoria e invenzione futurista, 196–7. Cit. in Cigliana, Futurismo esoterico, 310. In the self-portraits Auto-stato d’animo (1920) and Autobis (1935), Balla had compressed theosophy and spiritualism in triangular forms projecting them against remote celestial settings, shattering his own figure in ectoplasms composed of matter-light-energy – see Cigliana, Futurismo esoterico, 314. M. A. Pellizzari, ‘Futurist photography: Tato and the 1930s’, in Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909–44, 295.

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6.2 Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni), Pastore con somarello (camuffamento d’oggetti) (Shepherd with donkey (camouflage of objects)), 1930

photographic competition together with several other photographers, e.g. Bragaglia, Boccardi, Castagneri, Guarnieri, Parisio and Thayaht, all of them eager to promote a distinct futurist language in photography. Following closely the innovations introduced by dada and the surrealists, Tato’s photography focused on camouflage, simultaneity and transparency of objects. Tato’s so-called mechanical portraits germinated from Pierre Mac Orlan’s writings on photography. Observing surrealist photography, Mac Orlan discussed its mechanical nature, articulating the camera’s ability to visualise ‘the social fantastic’. Tato was inspired and began to intersect plane and figure in unbridled manners, superimposing abstract and mechanical objects on background face portraits, to reveal the ‘transparency of opaque bodies’ and highlight the structural and dynamic energy of the subject’s face, e.g. Mechanical Portrait of Remo Chiti (1930). In self-portraiture, ‘hand-drawn lines depart from the artist’s brain and connect, like animal horns, with a geometric ensemble of weights and measures to translate one of the manifesto’s key points: “Art is a cerebral secretion that can be measured exactly.”’111 The photograph of a collage dated April 1930 was utilised to illustrate the first publication of the manifesto under the caption: ‘Tato – “Pastore e somaro (camuffamento di oggetti)”’ (Shepherd and donkey (camouflage of objects); see Figure 6.2).112 111 B. Corra and E. Settimelli, ‘Pesi, misure e prezzi del genio artistico’ (11 March 1914), cit. in Pellizzari, ‘Futurist photography’, 297. 112 The photograph is also catalogued by BRBML, Marinetti papers, general collection, series VIII, folder 1966, under the spurious title ‘Spirit portrait of the Futurist Mario Carli’.

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This image summarised the mechanical tenets of futurist photography at this time. Its striking, sharp mechanical features mitigated any ‘spiritual’ suggestion: encased in a metallic carapace modelled on, and originating from, the exhaust pipe of a car, a hammer in the stance of a machine gun rests on its stand, looming large in the foreground. Framed by a metal halo, a stark white egg, all eyes and smiles, perched sharplined and coquettish on its square, robotic body, is foreshortened in the background. The mechanical theme and composition are at once emphasised and unsettled by the visible shadows projected against the backdrop, and, particularly, by the nonsensical mirth and untroubled smile etched on a merry plump egg.113 A drama of objects and a drama of shadows are wrapped into one here. Tato’s image is visually cluttered with machines and objects masquerading for satirical purposes. Its emphasis on composition, spectrality, superimposition and transparency of opaque bodies references one of the most visually striking techniques of the avantgarde: the photocollage (see sections 4.1 and 4.3). The mix of natural and artificial aspired to render the invisible visible and to negotiate the paradoxes of photography with the politics of the time: a society underpinned by machines and an art encompassing popular, everyday experience. Tato ‘embraced the camera as a means to transform, disguise, and conceal the world’ like a modern alchemist ‘conceiving new forms through darkroom chemicals and using props’114 found in kitchens, bars, wardrobes and studios. With Tato, the everyday made inroads into photography. By the time that Marinetti and Tato issued their manifesto, however, their homage to fotodinamica was too little too late: avant-garde photography had long rejected this modus operandi in favour of the straight image and the snapshot.115 This manifesto, however, had two virtuous consequences: to revive interest in fotodinamica and bring to the fore the work of a cluster of photographers operating at the margins of the futurist sphere of influence, e.g. Demanins, Wulz, Munari and Paladini. Working in Trieste in tandem with her sister Marion, Wanda Wulz (1903–84) was a professional who ran a successful photographic business she inherited in 1928 from her father Carlo, which thrived until she retired in the 1980s. Wulz’s photograph Io più gatto (Cat and I) featured her own face blending into the muzzle of a cat. This is arguably one of the most iconic and influential images of global avant-garde photography. Wulz’s foray into futurist photography, however, consisted only of a handful of widely praised pieces for the 1932 exhibition of futurist photography in Trieste. Wulz operated independently, producing neat and tidy compositions, usually

113 The egg may display visual echoes of the rounded, full and floating lines of the happy, laughing lady wearing an unfeasibly large hat in Boccioni’s oil painting The Laugh (1911). 114 Pellizzari, ‘Futurist photography’, 298. 115 Braun, ‘Giacomo Balla, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, and Étienne-Jules Marey’, 98.

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featuring the female figure, a ‘statement of the self-confidence and daring of the modern woman’.116 In the 1930s photography followed closely the development of industrialism, contributing to construct Italy’s industrial identity. The grandiose construction works sponsored by the Fascist regime were captured realistically in photographic campaigns applauded by the futuristi. Even though the genre may have been derivative,117 futurist photography and film lent their industrial and mechanical grammar to the construction of a modern Italian identity in celebratory function, as demanded by the regime. Curiously, futurist photography almost entirely overlooked Italy’s growing urban conglomerates and the grandiose and timeless monumentality of contemporary architecture. Cinema was tasked instead with capturing the growing urbanisation. Underpinned by the expertise in camera practice, optics and image composition developed by the Bragaglias, the divisionist light, optics and colour techniques, and the mechanics of vision, film took off and developed independently of futurism. 6.5b Bruno Munari: futurist beginnings The pulverisation of reality implicit in the blurred compositions of fotodinamica impressed an indelible mark in late futurist artists, especially Bruno Munari (1907–98). Munari’s approach was scientifically relevant, commercially savvy and typically oriented towards fragmenting the real, as is compellingly evidenced by his ‘useless machines’. ‘Standing astonished and enchanted amid a world of machines’, argues Hultén, Munari’s ‘art expresses an optimistic view toward man, the creator of machines, rather than toward technology as such’ leading to ‘more worthy relations with machines’.118 Like Leonardo, Munari understood technology as an art form, where machines broached the ancestral cleavage between work and art. His machines were the product of design, engineering and construction, an assemblage of standard parts, or modules, with minimum waste and handicraft. Produced for a mass market, they were infused with the dynamic and constructive energy of their component parts. Munari is best known for devising a series of parodical, dysfunctional, ‘useless machines’ underpinned by senseless automatic motion, idiotic, playful and repetitive kinetics, and commodified and commercial value. His machines punched through the sturdy framework of reality, mirroring the infinite becoming, the dynamism and circularity of the real. Tetracone, for example, was a cube containing four cones rotating

116 Bentivoglio and Zoccoli, The Women Artists of Italian Futurism, 149. 117 By way of example, Lista cited the photographs taken in October 1930 by Depero on the motorboat Rome on his way back from the US – Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista, 199. 118 Hultén, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, 13.

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slowly by force of small engines, exposing a changing combination of colours. The specularity and mechanical circularity of the Tetracone stood for the yin and the yang, the ambivalent complementarity in which nature and the real present themselves to the beholder.119 Exploring the conceptual core and the confines of materiality, Munari’s machines led to dematerialised, hyper-real, postmodern machines, as I shall argue below. Munari’s activities traversed late futurismo, specifically from 1927 to 1945 – Broeckmann brands him a ‘third generation’ futurist.120 When Munari moved to Milan in 1925, becoming conversant with design, advertising and graphics, he ‘found the futurists’ heterogeneity of methods, their ability to mix different art forms and techniques, their exploration of new media and new avenues of expression quite congenial to his own conception of art’.121 At the Milione gallery, where he worked in the 1930s, he became acquainted with surrealism, dada, De Stijl and Bauhaus graphic works.122 His own production became influenced by constructivist and Bauhaus art and design, so much so that he devised a system of light-capturing objects in dynamic equilibrium to bring to fruition Moholy-Nagy’s attempt to dematerialise art objects into kinetic light-projections. Munari’s floating constructions with tilted diagonals were decentred, multimaterial, gravity defying and poised between art and engineering, in the manner of Tatlin’s Corner Reliefs (1914–15). His Manifesto of machinism, written in 1938 and first published in 1952, acknowledged his indebtedness to Prampolini’s polymaterial assemblages of heterogeneous textures and materials (see section 5.1a).123 In 1929 Munari designed stage settings and costumes for Marinetti’s play Il suggeritore nudo (The naked prompter). His costumes for the human character were machine-heavy and robotic, explicitly referencing contemporary iconography, especially Pannaggi and Vasari. From then on, Munari worked for several advertising agencies, illustrating, among others, Tullio d’Albisola’s L’anguria lirica (Lyrical watermelon; 1934) and Marinetti’s ‘Poem of the milk dress’ (1937; see section 2.6). In 1933, he began to construct dysfunctional, ‘useless machines’, breaking away from the futurist apprehension of the machine. This departure can be regarded as ‘a counter-argument to the technophile […] rhetoric of futurism’ and as ‘surreptitious ironic gestures against futurism’.124 119 B. Munari, Design as Art (London: Penguin, 2008), 170–4 (originally in Arte come mestiere (Bari: Laterza, 1966). 120 Broeckmann, Machine Art, 14. 121 Antonello, ‘Beyond futurism: Bruno Munari’s useless machines’, in Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination, 317. 122 Ibid., 322. 123 Ibid., 323. 124 Ibid., 325.

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Munari had an eclectic, wide-ranging sensitivity for innovations in the European scene. His peripheralitity within futurism allowed him to gaze beyond the avant-garde and integrate industrial design with the productive world of technology.125 Munari acknowledged the intrinsic commodification of the work of art, which he regarded as a well-designed, durable, affordable object accessible to a large public. Like Depero, but with a more articulated understanding of the dynamics of trade and marketing, Munari was aware of the massification and democratisation of technology. He argued that: the artist wants to sell his work of art in the chain stores just like any other commercial article, stripped of its mystery and at a reasonable price. The artist must cast off the last rags of romanticism and become active as a man among men, well up in present-day techniques, materials and working methods. To get back into society, to re-establish contact with their neighbours, to create an art for everyone and not just for ‘the chosen few with bags of money’ must be the ethical goal of the contemporary artist.126

Commercial work was the bedrock of Munari’s activities. Industrially produced and mass consumed, his art consisted first and foremost of a practice of design, construction and ‘making’ of objects. Industrial production and marketing, planning, solutions and logistics underpinned Munari’s machines, in line with the functional and democratising practices of the Bauhaus, as he parodically encapsulated in his favourite aphorism: ‘Instead of pictures for the drawing-room, electric gadgets for the kitchen.’127 His machines encompassed design and projectuality. They were flexible, discrete, modular. Beauty was replaced by formal coherence. Function determined design, ensuring internal coherence – Munari invoked Lamarck’s principle whereby form must follow function, which was also one of the Bauhaus’s tenets.128 In sum, Munari’s practice encompassed simplicity of project and design, economy of materials, prefabricating and a rule of recycling at the end of the product’s lifecycle. Munari’s commercial logic was accompanied by an equally intense impulse to reimagine the machine as a recreational object: playful, ‘lightweight’ and funny. This was not a contradiction since his vision entailed an integration of simplicity and functionality along massified lines, as I shall explore in section 6.5c. Munari’s playful 125 J. T. Schnapp, public lecture, ‘The ABCs and XYZs of Bruno Munari’, UCL, London, 17 October 2012. See also Antonello, ‘Beyond futurism’, 315. 126 Munari, preface to Design as Art, 25 and 12 respectively. 127 Ibid., 25. This was a parodic take on the renowned Bauhaus motto: ‘instead of cathedrals, machines for living’. See also ibid., 27: ‘What Gropius wrote is still valid. This first school of design did tend to make a new kind of artist, an artist useful to society’. 128 Munari, Design as Art, 33.

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machines prefigured the iconography of Pop Art. Pursuing a form of ‘concrete abstraction’, they were contemporary and dialogical with Alexander Calder’s mobiles.129 6.5c A machine counterculture: ‘my useless machines’ In 1938 Munari composed a machine manifesto: Manifesto del macchinismo. Here, he described the machine as a ‘sentient companion species’.130 His original countercultural aesthetics consisted of replacing the utilitarian machine with the useless machine. While remaining conversant with the industrial machine, he aimed to explode it through senseless seriality, automatism and collapse of function. Munari’s vision was complemented by emergent technological forces which tore apart the sturdy fabric of reality. Munari’s commitment to the machine shines compellingly through a page of autobiographical prose where he reminisces about an old watermill and its colossal mechanical wheel. This passage is quoted entirely here because of it provides vivid evidence of his attachment to the mystery, poetics, uncanniness and wonder of the ‘Great Machines’: The view from the top of the dyke left us breathless, […] And there was our Machine, floating on the water near the bank. It was an old wooden watermill that might have been built by Robinson Crusoe himself. […] the Great Wheel turned slowly. The whole Machine was made of old wood, now quite grey, the hard grain standing out and the softer parts carved out by the weather. Only the metal axles of the Wheel and the millstones were polished by continual wear; they were inside the cabin in half-darkness, among the flour-sprinkled spiders’ webs and full sacks with almost human forms. The Machine squeaked and creaked, groaned and grumbled, and one could follow its rhythms in time with the turning of the Wheel. And the Great Wheel itself provided an ever-varied spectacle: with slow deliberation it drew from the river marvellous green weeds and water-plants like soft glass, held them up flashing in the sunlight, raised them as high as it could and then slowly lowered them, immersing them again in a shower of spray that fell with the sound of gentle rain. This sound formed a continuous background for all the other noises of the mill. […] And while my friends poked about in all the corners they could reach, tried to pick the lock of the cabin door or threw stones at the waterbirds, I stayed near the Great Wheel, with the river flowing ceaselessly under the spars where I sat as if suspended in air, watching the endless display of colours and lights and the movements of the Great Wheel.131

129 Crispolti (ed.), La macchina mito futurista, [n.p.]. 130 Broeckmann, Machine Art, 15. The manifesto was first published in 1952. 131 Munari, ‘The machines of my childhood (1924)’, in Design as Art, 221–3. Uppercases in the original.

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Munari’s emotional and intellectual attachment to the machine of the classic machine age is palpable here. Later in his life, however, under the influence of aerofuturism and the spread of abstract painting in Italy since the early 1930s, Munari’s conceptual and aesthetic focus shifted. Kandinsky’s pictures struck Munari as ‘essentially realistic’, yet inspiring. Balla and Depero’s ‘complessi plastici dinamici’, Paladini’s imaginist machines, Duchamp’s La Mariée and dada were also influential. Echoing Man Ray, Calder’s spinning and gyrating machines, incorporating time as a fourth dimension, provided further inspiration.132 Munari’s nostalgic contemplation gave way to irony and a resolve to ‘pathologise the mechanical’.133 The machines of today, he contended, should be idle, anti-functional, purposeless, ‘useless’ (inutili): ‘they do not produce goods for material consumption, they do not eliminate labour, nor do they increase capital’.134 A ‘macchina aerea’ (aerial machine) was conceived by Munari in 1930, the first of a long list of ‘useless machines’ to follow. He described it as ‘made of wood and metal, 1.80 cm tall, 30 cm wide and 60 cm deep’,135 composed of red spheres, one small black sphere and white sticks. The machine was suspended, hanging from the ceiling by way of a thin wire and constantly animated by air currents. ‘It looked like a constellation, a cluster of atoms or, as one could say today, a space station. […] hanging in my studio in Ravizza Street in Milan for a few years, later [it was] destroyed accidentally during a house move. My useless machines arose out of my observations of the movements of this first, unique aerial machine.’136 The useless machines were initially made of cardboard or glass, painted in plain colours and held together by simple fasting devices: a slim rod segment, flimsy threads or wires. The assemblage needed to be extremely lightweight so as to catch every single ray of light and be subject to the slightest weather change. The components were reciprocally proportional and ‘harmonious’, held together in a perfect balance which held the machine together and prevented its component parts from becoming entangled.137 ‘I cut out the shapes’, he elucidated, ‘gave them harmonic relationships to one another, calculated the distances between them, and painted their backs (the part one never sees in a picture) in a different way to allow them to turn and form a variety of combinations. I made them very light and used thin threads so as to keep them moving as much as possible.’138 132 133 134 135 136 137 138

Munari, Design as Art, 19. Broeckmann, Machine Art, 23. Munari, Design as Art, 23. Munari, Codice ovvio, ed. P. Fossati (Turin: Einaudi, 2008), 2. Ibid. Munari, Design as Art, 15. Ibid., 18.

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Munari complained that both the art market and mass taste were so impervious to change that they failed to understand the intellectual and aesthetic value of his machines, treating them as ephemera.139 He therefore felt he needed to turn to the realm of toys where his bizarre, pathological mechanisms might best fit in. In 1942 Munari devised a series of infernal toys, including a ‘mechanism to sniff artificial flowers’, an ‘appliance to predict dawn’, a ‘tail agitator for lazy dogs’ and a ‘sultana vending machine’. These ready-made, portable, inexpensive, easily produced and easy to handle machines could be handled by children, fulfilling his anti-elitist agenda. Bypassing the ‘ignominious game’ of exploitation of labour and economic gain, Munari’s toys aimed to expand the intellectual, cognitive and aesthetic skills of the user, developing the brain’s plasticity and modularity. ‘Designers construct games or toys to relay […] as much information as possible and, at the same time, to help sharpen the mind’.140 Nonsensical and demented, Munari’s complex machines were material manifestations of geometry, as well as chronographic mechanisms constantly tripped up by chance and dysfunctional causality. The more complicated, rational and abstruse were the mechanisms, the more entropic, idiotic and senseless their function and random their outcome. A new ontology was taking shape here, aware of the perpetually shifting, dissolving and reforming fabric of reality. In 1952, Munari produced machines in aluminium designed for mass production. Branded mobili, with clear reference to Calder, the motor is of particular interest here, once again not heroically, but rather poetically. The spring, as in a clock, was the hub of these constructions, a ‘temperamental reservoir of mechanical energy. When wound up, it has great force: when run down, it performs most erratically.’141 Munari demystified the spring, allowing it to recover ‘its own unregulated behaviour, and by adding two more springs in the form of thin rods that support discs, he created a wriggling dance that goes on while the force of the spring is running down; then it has to be rewound.’142 These anarchic, illogical springs inspired Tinguely and the exponents of postmodern machine art (see Conclusion: Ex machina). At close sight, Munari’s machines were not a departure but rather a coherent development of the machine project of the futuristi. It was the dynamic seed of futurismo, its legacy of movement, that stood behind Munari’s ‘macchine inutili’. Building on Boccioni and Balla’s motion-driven dematerialisations and studies in optics, Munari reconnected with the conceptual underpinnings of futurismo. By the same token, however, the ever-changing, indeterminate physics of his machines,

139 140 141 142

Munari, Codice ovvio, 6. Munari, Da cosa nasce cosa (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2007), 246–7. See also 250. Hultén, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, 164. Ibid.

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their incompleteness and constant repositioning in space and time aligned with the constant motion of infinitesimally small matter of quantum mechanics. The wavefunctional nature of a matter infinitely regressing to unlocatable and grindingly small units stood powerfully behind Munari’s machines. Like a wave function, Munari’s machines were dynamic projections or installations characterised by indeterminacy and flow. They brought to mind the blown-up model of a quantum atom: object, function and wave. ‘Leggerezza’ (levity) was key. Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle was developed in 1923–27, at the same time when Munari’s futurist career took off, his machine shortly to take a detour into the realm of immateriality. Standing at the fringes of futurismo, yet close to its core values, Munari translated the futurist machine into a virtual paradigm of legeresse suited to the wireless immateriality of our own digital age. While there is no doubt that ‘flight was a source of endless cultural stimulation during the years between 1920 and 1950’,143 it was Munari’s aerofuturismo that stood the test of time. Munari’s ‘useless machines’ were the end product of the futurist machine, completing a trajectory from simultaneity and dynamism, through to electricity and sexualised war machines, magical theatrical devices and companions of human labour, purist and neoclassical abstractions, flying machines of mystical import, ethereal radio and television waves, disembodied and fuzzy images on a photographic slab or a film. The absurdist, transmissible, modular, displaceable scope of Munari’s machines emancipates them from technology, ideology, teleology, functionality and, ultimately, rationality. An anti-Heidegger, anti-Marx and anti-Benjamin wrapped into one, Munari singled out design as a locus of co-existence of countless states of place, time and consciousness. Given over to infinite circularity, chance, contingency and unpredictability, more easily legible, perhaps, through the metadiscourse of postmodernism (see Conclusion: Ex machina), Munari’s machines held up a mirror to the quantum state of the real.

143 Wohl, Spectacle of Flight, 294. See also the Montenegro-born futurista Tullio Crali. The legacy of his first experience of flying in 1928 can be traced in his Orbital Art Manifesto (1969), a late ‘intervention in celestial surgery’ and plea for aeropainting on a cosmic scale.

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Conclusion: Ex machina One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour. (V. Woolf, The Waves, 1931) I believe connectivity is a human right, and that if we work together we can make it a reality. (M. Zuckerberg, cit. in The Washington Times, 2013)

Bruno Munari’s work was informed by the machine:1 a methodology, a conceptual framework and also an ironic and playful object situated at the end line of a commercial cycle, a parody of the utilitarian machine of the Industrial Revolution. Munari’s machines were the end product of a long line of futurist machines and their manifestations in postwar culture originally explored in this book. As a geology of the debate about technology engaging our own age, the futurist machine is very much alive today. Its urgency hinges on questions regarding the integrity of the human predicament, including bodies and labour practices, in a world increasingly run by algorithms and automatic machines, and pressing concerns about a ‘singularity’, when cognisant machines will outsmart humans and any smoothly accomplished merger of the two will pass completely unnoticed. The machine is the futurist’s future. As the chapters above elucidate, the futuristi’s preoccupation with the machine was framed spatially across a ‘revolutionised universe’ traversed by ‘multiplied and ubiquitous lives’.2 Machines were underpinned by dynamic, de-territorialised lives and identities typified by mobility, diaspora and exile. Since its foundation in 1909, futurismo and the machine shared a common goal: to set objects (and humans) in motion, according to the tenets of dynamism and simultaneity. If machines are, by definition, objects that produce or transmit movement or are made up of moving parts,3 their transmissional, translational, exchangeable vocation, their functional complexity and inherent dynamism, appealed to the Italian futurists. The attraction 1 Crispolti (ed.), La macchina mito futurista, [n.p.]. 2 Verdone in Sanzin, Enrico Prampolini, 16. 3 Carrouges, Les machines célibataires, 152: ‘la définition essentielle d’une machine: produire ou transmettre du mouvement’.

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was both technical and existential, as postwar futurist artists set out to live and work in global arenas, exiled or travelled along the lines of capital in pursuit of labour, new materials and technologies, or chased redemption and robust ideological utopias away from home. This book reflects on the machine’s implications for labour within the complex economic, social and political frameworks engulfing postwar Europe. The machine was, almost literally, the vehicle through which national and geographical boundaries were questioned: both stabiliser and tectonics of the modern age. This book also addresses the artificiality, otherness and alienation encoded in the binary machine–human, a ‘techno-dualistic account of ourselves, as software running on the hardware of our bodies’ stemming from ‘an immemorial human propensity to identify ourselves with, explain ourselves through, our most advanced machines’.4 Frequently articulated in the language of theatre and performance, this discourse is underpinned by the all too modern dychotomies artificial versus natural, machine versus human, inorganic versus organic. The futuristi were eager to explore new sexual, aesthetic and political possibilities inherent in mechanising humans, hybridising flesh and metal, including erotic coupling, miscegenation and technological reproductive means. This book offers insights into the inglorious swan song of futurismo and the eclipse of international machine culture, investigated through the lens of the lived lives and experiences of its main exponents after the First World War. The leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti remains a pivotal, ambiguous figure whose incessant activism continued to feed into the financial, commercial and logistic infrastructure of futurismo, a movement which may have otherwise run out of steam after the end of the War. Waxing and waning on the international stage, well-oiled by a personal fortune amassed from the trains, bridges and solid machines handled by his prudent father, a civil engineer, Marinetti steered futurism, taking on occasion controversial, unpredictable and contradictory turns and stunning reversals. Marinetti was the historical memory of futurismo: a chaotic junk room where disparate, even curious, positions coexisted.5 Working within or outside Marinetti’s sphere of influence, the Italian futurists were arguably the first artists in modernity to fully acknowledge that science and technics are the tune to which modern society dances, and to live and to love in step with this tune. Governed by technology, modern society was no longer defined by given, overarching cultural traditions, but rather by the factory, the art market, the trajectories of global capital. If the machine was by no means the monopoly of the 4 M. O’Connell, To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death (London: Granta, 2017), 63–4. 5 Cigliana, Futurismo esoterico, 331.

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futuristi, unique to them, however, were the individual manners in which their epistemological, symbolic, aesthetic and ideological investment translated into original and creative outcomes.6 Machines are a key to navigating and understanding the dynamics of modernity.7 Like Mumford, Steven Lubar embeds machines within large social frameworks where ‘technology […] is politics by other means’.8 Lubar devised different types of social relationships mediated by machines: social and class-oriented loyalty to machines, on the model of Marx and Sorel (see sections 4.1 and 4.2a); totalitarian aestheticisations of politics and body politics within a Copernican revolution shifting masses from countrysides to metropolitan industrial centres (see section 1.4); colonial expansion in aggressive capitalist and Imperialist fashion appropriating the primitive under a modernist umbrella (see sections 1.5 and 5.4); development of networked metropolises overriding the palinsestual archaeology of the traditional, premodern city (see section 3.4); utilitarian, Darwinian and anti-emotive anthropologies (see section 4.3b); abstracted or body-political forms in neoclassical, metaphysical, utopian or spiritual function (see section 5.3); engineering developing into a dematerialised, quantum mechanical and digital age (see section 6.5c). The machine was, of course, also an image, fetish, trope and metaphor, a cypher encoding modernity, the symbol of a new epistemology and paradigm of the futurist’s future. To regard it exclusively as symbolic, however, as even recent critiques have suggested, is reductive and devitalising.9 These positions tend to overlook the robust investment in the material and productive vitality of the machine. Numerous futurists discussed here did not eclipse humans under the encroaching power of technology, but relegitimised them as artisans, comrades, masters of the industrial machine. Driving capitalist economies, the machine was valued and had appeal at the social, cultural and symbolic level. Through an exploration of at least three decades, this book elucidates machine culture not in terms of a single epistemology, but of widespread discourses and practices.10 What of the machine beyond the lifespan of futurismo? Following the unresolved tension in the nineteenth century between mechanical and social progress and dystopian threats of mechanical slavery and coercion, the twentieth century attempted to emancipate the machine from mere technical apparatus. In Paris Peasant (1926) 6 Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men, 410. 7 Lubar, ‘Machine politics’, 198. Cf. with the UDA (Unione Distruttivisti Attivisti) founded in New York on 9 June 1929 by Carlo Bernard – later Bernari – Guglielmo Peirce and Paolo Ricci, with the purpose to advance science and technology as the only valid hermeneutic tools in the modern age. 8 Ibid., 206. 9 De Maria, ‘Introduzione’, XLI. 10 See also Versari, ‘Futurist machine art’, 150.

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Luis Aragon had already cautioned against the modern fetishisation of machine technology, a new totem religion of modernity and ‘tragic symbol’ to which the human race delegated its intellectual powers (see also section 5.4). Blurring the boundaries between the material and the metaphorical, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), penned by the founder of cybernetics Norbert Wiener, introduced an important distinction between dehumanising oppression symbolised by the rigid and inflexible ‘first machines’ and the ‘cooperative interaction’ of cybernetic machines, the friends and brothers of humans.11 According to Wiener’s colleague Warren McCulloch, cybernetics introduced a collapse of machine and human into each other: the human became ‘a special case of the information machine, and the information machine a special case of the human’.12 In the 1952 essay ‘Machine and organism’, Georges Canguilhem introduced a covert dig to industrialised labour in the West at the tail end of the Taylorist era, criticising Descartes’ assimilation of humans to the machine and the devaluation of the inanimate implied in the mechanisation of life.13 Marshall McLuhan was shortly to caution that a new age of relativity replaced the centralism and appetite for order and control of the Newtonian age with a ‘distributist’ pluralism ‘in the matter of power and control’.14 Borrowing from Sigfried Giedion, McLuhan came to view machine technology with diffidence, as ‘fragmentary, centralist, and superficial in its patterning of human relationships’.15 In Italy, the review Civiltà delle Macchine (Machine civilisation; 1953–79), founded by Leonardo Sinisgalli with Giuseppe Eugenio Luraghi, supported and developed a convergence between the humanities, especially literature and the visual arts, and the applied sciences and technology of factory work (see also section 1.6). The conceptual laboratory created around this journal dispatched to the factory poets and painters, the representatives of a humanistic culture traditionally alien to technology, tasking them to develop a new means of communication with workers and engineers. Prominent exponents of a new trend, the so-called ‘industrial novel’ (romanzo industriale), focused on machines and factory workers. For example, Paolo Volponi (1924–94) reimagined the human body as a ‘super-machine’,16 a microcosm of the celestial mechanical network stretching out in space and time.17 Associated with the authoritarian regimes that appropriated the machine after the First World See N. K. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, cit. in Broeckmann, Machine Art, 25. C. Pias, cit. in Broeckmann, Machine Art, 26. See Broeckmann, Machine Art, 23. McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, 22. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 23. P. Volponi, La macchina mondiale (Milan: Garzanti, 1973), 11. Other exponents of the industrial novel include Carlo Bernari (1909–92) and Romano Bilenchi (1909–89). 17 Volponi, La macchina mondiale, 32–3. 11 12 13 14 15 16

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War, the culture of the left was ambivalent. As I explored in section 1.2 and Chapter 4, however, the Marxist view of technology was not altogether negative, discriminating between social actors, strategies and means of deployment. Engaging in a polemic with Marx and Freud, in the 1970s Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari criticised the cycles of lack and consumption in societies predicated upon the family triangle. They exploded the anthropocentric bias of the machine in an orgiastic theory of desire consisting of flow and rupture (see especially Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1972). Borrowing from Humberto Maturana’s and Francisco Varela’s autopoetic machines, e.g. living systems of elements connected in multiple and comprehensive couplings, Guattari and Deleuze devised the ‘desiring machines’, e.g. psychological processes where the cut (‘coupure’) of one machine into another creates a field of agency and potential subjectivation. Throughout his writing, from ‘Machine and structure’ (1969) through to ‘Machinic heterogenesis’ (1991), Guattari developed an extensive machine theory in non-identitarian function. Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-oedipal machines laid the groundwork of an anti-technological stance in postmodernity. In Duchamp’s Transformers (1990) JeanFrançois Lyotard took Duchamp’s The Bride as a model of a depoliticised machine divorced from industrial constraints and power forces. Jean Baudrillard focused on the ‘simulation’ of real, reproducible objects: the cornerstones of the industrial age. Simulation brought about an enticing, artificial, simulated world of ‘hyper-reality’ whose perfection and precision reconfigured, remodelled and removed the real. Borrowing Baudrillard’s foreboding in considering the gap between material and virtual reality, Paul Virilio regarded technology as disorienting, suspiciously open to be manipulated by the powers that be. As such, technology was, in itself, ‘a distinctive militarist ideology’.18 Our technological time, posited Virilio, redrafted the administrative horizon of military logistics into virtual immateriality and computational flows. The masses are corralled into mobile trajectories while information technology provides the infrastructure of our technologised existence. Slavoj Žižek echoed Virilio’s pessimistic outlook and highlighted the ‘closure’ and passivity engendered by cyberspace. Hans Blumenberg, among others, reconstructed the history of machines’ complex relation with human endeavour, pinning down the beginning of a modern machine discourse to the convergence between anthropomorphism (= machines assimilated to the human form) and mechano-morphism (= humans assimilated to the machine form) or Descartes’ ‘theoretical constructability of humans and their similarity to machines’.19 In 1999, Martin Burckhardt similarly elucidated the machine in the light of its historical relation with the human unconscious. 18 See also Cooper, Technoculture and Critical Theory, 115. 19 Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie, cit. in Broeckmann, Machine Art, 22.

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Constructing a binary material–conceptual and stressing the machine’s ontology as both a thing and a ‘constraint of thought’ (Denkzwang), Burckhardt highlighted the interdependence of the machine with a blueprint, a plan, a construction: in other words, the machine’s companionship with us humans.20 Machines in socio-cybernetics (Wiener), philosophy of science (Canguilhem and Simondon) and cyber-feminism (Haraway) were influential at the turn between the twentieth and the twenty-first century. In the Noughties the machine is being revived in the light of emerging paradigms. Raunig’s ‘abstract machine’ is a formless entity emanating from Deleuze and Guattari’s war machine. Typified by diffusity, virtuosity and monstrosity, the abstract machine is built on dissonant power and ‘concatenations of singularities’. It inhabits today’s post-Fordist, post-Marxist, globalised economy of ‘cognitive capitalism’, where precarisation of labour and enslavement to machines in the form of a ‘permanent online life’ prevail.21 Re-reading Marx’s ‘The fragment on machines’, Italian (post)operaismo concludes that social knowledge in the post-Fordist era can no longer be absorbed by the industrial machine. Reclaiming the social quality of the intellect in the affective cooperation among workers, the postoperaisti aim to reconcile Marx, Guattari and poststructuralist machine theory.22 The technologised human body is also an increasing concern. In the late 1970s, Paul Virilio highlighted the romantic taste for bionic bodies where organs were replaced by technological grafts.23 Michel Foucault’s ‘body politics’, e.g. the arena where tensions and conflicts between the sexual and the economic, the body and the machine, are staged and negotiated, is increasingly under public scrutiny. Fulfilling the futurist aspiration to create a hybrid of human and machine (see section 2.4), the body is fast becoming the final frontier of technological domination: living bodies that are the product of ‘a coupling of bodies and machines in the culture of consumption’24 are encased in technological carapaces, extending human lifespan. As Will Self put it, we are a ‘man–machine matrix’.25 Popular culture too is permeated with embodied machines. Hollywood films continue to feature menacing robots modelled on 1920s mechanised androids (e.g. The Transformers series, 2007–present), the threat posed by alien mechanical societies spinning out of control (e.g. Prometheus, 2012) and the interface between human and posthuman, where the posthuman is a machine (Blade Runner, 1982; A.I., 2001; Blade Runner 2049, 2017), to cite but a few. Contemporary AIs are assembled on the 20 21 22 23 24 25

M. Burckhardt, Vom Geist der Maschine (1999), cit. in Broeckmann, Machine Art, 21–2. Raunig, Thousand Machines, passim. See P. Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude, cit. in Raunig, Thousand Machines, 112–15. Virilio, Speed and Politics, 129. Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, 51. Self, ‘A field trip to Heathrow’.

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same sci-fi images of ‘metal people’ of the evil kind, ‘robots who will steal […] jobs or spontaneously adopt a malevolent dislike of humanity’.26 James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) and Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop (1987) are redolent of Marinetti’s cyborgs, mutants where bodies of combat are galvanised by electrical synapses in neural circuits. Cyberpunk owes an intellectual debt to the Italian futurists too. In exploring the co-dependence of the biological body and technology, cyberpunk contemplates a broad span of possibilities, from mechanical prostheses to cloning, from holograms to seemingly infinite and sinister technological developments, leading to ethical, social and political questions concerning the posthuman (see section 5.3). In this context, Munari’s ‘useless machines’ (section 6.5c) find renewed interest in contemporary art, e.g. Marvin Minsky’s mechanised box, Nik Ramage’s steampunk ‘unplugger’ robot, the tech-nihilist robot of Matt Kenyon and, especially, Simone Giertz, YouTube’s ‘queen of shitty robots’ and her mechanical meltdown installations. ‘There is something cathartic about a useless machine’,27 muses Douglas Heaven in the New Scientist. A Manifesto dei programmatori futuristi (Manifesto of futurist programmers; 15 June 1991) posits a high-accented diatribe against the ‘pastness’ of information technology. The programmers borrow explicitly from the futuristi and their provocations in favour of all things modern. Afrofuturism, in particular, is one of the most engaging parodic takes on futurismo today. This field was first codified by Mark Dery in an influential essay ‘Black to the future’ (1994) where Afro-American culture was construed as afrofuturist due to the forcible erasure of African pasts. Combining elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, afrocentrism and magic realism, afrofuturism interrogates the historical predicament of black people addressing the concerns of the African diaspora through the lens of technoculture and science fiction. Race and technology underpin afrofuturism’s exploration of black identity in utopian and dystopian frames. 28 Afrofuturism encompasses creative writers (e.g. Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler), painters (e.g. Jean-Michel Basquiat and Angelbert Metoyer, celebrated in exhibitions in Harlem in 2014 and Brooklyn in 2016), photographers (e.g. Renée Cox), musicians (e.g. Sun Ra, Arkestra, George Clinton’s bands Parliament and Funkadelic), and filmakers (e.g. Janelle Monáe, whose films Prime Time (2013) and Many Moons (2010) explore slavery from metallic, cyborg and fashion angles).29 Solange Knowles, Rihanna and Beyoncé have incorporated afrofuturist themes in

26 E. Cameron, cit. in M. Brooks, ‘Artificial ignorance’, New Scientist, 7 October 2017, 30. 27 D. Heaven, ‘Dumb and dumber’, New Scientist, 23–30 December 2017, 50. 28 In the late 1990s, afrofuturism witnessed the interventions of Alondra Nelson, Greg Tate, Kodwo Eshun and others. 29 Cit. in Afrofuturism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrofuturism (accessed 13 September 2017), 2.

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music and fashion, e.g. Beyoncé’s film Lemonade (2016) showcased Serena Williams as an example of the empowerment of black women. Modernity was haunted by the looming presence of technology. Hackneyed machines, e.g. engines, pulleys and cogwheels, continue to provide sources of labour, as well as cultural inspiration, in today’s globalised world. Today, hundreds of robots work side by side with humans on assembly lines and packing stations across the globe.30 The age of the rigidly centralised, Fordist machine, however, is well and truly over. The paradigm has shifted to systems, networks and assemblages. Attention is now focused on the manners in which these connections shape society. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s latest book Assembly (2017), to cite a recent example, charts the rising impact of ‘social production’ and the parasitic role taken on by contemporary capitalism in extracting profit from a co-dependent coupling, or ‘assembly’, of humans and machines.31 The industrial arenas frequented by the futurists are, by and large, no longer with us: we inhabit a ‘third stage of capitalism’ rendering ‘the dilemmas of heavy industry and modern factory production obsolete’.32 The ‘radiant textuality’33 of the computer screens we daily peer into is electric, simultaneous and infinitely combinatorial. It explodes the stability of narratives and genres. Google Earth and other data interfaces incorporate personal logistics into a cartographic, intelligence framework, weaving a virtual dromological hell where a utopia of and for objects has replaced the social and political utopias once predicated on the machine.34 In other words, machines are now providing both the data and the subjectivity to make and define art, in a complex interaction where the boundaries between human and machine are blurred, as is the case with automatic art.35 Today we are on the threshold of a Fourth Industrial Revolution underpinned by the integration between material and immaterial, virtual and real, digital and mechanic. New materials, e.g. graphene, are complementing metals. The increasing sophistication of AI systems positions us at the threshold of a veritable ‘intelligence explosion’: super-intelligent machines, hardwired with vast numbers of processing elements, faster operational frequency and superior capacity for storage, are poised to acquire the capability to outsmart even the fastest and most powerful human mind. 30 H. Hodson, ‘Baxter breaks out’, New Scientist, 26 July 2014, 19. 31 M. Hardt and A. Negri, Assembly (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 32 F. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London, New York: Verso, 2007), 21. 33 The idiom ‘radiant textuality’ is J. J. Mc Gann’s, cit. in Perloff, Futurist Moment, xxviii. 34 I draw the notion of a utopia of and for objects from B. H. Bratton, ‘Logistics of habitable circulation’, cit. in Virilio, Speed and Politics, 19. 35 S. Ings, ‘Changing the rules’, New Scientist, 2 August 2014, 47.

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‘We cannot hope to compete with such machine brains. We can only hope to design them so that their goals coincide with our own.’36 We have even superseded Alan Turing’s 1950s machine as a mimic of human brain and actions: ‘real AI is software that runs on computers inside big metal boxes, honing its responses by crunching data’.37 The machine of today ‘cares about one thing, and one thing alone: data’.38 The world of the bulky, sturdy industrial machine, the product of a heroic age of engineering, has been eclipsed by ‘pure’ energy travelling on fibre optic cables. Algorithms, devices that relay to one another, increasingly constitute system and society. Social media have replaced communities of sharing in the factory. A cluster of ethereal, aseptic, translucent, interconnected networks is colonising both our senses and our aesthetic tastes. They govern our intellect and reshape our economic relationship within an ostensibly holistic society characterised by integration and interrelation. The tangible exploded. The virtual all but replaced the real. The futurist machine culture morphed into the connected totalitarianism we currently live in. ‘The information circuit’, wrote Italo Calvino, ‘stretches out in the perforated ribbons of automata born of other automata. Generations of new machines probably better than us will carry on living lives and speaking words that were also our own.’39

36 37 38 39

N. Bostrom, ‘Get ready for the dawn of superintelligence’, New Scientist, 5 July 2014, 27. Brooks, ‘Artificial ignorance’, 30. Ibid. I. Calvino, Ti con zero, in C. Milanini (ed.), Romanzi e racconti (Milan: Mondadori, 2004), 303.

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Select bibliography Archival sources Censi, Giannina, fondo, MART Folders: Foto Personali. Rosina Ferrario aviatrice (n. 35); Censi with Marinetti (68); foto di scena tratta da Lasciate ogni speranza di Eugène Lemercier, compagnia Maresca, Bologna 1934, ‘Quadro della macchina’ (107). 1930. La Tancia – Le Danze della Jungla – Il cigno – Un sogno – Castello Sforzesco. ‘Diario a Parigi per studiare danza’, 6 June–25 July 1930, [n.p. but 7]; ‘Serata Futurista al Castello Sforzesco di Milano’, Il Popolo d’Italia, 15 March 1930, [n.p.]. 1931. Corrispondenza alla famiglia dalla tournée di “Simultanina”. Letter to mother and father, Treviso, 25 May 1931, [n.p. but 4]; letter to parents, Udine, 27 May 1931, [n.p. but r/v]. 1931. Tabarano alla Corte che non Esiste. Galleria Pesaro. Aerodanza. Simultanina. Anon, review of Simultanina, Il Gazzettino di Padova, 3 June 1931; C. R., ‘Teatro Garibaldi “Simultanina” Divertimento … antifuturista’, Il Veneto, 3–4 June 1931, 3; Donatello D’Orazio, ‘La serata di “Simultanina”’, Il Popolo di Trieste, 31 May 1931, 6; F. T. Marinetti, ‘Simultanina e il pubblico: Analisi chimica delle serate futuriste’, [30 July 1931], 3; Sofronio Pocarini, ‘Dieci minuti con la danzatrice Giannina Censi’, L’Eco dell’Isonzo, [n.d.], [n.p.], 1932. Cen. 6. Bruno G. Sanzin, ‘La danzatrice futurista Giannina Censi’, Il Piccolo, 31 March 1932, [n.p. but 2]; Anon, ‘Le Manifestazioni futuriste di ieri alla presenza di S.E. Marinetti’, Il Piccolo, 2 April 1932, 3. Cen. 9. Diario personale – Corrispondenza – Appunti di una conferenza. Storia della mia vita, autograph manuscript, 1913–92, 1–137; Appunti autobiografici manoscritti, [n.p.], [n.d.], [n.p. but 3]; ‘Conferenze sul futurismo’, manuscript [n.d.], 1–5. Cen. 10. Ritagli illustrazioni ritagliate da Giannina adolescente. Una rivista inglese. Ère. Cen. 30. Cartoline e lettere di G. Censi a Bruno Sanzin.

Crali, Tullio, fondo, MART Folders: Cra. 1. Autograph letter from Marinetti welcoming Crali within the futurist movement, 10 June 1929; newspaper clipping ‘L’esposizione futurista al Circolo di lettura’ by Valentino Danieli, orig. in L’Isonzo, June 1931, [n.p.]; newspaper cutting ‘Le fantasiose tele

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degli aeropittori che usano il pennello come un riflettore’ by Paolo Buzzi, orig. in Gazzetta del Popolo, 24 October 1931, [n.p.]; newspaper clipping ‘Futuristi a convegno’ by Anon, orig. in Corriere della Sera, 16 June 1933, [n.p.]. Cra. 2. Poem ‘Volare’ by Luciano Folgore, in Le Vie dell’Aria (1939), 63; article ‘Nuova estetica della guerra’ by Marinetti, orig. in Giornale d’Italia, 20 sett.-30 ott. 1940, 64–5; article ‘La poesia non umana dei tecnicismi’ by Marinetti, orig. in Meridiano di Roma, 20 October 1940, [n.p.]; article ‘L’Aeropittura futurista inizia una nuova êra della plastica’ by Marinetti, in Catalogo della Mostra dei 6, [n.d.], [n.p. but 4]. Cra. 3. Article ‘Estetica futurista nella guerra multiforme’ by Marinetti, Il Solco, 17 July 1943, [n.p.].

Depero, Fortunato, fondo, MART Folders: Corrispondenza. A: Azari (letter [February 1927]; letter 3 August 1926; letter [11 July 1927]; letter 10 April [1928]; letter 13 May 1928; various undated letters. Bra-C: Bragaglia; Brinton (typescript ‘Giudizio di Christian Brinton (Uno dei più noti critici di New-York)’, [n.d.], [n.p.]); Buzzi (typescript ‘Un giudizio di Paolo Buzzi. 1932 Milano’, [n.p.], copied from an original letter, Milan, 10 November 1932); Campari. Cla: Clavel; Crali. F: Farfa (letter 19 January 1952, [n.p.]; letter ‘!depero depero!, in Rovereto NewYork 1928–29, Corrispondenze, 6, includes autograph poem ‘New York-cocktail’, [n.d.], [n.p.]); Fillia (typescript ‘Spiritualità aerea’, [n.d.], 1–3. M: Benedetta Marinetti (letter Rome, 22 August 1954, [n.p. but 3]); F. T. Marinetti (typescript ‘Depero e il nuovo stile decorativo’, in La Gazzetta del Popolo, Grido della stirpe and Il Brennero, [n.d. but orig. 14 March 1929, Gazzetta del Popolo], 1–6; postcard Capri, 11 September 1931, [r/v]). Mat-N: Bruno Munari; Ada Negri. O-P: Orazi; Giovanni Papini. Pon-R: Enrico Prampolini (postcard Naples [n.d.], 1); Enrico Roma (‘Arte e artisti europei in America: “Depero a New York”’, [n.d.], [n.p. but 6]; Luigi Russolo (letter Tarragona, 7 March 1933, [r/v]. Rus-S: Maria Russolo; John Salterini; Bruno Sanzin; Giovanni Scheiwiller; Enrico Settimelli. Sol-U: Somenzi; Sprovieri; Tato. Ritagli: Eco della stampa. Manifesto Azari, ‘Per una Società di Protezione delle Macchine’, La Fiera Letteraria, 24 April 1927, 3; Depero, ‘Autointervista’, [n.d. but 1925?], [n.p.]; Tavole paroliberiste, [n.d.], [n.p.]; Depero, ‘Stile di acciaio’, Giornale di Genova [1934], then in Il Brennero, 5 December 1934, [n.p.]; ‘New York: film vissuto (primo libro sonoro)’. Depero Futurista 1931. Draft manuscript, with original illustrations. ‘New-York Nuova Babele del pittore e poeta Fortunato Depero’. Draft manuscript, 179. Libro imbullonato Depero Futurista ([n.p.]: edizioni Dinamo Azari, 1927), [n.p.]. Cantiere. Unpublished draft manuscript, [1936–43], 1–5. Includes ‘Muscoli nello spazio’, 1–6; and ‘Ingranaggi nelle officine’, 6–12. Fotografie personali.

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Volumi miscellanei. Vol. XXXIII, 7: ms. ‘Macchinismo babelico’; vol. 851, 79: ms. ‘Estetica della macchina’, [n.d.], [n.p. but 194–6]; vol. XIX, 22: ms. ‘Arte sperimentale e rivoluzionaria (inc. ‘Paura della macchina’)’, 65–87 (81–2); newspaper clipping Alfredo Degasperi, ‘L’Atlante Depero’.

Dreier, Katherine S. papers/Société Anonyme archive, General collection, BRBML Series V. Photographs and artwork. Box 73, folder 1921: [Photograph of Ruggero Vasari], 14 November 1922. Series X. Subject files about artists. Box 77, folder 1991: [Poster F. Zampini & C.], [1923?]; box 110, folder 2662: [Photograph of collage by Pannaggi], undated; [Photograph of costume model for L’Angoisse des Machines, by Vasari], c. 1926; [Costume design for L’Angoisse des Machines, by Vasari], [1926]; [Photograph of dining room textile, Casa Zampini], 1925–26; box 119, folder 2839: [Poster F. Zampini & C], [1924].

Eisenman collection, General collection, BRBML Enrico Prampolini, Noi: Rivista d’arte futurista; Noi: Numero speciale: Teatro e scena futurista (back cover), 1924.

Folgore, Luciano, papers, JPGRIL Series I. Correspondence [undated unless otherwise stated]; box 2: Marinetti: letter on headed paper ‘Movimento futurista’, 25 August; telegram Rome, 18 March 1914; Prampolini: postcard from Paganica (Aquila) to Francesco Giacobbe, 26 December 1916; Severini: letter from Rome, 29 May 1960; letter from Viareggio, 21 March 1922; letter from Paris, 14 October 1914. Series II. Manuscripts c. 1904–60, undated; box 5: Poetry, 2: Poems from Canto dei Motori: ‘Torpediniera’, ‘L’elettricità’, ‘Incendio all’opificio’, ‘Il cinese caricaturista’, 7: Città veloce, 1919, 25: Poems (1920?), 34: Poems and poetry fragments: ‘La scimmia e il pappagallo’; box 8: Plays, 1: List of pantomimes, 2: ‘L’ora del fantoccio’, 1–2, 22: ‘Des ombres + des Fantoches + des hommes – synthese futuriste’, 53: Fragments of plays; box 11: Stories, Fables, etc., 37: Story fragments: ‘L’Isola del Robot’, 1–2; box 14: Prose Pieces. [all by Folgore], 1: Accounts of travels with F. T. Marinetti and Futurists, 2: Dinamica futurista, 1–10, 16: On pantomime, 1–3, 48: Conversazione Aerea, 25 June 1935, 1–6; box 16: Radioplays Il Grammofono della Verità–Matamoro–Il segreto dei piccoli, 12: play Pinocchio, 13–16: Il segretario dei piccoli (Pinocchio) 1948–49; box 18: Pinocchio, 1: radioplay Il segreto di Pinocchio, 1952, 2–3: ‘Il giornalino di Pinocchio’ 1953, 4: Pinocchio I, II, III, IV, summer 1954, 5: Pinocchio cosa hai fatto? (RAI, 50s), 6: Pinocchio, 7: Intervista con Pinocchio

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(radioplay) + Pinocchio sketch for TV, 1954, 8: Assorted Pinocchio radioplays, 9: History of Pinocchio, 10: Letter from Mayor of Pescia re. Pinocchio.

General collection, BRBML Marinetti and Fillia, La cucina futurista (Milan: Sonzogno, 1932) (bookcovers); Marinetti and Fillia, Salon d’automne de Lyon, 1935 (preface and selected pages), 1935; Vinicio Paladini, Arte nella Russia dei Soviets; il padiglione dell’URSS a Venezia (Rome: La Bilancia, 1925); Paladini, Arte d’avanguardia e futurismo (Rome: La Bilancia, 1923); Prampolini, Sala F – il 14 Aprile 1919 – pannello del pittore prampolini, c. 1933. Prampolini, Broom (front cover), October 1922.

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, papers, General collection, BRBML Series I. Letters by Marinetti, 1909–44. Series II. Letters by Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, 1921–44. Series III. Letters to and about Marinetti, 1898–1970; box 7, folder 121: letter Italo Balbo, 20 June 1928; box 8, folder 255: letter Karel Čapek, undated; box 10, folder 412: letter Depero, undated; box 15, folder 900: two letters Prampolini, undated; one letter Prampolini, undated [1923]. Series IV. Writings by Marinetti, 1895–1944. Series V. Writings of Others, 1900–61; box 47, folder 1866: Aldo Guatamacchia, Manifesto degli operai futuristi, undated. Series VI. Manifestos. Series VII. Catalogues. Series VIII. Photographs, 1888–1944; box 49, folder 1937: Marinetti’s wrecked car in a ditch, undated; folder 1939 [man lying on ground with a machine gun], c. 1917; folder 1940: [Marinetti with the legionari during the occupation of Fiume], 1918 [but 1919?]; [Marinetti, Benedetta, Prampolini and Tato in the Futurist section of the Biennale], 1925; box 50, folder 1946: [Bologna. Tato and Angelo Caviglioni seated on the floor of a futurist exhibition], 1926?; [Paris. Scene from Marinetti’s Play, Cocktail. Stage Set by Prampolini], 1927; [Rome. Marinetti, Benedetta, Depero (on ottoman), Mazza (behind Benedetta) and others (from the back, far left) Folgore, Chiti and Prampolini at Marinetti’s apartment, 1926?; folder 1951: [Benedetta, Vittoria and Ala with one of the five large panel paintings representing Land, Sea, Air, Telegraphic, Telephonic and Radio communication executed by Benedetta for the Post Office Building in Palermo, Sicily], c. 1934; folder 1952: [Rome. Marinetti, Benedetta, King Vittorio Emmanuel III, Mino Somenzi and others at the Prima Mostra Nazionale d’Arte Futurista, organised by the newspaper Futurismo], 1934; box 51, folder 1955: [Marinetti deplaning Pan American Airlines Grace], 1936; folder 1957: [Masnata,

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Goretti and Cucini], c. 1941; [Marinetti, in uniform, with Masnata, Goretti and Cucini, in an oxcart], c. 1941; folder 1959: [Venice. Marinetti, Benedetta and Sanzin with others at an art exhibition], c. 1943; folder 1960: [Marinetti on a tractor], undated; [Marinetti next to airplanes and other people], undated; box 52, folder 1956: Tato, [Marinetti – ritratto dinamico], 1932; folder 1966: Tato, [Mechanical portrait of the futurist poet Remo Chiti], 1930; Tato, [Spirit portrait of the Futurist Mario Carli], 1930; [Photomontage], undated; [Photomontage], 1933; folder 1967: Crali, Prima che si apra il paracadute, undated; folder 1968: Verossi, [L’Aviazione], 1942?; Tato, [Il Lavoro], 1941. Series IX. Clippings, 1914–83. Series X. Special Files, 1918–40. Series XI. Oversize, 1905–83.

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, Special collections, JPGRIL Marinetti correspondence and papers, 1886–1974 Series I. Letters and submissions to Marinetti and others, 1900–74; box 1: n. 23 Marinetti 1911: letter Depero, Milan 24 August 1911; box 2: n. 4 Marinetti 1917: letter Diaghilev, dated 23 February 1917, r; n. 6 Marinetti 1918 Aug–Dec: letters [Anton Giulio] Bragaglia dated 9 October, 24 October, 28 October, 10 November; postcard 23 November; n. 7 Marinetti 1919 Jan–Dec: letter Ugo Cangiullo, 6 April; n. 12 Marinetti [1924?]: autograph typescript Romolo Polidori, ‘La Macchina ha una Politica una Morale una Estetica’, 1–10; n. 16 Marinetti 1928 Jan–Dec: typescript minute Major General Director D. [Demetrio] Prampolini, ‘Diario delle esperienze di R. B. eseguite dall’Ing. Giulio Planta con l’impianto speciale costruito allo scalo Ticino nella zona delle officine di costruzione del Genio Militare di Pavia dal 9 febbraio 1928 al 27 giugno 1928’, Pavia, 18 June, 1–29; n. 20 Marinetti 1932 Jan–Dec: letter Geom. Pier Domenico Chiapella, ‘Avvenirismo Ideale standardizzato che si andrà evolvendo con relatività e standardizzazione da domenica 1–1–1933 a sabato 31–12–2044’, 19 June, 1–8; unsigned draft article [Luigi Scrivo], ‘Cinematografia’, [n.d.], 1; n. 23 Marinetti 1935 Jan– Dec: press cutting article G. Sommi Picenardi, ‘Sussurri dell’etere’, Radiocorriere, 17 March, [n.p.]; autograph text [Luigi Scrivo], ‘La radio futurista’, [n.p.], [n.d.], 1; clipping article Roberto Paolella, ‘Il cinema d’avanguardia’, [n.p.], [n.p.]; autograph manuscript Eppe Loreta, ‘Romanzo – sintesi della storia dell’Astronomia italiana’, [n.p. but 1–4]; n. 25 Marinetti 1935 and c. 1935: typescript Ruggero Micheloni, Il romanzo della superspecie o la Psicosintesi, 256; n. 29 Marinetti 1938 Jan–Dec: typescript poem Giacomo Giardina, ‘Nel mondo della Radio’ [title erased], [n.p.]; manuscript Maria Goretti, ‘Marinetti narratore, 29 April 1938, 1–11; poem Maria Goretti, ‘All’Aviatore’, 1–2; box 4: Marinetti correspondence 1946–74: n. 2 Jan–Nov 1947: letter Prampolini to Benedetta, 30 November 1947, [n.p. but r/v]; n. 4 Jan–Dec 1948: typescript letter Giovanni Korompay to Benedetta, Bologna 9 February 1948, 1; n. 6 1950 Jan–Dec: typescript letter Korompay to Benedetta, Bologna 10 April 1950, [n.p.

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but r/v]; n. 7 Jan–Apr 1951: letter Korompay, Bologna 23 April 1951, 1; n. 11 1953: ms. letter Depero to Benedetta, Rovereto 17 January 1953, 1; ms. letter Depero to Benedetta, Rovereto 22 January 1953, 1; ms letter Depero to Benedetta, Rovereto 6 May 1953, [r/v]; n. 16 Nov–Dec 1955: typescript letter Prampolini to Benedetta, 29 October 1955, 1–2; handwritten letter Prampolini to Benedetta, 2 December 1955, [r/v]; n. 17 Jan–Dec 1956: typescript note Anon, ‘MEDAGLIA D’ORO ALLA MEMORIA DEL PITTORE ENRICO PRAMPOLINI’, 1956, [n.p.]; n. 24 Jan–Dec 1960: handwritten letter Rosetta Depero to Benedetta, 21 December, [r/v]; box 5: typescript novel A. M. Pelacani, Evadere! Romanzo dell’epoca presente, 1934, 1–173; box 6: typescript novel Pelacani, Evadere! Romanzo dell’epoca presente, 1934, 174–330; box 7: Marinetti correspondence and submissions: n. 3 undated correspondence: Depero to Marinetti, [n.p. but 6]; fragment of handwritten letter Depero to Marinetti, [n.d.], [r/v]; n. 7 Undated correspondence R-Z: handwritten letter Luigi Russolo to Papini, Soffici, Palazzeschi, 1–3; n. 23 Undated, unsigned poetry submissions: typescript poem ‘Il poema delle Cave di Carrara’, 1–5; n. 24 Unsigned, undated prose submissions etc: typescript Anon, ‘Europa Europeismo Asia Italia Fascismo e Futurismo’, 1–3; n. 27 Unsigned undated prose submissions: untitled typescript, Geometria Appassionata et al., 1–55; box 13: Marinetti Photos; box 14: Futurist Art Photos; box 15: Marinetti A. L. A. and Letters to Cappa: n. 2 A. L. A. circulars, 1934–39: typescript dispatch from A. L. A.’s agency Marinetti, ‘L’aerocanzone delle Parole Nuove’ (text declaimed on Italian Radio 29 July 1939), 1–2; dispatch from A. L. A. agency Marinetti, ‘L’applaudita relazione di S.E. Marinetti all’ VIII convegno “Volta”’, [1938], 1–2; n. 4 Letters to Alberto Cappa 1926: manuscript letter, Benedetta Cappa to A. Cappa, 19 March 1926, [n.p. but 4]; manuscript letter ‘la tua sorellina’ to A. Cappa, [n.d.], [n.p. but 4]; manuscript letter ‘Beny’ to ‘Albertino’, Buenos Aires, 14 June 1926, 1–3. Marinetti student notebooks and other papers Series I. box 1: n. 3 manuscript letter Marinetti to Leone, 26 August 1891, [n.p. but 4]; n. 9: manuscript letter Luigi Freddi, [n.d.], [n.p. but r]; n. 17: manuscript letter Italo Tavolato, [n.d.], [n.p. but 2]; n. 20: manuscript letter Gino Severini, Paris 3 November 1910, [n.p. but 7]; n. 24 1914: manuscript letter Severini, Anzio, 23 January 1914, [n.p. but 4], n. 27 1918: manuscript letter Severini, Paris, 20 March 1918, [n.p. but 4]; n. 29 1919: two manuscript letters Gabriele D’Annunzio to Marinetti, 4 April 1919 and [n.d.]; n. 32 1920: manuscript letters Mario Carli, Fiume, 26 February 1920, [n.p. but 2]; 8 March 1920, r/v; 21 March 1920, r; 1 April 1920, r/v; 8 April 1920, r/v; 19 April 1920, r; box 2: dissertations, school assignments, exercises.

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso and Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, papers 1902–65, JPGRIL Series I. Manuscripts and Correspondence of Marinetti (1920s–30s), [undated unless otherwise indicated]; box 1: n. 8: ‘Trionfo dell’aeropittura di guerra sulle nature morte’, 1–2; n. 9:

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‘International avantgarde’ (autograph, begins p. 4); n. 17 ‘Prampolini’ (signed typescript), 1–6; n. 18 on Fernand Léger; n. 30 Aesthetics of Electricity; n. 36 ‘Ritratti Futuristi del Duce’ (transcript of radio conference); n. 48 La Grande Milano; n. 51 Pantomima dell’aviatrice; L’elica e il paesaggio; n. 57 South American trip; box 2: n. 7 ‘Società di protezione delle macchine’ (unsigned typescript, 1); n. 8 Typed speech (unsigned, [n.p.]); box 3: n. 13 Miscellaneous postcards and letters; n. 16 Sofia visit: typescript by Boyan Danovsky, ‘Marinetti ed il Futurismo’, Vreme, 18 January 1932; typescript by anon, ‘F.T. Marinetti a Belgrado’, 28 January 1939. Series III. Assorted manuscripts and Correspondence; box 9: n. 5 Magamal (pseudonym Eva Amendola): autograph typescript with dedication to Marinetti ‘La pazzia e la riforma del manicomio; autograph poem with dedication to Marinetti ‘Il Canto d’Amore della Donna Cosmica’, [n.p.], August 1918; box 10: n. 7 Letters to Cappa 1928; box 13: n. 1 Letters to Marinetti regarding Cappa and from Marinetti to Cappa; box 14: n. 1 Caproni; n. 4 Carra; n. 5 Art et Action; n. 9 Corra: proofs of Bruno Corra, ‘Marinetti Poeta delle Parole in Libertà Simultanee’, Rassegna Nazionale Jan. 1938-XVI; proofs of Corra, ‘Le parole in libertà nell’aeropoesia futurista’; n. 10 Corra; n. 13 Depero: autograph letter from Depero to Marinetti on paper headed Depero Futurist Art, [n.d.]; typescript ‘Discorso FascistaFuturista-Depero a New-York-City’, 1–4; n. 14 Depero; n. 27 Goretti: draft ‘Aeropoema guerriero quasi romanzo: Nozze Futuriste: Campana [sic] di Guerra con Trimotore, [n.p.]; ‘Il sonno delle macchine’, 1–13; n. 35 Jarry; n. 49 Miletti: typescript Vladimiro Miletti, ‘Trieste-Spalato in volo’, 25 August 1941-XIX; n. 54 Munari: typescript letter from Bruno Munari to Benedetta Cappa, 6 April 1950; n. 55 Mussolini; n. 61 Orazi: typescript ‘Nuovi avviamenti della poesia italiana e loro cause’, 1–10; box 15: n. 6 Pound: letter from Richard Aldington to Ezra Pound, [1914]; n. 7 Prampolini; n. 16: typescript ‘Sartoris, Alberto on Prampolini’; n. 21 Metal postcards and brass name plates; n. 22 Severini: copy of catalogue of Gino Severini’s exhibition at the Malborough gallery, April 1913; autograph letter from Severini to Marinetti, Paris, 15 February 1930; n. 26 Futurist postcards; n. 40 Idrovolante. Series IV. Music; box 16: musical score of Eros Sciorilli, ‘Motore innamorato’, Fox-Trot op. 23, 1931; typescript article Marinetti, ‘Mix dirige ora le orchestre dell’infinito’, [n.d.], 89–92. Series V. Newspaper clippings; box 18: n. 1 Clippings by Marinetti: ‘Donne, dovete preferire i gloriosi mutilati’, [n.p.], [n.d.], 148–9; n. 2 Clippings. Articles by Marinetti: ‘A Roma una vibrante orazione di Marinetti per la celebrazione del volo transatlantico’, [n.p.], [n.d.], [n.p. – copy of a public speech given by Marinetti at Teatro Aquarium in Rome on the invitation of the Rome Aeroclub on the theme of Italo Balbo and flying]; ‘“L’uomo e la macchina” di Augusto Platone’, Meridiano di Roma, 1 June XIX, [n.p.]; n. 3 Clippings. By Marinetti: ‘Poesia plastica musica e architettura africane – Manifesto futurista’, Gazzetta del Popolo, 15 January 1935, 3; n. 4 Clippings. by Marinetti: ‘La Società di protezione delle macchine’, [n.p.], [n.d.], [n.p.]; ‘La guerra futura’, Gazzetta [?], 20 January 1929, [n.p.]; n. 5 Clippings. Articles in French by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti; box 19: n. 1 Clippings.

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Poems in French by Marinetti; n. 2 Clippings about Marinetti; n. 3 Clippings. About Marinetti: Anon, ‘“The English are Wonderful” – Says Italy: The “Wild Racket” is Over and Forgotten Now’, Evening Standard, 8 January 1937, [n.p.]; B. Simionesco, ‘Articles de Paris: S. E. Marinetti et Abel Bonnard ont parlé, hier, de la jeunesse’, Le Journal, January 1938; Karl Frahm, ‘Spaghetti, carneplastico e altre specialità della cucina italiana’, Rivista delle riviste, 27 February 1938 (repr.), 275–6; Corrado Govoni, ‘L’estetica della macchina e della chimica nell’opera del poeta Marinetti’, Autori e Scrittori (Mensile del Sindacato Nazionale), V (1940), 1–3; n. 4 Clippings. Art images; n. 5 Clippings. Journalistic clippings about machinery/extraordinary events; I n. 6 Clippings. Hitler and Futurism: a. a., ‘Germania senza Futurismo’, Il merlo di Parigi, 29 August 1937, [n.p.]; Vincenzo Costantini, ‘Arte ed industrialismo’, La Sera di Milano, 10 August 1936, [n.p.]; box 20: nn. 1 and 2 Clippings. General: paper Anon, ‘Vomere e spada’, Rome – Philosophy Conference, 26 May 1929, [n.p.]; article Krimer, ‘Guido Keller ed il teatro aereo’, [n.p.], [n.d.], 3; n. 3 Clippings. General: article B. G. Sanzin, ‘L’urbanismo di Trieste’, [n.p.], [n.d.], 11–12; article P. G. Colombi, ‘Il pittore dell’astratto: PRAMPOLINI’, [n.p.], [n.d.]; clippings ‘Poesie inedite di Augusto Platone’, Romeo Fargnoli, ‘Ricordo di Augusto’ and Platone, ‘Antidiario Africano: Nulla da segnalare’, il lambello, [n.d.], 3; article [Marinetti and Prampolini], ‘L’aeroplano, gli scrittori, gli artisti, gli scienziati’, L’Ala d’Italia, [n.d.], 25–30; newspaper clipping Giuseppe Piazza, ‘La Città – motore’, I settecento anni di Berlino, [n.d.], [n.p.]; n. 4 Clippings. Journalistic clippings for book on World War II; n. 5 Clippings. Journalistic clippings for book on World War II–1941. Series VII. Photographs; box 23: n. 12 Futurist Art. Prampolini. Series VIII. Libroni; box 28: short column A. G. B., ‘Razzismo futurista’, [n.p.], [n.d.]; article (copy) Vincenzo Costantini, ‘Arte ed Industrialismo’, La Sera di Milano, 10 August 1936, [n.p.]; box 31: prints from slides of Marinetti’s Libroni, inc. ed. Wyndham Lewis, The Tyro. A Review of the Arts of Painting, Sculpture and Design; cartoon W. K. Haseloen [?], ‘How to Paint a Futurist Picture’, The Daily Mirror, 1912, [n.p.]; Anon, ‘Mr Balfour among Futurists. Signor Marinetti and “The Cause”. Visit to London’, The Standard, 21 March 1912, [n.p.]; box 32: carousel with slides reproducing pages of further Libroni; box 33: prints/photographs made of slides from Libroni 1909–13. Article Marinetti, ‘How Futurists Write’, Daily Express, 18 February 1913, [n.p.]; article Giovanni Papini, ‘Il significato del Futurismo’, Lacerba, I:3, 1 February 1913, 6–9; poem Libero Altomare, ‘Alfa’, Il Goliardo di Velletri, II:5, 13 April 1913, 2; poem Anon, ‘Versi maltusiani’, Il Goliardo di Velletri, II:5, 13 April 1913, 2; box 34: carousel of 80 slides. Valentine de St. Point, ‘Manifesto della donna futurista’; article Anon, ‘Futurism and Form in Poetry’, The Fortnightly Review May 1914, 804–16; Anon, ‘Musings without Method’, Blackwood’s Magazine June 1914, 854–64; box 35: slides on carousel. Essay Horace B. Samueli, ‘The future of futurism’, Fortnightly Review, April 1913, 725–40; article Walter Sickert, ‘The Futurist “Devil-amongthe-Taylors”’, The English Review, April 1912, 147–54; article Holbrook Jackson, ‘Who’s

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the Futurist – Wells or Marinetti?’, T.P.’s Weekly, 15 May 1914, 633; box 36: slides on carousel (80) of Marinetti’s Libroni. Essay Anthony M. Ludovici, ‘The Italian futurists and their traditionalism’, Oxford and Cambridge Review, July 1912, 94–122. Series IX. Posters and oversized items; Cover Der Sturm, Berlin, May 1912; Oversized War illustrations and 1 map of war zone; Poster in Russian, 11 February 1914; Reviews: Futurismo, Prima Linea (cascodalluminio, ‘Macchinolatria’, Prima Linea, I:7, 7 July 1913, 2).

Prampolini, Enrico, archivio, A900 Folders: V: SEVERINI, Gino, ‘Processo e difesa di un pittore d’oggi’, extract L’Arte, 1931; Materiale per studio su Prampolini scenografo: BRAGAGLIA, Anton Giulio, ‘Variazioni sulla Regìa’, extract Ottobre, 1936; PRAMPOLINI, ‘La scenografia nel Teatro del Colore’, draft typescript with autograph alterations, extract Balza, 1915, [n.p.]; Scritti teatrali di Prampolini (progetto di raccolta): ‘Scenografia futurista’ (1915), typescript; ‘I valori dell’allestimento scenico e i balli russi’, draft typescript, I Novissimi, ed. Achille Ricciardi, III:1, Rome, 9 June 1917; ‘L’evoluzione della Scenotecnica’, draft typescript, 1954; ‘Elementi formativi della Scenografia contemporanea [1950–54]’, draft typescript; ‘Panorama della Scenotecnica’, autograph typescript, preface to Scenotecnica, Milan: Hoepli, 1940; ‘Elementi formativi della scenografia contemporanea’, draft typescript, 1954 or 1950; ‘Rivoluzioni e reazioni della scenotecnica italiana’, autograph typescript, 1941–42, then in Spettacolo, 1 (1941) and 2–3 (1942); ‘La prima mostra a Roma di Scenotecnica Cinematografica’, cutting Il Secolo XIX, 8 February 1933, [n.p.]; Scritti di Prampolini sulla “Scenografia” e il “Cinema”: ‘Evoluzione e avvenire della Scenotecnica’, draft autograph 1936, then Lo Schermo, Rome, June 1936, ‘Il cinema a colori’, draft autograph, undated, Jean Cocteau, ‘Il sangue del poeta’, ‘saggio di Cinepoetica’, autograph, undated, and ‘Congresso Internazionale della Tecnica Cinematografica. Programma formulato da Enrico Prampolini rappresentante per l’Italia al I°, II° Congresso del Cinema tecnico indipendente – 1929–30’, autograph typescript, 1929–30; Scritti di Prampolini sul Teatro: ‘Evoluzione della danza’, La Provincia di Bolzano, 15 June 1933, newspaper cutting, [n.p.]; Teatro, V:3 (March–April 1927), includes ‘Scenosintesi plastica meccanica’; Teatro; Ritagli. Teatro: Scritti di Prampolini; Fascicolo miscellaneo di Prampolini: ‘Discorso/lezione sulla scenotecnica’, [n.d.], 1–9.

Prampolini, Enrico, fondo, CRDAV Documenti personali; Corrispondenza: 1917–24; 1917–19: letters/cards Severini, Janco, Tzara, Cendrars, Archipenko, Léger, Meriano, De Pisis; 1920–25: letters/cards Magrelli, De Pisis, Melzer, Pillement, van Doesburg, Rosenberg, Vantongerloo, Archipenko, Léger, Gropius, Servranckx, Moholy Nagy, Bragaglia, Dottori, Fillia; 1932–36: letters/cards Neymon, Alanova, Monarchi, Marinetti, Fillia, Vantongerloo; 1926–31.

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276 Attività artistica.

Opere e scritti di Prampolini: progetti e materiali preparatori: Costruzioni metalliche, undated manuscripts, various drafts; undated draft notes on Picasso’s art; undated collected material for a study Espressionisti tedeschi; manuscript Futurismo, [La Belgique artistique et litteraire], [July 1912]; undated typescript ‘Manifesto Arte Meccanica’; undated ‘Anticipazioni’; ‘Mechanic dance’, in La città futurista; manoscritti vari: typescript Presentation for 92nd Art Club Exhibition ‘Le arti plastiche e la civiltà meccanica’, 1955, 1–2; typescript Préface Exposition Prampolini à la Galerie “Le Niveau”, ‘Les etapes de une evolution futuriste’, 1938, 1–2; typescript Artisti italiani a Parigi, [n.d.], 1–5; manuscript ‘L’aeroplano’, [in L’Ala d’Italia: Gazzetta dell’aviazione], [n.d. but 1941?], 1–2; manifesti programmatici: ‘L’arte meccanica. Manifesto futurista’ (1923), ‘L’aeropittura. Manifesto futurista’, 1932; articoli su giornali e riviste: ‘Aeropittura e superamento terrestre’, Oggi e domani, 30 November 1931, 5; ‘La macchina naturista’, La Forza, 15 July 1935, [n.p.]; presentazioni di artisti (per personali e collettive, 1953–56); note biografiche e articoli: ‘Presenza nella pittura. Teorie ed esperienze. Dal futurismo all’astrattismo e oltre’, typescript Gino Gori, ‘Il teatro magnetico di Prampolini’, later in La scenografia contemporanea (Rome: Stock, 1926; catalogo generale manoscritto delle opere di Prampolini (esclusi i disegni e le scene e costumi); manifesto a stampa Aeroplastica Futurista.

Severini, Gino, fondo, MART Folders: 1. Corrispondenza: Balla, Boccioni, Carra, Marinetti, Russolo.

Somenzi, Mino (Stanislao), fondo, MART Folders: Som. III. Carte. 1932 Corrispondenza. Letter Ivo Pannaggi, 1–2; Per Som 2 + 9 (Cass B/5). Review Futurismo I (2 October 1932): Anon [Somenzi?], ‘iltedescopannaggi’, 2; Prampolini, ‘L’aeropittura. Valori spirituali della plastica futurista’, 4. Futurismo I (23 October 1932). Futurismo II (15 January 1933): Alberto Vianello, ‘Meccanestetica dello spazio’, 4. Futurismo II (30 April 1933): G. G. Avogadro, ‘Divergenze artistiche. La comprensione lirica della macchina, origine di bellezze nuove’, 2. Futurismo III (15 June 1934); Som. V. Documenti relativi all’impresa di Fiume. Periodical La Vigilia I (March 1921); ‘Carte appartenenti al defunto eroe Guido Keller’; typescript letter Keller to Benito Mussolini, Rome 8 November 1929 [r]; frontispiece Artecrazia IV (April 1938); typescript Mario Botter, ‘Memorie di un granatiere di Ronchi’, 1–75; Rodolfo Cianchetti, Ricordi di vita e di azione fiumana (Tripoli: Istituto Poligrafico Maggi, 1940), 1–23.

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TECHE Periodical reviews: from Radiocorriere: Anon, ‘Violetta e gli aeroplani’, VIII:37 (10–17 September 1932), 13; Camillo Boscia, ‘La mostra nazionale della radio’, 3–9 and Guido Sommi Picenardi, ‘Sussurri dell’etere’, 10, VIII:38 (17–24 September 1932); Anon, ‘Violetta e gli aeroplani’, VIII:39 (24 September-1 October 1932), 15; Sommi Picenardi, ‘Sussurri dell’etere’, VIII:41 (8–15 October 1932), 6; Sommi Picenardi, ‘Sussurri dell’etere’ VIII:42 (15–22 October 1932), 11. Videos: Luciano Folgore, Stella Stellina una Fata ti è vicina, broadcast 7 March 1956; Folgore, Le avventure di Zeffirino: Zeffirino vola e va, broadcast 18 January 1956.

Wind, Edgar, papers, BOD Special Collections, Edgar Wind Papers, MS Wind 10, folder 2, letter from Lowell M. Clucas Jr to EW from United States Department of State, New York, 19 June 1952, 3.

Works cited Adamowicz, Elza and Simona Storchi (eds), Back to the Futurists: The Avant-garde and its Legacy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013) Adams, Christopher, ‘Historiographical perspectives on 1940s futurism’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 18:4 (2013), 419–44 Adamson, Walter, ‘Fascinating futurism: The historiographical politics of an historical avantgarde’, Modern Italy, 13 (February 2008), 69–85 Adas, Michael, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989) Adler, Paul S., ‘Marx, machines, and skill’, Technology and Culture, 31:4 (1990), 780–812 Agnese, Gino, Marinetti una vita esplosiva (Milan: Camunia, 1990) Angelini, Franca, Teatro e spettacolo nel primo Novecento (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1996) Aniante, A. ‘Classicismo e futurismo’, Il Mattino, 12 July 1931, [n.p.] Anon, Esposizioni Futuriste II serie 1918–31 (Florence: Spes, 1977) ——, ‘Il genio futurista di Guglielmo Marconi esaltato da Prampolini’, Futurismo, 1:I (23 October 1932), [n.p.] ——, Machine Art (New York: Museum Modern Art, 1994) Antonello, PierPaolo, ‘Beyond futurism: Bruno Munari’s useless machines’, in Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination (2009), 315–36 Appadurai, Arjun, The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (London and New York: Verso, 2013) Apollonio, Umbro (ed.), Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973)

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278 Aragon, Luis, Paris Peasant (Boston, MA: Exact Change, 1994)

Arich de Finetti, Diego, ‘Venezia 1926: Pannaggi e compagni nel padiglione “soviettista”’, in Crispolti (ed.), Pannaggi e l’arte meccanica futurista (1995) Asor Rosa, Alberto, La cultura, in Romano and Vivanti (eds), Storia d’Italia, (1975) IV (II) Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1985) Bachelard, Gaston, ‘La mécanique non-newtonienne’, in Le nouvel esprit scientifique (Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), 45–62 Ballerini, Luigi, ‘La legge dell’ingratitudine: letteratura e industria tra le due guerre’, in Bàrberi Squarotti and Ossola (eds), Letteratura e industria (1997), II, 581–618 Ballo, Guido (ed.), Prampolini verso i polimaterici (Modena: Galleria Fonte d’Abisso, 1989) Banham, Reyner, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980) Bàrberi Squarotti, Giorgio and Carlo Ossola, Letteratura e industria, 2 vols (Florence: Olschki, 1997) Bartsch, Ingo, ‘L’uomo meccanizzato nell’ideologia del futurismo’, in E. Crispolti (ed.), Futurismo 1909–44: arte, architettura, spettacolo, grafica, letteratura (Milan: Mazzotta, 2001), 25–31 Beeston, Alix, ‘A “Leg show dance” in a skyscraper: the sequenced mechanics of John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer’, PMLA, 131:3 (2016), 636–51 Belli, Gabriella (ed.), La Casa del Mago: le arti applicate nell’opera di Fortunato Depero: 1920–42 (Milan and Florence: Charta, 1992) ——, Nicoletta Boschiero and Bruno Passamani (eds), Depero Magic Theatre (Milan: Electa, 1989) Bentivoglio, Mirella, ‘Innovative artist’s books of Italian futurism’, in Berghaus (ed.), International Futurism in Arts and Literature (2000), 473–86 —— and Franca Zoccoli, The Women Artists of Italian Futurism – Almost Lost to History (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1997) Benzi, Fabio, ‘Giacomo Balla: the conquest of speed’, in Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909–44 (2014), 103–6 Berghaus, Günter, ‘Danza futurista: Giannina Censi’, Dance Theatre Journal, 8 (1990), 4–7; followed by ‘In conversation with Giannina Censi’, 34–6 —— (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009) —— (ed.), International Futurism in Arts and Literature (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2000) ——, Italian Futurist Theatre 1909–44 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998) Biancale, Michele, ‘Il futurismo e la pittura del volo’, Le Vie dell’Aria, 3 June 1938 Bianchi, Stefano, ‘Silvio Mix: un autodidatta triestino sulle rotte del futurismo europeo’, in

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M. Girardi (ed.), Lungo il Novecento: la musica a Trieste e le interconnessioni tra le arti (Venice: Marsilio, 2003), 69–77 Boccioni, Umberto, Pittura e scultura futuriste (dinamismo plastico) (Milan: SE, 1997) Bohn, Willard, The Other Futurism: Futurist Activity in Venice, Padua, and Verona (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2004) ——, ‘The poetics of flight: futurist “aeropoesia”’, MLN, 121 (2006), 207–24 Bonfanti, Elvira, ‘Appunti per un’estetica della danza futurista’, in Vaccarino and Antolini (eds), Giannina Censi (1998), 55–62 Bontempelli, Massimo, L’avventura novecentista (Florence: Vallecchi, 1974) Borchardt-Hume, Achim (ed.), Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World (London: Tate, 2006) Borin, Fabrizio, ‘Acciaio: una fusione mancata tra letteratura, musica e cinema’, in Bàrberi Squarotti and Ossola, Letteratura e industria (1997), II, 667–80 Borri, Giancarlo, ‘Una contrapposizione “ideologica” d’inizio secolo: Gli ammonitori di Giovanni Cena (1904) e La nuova arma (la macchina) di Mario Morasso (1905)’, in Bàrberi Squarotti and Ossola, Letteratura e industria (1997), I, 559–67 Boscia, Camillo, ‘La mostra nazionale della radio’, Radiocorriere, VIII:38 (1932), 3–9 Bostrom, Nick, ‘Get ready for the dawn of superintelligence’, New Scientist, 5 July 2014, 26–7 Boyer, Christine M., Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1983) Bradbury, Malcom and James McFarlane (eds), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930 (London: Penguin, 1991) Bragaglia, Anton Giulio, ‘Aerodanza’, Ala d’Italia, January 1933, 49–56 ——, Fotodinamismo futurista (Turin: Einaudi, 1980) Bragato, Stefano, ‘F. T. Marinetti’s construction of World War I narratives (1915)’, Annali di italianistica: The Great War & the Modernist Imagination in Italy, 33 (2015), 115–30 Braidotti, Rosi, ‘Affirming the affirmative: on nomadic affectivity’, Rhizomes, 11/12 (Fall 2005/ Spring 2006) Braun, Edward, ‘Futurism in the Russian theatre, 1913–23’, in Berghaus (ed.), International Futurism in Arts and Literature (2000), 75–99 Braun, Emily, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) ——, ‘Vulgarians at the gate’, in L. Mattioli Rossi (ed.), Boccioni’s Materia: A Futurist Masterpiece and the Avantgarde in Milan and Paris (New York: Guggenheim, 2004), 1–21 Braun, Marta, ‘Giacomo Balla, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, and Etienne-Jules Marey’, in Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909–44 (2014), 95–102 Bravi, Francesca, ‘Fortunato Depero’s Radio-Lyrics’, in Buelens, Hendrix and Jansen (eds), The History of Futurism (2012), 271–82 Brilli, Attilio, La vita che corre: mitologia dell’automobile (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999)

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Broeckmann, Andreas, Machine Art in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2016) Brooks, Michael, ‘Artificial ignorance’, New Scientist, 7 October 2017, 28–33 Bru, Sascha, ‘The Untameables: language and politics in Gramsci and Marinetti’, in Adamowicz and Storchi (eds), Back to the Futurists (2013), 243–54 Bucarelli, Palma (ed.), Enrico Prampolini 1894–1956 (Rome: De Luca, 1961) Buelens, Geert, Harald Hendrix and Monica Jansen (eds), The History of Futurism: The Precursors, Protagonists and Legacies (Lanham: Lexington, 2012) Bullock, Alan, ‘The double image’, in Bradbury and McFarlane (eds), Modernism (1991), 58–70 Buscaroli, Beatrice (ed.), 5 febbraio 1909 Bologna avanguardia futurista (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2009) Calvino, Italo, Ti con zero, in Calvino, Romanzi e racconti, ed. C. Milanini (Milan: Mondadori, 2004) Campbell, Timothy C., ‘“Infinite remoteness”: Marinetti, Bontempelli, and the emergence of modern Italian visual culture’, MLN Italian Issue, 120:1 (2005), 111–36 Carli, Mario, ‘Appunti di un fascista in cammino’, Il Popolo di Roma, 22 July 1931 Carpi, Giancarlo, Futuriste (Letteratura. Arte. Vita) (Rome: Castelvecchi, 2009) Carpi, Umberto, Bolscevico immaginista: comunismo e avanguardie artistiche nell’Italia degli anni venti (Naples: Liguori, 1981) Carrouges, Michel, Les machines célibataires (Paris: Chêne, 1976) Cassirer, Ernst, ‘The myth of the State’, Fortune, 29:6 (1944), 165–206 ——, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, II, Mythical Thought (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1955) Celant, Germano, ‘Erotismo e lussuria’, in P. Hultén (ed.), Futurismo & Futurismi (1986), 473–4 Chase, Stuart, Men and Machines (New York: MacMillan, 1930) Cianci, Giovanni (ed.), Modernismo/Modernismi: dall’avanguardia storica agli anni trenta e oltre (Milan: Principato, 2005) Cigliana, Simona, Futurismo esoterico: contributi per una storia dell’irrazionalismo italiano tra otto e novecento (Naples: Liguori, 2002) Clark, T. J., Farewell to an Idea: Episodes to a History of Modernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999) Clifford, James, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) Consolo, Salvatore, ‘The myth of Pinocchio: metamorphosis of a puppet from Collodi’s pages to the screen’, in Pizzi (ed.), Pinocchio, Puppets and Modernity (2012), 163–74 Cooper, Simon, Technoculture and Critical Theory: In the Service of the Machine? (London and New York: Routledge, 2002)

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Craft, Robert and Igor Stravinsky, Stravinsky in Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958) Crispolti, Enrico ‘Come premessa’, in Futurismo 1909–44, 9–18 ——, ‘The dynamics of futurism’s historiography’, in Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909–44 (2014), 50–7 —— (ed.), Futurismo 1909–44: arte, architettura, spettacolo, grafica, letteratura (Milan: Mazzotta, 2001) ——, ‘Ivo Pannaggi’, in Hultén (ed.), Futurismo & Futurismi (1986), 534 ——, La macchina mito futurista (Rome: Editalia, 1986), [n.p.] ——, Il mito della macchina e altri temi del futurismo (Trapani: Celebes, 1971) ——(ed.), Pannaggi e l’arte meccanica futurista (Milan: Mazzotta, 1995) ——, R. Siligato, D. Arich de Finetti, G. Lista et al. (eds), Prampolini: dal futurismo all’informale (Rome: Carte Segrete, 1992) ——and Tonino Sicoli (eds), Marasco: Anni Dieci-Settanta dal futurismo al concretismo (Milan: Mazzotta, 1995) D’Alessandri, Antonella, ‘La genesi del libro imbullonato dalle lettere di Fedele Azari a Fortunato Depero dall’archivio di Fortunato Depero’, in Libri taglienti esplosivi e luminosi (2005), 113–29 ——, ‘Lettere inviate da Fedele Azari a Fortunato Depero’, in Libri taglienti esplosivi e luminosi (2005), 130–55 ——, Libri taglienti esplosivi e luminosi. Avanguardie artistiche e libro fra futurismo e libro d’artista. Un percorso di lettura dall’Archivio Depero e dal Deposito Paolo della Grazia presso il MART (Trento: Nicolodi, 2005) Daly, Selena, Italian Futurism and the First World War (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2016) Davidson, Robert A., Jazz-Age Barcelona (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009) De Maria, Luciano, ‘Introduzione’, in Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista (1996), XXVII–C Demetz, Peter, Aeronauti: Kafka, Brod, d’Annunzio e Puccini al Circuito aereo di Brescia del 1909 (Milan: Garzanti, 2004) ——, Italian Futurism and the German Literary Avant-Garde (London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1987) Depero, Fortunato, Un futurista a New York, ed. C. Salaris (Montepulciano: Del Grifo, 1990) ——, ‘Linguaggio aerodinamico’, Natura, December 1934, 33–8 ——, Liriche radiofoniche (Milan: Morreale, 1934; repr. Florence: SPES, 1987) ——, ‘Manifesto della pittura e plastica nucleare’, in 88ma mostra Depero: pittura e arte applicata 1915–51 prima presentazione di pittura nucleare (Rovereto: [n.p.], [1951]) ——, ‘Prospettive fiabesche di macchine rare’, Natura, July 1935, 29–34 Dinerstein, Joel, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003)

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Doyle, Laura and Laura Winkiel, Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005) Drudi Gambillo, Maria and Teresa Fiori (eds), Archivi del futurismo (Rome: De Luca, 1958), I; (Rome: De Luca, 1986), II Duranti, Massimo, Renato Miracco, Cremoncini, Roberta and Adams, Christopher, Piety and Pragmatism: Spiritualism in Futurist Art (Rome: Gangemi – Estorick, 2007) Evangelisti, Silvia (ed.), Fillia e l’avanguardia futurista negli anni del fascismo (Milan: Mondadori-Daverio, 1986) Ezrahi, Y., E. Mendelsohn, and H. Segal (eds), Technology, Pessimism, and Postmodernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995) Fagiolo Dell’Arco, Maurizio, La scenografia dalle sacre rappresentazioni al futurismo (Florence: Sansoni, 1973) Feher, Michel, ‘Of bodies and technologies’, in Foster (ed.), DIA Art Foundation (1987), I, 159–65 and ‘Discussion’, 166–72 Felice, Carlo A., Arti industriali d’oggi (Milan: Quaderni della Triennale/Hoepli, 1937) Fisher, Margaret, ‘Futurism and radio’, in Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination (2009), 229–62 Folgore, Luciano, Il canto dei motori (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di ‘Poesia’, 1912) Forgacs, David (ed.), The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–35 (New York: New York University Press, 2000) Forster, E. M., ‘The machine stops’, in Collected Short Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 109–46 Fossati, Paolo, ‘L’arte in Italia dopo la seconda guerra mondiale’, in Storia dell’arte italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), III, 551–625 ——, ‘Pittura e scultura fra le due guerre’, in Storia dell’arte italiana, 173–259 Foster, Hal (ed.), DIA Art Foundation: Discussions in Contemporary Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987) ——, Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2004) Fox Keller, Evelyn, ‘Critical silences in scientific discourse: problems of form and re-form’, in Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender, and Science (New York: Routledge, 1992), 73–92 Franco, Charles, La Beatrice di Dante: un’interpretazione psicanalitica (Poggibonsi: Lalli, 1981) Frattini, Alberto, ‘F. T. Marinetti: l’industria e le macchine nella sua invenzione poetica’, Lettere Italiane, LI:3 (1999), 434–48 Gadda, Carlo Emilio, ‘Le belle lettere e i contributi espressivi delle tecniche’, in I viaggi e la morte (Milan: Garzanti, 1958), 67–80 Gentile, Emilio, ‘Political futurism and the myth of the Italian revolution’, in Berghaus (ed.), International Futurism in Arts and Literature (2000), 1–14

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Giddens, Anthony, The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) Giedion, Sigfried, ‘The research into movement: futurism’, in Space, Time and Architecture (1982), 443–8 —— Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) Godoli, Ezio, ‘I futuristi e la metropoli’, in La metropoli futurista progetti im-possibili (Florence: Art Media, 2006), 1–19 Golding, John and Christopher Green (eds), Léger and Purist Paris (London: Tate Gallery, 1970) Gombrich, E. H., ‘Recovery and synthesis (1918–23), the lecture on serpent ritual’, in Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: Warburg Institute, 1970), 216–27 Goretti, Maria, Poesia della macchina: Saggio di filosofia del Futurismo (Rome: Edizioni Futuriste di ‘Poesia’, [1942]) Govoni, Corrado, ‘L’estetica della macchina e della chimica nell’opera del poeta Marinetti’, Autori e Scrittori, V (1940), 1–3 Gramsci, Antonio, ‘Grammar and technique’, in Forgacs (ed.), The Gramsci Reader (2000), 358–60 ——, ‘Marinetti e il futurismo’, in Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. L. De Maria (1996) ——, ‘Marinetti the revolutionary?’, in Forgacs (ed.), The Gramsci Reader (2000), 73–5 (orig. unsigned, L’Ordine Nuovo, 5 January 1921) ——, ‘Men or machines?’, in Forgacs (ed.), The Gramsci Reader, 62–4 (orig. unsigned, Avanti!, 24 December 1916) ——, ‘Rationalization of production and work’, in Forgacs (ed.), The Gramsci Reader (2000), 289–94 ——, ‘Some theoretical and practical aspects of “economism”’, in Forgacs (ed.), The Gramsci Reader (2000), 210–17 ——, ‘Workers and peasants’, in Forgacs (ed.), The Gramsci Reader (2000), 113–18 (orig. unsigned, L’Ordine Nuovo, 2 August 1919) Greene, V. (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909–44: Reconstructing the Universe (New York: Guggenheim, 2014) Haraway, Donna J., Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association, 1991) Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri, Assembly (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) Härmänmaa, Marja, Un patriota che sfidò la decadenza: F. T. Marinetti e l’idea dell’uomo nuovo fascista, 1929–44 (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2000) Harootunian, Harry, Problems of Comparability/Possibilities for Comparative Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)

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Heaven, Douglas, ‘Dumb and dumber’, New Scientist, 23–30 December 2017, 50 Herf, Jeffrey, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) Hewitt, Andrew, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993) Hoare, Quintin and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (eds and trans), Selection from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2007) Hodson, Hal, ‘Baxter breaks out’, New Scientist, 26 July 2014, 19 Hultén, K. G. Pontus (ed.), Futurismo & Futurismi (Milan: Bompiani, 1986) ——, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968) ——, ‘Profezie futuriste’, in Futurismo & Futurismi (1986), 15–21 Huyssen, Andreas, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Post-modernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986) Ialongo, Ernest, ‘Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: the futurist as Fascist, 1929–37’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 18:4 (2013), 393–418 Ings, Simon, ‘Changing the rules’, New Scientist, 2 August 2014, 47 Jameson, Frederic, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London, New York: Verso, 2007) ——, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992) ——, A Singular Modernity (London and New York: Verso, 2012) Jardine, Alice, ‘Of bodies and technologies’, in Foster (ed.), DIA Art Foundation (1987), 151–8 Jeffries, Stuart, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (London and New York: Verso, 2016) Kern, Stephen, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1983) Kirkby, Michael and Victoria Nes Kirkby, Futurist Performance (New York: PAJ, 1986) Kittler, Friedrich A., Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) Klöck, Ania, ‘Of cyborg technologies and fascistised mermaids: Giannina Censi’s aerodanze in 1930s Italy’, Theatre Journal, 51 (1999), 395–415 Larkin, Erin, ‘Benedetta and the creation of “second futurism”’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 18:4 (2013), 445–65 Léger, Fernand, ‘The machine aesthetic. The manufactured object. The artisan and the artist’, in Golding and Green (eds), Léger and Purist Paris (1970), 87–92 Leiber, David, ‘The socialization of art’, in Scudiero and Leiber (eds), Depero futurista & New York (1986), 87–119

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Levi, Erik, ‘Futurist influences upon early twentieth-century music’, in Berghaus (ed.), International Futurism in Arts and Literature (2000), 322–52 Lista, Giovanni, Arte e politica: il futurismo di sinistra in Italia (Milan: Mudima, 2009) ——, Cinema e fotografia futurista (Milan: Skira, 2001) ——, ‘La danza futurista’, in Vaccarino and Antolini (eds), Giannina Censi (1998), 27–38 ——(ed.), Enrico Prampolini: carteggio futurista (Rome: Carte Segrete, 1992) ——, Enrico Prampolini futurista europeo (Rome: Carocci, 2013) ——, F. T. Marinetti: l’anarchiste du futurisme (Paris: Séguier, 1995) ——, Futurisme – abstraction et modernité (Paris: trans / form, 1982) ——, Dal futurismo all’immaginismo: Vinicio Paladini ([n.p.]: Il cavaliere azzurro, 1988) ——, ‘Futurist music’, in Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909–44 (2014), 116–19 —— (ed.), Depero, Numero unico futurista Campari 1931, Futurismo 1932, Dinamo futurista 1933 (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1979) ——, Filiberto Menna, Nello Ponente, Achille Perilli and Enrico Prampolini, Continuità dell’avanguardia in Italia: Enrico Prampolini (1894–1956) (Modena: Comune di Modena, 1978) Lombardi, Daniele, ‘Mito della macchina’, in Nuova Enciclopedia del Futurismo musicale (Milan: Mudima, 2009), 188–201 ——, ‘Mix, Silvio’, in Nuova Enciclopedia del Futurismo musicale (2009), 176–87 Longo, Giuseppe O., Il simbionte: prove di umanità futura (Milan: Mimesis, 2013) Loriggio, Francesco, ‘Introduction’, in Social Pluralism and Literary History: The Literature of the Italian Emigration (Toronto, New York and Lancaster: Guernica, 1996), 7–28 Lubar, Steven, ‘Machine politics: the political construction of technological artifacts’, in S. Lubar and W. David Kingery (eds), History from Things: Essays in Material Culture (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 197–214 Ludovici, Anthony M., ‘The Italian futurists and their traditionalism’, Oxford and Cambridge Review, July 1912, 94–122 Luisetti, Federico, ‘A vitalist art: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s sintesi radiofoniche’, in Buelens, Hendrix and Jansen (eds), The History of Futurism (2012), 283–96 Lyttelton, Adrian, ‘Futurism, politics, and society’, in Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909–44 (2014), 58–76 Mann, Thomas, The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (London: Vintage, 1999) Marchi, Virgilio, ‘Scia di motoscafo. Gita alla Grotta Azzurra con Benedetta e F. T. Marinetti’, in E. Torelli Landini (ed.), Virgilio Marchi architetto e scenografo (Rome and Livorno: Galleria André and Galleria Peccolo, 2009) Marchis, de, Giorgio (ed.), Futurismo da ripensare (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2007) Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, ‘L’aeropittura e l’aeropoesia futuriste’, Le Vie dell’Aria, 7 June 1939, [n.p.] ——, ‘Discorso di Marinetti’, in E. Cerio (ed.), Il convegno del paesaggio (Naples: Casella, 1932)

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——, ‘Pinocchio and the mechanical body: Luciano Folgore’s papers at the Getty Research Institute Library’, in Pinocchio, Puppets and Modernity (2012), 135–62 —— (ed.), Pinocchio, Puppets and Modernity: The Mechanical Body (New York and London: Routledge, 2012) Plato, Gorgias 512; trans. with an introduction W. Hamilton (London: Penguin, 1960) Platone, Augusto, L’uomo e la macchina (Rome: Edizioni Futuriste di ‘Poesia’, 1941) Poggi, Christine, ‘Dreams of metallized flesh: Futurism and the masculine body’, Modernism/ Modernity, 4:3 (1997), 19–43 ——, ‘Ivo Pannaggi: Meccano-Futurista, constructivist, proletarian’, in Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909–44 (2014), 234–9 Poggi-Longostrevi, G., Cultura fisica della donna ed estetica femminile (Milan: Hoepli, 1933) Poleskie, Steve, ‘Art and flight: historical origins to contemporary works’, Leonardo, 18:2 (1985), 69–80 Prampolini, Enrico, ‘L’atmosfera scenica del teatro del colore rivive nel tempo e nello spazio’, L’Impero, 11 July 1923 ——, ‘Concezione dello spazio nelle arti plastiche’, in AAVV, Arte figurativa e arte astratta (Florence: Sansoni-Quaderni di San Giorgio, 1960), 89–96 ——, ‘L’esthétique de la machine et l’introspection mécanique’, in Cahier Jaune (Paris: [n.p.], 1932), 10–12 ——, ‘Evoluzione e avvenire della scenotecnica’, Lo Schermo, June 1936 ——, ‘Het Esthetische der machien en het ingrijpen der mekanica in de Kunst’, Het Overzicht, 21 (April 1924), 145–6 ——, Lineamenti di scenografia italiana (dal Rinascimento a oggi) (Rome: Bestetti-Edizioni d’Arte, 1950) ——, ‘La macchina naturista’, La forza: mensile dei gruppi futuristi naturisti, I:1 (1935), 4 Pratella, Francesco Balilla and Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noise: Destruction of Music by Futurist Machines ([n.p.]: Sun Vision Press, 2012) Pryse, Marjorie, ‘Afterword: regional modernism and transnational regionalism’, Modern Fiction Studies, 55:1 (2009), 189–92 Pupin, Michael, Romance of the Machine (New York and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930) Raunig, Gerald, A Thousand Machines (Cambridge, MA and London: Semiotext(e) / MIT Press, 2010) Re, Lucia, ‘Futurism, film and the return of the repressed: learning from Thaïs’, MLN, 123:1 (2008), 125–50 ——, ‘Mina Loy and the quest for a futurist feminist woman’, The European Legacy, 7 (2009), 799–819 Regnani, Gerardo, ‘Futurism and photography: Between scientific inquiry and aesthetic imagination’, in Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination (2009), 177–97

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289

Reichardt, Jasia, Robots: Fact, Fiction + Prediction (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978) Riccio, Gianluca, Prampolini: I taccuini capresi 1946–48 (Capri: La Conchiglia, 2013) Riou, Maïté, ‘Industria e sviluppo aeronautico nella letteratura italiana “ufficiale” degli anni 1930–35: mito e realtà’, in Bàrberi Squarotti and Ossola (eds), Letteratura e industria (1997), II, 721–40 Romano R. and C. Vivanti (eds), Storia d’Italia: Dall’Unità a oggi (Turin: Einaudi, 1975) Rossi, Paolo, I filosofi e le macchine 1400–1700 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2002) ——, La nascita della scienza moderna in Europa (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2007) Sabatino, Michelangelo, ‘Capri as the epicenter of “slow” futurism’, in Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909–44 (2014), 221–5 Safranski, Rüdiger, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002) Salaris, Claudia, Alla festa della rivoluzione: artisti e libertari con D’Annunzio a Fiume (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002) ——, ‘The invention of the programmatic avant-garde’, in Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909–44 (2014), 22–49 ——, Luciano Folgore e le avanguardie con lettere e inediti futuristi (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1997) ——, Marinetti editore (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990) Sanzin, Bruno G. (ed.), Enrico Prampolini (Omaggio di Trieste a … Enrico Prampolini) (Trieste: Moderna, 1973) Sanzin, Paolo, ‘Vinicio Paladini architetto’, in Pablo Echaurren, Giampiero Mughini, Luigi Olivetti et al., Vinicio Paladini futurista immaginista. Un percorso tra le culture dell’avanguardia: metafisica dada costruttivismo surrealismo astrattismo (Gussago: L’Arengario, 1997), 10–15 Sartini Blum, Cinzia, The Other Modernism: F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996) Sauwen, Rik, Germain Viatte and Michel Seuphor, Seuphor (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, [n.d.]) Schapiro, Meyer, ‘Abstract art’, in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries. Selected Papers (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978), II, 185–232 Schnapp, Jeffrey T., ‘The ABCs and XYZs of Bruno Munari’, public lecture, UCL, London, 17 October 2012 ——, 18BL. Mussolini e l’opera d’arte di massa (Milan: Garzanti, 1996) ——, ‘Propeller talk’, Modernism/Modernity, 1:3 (1994), 157 ——, ‘Rayon/Marinetti’, in P. Antonello and S. Gilson (eds), Science and Literature in Italian Culture from Dante to Calvino (Oxford: Legenda/MHRA/EHRC, 2004), 225–51 Scudiero, Maurizio, public lecture, Bologna Artbook Fair, 21 September 2007 ——, Massimo Cirulli and Gregory Allegri (eds), Oggi si vola! Cent’anni di tecnica, sogni e

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290

cultura di massa: manifesti, pitture e sculture aeronautiche del Novecento italiano (Bologna: XX Secolo, 2003) ——, and David Leiber, Depero futurista & New York: il futurismo e l’arte pubblicitaria. Futurism and the Art of Advertising (Rovereto: Longo, 1986) Scurto, Ignazio, ‘L’aviazione italiana e i suoi lirici interpreti’, Il Resto del Carlino, 18 November 1939, [n.p.] Segel, Harold B., Pinocchio’s Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons and Robots in Modernist and Avant-garde Drama (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) Seltzer, Mark, Bodies and Machines (New York and London: Routledge, 1992) Severini, Gino, ‘Il macchinismo e l’arte’, Noi, 2–3–4 (1918), 15 (orig. Mercure de France, April 1916) Seymour, Miranda, The Bugatti Queen: In Search of a Motor-Racing Legend (London, Sydney, New York and Toronto: Pocket Books, 2004) Sica, Beatrice, ‘Time and space in the writings of Marinetti, Palazzeschi, the group of L’Italia futurista and other futurist writers’, in Buelens, Hendrix and Jansen (eds), The History of Futurism (2012), 155–78 Siligato, Rossella (ed.), Prampolini: Carteggio 1916–56 (Rome: Carte Segrete, 1992) Sinisi, Silvana (ed.), ‘Varieté’: Prampolini e la scena (Turin: Martano, 1974) Sommi Picenardi, Guido, ‘Sussurri dell’etere’, Radiocorriere, VIII:42 (15–22 October 1932), 11 Stone, Marla Susan, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998) Strauven, Wanda, ‘Futurist poetics and the cinematic imagination: Marinetti’s cinema without films’, in Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination (2009), 201–28 ——, Marinetti e il cinema tra attrazione e sperimentazione (Udine: Campanotto, 2006) Street, Arthur and William Alexander, Metals in the Service of Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) Stubbs, Jeremy, ‘Futurism and surrealism: A two-speed avant-garde’, in Berghaus (ed.), International Futurism in Arts and Literature (2000), 305–21 Tate, Trudi, ‘The culture of the tank, 1916–18’, Modernism/Modernity, 4:1 (1997), 69–87 Taylor, Christiana J., Futurism: Politics, Painting and Performance (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1974, 1979) Terzano, Enzo N., Futurismo: Cinema, teatro, arte e propaganda (Lanciano: Carabba, 2011) Thomas, Benjamin, ‘Freedom and exile: Edgar Wind and the congress for cultural freedom’, forthcoming in G. Johnson (ed.), Exile and Expatriate Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge) Tichi, Cecelia, Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1987) Toni, Anna Caterina, Futuristi nelle Marche (Rome: De Luca, 1982)

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291

Tragbar, Klaus, ‘Conquest by architecture? Strategies of appropriation of Italy in Alto Adige and the Trentino after 1920’, unpublished conference paper, Sites of Memory, Sites of Border (Koper, 25–26 May 2017) Tretyakov, S., ‘Whence and whither (perspectives on futurism)’, Lef, 1 (1923), 193–203 Trodd, Tamara, The Art of Mechanical Reproduction: Technology and Aesthetics from Duchamp to the Digital (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015) Trotsky, Leon, ‘Futurism’, in Literature and Revolution (Chicago, IL: Haymarket, 2005), 112–37 Urquhart, James, ‘Chasing rainbows’, New Scientist, 12 March 2016, 36–9 Vaccarino, Elisa and Roberto Antolini (eds), Giannina Censi: Danzare il futurismo (Milan: Electa, 1998) Valesio, Paolo, ‘“The most enduring and most honored name” Marinetti as poet’, in F. T. Marinetti, Selected Poems and Related Prose, sel. L. Marinetti; trans. E. R. Napier and B. R. Studholme (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 149–65 Vasari, Ruggero, L’angoscia delle macchine (Turin: Edizioni Rinascimento, 1925) ——, L’angoscia delle macchine e altre sintesi futuriste, ed. M. E. Versari (Palermo: :duepunti, 2009) Verdone, Mario, Arti senza frontiere (Bologna: Bora, 1993) ——, Cinema e letteratura del futurismo (Rome: Bianco e Nero, 1968) ——, Il futurismo (Rome: Newton & Compton, 2003) ——, Teatro del tempo futurista (Rome: Lerici, 1968) ——and G. Berghaus, ‘Vita futurista and early futurist cinema’, in Berghaus (ed.), International Futurism in Arts and Literature (2000), 398–421 Veroli, Patrizia, ‘Futurism and dance’, in Greene (ed.), Italian Futurism 1909–44 (2014), 227–33 ——, ‘The futurist aesthetic and dance’, in Berghaus (ed.), International Futurism in Arts and Literature (2000), 422–48 Versari, Maria Elena, ‘The Central European avant-garde of the 1920s: the battleground for futurist identity?’, in V. Lahoda (ed.), Local Strategies International Ambitions: Modern Art and Central Europe 1918–68 (Prague: ARTEFACTUM, 2006), 103–10 ——, ‘Enlisting and updating: Ruggero Vasari and the shifting coordinates of futurism in Eastern and Central Europe’, International Yearbook of Futurism Studies – Futurism in Eastern and Central Europe, I:1 (2011), 277–98 ——, ‘Futurist machine art, constructivism and the modernity of mechanisation’, in Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination (2009), 149–75 ——, ‘Per una mitologia macchinista’, in Vasari, L’angoscia delle macchine (2009), 133–48 ——, ‘Il progettista’, in Vasari, L’angoscia delle macchine (2009), 149–61 Vinall, Shirley, ‘The emergence of machine imagery in Marinetti’s poetry’, Romance Studies, 6 (1985), 78–95 ——, ‘Marinetti, Soffici, and French literature’, in Berghaus (ed.), International Futurism in Arts and Literature (2000), 15–38

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292 Vinardi, Monica (ed.), Boccioni (Milan: Rizzoli/Skira, 2004)

Virilio, Paul, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology [1977] (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006) Volponi, Paolo, La macchina mondiale (Milan: Garzanti, 1973) Wagstaff, Christopher, ‘Dead man erect: F. T. Marinetti, L’alcova d’acciaio’, in H. Klein (ed.), The First World War in Fiction (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1976), 149–59 West, Thomas Reed, Flesh of Steel: Literature and the Machine in American Culture (Charlotte: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969) Whitford, Frank, Bauhaus (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995) Wirth-Nesher, Hana, City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Wohl, Robert, The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination 1920–50 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005) Wollstonecraft Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometeus, ed. S. J. Wolfson (New York: Longman, 2003) Zanini, Piero, Significati del confine (limiti naturali, storici, mentali) (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2000) Zoccoli, Franca, ‘Futurist women painters in Italy’, in Berghaus (ed.), International Futurism in Arts and Literature (2000), 373–97.

Periodicals Civiltà delle Macchine (1954–1956–1958) L’Ordine Nuovo (1921–1922) Noi, ed. E. Prampolini (series I and II, 1917–1925; anastatic reprint with ‘Nota critica’ B. Sani, Florence 1974) Poesia, ed. M. Dessy (1920, nn. 1–2–3–4–5–6–7–8–9) Stile Futurista (1934–35, I:1 (July 1934); II:6/7 (March 1935); II:15/16 (December 1935).

Web publications and resources Afrofuturism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrofuturism (accessed 13 September 2017), 1–10 Albergoni, Stefano, www.ambientetrentino.it/2015/02/15/montecatini-alumetal-storie-e-sug gestioni/ (accessed 1 June 2017) Antonello, PierPaolo, ‘On an airfield in Montichiari, near Brescia. Staging rivalry through technology: Marinetti and D’Annunzio’, Stanford Electronic Humanities Review, 7:1 (1999), https://web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/7–1/html/antonello.html (accessed 21 September 2017), [n.p.] Baldacci, Paolo, ‘Vinicio Paladini 1902–71: dipinti, collages, tempere e disegni di un protagoni-

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sta dell’arte italiana tra le due guerre’, in Porro Art Consulting, www.porroartconsulting.it/ pdf/Porro_asta_32.pdf (accessed 12 February 2007), 1–11 Bassin, A. and P. Krečič, www.baunet-info.com/media/documents/news/2014/04/09/Avgust_ %C4%8Cernigoj.pdf (accessed 23 December 2017), [n.p.] Berghaus, Günter, ‘The futurist conception of Gesamtkunstwerk and Marinetti’s total theatre’, Italogramma, 4 (2012), http://italogramma.elte.hu/sites/default/files/cikkek/letoltheto/ pdf/Italogramma_Sul%20fil_283–302_Berghaus (accessed 28 July 2018), 283–302 Braun, Marta, ‘Fantasmes des vivants et des morts’, Études photographiques, 1 (November 1996), http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/100 (accessed 4 July 2017), [n.p. but 1–17] Bucsescu, Dan and Stephen Friedman, ‘Eiffel Tower revisited: a guided tour into the world of architectural meaning’, http://bucsescu.com/html/4writing/eiffel.html (accessed 30 July 2018) Butler, Samuel, ‘Darwin among the machines [To the editor of the Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 13 June, 1863]’, in A First Year in Canterbury Settlement with Other Early Essays (London: New Zealand Texts Collection, 1914), http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/ tei-ButFir-t1-g1-t1-g1-t4-body.html (accessed 1 December 2017), 180–5 Dixon, Steve, ‘Futurism e-visited’, in 02.Papers, http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/vol0302/steve dixon.html (accessed 4 November 2017), [n.p.] Marx, Karl, ‘The fragment on machines from the Grundrisse’, http://thenewobjectivity.com/ pdf/marx.pdf (accessed 23 December 2017), 690–712 Mentor, Steven, ‘Manifesto technologies: Marx, Marinetti, Haraway’, www.dvara.net/hk/tech nomanifest.asp (accessed 11 August 2018), [n.p.] Self, Will, ‘A field trip to Heathrow via Harmondsworth Great Barn’, New Statesman, 20 March 2014, www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/03/will-self-field-trip-heathrow-harmondswo rth-great-barn (accessed 28 July 2018) Strauven, Wanda, ‘Le mécanoïde et l’androïde: deux faces du mythe futuriste dans le cinéma d’avant-garde des années vingt’, Cinémas / Cinélekta 4, 12:3 (2002); www.erudit.org/revue/ cine/2002/v12/n3/000734ar.html (accessed 2 August 2018).

Further reading Agnese, Gino and Vanni Scheiwiller (eds), Milano “Caffeina d’Europa”: Marinetti e il Futurismo a Milano (Milan: Scheiwiller, 1999) d’Amico, Alessandro and Silvia Danesi (eds), Virgilio Marchi architetto scenografo futurista ([Milan]: Electa, 1977) Anon, Documenti. Futurismo. Dall’avanguardia alla memoria (Milan: Skira, 2004) Antolini, Roberto, ‘Depero imbullonato e lito-latte come antecedenti ai libri d’artisti contemporanei’, Avanguardia, 27:9 (2004), 15–29

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294

Antonello, PierPaolo, Matilde Nardelli and Margherita Zanoletti (eds), Bruno Munari: The Lightness of Art (Oxford, Bern, Berlin: Peter Lang, 2017) Azari, Fedele, ‘Per una “Società di protezione delle macchine”’, La Fiera Letteraria, 24 April 1927, 3 Baldissone, Giusi, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (Milan: Mursia, c1986) Barisione, Silvia, Matteo Fochessati and Gianni Franzone, La Collezione Wolfson: aspetti dell’arte italiana tra le due guerre (Genoa: Tormena, 1996) Becker, Colleen, ‘Aby Warburg’s Pathosformel as methodological paradigm’, Journal of Art Historiography, 9 (2013), 1–25 Boccioni, Umberto, Taccuini futuristi, ed. P. Perilli (Rome: Mancosu, 2004) Bonifati, Nunzia and G. O. Longo, Homo immortalis: una vita (quasi) infinita (Milan: Springer, 2012) Bonito Oliva, Achille (ed.), Prampolini 1913–56 (Modena: Galleria Fonte d’Abisso, 1985) Bontempelli, Massimo, La vita operosa: Avventure del ‘19 a Milano, in La vita intensa. La vita operosa (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), 155–301 Bossaglia, Rossana, ‘Iconografia della macchina nell’arte italiana fra Otto e Novecento’, in Bàrberi Squarotti and Ossola (eds), Letteratura e industria (1997), I, 331–8 Brynjolfsson, Erik and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014) Carmelich, Giorgio, ‘Enrico Prampolini’, Energie Futuriste, September 1924 Castronuovo, Antonio, Macchine fantastiche: manuale di stramberie e astuzie elettro-meccaniche (Viterbo: Stampa Alternativa, 2007) Crémieux, Benjamin, ‘Futurismo e fiumanesimo’, La Testa di Ferro, I:37 (21 November 1920) Crispolti, Enrico and Gabriella De Marco, Enrico Prampolini: taccuini inediti 1942–56 ([n.p.]: Nuova Alfa, 1991) De Angelis, Valentina, Arte e linguaggio nell’era elettronica (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2000) Depero, Fortunato, ‘Il cinematografo e la pittura dinamica’, in ‘S. E. Marinetti nel Trentino’, numero unico, Rovereto, 1932 Fagiolo Dell’Arco, Maurizio (ed.), I classici dell’arte: Balla (Milan: Rizzoli / Skira, 2004) Farfa, Ovabere: Sincopatie futuriste, ed. S. Milan (Genoa: San Marco dei Giustiniani, 2005) ——, Poema del candore negro (Milan: viennepierre, 2009) Folgore, Luciano, La trappola colorata: romanzo extragiallo umoristico (Palermo: Sellerio, 2004) Fontana, Giovanni, ‘Anton Giulio Bragaglia e la sintesi del movimento: il diritto all’identità fotodinamica’, Avanguardia, 27:9 (2004), 31–44 Gadda, Carlo Emilio, ‘Tecnica e poesia’, in I viaggi e la morte (Milan: Garzanti, 1958), 53–66 Golding, John, ‘Futurism in Venice’, in Visions of the Modern (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 151–68 Gori, Gino, Scenografia: la tradizione e la rivoluzione contemporanea (Rome: Stock, 1927) Gramsci, Antonio, ‘Literary criticism’, in Forgacs (ed.), The Gramsci Reader, 395–7

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295

del Greco Lobner, Corinna, ‘James Joyce and Italian Futurism’, Irish University Review, 15:1 (1985), 73–92 Guillén, Mauro F., The Taylorised Beauty of the Mechanical: Scientific Management and the Rise of Modernist Architecture (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006) Hatherley, Owen, The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde (London: Pluto Press, 2016) Jannini, P. A., Giovanni Lista, Orlandi Cerenza et al., La fortuna del futurismo in Francia (Rome: Bulzoni, 1979) Lapini, Lia, Il teatro futurista italiano (Milan: Mursia, 1977) Lawton, Anna (ed.), Russian Futurism through its Manifestos, 1912–28 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988) Lista, Giovanni, ‘L’espace marionettisé ou la scène-machine du futurisme’, Puck, 1 (1988), 22–6 Longo, Giuseppe O., Il cervello nudo (Rovereto: Nicolodi, 2004) Ludington, Townsend (ed.), A Modern Mosaic. Art and Modernism in the United States (Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) Lupo, Giuseppe and Lacorazza, G., L’anima meccanica: le visite in fabbrica in ‘Civiltà delle macchine’ (1953–57) (Rome: Avagliano, 2008) Marchi, Virgilio, Architettura futurista (Foligno: Campitelli, 1924) ——, ‘Meridione azzurro’, in Torelli Landini (ed.), Virgilio Marchi architetto e scenografo, 45–8 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, Mafarka il futurista (Milan: Mondadori, 2003) ——, Il paesaggio e l’estetica futurista della macchina (Florence: Nemi, 1931) ——, ‘Ricostruire l’Italia con architettura futurista Sant’Elia’, in Teatro, ed. J. T. Schnapp (Milan: Oscar Mondadori, 2004), I, 477–533 Masoero, Ada, Umberto Boccioni: la città che sale (Milan: Silvana, 2003) Mumford, Lewis, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (London: Secker & Warburg, 1967), I and II Munari, Bruno, Le macchine di Munari (Turin: Einaudi Ragazzi, 1994) Nalini, Anna Maria, Futurismo in Emilia Romagna (Modena: Artioli, 1990) Notte, Riccardo, You, Robot: Antropologia della vita artificiale (Florence: Vallecchi, 2005) Ottinger, Didier (ed.), Futurism (London: Tate, 2009) Pampaloni, Geno, and Mario Verdone, I futuristi italiani: immagini, biografie, notizie (Florence: Le Lettere, 1977) Papini, Giovanni, L’esperienza futurista (1913–14) (Florence: Vallecchi, 1919) Pasqui, Ferruccio, Scuole d’arte in Italia (Milan: Quaderni della Triennale / Hoepli, 1937) Peeters, Jozef, ‘Het Futurisme’, Het Overzicht 13 (November 1922), 9–10 Pica, Agnoldomenico, Nuova architettura italiana (Milan: Quaderni della Triennale / Hoepli, 1936) Pippin, Robert B., ‘On the notion of technology as ideology: prospects’ (1995), in Ezrahi, Mendelsohn and Segal (eds), Technology, Pessimism and Postmodernism, 93–113

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Pizzi, K., ‘Dancing and flying the body mechanical: five visions for the new civilization’, The European Legacy – Future Imperfect – Italian Futurism between Tradition and Modernity, ed. P. Antonello and M. Härmänmaa 14 (2009), 785–98 Pratesi, Mauro (ed.), Futurismo e bon ton. I fratelli Thayaht e Ram ([Florence]: Olschki, 2005) Puppa, Paolo, Teatro e spettacolo nel secondo Novecento (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1990) Ravegnani, Giuseppe (ed.), Poeti futuristi (Milan: Nuova Accademia, 1963) Rebeschini, Claudio (ed.), Crali Futurista/Crali aeropittore (Milan: Electa, 1994) Rossi, Patrizio, ‘Il mito della macchina nella letteratura positivista e futurista’, in Bàrberi Squarotti and Ossola (eds), Letteratura e industria (1997), I, 481–90 Ruta, Anna Maria (ed.), Passo di corsa: espressioni futuriste in Sicilia (Palermo: Associazione Amici della Pittura Siciliana dell’Ottocento, 2004) Sabatino, Michelangelo, ‘Tabula rasa or hybridity? Primitivism and the vernacular in futurist and rationalist architecture’, in Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination (2009), 287–314 Salani, Ettore, Illuminazione teatrale e decorativa ad inondazione di luce (Tecnica) (Milan: Hoepli, 1941) ——, Tempo di “L’Effort Moderne” “La vita di un pittore”, ed. P. Pacini (Florence: Vallecchi, 1968) Sica, Paola, ‘Una donna con tre anime di Rosa Rosà: un romanzo protofemminista?’, Italian Quarterly, 159–60 (2004), 75–82 ——, Futurist Women: Florence, Feminism and the New Sciences (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) Sinisi, Silvana (ed.), Un inedito di Prampolini: il polline abbandonato (Rome: Bulzoni, 1991) Somenzi, Mino, Difendo il futurismo (Rome: A.R.T.E., [n.d.]) Storchi, Simona, ‘Il fascismo è una casa di vetro: Giuseppe Terragni and the Politics of Space in Fascist Italy’, Italian Studies, 62:2 (2007), 231–45 Taddei, Alessandro, ‘Ricostruzione storica dell’universo futurista – Note sulla mostra Futurismo 1909–44 (Roma, 2001)’, Avanguardia 18 (2001), 95–100 Taylor, Joshua C., Futurism (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961) Vaccarino, Elisa, Mario G. Losano, Brunella Eruli et al., Automi, marionette e ballerine nel teatro d’avanguardia (Milan: Skira, 2000) Van Gyseghem, André, Theatre in Soviet Russia (London: Faber and Faber, 1944) Verhaeren, Émile, Les Villes Tentaculaires (Paris: Helleu & Sergent, 1919) Virilio, Paul, The Art of the Motor (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995)

Index of names

297

Index of names Accardi, Carla 181 Adam, Paul 24, 30, 53 Adorno, Theodor 27 Agello, Francesco 225 Albert-Birot, Pierre 185, 199 Alberti, Leon Battista 22 d’Albisola (Mazzotti), Tullio 85, 252 d’Alembert, Jean-Baptiste le Rond 30 Alighieri, Dante 71 Alimandi, Enrico 229 Altman, Nathan 126 Amadori Depero, Rosetta 94, 114, 120, 123 Ambrosi, Alfredo Gauro 229, 242 Andreoni, Cesare 209 Angelini, Franca 157 Antamoro, Giulio (Gant) 144 Antheil, George 162 Apollinaire, Guillaume 197, 198, 199, 222 Apollodorus of Athens 1 Appadurai, Arjun 2, 93 Appia, Adolphe 183, 187, 190 Aragon, Luis 32, 70, 163, 211, 261 Archimedes of Syracuse 21 Archipenko, Alexander 31, 171, 200 Aristotle 21, 181 Arp, Jean (Hans) 176, 178, 181, 197, 201 Artaud, Antonin 194 Aschieri, Tullio 195 Autant (Autant-Lara), Édouard 155, 168 Azari, Fedele 84, 85, 89, 102–4, 105, 109–10, 113–14, 228 Azari, Paolo 101 Babeuf, François-Nöel 57 Bacon, Francis 22, 30 Baker, Josephine 215, 236 Balàzs, Béla 194 Balbo, Italo 75, 224–5 Balibar, Etienne 92 Balla, Giacomo 18, 45–6, 80, 84, 90–1, 98, 133, 139, 142, 143, 170, 171, 182–3, 213, 228, 230, 233, 248, 255, 256 Bambič, Milko 131

Baracca, Francesco 225 Barbara (Olga Biglieri) 229, 230, 231, 237 Barbaro, Umberto 138, 141 Barr, Alfred H. 177 Barthes, Roland 73 Bartók, Béla 100, 196 Basquiat, Jean-Michel 264 Baudelaire, Charles 53 Baudrillard, Jean 262 Baumeister, Willi 150, 181 Behrens, Peter 91 Belli, Domenico 195 Bellotti, Corinto 226 Benjamin, Walter 7, 27, 33, 126, 149, 180, 257 Berghaus, Günter 104, 134, 154, 212, 217, 240 Bergson, Henri 4, 78 Berkeley, Busby 68 Berlioz, Hector 161 de Bernardi, Mario 239, 241 Bernari, Carlo 44, 61 Bessemer, Henry 107 Beyoncé 264–5 Bilenchi, Romano 44 Blake, William 5 Blériot, Louis 222, 223 Bloc, André 181 Blumenberg, Hans 262 Boccardi, Piero 249 Boccioni, Umberto 3, 4, 41, 43, 49, 73, 90, 91, 115, 143, 171, 178, 182–3, 197, 228, 247, 256 Bogdanov, Alexander 127, 133 Boguslavskaya, Xenia 153 Bohn, Willard 43, 45, 226 Bohr, Niels 25 Bontempelli, Massimo 187 Boscia, Camillo 76 Bottai, Giuseppe 9, 10, 109 Botticelli, Sandro 216 Bourgeois, Pierre 194 Bourgeois, Victor 194 Boyle, Robert 30

298 Bragaglia, Anton Giulio 19, 80, 91, 132, 135, 138, 142, 143, 144, 146, 148, 170, 182, 184, 196, 199, 221, 238, 245–8, 249 Bragaglia, Arturo 245 Brahe, Tycho 22 Braidotti, Rosi 69 Braque, Georges 201 Braun, Emily 10 Braun, Marta 247 Brecht, Bertolt 126 Breton, André 138, 195 Brik, Lilya 126 Brik, Osip 126 Brod, Max 223 Broeckmann, Andreas 20, 252 Bru, Sascha 62 Brunelleschi, Filippo 22 Brunelleschi, Umberto 175 Brunius, Jacques-Bernard 190, 191 Bruno, Giordano 22 Brzękowski, Jan 176 Bugatti, Ettore 230 Burckhardt, Martin 262–3 Burrasca, Nino (Giordano Sabbadin) 241 Butler, Octavia 264 Butler, Samuel 24, 101 Caballero, Giménez Ernesto 194 Cage, John 78 Calder, Alexander 254, 255, 256 Callicles 30 Calvino, Italo 266 Cameron, James 264 Campanella, Tommaso 30, 215 Campigli, Massimo 175, 179 Cangiullo, Francesco 166, 173 Canguilhem, Georges 261, 263 Čapek, Karel 100, 142, 145 Cappa Marinetti, Benedetta 43, 90, 160, 173, 177, 203, 229, 230–1, 237 Cappiello, Leonetto 175 Capponi, Giuseppe 195 Caproni, Gianni (Giovanni Battista) 243 Carducci, Giosuè 44, 53 Čargo, Ivan 131 Carli, Mario 8, 49, 74, 80 Carlyle, Thomas 24 Carmelich, Giorgio 130, 131 Carol-Bérard (Charles-Louis Bérard) 161 Carpi, Umberto 139 Carra, Carlo 45, 179, 182, 200 Carrouges, Michel 16, 20, 31 Casavola, Franco 101, 104, 163, 187, 190, 193 cascodalluminio 67

Index of names Casella, Alfredo 99, 163, 173 Cassirer, Ernst 10, 32, 211 Castagneri, Mario 249 Catrizzi, Loris 104 Cavacchioli, Enrico 226 Cavalcanti, Alberto 194 Cendrars, Blaise 58, 199, 201 Censi, Carlo 235 Censi, Cristiano 244 Censi, Giannina 17, 19, 101, 182, 193, 221, 225, 232, 233, 234–7, 238, 239–44 Cerio, Edwin 173 Cernigoj, Avgust 129–32, 142, 150, 164, 169 Chagall, Marc 197 Chase, Stuart 20, 117, 224 Chemenov see Bartók, Béla de Chirico, Andrea see Savinio, Alberto de Chirico, Giorgio 139, 175, 176, 195, 196, 200, 209 Chiti, Remo 74, 249 Ciarrocchi, Franco 161 Cimabue 222 Clair, René (René-Lucien Chomette) 190 Clavel, Gilbert 99, 173 Clifford, James 40 Clinton, George 264 Cocteau, Jean 98, 112, 173, 191, 194, 198, 199, 201, 227 Comerio, Luca 79 Copernicus, Nicolaus 22 Corbusier, Le (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) 31 Corneli, Franca Maria 65 Cornell, Joseph 180 Corona, Vittorio 209 Corra (Bruno Ginanni Corradini) 45, 74, 80 Corradini, Enrico 36, 208 Cox, Renée 264 Craig, Edward Gordon 183, 187 Crali, Tullio 177, 195, 229 Cretinetti see Deed, André Crispolti, Enrico 43, 170, 212 Croce, Benedetto 44 Cucini, Dina 65 Curie Skłodowska, Marie 246 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 8, 49–50, 51, 71, 79, 163, 222, 223, 225, 226, 232 D’Arezzo, Maria 230 Darwin, Charles 24 De Ambris, Alceste 8, 37 Deed, André (André de Chapuis, aka Cretinetti) 79, 100, 145

Index of names De Filippis, Federico 179 Dekeukeleire, Charles 194 Delak, Ferdo 130–1 Delany, Samuel R. 264 Delaunay, Robert 176, 201, 222 Delaunay, Sonia 176, 201 Deleuze, Gilles 16, 262, 263 Del Monte, Guidobaldo 92 Demanins, Ferruccio 250 De Maria, Luciano 43, 62 Depero, Fortunato 18, 41, 45, 83, 84, 85, 89–93, 94–7, 98–102, 103, 104, 105–6, 108–13, 114–20, 121–4, 139, 140, 141, 143, 146, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 182–3, 185, 191, 203, 209, 228, 229, 233, 244, 253, 255 De Pisis, Filippo 175 De Re, Erminia 164 Dery, Mark 264 Descartes, René 22, 23, 24, 261, 262 Deslaw, Eugène 81, 195 Diaghilev, Sergei 98, 188, 189, 198, 233, 236 Di Bosso, Renato 71 Dickens, Charles 24 Diderot, Denis 30 Dinerstein, Joel 15 Diulgheroff, Nikolay 177, 229 van Doesburg, Theo 110, 115, 135, 142, 187, 212 Dolfi, Emilio Mario 130, 131 Dorazio, Piero 181 Dos Passos, John 57 Dottori, Gerardo 144, 177, 209, 229 Drago, Furio 49 Duce see Mussolini, Benito Duchamp, Marcel 31, 41, 58, 69, 205, 221, 255, 262 Dulac, Germaine 81, 194 Duncan, Isadora 233, 234, 236 Durand, Peter 83 Dürer, Albrecht 22 Duse, Mario 209 Dzirkals, Arnolds 153 Egorova, Lyubov 236 Einstein, Albert 4, 5, 25, 72, 87, 213, 220, 221, 228 Eisenstein, Sergei 82, 127, 145, 194 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 142 Engels, Friedrich 57 Ennius (Quintus Ennius) 55, 181 Ernst, Max 30, 176, 178 Ernst Werle, Dorothy 119 Escodamè (Michele Lescovich) 104, 237

299 Euripides 181 Evola, Julius (Giulio Cesare Andrea) 144, 170 Exter, Alexandra 171 Fabre, Marcel (Robinet) 79 Faraday, Michael 3, 24, 72, 228 Farfa (Vittorio Osvaldo Tommasini) 123 Ferla, Clelia 230 Ferrari, Elena 138 Ferrarin, Arturo 225 Ferrario, Antonina 235 Ferrario, Carla 236 Ferrario, Ethel 236 Ferrario, Rosina 230, 236, 239 Fillia (Luigi Colombo) 10, 18–19, 41, 46, 175, 177, 179, 203–10, 212, 213, 217, 219, 221, 225, 228, 229, 231 Fiozzi, Aldo 143 Folgore, Luciano (Omero Vecchi) 44, 175, 187, 190, 193, 199 Ford, Henry 4, 27, 38, 68, 95, 126 Foregger, Nikolai 144 Fornari, Antonio 138 Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan) 52, 157 Fossati, Paolo 211 Foster, Hal 16, 216 Foucault, Michel 263 Fox Keller, Evelyn 69, 205 Freeman, Austin 32 Fregoli, Leopoldo 79 Freud, Sigmund 139, 262 Frost, Henry P. 32 Fuller, Loïe 74–5, 79, 233, 234, 235, 236 Funi, Achille 179 Fyodorov, Nikolai 152 Gabo, Naum (Naum Neemia Pevsner) 83 Gadda, Carlo Emilio 51, 129 Galilei, Galileo 22 Gan, Alexei 140 Gant see Antamoro, Giulio Gance, Abel 81 García Benito, Eduardo 227 Garretto, Paolo 175 du Gast, Camille 230 Gastaldi, Mario 102 Gastev, Alexei 163 Gentile, Emilio 9 Gerbino, Giovanni 104 Ghiberti, Lorenzo 22 Giddens, Anthony 56 Gide, André 173 Giedion, Sigfried 261 Giertz, Simone 264

300 Ginanni, Maria 230 Ginanni Corradini, Arnaldo see Ginna Ginanni Corradini, Bruno see Corra Ginna (Arnaldo Ginanni Corradini) 74, 80, 82, 220 Giolitti, Giovanni 36 Giovannetti, Eugenio 149 Gleizes, Albert 176, 199, 201, 204 Gödel, Kurt 13, 221 Goebbels, Joseph 160 Goering, Hermann 160 Gončarova, Natalia 31 Goretti, Maria 17, 65–6, 231 Gorin, Albert Jean 181 Gorky, Maxim 127 Graham, Martha 240 Gral, Luigi 164 Gramme, Zenobe Theofile 72–3 Gramsci, Antonio 15, 27–9, 38, 62, 83, 95, 127–8, 133, 134, 204, 207, 234 Grémillon, Jean 81 Gréville, Edmond T. 190, 191 Gris, Juan (José Victoriano González-Pérez) 204 Gropius, Walter 82–3, 148, 150 Guarnieri, Giovanni Giuseppe 249 Guattari, Félix 16, 262, 263 Guillaume, Ferdinand (Polidor) 79, 144 Habermas, Jürgen 13 Haraway, Donna 16, 69, 263 Hardt, Michael 265 Hargreaves, James 23 Heartfield, John (Helmut Herzfeld) 149 Heaven, Douglas 264 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 211 Heidegger, Martin 33, 257 Heisenberg, Werner 13, 25, 221, 257 L’Herbier, Marcel 81, 184 Hero (Heron) of Alexandria 21–2 Hertz, Heinrich Rudolf 73 Herzfeld, Leni 149 Hewitt, Andrew 3 Hindemith, Paul 144 Hitler, Adolf 10, 151, 154, 158, 179 Honegger, Arthur 161 Hoover, Herbert 116 Horkheimer, Max 27 Hugo, Victor 61 Hultén, Pontus K. G. 21, 251 Huszár, Vilmos 144 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 69 Idelson, Vera 155, 167

Index of names Ikar (Alexander Barabanov) 146 Illari, Piero 50 Ivanov, Elena 146, 187 Jablowsky, Nino 131 Jacob, Max 131, 199 Jameson, Frederic 13, 15 Jannelli, Guglielmo 154, 159, 160, 183, 203 Jardine, Alice 69 Jarema, Joseph 202 Jarry, Alfred 30–1, 69, 148 Jeanneret, Charles-Édouard see Corbusier, Le Johnson, Philip 177 Joyce, James 142 Jung, Carl Gustav 70 Jünger, Ernst 33 Kafka, Franz 24, 31, 41, 142, 159, 223 Kambara, Tai 199 Kandinsky, Wassily 130, 141, 142, 171, 197, 212, 255 Keaton, Buster 151 Keller, Guido 49, 104 Kenyon, Matt 264 Kepler, Johannes 22 Khlebnikov, Velimir 227 Kiesler, Frederick John 113, 147, 189 Kliun, J. A. 144 Knowles, Solange 264 Kogoj, Marij 131 Kojève, Alexander 211 Korompay, Giovanni 43 Kosovel, Carmela 129 Kosovel, Srečko 129, 130, 131 Kracauer, Siegfried 68 Krauss, Rosalind 16 Kulbin, Nikolai 171 Kurek, Jalu 188, 200 Kushner, Boris 126–7 Lafargue, Paul 8, 45, 103 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 58, 253 Lang, Fritz 158, 184 Laureati, Giulio 225 Laurent, Ernest 201 Léger, Fernand 31, 41, 69, 81, 99, 131, 133, 136, 162, 172, 176, 179, 191, 194, 198, 199, 201, 204 Leiber, David 121 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 30, de Lempicka, Tamara 66, 230 Lenin, Vladimir 28, 29, 126, 127 Leonardo da Vinci 22, 251 Leonidoff, Leon 119

Index of names Liala (Amalia Liana Negretti Odescalchi Cambiasi) 222, 230, 232 Lissitzky, El 31, 110, 126, 191, 228 Lista, Giovanni 143, 212, 213 Litolatta women workers 17, 85–6, 87 Locke, John 24 Loew, Heinz 189 Lombardi, Daniele 167 London, Jack 97 Löwenstein, Grethel 91 Loy, Mina 171 Lubar, Steven 260 Lubitsch, Ernst 100, 151 Lukács, Georg 27, 31, 126, 134, 204 Lunacharsky, Anatoly 28, 126, 127 Luraghi, Giuseppe Eugenio 261 Lyotard, Jean-François 262 McCarthy, Joseph 141 McCulloch, Warren 261 McFarlane, James 40, 47 McLuhan, Marshall 261 Mac Orlan (Dumarchey), Pierre 249 Magamal (Eva Kühn Amendola) 231 Magito, Wy (Suria Grell Magito) 101, 176, 193, 238 Malespine, Émile 131 Malevich, Kazimir 31, 132, 152, 185, 228 Malinowski, Bronislaw 33 Malipiero, Francesco 100, 163 Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) 132, 194, 255 Mara, Oscar 74 Marasco, Antonio 143, 166, 168 Marchi, Virgilio 173 Marconi, Guglielmo 75, 214 Maré de, Rolf 188, 189 Marey, Étienne-Jules 91, 245 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso (Emilio Angelo Carlo) 7–11, 12, 16, 18, 28–9, 36, 37, 41, 42–7, 48–52, 53–5, 56–63, 64–71, 72–82, 83–8, 89, 90, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 108, 109, 110, 122, 127, 128, 131, 132, 135, 136, 137, 139, 142, 143, 147, 152, 154, 156, 159, 160, 162, 163, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 175, 179, 180, 182, 186, 187, 191, 194, 200, 201, 202, 204, 205, 207, 208, 209, 210, 215, 216, 217, 220, 221, 222, 223, 225, 226, 227, 229, 231, 233, 234, 235, 237, 238, 241, 242, 245, 248, 250, 252, 259, 264 Maritain, Jacques 207 Martin, Charles 107 Martin, Edwin 107 Martin, John 120

301 Martin, Wallace 107 Martin, Walter 107 Martinelli, Onofrio 175 Martini, Alberto (Giacomo Spiridione) 175 Marx, Karl 8, 25–6, 31, 45, 103, 126, 134, 204, 234, 257, 260, 262, 263 Masnata, Pino (Giuseppe) 76–7, 87, 226 Massine, Léonide 120 Maturana, Humberto 262 Maxwell, Billie 213 Maxwell, James Clerk 72–3, 228 Mayakovski, Vladimir 49, 127, 163 Medin, Gastone 195 Meriano, Francesco 197 Metoyer, Angelbert 264 Metzinger, Jean 201 Meyer, Hannes 150 Meyerhold, Vsevolod Emilevich 126, 145, 182, 234 Micks, Paolo 164, 165 Micks, Riccardo 164 Micks, Stella 164 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig (Maria Ludwig Michael Mies) 150 Mikhailov, Mikhail 155 Milhaud, Darius 200 Minsky, Marvin 264 Miraglia, Giovanni 223 Miró, Joan 176, 178 Mix, Silvio (Silvio De Re) 76, 101, 155, 161, 164–9, 191 Modigliani, Amedeo 197 Moholy-Nagy, Lázló 31, 83, 84, 110, 130, 142, 150, 160, 186, 248, 252 Molinari, Bernardino 163 Monáe, Janelle 264 Mondrian, Piet (Pieter Cornelis) 163, 176, 198, 201 Monti, Vincenzo 44 Morales, Melesio 161 Morasso, Mario 30, 57, 73, 208 Mori, Marisa (Maria Luisa Lurini) 195, 205 Morris, William 25, 94 Moscardelli, Nicola 199 Mosolov, Alexander 162 Muḥammad Tawfīq Pasha (Tawfiq of Egypt) 48 Müller-Lehning, Paul Arthur 149 Mumford, Lewis 34, 97, 117, 128, 260, Munari, Bruno 19, 46, 84, 139, 181, 221, 250, 251–3, 254–7, 258, 264 Murayama, Tomoyoshi 153 Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm 142 de Musset, Alfred 160

Index of names

302 Mussolini, Arnaldo 75 Mussolini, Benito 7, 8–11, 28, 29, 36–7, 62, 63, 75, 108, 109, 111, 136, 158, 222, 223–4, 225 Muybridge, Eadweard 245 Nagano, Yoshimitsu 153, 199 Nannetti, Vieri 80 Negri, Antonio 265 Negrone di Cambiaso, Caterina 230 Newton, Isaac 23 Nietzsche, Friedrich 4, 33 Nijinsky, Vaslav 190 Norris, Frank 97 Nosenzo, Vincenzo 85 Offray de la Mettrie, Julien 23 O’Neill, Eugene 189 Orazi, Vittorio (Alessandro Prampolini) 167, 200 Oriani, Pippo (Giuseppe) 177, 208, 229 Ottolenghi, Benvenuto 114, 117 Ottolenghi, Carla 243 Ozenfant, Amédée 213 Paladini, Vinicio 18, 45, 46, 100, 129, 131, 132–8, 138–41, 142, 143, 144–6, 152, 154, 157, 169, 174, 182, 200, 205, 234, 250, 255 Palissy, Bernard 22 Pannaggi, Ivo 1–2, 41, 45, 46, 100, 129, 132, 135–6, 138, 139, 141, 142–52, 154, 155, 157, 161, 169, 181, 182, 184, 200, 205, 234, 252 Papini, Giovanni 198 Pappus of Alexandria 21 Parini, Giuseppe 44 Parisio, Giulio 249 Parnak, Valentin 144, 193 Pastrone, Giovanni 79 Pattarozzi, Gaetano 226 Pavolini, Alessandro 76, 82 Pérez-Jorba, Joan 199 Peyrey, François 222 Piatti, Ugo 49 Picabia, Francis 30, 41, 58, 69 Picasso, Pablo 70, 98, 172, 198, 199, 201, 216 Pickering Iazzi, Robin 65 Pilon, Veno 131 de Pinedo, Francesco 225 Pirandello, Luigi 79, 108, 151, 156–7, 194, 247 Pizzetti, Ildebrando 163 Planck, Max 23, 25 Plato 21, 30

Platone, Augusto 62 Plautus, Titus Maccius 181 Pocarini, Sofronio 130 Podhajska, Zdenka 193 Podrecca, Vittorio 99, 185, 187 Poggi, Christine 70 Poggi-Longostrevi, G. 242 Polidor see Guillaume, Ferdinand Popova, Liubov 145 Pozzati, Severo (Sepo) 175 Pozzo, Ugo 229 Prampolini, Alessandro see Orazi, Vittorio Prampolini, Enrico 14, 18, 41, 43, 46, 75, 81, 98, 132, 136, 139, 143, 153, 155, 160, 166, 167, 168, 170–2, 173–81, 182–97, 198–203, 204, 206, 209, 210, 212–17, 219, 220, 228, 229, 231, 233, 238–9, 252 Pratella, Francesco Balilla 76, 162, 166, 167, 187, 222 Protazanov, Yakov 138, 184 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 62 Proust, Marcel 142, 247 Puccini, Giacomo 223 Puma, Marcello 87 Puni, Ivan 153 Pupin, Michael 106 Queneau, Raymond 83 Raimondi, Fernando 195 Ramage, Nik 264 Rampa-Rossi, Franco 29 Raunig, Gerald 263 Ravel, Maurice 163, 164 del Re, Arundel 199 Reggiani, Mauro 181 Reich, Wilhelm 67 Reverdy, Pierre 199 Richter, Hans 194 Ricotti, Maria 189, 201 Rihanna 264 Rimbaud, Arthur 61 Rinnan, Frode 151 Rispoli, Mario 195 Rivera, Diego 179 Robinet see Fabre, Marcel Rodchenko, Alexander 132, 227 Ronco, Aldo 138, 141 Rosenberg, Léonce 176 Rossini, Gioachino 161 Rosso, Mino 229 Roussel, Raymond 31, 69 Ruskaja, Jia (Evgeniya Fyodorovna Borisenko) 146, 187

Index of names Ruskin, John 24, 25, 94 Russolo, Luigi 49, 76, 81, 104, 161, 162–4, 167, 175, 176, 190, 195, 201, 238 Ruttmann, Walter 140, 194 de Sade, Marquis (Donatien Alphonse François) 54 de Saint-Exupèry, Antoine 222 de Saint-Point, Valentine (Anna Jeanne Valentine Marianne Glans de CessiatVercell) 187, 233–4, 237 de Saint-Simon, Henri 134 Saladin, Paolo Alcide 229 de la Salle, Duchess (Marika Karousos) 167 Sandvik, Ola 151 Sanguineti, Edoardo 7 Sanminiatelli, Bino (Fabio) 170, 198–9 Sant’Elia, Antonio 15, 43, 49 Sanzin, Bruno G. 131, 207, 241 Sanzin, Paolo 140 Savinio, Alberto 175, 200, 209 Schaeffer, Pierre 78 Scheerbart, Paul 82 Schlemmer, Oskar 144, 150, 189 Schmidt, Kurt 189 Schnapp, Jeffrey T. 12, 108, 222 Schrödinger, Erwin 25 Schwitters, Kurt 96, 143, 160 Scirocco, Federico 143 Scurto, Ignazio 71, 226, 230 Self, Will (William Woodard) 263 Semper, Gottfried 95 Sepo see Pozzati, Severo Sermolino, Lina 123 Settimelli, Emilio 45, 74, 80 Seuphor, Michel 154, 167, 175, 200–1, 204 Severini, Gino 41, 45, 91, 175, 200, 201, 202, 203, 207, 217 Shankar, Uday 236 Sheeler, Charles 122 Shelley, Mary 24 Siemens, Carl Wilhelm 107 Simondon, Gilbert 263 Sinisgalli, Leonardo 44, 181, 261 Siqueiros, David Alfaro 179 Sironi, Mario 7, 49, 143, 179 Socrates 30 Soffici, Ardengo 199 Somenzi, Mino (Stanislao) 49, 102, 209, 220 Sommi Picenardi, Guido 112 Sorel, Georges 157, 260 Spengler, Oswald 32–3 Stearns, Harold 57 Stein Gertrude 151

303 Steiner, Rudolf 214 Stella, Joseph 122 Stepančič, Edvard 131 Stepanova, Varvara 145 Sterenberg, David 126 Stevens, Wallace 199 Storer, Edward 200 Strato of Lampsacus 21 Stravinsky, Igor 98, 155, 165, 168 Sue, Eugène 53 Sun Ra 264 Survage, Léopold 176 Tate, Trudi 60 Tatlin, Vladimir 126, 138, 158, 212, 227, 252 Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni) 132, 133, 209, 229, 248–50 Taylor, Frederick W. 27, 95 Teige, Karel 138, 197 Terra, Dino 138 Thayaht (Ernesto Michahelles) 249 Tichi, Cecelia 16 Tinguely, Jean 256 Tōgō, Seiji 153 Tombaugh, Clyde 213 Toscanini, Arturo 151 Tozzi, Mario 175 Tretyakov, Sergei 12, 145 Trodd, Tamara 144 Trotsky, Leon 29, 35, 38, 126, 127 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin 152 Turing, Alan 266 Tyrwhitt, Gerald (Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, Lord Berners) 99, 200 Tzara, Tristan 201 Umbehr, Otto Maximilian (Umbo) 149 Varela, Francisco 262 Vasari, Ruggero 129, 148, 149, 152–61, 167, 168, 169, 190, 212, 252 Veblen, Thorstein 96, 128 van Veen, Marie Louise 154 van de Velde, Henry 95 Veltchek, Vatslav 189, 191 Venna, Lucio 80, 170 Verdone, Mario 43, 151 Verhaeren, Émile 30, 53 Verhoeven, Paul 264 Veroli, Patrizia 234, 244 Veronesi, Luigi 181 Verossi, Plinio 244 Versari, Maria Elena 218

304 Vertov, Dziga 194 Vico, Giambattista 44 Vignazia, Angelo 229 Vigo, Jean 194 Virilio, Paul 16, 262, 263 Visintini, Mario 226, Vitrotti, Giovanni 79 Vitruvius 21, 55 Vlah, Giuseppe 131 Volponi, Paolo 44, 261 Wagstaff, Christopher 60 Walden, Herwarth 131, 153, 154 Warburg, Aby 19, 32, 177, 211, 215, 217, 221 Watt, James 22, 23 Weber, Max 27 Wells, H. G. (Herbert George) 61 Wenglor, Alice 148

Index of names Whitman, Walt (Walter) 24, 30 Wiene, Robert 184 Wiener, Norbert 261, 263 Williams, Carlos Williams 97 Williams, Raymond 15, 40 Williams, Serena 265 Wind, Edgar 32, 221 Wright, Wilbur 222 Wulz, Carlo 250 Wulz, Marion 250 Wulz, Wanda 250–1 Zāle, Kārlis 153 Ziegfeld, Flo (Florenz Edward Jr) 68 Žižek, Slavoj 262 Zola, Émile 53–4, 68, 82, 232 Zucca, Louis 120 Zucco, Mario 229