Futurist Conditions: Imagining Time in Italian Futurism 1501343122, 9781501343124

Citation preview

Futurist Conditions

Futurist Conditions Imagining Time in Italian Futurism David Mather

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © David Mather, 2020 David Mather has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 221 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Giacomo Balla, Line of Speed, Form, and Sound, 1915, 24 × 33 cm. © A. Dagli Orti / De Agostini Picture Library / Bridgeman Images © DACS 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mather, David (Art historian), author. Title: Futurist conditions: imagining time in Italian futurism / David Mather. Description: London; New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020035260 (print) | LCCN 2020035261 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501343124 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501343117 (epub) | ISBN 9781501343100 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Futurism (Art)–Italy. | Motion in art. | Art and photography. Classification: LCC N6918.5.F8 M38 2020 (print) | LCC N6918.5.F8 (ebook) | DDC 709.04/033–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035260 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035261 ISBN: HB: 978-15013-4312-4 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4310-0 eBook: 978-1-5013-4311-7 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Introduction: Temporal Imagination 1 1 The Bragaglias’ Unreality 47 2 Balla’s Transformation 95 3 Boccioni’s Body-Buildings 135 Conclusion: Collective Conditioning 197 Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Index

221 223 226

Introduction Temporal Imagination

Historical accounts of Italian futurism often chronicle its obsession with industrial machinery—an interpretive scheme based on technological themes, which has assumed diverse forms over the years. A prominent version of this scheme identifies specific machines that the futurists represented and directly equated with modernity, such as trains, streetcars, automobiles, ocean liners, and, later, airplanes. Such machinic subject matter not only informed a wide range of futurist images and attitudes but also introduced features of the movement’s guiding ideology, redolent with a modernist faith in industrial progress and altered psychosocial routines.1 Scholarship in this vein has rightly emphasized the life and work of Italian futurist leader, writer, and financier Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, whose 1909 manifesto launching this movement contains a memorable depiction of automobile travel.2 When revisiting the daring exploits of the Romantic poets, Marinetti embraced a concept of kinetic velocity that functions both literally and figuratively—as spatial displacement over time and as an initiation into a futurist sensibility combining excitement, danger, improvisation, and violence.3 The speeding car symbolized for him the coordinated activities of a group of artists and acolytes, who risked injury or even death to be transported into a heightened state of awareness.4 Calibrated to meet the multiple pressures of modernization, futurism in this dominant scheme composes potent fusions of human (typically masculine) and mechanical elements, and develops a recurring pattern, or repertoire, of literary, visual, and sonic motifs referring to machines that also contributed to visualizing a new collective identity. Alongside the poetic value of the automobile engine—firing on all its literal and metaphorical cylinders—Marinetti’s mechanical worldview presupposed an influential set of historical and conceptual linkages between art and politics, including their common aspiration to forge a group identity and to address mass audiences. For instance, his loudly vocalized renditions of writings on aggressively modern themes made him a vibrant but easily caricatured

2

Futurist Conditions

orator, who inundated his listeners with strings of free-form, disjointed, and onomatopoetic images, as if rallying menacingly machinic forces to the radical cultural and political cause of futurism.5 Through an overarching analogy with mechanicity, he identified and imitated increasingly unfamiliar aspects of modern life. According to Marinetti, the futurists’ ostentatious artistic and political activities reverberated through the bourgeois public sphere like an automobile traversing the landscape—accompanied by loud noises, jostling forces, eddying dust, and cries of terror and delight.6 Profound uncertainty also arrived for the futurists in the form of unplanned outcomes of the motorized activities, which had the advantage of implicitly precluding any lingering doubt about the consequences of one’s actions—by reducing unfolding experience to a series of split-second decisions made while in transit. With its exhilarating rush of speed, the mechanical combustibility espoused by Marinetti delivered a sense of urgency to the broader futurist claims to reimagine the cultural and political landscape and to assist modern Italians in acclimating to an accelerated life. Crucially, the futurist leader’s repeated success at eliciting passionate responses from his audiences, even provoking instances of social unrest, demonstrated an intimate connection between futurist artistic and sociopolitical activities, which he later described so convincingly as art-action.7 Marinetti’s combustion engine analogy for futurism underscored other historical and conceptual links between politics and vanguard art-making practices during that tumultuous era. In a general sense, the aggressive style of performing for large audiences, pioneered by firebrand Marinetti (and predating the use of microphones and loudspeakers), presaged aspects of the domineering character and content of fascism.8 In a more specific sense, his megalomaniacal persona resonated through the political sphere as well: in 1918 and 1919, Marinetti formed a political party with the radical socialist Benito Mussolini, which consequentially honed a recognizable set of performative gestures and attitudes, even though it did not meet with electoral success.9 In part due to Marinetti’s unequivocal proclamations, the visual artists who became affiliated with futurism can seem to have been either complicit with or else compromised by their leader’s cataclysmic vision of violent mechanized forces unleashed. After all, they benefited greatly from the publicity and subsequent commercial interest in their work, if and when attributed to and limited by his aspirational goals. In addition to following direct economic incentives for participating in futurism, Marinetti and his colleagues instigated scenes of disruption—spontaneously in public settings or in front of assembled audiences—that were not entirely distinct from the futurist paintings depicting demonstrative social activities,

Introduction

3

such as riots, an anarchist funeral, and patriotic gatherings. Here a machinic interpretation of futurism can accurately describe how new approaches to artmaking helped them to haphazardly assemble a blueprint to be followed by other radicalized individuals and groups, including those who later succeeded in seizing political power in Italy after the First World War.10 A 1913 photograph of a crowd gathered outside a window display at a bookstore in Rome illustrates some of the difficulties of trying to precisely differentiate Marinetti’s sentiments from those of the other futurists, as much as from those of a faceless multitude (Figure I.1). While some futurist artworks depict violent behaviors that appear to illustrate Marinetti’s overbearing, destructive impulses, these artists pursued adjacent avenues of development that cannot be easily explained by simple inferences to their obedience or obsequiousness. Indeed, some prominent aspects of futurist artistic experimentation were explicitly created to contrast with the vehicular and mechanistic themes that have been the focus of much scholarly interest. Similar complications concerning mechanicity emerge from the welldocumented futurist desire to replicate moment-by-moment movements by imitating the late nineteenth-century research of the French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey.11 Unlike other photographic media at the time, his chrono­ photography did not generate recognizable, naturalistic images, so it proved to

Figure I.1  Crowd gathers at Lux bookstore window displaying Umberto Boccioni’s painting Deconstruction of Figures at a Table (1912), Via Convertite, Rome, 1913. Photographer unknown. Courtesy Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (910141).

4

Futurist Conditions

be acceptable as a source of inspiration to vanguard visual artists. Given that a handful of futurist works do strongly resemble Marey’s imagery—mechanically transcribing kinetic forces into fixed, immobile visual forms—rekindled interest in the scientist’s systematic research from twenty-five years earlier may, however, signal a lack of methodological finesse, given that resemblance also implies an overly reverent mode of picturing, albeit nonnaturalistically.12 At once formally restrictive and conceptually delayed, the obvious references in certain artworks to this type of mechanical reproduction seem to reaffirm their technological fixation and mark an attendant failure to more fully integrate mechanical media into their creative practices. In this critical context, interpretive ironies abound: despite experimenting with artistic mediums, the futurists at first avoided photography and film; by defying their own forward-leaning attitudes, these practitioners of traditional artistic mediums blundered into a humorously hypocritical image of retardaire futurism; having accelerated to meet the demands of the modern world, they either arrived too late or not at all. With an eye toward updating the recurring interpretations that futurist visual art was too literal, almost backward, in its images of modernity, this study analyzes the generative role that photographic media played in futurist visual practices, while also framing extended discussion of some artistic differences that emerged amid their evident enthusiasm for industrial-era transportation. Within this framework of art historical revision, futurist artworks will be viewed not only as texts to be closely “read,” by means of one or more iconographic or semiotic systems to decode them, for instance, but also as works “spoken,” or “doing the speaking”—that is, as images showing a capacity to articulate formalconceptual arguments in and about the visual systems within which they exist. As with other advanced art-making regimes, a capacity to act upon the world and its systems of meaning-making can coexist with attempts to mimic aspects or instances of them. Also, as specific, idiosyncratic modes of artistic agency, these creative practices need not be constrained by the conscious intentions of their makers, in that they can encompass qualities of material significance above and beyond those that may have been overtly intended.13 An astute reader might smartly reply: Who can presume to make an assessment about the as-yet unspoken qualities of futurist artworks? Even if attempts to articulate the underlying formal and conceptual principles might, in this interpretive account, be considered speculative or incomplete, some of the material truths that help to define or explain those artistic activities may be identified with a comparative formal, textual, and material approach, and, through this process, the physical properties may be placed on a more equal footing with many of

Introduction

5

the nuanced arguments found in philosophical, literary, and performative contexts, for example. Despite its perceived deficiencies, this comparative, interpretive method asserts that the material imagery “speaks,” regardless of whether the makers consciously designated those singular visual qualities to be foregrounded, even and especially when the works discussed do not fit comfortably with existing historiographic narratives. Since this art historical and intellectual project is not intended to be comprehensive or generalizable across all futurist practices, phases, and investments, the at times idiosyncratic comparisons to follow among specific futurist artworks and texts presume to complement—not necessarily to invalidate—the scholarship of other futurist historians. This type of methodological aspiration cannot and should not, however, preclude some acknowledgment of this approach’s limits and any exclusions to its usage. At the same time that the early futurists identified kinetic motion as being symptomatic of the conditions of modernization, the altered perception induced by the photographic camera and its light-sensitive materials would pose a specific, daunting aesthetic challenge for visual artists of the modern era: how to visualize unfolding temporality. Prior to the First World War, the highly contested status of photography and film in the visual arts meant that, depending on one’s viewpoint, the resulting images either revealed the essential (i.e., unchanging) qualities of phenomena depicted or preserved accidental (i.e., constantly changing) details. Similarly, some futurist artists believed photography could capture hidden essences, while others doubted its capacity to legibly render experiential truths, due to an overproduction of fleeting, arbitrary views. Between 1911 and 1914, the futurists would compose a wide variety of imagery to envision kinetic forces in both photographic and nonphotographic media, amounting to a new repertoire of informed responses to mechanized visual media. Rather than simply registering kinetic visual effects to mimic time-motion photography, the futurists investigated some of the significant, underlying issues that related to imagining time in static media, such as how to picture different durations, how to visualize nonvisual data or nonlinear relations, and how to convey the volatility of a historical moment. By directly inspiring such productive and prolific responses, it was the camera— not the engine—that prompted the most enduring futurist formulations about early twentieth-century temporality. Unfortunately, during a fertile phase of this experimentation, an unbridgeable rift emerged concerning the status of photography, a rift that permanently fractured this cultural movement in late 1913. Due to differing opinions about photography and cinema among the

6

Futurist Conditions

futurists themselves, the camera and its light-sensitive chemistry can, thereby, provide a useful gauge of distinct, at times conflicting, responses to the complex but static visual structures associated with futurist temporalities. To highlight some of the key distinctions among compositional strategies in futurism, the comparative and interpretive method to be used across this volume’s three main chapters foregrounds artworks made by Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, Giacomo Balla, and Umberto Boccioni. Scholarly investigation of different artistic media—photography, painting, and sculpture respectively— will frame an interpretive structure in which individual works offer varied solutions to the same general artistic problem of indicating the altered tempos of modern life. In anticipation of the formal and textual analyses that follow, it can be instructive to revisit some of the main lineages of picturing time and motion. In particular, assorted futurist images mimicked Marey’s time-motion principles, so the emphasis to be placed on the scientist’s achievement in the following section of this introduction will inform discussion about the ways this method served substantively different and divergent futurist aims. Although his rigorous approach introduced various tools to mechanically transcribe kinetic forces into static visual forms, the futurists modified this premise of transcription to include both mechanical and nonmechanical modalities, again augmenting, and at times overtly contradicting, scientific positivism with their artistic variations on well-known fin de siècle vitalist ideas. After a section on Marey’s influence on futurist visual artists (necessarily supplemented by their adaptive vitalist approaches), additional contextualization of these futurist engagements with photography and film will precede another introductory section on the long-standing art historical and cognitive methods used to interpret the temporalities of visual motion. From these multiple, superimposed frames of reference, clear delineations will emerge among contested modes of visuality, in order to describe distinctly futurist subjectivities, as will be revealed vis-à-vis their diverse formal and conceptual arguments for imagining time.

Chronographic Methods The time-motion studies of Marey and his longtime assistant Georges Demenÿ epitomized late nineteenth-century efforts to scientifically analyze the evidentiary visual traces of human and animal movements. By the early twentieth century, this physiological research would eventually signal a momentous shift in the way artists could visualize motion, but its impact on the arts did not transpire as

Introduction

7

Marey expected. The scientist presumed that artists, such as the painters trained at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, wanted to learn to represent moving figures more naturalistically than was possible through human observation alone. According to him, this system of analysis could benefit artistically rendered figures—by revealing precisely delineated relationships among anatomical parts, in order to augment any other techniques used to replicate the same phenomena under specific lighting and atmospheric conditions. To the scientist, his objective, physical truths could assist the creation of accurate artistic representations of vigorous activities: “[An] artist would devote his talents, by the aid of such photographs” to offer “a faithful expression of the action of the muscles.”14 For painters depicting galloping horses, lunging athletes, energetic dancers, or even expressive faces, according to him, photographs can reveal “all the phases of a performer’s movements, and afford the artist a choice of more or less expressive and graceful positions.”15 Despite this extraordinary perceptual and cognitive enhancement, Marey did not predict how his method of recording invisible or unfamiliar phenomena would later be applied to creative aims. Two decades after Marey’s research concluded, early twentieth-century artists, including the futurists, seized upon its rigorous methods of transcribing kinetic activities as another way of pursuing a rapidly expanding interest in nontraditional pictorial aims.16 For vanguard painters, creating less referential, more abstracted imagery entailed finding nonnaturalistic approaches to register sensations through their artistic imagery—as with both the Divisionists’ applications of adjacent, contrasting strokes and the Fauvists’ focus on chromatic intensities. Also, due to steady improvements in the technical and chemical processes that made instantaneous photography possible by the turn of the twentieth century, artists working in traditional media confronted the uncomfortable prospect of being replaced by mechanized media, at least in the task of accurately replicating visual perception. Although abstraction emerged, in part, from their suspicion toward photographic reproducibility, another less well-rehearsed permutation of this art history has identified nonreferential photographic content as well.17 In effect, Marey’s principles for inscribing bodily motion gave artists a precise, systematic means to capture kinetic and sensory data in a visually abstracted manner, which directly addressed another one of the foremost material challenges faced by artists of that era, concerning how to apply pigments to flat surfaces without merely mechanically or photographically replicating with undue literalness the effects of the visible world. Conceptually, Marey’s project manifested a coherent, mechanical response to naturalism based on two closely coupled premises: first, human visual perception is inherently

8

Futurist Conditions

limited, particularly when discerning physical motion over minute increments of time, and, second, his technical inventions overcame this constraint—by registering and recording phenomena inaccessible to the unaided senses. The futurist visual practices chronicled in this book would co-opt Marey’s system in order to compose images convincingly (and productively) removed from natural perception and naturalistic appearances. Based on a principle termed “the graphical method,” Marey designed and built numerous devices to accurately track phenomena—that is, to make visible previously invisible or imperceptible forces of the natural world.18 When referring to these specialized tools in 1878, he eloquently observed, “When the eye ceases to see, the ear to hear, touch to feel, or indeed when our senses give deceptive appearances, these instruments are like new senses of astonishing precision.”19 His technical solutions also represented the prosthetic extension of innately human sensory processes. For instance, his portable sphygmograph detected the beating of a human heart and transcribed its indexical traces with a small stylus moving across a piece of paper. Since these inscriptions followed a clearly delineated timeframe, they may be termed “chronographic.” The same idea to receive and to graphically transcribe data from the natural world extended to photographic cameras in the 1880s. Termed “chronophotography” by Marey, this variation on the graphical method preserved the specific traces of human and animal movements onto chemically treated plates. Resolving problems he encountered due to the long exposure times, these shorter exposures enabled him to superimpose the successive instants of an activity onto a single surface chronographically—again, according to predetermined increments of time. His strictly regulated photographic procedure counteracted innate perceptual limitations, while also bypassing more widely accepted linguistic and pictorial modes of description.20 Marey’s graphical method, in general, and chronophotography, in particular, participated in a historical redefinition of human perceptual and cognitive capacities.21 His automated procedures permitted the invisible forces of natural phenomena to be revealed more accurately (and with less distortion) than was possible through unmediated sensations alone, but this perceptual mechanization led to the anxiety associated with accessing previously unseen or imperceptible data. As several Marey scholars have noted, his method did not merely update antiquated representations or simply substitute new symbols for the designations of known phenomena. Rather, the human body was, in effect, being reinvented with each new instrument of perception, given that some of his instruments collected traces of previously unknown or unnamed phenomena.22

Introduction

9

That is, this emergence of unacknowledged sources of data would be performed bodily. By identifying these new sources, the mechanical and chemical procedures of his automated devices seemed to confirm the supposition that human perception can only ever be partially aware of the physical properties, or even the essential truths, of nature. In light of how disorienting this redefinition of perception may have been, a comparison between two Marey photographs from 1884 will illustrate not only why the scientist thought chronophotography could benefit naturalistic representation in the arts, but also why his research later fueled unforeseen visual experimentation in Italian futurism. The first image, Demenÿ Wearing Black Costume (Figure I.2), posed his assis­ tant outdoors, dress as if ready for a time-motion experiment. Wearing a black outfit with a black hood, both of which are visible against the pastoral backdrop of the Parisian periphery, Demenÿ assumes an air of comfortable assurance—with a flared foot and a hand on his hip. It’s just another day at the Physiological Station, his body language asserts in the ingrained parlance of traditional portraiture.23

Figure I.2  Étienne-Jules Marey, Demenÿ Wearing Black Costume with White Lines and Points, 1884, black-and-white photograph. La Cinématèque française, Paris.

10

Futurist Conditions

The dark cloth draped over a modified narrow-brim hat intentionally obscures his countenance, even if a sliver of his nose peaks out. This disguising technique was conceived by the scientist to present his test subjects “without confusion,” meaning to show them devoid of recognizable details, such as facial features and other data unrelated to their kinetic activities.24 Masking each of them in a black outfit against a dark background was Marey’s inventive solution to suppress their visible contours and to resolve the visual confusion that plagued his earlier attempts to register multiple superimposed images precisely and legibly. In addition, clearly visible in this full-length portrait, bright stripes and reflective spots have been affixed to the exterior of the dark costume as a means to highlight the essential nodes of physiological data, measured over brief spans of time. The second photograph, titled Jump in Place (Figure I.3), captures the result of a motion experiment in which Demenÿ wore the same outfit to leap straight up into the air. Notably, only half of this activity has been recorded, since inclusion

Figure I.3 Étienne-Jules Marey, Jump in Place, 1884, black-and-white chrono­ photograph. Archives of the Collège de France, Paris (3 PV 742).

Introduction

11

of the missing half may have overwritten and spoiled the usable data. The deep knee bend near ground level likely follows a careful descent from the apex of the jump, rather than an exceedingly strenuous launch from the same crouched position. Widely spaced white dots follow the head’s accelerating downward path. Unlike the posed portrait, Jump in Place has drastically deemphasized anatomical contours and circumvented the conventions of naturalistic illusionism. Although the idea to render motion “without confusion” hinged on reducing excessive data, this reductive procedure translated a formerly illusionistic record into an entirely different, nonnaturalistic system. Registering less data overall than the portrait, strictly speaking, the chronophotographic image tracks the body’s positions in and over time. But, these unfamiliar visual effects would have met with perplexity by an untrained observer. Like a statement of givens, prudently set forth prior to formulating a more complex visual problem, the traditional portrait of Demenÿ defined aspects of the experimental setup to assist an inexperienced viewer when translating from a familiar pictorial system into an analytical, unfamiliar one. Alternately expressing and suppressing Demenÿ’s figural contours, these two photographs could have made it easier for someone to more directly comprehend the chronophotographic results, as well as to reverse course and apply them to a traditional pictorial style. By knowing certain marks corresponded with specific positions, an artist might then sketch the precise position of bodily suspension at any given instant, before augmenting that basic schema with requisite layers of detail. However, even if these two Marey photographs could assist someone to make more naturalistic works, the same images can help to explain why certain artists, such as the futurists, would later reject Marey’s advice. By learning to move back and forth between chronographic and non-chronographic systems, an astute viewer could reasonably conclude that this procedure offered a viable alternative to long-standing pictorial conventions that demanded linear perspective, tonal shading and chiaroscuro, and naturalistic (or “local”) coloration. Although artists had long felt visual conventions needed updating, it was exceptionally difficult to demonstrate, convincingly and precisely, how such images should otherwise look.25 Having reduced actual phenomena to multiple, superimposed geometrical traces, Marey’s chronographic method became a promising path forward for those artists who rejected naturalism. Filtering into futurism a few decades later, this method of time-motion analysis inadvertently solved, or offered a range of solutions to, the challenge of nonnaturalistic visuality in the arts: with startling precision, his chronographic images effectively recalibrated the complex interrelations among observable objects, perceptual data, and their

12

Futurist Conditions

material inscriptions. Due to his death in 1904, Marey never learned the extent to which chronophotography assisted artists with identifying techniques that could be either used directly or modulated to systematically register phenomena nonnaturalistically. As the futurists embraced this alternative to traditional pictorial practices, an important lingering issue related to nineteenth-century positivism needed solving: how to reconcile Marey’s observational method with the living, pulsating phenomena of the modern world. Unlike most of his French contemporaries in the sciences, Marey maintained an unwavering positivist belief in discovering the clearly definable, material explanations for all natural processes.26 This doctrine, termed “mechanism,” presupposed that any actual phenomena could eventually be explained using physical laws that discounted appeals to invisible or immaterial causes. Such a principled rejection of metaphysics and assorted mysticisms meant that unseen agencies and indefinable forces could no longer feature in valid scientific explanations.27 While the futurists gladly imitated Marey’s unfamiliar, schematic imagery, this doctrine of mechanism—with its mechanical (viz., rationalist) worldview—would have been nearly impossible for them to accept at face value. If all observable outcomes can be traced to the rigorously defined principles of physics and physiology, then art-making itself would be scientifically explicable by closely analyzing its physical, material processes. For the futurists, this view of artistic inspiration would have required a potent, compensatory supplement to counteract Marey’s prohibition against metaphysical claims. Depending on one’s stance relative to the long-running historical debate between the mechanists, who defended scientific positivism, and the vitalists, who appealed to immaterial essences, artistic practices might be considered to be either rationally explicable or not fully available to analysis. By siding with the vitalists, the futurists necessarily defended the untranslatable, or even indefinable, qualities of the artistic imagination against encroachment by Marey’s scientific materialism. Unlike Marey and the other mechanists, the vitalists argued that not all aspects of human experience could be recorded, analyzed, and explained, particularly not the most essential ones. The French vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson noted that the mechanists’ rendering of human activity produced only stasis: “All that it [mechanics] retains of motion .  .  . is immobility.”28 In effect, a mechanistic approach might partially describe the physical effects of invisible processes, but it cannot fully account for the irreducible qualities of living things (not only humans), which were, for Bergson, veritable lifeworlds in continuous flux.29 By rejecting the perceived determinism in Marey’s analysis,

Introduction

13

Bergson and his followers believed that human psychic truths—those irreducible manifestations of nondeterministic, immaterial essences within human consciousness—were impossible to study scientifically, because they cannot be precisely predicted or recorded. Whereas Marey believed underlying causes and material effects were definable and calculable for any physical system, Bergson thought that certain aspects of human thought and experience were impossible to fully and adequately represent. Summarizing the view with which he strongly disagreed, the philosopher stated, “Wherever we succeed in giving a mechanical explanation, we observe a fairly strict parallelism between the physiological and the psychological series.”30 Based on what he took to be a faulty premise, the materialist idea of “strict parallelism” between mind and body needlessly constrained the conceptualization of intangible human qualities.31 If Marey’s research can be instructive, it can never fully explain certain human attributes, a vitalist might claim. By contrast, a doctrine of immeasurable, vitalistic forces retained at least the possibility that ineffable aspects of living phenomena exist, but only if they were not extracted from living actualities.32 In the long shadow of this discursive contest between mechanism and vitalism, several futurists adopted Marey’s mechanical method of transcribing kinetic motion over time, but they would compensate for the unsavory mechanistic implications within its materialist worldview—by professing Bergsonian ideas about life’s continuous, indivisible movement.33 One particular aspect of this late nineteenth-century doctrinal dispute touched futurism even more directly—when discussing the specific technological media of visual reproduction, which Bergson strongly associated with scientific overanalysis. He rejected the fixity of photographic snapshots, because he considered them to be the result of unwarranted determinism that divided up experiential reality (in order to analyze it) without really grasping it. A recurring example Bergson used to explain the folly of overanalysis was one of Zeno’s Paradoxes, in which an arrow let loose never arrived at its target, because the projected path it had been meant to follow could be indefinitely divided into smaller and smaller parts, purportedly leaving the object itself suspended in midair.34 Amusingly, this example prompts requisite incredulity: when life’s movement has been facetiously reduced to a limited set of analytical instances, or “stills” (which Bergson attributed to both Zeno’s analogy for overanalysis and to photographic analysis), living phenomena were, knowingly or not, being dissected, and their essences destroyed. Later distinguishing between deterministic fixity (i.e., snapshots) and nondeterministic motion (i.e., inner dynamism), Bergson portrayed cinema as just another form of analytical

14

Futurist Conditions

absurdity that composes a succession of lifeless stills that diminishes or destroys the intangible aspects of the things pictured.35 For his own part, Marey disliked film as well, because he thought it was not analytical enough, in that the act of merely reproducing perceptual illusions precluded them from figuring into his more rigorous and formal analyses of those illusions.36 For early twentiethcentury artists and intellectuals well aware of the debate between mechanism and vitalism, the media of instantaneous photography, chronophotography, and cinema not only altered how images were made and presented but also modified and reconfigured the internal (viz., nonmechanical) human processes of visual perception. In spite of some obvious similarities between Marey’s research and selected futurist works, such as their use of multiple figural traces aggregated onto a single image surface, the futurists implicitly rejected scientific materialism by resorting to Bergson’s idea that only by harnessing the irreducible qualities of motion could vitality be preserved.37 As the antitheses of life-in-movement, according to Bergson, photography and film did not capture the fullness of life unfolding, notwithstanding Zeno’s clever rationalizations to the contrary. In addition, Bergson’s references to mechanized visual media signified useful analogies for characterizing scientific analyses and deterministic thinking, but it’s unclear the extent to which the futurists accepted each of the various registers of his notoriously difficult philosophy, but Umberto Boccioni shows some of the clearest traces of Bergson’s influence on his own voluminous writings.38 When describing how artistic practices are expressions of human dynamism, for instance, the futurist revisited and adopted Bergson’s strong objection to photographic media.39 This strangely defiant response to the work of the camera would become an increasingly untenable position that pitted manual human activities against the perceived incursions into art-making by modern technologies. Boccioni would regularly repeat an opposition (preferred by Bergson) between indivisible, vitalistic movements and immobile, mechanical images; while the latter category no doubt encompassed filmic and other mechanical modes of reproduction, Boccioni would likely have included futurist artworks in the former grouping.40 That is, the underlying dichotomy between arrested matter and unfurling moments needed to be adjusted to highlight artistic expressivity as a vitalistic activity, even though Bergson noted that all fixed representations and static, material forms could not and did not fully and adequately preserve vitalistic essences.41 Notwithstanding the problem of correlating specific artworks with Bergson’s abstract principles (and despite some clever titles for artworks), Boccioni’s uncompromising attitude toward

Introduction

15

photography and its mechanistic fixity would create a contentious issue that extended to a variety of futurist art-making practices, as will be explored in the chapters to come.42 A central argument in this book will be that the camera and its photographic media—used to make both still and moving imagery—played a crucial role in the futurists’ artistic practices. When revisiting Marey’s chronophotography, various of their images imitated the moment-by-moment kinetic sequences of motion in order to insinuate the existence of other invisible, immaterial forces.43 Three of the key episodes of this formal and conceptual progression will be discussed in the forthcoming chapters: the Bragaglias’ illustration of vitalistic thinking in their artistic photography, Balla’s vast expansion of the methods of picturing invisible phenomena, and Boccioni’s overt rejection of mechanized visuality, in favor of a vitalistic system for expressing the shifting fortunes of a kinetic subject. Unlike Marey’s system of transcription, the physical and material properties found in their futurist imagery came to serve as analogies by which to intimate assorted hidden, immaterial realms. In-depth interpretations of those episodes will emerge from the methodological premise that the futurists conceptualized their images of physical, kinetic motion to be analogical structures, for which their literal symbolic references could serve as convenient stand-ins for a myriad of living, pulsating phenomena. This conceptual shift from literal movements to visual analogies for experiencing modern life may be distinguished from Marey’s scientific program, but it can be further set apart from Bergson’s philosophy, which could not be easily translated into specific artistic techniques.44 Before returning to some of the long-standing historical analogies for kinetic motion in the visual arts, it can be worthwhile to revisit how early cinema related (or not) to futurism, at a moment when this new medium, with its rapidly expanding commercial industry in Italy, was drastically reshaping visual perception.

Early Cinematic Cues Another initial irony about the early futurist responses to mechanical reproduction involves a prevalent art historical narrative that has closely associated many of its artworks with technological advances in visual reproduction, such as chronophotography and cinema. From futurism’s earliest days, critics had assumed that futurist paintings depicted motion in the vein of moving pictures, with one claiming that, by offering viewers only charades of motion, their images were overly analytical and lacking in artistry.45 Curiously,

16

Futurist Conditions

those recurring references to futurist paintings as imitations of film actually amounted to a cruel accusation at the time, considering that many observers of early cinema believed its mechanical imagery diminished the vibrancy of life, rather than revealing it.46 Most notably, Boccioni vigorously contested this techno-centric interpretation by claiming that the motion in their works manifested emotional and intuitive paths (rather than literal or mechanical ones), and, in turn, he charged cubism (rather than futurism) with using such analytical and mechanical procedures.47 A more recent instantiation of this same narrative attends to the perceived formal and conceptual limitations of early futurism, and the idea that, by mimicking aspects of mechanical media, these artists had been overly literal, especially when contrasted with complex conceptual alternatives and abstracting tendencies in other artistic experiments from 1910 to 1913.48 Along with capturing an apparent misunderstanding about the conceptual implications of futurist imagery, the presumption that the futurists uncritically emulated mechanical and cinematic processes had emerged from the broad sociocultural debate, predating futurism, on the nature and status of the cinematic image. In 1907, Italian author Giovanni Papini, who became allied with the futurists in 1912, portrayed the movie theater as a site of philosophical inquiry, even if the visual effects found there were perceptually and psychically disorienting.49 For Papini, film projections in dark theaters prompted spectators to experience new qualities of visual perception. Historically, a rapid increase in the number of Italian film production companies in the four years before 1910 resulted in a threefold increase in the number of films made during that same period.50 Perhaps the foremost invention in the Italian film industry before the First World War was the pioneering of the historical epic genre, resulting from a combination of factors, including the availability of longer film stock, large outdoor film sets, innovative funding mechanisms for larger productions, and the proliferation of newly built movie houses to meet increased demand. Among early Italian film practitioners were the Roman brothers Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, who joined futurism after training at the film studio Cines. The vociferous debate within futurism concerning their artistic use of mechanical media will be investigated in Chapter 1. Elsewhere, the Italian film theorist Ricciotto Canudo, then living in Paris, came to regard film as a full-fledged artistic medium that invited viewers to forget their individual identities and become part of a unified, collective entity.51 A similarly collectivist interpretation of film included an anonymous critic of this era, who noted: “Everyone crowds together, mingles, merges in the grand caldron of the cinematograph.”52 In 1909, Italian socialist

Introduction

17

Arturo Labriola proclaimed cinema to be a tool of mass education, with which to vivify the lessons of history—the same socially progressive reasoning offered by the futurists in late 1916.53 Although some Italians considered cinema to be capable of educating children, awakening collective spirit, or inspiring social revolution, the realities of securing financing for this expanding national industry amounted to a strong countervailing tendency that would reinforce many of the existing norms and traditions guiding its forms of popular entertainment.54 The historical context of early filmmaking and film criticism in Italy was influential for the futurists to the extent that these artists initially approached cinema hesitantly, with very little evidence prior to the First World War to suggest that they should treat film as an inherently futurist medium.55 In 1912, before being granting official entry to futurism, Bruno Corra penned the manifesto “Abstract Cinema—Chromatic Music,” in which he documented experiments made by him and his Ravenna-based associates to compose quasi-musical symphonies with nonrepresentational color.56 At first, the group constructed a “chromatic piano”—a keyboard now lost or destroyed that controlled painted electric bulbs—which they considered unsatisfactory due to its limited luminosity.57 Again, the collaborators circumvented the film camera when passing hand-painted strips before a powerful projector bulb to generate dazzling colored light. Considering the rivalry among visual media, it is notable that these projected works symbolically replaced painters, including an instance of a blank canvas serving as their projection screen.58 Perhaps unsurprisingly, when this group was assimilated into futurism in 1913, their mechanized version of chromatic intensity came into conflict with the views of other futurists, and the recent recruits Corra and his brother Arnaldo Ginna decided to abandon cinematic abstraction.59 In 1914, Aldo Molinari made a film based on Aldo Palazzeschi’s futurist text “Il controdolore” (1913), which might have been considered the first futurist film, if Boccioni and Marinetti had not openly criticized it for being insufficiently futurist, going so far as to designate it an unauthorized use of futurist principles.60 In a general sense, the futurists’ eventual acceptance of cinema arrived only after turning away from Boccioni’s outspoken opposition.61 By 1915, Balla unselfconsciously admitted that, when “watching a cinematographic performance, we find ourselves in front of a painting in movement.”62 In the following year, the first film to be made (and authorized) by the futurists—Ginna’s now lost black-and-white film Vita futurista (Futurist Life) (dir. Arnaldo Ginna, 1916)—involved stringing together disjointed scenes from a stereotypically indefatigable futurist day, including eating, fighting, racing, and exercising.63 Taking up the artistic challenges posed

18

Futurist Conditions

by the inventions of cinema, chronophotography, and photography, the futurists reaffirmed their decisions to use static artistic media, and they revisited some of the key issues concerning visualizing motion, which had already figured prominently in art history before the arrival of futurism.

Anticipatory Motion Following Renaissance-era discussion of the relative merits of artistic media, which drew from fragmentary accounts on the subject by the ancient Greeks, the paragone debate about the intrinsic qualities of media reemerged when art history was pioneered as a stand-alone discipline. In 1766, German aesthete Gotthold Ephraim Lessing revisited a key distinction between succession and simultaneity, for which works with images following one after another over time (e.g., poetry and music) were differentiated from works offering a single, static image “all at once” (e.g., painting and sculpture). Despite this difference, he stated that artists can adeptly adjust for the limitations of a static medium— by selecting a single pivotal instant that alludes to adjacent instants and that foreshadows an eventual resolution. Famously translated into English as “the pregnant moment,” a set of well-chosen static forms can allude to past and future events within a particularly expansive present.64 Lessing’s indelible example is the Hellenistic sculpture referred to as Laocoön and His Sons, made by several artists from Rhodes around the first century BCE and unearthed in Rome in 1506 (after centuries missing) (Figure I.4). Capturing the climax of a well-known ancient myth, this sculptural rendering depicts two enormous serpents setting upon three members of one family. Unlike poetic descriptions of Laocoön’s anguished cries, this marble figure’s relative calmness amid desperate activity underscores the author’s point that a privileged instant can imply what is not shown directly. For Lessing, hinting at a viscerally anguished condition, rather than overtly depicting it, infused static forms with a distinct modality of time: something not yet actualized, but present virtually.65 Whereas this privileged view implies successive moments within a specific narrative, the same idea about temporally suggestive forms shifted historically to include the qualities associated with other visual modes of temporality as well. As mechanical and chemical innovations among competing photographic processes in the mid-nineteenth century permitted the precise qualities of perceptual experience to be preserved within a static medium, by 1895 other optical devices simulated visual motion by successfully recording the impressions

Introduction

19

Figure I.4  Hagesandros, Polydoros, and Athenodoros of Rhodes, Laöcoon and His Sons, c. first Century BCE (or first century CE), excavated in Rome in 1506. Museum Pio-Clementino, Vatican Museum, Vatican City.

of more or less real-time activities.66 Alongside the generalized amazement at the material impressions of actual events, contemporaneous artistic discussions of these mechanized media hinged on whether the resulting imagery revealed a subject’s underlying essence or chronicled its trivialities devoid of deeper significance. According to Henri Matisse in 1908, photography preserved only the most accidental, arbitrary views of a subject, rather than capturing the deeper expressive or emotional truths he sought.67 Harkening back to the paragone debate, Matisse reasoned that artists have the capacity to grasp a figure’s essential grace and beauty by maintaining distance from the overly literal and mechanical effects of photographic media.68 Prior to photography’s wider acceptance as an artistic medium, many observers (not only Bergson) had believed that its automated, “accidental” procedures were incapable of showing deeper truths or essences, as visual artists purportedly did. Umberto Boccioni used a similar term—“visual accident”—to describe slavishly naturalistic imagery, including photographs and films, which he deemed unable to capture the essences of the phenomena pictured.69 Rather than depicting a “series of small, fragmentary, accidental occurrences,” true artistic expressivity communicated a subject’s essential, emotive potentiality.70 According to Boccioni, traditional artistic mediums could preserve the essential truths of vitalistic motion, whereas the more accidental qualities of instantaneous photography could not, which, to his mind, greatly diminished its status among

20

Futurist Conditions

the visual arts. Even if these devices could record the impressions of people amid daily, observable activities, Boccioni disdainfully described photographic media as a “wretched obsession with optical illusion.”71 Contrasting properties among visual media, he conspicuously anchored futurist art in vitalist thinking, since it “leaves the task of the verisimilar reproduction of objects and figures to illustrators and, above all, to photographers.”72 Boccioni’s resistance to mechanical forms of visual reproduction effectively meant that the other futurists needed to remain cautious about photographically inspired imagery and that early Italian futurism could not (and would not) fully embrace cinema before 1916. Prior to that time, when photographic processes were used or cited, they were carefully circumscribed: for instance, Anton Giulio Bragaglia claimed in 1913 that he and his brother had no interest in scientific photography or cinematography, and, after being reprimanded by Boccioni for using photographic techniques, Balla redirected his efforts toward more abstract compositions, though Boccioni found those to be “too photographic” as well.73 If photographic reproducibility remained a contentious issue for the futurists through the outbreak of the First World War, a deeper confluence among the artistic responses to mechanical forms emerged in the direct investigations of human visual perception. In the middle of the twentieth century, German cognitive psychologist and cultural theorist Rudolf Arnheim approached representations of kinetic motion systematically, as part of a sweeping overview of perception.74 His research on the ways that sensory pathways (i.e., seeing, hearing, and touch) permit people to access various registers of experiential data led him to presuppose that fixed and moving images (whether photographic or not) have the capacity to convey to viewers complex data about specific attitudes, skills, knowledge, and beliefs. Revisiting the ancient distinction between simultaneous and sequential media, Arnheim argued that viewers interpret motion through perceptual habits, which enable them to supplement static visual forms vis-à-vis the specific mental operations of continuation and animation, for instance. In this perceptual model, certain visual stimuli, such as human figures, can induce kinesthetic responses in viewers, whereas another visual faculty makes informed guesses about objects or images of objects, such as when the outstretched wings of a bird implies motion. Because viewers require time to process those “immediate” visual data, the external sensory cues necessarily correspond to time-dependent processes within individual viewers, meaning that even “all-at-once” images unfold according to the temporality of perception.75 Arnheim also observed that the successive instants in cinema and stroboscopic photography of kinetic motion generate internal rhythms and

Introduction

21

tempos for a viewer, which remain distinct from any external, mechanically defined increments of time. They have their own temporal signatures. As part of this discussion, he singled out the Italian futurists, along with Marcel Duchamp, for using “stroboscopic effects” to multiply subject matter across a single frame.76 Although Arnheim did not offer any sustained analysis of futurist imagery, his analytical framework addresses some of the experiential conditions triggered by motion—not only as literal representations of kinetic activities but also as internal templates of perception and cognition, learned over time. According to him, a viewer responds to the expressive qualities of visual motion—by understanding formal relations, by relating them to his or her internal experiential templates, and by identifying their literal and analogical meanings, such as when decoding diagrams or sets of instructions.77 Whether fixed or moving, photographic or nonphotographic, these specialized modes of data transmission (viz., images) manifest perceptual and cognitive activities that can directly associate internal, temporal schema with the specific material properties of external imagery.78 In the mid-twentieth century, German art historian Ernst Gombrich likewise claimed that the perception of still imagery entails time-dependent activities that amount to “reading an image.”79 Accordingly, visual recognition can register varied expressions (or representations) of time in static media.80 As a set of temporally rich, historically specific activities, visual perception may be trained to comprehend diverse compositional techniques (in both traditional and nontraditional media), such as blur, repetition, masking, cropping, and compositing.81 When describing how such techniques try to compete with the drastically reduced timespan of photographic instants, Gombrich demonstrated a profound, but not fully articulated, interest in avant-garde experiments that drew attention to the underlying normative modes of visuality.82 In his estimation, early twentieth-century European painters “imposed an alternative reading on reality and thus gradually succeeded in exploring the dazzling ambiguity of vision.”83 If the attendant confusion could no doubt be visually stimulating, he singled out the Italian futurists, “with all their glorification of speed and movement,” as having pursued an overly literal rendition of kinetic motion that “followed the camera rather tamely in the imitations of double exposures.”84 By assuming that the futurists’ interest in photographic processes precluded them from exploring the same dazzling complexities as other artists, he did not examine any of the nonliteral structures associated with time-motion in futurism. Adjacent to this reductive framing of futurism, Gombrich formulated another position that may be productive for rethinking futurist imagery: he

22

Futurist Conditions

highlighted those qualities of anticipation that foreshadow events to come.85 After reiterating the temporality of perception, he added, “the immediate future we are thus making ready for is as much really present in our mind as is the past.”86 He claimed that a photograph, painting, sculpture, or other material image can be psychologically set into motion through a cognitive function he termed “anticipation of the future.”87 Picking up on and extending Lessing’s mention of virtual motion, Gombrich signaled a model of perception that permitted visual techniques to manifest relatively complex temporal inferences, such as anticipation.88 Yet, if Lessing’s pregnant moment suggested what came before and what will come after in a fixed narrative progression, Gombrich situated anticipatory visuality amid a cognitive process governing the use of any sensory data, by which people make informed guesses about what was, what is, or what will be. By making predictions based on visual data alone, anticipation circumscribes a valuable category for both static and moving images, whose thematic content or formal techniques trigger or even modulate temporally conditioned responses.89 Outside of the visual arts, anticipation also designated an innately timesensitive, human faculty in philosophical, psychological, and physiological texts from the turn of the twentieth century. For instance, French philosopher Edmund Husserl described it as a fundament of experience (alongside memory and real-time perception), which greatly expanded the description for the types of temporality that can exist internally for a person.90 Elsewhere, Henri Bergson distinguished between two types of anticipation: one type predicts patterns of activity in order to reduce uncertainty, and the other type preserves uncertainty as an aspect of voluntary, non-prescribed action.91 In this case, anticipation manifested distinct modes of imagining events to come—as predictable, mechanical trajectories or, by contrast, as unpredictable, dynamic ones. For the former case, the future could be considered a transparent or semitransparent medium, through which spatial and temporal relations may be precisely deduced, recorded, and regulated. By contrast, the latter type alludes to what comes next, though it cannot be precisely known, so this version of unfolding time remains comparatively opaque (i.e., unclear, non-visible, or obscured). In Bergson’s work, the unpredictability of this second type of anticipation enhances autonomous free will, which can flourish in the absence of the more overbearing precision associated with the first type.92 If Lessing’s pregnant moment presumed that viewers would have familiarity with the myth of Laocoön, thus fitting the more calculable type of anticipation, Bergson’s privileging of uncertainty foregrounded distinct temporal conditions that avoided predetermined paths

Introduction

23

and “mechanical” solutions. Over a few years (c. 1911–13), the visual languages of futurist imagery would shift radically—from rendering calculable, precise trajectories to exploring less clearly defined visual modalities of time and motion. In the early twentieth century, anticipation caused anxiety-inducing conditions that acknowledged an unpredictable future, while traversing a range of bodily and mental symptoms, according to the German psychophysiologist Wilhelm Wundt. The human propensity to “outrun the impressions of the present” had suggested to Wundt that virtual forces can readily modify and distort what is perceived to be a real-time situation.93 This emphasis on phenomena that cannot be fully known permits all manner of dream, menace, and desire to enter consciousness—not simply as calculable estimates of future events, but also as possible or imaginary outcomes. Whether time was considered clearly delineated or shrouded in opacity, the concept of the future (c. 1900) exerted unseen pressures onto unfolding human experience, complicated by multiple possible solutions and suspended in the forewake of what would only transpire if and when certain conditions are met. From the limited view of the present, we can perceive conditional futures. In 1913, Italian polymath Guglielmo Ferrero similarly described a nervous condition, for which an inability to anticipate events with precision could lead to profound agitation.94 Convinced that this affliction would culminate in pernicious health effects, Ferrero all the same admits that, in overtly less debilitating temporal situations, this same faculty of anticipation could fuel creativity in the arts. For the Italian futurists, tracking anticipatory tempos across both mechanical and nonmechanical media could assist viewers to acclimate to continuously changing conditions of time—by sharing their own artistic solutions to the mental and physiological challenges posed by industrial mechanization. As human sensitivity to the conditions of modern temporality increased, the idea of anticipation held open a deeper question about whether or not altered perceptions of time may be directly induced by static visual forms.

Visual Analogies Beginning with Marinetti’s vision of vehicular danger and exhilaration, the futurist obsession with speed was never strictly literal, but traversed multiple registers of meaning—as specific subject matter, as a radical attitude for altering traditional ways of life and for prompting perceptual adaptation, and as an analogy for the qualities or effects of a rapidly modernizing society. During an intense period of experimentation from mid-1911 to mid-1914, futurist visual

24

Futurist Conditions

artists constructed a range of images to register the qualitative, or experiential, measures of time, at times augmenting other quantitative, or mechanistic, ones. But, if Marey’s method demonstrated how photographic procedures can augment inherently limited perceptions, these artists assumed that, along with identifying unseen sources of living phenomena, other invisible modalities of visual motion could likely be found as well. By co-opting the effects associated with chronophotography, they formulated poetic and vitalistic pictorial solutions aimed at asserting alternative perceptual and experiential modalities. Originally predicated on a shared interest in kinetic speed, these artists initially focused on the indispensable strategy of using the visual traces of physical and physiological motion to compose visual analogies, which opened to and pictured other abstract or non-sensory registers of meaning. As noted in the preceding section, the category of anticipatory motion could accommodate diverse, at times competing, temporal qualities. Although well suited to Marinetti’s disruptive cultural and political program, futurist visual art did not always or necessarily conform to the discrete temporal categories of past, present, and future. Such temporally rich imagery strategically recorded actual material conditions to suggest adjacent unseen forces, virtual phenomena, or alternative trajectories; that is, along with denoting kinetic forces via machinic symbols, their visual forms corresponded with new perceptual and cognitive suppositions that presumed an altered awareness of time. Stretching the limits of the underlying visual rules in order to allude to what otherwise could not be shown, these analogies were fairly openended, meaning that the target values (i.e., what they are analogies for) might remain undefined or undisclosed, making them more challenging to identify and characterize than any straightforward symbolic associations. To navigate more easily among the multiple, competing modes of visual motion in Italian futurism, it can be instructive to recall a rigorous model of visuality articulated by the American philosopher Nelson Goodman. Constituting densely layered ensembles of meaning, spanning a myriad of syntaxes and contexts, visual works of all types (not only artworks) rely on conceptual schemas governed by rules that may or may not refer to the subject matter depicted. That is, the verisimilitude of any image does not determine or exhaust its functionality within a given system (termed “visual language” by Goodman), similar to the way a coin can serve analogically as a game piece, during which it temporarily follows a set of rules unrelated to its monetary value.95 Similarly, an image’s function does not necessarily dictate its formal or thematic content, and a visual work might function into one or more visual systems, for which specific meanings do not always and unavoidably correspond with its subject

Introduction

25

matter. An important overarching distinction for Goodman’s “languages” is the dichotomy between literal and metaphorical meanings, which typically derive from adjacent visual systems. However, the unequivocal designation of any specific image as strictly literal or metaphorical (though sometimes both) can be problematic, such as when an image’s function remains uncertain or incomplete, or when its visual forms function in multiple systems at once, or when an image retains a fixed meaning in one system, but carries shifting or obscured associations in another one.96 Encompassing both literal and metaphorical possibilities among multiple fixed and dynamic systems, Goodman’s theory of visual meaning traverses both photographic and nonphotographic media, and the value of any given imagery can follow as much (if not more so) from how it operates among various visual languages as from what subject matter it depicts or even how it was made. Given that even highly descriptive (i.e., literal) signs can develop metaphorical associations, Goodman’s theory helps to explain how the properties or behaviors from adjacent visual systems can derive from and expand the conceptual range of any specific imagery (literal or naturalistic).97 As a general instance explored by Goodman, not in much depth, early twentiethcentury painters deemphasized thematic or symbolic content when redefining the abstract pictorial qualities of their increasingly nonrepresentational works. When applying this same approach to the material of art history, futurist images of kinetic and other temporal actions can carry both literal and metaphorical significance, and they may be framed relative to the multiple, adjacent visual syntaxes in which they appear and participate. In 1913–14, several futurist painters adopted the term “plastic analogies” to describe a method for making artworks, by which firsthand experiences would be translated into visual forms, so that viewers interpreting those forms can access radically modern perceptual and cognitive data. Before this concept appeared in the visual arts, Marinetti had already prescribed an analogical technique for composing futurist literature, which entailed combining two or more symbolic forms into a single, composite image.98 However, the key text prompting this discursive choice to describe artworks as analogies was a review of the futurist exhibition in Paris in February 1912, in which French poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire noted the artists seemed disinterested in “plastic problems” and “purely plastic concerns.”99 To Apollinaire, futurist imagery was more literal (viz., less conceptually rich) than work by other avant-garde movements at the time, and, due to this author’s stature and close acquaintance with the futurists, this discursive framing not only influenced their revised descriptions of their works but, even more significantly, led some artists to alter their compositional

26

Futurist Conditions

practices. Later that year, Boccioni took an interest in “pure plastic rhythm” and “plastic movement,” but his first use of the phrase “plastic analogy” came in a handwritten chapter draft from late April 1913.100 Opening to a new internal reality, which signified to him “the very essence of poetry,” plastic analogization blossomed at the heart of futurist visual art to guide its ongoing development. This radical principle of poetic visual and material associations would signal the fruition of several interrelated concepts, such as plastic emotion, plastic states of mind, plastic totality, and, appearing in the subtitle of Boccioni’s 1914 book, Plastic Dynamism.101 If Apollinaire identified symbolic literalness as an impediment to their capacity to experiment productively, the critic’s references to plasticity in the visual arts found a particularly receptive audience in the futurists themselves, who came to reframe their creative efforts with more formally rigorous and conceptually attuned discourses.102 When writing about futurist approaches to plasticity, Boccioni expressed his desire to depict visual motion, which led him to acknowledge the differences between literal kinetic motion and a type of motion that was not or had not yet been actualized.103 Using terms reminiscent of Bergson’s philosophy (viz., absolute and relative motion), a key distinction among multiple types of motion indicates Boccioni realized that virtual conditions might be indicated visually, irrespective of any immediately observable activities or effects. Practically speaking, this advanced theorization of virtual and actual motion in the visual arts implies that any thematic content is capable of registering either literal or analogical values; that is, even if pictorial subjects have (or possess) kinetic motion literally, they may be framed by (or expressed through) an analogous, virtual case of futurist time-motion.104 When Boccioni applied this distinction to depicting a range of actual and virtual qualities, however, another tricky artistic question remained: Which formal and material structures in his works corresponded with which qualities of unfolding temporality?105 Critically, by seeking to use analogical inferences to show what was latent inside an object or a person, this artist rejected the “accidental” appearances for picturing vitalistic motion with photographic media, as he formulated a nonphotographic alternative to convey a set of essential, but materially specific, qualities he termed “plastic potentiality.”106 Purportedly conveyed by the physical objects themselves, this condition of potentiality might coincide with literal, observable phenomena, but, more likely, it signaled deep-seated, virtual qualities that have not (yet) been manifested in actuality. Close analyses in this study of the futurists’ choices of artistic materials and techniques will largely hinge on their conflicting interpretations of the historical appearance of the camera—a general

Introduction

27

designation referring to the automated mechanical and chemical processes of photography, chronophotography, and film. Whether by denoting identifiable subject matter or by alluding to virtual, invisible sources of movement, or by referring to political struggles and economic realities in the broader society, the futurists envisioned complicated material and visual analogies for a range of vitalistic, nonmechanical temporalities. By the early twentieth century, photography, chronophotography, and cinema had exerted powerful effects on the perceptual and cognitive systems of artists and viewers alike, with each mode of mechanized vision carrying distinct qualities for transcribing a range of experiential connotations. According to the American media historian Mary Ann Doane, a new epistemic structure emerged around 1900, stemming from multiple technological inventions that together sparked a historically specific awareness of time.107 Having become sensitized to the principles and effects of unfolding time, the futurists responded to the temporal implications of proto-filmic and filmic motion, but they also resisted the overt materialist and rationalist principles underlying mechanized modes of visuality, according to Doane. Although the futurists did not argue for a single, cohesive, or systematic alternative to the effects of this mechanization, they introduced a spectrum of vitalist connotations into their compositional techniques to purportedly reveal implausible, distorted, at times illegible aggregations of sensory data. Within the broad lineage of mechanized perception, futurist visual art captures a strong tension between legible and illegible forms, which plays against the crucial distinction between literal and analogical meanings, but which Doane directly links to emerging historical concerns with contingency.108 Overall, since analogical registers of meaning can overlay literal renderings of motion, careful examination of the sociohistorical conditions and intellectual environment informing futurist visuality can illuminate subtle variations among specific artists’ efforts to imagine distinct temporalities. More specifically, along with the themes of kinetic activity, such as motorized transport, a complementary interpretation of futurism positions the era-defining automated procedures of the camera at the core of their diverse creative practices (among several adjacent visual systems), due to its capacity to record and imagine visible and invisible phenomena. The automated perception of the camera and long-standing interest in visual motion in both art history and cognitive science offer two points of entry for analyzing multiple futurist approaches to visual motion. In Chapter 1, the photographic techniques developed by Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia contributed a powerful riposte to the more restrictive logic of Marey’s chronophotographic procedures—by alluding to psychic and spiritual forces

28

Futurist Conditions

that manifest in and through our human apparatus. For the brothers, the temporality of their machinic vision could reveal or analogize human essences. The Bragaglias’ official affiliation with futurism lasted briefly (approximately ten months), and it was punctuated by a public condemnation published in the main futurist journal Lacerba in October 1913. The controversy surrounding their photographic research also had the unanticipated effect of refocusing the efforts of other futurist artists on addressing the psychophysiological experiences of motion—in both its literal and analogical dimensions. While these refocused efforts are examined in the chapters that follow, a pivotal contradiction between mechanically reproduced images of actual bodies and metaphysical connotations of bodily processes can be provisionally explained by only tenuously resolving a lingering worry that automated visual media would redefine human subjectivity without retaining its spiritual content. Indeed, their data spanning assorted perceptual, kinesthetic, and temporal registers were discussed in Anton Giulio’s writings as inspiring individual and collective modes of spiritual renewal. But, by trying to combat the perceived dangers of mechanization in and through their experimental photography, the Bragaglias decided to recreate and then openly fake the hidden sources of bodily vitality. One source of anxiety-inducing contradiction was deferred, at least temporarily, while another one was revealed. In Chapter 2, Giacomo Balla initially explored visual analogies between kinetic forces and mechanical imagery by depicting chronophotographic motion in a straightforward and literal manner. Based on a premise similar to the one motivating Marey’s research—to make invisible forces visible—Balla’s imagery was criticized by Boccioni for not questioning, as well as not supplementing, certain positivist assumptions concerning his adopted visual system. Soon Balla’s static images of unfolding time assumed much more unfamiliar or inscrutable forms. By heeding Boccioni’s advice, he steadily shifted away from formal literalness toward underscoring other connotations for physical motion: Balla’s precise patterns of various kinds of energetic discharges transcribed visual and nonvisual sensations alike, and they served as modifiable visual schema for consumer products and clothing designs, as well as templates for collective agency and societal rejuvenation. Drawing upon chronophotography to reveal complex visual analogies for mechanically defined instants, Balla applied Marey’s scientific lessons to the challenges of visualizing psychic and social aggregates and of pioneering a recurring motif in a range of media: festive urban collectivity. Boccioni’s images of bodily motion appear in Chapter 3 as part of an investigation into his series of plastic analogies depicting a demonstrative

Introduction

29

mode of futurist subjectivity. Based on the artist’s self-professed awareness of historical forces driving Italy’s industrial modernization, his images of frenetic bodily activities allude to adjacent phenomena that are intentionally enigmatic to decipher. Drawing upon interpretive analyses of the artist’s writings, alongside critical responses to his artworks, this chapter portrays his bodily imagery as both implicit and explicit rejections of photographic procedures, as were adopted by the Bragaglias and imitated by Balla. Even though Boccioni’s figures-in-motion resembled aspects of other futurist solutions—by similarly calculating the sensory patterns of anticipatory motion—his complex structures relied on an idiosyncratic formal language of bodily exertion, which served to analogize invisible psychosocial forces circulating among large, anonymous, urban populations. As this chapter argues, the analogical value of his images can function as the generalized template of a futurist body-in-motion, one calibrated to radically diverge from the mechanized chronologies of the camera. Amid a series of perceptual distortions, formal displacements, and bold conceptual substitutions, Boccioni’s faceless figures would merge unexpectedly with the surrounding architecture—their energetic forces becoming strangely immobilized at the moment of their most ambitious vitalistic extension. If similarly demonstrative connotations mark the work of other futurist artists at this time, Boccioni’s assertively nonmechanized images of unencumbered bodies construct complex visual analogies for a timely departure into plastic potentiality, a planned escape from a detail-heavy naturalism and from actual social and historical conditions, and a flight into the adjacent temporalities of anticipation, contingency, and destiny. Comparisons among several futurist images, while necessarily abbreviated, can foreground specific artistic qualities to be correlated with distinctly futurist conditions. In The Walking Man (1911) (Figure I.5), the Bragaglias pictured a human presence unfolding according to an irregular, temporal repetition of horizontally interconnected traces. Unlike Marey’s rationalist procedures, meting out equal, precisely calculated units of linear time, the subtle hesitations and accelerations of this ambulating futurist confirm that the mechanical procedure augmented the brothers’ efforts to imagine expressive activities, including spiritual essences. By contrast, as Boccioni identified and responded to the perceived threat posed by photographic media, he envisioned a figural system not confined to mechanically produced temporal slices, but rather expanded to new temporal conditions, expressed through abbreviated forms (i.e., no head, no hands, and no feet) and forcelines running perpendicular to the perceived anatomical contours (Figure I.6). Unlike the “accidental” photographic

30

Futurist Conditions

 

 

Figure I.5 (left)  Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, The Walking Man, 1911, gelatin silver print. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (90-B21279). ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome. Figure I.6 (center)  Umberto Boccioni, Muscular Dynamism, 1913, pastel and charcoal on paper, 34 × 23 ¼ in. (86.3 × 59 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Figure I.7 (right)  Giacomo Balla, Piedigrotta in Velocity + Noise, c. 1914, 19 ¼ × 13 in. (49 × 33 cm), pencil, ink, and oil paint on metallic foil and paper. Collection Sergio Poggianella, Rovereto, Italy. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

views to be avoided, Boccioni’s defiantly nonmechanized figures presuppose invisible essences fueling a deep-seated psychophysical potentiality, visualized analogically as a figure spilling out beyond the parameters of anatomically correct definitions of the modern urban subject. For Balla, automated processes and mechanical velocities alluded to both human and inhuman qualities, which can coexist within a chaotic urban landscape. In Piedigrotta (c. 1914) (Figure I.7), mechanized forms overrun the bipedal striding motion, and their combined kinetic effects generate a well-coordinated graphical pattern punctuated by its serrated mode of conveyance. Unlike his earlier, more literal chronophotographic imagery, such as Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912), the sequential positions in Piedigrotta compose an ensemble of machinic and non-machinic forces moving through the futurist medium par excellence—the human body. Even as each formal solution offers an individual artistic response to the camera, taken together these darting figures indicate something of the disparate range of futurist techniques, media, and analogical associations to be covered and closely compared in the following chapters. In the early Italian futurists’ rush to create visual analogies to conceptualize a rejuvenated, mobile subject—with new perceptual, psychophysical, and sociopolitical capacities—their formal experimentation produced a wide spectrum of actual, potential, and imaginary trajectories, in which highly

Introduction

31

differentiated compositional strategies plotted out the temporal qualities of individual and collective experiences, relative to technological modes of perception.109 At times yielding precise trajectories of imagined time, these artists also flirted with nondeterministic trajectories, which registered aspects of their dawning awareness of the more unsettling and destructive effects of modernization. The challenge to accurately describe this historical shift in temporal awareness across varied visual systems can be extended to addressing the interpretive problem concerning how specific formal techniques and material qualities pertained to and expanded futurist thinking. Although the adaptable conditions of futurist visuality were often dependent on idiosyncratic artistic assumptions about modern experience, these futurist artists embraced shared strategies to introduce viewers to seemingly uncharted formal and conceptual terrain rooted in disruptive thematic associations. Amid complicated repertoires of real and imagined trajectories, such as explosive forces, unstable patterns, social unrest, destructive possibilities, and other energetic discharges, these futurist visual artists focused on the strange perceptual and sociohistorical effects they experienced, while their hypersensitized images anticipated altered patterns and changed conditions— in an exceedingly opaque future.

Notes 1 In 1969, Enrico Crispolti framed futurist aesthetics with the “myth of the machine.” Enrico Crispolti, Il mito della macchina e altri temi del futurismo (Trapani, Italy: Celebes, 1969). A few years later, Roberto Tessari described futurism’s enthusiasm for technology as an extension of nineteenth-century literary motifs. Roberto Tessari, Il mito della macchina: Letteratura e industria nel primo Novecento italiano (Milan: Mursia, 1973). 2 Marinetti’s manifesto was inspired, in part, by a real-world experience of vehicular misfortune. Günther Berghaus, Genesis of Futurism: Marinetti’s Early Career and Writings, 1899–1909 (Leeds, UK: Society for Italian Studies, 1995), 76. 3 The clearest outline of the futurist sensibility is found in F. T. Marinetti, “Destruction of Syntax—Untrammeled Imagination—Words-in-Freedom” (June 1913); reprinted in F. T. Marinetti, Critical Writings, ed. Günther Berghaus and trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006), 120–31. 4 F. T. Marinetti, “Fondation et manifeste du Futurisme,” Le Figaro year 55, series 3, no. 51 (February 20, 1909): 1.

32

Futurist Conditions

5 While cars symbolized industrial modernity writ large for Marinetti and the other futurists, British artist and writer Wyndham Lewis mocked Marinetti’s simplistic modernist mantra of “automobilism.” See Wyndham Lewis, “Long Live the Vortex!,” Blast 1 (June 1914): 12; and Wyndham Lewis, “A Review of Contemporary Art,” Blast 2 (July 1915): 40. 6 F. T. Marinetti, “New Ethical Religion of Speed” (June 1916); reprinted in Marinetti, Critical Writings, 253–9. In “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” (May 1912), Marinetti mentioned the automobile engine as a useful literary model; reprinted in Marinetti, Critical Writings, 107–19. Other examples of Marinetti’s mechanistic literary imagery before the First World War include “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909); his novel Mafarka the Futurist (1909); and the text “Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine” (1910–15). 7 Marinetti described the integration of aesthetic tendencies with sociopolitical activities as art-action (arte-azione in Italian); see F. T. Marinetti, Guerra sola igiene del mondo (War, the World’s Only Hygiene) (Milan: Ed. Futuriste di “Poesia,” 1915), 6. Art historian Giovanni Lista sketches an “activist model” of futurism to frame movement’s confrontational dimension as a rehearsal of patriotic claims. Giovanni Lista, “The Activist Model; Or, the Avant-Garde as Italian Invention,” South Central Review 13, nos. 2–3 (Summer–Fall 1996): 13–34. For Lista, this activist model contrasted with cubism’s “atelier model,” oriented around nonconfrontational practices in the studio and at the gallery. Also, Christine Poggi discusses Marinetti’s desire in 1908 to establish an activist art movement. Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 4. 8 Jeffrey Schnapp describes an “aggressive cultural nomadism” that presages a “genuinely fascistic subjectivity.” Jeffrey Schnapp, “Forwarding Address,” Stanford Italian Review 8, nos. 1–2 (1990; special issue: “Fascism and Culture,” eds. Jeffrey Schnapp and Barbara Spackman), 57. Also, Simonetta FalascaZamponi investigates the visual and performative modes of hypermasculinity in the life and career of Mussolini; Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Günther Berghaus, “Futurism and the Technological Imagination Poised between Machine Cult and Machine Angst,” in Günther Berghaus, ed., Futurism and the Technological Imagination (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 1–40. For more on how a futurist machine aesthetic supported (and then turned away from) fascism, see Christine Poggi, “The Return of the Repressed: Tradition as Myth in Futurist Fascism,” in Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum, eds., Donatello Among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity

Introduction

33

in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 203–21. 9 In late 1918, Marinetti joined political forces with the war veteran group the Arditi (“Daring Ones”) to form the Futurist Political Party, an immediate forerunner of the Futurist-Fascist Party, a direct political alliance with Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party in 1919. Marinetti demonstrated in a style of participatory nationalism that Benito Mussolini and other Italian Fascist leaders used and extended with military precision under the banner of mass collective agency. Despite differences that made their continued day-to-day collaboration untenable by early 1920, Marinetti and Mussolini remained allied until late 1944. Günther Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996), 110–24. For another interpretation of Marinetti’s mechanistic principles manifesting non-machinic (or less directly machinic) unconscious impulses, see Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 10 Alongside direct involvement with regional labor organizations in Italy, this futurist blueprint for undertaking demonstrative public actions was rooted in ongoing contact between several futurists and the main Italian nationalist party before 1914. For instance, in 1910 Marinetti participated in II Congresso dell’Associazione nazionalista italiana (The 1st Congress of the Italian Nationalist Association) in Florence. In 1912 Marinetti and Umberto Boccioni likely attended the 2nd Congress of the Italian Nationalist Association in Rome (December, 1912); see Gino Agnese, Vita di Boccioni (Florence: Camunia, 1996), 287 note 7. 11 Extensive scholarly discussion of Étienne-Jules Marey’s influence on Italian futurism has included Giovanni Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista (Milan: Skira, 2001); Giovanni Lista, Balla, catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre (Modena, Italy: Galleria Fonte d’Abisso, 1982); Giovanni Lista, Balla: La modernità futurista (Milan: Skira, 2008); Poggi, Inventing Futurism; Giovanna Ginex, “Boccioni e la fotografía,” in Laura Mattioli Rossi, ed., Boccioni: Pittore scoltore futurista, exhibition catalog (Milan: Skira, 2006), 137–55; Giovanna Ginex, “L’artista Narciso: Boccioni, Picasso e la fotografia,” L’uomo nero 1, no. 2 (June 2004): 79–99; and Giovanna Ginex, “Snapshots from the Studio of Umberto Boccioni,” in Laura Mattioli Rossi, ed., Materia: A Futurist Masterpiece and the Avant-Garde in Milan and Paris, exhibition catalog (New York: Solomon Guggenheim Museum, 2004), 63–81. 12 In his 1914 book, among his other published texts, Boccioni disapproved of any actual or implied resemblance between futurist paintings and Marey’s chronophotography. Umberto Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism), trans. Richard Shane Agin and Maria Elena Versari (Los Angeles:

34

Futurist Conditions

GRI, 2016), 110 and 139. More recently, a well-regarded survey of modern art describes aspects of the perceived limits of Italian futurism, see Hal Foster, Rosalind E. Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 90–3. 13 Rooted in the physical, material qualities of futurist artworks, this simplified version of a more complex argument identifies formal and conceptual processes that may not have been consciously addressed by the maker(s). On specific meaningful arrangements in Picasso’s studio, see Yve-Alain Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson,” trans. Katherine Streip, Representations 18 (Spring 1987): 33–68 (especially 54). Other key examples in this argument include the specific chronologies of the manufacture of artistic materials (e.g., Ripolin paints), wherein an artwork contains physical properties that fit within the wider sociohistorical spectrum of art-making, in spite of an artist’s conscious awareness. Ann Temkin, “Color Shift,” in Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, exhibition catalog (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 21–2. 14 Étienne-Jules Marey, Movement (New York: Appleton and Co., 1895), 175–6 and 174 respectively. 15 Ibid., 185. Implicit in this idea to correct artistic techniques was Marey’s assumption that physiological research tracked some of the same invisible forces of nature that artists traditionally associated with grace, beauty, and a visual spectrum of moods or emotions. 16 In futurism, the first references to Marey’s chronophotography date from 1911 for Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia and 1912 for Giacomo Balla. Outside Italian futurism, Czech artist František Kupka was likely the first avant-garde artist to mimic the multiple temporal exposures found in Marey’s multi-superimposed imagery, including his drawing Cinematic Decomposition (c. 1900) and his series Woman Picking Flowers (1909–10). Living in Puteaux near Paris, Kupka regularly saw Marcel Duchamp, who applied Marey’s chronophotographic work to humorously caricature figural motion in Sad Young Man on a Train (1911) and Nude Descending a Staircase Nos. 1 and 2 (December 1911 and January 1912, respectively). Duchamp alone seems to use these references to kinetic motion ironically—to depict mechanical and bodily automatisms taking the place of artistic and figural expressiveness. 17 Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 276–7. 18 The term graphical method appears in the title of Marey’s book La méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et particulièrement en physiologie et en médecine (The Graphical Method in the Experimental Sciences and Particularly in Physiology and Medicine) (Paris: G. Masson, 1878). On the disclosure of unseen actualities, see Braun, Picturing Time, 61 and 81. Elsewhere, Suzanne

Introduction

35

Stewart-Steinberg describes Marey as “the inventor of a broad panoply of machines and gadgets designed to register the visible and, more importantly, the invisible movements of the body.” Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 142–3. 19 Étienne-Jules Marey, La méthode graphique, 108; cited in translation in Braun, Picturing Time, 40. 20 Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronographic devices compensated for the limits of human perception by providing new methods of automated inscription. As he wrote, “These instruments [are] sometimes destined to replace the observer.” Marey, La méthode graphique, 108. 21 On this historically significant epistemological shift, including discussion of Marey’s new tools of mechanical inscription, see Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 33–68. 22 In certain cases, as with the measuring of the human heart rate, Marey graphically and mechanically updated existing techniques to record an already known phenomenon. In other cases, Marey’s graphical method made visualizations of previously unknown phenomena (not only known ones). See Joel Snyder, “Visualization and Visibility,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, eds., Caroline Jones and Peter Galison (London: Routledge, 1998), 379–97. Also, Josh Ellenbogen characterizes Marey’s inscriptions as a method of automatic image-making that transcribed phenomena that otherwise would not be known. Josh Ellenbogen, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 1–24. 23 Funded by the city of Paris and overseen administratively by the Collège de France, the Physiological Station was the name of the research facility in the Bois de Boulogne on the outskirts of Paris that Marey started using in August 1882. 24 Marey described this problem and his solution to it as follows: “This confusion from the superimposition of images sets a limit to the application of chronophotography on fixed plates, yet . . . this difficulty may be overcome. The most obvious method consists in artificially reducing the surface of the object under observation.” Marey, Movement, 60–1. In another text, Marey said the increased frequency of images required him to reduce the figures to lines. ÉtienneJules Marey, “Emploi des photographies partielles pour étudier la locomotion de l’homme et des animaux,” Comptes Rendus des Séances de l’Académie des Sciences 96 (1883): 1827–31. 25 The extended duration of French Postimpressionism and Italian Divisionism largely stemmed from visual artists searching (without success) for alternatives to depicting light reflecting off the literal material surfaces comprising

36

Futurist Conditions

representational subject matter. At the turn of the twentieth century, other systematic variations of nonnaturalistic visuality developed simultaneously in science visualizations and in the compositional strategies of the visual arts. See John Gage, Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism (Berkeley: University of California, 1999). 26 According to Anson Rabinbach, German and French physiological research were diametrically opposed, and the positivist German scientists (but also including Marey) defended materialist methods quite different from the techniques typically used by the French researchers. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 49–55 and 87–93. 27 On the debate between mechanism and vitalism, see ibid., Chapter 2 (especially 64–6) and Chapter 4 (especially 90–3). 28 Although Marey was not named, Bergson strongly implied the French physiologist’s research in this quotation. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001), 119. This text was originally published as Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1889). 29 In Time and Free Will (2001), Bergson argued in favor of irreducible human qualities, to which he gave various terms “deep-seated psychic states” (ibid., 198), “inner dynamism” (ibid., 172), “the living activity of the self ” (ibid., 178), and “human freedom” (ibid., 147, 203, and 215). 30 Ibid., 146. 31 Ibid., 147–8. This principle of strict psychophysical parallelism effectively greatly reduced the chances that immaterial forces (and the metaphysical arguments attending them) would qualify as valid responses to scientific queries. For Bergson, this overly reductive approach tried to settle the question of immaterial essences in advance (by prohibiting them), so materialist explanations represented to him obvious threats to those more intangible human qualities (as per note 29). 32 Ibid., 140–4. 33 Marking a major deficiency pertaining to vast material potentialities that remain underappreciated or are simply overlooked by fin de siècle vitalism, Bergson did not endorse any specific art-making tendencies, experimental or otherwise, but he categorized them as free acts: “We are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work.” Ibid., 172. Notable texts on Bergson’s influence on futurism include Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Brian Petrie, “Boccioni and Bergson,” The Burlington Magazine 116,

Introduction

37

no. 852 (March 1974), 140–7; Mark Antliff, “The Fourth Dimension and Futurism: A Politicized Space,” The Art Bulletin 82, no. 4 (December 2000): 720–33; Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension: Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983); and Poggi, Inventing Futurism. 34 Bergson referred frequently to this same arrow analogy by Zeno to illustrate the ridiculousness of overanalysis. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 112–15; Bergson, Matter and Memory (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 250–3; and Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005), 335–40. 35 Despite referring to a specific apparatus, Bergson’s use of the terms “cinematograph” and “cinematographical” symbolized, for him, the mechanistic view of time and human experience that he rejected. See Bergson, Creative Evolution, 331–3. 36 Étienne-Jules Marey, preface to Eugène Trutat, La photographie animée (Paris: Gauthier Villars, 1899), vii. 37 Good counterarguments to this seemingly anti-scientific claim highlight the importance to futurism of scientific concepts, such as the Fourth Dimension, radiography, wireless signals, and modern building materials, among other examples. See Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (1983); and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “Editor’s Introduction: I. Writing Modern Art and Science—An Overview; Part II. Cubism, Futurism, and Ether Physics in the Early Twentieth Century,” Science in Context 17, no. 4 (2004): 423–66. While chronophotography is a historical case of scientific research influencing art-making practices, the futurists did not embrace it to the deficit or exclusion of their artistic aims and spiritualist beliefs. 38 Boccioni’s undated, handwritten notes (in French) transcribed some key phrases and propositions from Bergson’s 1896 text Matter and Memory (Matière et memoire). Umberto Boccioni, Notes on Henri Bergson’s Matière et memoire, Getty Research Institute, Special Collections, Boccioni papers, 1899–1986, Accession no. 880380, Box 3, folder 29. Scholarly discussion of these notes appears in various sources: Petrie, “Boccioni and Bergson,” (1974), 140–7; Flavio Fergonzi, “On the Title of the Painting Materia,” in Mattioli Rossi, ed., Materia, 47–53; and Denis Viva, “Moto assoluto + moto relativo. Appunti di cinematica per il dinamismo plastico,” in Francesca Rossi, ed., Umberto Boccioni: Genio e memoria, exhibition catalog (Milan: Palazzo Reale and Electa, 2016), 180–5. 39 Alongside other critical remarks, Boccioni dismissed photography perhaps most assertively when he wrote: “We have always rejected with disgust and contempt even the remotest connection with photography, because it is outside art. Photography is valuable in one respect: it reproduces and imitates objectively, and, having perfected this, it has freed the artist from the obligation of reproducing reality exactly.” Boccioni, “Futurist Dynamism and French Painting,” Lacerba

38

Futurist Conditions

1, no. 15 (August 1, 1913): 171; translated in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (Boston: MFA Publications, 2001), 110. 40 In his book Pittura scultura futuriste (Futurist Painting Sculpture) (1914), Boccioni regularly contrasted the two spheres of fixity and dynamism, for example, when he uses the phrases “fixed accident” (accidente fissato) and “arrested moment” (momento fermato) to note mechanical time, whereas he seems to prefer “unfurling” (si svolgono) and “unfolding” (succedersi) to describe the temporality of living things. See Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism) (2016), 125, 109, 102, and 115, respectively. 41 In Matter and Memory, Bergson cites the conventional mode of representation as opposing or suspending consciousness, and later he finds that symbolic representations defy duration (Matter and Memory, 2004, 66 and 105, respectively). Elsewhere, he asserts there’s no equivalency between symbols (i.e., symbolic representations) and duration (ibid., 220). When explaining a dichotomy between intellect and instinct (later, called intuition) in Creative Evolution (originally published in 1906), Bergson describes how representations are devoid of true vitality, because they negate action and counteract fluid thought processes. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Harry Holt, 1911), 143–5, 154. 42 In early 1912, Boccioni considered Giacomo Balla’s works to have not been advanced enough to be included in an Italian futurist painting exhibition in Paris. In late 1912, Boccioni again referred to Balla’s chronophotographic techniques as “too photographic and episodic.” Umberto Boccioni, Lettere futuriste, ed. Federica Rovati (Rovereto, Italy: Egon and Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, 2009), 60–1 and 241–4. In addition, Boccioni’s conviction that photography did not belong among the traditional visual arts was the primary (and perhaps the only explicable) reason for the October 1913 expulsion from futurism of the photographers Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, to be discussed in Chapter 1 of this volume. 43 Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 89–95. 44 For art historian Mark Antliff, Bergson’s philosophy touched a wide range of political beliefs within early twentieth-century avant-garde artistic circles in France and Italy—from anarchism and syndicalism to militarism and reactionary monarchism. Antliff, Inventing Bergson, 160–8; see also Antliff, “The Fourth Dimension and Futurism,” The Art Bulletin 82, no. 4 (December 2000): 726–7, 730. The interest in Bergsonian ideas by various avant-garde artists indicated, according to Antliff, a spiritualist tendency and an abiding aversion to rationality—both of which resonated with nationalistic and authoritarian impulses. Antliff, Inventing Bergson, 10–11 and 178. 45 In 1911 French critic Roger Allard dismissively noted the futurist painters, who had “a film camera in their bellies,” exploited an obvious contradiction between

Introduction

39

the fixed forms of images and the implied movements of subject matter. Roger Allard, “Les Beaux Arts,” Revue indépendente no. 3 (August 1911): 134. Discussing futurist paintings the following year, Henri des Pruraux said that photography presents unsightly untruths, a type of mechanical deception: “we get used to the monstrosity of its perspective . . . its ugly lie ends by taking the place of reality.” Henri des Pruraux, “Il soggetto nella pittura,” La Voce 4, no. 44 (October 31, 1912): 921. 46 Negative published criticisms of early film projections appeared in various countries. In his 1896 journalistic account of his first visit to the Cinematograph, Russian writer Maxim Gorky observed: “Yesterday I was in the kingdom of shadows. This is not life but the shadow of life and this is not movement but the soundless shadow of movement.” Maxim Gorky, “The Lumière Cinematographe (Extracts)” (1896); reprinted in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 25. Due to its disturbing sensorial qualities (grey muteness), the cinematic image presents life deceptively, “a life devoid of words and shorn of the living spectrum of colours, a grey, silent, bleak and dismal life.” Ibid. Two decades later, critics continued to condemn film’s perceived reduction of life to “a series of ugly and barren sights” and to “a world of all things black and white!” See Piero Antonio Gariazzo, Il teatro muto (Turin: S. Lattes, 1919), 100; and Terry Ramsaye, “Color Photography and the Motion Picture,” Photoplay 15, no. 4 (March 1919): 84–6. 47 Umberto Boccioni, “I futuristi plagiati in Francia,” Lacerba 1, no. 7 (April 1, 1913): 67. 48 Textbooks on early twentieth-century modern art typically contrast Italian futurists’ seeming literalness with the formal and conceptual strategies in other avant-garde movements at that time; see, for example, Foster, et al., Art Since 1900, 90–3. Another instance of futurist works being compared to cinema came from Marcel Duchamp, who noted decades later: “The futurists’ interest in suggesting movement . . . [an] attempt to give cinema effects through painting.” Duchamp, Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (New York: De Capo Press, 1973), 124. 49 Giovanni Papini, “La filosofia del cinematografo,” La Stampa 41 (May 18, 1907): 1–2. 50 Aldo Bernardini, Il cinema muto italiano 3 vol. (Rome: Laterza, 1980, 1981, and 1982, respectively); and Pierre Sorlin, Italian National Cinema, 1896–1996 (London: Routledge, 1996). 51 Ricciotto Canudo, “Trionfo del cinematografo,” Il Nuovo giornale (November 25, 1908): 3; reprinted as “Naissance d’un Sixième Art—Essai sur le Cinématographe,” Les Entretiens idéalists 10, no. 61 (October 1911): 32–40; translated as “The Birth of a Sixth Art,” in Richard Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/

40

Futurist Conditions

Anthology, Vol. 1; 1907–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). As early as 1906, Ricciotto Canudo was committed to a new vision of society rooted in film. Ara Merjian, “A Screen for Projection: Ricciotto Canudo’s Exponential Aesthetics and the Parisian Avant-Gardes,” in European Film Theory, ed. Temenuga Triofonova (London: Routledge, 2008), 232. 52 C. Previtali, “I gusti del pubblico,” La Vita Cinematografica no. 3 (February 15, 1912); reprinted in Tra una film e l’altra: Materiali sul cinema muto italiano; 1907–1920 (Venice, Italy: Marsilio Ed., in association with Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema, 1980), 143. 53 “La crisi nella Cinematografia” (interview with Arturo Labriola), Lux 2, no. 11 (October 1909): 1; cited in Davide Turconi, La stampa cinematografica in Italia e negli Stati Uniti dalle origini al 1930 (Pavia, Italy: Amministrazione Provinciale di Pavia, 1977), 11. Labriola responded: “Why not plunder the treasures of our civic history, so dramatic and so unknown to the masses? Why not give ourselves a general picture of all of our national development?” (ibid.; my translation, emphasis in original text). Cinema would be described by the futurists as “the best school for boys: a school of joy, of speed, of force, of courage, and heroism.” F. T. Marinetti, Bruno Corra, Emilio Settimelli, Arnaldo Ginna, Giacomo Balla, and Remo Chiti, “Futurist Cinema,” L’Italia futurista 1, no. 10 (November 15, 1916); reprinted in Marinetti, Critical Writings (2006), 260–5. 54 On the development of the Italian film industry, see Aldo Bernardini, Il cinema muto italiano and Gian Piero Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano: 1895–1945 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1979). 55 A notable exception is, in 1913, Marinetti gave written responses to a set of questions about cinema, to which he responded that this visual medium has “futurist conceptions and intentions.” Marinetti’s responses were published as part of a recurring series titled “Inchiesta sul cinematografico” in the newspaper Il Nuovo giornale; his answers were printed November 30, 1913 (issue no. 328); cited in Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista, 30 and 127 note 19. 56 This manifesto appeared in a collection of texts by Bruno Corra and his brother Arnaldo Ginna titled Il pastore, il gregge e la zampogna (Bologna: Libreria Beltrami, 1912); reprinted in Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, 66–70. Bruno Corra and Arnaldo Ginna were the pseudonyms used by the brothers Arnaldo and Bruno Ginanni-Corradini. 57 Bruno Corra said that he and his collaborators decided this experiment had been unsuccessful, since they “needed to have a truly stupefying intensity of light at our disposition.” Ibid., 67. 58 Ibid., 68. Giovanni Lista captures a sense of the threat posed to painters by these mechanized methods when he calls these chromatic experiments cinepittura (“cine-painting”); Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista, 26.

Introduction

41

59 Bruno Corra, “Abstract Cinema—Chromatic Music,” in Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, 69. 60 On futurist (viz., Boccioni’s) resistance to the film titled Mondo Baldoria (dir. Aldo Molinari; February 1914, Vera Films, Rome), see Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista, 31. If a lack of permission was proffered as the primary reason for this rejection, Boccioni’s dislike of mechanical reproduction was most likely sufficiently passionate to convince Marinetti (if only temporarily) to not fully and publicly embrace this mechanized artistic medium. 61 Lista mentions “the disengagement and estrangement of Boccioni” as a factor in futurism moving toward film in 1914. Ibid., 38. Although not directly related to the historical emergence of film per se, Boccioni caused dissension when he tried in 1914 to claim credit (erroneously by my account) for inventing the idea of visualizing odors, which was first published and commonly attributed to futurist painter Carlo Carrà, even though Boccioni mentioned the idea of making compositions with enormous colored gases in his May 1911 lecture at the Circolo Artistico in Rome; printed in Ester Coen, Umberto Boccioni: A Retrospective, exhibition catalog (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988), 231. 62 Giacomo Balla, “The Late Balla—Futurist Balla” (1915), in Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, 206. 63 Given this film no longer survives, but was described in contemporaneous written accounts, Ginna’s film evidently matched Marinetti’s views on the variety theater, which prescribed rejecting unified dramatic narratives as a way to demystify theatrical illusionism. Marinetti, “The Variety Theater” (1913), in Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, 126. 64 Lessing termed this kind of moment prägnant(e) and prägnantesten, which may be translated into English as “incisive,” “significant,” “fruitful,” or “pregnant”—the latter having the advantage of implying temporality. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon, oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (Berlin: Erster Theil, 1766), 154 and 192. 65 While being overshadowed by the common English translation of his phrase “pregnant moment,” Lessing’s differentiation between actual and virtual qualities is arguably a more nuanced insight: “But what is not actually in the picture is there virtually, and the only true way of representing an actual picture in words is to combine what virtually exists in it with what is absolutely visible.” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay Upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Ellen Frothingham (Boston: Roberts Bros., 1887), 121. For the original quotation, see Lessing, Laokoon, 193. 66 On the extensive history of pre-cinematic devices producing illusions of motion, see Barbara M. Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001), 354–6.

42

Futurist Conditions

67 After referring to photography, Matisse’s description of expanded temporality mirrored Lessing’s words centuries earlier (for instance, compare note 65): “[W]hen we capture it by surprise in a snapshot, the resulting image reminds us of nothing that we have seen. Movement seized while it is going on is meaningful to us only if we do not isolate the present sensation either from what precedes it or that which follows it.” Henri Matisse, “Notes of a Painter” (1908), in Matisse on Art, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California, 1995), 39. 68 Ibid. 69 Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture (2016), 71 and 125. 70 Ibid., 110 and 139. 71 Ibid., 105. 72 Ibid., 71. 73 Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista (1980), 27–9. Boccioni’s quotation comes from his letter to Severini in early January 1913; see Boccioni, Lettere futuriste, 60–1 and 244. 74 Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954/2004). At the end of the nineteenth century, the cognitive mechanism and the mental associations with time were notably investigated by the French moral philosopher and poet Jean-Marie Guyau (1854–88); see Jean-Marie Guyau, “La genèse de l’idée du temps” (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1890), 117–18. 75 For Arnheim, different tempos and temporal cues (akin to a speeding up or slowing down of musical motifs) can influence the pace of an audience’s bodily processes. Ibid., 384. 76 Ibid., 435. 77 Ibid., 386. 78 Ibid., 396. Continuing Arnheim’s pioneering work on the kinesthetic nature of visual perception, Italian neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese describes human visual perception as embodied vision. For instance, see Gallese, “Embodied Simulation: From Neurons to Phenomenal Experience,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4, no. 1 (2005): 23–48; see also, Gallese, “The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural Basis of Intersubjectivity,” Psychopathology 36, no. 4 (2003): 171–80. 79 Ernst H. Gombrich, “Moment and Movement in Art,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964): 293–306, quotation from 302. 80 On the temporality of perception, Gombrich claims: “If perception both of the visible world and of images were not a process in time, and a rather slow and complex process at that, static images could not arouse in us the memories and anticipations of movement.” Ibid., 305–6.

Introduction

43

81 A similar conclusion about the effects of movement in art history appears in Moshe Barasch’s chapter “Time in the Visual Arts,” published in The Language of Art: Studies in Interpretation (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 247–65. 82 Gombrich, “Moment and Movement in Art,” 295 and 296. 83 Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 363. 84 Gombrich, “Moment and Movement in Art,” 305. 85 Ibid., 294–5 and 296. 86 Ibid., 300. On Lessing’s (as well as Lord Shaftesbury’s) demands for anticipation and repeal, see ibid., 296. Elsewhere, Gombrich made the faculty of anticipation a central feature of human visual perception; see Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 228. 87 Gombrich, “Moment and Movement,” 303. 88 Lessing, Laocoon (1887), 121; see also note 65. 89 Gombrich astutely acknowledged “[t]he possibility that all recognition of images is connected with projections and visual anticipations.” Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 191. 90 Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1964), 80–1. Husserl’s concept of Vorerinnerung may be rendered in English as anticipation, expectation, or protention of future images. 91 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 192–7. 92 Ibid., 203, 210, 214–15, and 219–20. 93 Wilhelm Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1907), 376. Wundt noted about the future: “Emotions exhibit peculiar modifications when their affective character is [determined] . . . by ideas which refer to the future, whether in the way that an occurrence is definitely expected, or that some indefinite idea of the future gives rise to a feeling, and through it to an emotion. The most general of these expectations of the future is expectation itself. In it we outrun the impressions of the present, and anticipate those which the future will bring.” Ibid., emphasis in original text. 94 Guglielmo Ferrero, “The Limit of Sport,” in Ancient Rome and Modern America (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1914). One striking passage reads: “Never has man lived in such a state of permanent and growing excitement. . . . The limits of the over-excitement of our nerves raise one of the most serious problems of our epoch.” Ibid., 339–40. 95 As part of his distinction between content and usage, Goodman affirms: “the denotation of a picture no more determines its kind than the kind of picture determines the denotation.” Nelson Goodman, The Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1968), 26. Later, he restates this categorical distinction; ibid., 40.

44

Futurist Conditions

96 Goodman notes that the boundary between literal and metaphorical is porous and often unclear; ibid., 90. 97 On an image altering the system within which it operates, see ibid., 72. 98 In his “Technical Manifesto of Literature” (1912), Marinetti stated: “The analogical style is thus absolute master of all matter and its intense life.” Reprinted in translation in Marinetti, Critical Writings, 109. In “Destruction of Syntax– Untrammeled Imagination–Words-in-Freedom” (dated May 1913; published June 1913), Marinetti described how, following an intense experience, a friend “will breathlessly fling his visual, auditory, and olfactory impressions at your nerve ends, just as they come to him . . . he will hurl huge networks of analogy at the world.” Ibid., 123. For more discussion about Marinetti’s literary mode of analogization, see Cinzia Blum, The Other Modernism: F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 46. 99 Guillaume Apollinaire, “Chroniques d’art: Les futuristes,” Le Petit Bleu (February 9, 1912); reprinted in Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews, 1902–1918, ed. LeRoy Breunig and trans. Susan Suleiman (Boston: MFA Publications, 2001), 203. 100 Boccioni’s phrases “pure plastic rhythm” and “plastic movement” appear in “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture” (1912), and in “Plastic Dynamism” (1913). For “plastic analogy,” see Umberto Boccioni, manuscript titled “Stato d’animo” (dated April 28, 1913), Getty Research Institute, Special Collections, Boccioni papers, 1899–1986, Accession no. 880380, Box 2, folder 2. A revised version of this chapter (retitled “Physical Transcendentalism and Plastic States of Mind”) appeared in his book Pittura scultura futuriste (Dinamismo Plastico) (Milan: Ed. Futuriste di “Poesia,” 1914). 101 Aside from the 1914 book’s subtitle, the examples are taken from Boccioni’s chapter titled “Physical Transcendentalism and Plastic States of Mind,” in Boccioni, Futurist Painting and Sculpture (2016), 142–58. Art historian Maria Elena Versari has gone furthest to date to highlight the analogical structure of Boccioni’s sculptures, which revolved around the terms “plastic” and “plasticity.” Maria Elena Versari, introduction to Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture (2016), 42, 44, and 48–52. 102 Along with Boccioni, the futurist artists using this rhetoric included the futurist painters Gino Severini and Carlo Carrà. Severini first referred to “plastic analogies” in December 1913–January 1914. Gino Severini, “The Plastic Analogies of Dynamism: Futurist Manifesto,” reprinted in Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, 118–25. However, in a catalog essay from April 1913, Severini noted: “I believe that every sensation may be rendered in the plastic manner.” Gino Severini, “The Futurist Painter Gino Severini Exhibits His Latest Works,” exhibition pamphlet (London: Marlborough Gallery, 1913), 7. In

Introduction

45

addition, futurist painter Carlo Carrà mentioned “plastic planes” in a published text; see Carlo Carrà, “Piani plastici come espansione sferica nello spazio,” Lacerba 1, no. 6 (March 15, 1913): 53–5. 103 From late 1913, Boccioni employed a Bergsonian distinction between absolute motion and relative motion to identify the representational condition of potentiality (akin to an essence), which was set apart from any observed or apparent spatial displacement (akin to an accident). For a slightly later text that offers the clearest traces this tendency, see Umberto Boccioni, “Moto assoluto + Moto relativo = Dinamismo,” Lacerba 2, no. 6 (March 15, 1914): 90–3. Scholarly interest in this aspect of Boccioni’s theory has been extensive, so the research presented in the present volume uses this distinction (i.e., between absolute and relative motion) to argue for the artist’s shifting conceptualizations of visual and material form. See Antliff, “The Fourth Dimension and Futurism: A Politicized Space,” 723–6; and Viva, “Moto assoluto + moto relativo. Appunti di cinematica per il dinamismo plastico,” 180–5. 104 This investigation of the metaphorical significance of speed aims to supplement interpretations involving kinetic velocity, such as when Tim Harte refers extensively to Italian futurism. Tim Harte, Fast Forward: The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910–1930 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 2009), 3–4, 8–11, 17–19, and 22. 105 In April 1912, Boccioni discussed using disparate, real-world elements into wet plaster, in order to indicate distinct, but interconnected, aspects of actuality, a formalconceptual approach set forward in his manifesto prescribing that an assemblage rediscovers “plastic sensitivity” by using wood, cardboard, paint, metal: “even twenty different types of materials can be used in a single work of art in order to achieve plastic movement.” Boccioni, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture,” April 1912 (leaflet published by Poesia); reprinted in Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, 51–2 and 61–5. Although Boccioni’s use of real-world elements indicates a seemingly incongruous return to symbolic literalness, the analogical dimension of his imagery was theorized precisely to enhance the conceptual reach of those material qualities. Maria Elena Versari describes the tension between Boccioni’s theory and practice as an “embarrassing paradox,” in which the fragile plaster cannot accomplish the conceptual work needed to reveal a continuous, cosmic interconnection. Maria Elena Versari, “‘Impressionism Solidified’–Umberto Boccioni’s Works in Plaster and the Definition of Modernity in Sculpture,” in Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand, eds., Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting, and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 340–1. 106 Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture, 111. Elsewhere in this text, Boccioni refers to accidental forms or the accidents governed by the definite, precise qualities of visual appearances; ibid., 71, 82, 88, 108, 125, 147, 149, and 157. Although the Italian

46

Futurist Conditions

term accidentalità has no precise equivalent in English that can cover its multiple usages in Italian, some instances can mean “contingency.” Versari, “Introduction,” to ibid., 71. 107 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time. Extensive interest in perceptual and cognitive processes at the turn of the twentieth century often required automated modes of visuality to record the indexical traces of the objects of study, but also a heightened sense of contingency introduced a sense of both private and public expressions of internal psychic and emotive activities as much as it revealed external physical events. 108 Ibid., 84, 85, and 88. 109 When considering virtual conditions with respect to psychic and physiological potentialities, philosopher Brian Massumi identifies a veritable reorganization of human bodily forces due to “the actuality of an excess over the actual.” Brian Massumi, Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 131.

1

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

In 1911, the Italian brothers and artistic collaborators Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia launched an inventive visual system for rendering bodies-in-motion by using long photographic exposures, permitting the figures to stretch and become distorted as they glide across the frame.1 Initially sparked by attending a lecture by the futurist Umberto Boccioni in May 1911 at the Circolo Artistico Internazionale in Rome, this method later developed into an important avenue of futurist visual experimentation, but it would also undermine several of the other futurist aims—such as its desire for internal coherency as an organization and as an expression of its collective spirit. In their enthusiasm for the futurist approach to dynamic imagery, the brothers presented kinetic bodily activities in a manner reminiscent of chronophotography, pioneered at the end of the nineteenth century by the French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey. According to Anton Giulio, who wrote prolifically during this period, Marey’s scientific analysis amounted to an aesthetic failure, because it divided up the constant flows of bodily motion and offered only “the precise, mechanical, icy reproduction of reality.”2 Rather than analyzing frozen or “dead” slices of activity like Marey, the Bragaglias’ chronographic system, termed “photodynamism,” permitted continuous trajectories of kinetic movement to register onto the chemically prepared surfaces, which, according to Anton Giulio, automatically preserved the traces of psychophysical vitality in an intuitive and expressive manner.3 Counterintuitively perhaps, their technically advanced method attempted to reveal the sources of human expressiveness through the photographic accumulation of superimposed visual data. Despite their early successes, including several exhibitions and articles by Anton Giulio and critics, resistance to their work steadily increased within futurism, particularly from Boccioni, and it culminated in their receiving an embarrassingly public rebuke and their expulsion from the movement after a brief, but productive, period. Official announcement of the Bragaglias’ dismissal appeared in the bimonthly futurist journal Lacerba on October 1, 1913.4 This short notice signed by the most prominent futurist painters at the time stated

48

Futurist Conditions

unequivocally that photodynamism was merely photographic research and no longer related to futurist innovation in the visual arts.5 This acrimonious split had the immediate effect of closing down a main area of artistic exploration for the movement, but this dramatic episode also punctuated an ongoing debate within futurism about the direction and significance of its activities in the visual arts. In a literal sense, the debate hinged on the role of mechanical reproduction in futurism, though the roots of this conflict lay deeper. Arguing for photography’s place among the other, more traditional arts, Anton Giulio published several texts outlining the initial hypotheses and preliminary results of photodynamism. It would no longer be enough for photographers to simply be good craftsmen who imitated painting, but rather they could redefine aesthetic ideals by rendering “the perfect evocation of the complete emotion.”6 By compensating for the faults and biases of human perception, Anton Giulio claimed, the automatic processes of the camera could record the energetic traces of human bodies and thus could provide glimpses of heretofore hidden sources of vitality. Yet, to qualify their participation within the selective group of futurists, the Bragaglias also portrayed their technical experimentation as distinct from, and in many ways opposed to, the principles of scientific analysis. They wanted to be considered more than just technicians. By contrast, Boccioni, the main theorist of futurist visual art, presumed that an artist’s capacity to present the vitality of the modern world depended on radical modes of perception, which existed without the aid of optical or mechanical instrumentation.7 Contradicting a general futurist fascination with modern technology, particularly with regard to vehicular speed, Boccioni expressed his vehement opposition to photography, which ultimately resulted in the dismissal of the Bragaglias.8 In private correspondence as well as in published articles, Boccioni characterized photography as being beyond the scope of fine art.9 Although this opposition may seem regressive in light of the acceptance of photography and film in avant-garde circles during the interwar period, this disagreement on the status of mechanized imagery was central to the definition of, and rupture within, early futurism. Significantly, this disagreement had been preceded by early critical responses to futurist painting. Prior even to their first major group exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in February 1912, the futurist painters were haunted by mechanical reproduction, which several art critics used as an analogy to characterize the motion depicted in many of their works. In 1911 French critic Roger Allard dismissively noted the futurist painters, who “have a film camera in their bellies,” have merely exploited an all-too obvious contradiction between the fixed forms

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

49

of visual representation and the suggested movements of its subject matter.10 Akin to mechanical or moving pictures, their imagery offered nothing more than a charade of motion. The following year art critic Henri des Pruraux likewise referred to the filmic medium when disparaging Boccioni’s paintings, which, according to him, imitated the unsightly untruths of mechanical reproduction.11 Deemed overly analytical and lacking in artistry, futurist painting was repeatedly denigrated as being cinematic or cinematographic (a period term deriving from the Lumière brothers’ invention). While sounding tame or perhaps even complimentary to contemporary ears, this recurring reference to film was a pretty damning accusation at the time, since many writers argued that mechanical imagery diminished the vibrancy of life.12 In a 1914 text, Boccioni explicitly contested the idea that the futurists mimicked cinema and reduced dynamic, living processes to their flimsy appearances; rather, in the artist’s view, the trajectories of kinetic motion in their paintings pursued more emotional and intuitive paths.13 Rejecting the allegation of cinematography buttressed his main point in that text: cubism, not futurism, was allied with analytical and mechanical principles. According to this logic, cubism and cinema were both objectionable for precisely the reason that critics had rejected futurism— due to the threat of mechanical lifelessness. Because futurist painting was already considered by some observers to be too closely allied with mechanical processes, the Bragaglias’ mechanized imagery posed a danger to futurism’s selfdefinition—and prompted a fissure that led to their expulsion. Alongside this negative criticism of futurist painting, Boccioni’s resistance to photodynamism reiterated a long-standing rivalry between human observers and mechanical devices, which, by the early twentieth century, took the form of Italian film critics’ wondering if mechanical imagery would one day replace traditional artists.14 A text from early 1909 suggested that film was exploring “an enormous current of new aesthetic emotion, with plastic art in movement.”15 The same year another critic declared: “It is the machine that takes the place of the artist and; it, even more, imitates man, and in what seemed like his invulnerable dominion: the manifestations of the spirit.”16 Another writer stated that even if a rejection of film had been warranted on artistic grounds, given that most films “offend some elementary and immutable artistic need,” any resulting “antipathy by painters for cinematography” was misplaced, because all forms of mechanical reproduction “liberated art from its pedestrian task of being the exact and minute reproducer.”17 Artists should actually celebrate their avoidance of the mindless chore of reproduction. In spite of this witty reassurance, the threat posed to the traditional arts could not be easily dismissed when another writer

50

Futurist Conditions

insisted that film “realizes maximum mobility in life but at the same time makes you dream of a new art, different from any manifestation already existing.”18 Not simply a means of reproduction, but a sophisticated art form among the others, cinema had been described in 1908 by the film theoretician Ricciotto Canudo as “a new art,” while the author Giovanni Papini argued in 1907 that a movie theater could be a site of deep philosophical inquiry into the modern era.19 As the artistic potential of film was affirmed, traditional artists worried that their creative practices were being undermined or would be replaced. Mentioned repeatedly in the critical reception of futurist painting, while posing a threat to traditional artists, film was a rapidly expanding commercial industry in Italy—one from which the Bragaglia brothers directly emerged before gravitating toward futurism in 1911. From 1907, their father Francesco held a lofty and lucrative position at the film studio Società Italiana Cines in Rome. The brothers’ early professional lives were spent on a sprawling film lot, where they trained with leading film directors and camera operators who at the time were pioneering the historical epic.20 With their father leading a company at the forefront of the Italian film industry before the First World War, the brothers would likely have been exposed to a range of activities—from financing and project development to assorted aspects of production, postproduction, and even distribution. Notably, after gaining this experience in and around commercial filmmaking, they did not continue in this professional pursuit.21 The Bragaglias turned away from large-scale costume dramas, in order to seek opportunities for greater artistic experimentation, and they arrived to futurism with a set of aesthetic concerns that engaged the central aesthetic challenge for the other futurist visual artists—visualizing motion. When highlighting the inherently expressive qualities of bodily motion, their photographic method posed multiple dangers to the visual arts and revealed the surprisingly antitechnological bias of Boccioni’s understanding of futurism. Despite enthusiastically embracing Boccioni’s concept of “pictorial dynamism” in the first half of 1911, the Bragaglias were not officially accepted into futurism until December 1912. In the intervening period, Anton Giulio lectured and wrote extensively on photodynamism, affecting a rhetorical style that closely mirrored the assertive, unyielding tone of many futurist manifestos. In part, making his case for admission into futurism meant trying to affirm the status of photography as an artistic medium. In this sense, their methods needed to be distinguished from Marey’s scientific photography, in spite of any methodological similarities, and Anton Giulio offered a range of theoretical claims to this effect. In another sense, their creative use of this medium need to be contrasted with the dominant period styles of artistic photography, the practitioners of which, since

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

51

the nineteenth century, had aimed to legitimate their mechanically produced imagery by imitating the long-standing pictorial conventions of painting. Photodynamism, by contrast, amounted to a radical rethinking of photographic conventions, by adeptly demonstrating its departure from other approaches of fine art photography, according to Anton Giulio.22 Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the brothers imagined a place for themselves among the futurists, who were espousing a program of radical artistic experimentation, while also relying heavily on traditional mediums, such as painting and sculpture. In 1912, Anton Giulio boldly asserted that the expressive capacity of the camera was comparable to painting: “But I too know how to express the soul with the artifice of my machine just as they can with the artifice of their brush.”23 In spite of the Bragaglias’ idea to foreground human expressive qualities, the perceived threat from mechanical processes to the traditional visual mediums was drawing ever closer. Yet, despite the danger posed by photography to the fine arts, in general, and despite the harsh recent reception to futurist painting, in particular—both of which offer initial context for Boccioni’s resistance to photodynamism—there was still a measure of collegiality at the turn of 1913, when Boccioni modeled for a photodynamic portrait made by the two brothers in Rome (Figure 1.1). Rather,

Figure 1.1  Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, Polyphysiognomic Portrait of Umberto Boccioni, c. 1912–13, black-and-white photograph, 4 ⅞  ×  6 ⅝ in. (12.3  ×  17 cm). Private Collection, Milan. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

52

Futurist Conditions

the catalyst for an irreparable rupture seems to have originated apart from these small, dark images with strange visual patterns. In spite of Boccioni’s seeming tolerance, photodynamism was likely disqualified from playing any further role in futurism, at least in Boccioni’s mind, due to the extravagant claims made on behalf of his art form found in Anton Giulio’s recently republished second edition of Futurist Photodynamism (1913). For instance, when claiming that their chronographic method enhanced human perception and that photography established a foundation for other visual mediums, the author added this unnecessary claim: only photodynamism could generate the intuitive and expressive trajectories that revealed vital, living processes.24 This type of exclusionary sentiment, conveyed by his use of the term “only” (relative to other artistic mediums), is reiterated several times in his book, but it is difficult to know whether he was intentionally antagonizing other artists or simply adopting the rhetorical excess he thought futurism demanded. From Boccioni’s perspective, however, another statement by Anton Giulio about painting remaining subservient to photography would have been even worse for him.25 In light of an historical suspicion about mechanical processes and an ongoing defense of futurist painting against its critics, Anton Giulio’s more direct and aggressive challenge to the status of futurist painting forced Boccioni to abandon his cautious tolerance, which itself was likely tinged with an optimism about photodynamism’s possible role in promoting his own artistic efforts.26 By mid-1913, these artistic differences appeared irreconcilable once the futurist painter decided to reevaluate his previous assessment.27 Boccioni’s opposition to photodynamism began in the summer of 1913, and by October the Bragaglias were expelled, which had the effect of further inhibiting futurist engagement with photography and film—at least until August of 1916 when Boccioni died tragically during a military exercise near Verona. The first manifesto of futurist cinema was signed by a group of futurists less than a month after Boccioni’s untimely death, and then printed in late September 1916, so his death effectively marked the start of futurist cinema.28 This bitter dispute over the status of mechanical reproduction in the arts had the immediate effect of turning photodynamism into a short-lived project on the periphery of a long-lived, illustrious artistic movement. Yet, it may be surprising the extent to which the reverse is the case as well. Early futurist artistic strategies can and should be reassessed relative to their (viz., Boccioni’s) defiance of photographic methods. As an artist supposedly embracing the modern world, Boccioni could not fully and unconditionally accept photography. Ironically, even though photodynamism had introduced the mechanical apparatus

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

53

into artistic processes, as Boccioni (and others) feared, it tried to counter the deadening effects of mechanicity—by presenting bodily gesture as an irreducible component of expressiveness. The Bragaglias’ contributions to visualizing motion would also reveal a contradiction at the heart of futurist thinking about art and technology, and this ostensibly technological dispute instigated important strides, even by those futurists who worked with traditional materials. As part of this reassessment of the place of photography in early futurism, one might ask how Anton Giulio’s rhetoric converged with and diverged from the visual ideas expressed by the Bragaglias’ photodynamic imagery, how this dispute about artistic mediums alters the dominant narratives about futurist visual art, as well as how a desire to preserve human vitality amid the increasingly automated and technical conditions continued in the photographic research conducted by the brothers after their expulsion. Having largely been relegated to the outskirts of early twentieth-century artistic experimentation, the complicated legacy of the Bragaglias’ visual system—both during and after their involvement with futurism—rewards closer examination.

Gestural Forms The first known photodynamic image from July 1911, titled Greeting (1911) (Figure 1.2), depicts a male figure flashing an extravagant welcome— simultaneously smiling broadly, lifting his hat, bowing his head, and waving his arm.29 As if rapidly externalizing an internal force, his figure creates a communicatory activity that seems to exceed his anatomical limits. By compressing the temporality of the gesture into blurred motion on the image surface, the accumulation of adjacent, interconnected positions generates the opposite effect in the viewer—perceived rather as overflowing forces or as a springing into action. Yet, framed against a dark ground, the salutation also floats disconnected from any identifiable social circumstances; in this respect, the lack of specificity communicates a more general desire to communicate, though it also carries metaphorical significance by formally introducing the brothers’ practice to an audience. As part conjecture and part statement of intent, this photograph has a performative quality—to introduce—as if demonstrating its visual approach with a type of verbal content: Please acquaint yourself with photodynamism. Printed onto a thick paper that was then sent as a postcard to Giuseppina Pelonzi, the young woman who Anton Giulio married in 1915, the picture originally circulated through the postal system to bring its amicable

54

Futurist Conditions

Figure 1.2 Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, Greeting, 1911, black-and-white photograph. Private Collection. © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

message from afar. The Bragaglia brothers repeated this same theme of salutation in several works, including The Bow (1911) (Figure 1.3) and The Nod of Greeting (1913). From the start, they pursued a mode of registering bodily forces that foregrounded gestural expressivity and overtly counteracted the other scientific methods used at the time to describe and analyze human physiology. Anton Giulio’s descriptions of photodynamism repeatedly identified the importance of gesture. In order to observe the movement of life, he claimed, “We want to render, graphically, the perpetual motion in the perpetuity of a given gesture.”30 Rather than breaking an action into its component parts, as with chronophotography or snapshot photography, they sought a visual synthesis of gestures, which was not to be confused with the “scientific analytical reconstruction.”31 Reverting to the first-person singular pronoun, he insisted: “I deny conducting the analysis of the gesture, and I deny making the equivalent of a hundred [photographic] instances.”32 In defiance of chronographic analysis, photodynamism intended to present “the dynamic result of the gesture, that is, the synthesis of its trajectory.”33 Instead of showing merely incidental fragments of an activity, their images were intended to be cohesive units with communicatory

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

55

Figure 1.3 Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, The Bow, 1911, black-and-white photograph. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

value, a type of gestural phrasing that registers more complete thoughts or feelings. One complementary theoretical premise behind the works pertained to the capacity of gestural synthesis to provoke responses in viewers: “The gesture is to us a pure dynamic sensation and being this, nothing else than the effect produced on our sensibility by its trajectory, we are able to make one feel the dynamic sensation of the gesture and we are able to reach this aim.”34 Realizing that such experimentation with bodily imagery would probably be unfamiliar to most people, Anton Giulio boldly asserted: “We study the monstrous beauty of a gesture.”35 Revisiting the dichotomy between traditional beauty and a new mode of bodily expressiveness, photodynamism addressed itself to a murky, ill-defined realm of expressive bodily forces. Working at the forefront of gesture research at the turn of the twentieth century, German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt compiled a set of scientific findings, which are unrelated to the development of photodynamism, but which can contribute valuable historical background and intellectual context for its appearance a

56

Futurist Conditions

decade later. By way of offering another interpretive lens to map some of the peculiar discourses on bodily movement in the early twentieth century, Wundt’s broad outline for a vast domain of human communicative action can help explain why gesture is challenging to study rigorously. In general, the vitality of gestures for an individual or a society was relative to one’s degree of emotional temperament, what Wundt termed “the constant affective tendency.”36 As part of a “natural language” common to all peoples, comprising “first and foremost affective expressions,” gestures can also assume many of the properties of a spoken or written language.37 At times, gestures behave quite like words but, at other times, they do something else. To account for the diversity of forms, Wundt proposed a system that could accommodate wide variation: the most “natural” or intuitive gestures were termed “demonstrative” and “indicative,” while the more “artificial” ones that resembled words were “symbolic.” Most importantly for his heuristic model, any given gesture could shift among these categories or could occupy several at once.38 For instance, a gesture may be directly indicative, as with the symbol for “bull,” which is synonymous with “strength,” but the same gesture could be symbolic, such as when it connoted “evil” due to an association with the horns of the devil or when it became a protective sign “to ward off evil.”39 A single form can shift among categories to assume different meanings, but those subsequent transitions did not mean the form necessarily lost its original or former connotation. Such an accommodation of porous boundaries and malleable, multiple forms introduced a high degree of ambiguity into his system.40 In addition to permitting divergent meanings to emerge in situ, the constant use and reuse of gestural forms explains the emergence of altogether new forms, which the scientist termed “neologisms” in the vein of linguistics.41 Since any gesture can have or develop both concrete and abstract meanings and since new forms appear frequently, Wundt’s gestural semiotic model resulted in significant variability and instability among forms, the interpretations of which also fluctuated according to varying usages and contexts. He relied on a loosely defined system of bodily expressions that permitted ambiguity among fixed categories, as well as frequent neologistic departures from those categories. Wundt argued that any gestural system of visual communication can become more dynamic or unstable, rather than remaining precisely defined, as with the rules of grammar. Visualizing those shifting boundaries and adaptable relations among gestural forms well describes the Bragaglias’ photodynamism. A defining quality of the Bragaglias’ photographic project largely revolves around generalized gestural forms, as repeatedly signaled by their use of generic titling. As with the photos of salutation—Greeting, The Bow, and The Nod of

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

57

Greeting—the imagery isolates exemplary or notable cases of an activity, rather than documenting the motion of specific persons or events. Emerging from dark backdrops, these mostly solitary figures have been separated from the concrete actualities denoting their social milieu. So, even as the brothers, their family, and their friends enacted or playacted the actions, one underlying premise asserted that these figures are subsumed by the broader classification of gestures, for which a figure’s particular social and contextual markers are intentionally lost or suppressed. As if caught in amber, they exist in a suspended animation. Capturing gestures during extended photographic exposures, the resulting images stand as actions abstracted from everyday life and freed from the particular situations within which they transpire. The abundant use of gerunds in the titles alludes to broad categories of movement that often avoid mentioning the identities of the sitters, as in Greeting (1911), Searching (1912) (Figure 1.4) and Changing Position (1911) (Figure 1.5). When figures are noted, the subjects remain nonspecific, as with The Typist (1911) and A Figure Under the Stairs (1911). As general cases, the images mask those social and historical conditions that could arbitrarily restrict the interpretation of its semi-abstracted photographic content. As Wundt well understood, gestures communicate very specific messages, but also evade clear

Figure 1.4 Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, Searching, 1911, black-and-white photograph. Private Collection. © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

58

Futurist Conditions

Figure 1.5  Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, Changing Position, 1912, black-andwhite photograph. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

demarcation when oscillating among their multiple meanings. The Bragaglias’ imagery explored the generative aspects of gestural ambiguity—by unmooring the visual evidence of concrete forms from their specific contexts and by permitting them to wander among various levels of interpretation. An explanation of the process of simultaneously fixing and unfixing gestural signs appears in Anton Giulio’s 1913 book, precisely measured by the maker’s desire to underscore general categories: “As it [a gesture] grows more deformed, it becomes less real and hence more ideal, and more lyrical, and more extracted from its own personality and approaches a type with the same evolving effect of deformation that the Greeks followed in order to find their types of beauty.”42 By eliminating the specific conditions of social exchange, their pictures aspired to become abstract concepts governing many different instances—as generalized forms or types. Likewise, when elsewhere claiming to reveal “the transcendentalism of the phenomenon of movement” through the “transcendental photograph of movement,” Anton Giulio seems to be alluding to idealist philosophy, in which ideal forms exist irrespective of any specific cases to be located in the material world, akin to the Greek ideal of beauty.43 However, given his previously cited resistance to the conventions of traditional beauty,

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

59

there may be reason to suspect that the brothers’ efforts to transcend somewhat strictly defined literal or concrete meanings did not necessarily require appealing to idealized or divine categories. Another kind of transcendence is suggested, in that his term “transcendental” also connotes any qualities immanent within commonly perceived material forms—that is, as indicators of generalizable qualities associated neither with concrete instances nor with clearly defined, abstract ideals per se. With respect to bodily expressions, the use of the terms “ideal” and “transcendental” likely denotes visual traces removed from their material specificities, in order to mark their departure from naturalistic associations. That is, less overtly naturalistic and “less real” do not always mean “more idealized.” Such an interpretation of their nonnaturalistic, nonidealized images matches his appeal to “transcendental qualities of the real,” which may be perceived as being immanent to any specific instances of phenomena, but which are not restricted only to those instances.44 Instead of reiterating Platonic ideals or essences, these lyrical forms explored a less well-defined realm of the blurring, shifting boundaries among gestures, which have been translated in and through visual experimentation. For Anton Giulio, photodynamism was a set of creative responses to more historically established approaches to artistic and hobbyist photography, whose primary defects were realism (“the brutality of copying the real”) and the photographic instant (“the most bestial error of the snapshot”).45 In the former, an overly literal replication of visual appearances was considered deficient, while the arbitrary qualities of the latter were hardly an improvement, as exemplified by snapshot photography. Premised on a different mode of perception beyond the normative constraints of human vision and its conventional representations, photodynamism had explicitly departed from these pictorial conventions to approach greater aesthetic merit.46 This same constitutive premise of departure was also rehearsed in another of his texts that asserted the artistic value of their staged photographs: “Precisely by being unreal they are Art.”47 Straining the bounds of logic, he claimed that simply departing from realistic forms could guarantee a measure of aesthetic significance. While his reasoning is flawed, his formulation nonetheless captures a desire for radical reversal: in the topsy-turvy world of experimental visual practices, the beautiful can appear to be monstrous, and the monstrous beautiful. The nonnaturalistic inscription of communicative activities by means of the mechanical apparatus was the main direction of their efforts. If a belief in experimentation led the brothers to negotiate various artistic solutions, photodynamism was not conceived to simply illustrate Anton Giulio’s texts, nor have his texts provided straightforward explications of their images.

60

Futurist Conditions

In photodynamic terms, text and image each establishes its own logic, meanings, and even contradictions that converge and diverge with one another. The artistic aim of representing reality can carry an instructive lesson on a key incongruity between photodynamic treatise and its imagery. Anton Giulio saw the concept of reality as something not so much obviously deceitful as malleable and interpenetrated by other realms or dimensions. Even though he would refer to an aestheticizing “removal from reality,” other passages in his book reformulate the term “reality” to bring an alternate meaning to photodynamism’s idea to pursue “the spirit of living reality.”48 He plainly states: “We want to remember the most vibrant sensation of the deep expression of a reality.”49 Similarly, while photodynamism may offer “the representation of reality,” he also unselfconsciously claims, “Our aim is the most extreme removal from reality.”50 So, the same term marks what the brothers both did and did not want to accomplish with the aid of photography, a seeming contradiction culminating in this amusingly obtuse claim: “We want, in short, to remember reality unrealistically.”51 This intentional ambiguity may be summarized as follows: if reality as it appears can be distinguished from reality as it really is, then their compositional procedures would necessarily be unfaithful to one, in order to be more faithful to another. To be sure, the camera itself symbolized an indispensable tool for revealing the purportedly hidden realms: the “purifying” operation of the camera can “render life in its unique, logical expression” and also can frame “reality in its most profound, less realistic character.”52 Moreover, their photographic mechanism aspires to “show what is in our sensibility . . . to make it perceive also what is, one says, transcendental.”53 Again, the term “transcendental” signals a departure from verisimilitude and an arrival at aesthetic value, and this same distorted logic led him to embrace artistic unreality as well: Everyone thus recognizes the unreality of figures in the most recent expression of art. . . . Who does not feel the suggestive poetry of art in that unreality, in that vague indecision, with which people in the photographic pictures are delineated without a clear hardness, but dimly?54

Aside from reiterating his dubious correlation between unrealistic images and artistic value, Anton Giulio asserted that imaging techniques can play significant roles in constructing both reality and unreality. If such rhetorical ambiguity describes the formal and conceptual parameters of their visual system—exploring the expressive dimensions of gesture adjacent to naturalistic copying—their imagery aimed to preserve one (unreality) by distancing itself from another (reality).

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

61

With respect to the visual qualities of photodynamism, the Bragaglias’ representations of the human figure avoided physically or anatomically defined qualities that connoted, to them, the overly scientific portrayals of Marey’s chronophotography. Any “unrealistic” aspects of the photodynamic figures were not—and perhaps could not be—revealed through clearly legible, or realistic, forms. According to Anton Giulio, their technically advanced processes underwrote an interest in the hidden qualities of their subjects: “We are seeking in fact that movementist [sensation] because it is rich in magnificent, secluded depths and multiple emotive sources by which it is made unspeakable and ungraspable.”55 While these depths could certainly be conflated with mysterious or spiritual dimensions of human perception and experience, the practical necessity of working with a visual medium—in this case, photography—requires translating those emotive depths into specific compositional strategies.56 To connote the hidden dimensionality of “unspeakable and ungraspable” forces, the resulting images would need to imply the presence of something beyond literal, legible forms of the physical bodies. Obviously, his verbal descriptions of such evanescent effects added to the rhetorical ambiguity, as analysis of Anton Giulio’s writings confirms. Yet, this representational conundrum becomes less difficult to explain visually by returning to the qualities of expressive gestures schematized by Wundt, which themselves precipitated and animated photodynamism: even when the boundaries among these gestural categories appear precisely legible, as its generic titling would imply, the connotations for individual gestures or images of gestures freely dissolve, distort, and/or proliferate. Wundt’s “language of gesture” likewise had described a type of promiscuity among specific forms traversing its diverse method of classification, and Wundt went so far as to acknowledge a close reciprocity between gestures and images of them which produces a spectrum between relative fixity and mobility, as well as between literal and abstract associations.57 Due to this affordance for ambiguity within Wundt’s system, any shifts in the forms of material expression—whether as bodily gesture or as the visual traces of gesture—increase the potentiality for diverging meanings. Rather than relying on clear boundaries to ensure highly rational exchanges of fixed signs or symbols, Wundt’s analysis of communicatory and emotive complexity not only permitted but also actively courted distortion, multiplicity, and possible confusion. Regardless of whether the Bragaglias intended to follow Wundt’s gestural system, they considered expressive gestures to be the primary means for connoting immaterial, hidden forces, whose nonliteral and semi-legible qualities could be captured photographically.

62

Futurist Conditions

The most striking and consistent formal feature of the Bragaglias’ imagery from 1911 to 1914 involves its use of prolonged photographic exposures, during which brightly lit bodies moving against dark backgrounds generate blurred streaks of light on the image surfaces. Working in tandem with the chemically prepared, light-sensitive plates held within it, the camera apparatus automatically recorded gestural activities; however, Anton Giulio couched these lengthened exposure times in several key assumptions at the beginning of his 1913 book. If anyone should consider photodynamism to be simply blurred photos, he argued, he or she would be mistaken: it does not blur images, but rather sets them into motion.58 His initial objection to the term “blurred” likely stemmed from its association with arbitrariness and “the most bestial error”— even though, by nearly any other measure or definition, their imagery may indeed be described as being blurred. Anton Giulio’s resistance turned into an acknowledgment of his fascination with blur, and his position softened even further when he envisioned less literal, more metaphorical connotations for this same term. Used correctly, blur could allude to phenomena beyond literal, kinetic motion. In the late nineteenth century, Marey’s stroboscopic shutter successfully eliminated the anathema of blur, and its attendant excess of data—by reducing the amount of light hitting the photographic plate.59 If the lack of precision and the informational excess were unfavorable to Marey’s research objectives, blur would become technical and aesthetic advantages for the Bragaglias. Instead of adopting restrictive viewpoints defined by small increments of mechanically defined, elapsed time—whether in isolation (as with snapshot photography) or in succession (as with chronophotography and cinema)—Anton Giulio argued that their artistic project aimed to expand the temporal frame of reference for still photography.60 The lack of visual clarity in their imagery, resulting from extended exposure times, implies the existence of deeper realities. Alongside the kinetic effects of the unfolding gestures, the blurred impressions could connote psychological, emotional, or other immaterial flows. Irrespective of whether a viewer can fully accept these connotations of invisible or hidden aspects, the technique of blur had permitted specific instances of bodily activity to register as more general categories of gesture, for which a degree of abstraction from material specificity pushed the conceptual premise in a favorable direction. As such, the “secluded depths” of the blurred gestures would connote that which might exist beyond any literal accumulations of multiple, adjacent moments in a single frame: the unfixing of gestures from their visually naturalistic and socially enacted conventions had created an open-ended analogy for the emergence of expressive forces that Anton Giulio would describe alternately as general cases of

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

63

behavior, as deep-seated spiritual forces, and as other connotations of invisible or immaterial causes. Photography, according to Anton Giulio, was unaccustomed to depicting general cases up until that moment, so it remained confined to revealing only concrete specifics: “For photography, it has never been possible to give even the concept: the general idea of motion.”61 By contrast, photodynamism’s move from particular to general worked in tandem with photographic blur to support a distinct typology of motion, within which a distorted image moved “closer to a type.”62 Examples of their visual system framing bodily activities as both literal and figurative include The Walking Man (1911) (Figure 1.6), Making a Turn (1912), Searching, and Changing Position. In each of these images, a general case of activity predominates over any particular situation: quickly passing by, circling for a clearer view, looking around to ascertain, or abruptly shifting in one’s seat.63 Loosened from their anchorage in concrete conditions, these psychophysical activities do not refer to specific waking lives per se, but rather slide by way of photographic blur toward more generalized psychic or emotive flows (albeit still clearly gendered). Even when the particulars of a situation are

Figure 1.6 Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, The Walking Man, 1911. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (90-B21279). ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

64

Futurist Conditions

obscured, a physical act can still imply moment-by-moment internal processes or more anonymous daily routines—a plan, desire, passing thought, doubt, and so on.64 Without clear specification, these semi-legible gestures remove specific social or historical conditions and visually sketch out an everyday mode of existence that bridges external and internal processes, visible and invisible phenomena, and legible and illegible signs. Liberated from their more clearly defined, but also more isolated, moments these generalizable behaviors do not negate expressiveness altogether. They allude to secluded depths spilling forth unexpectedly into their worlds—as when a pressing desire or a practical choice precipitates action. Alongside general cases of gestural expressivity, another category of the Bragaglias’ photodynamic project, called “polyphysiognomic” portraits, superimposed different poses of an individual sitter onto a single surface. For instance, in Polyphysiognomic Portrait of Luciano Folgore (1912) (Figure 1.7), the head of the futurist poet has been composed of multiple blossoming impressions overlapping on the vertical axis. Unlike the general categories, these luminous traces are now anchored in the individualizing traces of a particular person—that

Figure 1.7  Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, Polyphysiognomic Portrait of Futurist Poet Luciano Folgore, 1911, black-and-white photograph. Courtesy Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (90-B21279). ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

65

is, in the features of individual portraiture. Describing the more individualizing forms, Anton Giulio conjectured: A gesture of an individual often summarizes his or her entire personality . . . they are essential and indispensable, on a par with [similar to] a tic, any grimace, a way of writing, walking, laughing, talking, turning oneself, looking, etc.65

Those specific traits that purportedly reveal an “entire personality” provide supplements to their imagery of everyday routines. But, any distinction between general and idiosyncratic forms is not as unequivocal as one might imagine. The Bragaglias further expanded the contours of their visual system of expressive gestures, at which point their project began to resemble the basic contours of another ambitious photographic project. The German photographer August Sander aimed to give a broad survey of specific instances of twentieth-century social types. Similar to the brothers’ efforts to preserved general categories, Sander also augmented his mode of realistic, but generic, portraiture with the inclusion of highly specific portraits. Aside from their preoccupations with realism and unreality respectively, a telling difference between these visual systems is that Sander documented people in specific situations—with their poses, physical traits, attire, and particular locations all serving to specify their positions (and roles) within the larger social and economic whole. By contrast, the Bragaglias eschewed this degree of localization, and their individual portraits would remain less anchored in concrete and contextualizing details. Besides using blurred motion, their process eliminated many of the living and working conditions of specific people in specific situations, which Sander preserved. The Bragaglias had embraced a mode of nonspecification—a photographic procedure that abstracted visually from material actualities, in order to allude to secluded depths or spiritual forces at work behind any deceptive appearances. The technique of rotating a subject in order to expose multiple views of a specific person onto the same surface returned in Polyphysiognomic Portrait of Umberto Boccioni (c. 1912–13), whose four distinct, superimposed cranial positions make this portrait nearly unrecognizable. Although certain lines or shapes have been clearly inscribed, as with the high-contrast profile on the right side of the picture, others have become obscured by darkness or overexposure, as with a much fainter trace on the far left. Between these profiles emerges an ellipsoidal configuration of undulating features and occlusions: its mandibular depression anchors a discombobulating band of ears and noses, itself supporting an ocular migration upon which sets an impenetrable brow. Boccioni’s quadrupled visage

66

Futurist Conditions

also preserves the historical confrontation between the Bragaglias’ camera and an individual who had remained suspicious of its role in the arts, as if the nature of the representational and artistic challenge was not yet revealed to him. In one sense, the brothers intended their automatic photographic processes to highlight the “unspeakable and ungraspable” traces of embodied human experience. In another sense, their photographic mechanicity came to symbolize for the sitter a threat to his own artistic practice, to his own existence as an artist. However, a strange paradox emerges: Did this particular photodynamic image register or suppress the essential qualities of its tolerant, but unconvinced, subject? An unresolved issue of precedence among these men and their mediums would surely inform their later misunderstanding about the authenticity of artistic materials, which, at least for a few superimposed moments, could be deferred by the Bragaglias’ visualization of Boccioni’s individualized expression— in which the brothers’ mechanistic technique referred to the sitter’s unique human presence. Ironically, as one of the Bragaglias’ most successful examples of picturing the successful integration of human and machinic qualities, this artwork registers a budding sense of impossibility, a latent anxiety about its ambiguous artistic potentiality. By purportedly registering the unique psychic conditions or underlying traits of their sitters, the Bragaglias’ multifaceted portraits loosely corresponded with contemporaneous discourses on psychological multiplication, which made frequent and telling references to photography. For psychologist Sigmund Freud, multiple photographic exposures were a ready analogy for the psychic operation of condensation, such as when manifesting in dreams, for instance.66 In Freud’s view, the blurred or faint parts of a superimposed image represented superfluous details, while any areas of stillness in it revealed what was more enduring or common to those multiple views or aggregated elements, as with family resemblances. Whereas the clarity of a multiple image, for Freud, symbolized a recurring pattern of psychic information (whether momentary or indelible), the blurred impression, for the Bragaglias, proved to contain more significance than any fixed ones, because it could claim to indicate the innermost experiences of a sitter: the individualizing trait or fleeting movement communicates either a general pattern of action or a unique gestural signature. For Anton Giulio, this kinetic visual language could accurately preserve the ineffable qualities of human expressivity.67 Along with registering aspects of a creative person onto the image surface, photodynamism flirted with other metaphysical qualities of multiplication.

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

67

If the polyphysiognomic sitter happened to be an artist, the multiplied image would capture that person’s individual capacity for imaginative multiplicity. According to Anton Giulio, artists innately project multiple scenes or perspectives into the space of the imagination, thereby translating “one hundred voices” and “one hundred visions” into visual, textual, dramatic, and sonic forms.68 Photodynamism treated creative individuals like conjurers of spirits, through whom expressive forces can move and become visible. As such, the medium’s light-sensitive properties were rhymed with a sitter’s essential psychosocial traits. In this same vein, Anton Giulio referred to a sitter as an “ultra-sensitive being” with the qualities of sensitivity accruing to the visual medium (i.e., its capacity to capture secluded depths mechanically) and any artistic-spiritual tendency of the model (i.e., his or her imaginative intuition).69 In addition to the techniques of photographic blur and multiple exposures to register a person’s “secluded depths,” the settings of the dark, murky images closely resembled the rooms for séances and other places conducive to occult circumstances. Their specific techniques and choice of subjects marked a similar desire to reveal unseen forces—in an expansive spectrum of generalized and individual behaviors. Another photograph showing a dark, solitary figure greatly accentuated those qualities associated with occult forces moving in and through the Bragaglias’ works (and Anton Giulio’s writings). A Gesture of the Head (1911) (Figure 1.8) features Anton Giulio’s own unrecognizable visage floating on a dark background, with dark clothing worn to mask extraneous light impressions (similar to Marey’s method).70 Unlike the brothers’ other portraits, however, this image does not superimpose multiple distinct views of a person. Rather, it contains a single continuous, brightly illuminated figure rapidly trailing off to the left, as if disappearing into a faint wisp. As a uniquely truncated kinetic trajectory, this brief burst of blurred motion positions an indistinct facial plane against a few identifiable traits: a luminous cloud envelops the mouth, blowing like a comet over the subject’s nose and brow; its icy deposit obscures the terra firma of his individual identity, as if its barely discernible features have been submerged beneath the surface of the image. The enigmatic shape exemplifies a mode of gestural decompression, for which the accumulated data arrives to the viewer all at once, yet these semi-abstracted traces are conceptually anchored by an ambiguous title, describing an indefinite gesture of an unidentifiable head. While its gestural expression supposedly refers to the deeper vitality of bodily motion, the figure also moves erratically in its murky visual realm—as if trying to discover or invent an internal logic for itself or perhaps looking for any

68

Futurist Conditions

Figure 1.8  Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, A Gesture of the Head, 1911. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

69

discernible contours of its unique impress on the plane of existence.71 As a deeply embedded analogy for individual personality, akin to an introspective search for one’s own defining characteristics, the nearly illegible traces portray Anton Giulio as an enigmatic and vertiginous construct, a cipher that emerges along the technological horizon of human expressive capacities, for which obscure spatialized spiritual depths intersect with and emerge from the multiple tangents plotted onto the image surface. By compressing the body’s expressiveness into a concise visual structure, A Gesture of the Head implies spatiotemporal extension without predetermining the precise contours of its eventual resolution, a malleable form that establishes its unique rhythm of gestural unfolding. Strategically indiscernible, appearing alien to many spectators, it gives us a glimpse of a culturally significant, generalized figure, which, by adapting itself to the mechanical processes, indicates a path toward successful human-machine integration.

Mechanized Soul After being expelled from futurism in the fall of 1913, the Bragaglias continued their photographic research on expressive bodies-in-motion by staging spirit photographs to accompany texts published by Anton Giulio outlining how to make images of occult phenomena. This overtly spiritualist dimension of their work derived and benefited from significant popular interest in this cultish type of photographic practice dating to the mid-1800s and continuing into the twentieth century, a period during which prominent intellectuals, and even some scientists, acknowledged the value of investigating spiritualist claims.72 A shift from photodynamism to spirit photography had led the brothers to the less obviously aesthetic reception of their images. If the Bragaglias’ imagery after October 1913 emerged from a slightly different set of assumptions than photodynamism, this later occultist imagery was not inconsistent with their futurist works: both explored a vitalist impulse to uncover unreality and hidden depths. In their earlier futurist works, their blurred figures referred to expressive qualities in everyday gestures and idiosyncratic personal traits, while their later, multiple-exposed figures allude to metaphysical, disembodied forces adjacent to or separate from the physical body. These adjacent projects manifested similar assumptions: to suspend concrete actualities and to reveal hidden, immaterial forces. Unlike the spatial displacement in their kinetic photodynamic works,

70

Futurist Conditions

these subsequent images of emanations split and multiply the mind-body substance: a projection beyond the physical envelope of the body. In his book on photodynamism, Anton Giulio described a sense of dreamlike detachment that accords with their spirit photographs as well: “Where is the whole evanescence of the true figure that in dreams was flying and, through its movement, was profoundly detaching itself from its material, in order to become more diaphanous, more imprecise, and, I would say, more spiritual?”73 Various answers to this question emerge: the futurist works pictured interior forces moving in and through bodies, while their later spiritualist images presupposed spiritual essences disengaging from materiality. Extending from his earlier notion of “one hundred [inner] voices” and “the instrument of the invisible body,” the author identified the possibility of phantasmal multiplicity interpenetrating the visible body.74 While detailing arguments in favor of a mode of evanescent disembodiment, Anton Giulio described technical features of their own photographic imagery. One article from November 1913 even labeled their work as “trick photographs.”75 The seeming disingenuousness of openly admitting to faking spirit photographs has prompted scholarly disagreement over whether the Bragaglias were ironic or sincere in this occultist turn, after their expulsion from futurism.76 As I will argue, Anton Giulio’s description of “trick photographs” does not signal an admission of deceptive practices, but rather is a straightforward acknowledgment of another important premise for their visual research, rooted in deep-seated anxiety about the positivistic certainty in scientific photography at the turn of the twentieth century. The nineteenth-century Italian positivists Cesare Lombroso and Angelo Mosso had tried to determine as precisely as possible the underlying truths of human physiology and psychology, and many of their science experiments attempted to inscribe the invisible forces of the human body for later analysis. Any incongruity detected between invisible interiors and visible exteriors was welcomed by scientists aiming to uncover both the human body’s deceptive appearances and any particular subject’s capacity for fakery, lying, or simulation, as with a criminal or an alleged criminal.77 In light of the acknowledged limits of the unaided human senses, researchers invented assorted measuring devices to record traces of psychophysiological data, which presumed to offer a more faithful record of intangible, interior phenomena. As a strict materialist, Marey believed any knowable truth about a human body could be recorded and scientifically explained, and he sought to learn the “secrets” of the trained athletes appearing in his motion studies, thereby identifying any corresponding principles for later reuse.78 In Marey’s analytical system, no murky, expressive

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

71

depths could elude detection and escape translation into physical exertions or manual work done in increasingly restrictive modern workplaces. For Marey, expressive gestures were a vague, indefinable aspect of human behavior, which was inconsistent with the rationalization of physiological activities. By depicting bodily expressivity (i.e., what Marey intentionally bracketed out), the Bragaglias were asserting their own nonscientific claims about what qualifies as valuable data and as psychophysiological truth. Anton Giulio’s reference to trickery actually frames an overarching imperative to find an alternative, not entirely rationalized, system of figural movement. Even if their solutions entailed performativity and a modicum of trickery, the brothers’ visual works presume to preserve the invisible, spiritual dimensions of the human mind-body. Whether their spirit images were ironic or sincere matters far less than counteracting an unsettling suspicion—perhaps even a fear—that the modern, mechanized body was gradually being emptied of its expressive depths.79 By highlighting the murky, expressive capacity of their photographic subject—both in futurism and continuing after their expulsion—photodynamic imagery registers a set of vitalistic responses to the more fully rationalized, mechanistic systems of physical activities, as with chronophotography. For the moment, consider how a vitalistic understanding of psycho­ physiological forces might relate to artistic processes. If, according to a vitalist perspective, vibrant human experiences can never be fully represented— otherwise those forms might be repeated indefinitely, mechanically, and thus proven to be devoid of vital substance—then it figures that some part of the creative mind or living spirit remains obscure to analysis.80 However, even though vitalism discounts some connotations of materially or physically defined forms, it doesn’t disavow artistic activity completely. In fact, the material production of visual works results in imagery that uses both recognizable and unrecognizable forms, such as when referring to intangible emotions or psychic flows. Thus far, this account accords with this examination of photodynamic images, as well as with Anton Giulio’s desire to “remember reality unrealistically.” But a logical problem arises when extending this vitalist premise to artistic practices: if living essences cannot be fully represented, an artist would have to simply allude to them without presuming to reveal them in their entirety. From a vitalistic standpoint, an artist can attempt to indicate what lies beyond any fixed or evolving system of representation. In effect, vitalist imagery would not be able to preserve human expressivity so much as it would fail to show them in their entirety, either by choice or by necessity. This condition of representational absurdity stems from the seemingly impossible aim of representing the

72

Futurist Conditions

unrepresentable, so one must necessarily settle for gesturing toward immaterial essences in absentia. According to this unnerving impossibility, vitalist artists could opt for composing purposefully failed simulations of human essences, in order to leave some conceptual space for living essences to exist beyond any fixed, material forms. In this sense, the Bragaglias’ system for picturing gestural activity—via photographic blurring, visual multiplication, and dramatic staging—may have created visual signposts to indicate phenomena that could not otherwise be adequately shown. By responding to this vitalist challenge in light of a perceived threat, the Bragaglias could allude to elusive subject matter (for instance, spiritual essences) without presuming to capture them fully. In a similar vein, the apparent incongruity of the Bragaglias’ mechanically faking vitalist essences offered a strong indication of an underlying condition of their photographic practices—the revision of positivistic methods—that permitted another, more fantastical version of chronographically inscribed psychophysical truth to emerge. Staging expressive truth, if only as a set of technical or visual tricks, may not have been as distasteful as it may seem, given that it may have represented an acceptable alternative to the quite disturbing possibility that the human body could eventually be prohibited from displaying its full expressive range, thus becoming increasingly soulless and dead. To revive the possibility of invisible expressive forces, the Bragaglias’ chronographic system functioned as a fantastical corrective to a strictly delimited, positivistic system for defining psychophysiology, a conceptual path opened through its productive indiscernibility. Yet, since their system of expressive inscription coupled invisible, expressive corporeality with mechanical processes, the body and the visual medium remained deeply intertwined: their lively figures were subjected to those sociohistorical conditions of technological representation.81 Although inexplicable and vitalistic, rather than explicable and mechanistic, their imagery offered an experimental rendition of the modern mind-body rooted in a set of technologically produced visual effects. To the contrary, Marey presumed that if the body’s expressive capacity did not fit into his model of efficient, energetic expenditure, it might not be worth preserving: Marey’s flawed materialist assumption suggests, if only in retrospect, a desire to bracket out types of human expressivity. Yet, some vitalist responses can seem equally problematic: by reversing the terms of Marey’s apparent exclusion, one might claim that expressivity can only exist outside mechanized systems of inscription, such as when Boccioni depicted photography and film as being anathema to artistic expression. The brothers’ works, however, did not subscribe to a strict separation between mechanical mediums and human expressivity, between machines and

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

73

bodies, but rather they envisioned productive responses to both positions: the materialist exclusion of indefinable flows and the vitalistic prohibition against mechanistic infiltration. Originally using a chronographic system to picture human expressivity—first as futurism and then as spirit photography—the Bragaglias provided the conceptual and technical basis for imagining vitalistic content in another medium of mechanical reproducibility as well. In early 1913, while briefly allied with futurism, Anton Giulio published a short text titled “In the Year 2000,” in which he imagined a technological medium that did not yet exist.82 After referring to Éduoard Belin’s telephotographic machine, unveiled in 1907 as an instrument for transmitting still images over recently installed telephone lines, Bragaglia wondered if, in the future (surely by the titular year 2000), an invention would convey real-time moving images over great distances. Curiously, few practical benefits of these transmissions can be discerned, but rather he focused on the dire results of interacting with distant figural forms, which he termed “phantoms.” If a viewer should get angry with a phantom, he reasoned, “Won’t there be the desire to slap him immediately?”83 This same deeply felt, perhaps even uncontrollable, passion had already been playacted by the Bragaglia brothers in 1912. In the photograph The Slap (Figure 1.9), a standing figure strikes a seated male, whose blurred trajectory

Figure 1.9  Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, The Slap, 1912. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

74

Futurist Conditions

ends up on the floor. If not for his later description of distant, telegraphic forms inciting physical action, this image’s darkened spare interior might suggest a scene of violent interrogation, an alternate means for trying to discover the hidden depths of a person. In the artist’s view, however, such a violently emotional response was warranted if the distant entity had been impertinent or malicious, for instance. Considered alongside its photographic supplement, this text described a fairly literal means by which bodily images can have real-world consequences: visceral subject matter. Later in the same article, Anton Giulio pondered the potential for erotic encounter in this futuristic medium: “Think of the kisses that the phantasms will give.”84 Any pleasure or satisfaction quickly dissipates, he decided, as viewers realize the images are merely projections from afar, not actual persons. Such a medium of long-distance, emotive communication could hardly be enjoyed: “Oh! The tortures of the nearby distance similar to the torments of . . . the most unfortunate futuristic Tantalus!”85 Even though these artificially kindled desires led only to disappointment, these phantasmal effects precipitated an unusual twist in the text’s final sentence: I think that within 100 years there will be a nocturnal, telephonic, anticinematographical love, in which minds abandon themselves to the madness of a deceptive hour, winding up as their own shadows, one inside the other, in the longing for a love that is just too phantasmagoric: very spasmodically phantasmagoric.86

As viewers succumbed to phantom desires, they become phantoms themselves. Such irresistible illusions implied to him a dangerous potential for increased dissatisfaction and alienation by becoming more deeply interconnected due to technological innovation. Along with anticipating the demise of photodynamism and the emergence of another dynamic visual medium, Anton Giulio was reflecting upon a set of other possible consequences to his and his brother’s photographic efforts—not in terms of artistic alienation per se, as Boccioni had feared, but through the spectators being swept up in an emotional situation, or perhaps a convincingly simulated one.87 Its success as an expressive medium could culminate in the previously unforeseen danger of being consumed by it. Following from the paradox of the mechanized soul—that it might be better to simulate spiritual essences than to face the prospect of there being none—the brothers attempted to disclose expressive truths by introducing a new mode of temporality into their still images, even if those spiritual essences could never be

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

75

fully actualized. Extending this logic to an unrealized sociotechnical innovation, Anton Giulio foresaw complicated emotional responses that spectators might have to any audiovisual medium, whether simulated or actual. Predicated on intense technological mediation of daily experience, his idea of phantasmal projection resembles the mass séances of cinema and, later, television, and might hint at individualized, televisual media of a new millennium (c. 2000).88 Irrespective of any predictive value, the seductively tantalizing qualities of Anton Giulio’s evocative phantoms also paralleled contemporaneous developments in early silent cinema. As an implicit response to the nascent language of cinematic gesture that the brothers learned at Cines, photodynamism redefined bodily motion to be an enigmatic engagement with the emotional qualities and spiritual depths of figures. Again, their disaffection with film may be explained, in part, by a fear of inexpressiveness, so their bodies-in-motion alluded to invisible, expressive forces that would bring a vitalistic supplement to both early filmic production and chronophotographic methods. According to Anton Giulio’s account, the path followed by photodynamism would lead to immense spectacles involving immersive images of crowds and battles, spectacles no doubt reminiscent of the historical epic films pioneered in Rome during those years.89 As the Bragaglias’ photodynamic phantasmagoria redirected the physiological “truths” of chronophotography toward more evanescent forms, their gestural language of vitality also reoriented a prevailing artistic futurist sentiment at the time—away from “lifeless” photographic mechanicity (whether naturalistic or not) toward a more nuanced awareness of ongoing human-machine interaction.

Chronographic Instability The irony of aiming to reveal vitality using static visual forms was not lost on the futurists, who primarily worked with traditional artistic media.90 Although futurist photography and painting both referred to the same vitalistic principles and both used experimental techniques, the irreparable conflict between the Bragaglias and Boccioni revolved around the central issue of which visual medium was best suited to depicting phenomena inherently difficult or even impossible to represent. Underlying arguments in favor of both positions, vitalist philosopher Bergson had advised people to avoid employing conventional representations and fixed symbolic forms.91 Associated with those “mechanical” modes of thought and experience that replaced the irreducible qualities of sensory experiences, static forms, such as widely circulated symbols,

76

Futurist Conditions

were “incapable of proving, disproving, or illustrating free will,” according to Bergson.92 Similar to the Bragaglias (and Wundt, for that matter), Bergson identified a degree of productive ambiguity that eluded static, mechanical representation. But substantial confusion arose in artistic circles, including in futurism and cubism, over Bergson’s principled rejection of mechanistic or “mechanical” thinking. Did he mean mechanical literally to signify advanced technologies, or is the term to be applied to any stable, fixed symbolic systems? Was Bergson describing a problem with mechanical mediums or any form of static representation whatsoever? These questions were at the heart of the Italian futurist disagreement about photography in 1913, when, following Bergson, the futurists asked, What medium is better suited to revealing the qualities of lived experience? Already steeped in the anxieties about visual mechanization within an increasingly mediated society, photodynamism emphasized the uncertain status of and newly redefined relations among images, bodies, and perceptions. So, the conflict was not simply an issue of the camera replacing the painter’s hand, thereby relieving traditional artists from the dull task of copying; rather, it was a matter of demonstrating which visual approaches could most effectively allude to essential human qualities. This relatively brief, but deep rift over artistic mediums assumed an outsized role in defining futurist visuality, which consistently hinged on visualizing invisible vitalist forces. Some scholars have noted the unusual “ontological effects” of early twentiethcentury systems of mechanical reproduction, which were symptomatic of the widespread reconceptualization of assorted phenomena, in light of the photographic and filmic apparatuses. While directly reflecting the technical alternatives to the manual practices of painting, these mechanized media also destabilized the very status and definition of the subjects being represented or imagined, and even extended to those individuals who made images: artists, filmmakers, and other visual practitioners. According to French theorist André Bazin, a major historical shift in visual ontology arose from the fact that, in addition to preserving natural appearances in greater detail than was possible in painting, photography created hallucinatory substitutes for reality, which undermined or replaced the things depicted.93 These semblances of phenomena might seem irrational or magical for observers who may not be acquainted with material and technical processes, and such evanescent effects conveyed an existential condition of transitoriness, for Bazin. Similarly, Giovanni Lista noted that photographic media have “ontological resistance” to translating energetic forms, and he summarized the ontic realities of their visual illusionism: “The

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

77

photographic lie becomes a projection that suggests a tangible truth.”94 For Tom Gunning, photodynamism punctuated a longer history of photographically articulating “a new concept of the body and its energies” beyond the visible realm.95 In essence, photodynamic images could not be defined unequivocally as being either evidence or fantasy, which threw into doubt the status of the phenomena depicted as actual, virtual, or otherwise. In one sense, those figures mechanically shown may be considered mechanical visual mediums in their own right: both moving and remaining static, they seemed at once living and dead—that is, uncanny.96 Riffing on this same ontic instability, media historian Friedrich Kittler has observed another general fact of early twentieth-century European cultural history: the new mediums of representation conditioned both new bodies and new minds.97 So, another of the fears inaugurated by photography and extended by photodynamism was that anyone portrayed in mechanical images might become somehow less human, less alive. No matter how much vitality static images attempt to reveal, as Bergson noted, they remain only a travesty of life, a forgery of less easily represented qualities, while Anton Giulio pointed out a danger of spectators becoming emotionally entangled with the figural projections. To more fully appreciate how Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia’s project participated in the ontological shift precipitated by mechanical visual media, it can be useful to compare their interpretation of human-machine interaction with the findings of others during that era. Paralleling many of the formal and conceptual concerns in futurist photodynamism, Luigi Pirandello’s short pre–First World War novel Shoot!: The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio adeptly considers how visual mechanicity produced an altered subjectivity.98 Set in early twentieth-century Rome, where the author resided, this fiction takes the form of journal-style notebooks kept by a handturned film camera operator named Serafino Gubbio and nicknamed Shoot!99 This first-person account chronicles his creeping sense of estrangement caused by his vocation of filmmaking. In the opening pages, Serafino tries mentally adapting, and proudly professes a newfound emotional detachment that mirrors the action of the camera itself, which he steadily cranks. Yet, he’s quite pessimistic as well: “What’s mankind to do then, after all the machines have been taught to go by themselves, that . . . still remains to be seen.”100 Fully expecting to be replaced by a machine (eventually), he becomes increasingly detached and machinelike. If the ancient poets deified their feelings, the cameraman reasons, then the modern-day deities are made of metal, with his disembodied voice adding, “Long live the Machine that mechanizes life!”101 This cheer of feigned support

78

Futurist Conditions

is immediately contradicted: these “monsters” enslave humans, devouring their hearts and minds and giving them “exquisite stupidities” in return.102 Alongside the overtly machinic imagery, the story depicts the pernicious effects of the film camera, which, like a wild beast, devours human souls, as the cameraman acts as an emotionless accomplice who feeds film stock to the voracious creature.103 By playing mechanized perception against animal instinct, Pirandello positions the uncertain status of what was considered to be human at the dangerous middle ground between volatile animal and machinic forces. This story about the strange psychological effects of filming on Serafino can be read as an extended allegory for industrial modernization in Italy and around Europe in the early twentieth century. Not only was the Italian economy revving to a higher level of production, but an infusion of capital into the national film industry fueled the increasing value of its filmic commodities, both domestically and internationally.104 Serafino’s new vocation suggested the need to adopt strange bodily routines, different attitudes, and other modes of being. By mimicking the detached, impassive vision of the camera, Serafino tries to respond appropriately to mechanization, while forging a productive, ongoing relationship to it. Although this provisional resolution to his inner conflict (i.e., emotional detachment) arrives early in the text, difficulties emerge both pertaining to the narrator’s own irrepressible desires and resulting in various tragic and comical situations, in which he finds himself over the course of the story. Fears about uncontrollable animal instincts, for instance, accelerate his descent into machinelike automation. Eventually, his psychic and social dysfunction culminates in tragic events he might have prevented to which he responds by withdrawing completely from the world—into a catatonic state. Pirandello’s story frames Serafino’s vocation as both spark and fuel for his progressive estrangement. Determined to find his way in the modern world at any cost, the cameraman becomes a caricature of lifeless, machinic operation marked by an inability to communicate verbally. Despite Pirandello’s focus on the ostensibly dehumanizing effects of this mechanical medium, it would be incorrect to claim, as some critics have, that this is an explicitly anti-technological novel or an implicit negation of early futurist ideas.105 The reasons can primarily be found within the structure and logic of the narrative itself. Although Shoot! portrays the film medium and film industry in a disparaging light, Pirandello’s man-machine configuration (i.e., the cameraman) emerges from concerns unrelated to the fear of automating human tasks, but rather it strongly implies that these effects reflected the character’s emotional dysfunction. Significantly, the novel avoids obvious moralism, which might imply that the

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

79

narrator could have made better decisions. For instance, it is not assumed he would have been better off if he had not entered the film industry or if he had been more communicative or acted more responsibly. Without offering clear alternatives to the character’s predicament, the story turns steadily—if also mechanically—toward a seemingly inevitable conclusion: total body-machine fusion. Not only the filmmaker but also the actors and viewers experience the estrangement provoked by the camera in Shoot! Their automated perceptions throw into doubt the beliefs they held prior to film’s destabilization of human processes and its blurring of previously clear distinctions.106 But, rather than trying to negate or counteract the effects of technology, this story describes the sequential phases of a gradual, seemingly unavoidable outcome of machinehuman integration. Another aspect of this technological theme is the use of an unreliable narrator: Serafino blames the camera for his personal crisis, but the causes of his mental and emotional breaks remain unclear. In this narrative, the medium of mechanical reproduction symbolizes a deeper anxiety about the shifting psychosocial attitudes and cultural relations during that historical moment. Can humans adapt to the new world or not, and, if so, will they remain recognizably human? If Pirandello’s story represents a worst-case scenario for human-machine interaction, it is due to the main character’s incapacity to adjust emotionally to the machinic processes, which indicates deficient human responses more even than technological dangers per se. Despite portraying psychic and emotional instability precipitated by the film camera, Pirandello himself did not dislike cinema. For instance, he said in a 1924 interview in Paris: “I believe film more easily, more completely than any other means of artistic expression can give us the vision of thought.”107 In addition, the author was involved with several film projects and screen adaptations of his published works, including his 1918 negotiation (ultimately unsuccessfully) with Anton Giulio Bragaglia for the film rights to Shoot!108 It is not particularly surprising to learn that the former futurist had been interested in making Pirandello’s story about the effects of psychosocial estrangement on the producers of machinic imagery. Irrespective of Pirandello personal appreciation for film—both as a technical medium and as an industry—his darkly amusing tale of human-machine dysfunction exaggerated prevalent anxieties at the time concerning automation and automatism.109 The unstable cameraperson in Shoot! offers an extended literary device for presenting the theme of estrangement in the modern world. By addressing the issue of bodymachine integration, Pirandello astutely surmised that mechanized vision might entail significant emotional and psychological changes to human perception

80

Futurist Conditions

itself. That is, this cautionary tale about the dissolution and reconstruction of individual subjectivity presents the resulting tragedy not so much as a mechanical problem as an implicitly emotional failure. His dramatization of the pernicious effects of mechanical reproduction contrasts with the Bragaglias’ more optimistic version of human-machine interaction, which changed course due to creative difficulties with the futurists (viz., Bocconi).110 Pirandello’s narrative solutions resemble both the images and the texts in the Bragaglia’s project. Like many of the futurists, Serafino embraced disorienting change, rather than denying it: “to make a clean sweep and start afresh.”111 Such a desire to effect a clear-cut temporal rupture fits with a vitalist understanding of psychosocial and historical rejuvenation, espoused by many futurists, relative to an ongoing transformation that may or may not require modern technology. For instance, the Bragaglias’ version of a fresh start involved mechanically rendering gestural expressivity and staging spiritual essences. Elsewhere, Serafino characterizes the exposed film waiting for development as containing “the products of our soul,” a sentiment echoed by Anton Giulio’s belief that a photodynamic inscription can capture aspects of the human soul: “The picture therefore can be invaded and pervaded by its subject’s essence.”112 Also, the Bragaglias’ professional training with mechanized images and artistic pursuits were firsthand experiences similar to those of the cameraperson in Shoot! Yet, Serafino’s emotional discomfort resonates not with the Bragaglias but with Boccioni whose suspicion about mechanical reproduction amounted to an antiphotographic bias. For Pirandello’s main character, film distorts reality: it spawns confusion about human identity and blurs the distinction between the real world and fantasy, and provokes a dysfunctional integration of humans and machines.113 While Serafino’s breakdown stems from an unsuccessful internalization of mechanical processes, these same qualities of blurred boundaries, multiple identities, and machinic visions may also be used to describe features of the unreality explored in Anton Giulio’s writings.114 A similar sense of ontological instability—extending to the image-makers, actors or sitters, and spectators— attended to their versions of human-machine interaction. In spite of the bold, enthusiastic claims Anton Giulio made on behalf of his artistic medium, the indiscernible realm of photodynamism narrated a similar set of psychosocial and technological dangers. The Bragaglias’ idea to address, rather than avoid, the challenging psychosocial effects of mechanicity may, in some respects, be a precursor to the heroic cameraman in Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (1929). In a fairly literal sense, photodynamism’s “purifying” operation of the camera extended to

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

81

this Russian filmmaker and writer’s belief in the “photo-eye.”115 Everything is reassessed in and through the mechanized gaze of the camera. For both Vertov and the Bragaglias, machinic vision marked a dramatic sociohistorical shift in human psychic and emotional patterns, but the camera’s automated vision would be able to assist people and society to adapt.116 Also, similar to Anton Giulio’s “transcendental photograph of movement,” for which “we [the brothers] also envisage a new machine that is able to make one perceive, better than today,” Vertov expressed similar optimism for mechanical perception: “Hurrah for the poetry of machines, propelled and driving.”117 Both Anton Giulio Bragaglia and Vertov displayed sincere enthusiasm in their works for perceptual automatism, which contrasted dramatically with Pirandello’s sarcastic slogan “Long live the Machine that mechanizes life!” Vertov considered the truth of the world to be both mechanical and lived in real-time beyond the confines of a film, and while photodynamism also believed machinic vision could capture aspects of bodily experience, its version could be simulated as well. Although not continuing as futurists after early October 1913, the Bragaglias’ commitment to exploring the human-machine integration signaled a creative engagement with the deeper psychic and social effects of technology. The photodynamic images themselves did not provoke the opprobrium of Boccioni, who may well have agreed that the visible body was “merely the instrument of the invisible body,” as Anton Giulio noted. However, Boccioni thought that artistic expression (as a generalized human activity) should be defined beyond the reach of emerging visual technologies, a stance that directly conflicted with the practices and discourses of photodynamism, especially considering that Anton Giulio made some unwise, exclusionary claims in his book concerning the preeminence of photographic media over other media at capturing human expressiveness and other hidden depths.118 If photography provoked a major disagreement within futurism, it also had an unforeseen effect: by forcing the other futurist visual artists Giacomo Balla and Boccioni (to be discussed in Chapters 2 and 3) to consider the problem of mechanized vision. That is, the ontological and methodological instability of photographic media upended even non-technological futurist approaches to visual experimentation using primarily traditional materials. When, in November 1915, futurist writer Giovanni Papini vigorously defended photography in an unpublished, handwritten note, he offered another variation on the well-rehearsed claim that the camera was freeing painting from the task of representing the so-called reality.119 The usually astute Papini had either missed or misunderstood the nature of futurist photography (and its discourses), which intentionally defied realistic appearances. When Anton Giulio described the

82

Futurist Conditions

deadening effects of mechanical reproduction, which merely copied the world as it appeared, he suggested that photodynamism could access an essential unreality behind appearances. Most importantly, any presumed opposition between humans and technology could be overcome through a body-machine collaboration that aimed at safeguarding human vitality by preserving individual expressive gestures. In the Bragaglias’ efforts to preserve human qualities amid technological modernization, they departed from established visual systems for connoting human expressivity in painting, photography, and early film. Rather than preserving or reinstituting conventional pictorial qualities, they reimagined that humanness could take the forms of illegible and inscrutable figures caught amid “unspeakable and ungraspable” forces.120 When shifting from the film industry to futurist photography, the brothers had introduced a non-cinematic model of gestural expressivity, in which human figures signify forces extending beyond the fixed boundaries of the physical body and its mechanized reproductions.121 Their visual analogies for invisible forces implied moving in, through, and beyond psychophysiological constraints, but their blurred, multiplied gestures also revisited a long-standing creative paradox: how to represent unrepresentable qualities. For them, photographing bodily expressiveness did not mean picturing them with great precision, but rather meant allowing bodies and images of bodies to become less discernible and more evanescent amid the ongoing machine-human integration.

Notes 1 Following from the attribution listed in early twentieth-century literature, the authorship for photodynamic images will be listed as the two brothers working collaboratively, though Anton Giulio solely authored many texts on photodynamism, which variously used first-person singular and first-person plural pronouns to describe this research. See Giovanni Di Jorio, “L’Arte fotograifca dei fratelli Bragaglia,” La fotografica artistica (July 1912), 109; and Edoardo Di Sambuy, “La fotografica futurista di Anton Giulio e di Arturo Bragaglia,” La fotografia artistica (May 1913), 71–5. Art historian Giovanni Lista also credits both brothers for this visual research; Giovanni Lista, Futurism and Photography (London: Merrell, 2001), 21 and Giovanni Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista (Milan: Skira, 2001), 148. It is notable that another Bragaglia brother, Carlo Ludivico, asserted primary authorship; however, the legal judgment in the Rome civil court proceeding that resulted from this assertion of authorship explicitly denied this claim in June 1995. See Maurizio Verardi (appointed judge), “Sentenza Tribunale

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

83

Civile di Roma—Anton Giulio Bragaglia,” Court of Rome, First Civil Section, June 8, 1995. 2 Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista (Turin: Einnaudi, 1980), §19 (p. 27). Unless otherwise noted, the translations from this and other texts by Anton Giulio are those of the author. He also described Marey’s chronophotography as “a form of cinematography,” which “certainly does not intend to reconstruct movement, nor to give the sensation of it [movement]” and had been “used in the teaching of gymnastics.” Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §22 (pp. 27–8). 3 On expressive aims, see Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §23 (p. 29). 4 Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Luigi Russolo, and Ardengo Soffici, “Avviso,” Lacerba 1, no. 19 (October 1, 1913), 211. 5 Although the names of the other artists accompanied the announcement, it remains unclear the extent to which they agreed with Boccioni, who clearly spearheaded the resistance. For instance, the painter Giacomo Balla, who resided in Rome, like the Bragaglias, had grown relatively close with the brothers from early 1911. The futurist tendency to sign documents collectively, as with published manifestos, may have entailed an imprimatur of unified public support for Boccioni’s position, in the absence of any other process for coming to the decision within the geographically dispersed group. 6 Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §8 (p. 17). 7 In part, Boccioni discussed how the artist’s role in society is as the translator of the chaos that entangles things, and it would not be possible for people to imagine life in the past epoch without art’s translation, according to Boccioni, since artists are the only record of what people in different epochs saw, heard, adored, and loathed. Boccioni, lecture in Rome in May 1911; printed in Ester Coen, Umberto Boccioni: A Retrospective, exhibition catalog (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988), 233. 8 Lista, Futurist and Photography, 33. “Though they [the futurists] advocated a culture dominated by technology, they encountered problems with the use of the camera because of the way it directly affected their image.” Giovanni Lista also describes Boccioni’s rejection of photography and film as rooted in his defense of futurism against cubism. Lista, Cinema e fotografia, 14. 9 In August 1913, Boccioni claimed: “We have always rejected with disgust and contempt even a distant relationship with photography, because it is outside art.” Umberto Boccioni, “Futurist Dynamism and French Painting,” Lacerba (August 1, 1913); reprinted in translation in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (Boston: MFA Publications, 2001), 107–10. In a letter to gallery owner Giuseppe Sprovieri in September 1913, Boccioni writes: “It is presumptuous inutility that damages our aspirations of liberation from the schematic or successive reproduction of stasis and motion.” Reprinted in Umberto Boccioni, Lettere

84

Futurist Conditions

futuriste, ed. Federica Rovati (Rovereto, Italy: Egon and Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, 2009), 87 and 268–72. 10 Roger Allard, “Les Beaux Arts,” Revue indépendente, no. 3 (August 1911), 134. 11 Henri des Pruraux, “Il sogetto nella pittura,” La Voce 4, no. 44 (October 31, 1912), 13. 12 The criticisms of film were by no means universal, but they appeared in commentaries in several different countries. Maxim Gorky, “The Lumière Cinematographe (Extracts)” (1896); reprinted in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 25; Piero Antonio Gariazzo, Il teatro muto (Turin: S. Lattes, 1919), 100; and Terry Ramsaye, “Color Photography and the Motion Picture,” Photoplay 15, no. 4 (March 1919): 84–6. On the lack of vitality perceived by early cinema critics, see also Introduction, note 46, in this volume. 13 Boccioni claimed, “We, who are accused of having an exterior vision of things, of engaging in cinematography, are the only ones to march toward something definitive, which is an intuitive, developmental creation.” Umberto Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism), trans. Richard Shane Agin and Maria Elena Versari (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2016), 102. 14 On the development of objectivity in nineteenth-century scientific photography, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010), Chapter 3 “Mechanical Objectivity”; and Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), Chapter 4 “Moments of Contact.” 15 B.C.V., “L’avvenire del cinematografo,” La Rivista Fono-Cinematografica, nos. 3–4 (January 20–6, 1909); reproduced in Tra una film e l’altra: Materiali sul cinema muto italiano; 1907–1920 (Venice, Italy: Marsilio Ed., in association with Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema), 66; my translation and emphasis preserved from the reprinted text. 16 An unsigned text “Estetica e cinematografia,” Lux 11 (October 1909), reproduced in Tra una film e l’altra, 84 (my translation). 17 A. Vicenzi, “Il cinematografo e la pittura,” Lux 12 (November 1909); reproduced in ibid., 88–9. 18 B.C.V., “L’avvenire del cinematografo,” reprinted in Tra una film e l’altra, 67. 19 Ricciotto Canudo, “Trionfo del cinematografo,” Nuova giornale (November 25, 1908), reprinted in 1911 as “Naissance d’un Sixième Art—Essai sur le Cinématographe,” Entretiens idéalists 10, no. 61 (October 1911): 32–40. Giovanni Papini, “La filosofia del cinematografo,” La Stampa 41 (May 18, 1907): 1–2. 20 Anton Giulio Bragaglia, “La Stirpe Bragagliesca,” L’Osservatore politico letterario, no. 6 (1965): 51. Elsewhere, Antonella Vigliani Bragaglia notes: “Bragaglia works with Mario Caserini and Enrico Guazzoni.” Antonella Vigliani

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

85

Bragaglia, “Fotodinamismo e cinema d’avanguardia,” in Appendix of Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, 134; my translation. 21 In 1910, their father Francesco was replaced as Director General by the Piedmont baron Alberto Fassini Camossi, and this change most likely directly affected the brothers’ professional ties with the studio, possibly souring their enthusiasm for large studio filmmaking. 22 Anton Giulio Bragaglia, “L’Arte fotografica,” La Fotografia artistica 8, no. 4 (April 1912): 55–7. 23 Anton Giulio Bragaglia, “L’Arte nella fotografia,” La Fotografia artistica 8, no. 2 (February 1912); reprinted in Appendix of Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, 223. 24 On providing the foundation for futurist painting and sculpture, see Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §1 (p. 13). He claimed their research proved that “the Photodynamic is much more appropriate to today’s needs than all representational media now in use.” Ibid., §58 (p. 52). “In fact, it is only through our researches that it is possible to obtain proportionate visions, in the strength of the images, at the very time of their life and, what’s more, at the speed with which they lived in space and in us.” Ibid., §22 (p. 28). 25 Anton Giulio notes, “It is only by the Photodynamic that the painter will be able to know what happens in the inter-movemental states that have been generated.” Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §26 (p. 32). Also he writes, “In the synthesis, the precise and almost invisible analytical elements . . . can be rendered visible only by the Photodynamic with its scientific aspects.” Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §25 (p. 30). 26 In mid-1913 Boccioni sent this portrait to a futurist journal in Bergamo, along with some promotional photos of his recent sculptures, though he later retracted his permission to print the portrait. Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista, 156. 27 The Bragaglias’ dismissal from futurism is chronicled (with varying explanations) by numerous texts by historians of arts and science. Giovanni Lista describes Boccioni’s rejection of photography and cinema a “deep historical mistake,” likely resulting from his defense of futurist painting against cubism and his increasing suspicion of the photographic apparatus, including futurist photodynamism. Lista, Cinema e fotografia, 14. The irony of his “mistake” is heightened by the fact that, as Lista noted, Boccioni was perhaps the first avant-garde artist to stage his identity photographically in a multiple portrait of himself, c. 1905–7; ibid., 142–4. Marta Braun discusses the disagreement in the context of Anton Giulio’s claims of providing a scientific basis for further futurist research, which “were unacceptable to the Futurist painters.” Marta Braun, “Anton Giulio Bragaglia: Photodynamism and Photospiritism,” in France Choinière and Vincent Lavoie, eds., Shockwaves: Photography Rocks Representation (Montreal: Éditions Dazibao, 2003), 90.

86

Futurist Conditions

28 F. T. Marinetti, Bruno Corra, Emilio Sentimelli, Arnaldo Ginna, Giacomo Balla, and Remo Chiti, “The Futurist Cinema” (1916), in Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, 208. 29 Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista, 151–2. 30 Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §4 (p. 15); emphasis in the original text. 31 Ibid., §14 (p. 25); cited in Lista, Cinema e fotografia, 164. 32 Ibid., §14 (p. 24–5); my emphasis. 33 Ibid., §27 (p. 33); the emphasis in the original text uses bold rather than italics. 34 Ibid., §16 (p. 25). 35 Ibid., §44 (p. 42). 36 Wilhelm Wundt, The Language of Gestures (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 66. The first volume of Wundt’s ten-volume Völkerpsychologie was published in 1900, and it was first published in English as the stand-alone volume The Language of Gestures in 1973. 37 Wundt, The Language of Gestures, 146. 38 Ibid., 101 and 110. 39 Ibid., 90. 40 Adam Kendon’s work of gesture has informed my formulations about Wundt; see Kendon, Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 43–4, 57–60. 41 Wundt, The Language of Gestures, 57–8. 42 Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §22 (p. 29); emphasis in the original text. 43 Ibid., §26 (p. 32) and §28 (p. 34), respectively. 44 Ibid., §7 (p. 17). 45 Ibid., §8 (p. 18). 46 At the beginning of his book, Anton Giulio writes: “I affirm that one can make art with the mechanical photographic means only if one overcomes the pedestrian photographic reproduction of the truth, immobile or caught in a pose in an [photographic] instance.” Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §1 (p. 13); emphasis in the original text. 47 Bragaglia, “L’arte fotografica,” 57. 48 Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §7 (pp. 16–17). 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., §26 (p. 31) and §28 (p. 34), respectively. 51 Ibid., §7 (p. 16). In an earlier text, he similarly claimed, “Everyone thus recognizes the unreality of figures in the most recent expression of art. But the best and almost the entire artistic virtue of recent photography consists of precisely what they consider a defect.” Bragaglia, “L’arte fotografica,” 56. 52 Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §5 (p. 16). 53 Ibid.; emphasis in the original text.

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

87

54 Bragaglia, “L’arte fotografica,” 56. 55 Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §7 (p. 17); emphasis in the original text. 56 Ibid., §15 (p. 25). 57 Wundt, The Language of Gestures, 140 58 Anton Giulio notes: “It has been said that our photographs are blurred. But only by those who are incompetent or in bad faith those photographs would be considered blurred, ours: and [they are considered] only photographs and photographs [that are] only blurred: because anyone can see the fact that they possess a lot more and are not only blurred, but movemented [Italian neologism movimentate].” Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §2 (p. 14); emphasis in the original text. See also Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §2 (p. 15). 59 Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 64–6 and 79. “The surfeit of detail frozen by the camera was obscuring the clear expression of movements.” Ibid., 79. 60 Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §20 (p. 27). 61 Ibid., §8 (p. 17); emphasis in the original text. 62 Ibid., §22 (p. 29); emphasis in the original text. 63 In one passage from his book, Anton Giulio identifies the act of dancing as not being limited to the dancer. Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §29 (p. 35). 64 Wundt positions the shifting communicative value of gestures in terms of internal processes: “Like the first appearance of symbolic gestures out of expressive movements, the metamorphoses of meaning are also in themselves processes resulting from the constant change in psychological conditions.” Wundt, The Language of Gestures, 94. 65 Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §40 (p. 41); emphasis in the original text. 66 In 1916–17, Sigmund Freud claimed: “The outcome of this superimposing of the separate [psychic] elements that have been condensed together is as a rule a blurred and vague image, like what happens if you take several photographs on the same plate.” Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lecture on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 211. Elsewhere, Freud cites the technique of photographic compositing used by Francis Galton to reveal family resemblances among different persons; Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, trans. Abraham Arden Brill (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 117, 274, and 395. 67 Anton Giulio explained the idea this way: “Every man and every landscape possesses their own dynamic style, so that a representation devoid of the signification of it [style] is also devoid of an absolutely indispensable thing.” Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §40 (p. 41); the original emphasis has been removed.

88

Futurist Conditions

68 Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §9 (p. 18) 69 Ibid. The analogy of photographic medium and sensitive body was not uncommon for avant-garde artists, such as František Kupka who called the artist’s mind as “an ultrasensitive film, capable of seeing even the unknown worlds whose rhythms would seem incomprehensible to us.” Cited in Braun, “Anton Giulio Bragaglia: Photodynamism and Photospiritism,” 87. 70 Along with a new shutter mechanism, Marey dressed his subjects in black outfits to remove excess data, as discussed in the Introduction. 71 With respect to vertigo, Anton Giulio explicitly referred to “our vertiginous day,” “vertiginous modern life,” and “visual vertigo.” Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §32 (p. 37), §33 (p. 37) and §36 (p. 39), respectively. Also, one critic at the time drew attention to the “visual vertigo” caused by photodynamism, which he said created disequilibrium between the eye and in the inner ear; Sambuy, “La fotografica futurista di Anton Giulio e di Arturo Bragaglia,” 75. 72 After being elected President of the Society for Psychical Research in London, Henri Bergson addressed the society in May 1913, prescribing “the science of mind-energy” to measure telepathy among minds and with the dead. This lecture is reprinted in Bergson, Mind-Energy (London: Macmillan, 1920), 60–83. Prominent Italian scientists Cesare Lombroso and Angelo Mosso also believed special technologies could document unseen psychic and physiological phenomena. Lombroso published a text on paranormal phenomena, After Death—What? (London: Fisher Unwin, 1909). For critical account of Lombroso’s spiritualism, see Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 268–71. Mosso conducted physiological research to measure vasomotor reactions, and his plethysmograph was a device invented to measure the “movement of the soul,” according to Mosso; see David G. Horn, The Criminal Body: Lombroso and the Anatomy of Desire (London: Routledge, 2003), 117–22. 73 Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §15 (p. 25). 74 Anton Giulio describes some of these phenomena: “In us there are a number of different psychic principles and different bodies that interpenetrate, and the visible body, considered from the psychic viewpoint, is merely the instrument of the invisible body.” Anton Giulio Bragaglia, “I fantasmi dei vivi e dei morti,” La Cultura moderna, Natura e arte (November 1913), 756; cited in translation in Lista, Futurism and Photography, 28. 75 Bragaglia, “I fantasmi dei vivi e dei morti,” 756. The phrase “photography of tricks performed by us” is also mentioned in the Appendix to Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, 251. 76 Giovanni Lista frames the admission of faking the spirit photographs as a consciously tongue-in-cheek approach: “Anton Giulio then ironically fabricated

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

89

‘trick photographs’ of apparitions, also organized séances and spiritistic meetings, which he defined as ‘a joke.’” Lista, Futurism and Photography, 28. Braun does not find complete ironic detachment: “Although he uses a tone that is often incredulous and sarcastic . . . nevertheless it is clear that he has made serious study of the literature and this scepticism comes from an informed belief . . . that it is possible to record a transcendental reality with a camera.” Braun, “Anton Giulio Bragaglia: Photodynamism and Photospiritism,” 91. Tom Gunning observes: “Bragaglia did not claim his ‘spirit photographs’ to be medium-induced impressions of the spirit world. He confessed they were staged. However, he also claimed that they gave a more reliable image of the spirit world than the supposed products of the spirit themselves.” Tom Gunning, “Haunting Images: Ghosts, Photography and the Modern Body,” in The Disembodied Spirit, ed. Allison Ferris, exhibition catalog (Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2003), 16. 77 Various scientific devices, such as Cesare Lombroso’s plethysmograph, were invented to determine who was faking illness, and this type of “truth-telling” technology occupies a place in the genealogy of the lie detector test. See Horn, The Criminal Body, 129. Stewart-Steinberg discusses Lombroso’s spiritualistic experiments in the relation to the history of the visual arts. Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect, 270. 78 Marey’s chronophotographic research contributed to disciplinary approaches for increasing the productivity of workers, in part, by suppressing or bracketing out the expressive capacity of the body. Historically, Marey’s work assisted other researchers to reorganize labor activities by making the human body more efficient, as with Frederick Winslow Taylor’s management of factories, as well as with Charles Frémont’s standardization of industrial machinery—both of which redefined labor practices scientifically. Frederick Taylor, “Shop Management” (1903), republished in Taylor, Scientific Management (New York: Harper, 1947), 133; Charles Frémont, Étude expérimentale du rivetage (Paris: Siège de la Société, 1916). Also, Anson Rabinbach directly juxtaposes Marey’s scientific photography to Frederick Taylor’s system for improving the productivity of factory workers (i.e., Taylorism); see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 238–49. 79 This is a counterargument to Tom Gunning’s idea that spirit photography visualized a de-corporealized modern body: “Their [spiritualist photographers’] evocation of a state of disembodiment and their challenge to photography to represent such a state, seemingly beyond the grasp of visuality, provides a powerful emblem of the fate of the body in the modern age.” Gunning, “Haunting Images,” 14–15. 80 Bergson presumes as much in his writings, when he claims in Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (Mineola,

90

Futurist Conditions

NY: Dover, 2001) that “we cannot make movement out of immobilities” and that the study of mechanics retains only the measurement of motion, or immobility. Bergson, ibid., 115 and 119, respectively. 81 Amid the convergence of the mechanical apparatus and the body’s invisible forces, it may not be entirely surprising to learn that, after Marey’s death, his devices for transcribing a body’s immaterial forces were used to document spiritualist séances, in research conducted by Jules Courtier in 1907–8. See Clément Chéroux and Pierre Apraxine, eds., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, exhibition catalog (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, in association with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2005), 253. 82 Anton Giulio Bragaglia, “Nell’anno 2000,” Patria (January 26, 1913); reprinted in the Appendix of Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, 240–1. 83 Ibid., 240. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid. One of Zeus’s sons, Tantalus was caught deceiving the gods, and was punished by having to stand under an apple tree in a lake. If he reached for the fruit, the branch would move out of reach and if he stooped to drink, the water would recede. While the original Italian word appears in the plural form, a singular form in English seems preferable to Tantaluses or Tantali. 86 Ibid., 240–1. Bragaglia is suggesting a dynamic, personal medium of interaction. However, the word “anti-cinematographical” suggests vitalism, and it derives from Bergson idea that the cinematographical form was mode of static representation: “The mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind.” Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005); originally published as Bergson, L’évolution créatrice (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1908). 87 In his 1913 book, Anton Giulio noted that even though photodynamism reproduced vitalistic imagery mechanically, he believed a newer apparatus in the future would replace it: “We also envisage a new machine that is able to make one perceive better than today.” Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §28 (p. 34). 88 Avant-garde photographers of the interwar period later adopted the séance as a symbol of collectivity: the surrealist Man Ray’s image Waking Dream Séance (1924) included many prominent surrealists, and the futurist Mario Castagneri made a composite in which the participants’ hands at a table-turning séance have been fused with a turning roulette wheel in The Turning Basin Overflows with Desires (c. 1934). Media historian Jeffrey Sconce documents the strong historical correlation between technological development and spiritualism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and he investigates the close relations between technological development, occultism, and popular entertainment. See Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

91

89 Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §44 (p. 42). 90 Amusement about this irony also pervaded criticism that portrayed futurist painting as being cinematic and not static. For instance, when distinguishing his own works from the futurist painters, Marcel Duchamp observed: “My interest in painting the Nude [Descending a Staircase, No. 2] was closer to the cubists’ interest in decomposing forms than to the futurists’ interest in suggesting movement. . . . My aim was a static representation of movement—a static composition of indications of various positions taken by a form in movement—with no attempt to give cinema effects through painting.” Duchamp, Salt Seller: the Writings of Marcel Duchamp (New York: De Capo Press, 1973), 124. 91 Despite implying a choice for the reader, Bergson was prescribing his preferred option: “Either you keep to what consciousness presents to you or you have recourse to a conventional mode of representation.” Bergson, Time and Free Will, 66. Also, he contrasted mechanical processes with spontaneous and free forces. Ibid., 140–4. 92 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 183. For more references to mechanical immobility, see also, ibid., 119, 173, 180, and 198. 93 André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” trans. Hugh Gray, Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (Summer 1960): 4–9. Parts of Bazin’s argument would have pleased both Boccioni and Bragaglia—the former due to an admission that photography indeed aimed to usurp painting; the latter due to the presumed superiority of photography and its significance in the history of the plastic arts. 94 Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista, 14. The phrase appears in the following translation of this passage: “The mechanical image has been considered as an anesthetic medium, which is to say ontologically resistant to the translation of a conception of art that is [the] transmission of vital energy.” Also, media historian Marta Braun refers to photodynamism’s ontological dimension of picturing invisible forces. Marta Braun, “Anton Giulio Bragaglia: Photodynamism and Photospiritism,” 89. For an earlier text on the same topic, Braun posed Bragaglia’s attempt to picture invisible forces as an epistemological problem; Marta Braun, “Fantasmes des vivants et des morts: Anton Giulio Bragaglia et la figuration de l’invisible,” Études photographiques (November 1, 1996); posted online November 2002: http:​/​/etu​​desph​​otogr​​aphiq​​ues​.r​​evues​​.​org/​​100. 95 Gunning, “Haunting Images,” 14–15. 96 André Bazin says photography embalms or mummifies the objects shown, whereby its “disturbing presence” conveys the nature of reality, no matter how blurred or distorted the resulting images are. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 8. 97 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 136 and 147.

92

Futurist Conditions

98 This text assumed different published and unpublished forms over many years, though its main structural and thematic maturation occurred in 1914–15. According to Francesco Càllari, the idea for the work probably began as a short story La Tigre in 1903–4, which the author tried but failed to publish as a serial in 1914 and then revised the work and successfully published it in monthly sections in 1915. Francesco Càllari, Pirandello e il cinema (Venice, Italy: Marsilio Editori, 1991), 20–1. The compiled novel was published in 1917, but was later revised and republished in 1925. For further chronological analysis, see Alessandro Vettori, “Serafino Gubbio’s Candid Camera,” Modern Language Notes 113, no. 1 (January 1998), 79. 99 The Italian phrase “Si gira!” (meaning literally, “Turn it!” but translated as “Shoot!”) was a director’s command for the operator to initiate a film shot by cranking the camera’s handle. 100 Pirandello, Shoot!, 6; translation altered from printed version. 101 Ibid., 7. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid., 3: “The machine is made to act, to move, it requires to swallow up our soul, to devour our life.” 104 Gian Piero Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano: 1895–1945 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1979); Aldo Bernardini, Il cinema muto italiano, 3 vol. (Rome: Laterza, 1980, 1981, and 1982, respectively); and Pierre Sorlin, Italian National Cinema, 1896–1996 (London: Routledge, 1996). 105 Mario Verdone, “Pirandello e il futurismo,” in Enzo Lauretta, ed., Pirandello e la avanguardie (Agrigento, Italy: Centro Nazionale di Studi Pirandelliani, 1999); and Alessandro Vettori, “Serafino Gubbio’s Candid Camera,” 79–107. An example of an anti-technological interpretation conflates the author’s view with the character’s delusion; ibid., 83–4. 106 Pirandello portrays film actors becoming detached from reality: “Here they feel as though they were in exile. In exile, not only from the stage, but also in a sense from themselves.” Pirandello, Shoot!, 34. This exile leads to uncanny misrecognition when an actress is “speechless and almost terror-stricken at her own image on the screen, so altered and disordered. She sees there someone who is herself but whom she does not know.” Ibid., 40. Citing Pirandello in his artwork essay, Walter Benjamin describes the estrangement of an actor in front of the camera as analogous to the loss of aura inherent in mechanical reproduction. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (second version), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 3; 1935– 1938 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2002), 113. 107 Luigi Pirandello interview with René Jeanne, “Cinq minutes avec Pirandello,” Les Nouvelles littéraires (November 15, 1924): 8; cited in Càllari, Pirandello e cinema, 24; my translation.

The Bragaglias’ Unreality

93

108 Nina Davinci Nichols and Jana O’Keefe Bazzoni, Pirandello and Film (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 11. The film rights were discussed in a letter from Pirandello to Anton Giulio Bragaglia, January 25, 1918; reprinted in Mario Verdone, I fratelli Bragaglia (Rome: Lucarini, 1991), 17. Anton Giulio Bragaglia elsewhere mentioned performing several Pirandello works for the theater in the 1920s; Bragaglia, “La Stirpe Bragagliesca,” 62. 109 In certain respects, the emotional detachment portrayed in the novel may have mirrored aspects of Pirandello’s self-reported experience of living like a phantom. In a 1908 letter to his daughter Lietta, he described his reaction to his wife becoming increasing disconnected from reality, eventually resulting in her institutionalization: “There is someone living my life and I don’t know who he is.” Cited in translation in Nichols and Bazzoni, Pirandello and Film, 19. 110 Ricciotto Canudo was committed to a new vision of society rooted in film; as early as 1906, he described a modern spirit for a new man, based on the dominance of the film camera. See Ara Merjian, “A Screen for Projection: Ricciotto Canudo’s Exponential Aesthetics and the Parisian Avant-Gardes,” in European Film Theory, ed. Temenuga Triofonova (London: Routledge, 2008), 232. 111 Pirandello’s main character notes: “I ask myself whether really all this clamorous and dizzy machinery of life . . . has not reduced the human race to such a condition of insanity that presently we must break out in fury and overthrow and destroy everything. It would, perhaps, all things considered, be so much to the good. In one respect only, though: to make a clean sweep and start afresh.” Pirandello, Shoot!, 3. 112 Ibid., 8, and Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, 35, respectively; the original emphasis in the latter was removed. 113 Through a catena of mechanomorphic substitutions, the camera overtakes his body, finally replacing his head and dispossessing him of his mental faculties: “My head is here, inside the machine, and I carry it in my hand.” Pirandello, Shoot!, 55. Later, this identity is jeopardized: “Was there an I there then that now no longer existed? . . . I, no, I was not there; albeit, not being there, I should have found it hard to say where I really was and what I was, being thus without time or space.” Pirandello, Shoot!, 103–4. 114 Anton Giulio wrote: “In us there are a number of different psychic principles and different bodies that interpenetrate, and the visible body, considered from the psychic viewpoint, is merely the instrument of the invisible body.” Bragaglia, “I fantasmi dei vivi e dei morti,” 756. Notably, Pirandello’s description of the multiplicity of souls in his book on humor resembles Bragaglia’s view: “what about the perpetual mobility of successive perspectives? What about the constant flow in which souls are? . . . But if we have within ourselves four or five different souls— the instinctive, the moral, the emotional, the social—constantly fighting among

94

Futurist Conditions

themselves? The attitude of our consciousness is contingent upon whichever of these souls is dominant; and we hold as valid and sincere that fictitious interpretation of ourselves, of our inner being.” See Pirandello, On Humor, trans. Antonio Illiano and Daniel P. Testa (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1974), 143. 115 On the “purifying” operation of the camera, see Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §5 (p. 16). Dziga Vertov writes, “The kino-eye lives and moves in time and space; it gathers and records impressions in a manner wholly different from that of the human eye . . . I am kino-eye. I am a builder.” Dziga Vertov, “The Resolution of the Council of Three, April 10, 1923” (1923); reprinted in Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson and trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 15–17. 116 Ibid., 8: “We introduce creative joy into all mechanical labor, / we bring people into closer kinship with machines, / we foster new people.” 117 Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §28 (p. 34), original emphasis removed. Dziga Vertov, “We: Variant of a Manifesto” (1922); reprinted in Vertov, Kino-Eye, 9. Like Pirandello, Vertov plays with a perception of human fault: “The machine makes us ashamed of man’s inability to control himself.” Ibid., 7. 118 Bragaglia, “I fantasmi dei vivi e dei morti,” 756. 119 On Papini’s handwritten text from November 1915, see Marcello Vannucci, Mario Nunes Vais, gentiluomo fotografo (Florence: Bonechi, 1976), 25; cited in Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista, 167. 120 Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista, §7 (p. 17). 121 Photodynamism focused on the gestures that indicate psychic and emotional vitality, while gestural rapidity also typified the psychological and emotional contours of early film acting. One early film critic describes the unsettling frenetic gestures in early cinema: “And the rapid gesture, which emerges with the precision of a monstrous clock with [mechanical] figures, excites the spirit of the modern spectator, already used to living rapidly.” B.C.V., “L’avvenire del cinematografo,” reprinted in Tra una film e l’altra, 67.

2

Balla’s Transformation

In 1913, the Italian futurist painter Giacomo Balla became obsessed with visually rendering passing automobiles as he sat along Via Veneto across from Palazzo Margherita, now the US Embassy, in Rome where he resided. Over the course of several months, working day and night and in all kinds of weather, he rapidly progressed from making contour drawings of boxy, black vehicles and their drivers, mimicking the chronographic method of French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey, to creating more complicated, nonnaturalistic patterns corresponding with the “new sensations” of vehicular speed.1 Balla’s transition from visible automobile contours to chaotic profusions of geometrical forms was chronicled in several of the artist’s sketchbooks, a substantial cache of studies, as well as numerous large paintings. What emerged was an innovative visual language so radical and impressive that even those closest to him were incredulous at the profound strides he made. “Balla has stunned us,” wrote futurist painter Umberto Boccioni in a January 1913 letter to fellow futurist Gino Severini, noting that their friend’s “courageous evolution has touched me and [futurist founder F. T.] Marinetti like a heroism, examples of which are rarely seen.”2 The same letter also explained Balla’s constructive response to being shunned by his fellow futurists the prior year (in February 1912), when his paintings were considered insufficiently resolved to merit inclusion in the first major futurist group exhibition at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris. According to Boccioni, Balla was overheard telling someone: “They did not want me in Paris, and they were right; they are much more advanced than me, but I will work and progress too!”3 Work and progress he did. By the middle of 1913, his initial investigations into kinetic vehicular forces led him to think expansively about a visual language of motion that purportedly transcribed all manner of energetic forces—physical, psychic, and even spiritual. Ranking among the most advanced creative trajectories pioneered by European visual artists before the First World War, Balla’s more fully developed futurist style of 1913–15 may be traced back directly to a series of extrapolations from his initial use of Marey’s

96

Futurist Conditions

mechanical method, which came about through creative dialog with both the Bragaglia brothers and Boccioni. A few years earlier, in March–April 1910, Boccioni invited Balla to join futurism after the artists Aroldo Bonzagni and Romolo Romani, two signatories of the first manifesto of futurist painting, exited the movement and distanced themselves from the others’ inflated rhetoric and aggressive tactics.4 In numerous manifestos and as part of a variety show that traveled around Italy in 1910, the poet and editor F. T. Marinetti promoted art-action—a predisposition to try to integrate artistic tendencies with political sociopolitical activities, which manifested as an incendiary brand of racial and national politics alongside a stringent prescription of diverse experimental creative practices.5 By that time, Balla was already well established as an artist who mentored young artists, including Boccioni and Severini (c. 1900–6), when they resided in Rome, before relocating to Milan and Paris respectively, and predating their association with futurism. In those years, Balla introduced them to a socially conscious mode of Divisionist painting, which would later serve as the main technical basis from which early futurist painting was launched.6 In spite of the rebellious rhetoric of the first two painting manifestos of 1910, which presumed to disrupt the creative inertia that had settled over the lingering Belle Époque in Italy and across Europe, the futurists had not yet formulated their visual practices distinctly enough from Divisionism to warrant their exaggerated claims of change and renewal. A turning point came in late 1911 when the Milan-based futurist painters Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, and Luigi Russolo visited Severini in Paris, and their increased familiarity with cubism sparked a thorough reevaluation of their own pictorial methods.7 Balla, who did not make that trip from Rome, lagged noticeably behind the others for the next year or two. Whether due to his geographic distance from Milan and Paris or his Divisionist commitments, especially among dealers, critics, and collectors, or a combination of the two, Balla did not undertake his most intense experimentation until after being excluded from that landmark 1912 exhibition in Paris. For Boccioni, who had become a de facto spokesperson for futurism by early 1912, Balla’s problem stemmed from his rather too literal interpretation of the futurist enthusiasm for mechanical invention and industrial modernity, which famously centered on accelerated modes of transport.8 Although Balla was not alone in this kinetic interpretation of futurist ideas, he did not respond as the others had to the pictorial challenges posed by cubism.9 Consequently, his work rather uncomfortably confirmed a recurring accusation leveled by prominent Parisian critics and intellectuals, who considered futurist painting to be too mechanical and too cinematic in its depiction of objects and figures in motion.10

Balla’s Transformation

97

After receiving Boccioni’s criticism, Balla decided to fully reconsider his Divisionist techniques, which, up to that moment, he had been rather cautiously updating to match his new futurist conviction. In early 1912, Balla met Anton Giulio Bragaglia, who lived near Rome and who, along with his brother Arturo, was experimenting with the chronophotographic method developed by Marey and his longtime assistant Georges Demenÿ. By the middle of 1912, Balla adopted a variation on the same technique indebted to Marey, for which the successive phases of motion informed multiple, contiguous traces. Balla’s first paintings in this vein, in which figures or objects remained clearly recognizable, include Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, Girl Running on a Balcony, and The Hands of the Violinist (all from 1912). If these earliest sequential inscriptions directly imitated chronophotography, the criticism of their mechanicity prompted the artist to endorse a greater level of pictorial experimentation—culminating in his direct observation of passing automobiles. For example, when Boccioni reported to Severini about Balla’s “courageous evolution” in January 1913, he described the works of their former teacher as being “too photographic and episodic.”11 For Boccioni, Balla’s research was headed in the right direction, but those late 1912 paintings were still too literal, and continued to carry unfortunate associations with mechanically reproduced motion. Soon after, Balla embarked on his daring stylistic procedures to accommodate connotations that diverged significantly from Marey’s scientific aims and to create visual effects associated with significantly less literal, more abstracted modes of painting. Although art historians often mention this radical, highly productive shift, an emphasis on the early chronophotographic works that Boccioni and others harshly criticized inadvertently reinforces some of the prevalent misconceptions about early futurist visuality—such as its undue focus on literal representations of kinetic motion and mechanized subjects. Additional exploration of Balla’s growing aversion to naturalistic, identifiable imagery will offer greater precision when tracking across several bodies of work the successive phases of his expanded mechanistic technique. Closely examining his alterations to Marey’s underlying method will demonstrate how chronophotography was reformulated into abstracted forms of motion, which later contribute to a new visual language for imagining collective desires.

Signs of Motion Two of the main artistic avenues opened by early futurist visual art before the First World War pertain to speed and sensation. While not identical, these

98

Futurist Conditions

tendencies revolved around the same experiential premise, attuned to the sociohistorical challenge of understanding what it meant to be modern. Itself a product of scientific and technological innovations in the nineteenth century, vehicular speed introduced a new conception of the world, its inhabitants, and their relations. In Marinetti’s founding manifesto of futurism in 1909, a speeding vehicle forcefully extended, and then abruptly affirmed, the limits of human control. Linked by Marinetti to excitement, danger, improvisation, and violence—all qualities of a new futurist sensibility—kinetic speed disrupted traditional ways of life, and the futurists embraced it unflinchingly, even though these newly minted subjects could only fitfully master its chaotic pressures and erratic pulsions.12 Based on a set of sociotechnical inventions that altered psychophysical conditions and social relations, velocity was, for the futurists, symptomatic of a larger process of modernization, the dramatically mobile part of an unsettled whole. So, the futurist concept of speed functioned as both a literal phenomenon and a convenient analogy for an uncertain, rapidly approaching future. It also became a humorous caricature when the British artist and writer Wyndham Lewis repeatedly joked that Marinetti’s futurist interpretation of modernity should really be called “Automobilism.”13 Vehicular transport marked the most literal contours of futurist enthrallment with modern society, but an adjustment to their thinking occurred in 1912–13, as many experimental visual artists from Europe shifted their attention to the central role played by perceptual mechanisms. By readjusting to the sensations associated with rapid and disruptive motion, the futurist sensibility pursued another avenue for apprehending the underlying truths of modern experience. Balla’s path from kinetic velocity to psychosocial effects—from literal to abstracted motion—was more direct than the other futurists, and this formal trajectory defines a series of small, but significant, updates to his underlying chronophotographic premises. Balla’s series of works depicting automobiles in motion (c. late 1912–14) imagined various ways that the forces of vehicular activity emanated into the surrounding environment, including how those kinetic effects influence the physical and perceptual conditions of the viewer. In Car + Speed + Light (1913) (Figure 2.1), overlapping geometrical patterns imprinted the unfolding temporal event onto a static flat plane to create a new visual syntax: wide emanating waves, spiraling eddies of air, and slicing diagonals, with the repeated vehicular outlines faintly visible in the upper half of the frame, as if moving right to left. All of these visual effects—both straight-line and wave-like behaviors— follow the dominant separation of lights and darks, whose spatial alternation delineate separate perceptual units, or qualia, in interconnected moments.

Balla’s Transformation

99

Figure 2.1  Giacomo Balla, Car + Speed + Light, 1913, Collection Museo del Novecento, Milan, Italy. Courtesy Mondadori Portfolio / Art Resource, NY. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

In Automobile Velocity + Light (1913) (Plate 1), a similarly restricted palette likewise traced kinetic motion along a dusty horizontal trajectory based on empirical observations, though here resulting in more abstracted visual patterns—as if the sensory data pictured no longer referred as precisely to identifiable physical phenomena. While the repetition and superimposition of nonnaturalistic forms resemble Marey’s chronophotography, it can often be difficult to determine the extent to which the mechanized processes guided and governed his artistic process. In one sense, the artist imitated Marey’s automatic procedure for mechanically accumulating the data of moving bodies, but in another sense, chronophotography or any other mechanical device did not directly aid Balla in producing images. To more fully appreciate how the artist interpreted mechanical procedures in relation to these kinetic forces and to identify which one Balla borrowed and which he did not, it can be useful to describe some of the underlying assumptions of Marey’s method. Developed over many years, Marey’s experimental method for transcribing the vectors of human and animal motion remained rooted in this broad scientific aim: to make visible the invisible forces of the natural world.14

100

Futurist Conditions

Figure 2.2  Étienne-Jules Marey, The Walking Man, 1886, black-and-white chrono­ photograph. Collection Musée Étienne-Jules Marey, Beaune, France.

By revealing what the eye could not directly apprehend, the camera and a bevy of other devices would serve to uncover the underlying truths of movement, which usually pass too quickly before the unaided senses. As part of his search for invisible scientific truths, chronophotography purportedly revealed the precise energetic expenditures of bodies over time. The initial results of chronophotography had been unsatisfying to the scientist, because too much information was reaching the light-sensitive plates, thereby overwriting and obscuring the useful data. To restrict the amount of data, Marey invented two techniques that contributed to his distinctly nonnaturalistic visual forms, as exemplified by The Walking Man (1886) (Figure 2.2): the first was to rapidly shutter the camera’s aperture to break up the continuous, blurred motion and to isolate separate fractions of a single trajectory of motion; the other was to dress his figures in black clothing and position them against a black background, while at the same time adding moving white lines or points to their outfits, in order to track the essential, but abstracted points of the body over time. This technically enhanced, spatiotemporal analysis sought to serve a grander social project: psychophysical correction. Well-trained athletes, for example, modeled physical activities to establish standards of excellence against which to measure unskilled, nonnormative, or “pathological” forms.15 In addition, reducing figures

Balla’s Transformation

101

to abstracted patterns necessarily countered the traditional norms of figural expressivity in painting, for which precise anatomical proportions underwrote an engrained logic of evocative postures and gestures. The scientist imagined that his method could even teach visual artists how their manually rendered figures of animals and humans might become more convincingly naturalistic.16 Ironically, twenty to thirty years later, his research produced the opposite effect on the arts—by seeming to grant artists permission to reject entirely the rules of traditional, anatomical figuration.17 After Marey successfully showed that certain invisible forces could be made visible (as with psychophysical exertion), experimental visual artists became more interested in sidestepping naturalism altogether—to reveal an expansive range of invisible forces. In 1912 when Balla initially gravitated to Marey’s methods, the futurists’ overarching project was already oriented toward disrupting established conventions in the visual, literary, and sonic arts. Balla’s main contribution to this project emerged from his Marey-inspired works, and as art historian Giovanni Lista observed, he shared Marey’s desire “to purge the image of [blurred] movement,” which pushed toward abstracted, geometrical patterns devoid of recognizable contours.18 Art historian Christine Poggi has offered another instructive interpretation: in Balla’s use of Marey’s method, one finds “a dehumanized world of mechanized vision” and “a release from anthropomorphic norms of perception.”19 Like Marey, Balla envisioned the world anew through a mode of visual mechanicity.20 If the central influence of chronophotography is unmistakable, the overall direction of Balla’s artistic development diverged significantly from Marey’s scientific approach through a complicated process of assimilation and revision. One of the main interpretive dilemmas stemmed from trying to accurately characterize the mechanical processes Balla imitated. How were they manifested and directed, and how did their connotations shift over time? In spite of his debt to scientific rationalization, the futurist entirely redirected the effects and purpose of that photographic mechanicity: Marey wanted to make visible physical actualities beyond normative human perception, while Balla trusted his perceptual processes and imagined different types of energetic qualities to be visually transcribed. In a notebook from 1913, Balla referred to wanting to paint “the shocking chaos of universal dynamic action” by depicting vehicular motion and the “new sensations” deriving from that motion.21 For him, velocity altered human experience, but this new sensibility required a new language to indicate energetic forces beyond how things were usually perceived and represented. To address this requirement, Balla imagined the role of the great artist to manifest a highly sensitive perceptual apparatus,

102

Futurist Conditions

akin to a photographic process, which has the capacity to reveal a variety of invisible forces—natural and supernatural, real and imagined.22 When departing from the literal velocity of vehicles, Balla’s model for heightened perception became a creative and spiritual mode of automatism that implicitly transformed Marey’s mechanical method. Before returning to specific examples of Balla’s tendency toward visual abstraction, it is worth noting that, in much art historical analysis of his early futurist works, a recurring description of Balla’s shift from naturalistic contours to abstract patterns centers on the concept of “dematerialization.” This term, as well as its adjectival variants, can be found in a range of commentary, along with thematically related references to the destruction of the subjects depicted.23 Such terminology may be understandable to the extent that the futurists referred to their own imagery as reconceptualizing immobile or solid matter, such that light and motion “destroy the materiality of solid bodies,” and, elsewhere, Balla claimed that futurism was “destroying the immobility in the works of art.”24 Yet, this rhetoric can be misleading. In one sense, Balla’s visual works certainly underwent a change that entailed no longer referring directly to objects in the world—that is, his visual system became less directly referential and more nonreferential. In another sense, this shift toward abstraction resulted from his rejecting the traditional system of techniques used for centuries to give imagery the illusion of depth, solidity, spatial cohesion, etc. But no phenomena were destroyed, and his images of unrecognizable objects simply altered the pictorial codes and methods of mark-making. If anything, his abstracting tendency materialized new types of seeing and thinking no longer limited to representing recognizable phenomena. Also, when describing dematerialization, art historians are (whether consciously or not) deemphasizing the constructed qualities of his imagery. Irrespective of the phenomena motivating them, these visual structures more easily move directly from chronophotographic research on motion to abstract images based on motion. Without referencing objects in the world or their presumed dematerialization, Balla’s efforts generated “signs of motion” that modified many of the underlying, naturalistic assumptions about real-world references and pictorial veracity.25 Although Boccioni and others decried the language of mechanical and repetitive elements, his visual experimentation led to a mode of visual abstraction distinct from Marey’s method.26 Writing retrospectively in “The Late Balla” (1924–5), Balla characteristically referred to himself in the third person to describe the kinetic effects he visualized in 1912–13: “He never spoke, always alone, [he] walked through the streets stopping every ten steps observing, thinking; he traced mysterious,

Balla’s Transformation

103

incomprehensible signs on small pieces of paper.”27 These “mysterious, incomprehensible signs” derived from transcribing observed forces and lived sensations into visual forms that were initially difficult to decipher, apparently even for the artist himself. As this visual experimentation continued, and as the concreteness and literalness of the representations became progressively obscured, the resulting imagery would become less clearly linked to any tangible precursors in the lived world. At some point, Balla’s visual signs of motion behaved independently of any referential value as indexes of specific objects or experiences.28 Uncoupled from physical phenomena and the naturalistic conventions for representing them, his paintings reinterpreted literal or kinetic motion to signify varieties of unobservable, invisible forces, including projected and imagined ones. One straightforward description of Balla’s transformation between 1912 and 1914 might reasonably claim that he composed increasingly abstracted images that were not aligned with clearly observable objects or events. If this description remains accurate for his overall approach during this time, it does not address significant aspects of how his images changed over a few years—such as what it means to abstract visually and what happens in those images that deviate from physical actualities. Even if Balla did eventually (and purportedly) visualize all manner of invisible or energetic forces, it did not happen all at once, but rather arrived as the result of a series of formal and conceptual adjustments.29

Variable Speeds A colorful work on paper titled Speeding Automobile (c. 1913) (Plate 2) signaled Balla’s passage to a greater degree of visual and conceptual abstraction, in which he matched the absence of a literal, vehicular referent with a similar lack of repetitive geometrical patterns, which had earlier approximated chronophotographic inscription. Without the grid-like, vertical slices to measure adjacent temporal moments, its curving lines were less closely correlated with the incremental spatiotemporal relations of a rigidly mechanical schema. Freed from that more strictly defined structure, this looser ensemble of superimposed curves floats adrift, anchored only by the descriptive title’s reference to a tangible, moving object. Yet, it remains unclear whether this label “speeding automobile” is meant to be restricted to a certain vehicle or to be expanded to the more general category of any one whatsoever. At the formal level, Balla’s overlapping curvilinear lines might reveal the essential features of

104

Futurist Conditions

a specific instance of kinetic motion, akin to Marey’s strategies for reducing the real-world data contained by the images. But, this vehicular velocity might also extrapolate a set of general qualities unrelated to any single, observable object. Notably, this work replaced stark differentiation of dark and light with softer, but still well-differentiated hues, each of which followed a distinct pattern of movement: broad blue waves, red pirouettes, and bounding green. By departing even further from concrete referentiality, Balla’s visual structure intentionally stretched the bounds of photographic precision—in order to play with distinct ideas of discursive anchorage and free-floating signifiers and to compose another rendition of forces registering on a sensitive surface. One intriguing interpretation of Balla’s less directly referential works from this period considers these colors to be transcriptions of distinct sensations— such as visual, sonic, and olfactory stimuli, perhaps including internal kinesthetic, sensorimotor, or proprioceptive responses as well.30 The artist’s writings periodically mention a desire to reveal the sensations of motion, which mirror the phrase “dynamic sensations” from the 1910 “Futurist Manifesto of Painting” (not originally signed by Balla, but later cosigned by him). Along with the previously cited phrase “new sensations” from the text “Everything Moves” (1913), Balla cryptically cited “parallel sensations” in an unpublished manifesto “Action of Colors” (1914), and, perhaps most descriptively, the artist wrote a letter to Alfred Barr Jr. (dated November 28, 1948) that retrospectively characterized his earlier studies as “based on the research for the lines of movement in color to give a form to sensations and thought.”31 As one among several similar citations, Balla closely correlated the lines and colors with dynamic internal processes. Given that the artistic uses of Marey’s chronographic method presumed to make visible various invisible or imperceptible forces, Balla’s shift from physical conditions to sensory data followed a seemingly direct substitution of subjective qualities for observable, objective properties. This formal substitution hypothesis might be satisfying to the extent that it fits both the empirical basis of his initial observations and their departure from naturalistic conventions, though it remains unclear how an artist’s use of specific lines and hues refers to distinct senses or ranges of sensory data. One could attempt to make an informed conjecture about how sensory data may be visually encoded, but it cannot be verified (such as by recreating his experiential conditions to confirm his findings). Another possibility is this general idea to transcribe multiple sensory channels implied a kind of systematic organization that may not necessarily compute specific formal qualities and interrelations. Rather than constituting a fixed principle of direct translation, Balla’s visual experimentation employed a more general

Balla’s Transformation

105

model or diagram of formal relations, which may or may not have involved the direct transcription of experiential data. An important facet of Balla’s idea to visualize nonvisual sensations revolved around sounds and noise. In Noise Forms of a Motorcycle (c. 1913–14) (Plate 3), auditory vibrations correspond with the speed of a moving vehicle. Evidently made after a motorcycle ride with a friend through Villa Borghese in Rome, the multiple serpentine lines traverse several interlocking patches of pale color, suggesting terrain and foliage glimpsed at a rapid pace.32 This semi-referential ground would temporarily counteract the push toward nonliteral forms signifying kinetic speed. When making this kind of visualized-sound image, the artist would have faced a problem: how to indicate with precision the ways sound emissions did or could behave within the spatiotemporal framework of the chronographic image. Did they proceed in straight-line velocities like projectiles, or did they generate curved waves emanating from fixed sources, or perhaps both at once? Also, how did different kinds of sound emission register visually, whether by mimicking the scientific study of sound waves or by some other means? To find solutions, Balla altered the single, horizontal axis of kinetic motion, and he introduced multiple axes of rotation and emission.33 Again, Noise Forms of a Motorcycle lacked the vertical slices of adjacent spatiotemporal units, but rather presented a set of lurching, spiraling vectors, perhaps derived from the spiraling shapes of automobile wheels found in his earlier automobile works, or perhaps even other research done by Marey on birds in flight.34 Here the vehicle no longer moves on a fixed axis through a succession of adjacent moments; instead it pivots around a central point, with its unwinding spirals circumnavigating the picture plane. Intriguingly, to indicate mechanical vibrations sonically emitted into the surroundings, the conjoined auditory spirals have been embellished with decorative motifs—smooth undulations, mechanical grooves, saw-toothed serrations, and a few spikey flourishes. This idiosyncratic structure thus suggests different sonic qualities, necessarily abstracted from sensory perception, shown alongside the semi-referential green pigment denoting the physical landscape. As a case of unclear referentiality, this particular work abstracts from the specific, concrete actualities noted in the title, but its methods of abstraction were also extended to other categories of sensation, as well as to more obviously imaginary forms. By simulating chronographic processes to picture kinetic and sensory activities along Via Veneto, Balla produced an intriguingly equivocal mode of abstraction that combined apparent specification with aspects of both generalization and imagination.35 Overall, his analyses of automobiles emerged

106

Futurist Conditions

from his firsthand experience, from his mental translation of the received data, and from his manual dexterity at marking visual surfaces. Even so, it remains unclear how closely the resulting imagery conformed to, abstracted from, or reformulated his sensory impressions. Balla’s visual results cannot be verified in relation to any physical phenomena or sensory data, despite mimicking Marey’s chronographic approach.36 Relative to the artist’s experience, one and the same image might be quite specific, fairly generalized, or even somewhat speculative. As Balla continued to transcribe and translate sensorial data into visual form, his images progressively lost their anchorage in observable phenomena, and the referential content gradually became less and less recognizable. In this sense, Balla’s abstract trajectories might move toward increasing generalization, as a set of kinetic qualities denoting any vehicular experience whatsoever, while connoting modern life. But, Balla also precisely denoted experiential specificities, which, due to Marey’s example (i.e., to make visible the invisible), can depart from direct, sensory experiences. Whether simulating precise observation, or generalizing from concrete actualities, or indulging in pure speculation, these vehicular images traversed diverse connotations of visual abstraction—and they could also be combined to offer pictorial evidence of experiential truth, what it felt like to be overcome with the chaotic impressions generated by industrial mechanization.37 After initially depicting horizontal velocities as contiguous vertical segments or slices, Balla deviated from this straightforward application of the chronophotographic method by exploring multiple, superimposed patterns with contrasting rectilinear and curvilinear motifs.38 For instance, another work presenting kinetic motion and sonic emission, if only judging from the title, is Speed Sky Noise (c. 1913–14) (Plate 4). With no singular object or vehicle, the complicated sensory impressions have been chromatically differentiated: wavy blue currents, bobbing green, angular pink, and restive orange. Despite the absence of a cohesive line of force, the colorfully patterned lines make sense as a spatiotemporal progression from left to right, for which the different colored elements work in parallel and at different rates of motion. The blue waves propagate from the lower left corner to the upper right, in a similar direction as the looping green, while both pink and orange lines generally flow left to right, sometimes multiplying and reversing course. What in earlier vehicular works were multiple effects generated by a single spatiotemporal progression are now disaggregated into varied paths that diverge from a strictly defined spatiotemporal principle. Separable and superimposed, these multiple, colorized paths create distinct shapes, each tracing a unique imprint, as if following a

Balla’s Transformation

107

separate channel, stimulus, or sensation, together which depart from literal kinetic associations and into an expanded multisensory framing. This same principle of superimposing multiple, overlapping patterns appear in a small group of Balla’s works from 1914, which share variations on the same title Complex of Noise + Velocity. The auditory element in their title refers to one of variously overlapping visual pathways. In the painting Colored Complex (1914) (Plate 5), wide blue curves are traversed by looping orange French curves and straighter red lines, loosely reiterating the same chromatic variations found in Speed Sky Noise, but omitted the green element.39 Building on these chromatic and linear similarities, Balla added darker and lighter shades to create the effects of volumetric shading within each separate hue. In a wall-hung cardboard version from the same year (unfortunately destroyed or lost, though identifiable from period photographs), the same composition was rendered in three dimensions, an idea that prompted a posthumous reconstruction in aluminum of the original cardboard relief (Figure 2.3). The visual depth of the painting now appears as literal, spatial depth, though this formal property may not have necessarily corresponded with any physically defined, spatial qualities. Adding to an already adaptable visual language of motion, Balla’s visual and literal depth may have simply accentuated the distinctness of each separate sensory channel, signaling another bold solution to the problem of visualizing invisible data. As another variation on his idea to aggregate multiple, superimposed elements, Balla’s Line of Speed, Form, and Sound (1915) (Plate 6) no longer follows a single

Figure 2.3  Giacomo Balla, Plastic Complex of Noise + Velocity, c. 1914–15 (metal reconstruction from 1968). Collection and Courtesy Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (Inv. 72.21). ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

108

Futurist Conditions

discernible progression, as with his earlier images of kinetic forces or the effects they produced, either as horizontal series or as spiral arrangements. A stark palette of bright crimson, reddish brown, dirty white, steely blue, and matte black accentuates the hard-edged and partially overlapping shapes. His title implies its forms derive from the discrete sensory channels of kinetic motion and sound, though this formal solution marked yet another dramatic shift toward visual simplification. Rather than transcribing chaotic sensory patterns, the chromatic and tonal shifts, which themselves imply volumetric extension of immaterial or imaginary elements, create qualities of spatial depth that somewhat complicate his previous strategies for visualizing sound—for a simple, but no less challenging, reason. Whether consciously or not, the artist more frankly acknowledged the visual and material constraints of his chosen medium: paint. No longer strictly functioning as a medium or means to denote kinetic and sonic connotations and to connote immaterial forces, the formal properties of oil painting (such as texture, irregular blending, and color relationships) introduce themselves as a new visual end in itself. After recording the sensorial effects of vehicular speed and, later, indicating auditory inflections, Balla arrived at an adjacent answer to the same underlying question: How to make visual sense of intensified, multisensory experiences? Instead of emphasizing the sensorial properties, empirically collected or extrapolated into speculative perceptual patterns, his formal development produced a well-articulated visual structure with distinct, nonreferential materially and formally qualities that connoted nonvisual data. To help explain this shift in Balla’s imagery from depicting specific sensory effects alongside the boulevard to abstract renderings without clear specification, it’s important to consider how the artist’s expressive ends had at first borrowed and then gradually altered the underlying logic of Marey’s chronophotography (i.e., repeated contiguous spatiotemporal units). Over the course of 1913, Balla balanced the immediacy of disparate impressions with a countervailing desire to articulate their inherent interconnections: stretching from kinetic forces to sensory effects to material images. Extrapolating from the scientist’s chronographic method of making invisible phenomena visible, Balla’s vision of multiple forces went beyond just transcribing kinetic, physical forces to include the psychophysics of perception and other aspects of visual knowledge. In contrast to Marey’s mechanical and photographic inscriptions, Balla’s model of actual and imaginary transcriptions generated material signs at the service of a new system of creative automatism—an autopoietic formulation of energetic and perceptual relationality. As he steadily expanded upon and generalized from the qualities of multisensory transcription, he eventually labeled one recurring

Balla’s Transformation

109

visual pattern with the term “vortex,” which appeared in the titles of numerous works, but also carried important connotations in his life and work beyond its nominal, descriptive value. Balla’s vortex designated a set of generative forces at the heart of his perception and expression of a cosmic whole.

Vortical Structure Extending the scope of visual transcription in his drawings and paintings, Balla extrapolated a new adaptable visual motif of vortexes (or vortices). While this vortical structure grew from his chronophotographic method for signifying vehicular velocity, this formal and conceptual structure can be traced historically in the visual arts.40 For instance, the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci depicted several variations on vortexes observed in the natural world—in flowing water, in the air, and in the human heart, for instance. Informed by direct observation, this positivist inclination investigated a recurring energetic feature of the natural world, which did not appear in his paintings. In nineteenth-century British painting, the theme of the vortex carried a range of concrete and abstract possibilities, which marked a “historical shift in patterns of conceptualization and representation,” according to art historian W. J. T. Mitchell.41 Before 1900, this asymmetrical, open-ended structure defied closure and promoted a kinetic, ever-changing framework that symbolized disruption and an alternate principle of order.42 For a group of early twentieth-century British artists called vorticists, the vortex became an umbrella term connoting cultural upheaval and sociohistorical violence with calm self-awareness residing at its center.43 Emerging after futurism’s founding, vorticism remained distinct from, and hostile to, the Italian movement, which would provoke some of the British artists’ critical responses and creative activities.44 Balla’s first use of the term likely dates from 1913, when it appeared in the names of several drawings of abstracted velocity, such as Vortex (c. 1913) and Vortex with Radiations (1913–14), among others. As a formal device originally rooted in the theme of kinetic motion, Balla’s vortical structure inaugurated another round of formal and conceptual recalibration. In a modest graphite study from 1913, among a group of works now called First Studies of Vortexes, the contour lines of motion accentuate the overall effect of diagrammatic simplification. A continuous, spiraling line curls from the center of the lower half of the page toward the upper left corner, as two shorter, discontinuous semicircles are interposed atop the first, as if to echo its twisting,

110

Futurist Conditions

Figure 2.4 Giacomo Balla, Line of Velocity + Vortex, 1911, charcoal on paper. Collection the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas. Courtesy Joseph and Sylvia Slifka Collection and Bridgeman Images. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

unpredictable qualities. Also, the lighter marks of a loosely geometrical grid suggest curvature akin to the lines in a transverse Mercator projection map. In a literal sense, this diagrammatic two-dimensional inscription translates invisible forces into the flat, visible plane. Unlike the prominent linearity of First Studies, another drawing, Line of Velocity + Vortex (1913–14) (Figure 2.4) uses adjacent, shaded areas to compose a tourbillion shape intersecting with a single diagonal line. Despite the subtle shading of adjacent volumes, this abstracted diagram of forces represents neither a geometrical solid nor a solid material structure per se, but rather it identifies an abstract set of complex energetic relations with variable degrees of intensity. The one straight line can be interpreted to be a generalized path of kinetic motion, surrounded by the multiple eddies of air, dust, and other gases or particulate matter, which are at once separate and conjoined.45 In both of these examples, the vortex departs from referential specificity to convey abstraction as a generalized, diagrammatic function. In his writings, Balla described the vortex as a significant aspect of his own artistic transformation. In an unusual and rarely discussed text from 1920, titled “How Does One Create the Work of Art?,” the artist outlined a mythic narrative of collective forces emerging historically in and through the figure of the artist. The opening paragraph captures the qualities of interconnectivity and divine causation, associated with what he experienced as efflorescence: If the forces of Destiny, unknown to humans, believe that the opportune moment has come to establish an epoch of history through art, new energies, determined by the instinctive development of evolution, make blossom the ideal

Balla’s Transformation

111

that is eternal strength permeated with passion, love, optimism, then the artistic genius, spiritualized mechanism of intuitive sensibility . . . creates the work of art that expresses the true, vital collective feeling of a people, who, because of its greatness, leaves an imprint on history. And, when a new ideal, desired by the eternal springs, will blossom on the earth, the crowds will awaken to a new life and the new art of the future will arrive.46

In this epic scenario, unknown invisible forces act on the artist—whose creative practices are described as a “spiritualized mechanism of intuitive sensitivity”— to enable the creation of imagery that not only expresses individual renewal but also awakens feelings of collectivity. Sketching out a particular role for the artist, Balla claims this type of creative, spiritual automatism united a sense of the macroscopic milieu of historical destiny with an individual artist in any given situation. According to Balla’s associative logic, invisible forces rebounded from specific art objects back onto a populace, even to the broader temporal scales of history and eternity. By tracing a heroic, transhistorical arc, Balla was at once identifying his own genius and attributing it to forces beyond his control operating in and through him—as if animated by a divine, invisible source. At the end of this text, the vortex returns as a mode of spiritual guidance that bridges vastly different scales and temporalities: Everything dies and everything is born on earth and, when the invisible hand of destiny (as big as the universe) grabs this crazy little world again and touches it, as if it was an orange to feel its ripeness, a vortex of instinctive transformation is formed, a universal awakening of virgin energies, and only for a moment, the ideal reappears, which inspires the artist and finally the work of art is born.47

Although written years later, this text narrates his earlier artistic trajectory: “a vortex of instinctive transformation” conceptualizes an indefinite, abstract formulation related to his specific titles and visual motifs developed in 1913, which also represented a broader shift in his creative research before the First World War. As the apotheosis of Balla’s artistic efforts at this time, which repeatedly and deftly converted firsthand observations into imagined modes of mechanical inscription, this abstracted vortical structure provided him with a key, mediating concept for explaining how the energetic forces alluded to in his artworks were linked both to specific historical contexts and to the generalized patterns of a society.48 In Balla’s luminescent pastel work from 1914, titled Abstract Velocity (Plate 7), several ideas come together in a multilayered image that straddles several distinct, but interrelated connotations. Handwritten alongside his signature and

112

Futurist Conditions

date and next to his signature chop mark, its nonspecific title no longer refers to a particular type of vehicular motion, as in earlier works, but describes a broader category of motion—an abstracted one. On a neutral, off-white ground, five bright hues converge to form a recognizable configuration of multiple, superimposed linear behaviors: sweeping light blue waves traversed by lyrical dark blue curves with a yellow counterpoint and a few white highlights. The discontinuous shading and smudged lines indicate the copresence (and interpenetration) of colorized volumes, as a dark greenish blue vortex unspools from the bottom of the image through three full rotations to fill the frame. Because the abstract forms resemble the atmospheric disruptions in his earlier kinetic works, they might indicate a specific object of study, for which kinetic activity translates into a nonreferential view of actual conditions or physical relations. But, the work could also suggest conceptual remove from those same forces—by referring to a more distended relation to those actualities or to a more inclusive category of kinetic activity. However, given that the vortical structure fits into a pattern of less anchorage in the observable phenomena of the world, this imagery likely signifies more generalized invisible or intuitive energies.49 According to this interpretation, a “spiritualized mechanism of intuitive sensitivity” had guided him to create this visual sign so that viewers could also experience metaphysical or otherworldly energies.50 Also, the term “vortex” in Balla’s “How Does One Create?” text marked the interpenetrating unity of multiple, simultaneous frames of reference, forming a set of abstracted kinetic forces that coexist in a single image—as concrete or evanescent sources, as actual or imagined trajectories, and as physical or metaphysical phenomena. Finally, while this vortical imagery marks an apex of Balla’s extrapolation from Marey’s mechanical analysis, this visual structure represented the logical continuation of the same formal and conceptual premises of visualizing invisible forces—that eventually implicated these generalizable conditions of mass collectivity into the milieus of commerce and politics.

Commercial Forces In a handwritten manifesto from early 1914, Balla railed against dark, funereal, and lifeless clothes, and proposed what he deemed to be an appropriately futurist response: “IT IS NEEDED TO INVENT FUTURIST CLOTHING the most joyousssssss insolent vibrant in iridescent colors . . . that generate this blinding joy of clothing in motion through the noisy streets transformed

Balla’s Transformation

113

by the new futurist architecture.”51 Before examining some sketches he made for men’s suits designed to mirror his abstract visual language of speed, it is worth considering a small, but pivotal, mixed-medium work on paper titled Piedigrotta in Velocity + Noise (c. 1914) (Plate 8). Named for a neighborhood in Naples surrounding the church Santa Maria di Piedigrotta, not far from a large grotto in Parco Virgiliano, this figure bounds right to left with dramatic flair that is reductively rendered with the formal restraint of grisaille. Its repetition of visual linear elements—some drawn and others pasted onto the surface— composed the visual echoes of planes or parts tracked over time, mimicking Marey’s chronophotographic traces of motion. The figure’s swirling, serrated feet make for an exceptionally assertive stride, as if the whole ensemble of bodily forces has been mechanized. In this case, the artist’s abstract, decorative language of adjacent temporal instances produced the embodied connotation of psychophysiological processes activated by mechanistic forces. As Balla shifted from moving automobiles to vortexes, and, then, to the human body, his abstract category of physical and metaphysical forces began to reverberate throughout the modern urban environment. Unlike many of the other futurist artists, such as Boccioni and the Bragaglia brothers, who pondered deeply the implications of chronographic motion for humans, Balla only fleetingly considered the human figure, treating it as one of various materials and surfaces across which energetic forces could move. Rather than emphasizing the psychological or physiological effects of mechanical processes, Balla imagined some of the ways people could be entirely enveloped by the reverberations issuing from the modern world. As shown in his several texts, sketches, and, later, in actual clothing designs, Balla used the same syntax of abstracted velocities to reroute his colorful, repetitive patterns onto human figures in the form of hand-painted, asymmetrical men’s suit designs in bright hues. These vehicular effects were printed on clothing as the generalized motifs of energetic discharge—akin to tire marks left by automobiles or other kinetic forces on the futurist bodies. While announcing a wearer’s rejection of sociocultural tradition, his suit designs introduced new accents to a person’s daily routine: the diverse patterns and cuts of the outfits were to be worn at different times of the day.52 One drawing for a morning-time suit (1914) (Plate 9), for instance, employed overlapping blue and rose-colored waves to be hand-painted atop a light-colored fabric. In contrast to this airy, vibratory pattern, a nighttime suit called for a black fabric to be painted with yellow and green highlights projecting aggressively from the muted ground. Aside from their unconventional brightness and asymmetrical patterning, these designs were also tailored to match the geometric shapes—rounded to fit with the blue

114

Futurist Conditions

waves of the morning suit or else pointed to accentuate the sharp yellow edges of the nighttime suit. Like the Piedigrotta drawing, these nontraditional designs identified the wearers with the multiple trajectories and complicated rhythms of modern life, as the human body becomes another of the numerous surfaces onto which energetic forces are projected and modulated. If the drawings of, and writings about, futurist clothing may be considered another continuation of his velocity works, how might his artistic assumptions have changed? At the root of Balla’s sartorial inventiveness emerged a high degree of stylistic variation that evidences a surprisingly novel approach. As part of a handwritten manifesto on clothing in early 1914, Balla describes one of the reasons behind his innovative suit designs: futurist clothes should exist “simply and above all for a short time with the aim of growing industrial activities and giving continuous enjoyment of the new to our body.”53 Balla claims that the new designs would spark social and economic activity—due to the intentionally shorter lifespans of the objects themselves. For him, the cost of replacing them could rev the engine of commerce. Counterintuitively, when the artist referred to “industrial activity,” he was likely referring to small-scale manufacturing by individual artists and artisans rather than to mass production in a factory. A statement by the artist from late 1915 summarized his resistance to mechanical processes: “To renew ourselves [by] creating an art that no machine will be able to imitate.”54 If this idea to signal the faster pace of modern life rooted in intensive manual labor is a bit unexpected, Balla also successfully applied his artistic and artisanal talents to creating some commercial product lines.55 In a seminal collaboration in 1928 with Riccardo Gatti’s ceramics factory in Faenza, for instance, Balla made a number of designs intended for modern appetites, including a hand-painted majolica dinner plate with an angular motif (Plate 10). Many of his numerous designs for vases, plates, lamps, and ashtrays would be fabricated during the late 1920s and early 1930s, a period of significant expansion in the futurist decorative arts, which lent a strong impetus to refining both hand-crafted and mass-oriented commercial production in several regional workshops in Italy.56 Such artistic designs gestured toward an emerging mass market for commercial goods according to the cultivation of adventuresome consumer habits, a key tenet of labor-intensive fashion and design industries in mid-twentieth-century Italy.57 By pushing his creative ideas toward an accelerated cycle of production and consumption, Balla was designing clothing and products to signal an unanticipated shift in pre–First World War experimentation in the visual arts, thereby putting him at odds with most of the artists and intellectuals, who approached mass society with more detachment and pessimism.58

Balla’s Transformation

115

In contrast to the critiques of mass society voiced by many early twentiethcentury artists and intellectuals, art historian and curator Germano Celant has presupposed an alternative attitude, as outlined in his 1980 text “Futurism as Mass Avant-Garde.”59 The futurists did not solely pursue an elevated, intellectual program aimed at sparking cultural and political renewal through the rejection of populist concerns, according to Celant. Rather, it was quite the opposite: Italian futurism consciously moved away from elitist cultural gatekeeping and toward popular and commercial forms.60 Productively reformulating avant-gardist principles for a mass audience, Balla’s move amounted to artistic revolution through “aesthetic abasement”—an intentional turn to making art dedicated to passivity and the banal.61 For Celant, this direction inaugurated a more relaxed attitude toward commercial aims, which were easier for a mass population to assimilate than the more critical aspects of other avant-garde programs.62 From this perspective, the seeming failure of early Italian futurism to achieve concrete political aims involved its desire to garner mass consumer appeal, but a less discussed aspect of this history entails framing how and why the futurists embraced intentionally non-elitist, commercial practices. Following Celant’s bold proposition, I’d suggest that Balla repeatedly pitched his boisterous, at times commercial, vision to a mass audience, whose collective desires did not necessarily preclude making more politically or ideologically driven choices. Exemplifying a sincere desire to create objects and images for the general public, the artist’s designs for clothing and other consumer products anticipated widespread efforts to spark commercial demand for modern industries, even as they subtly undermined some of the sociocultural premises informing other experimental and critical practices at the time.63 Developing visual designs directly equated with an accelerated rate of socioeconomic exchange, Balla had applied his semi-mechanized kinetic patterns to various visual mediums, while his artistic imagery and his language referenced a mode of collective agency that presumed to transmit shared or common values to the wider population. At times, translating kinetic forces into a modern attitude took the adaptable forms of Balla’s wearable patterns and everyday consumer objects. Unlike most of the mainstream socialist visions of economic and spiritual betterment through conscientious labor practices, Balla offered a somewhat different economic justification: when translated directly into increased production, a faster rate of consumption could be an alternate source of socioeconomic vitality.64 His vision of commercial production for a non-elite clientele manifested a close reciprocity between productive activities and new forms of recreation. In a 1915 manifesto signed by him and fellow

116

Futurist Conditions

futurist Fortunato Depero, the desire to revitalize the entire world entailed introducing a specific category of object to exemplify an expanded concept of leisure: the futurist toy.65 This plaything not only would be for children but “will be of great use to adults too, since it will keep them young, agile, jubilant, spontaneous, ready for anything, inexhaustible, instinctive, and intuitive.”66 This playfulness exemplified Balla’s accelerated mode of commerce, through which new consumer tastes were fulfilled not by endless mechanical repetitions but, rather, through the aggregated labors of artisanal producers.67 Amid such an all-encompassing vision of expanded consumer tastes, however, this cycle of commercial activity was also subjected to unanticipated events and other expressions of collective desires, including when Balla’s clothing manifesto became a voice for strident nationalism. Originally drafted in early 1914, Balla’s text “Futurist Manifesto of Men’s Clothing” was later rewritten, translated into French, and published as a standalone brochure titled “Futurist Men’s Clothing” (May 1914).68 Since this later version of the manifesto closely imitated Marinetti’s schematic style of numbered points and rhetorical contrasts, it remains highly probable that the poet either suggested or simply implemented significant revisions to the text. Moreover, this French version served as a template for a third version, called “The Anti-Neutral Suit,” published in September 1914 with additional revisions made by Marinetti to reflect a more aggressively patriotic stance after the start of the First World War.69 In this final version of the text, which misleadingly listed Balla as the only author, despite Marinetti’s obvious involvement, each brightly clothed man has become a living flag, symbolizing support for Italy’s possible intervention in the recently launched war: “We want to color Italy with Futurist audacity and danger, and at long last, give the Italians aggressive and cheerful clothes.”70 In their fusion of sociopolitical aggressiveness and celebratory chromatism— both of which forbade neutrals—Balla’s sartorial experiments have become part of the futurists’ ongoing attempts to realign youthful, muscular energies with a vision of the unified nation-state. By reorienting Balla’s creative ideas about sociocultural and economic renewal, this feverishly militaristic text simultaneously mocked traditionalists, raged against political neutrality, and offered military-like directives, while making an appeal for young Italian men to demonstrate publicly. As Balla’s kinetic velocities came to symbolize collective energies, militaristic nationalism fueled an alternate narrative of Italian vitality. Rather than marking a minor deviation from his artistic trajectory that embraced commercial practices, Balla’s interest in patriotic collectivity became another major episode in the ongoing aim of Italian social and aesthetic resurgence.

Balla’s Transformation

117

Crowd Formations According to a prominent nineteenth-century social theory, crowds had magnified many of the unpleasant features of urban life—from somnambulism and docility to emotionalism and violence. By framing the general populace as a phantasmagoria of depravity and “primitive” responses, crowd psychologists managed to unify diverse social threats under a general heading of social disorder. To preserve the rational workings of civil society, it was often argued, various marginalized social groups that displayed irrationality and dysfunction would be excluded from the political sphere.71 However, according to the Italian criminologist Scipio Sighele, the populace also held the fate of the world in its hands and maintains “absolute control” over the world’s destiny, though it had not yet shown itself worthy of this historical task.72 Sighele’s reformminded populism was put into practice in 1910 when he and political essayist and nationalist Enrico Corradini formed the Italian Nationalist Party, which attracted a small, vociferous minority of the Italian population—including several futurists—to the cause of nationalism. At the end of 1912 in Rome, during its annual conference (likely attended by both Marinetti and Boccioni), the party decided to become absorbed into the parliamentary system, thereby precipitating a contentious split between populist and authoritarian camps, led by Sighele and Corradini respectively.73 In futurism’s founding manifesto of early 1909, F. T. Marinetti pitched his radical program to socialists, anarchists, and syndicalists alike, though he left little doubt about his own anti-democratic views.74 If Marinetti remained aligned with Corradini’s more repressive vision, the other futurists ambiguously alternated between positive and negative assessments of patriotic urban crowds. Within this spectrum of political views, Balla remained aloof from Marinetti’s vision of militant nationalism—at least until he became a direct agitator for social and political radicalism during the large political demonstrations in Rome during May 1915.75 When later characterizing this period of political mobilization, Balla described his house as “the volcanic center of futurism, a bustle of young people,” and his invigorated patriotic attitude is playfully captured in Francesco Cangiullo’s sketch Balla in Action on the Scene (1915), which directly performs the celebratory passion of his sociopolitical convictions76 (Figure 2.5). Dating from the spring of 1915, a suite of Balla’s semi-abstracted paintings of massive historic demonstrations was another important culmination of the artist’s personal and professional transformation. These gatherings symbolized to him a variant on Marinetti’s principle of art-action, premised on his radical

118

Futurist Conditions

Figure 2.5  Francesco Cangiullo, Balla in Action on the Scene, 1915. Collection Museo del Novecento, Naples, Italy. Mondadori Portfolio / Archivio dell’Arte / Luciano Pedicini / Bridgeman Images. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

idea that aggregated physical and psychic energies could directly fuel social, cultural, and political rejuvenation.77 For Balla and the other pro-war futurists, the conflict initially seemed to be a positive development in world affairs, due to the increased likelihood that hidebound traditions might be swept away in a brief, ritual conflagration. Although futurist militarism certainly predated the First World War—most clearly expressed in Marinetti’s free-word poems about violent armed struggles, such as “The Battle of Adrianople” (1912) and “Bombardment” (1913)—their bellicose rhetoric intensified substantially after the war’s outbreak in August 1914.78 Their military interventionist platform was primarily rooted in long-standing Italian irredentist claims for the territories of Istria, Trento, and Trieste—claims that formed the basis of Italy’s diplomatic efforts with Austria-Hungary in late 1914 and eventually yielded the main pretext for Italy declaring war in May 1915. During these massive, raucous demonstrations, the futurists reiterated their uncompromising social and political views, applying

Balla’s Transformation

119

public pressure to those political and diplomatic efforts.79 Balla’s patriotic imagery borrowed heavily from his previous solutions; however, alongside the connotations of kinetic discharge and interconnectivity, the artist expanded his sociopolitical premises. Having previously explored images of collective agency in recreational and commercial contexts, Balla applied the unifying idea of mass collectivity to festive imagery of patriotic demonstrations. Several formal devices found in Balla’s speeding automobile images reappear in Waving—Patriotic Demonstration (1915) (Plate 11) in the form of the curving or vortical shapes to connote a large, celebratory urban crowd. A close resemblance exists between this work and Speeding Automobile (c. 1913): the bounding green shapes from the earlier picture, which conveyed the waviness of the landscape, were transposed into a human register in the later nationalistic image—as solid black undulations symbolizing the joined profiles of marchers converging on a fixed point.80 Slightly higher than these modeled black shapes are faint curves emanating from a different point—as smoother lines of force hovering over or emitted from the visually abstracted crowd. Beneath this fainter array, though still above the solid black forms, a light, crisp outline resembles a cut ribbon folding back onto itself, like a doubled figure 8 on its side. With its sweeping, overlapping curves positioned above the undulating crowd, this modified geometrical figure corresponds with the strenuous action of waving of large flags, indicated in the work’s title. Reappearing in several of Balla’s other images of patriotic crowds, this motif with ribbon-like folds became a fixed emblem denoting the public demonstration of collective, nationalistic spirit. Rather than imagining naturalistic objects in motion or abstracted sensorial data multiplying across the picture plane, Balla reduced the entire chaotic scene to a discrete nationalistic symbol, thus synthesizing a single visual structure of abstracted velocity. As a specific use of visual motion, this template of collectivity involved more than simple wordplay involving movement, rhyming kinetic motion with sociopolitical attitudes.81 It was an apotheosis of his visual experimentation that reformulated the multiple, disparate effects of kinetic action into a timely projection of collective desire. Similar to how Balla’s kinetic patterns coalesced into a recurring pattern connoting sociopolitical demonstration, his patriotic imagery relied on another all-purpose motif in order to convey the character of collective activities. Modeled after the French curve, an adaptable, curvilinear design resolved into and animated innumerable separate units, all connoting the discharge of aggregated sociopolitical energies. In the work Parade + Crowd (1915) (Plate 12), several tricolored swathes mimic the Italian flag—in their patterning and coloration, as

120

Futurist Conditions

well as in their similarity to large pieces of hoisted, undulating fabric. This palette takes one particular phrase from the third clothing manifesto, ventriloquized by Marinetti, and signed by Balla, and enacts it somewhat literal: wearers of the futurist suit become “living Futurist flags.”82 In this image, those lyrical shapes mimic the flags waving vigorously above a crowd. Below the tricolored swathes are groups of similar curvilinear shapes—a highly adaptable motif originating from kinetic motion, but now connoting the undulations of densely packed human bodies.83 As with his earlier kinetic motif, these chromatic swathes composite sensory data, though now they symbolize adjacent social units as well. An especially vibrant grouping in the lower right corner moves in unison, like Three Graces dancing across the futurist city. Balla’s formal language of motion envisioned a festive occasion for which kaleidoscopic patches resonated with modern rhythms, as if visually manifesting his description of clothing: “All around us we shall find acrobatic blocks of colours.”84 After Balla brought his force-forms into the urban cityscape as clothing and product designs, these same decorative patterns were reintroduced into the urban habitat as public displays of the rising nationalist sentiment, thereby strongly correlating the futurist commitments to speed, sensation, and collectivity. If these oversized swathes of color in Parade + Crowd symbolized diverse, simultaneous actions within a crowd, they also functioned as an adaptable formal motif to give shape to urban crowds by accommodating and integrating those same disparate energies. Balla’s visual language of literal and abstracted motion formed the basic template through which he expressed the sociohistorical forces of collectivity. His adaptable swathes of color at times stood for large crowds in the streets, but they also floated above the crowds like flags waving and other spatialized projections. In the painting Shout of “Viva l’Italia,” the symbol of collective spirit has been projected into three dimensions—as surging waves of patriotic noise filling the air and reverberating among the bodies and buildings.85 In Patriotic Song, three imposing columns of the Italian colors rise into the blue sky, signifying patriotic chants or songs that assumed volumetric form. In imagery that was not directly referential, his patriotic crowds were unified by a festive, anonymous motif correlated with sounds and appeared more exuberant even than Carrà’s wellknown Free-Word Painting–Patriotic Festival. By contrast with Balla’s image, Carrà’s verbal-visual vectors of crowd activities were composed of collaged and hand-drawn elements that were unmoored from the rules of syntax and usage, as multiple verbal and sonic cues in the cacophonous cityscape converging upon the word Italy at the image’s center. Made in June 1914 and presaging a shift among the other futurist visual artists to militaristic nationalism, Carrà’s contentious crowd predated by about a year Balla’s abstracted, but more formally unified

Balla’s Transformation

121

imagery of crowds. By May 1915, the public mood had changed considerably, and huge crowds assembled in Rome to denounce the parliamentarians whose diplomatic maneuvering intended to avoid taking a side in the international conflict. Yet, Balla’s generally pro-interventionist attitude did not prevent him from depicting a large gathering in support of Italian neutrality in Perils of War (1915) (Plate 13). The same adaptable, undulating motif took the shape of a multi-headed, fork-tongued creature that appears to fight with itself.86 When offering a glimpse of the purportedly less bloodthirsty, neutralist position, Balla used connotations of self-violence projected onto the activists urging restraint, thereby dissipating his celebratory mood. In a text titled “How Does One Create the Work of Art?” (1920), Balla described that he thought his art-making entailed vortical forces beyond his own control, and he reiterated his belief that artistic images can revitalize the collective spirit in a previously cited quotation worth repeating: the “spiritualized mechanism of intuitive sensibility . . . creates the work of art that expresses the true, vital collective feeling of a people.”87 Balla’s idea of the vortex had come to signify a belief in underlying destinies (for individuals and peoples alike) and other unseen forces. In his imagery, restive collective desires took the forms of individual artworks showing crowds filling the streets to voice their shared political sentiments, but they also informed his involvement with the fabrication of commercial products, such as clothing or furniture. A similar reciprocity between an artist and a people fed his notion that artworks could actualize the collective spirit, and conversely, that “the crowds will awaken to a new life and the new art of the future will arrive.”88 Just as Marey developed a mechanical method for visualizing invisible biomechanical forces, Balla employed a modified chronographic visual language to establish a creative platform for projecting all manner of automated, but intangible forces—kinetic, abstract, imagined, decorative, and sociopolitical. Balla’s formal and conceptual transformation followed a model of energetic transference, through which similar patterns of activity could be identified in, or projected onto, diverse phenomena. Beginning with his vehicular imagery in 1912–13, Balla’s visual motion framed energetic forces as the nonnaturalistic effects and sensations of kinetic activities, filtered through the artist’s imagination. Originally based on his firsthand experience, the multisensory patterns later became recurring motifs with more schematic associations that stood for distinct, interdependent channels of information. Gradually extrapolating from observable events in 1913–14, his abstracted imagery of kinetic activities equivocated between imprinting concrete actualities and indicating generalized categories. Further expanding on those literal velocities, Balla’s abstract forms

122

Futurist Conditions

came to signify a sense of psychosocial and historical change, culminating in his patriotic crowd images from 1915. The same visual structure filtered back into specific sociohistorical situations—as an adaptable template of aggregated energetic activities. After Balla worked out a set of aesthetic principles that transformed literal, kinetic forces into a model of collective agency, his vitalistic visualizations of commercial and patriotic activities helped forge an alternate image of radical social change—in the form of a collectivity somewhat disconnected from the military violence it advocated. In the late 1920s, Balla revisited his idea that artistic expression, when permitted to develop freely, could elevate humanity: “the human spirit perhaps will be the authentic expression in the future.”89 Curiously, in spite of the deaths of futurist friends and colleagues, among other significant losses for Italy, during the First World War, Balla continued to treat destructive violence as a viable solution to the intractable problem of social, political, and cultural stasis: “Future wars, terribly destructive for people and things, will disinfect the world of traditionalist conservatism.”90 Holding fast to a recurring idea that modernization was inseparable from destruction, Balla clung to the futurist vision of aggressively remaking and rejuvenating the world. For him, radical positive changes would not come without a struggle, without advocating for ongoing destruction and rejuvenation. Apparently, it did not occur to Balla, or perhaps did not matter to him, that the forces of traditionalism and conservatism might be well positioned to harness the cleansing effects of conflict and aggression— in order to defend the status quo. In the process of extrapolating from Marey’s original premise of making invisible forces visible, Balla embarked on a formal and conceptual project that culminated in his self-image as an artist-activist who could translate shared sociohistorical ideas into images of collectivity. After responding to the criticism leveled against the literalism of his chronographic works, Balla productively abstracted from the kinetic forces and turned his mechanical modes of visuality into a source for psychosocial and commercial adaptation, even as this experimentation would also reroute the collective imagination toward more destructive ends.

Notes 1 In a notebook entry from early 1913, Balla described “painting new sensations.” Giacomo Balla, Scritti futuristi, ed. Giovanni Lista (Milan: Abscondita, 2010), 19–20. All quotations from the same volume in this text are my translations. Balla noted in retrospect about that period in his life, while referring to himself in third

Balla’s Transformation

123

person: “He was seen standing still in Via Veneto in front of the palazzo of Regina Margherita tenaciously studying, for more than a year and every night, in good weather, in wind, precipitation, heat, cold, to understand all of the gradations, colorations, that succeed one another during the development of the different seasons, in order to finish a painting that was a true masterpiece of nocturnal sensations.” Giacomo Balla, “Il fù Balla” (The Late Balla) (1924–5); printed in ibid., 51. The title of this latter short text was likely derived from Luigi Pirandello’s 1904 book Il fu mattia Pascal. 2 Umberto Boccioni, Lettere futuriste, ed. Federica Rovati (Egon and Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, 2009), 60–1 and 241–4; my translation. 3 Ibid. 4 Bonzagni’s decision to leave futurism is mentioned in Boccioni’s August 1910 letter to Severini, and it was purportedly rooted in his greater stylistic affiliation with German expressionism. No specific reasons were given for Romani’s departure, though stylistic differences are also evident. 5 Marinetti used the term “art-action” [Italian: arte-azione] to describe their combined artistic and sociopolitical interventions. Marinetti, Guerra sola igiene del mondo (War, the World’s Only Hygiene) (Milan: Ed. Futuriste di “Poesia,” 1915), 5. 6 In “The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting,” signed by various futurist painters, but primarily authored by Boccioni, a central aesthetic principle of innate complementarity [complementarismo congenito in Italian] was an updated rendering of the Divisionist idea to apply contrasting strokes in adjacent areas of the painting. See Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Balla, and Severini, “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto” (1910); reprinted in translation in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (Boston: MFA Publications, 2001), 29. In a later text “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture” (April 1912), Boccioni reconsidered and expanded innate complementarity into interpenetration of planes. See Boccioni, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture,” reprinted in translation in ibid., 52. 7 In October 1911, Boccioni, Carrà, and Russolo, along with Marinetti, traveled to Paris after Severini had insisted that the Milanese painters visit him in order to see the latest cubist works. Gino Severini, The Life of a Painter: The Autobiography of Gino Severini (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 93–5. 8 Marinetti’s founding manifesto of Italian futurism in 1909 described a speeding automobile careening into a muddy ditch outside a factory in Milan. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (February 1909); reprinted in translation in Marinetti, Critical Writings, ed. Günther Berghaus (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 12–13. 9 Art historian Giovanni Lista suggests that Balla never engaged with the artistic issues posed by cubism, and he describes “the total absence of any kind of support of cubist syntax in the construction of the image.” Giovanni Lista, Balla, catalogue

124

Futurist Conditions

raisonné de l’oeuvre (Modena, Italy: Galleria Fonte d’Abisso, 1982), 49. All quotations from the same volume in this text are my translations. 10 Henri des Pruraux, “Il soggetto nella pittura,” La Voce 4, no. 44 (October 31, 1912): 13; and Roger Allard, “Les Beaux Arts,” Revue indépendente 3 (August 1911): 134. 11 Boccioni, Lettere futuriste, 60–1 and 241–4. 12 On the futurist sensibility, see F. T. Marinetti, “Destruction of Syntax— Untrammeled Imagination—Words-in-Freedom” (May 1913); reprinted in translation in Marinetti, Critical Writings, 120–31. 13 Wyndham Lewis, “Long Live the Vortex!,” Blast 1 (June 1914), 12; and Wyndham Lewis, “A Review of Contemporary Art,” Blast 2 (July 1915), 40. Also, the phrase Milanese automobilists is derisively substituted for Italian futurists in Wyndham Lewis, “The Art of the Great Race,” Blast 2 (July 1915), 72. 14 Marey stated that his instruments revealed what was previously hidden from view: “When the eye ceases to see, the ear to hear, touch to feel, or indeed when our senses give deceptive appearances, these instruments are like new senses of astonishing precision.” Marey, La méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et principalement en physiologie et en médecine (Paris: G. Masson, 1878), 108; cited in Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 40. On Marey’s disclosure of unseen actualities, Marta Braun notes, “To make the camera ‘see’ what was invisible, he [Marey] suppressed the field of visibility.” Ibid., 81. 15 Marey mentions various practical applications of his chronographic research, including the training of athletes and workers, as well as the definition and diagnosis of nonnormative traits. Étienne-Jules Marey, Movement (New York: Appleton and Co., 1895), 134–45, especially 139 and 142. 16 Marey, Movement, 172. 17 Avant-garde artistic applications of Marey’s research were initiated by František Kupka (c. 1900) and continued by the Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia (early 1911), Marcel Duchamp (late 1911 and early 1912), and Giacomo Balla (1912). See note 16 in the Introduction to this volume. 18 Lista, Balla, cat. raissonnée (1982), 51. In this indispensable scholarly resource, the English translation of the French d’épurer was mistakenly printed as “depuration” rather than “to purge.” 19 Christine Poggi examines with acuity Balla’s conceptualization and creation of the 1912 series of abstract color works, titled Iridescent Interpenetration, which were made around the time of his motion study Girl Running on the Balcony (also 1912). Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 129–32. 20 According to Poggi, when applying Marey’s principles, “Balla . . . introduced a distinct element of mechanicity and repetition to his art.” Ibid., 141. Here the

Balla’s Transformation

125

term “mechanicity” underscores the historical debt owed by Balla to Marey’s experimental method. 21 Balla, Scritti futuristi, 20. 22 Balla refers to the “spiritualized mechanism of intuitive sensibility.” Balla, “How Does One Create the Work of Art?” (1920); reprinted in Balla, Scritti futuristi, 48. 23 Various prominent scholars make mention of dematerialization and destruction. For instance, Poggi refers to Marey’s influential method as “creating a dematerialized graph of lines and dots” and to Balla’s Girl Running on Balcony (1912) as showing the “dematerialization of moving objects into vectors of energy.” Poggi, Inventing Futurism, 117. Likewise, Lista finds in Girl Running on Balcony “the dematerialisation of the form is pushed to the point of the most precarious fragmentation.” Lista, Balla, cat. raissonné (1982), 45. Lista also describes Balla’s desire “to translate the lively personification of a dematerialized nature.” Lista, Balla: La modernità futurista (Milan: Skira: 2008), 125; all quotations from the same volume in this text are my translations. Additionally, these formulations have been used to describe the Bragaglias’ photodynamism and Boccioni’s paintings; see Poggi, Inventing Futurism, 117, and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “Vibratory Modernism: Kupka, Boccioni, and the Ether of Space,” in Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, eds., From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 135. 24 Signed by Balla and others, the second futurist manifesto of painting described how light and movement “destroy the materiality of bodies,” and mentions a lack of faith in “the opacity of bodies” due to scientific advances, such as X-Rays, chronophotography, and other “energetic” or “vibratory” interpretations of matter. Balla, Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, and Severini, “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto” (April 1910); reprinted in Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, 27–31. On destroying static art, see Balla, Scritti futuristi, 19. 25 Using alternative phrases to describe Balla’s visual thinking emerged, Giovanni Lista describes Balla’s technical development of an autonomous language of painting produced “signs of movement” and “signs of motion.” These and various related formulations appear in Lista, Balla, cat. raissonné (1982), 51. Elsewhere, he describes the “kinetic sign” in the work of the Bragaglia brothers; see ibid., 47. 26 Poggi notes, “Marey’s chronophotography . . . allowed him to imagine abstract, graphic patterns . . . as independently expressive elements.” Poggi, Inventing Futurism, 139. She also alludes to the fact that artistic practices borrowed from scientific ideas. Ibid., 140. 27 Balla, “The Late Balla” (1924–5), reprinted in Balla, Scritti futuristi, 51. 28 To some extent, the term “indexes” can be useful to describe the abstracted patterns of movement Balla made when tracing the paths or effects of actual phenomena, as he observed along Via Veneto, for instance. As defined by Charles Sanders

126

Futurist Conditions

Peirce, the concept of indexicality has a strong association with direct, dependent inscriptions of forces that are verifiably in the world. C. S. Peirce, The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Vol. 2 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), 53–4 and 56. Unfortunately, this term does not extend as clearly to phenomena that are not, or have not yet been, actualized; one might model or diagram future events or even imagined ones, but one does not index them per se. According to Lista, “The theme of movement is placed beyond every representation of the world of objects.” Lista, Balla, cat. raissonné (1982), 51. Balla’s visualization of kinetic motion became “a geometric pattern that no longer has any phenomenal, diagrammatic, symbolic or signaled reference.” Ibid., 59. 29 Fabio Benzi has characterized Balla’s transformation to more abstract futurist works as presenting “one of the most conspicuous problems for the exegesis of his artistic development.” Fabio Benzi, “Giacomo Balla: The Conquest of Speed,” in Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe, ed. Vivien Greene, exhibition catalog (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2014), 104. 30 On the formal qualities and concrete phenomenology of Balla’s images of kinetic motion, see Lista, Balla, cat. raissonné (1982), 51 and 58, respectively. 31 Balla, Scritti futuristi, 20, 21 and 111, respectively. Borrowing the same phrase from the 1910 manifesto, Lista discusses Balla’s transcription of “dynamic sensations”; see Lista, Balla (2008), 58–9 and 62–4. Lista argues that Balla creates visual analogies for sensations, which likely grew from an interest in dynamographic drafting; see Lista, Balla, cat. raissonné (1982), 49 and 51. 32 In other works from this period, such as Velocity + Landscape (1913) and Line of Velocity + Landscape (1913), landscape is repeatedly signified with horizontal green undulations, which could also correspond with one or more specific sensations. 33 Marey and German physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach both pioneered nineteenth-century scientific imagery of sound waves, and, while these findings are descriptive, they do not account for the specific methods used by Balla to translate wide sonic variation into visual forms situated in complex spatial environments. On the turn of the twentieth-century history of the scientific study of sound, see Guisy Pisano, “L’Acoustique de la parole par la method expérimentale,” in Sur les pas de Marey: Science(s) et cinéma, eds. Thierry Lefebvre, Jacques Malthête, and Laurent Mannoni (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). 34 Marey’s studies of birds in flight will be mentioned later in this chapter; see note 38. 35 Balla noted in one 1913 notebook, without punctuation and next to several contour drawings of automobiles: “Everything is abstracted with equivalents that, from their point of departure, go on indefinitely.” Balla, Scritti futuristi, 19. The text is also transcribed in Balla: Il taccuino n. 5, 1912/1914, ed. Maurizio Fagliolo dell’Arco (Turin: Martano Ed., 1983). In a similar vein, Ernst Mach noted in 1875: “To abstract means to sense the common aspects of disparate things.” Ernst Mach,

Balla’s Transformation

36

37

38

39

127

Fundamentals of the Theory of Movement Perceptions (London: Kluwer Academic, 2001), 113–14. Marey’s chronophotographic method showed a similar lack of verifiable evidence, due to the fact that even when the images record particular physiological experiments, it can be challenging to formulate any meaningful conclusions concerning those results that depended heavily on the design of the experiments, the equipment calibration, the instructions given to the subjects, and the specific psychophysical qualities being measured. Perhaps the most astute analysis of Balla’s abstraction appears in two texts by Giovanni Lista, Balla, cat. raissonné (1982) and Balla: La modernità futurista (2008). Lista traces Balla’s stylistic transformation from positivist inclination to imitate the mechanical analysis of Marey’s method to pioneering of an “abstract language” as a “new plastic language to transcribe an abstracted idea of velocity.” Lista, Balla (2008), 63. Lista described Balla’s visual abstraction as a kind of “abstract language” (ibid.) and as “abstract equivalents” of different sensations (ibid.), and as a form of eidetic reduction that preserves the essences of motion by leaving out what is inessential (ibid., 64). More importantly, Lista described Balla’s velocity images as producing a type of abstraction distinct from “the dead end of an abstract art based solely on the self-signification of painting” (ibid., 67). Lista argues that the different qualities of line in Balla’s work originated from variations in Marey’s research. Specifically, Balla’s discontinuous horizontal repetitions (i.e., successive instants of vehicular velocity) gave way to continuous, sinusoidal lines (i.e., motion along a single dimensional axis), and then to meandering lines (i.e., motion along multiple axes simultaneously). Lista, Balla, cat. raissonné (1982), 45–53. Lista discusses how the continuous, sinusoidal lines in Balla’s Swallows in Flight paintings set an artistic precedent for his use of multiple simultaneous linear patterns to indicate different aspects (or views) of a single trajectory. According to Lista, the third category of coaxial motion relates to Marey’s “aerial kineticism,” in which a continuous line of motion folds back onto itself, as in the case of flying or hovering birds. Ibid., 47. This specific pattern of superimposed shapes—radiating waves, hard-angled lines, and French curve—recurs with such frequency in the artist’s works from 1913–15 that it operates as a kind of template, which is separate (or abstracted) from the particulars of any specific, observed instance of kinetic motion and which determines a more generalized set of relations with respect to multiple instances, or an essence of kinetic motion. A tendency toward general vehicular velocities will be discussed later in this text in terms of Balla’s titling conventions, but it’s worth mentioning also that such abstraction is signaled in numerous titles containing the phrase Abstract Velocity.

128

Futurist Conditions

40 In his notebooks from 1912–14, drawings of moving automobiles depict the wheels as spiraling forces, extending into the environment. For instance, plates no. 316, 317, 318 and 319, in Lista, Balla, cat. raissonné (1982). 41 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Metamorphoses of the Vortex: Hogarth, Turner, and Blake,” in Richard Wendorf, ed., Articulate Images: The Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 125. 42 Ibid. 127 and 140. 43 Ezra Pound coined the word “vorticism” in late 1913 for a group of vanguard artists working in England, who he contrasted favorably with Italian futurism: “Futurism is descended from impressionism. It is a spreading, or surface art, as opposed to vorticism, which is intensive.” Pound, “Vorticism,” Fortnightly Review 96 (September 1, 1914): 461–71. Elsewhere he noted: “The principles of Vorticism and Futurism . . . are in direct or almost direct opposition.” Pound, “Synchromatism,” The New Age (February 4, 1915): 389–90. In his poetry and prose, Pound also developed vortex imagery, such as in his poem “Vortex” (1914), in which he wrote, “The vortex is the point of maximum energy,” and “All the past is vital, all the past that is capable of living into the future, is pregnant in the vortex, NOW.” See Lewis, “Long Live the Vortex!” 153. 44 The British artist and writer Wyndham Lewis was generally derisive about futurism, which he termed “automobilism.” Lewis, “Long Live the Vortex!” 8. Lewis was also irked by Marinetti’s aggressive vocal performances, which he compared to air bombardment during the First World War: “My equanimity when first subjected to the sounds of mass-bombardment in Flanders was possibly due to my marinettian preparation—it seemed ‘all quiet’ to me in fact, by comparison.” Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 33. 45 Lista describes shifts in Balla’s visual techniques and his titles as “eidetic reduction” of the kinetic phenomena to their essences. Lista, Balla (2008), 64. 46 Balla, Scritti futuristi, 48–9. 47 Ibid., 49. In this translation, the Italian term mondàccio (“crazy little world”) replaces the highly irregular (and likely erroneous) term mondoccio. 48 An autobiographical text written years later by Balla reiterated his view that his artistic development was the work of a vortex triggered by the mechanism of faith, again referring to himself in third person: “To forget, to destroy, to bury everything and everyone especially himself [Balla], with his career, and to throw himself virginal into the new sensibility, into the mysterious vortex of intuition, in search of a new ideal.” Balla, “Appunto autobiografico” (Precisely Autobiographical) (1924–5), in Scritti futuristi, 52. 49 Evidence for a generalized energetic model can be found in Balla’s reference to an intuitive vortex of artistic inspiration. Following this idea, Lista differentiates the

Balla’s Transformation

50 51

52

53 54 55

56

57

58

129

mechanical temporality implied by Balla’s chronophotographic imagery and the temporality implied by his vortex imagery: “The form of the mechanical speed was a form that is inscribed in a temporal sequence. The vortex instead belongs to an infinite time.” Lista, Balla (2008), 64. Fabio Benzi insists on the theosophical context of Balla’s mature works. Fabio Benzi, “Giacomo Balla: The Conquest of Speed,” 104 and 106 note 15. Balla, “Manifesto futurista del vestito da uomo” (January–March 1914); reprinted in Balla, Scritti futuristi, 22. The English word “iridescent” has been used for the highly irregular Italian term iridisti, used by Balla in place of the more usual iridescente. Different times of the day are also represented in Balla’s 1904 painting The Worker’s Day, in which distinct pictorial areas composite together various moments in a long day of strenuous work. Balla, “Manifesto futurista del vestito da uomo” (January–March 1914); reprinted in Balla, Scritti futuristi, 22. Balla, “Fu Balla e Balla Futurista” (Late Balla and Futurist Balla) (1915) in Scritti futuristi, 40. Balla’s more overtly commercial impulse (as exemplified by his suit designs) was reaffirmed a few years later when he commented that shop windows had become more important than traditional art exhibits: “Any store in a modern town, with its elegant windows all displaying useful and pleasing objects, is much more aesthetically enjoyable than all those passéist exhibitions which have been so lauded everywhere.” Giacomo Balla, “The Futurist Universe” (1918), in Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, 219. Among the various futurists who engaged with the regional artisanal manufacturers of luxury goods in the interwar period, Balla was joined by Fortunato Depero, Enrico Prampolini and Tullio d’Abisola. See Enrico Crispolti, ed., La Ceramica Futurista da Balla a Tullio d’Abisola (Florence: Centro Di, in association with Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche, Faenza, 1982). Futurist commercial involvement stretched from clothing and ceramics to carpets and other domestic (and auto­ mobile) goods. Also, adjacent to fabrication of commercial objects were futurist efforts to update the language of advertising. See Fortunato Depero, Futurist and Advertising (1931), ed. and trans. Pasquale Verdicchio (La Jolla, CA: Parentheses, 1990). When Ardengo Soffici eventually embraced the futurist program in 1913, he remarked on the need to transform Italian society by altering the habits of Italians: “If we mentally change human beings, their works and their style we will have a demonstration of life and freedom.” Soffici, “Ancora del Futurismo,” La Voce 4, no. 28 (July 11, 1912): 852; cited in Severini, The Life of a Painter, 99. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 13–14 and, relating to Italian futurism, 109 note 4.

130

Futurist Conditions

59 Germano Celant, “Futurism as Mass Avant-Garde,” in Anne d’Harnoncourt, ed., Futurism and the International Avant-Garde, exhibition catalog (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1980), 36–41. 60 Ibid., 36–7. 61 Ibid., 37–8. “It is therefore interesting not as a stylistic development, but as an avant-garde development that consecrated the banal to art and thus represented the ascending curve of mass anonymity in the sphere of creativity.” Ibid., 41. 62 Christine Poggi offers what can be taken to be a strong counterargument to Celant by claiming the futurists failed in many respects to develop a mass aesthetic. Christine Poggi, “Folla/Follia: Futurism and the Crowd,” Critical Inquiry 28 (Spring 2002): 709–48, quotation from 748. A similar argument about anti-elitist production emerges in the Russian avant-garde’s interest in finding socialist alternatives to bourgeois consumer objects in the interwar period; Christina Kaier, Imagine No Possessions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 63 In 1915, Balla, along with fellow futurist Fortunato Depero, wrote about how this expanded sphere of consumption could supply the collective with futurist goods: “We Futurists . . . seek to realize this total fusion in order to reconstruct the universe by making it more joyful, in other words by an integral re-creation.” Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, “The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe,” 1915; in Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, 197. 64 American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen thought the forms of mass recreation originated in the “leisure class,” but he was well aware that a diffusion of recreational habits symbolized for the less fortunate a chance to imitate the poses of superior socioeconomic standing. In 1899, Thorstein Veblen wrote: “The prescriptive position of the leisure class as the exemplar of reputability has imposed many features of the leisure-class theory of life upon the lower classes.” Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 163. Again, Balla said futurist clothes should be made to last “for a short duration with the aim of growing industrial activities.” Balla, “Manifesto futurista del vestito da uomo” (January–March 1914); reprinted in Balla, Scritti futuristi, 22. 65 Balla and Depero, “The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe,” 197. 66 Ibid., 199. 67 On the craft-oriented production of regional workshops, see note 56. 68 Balla, “Manifesto futurista del vestito da uomo” (January–March 1914), reprinted in Balla, Scritti futuristi, 22–3. 69 Giacomo Balla, “Le vêtement masculine futuriste” (dated May 20, 1914); reprinted in Balla, Scritti futuristi, 24–8; and Balla, “The Anti-Neutral Suit” (September 1914); reprinted in Balla, Scritti futuristi, 28–32. On the texts’ dating, see Lista, Balla (2008), 166. Also, Günter Berghaus points out that Marinetti’s revisions reflected his own strongly interventionist attitude, which Balla likely shared; see Günter

Balla’s Transformation

131

Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (New York: Berghahn Books, 1996), 76. 70 The English translation of Balla’s “The Anti-Neutral Suit” was first published in Virginia Dortch Dorazio, Giacomo Balla: An Album of His Life and Work (New York: Wittenborn, c. 1969). 71 For explicit criticisms of democracy and parliamentarianism, see Scipio Sighele, “Contro il Parlamentarismo,” in Morale private e morale politica (1913) and “Il Parlamento e la psicologia collettiva,” in L’intelligenza della folla, second edition (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1911). Sighele’s texts helped undermine a key formulation of Karl Marx’s philosophy—that socioeconomic aims can be achieved through class unity. 72 Sighele, L’intelligenza della folla (1911), 3. Sighele described the crowd’s agency as “the absolute control that collectivity has now taken in the destinies of the world.” Ibid., 3; my translation. If the historical destiny of Italy depended on the shared sentiments of its people, as Sighele speculated, it fell to individual artists to imagine collective desires that would otherwise remain as untapped potential. 73 In early 1913, the opposing elitist and populist wings within the Italian Nationalist Party, led by political essayist Enrico Corradini and Sighele respectively, split over the question of whether to become allied with members of (or candidates for) the Italian parliament and, thereby, to be open to integrating into the mainstream political movements and discourses. Sighele wanted the party to remain unassimilated and defiant, while Corradini sought the power such institutional standing probably assured. As for the futurists at the time, Marinetti attended the First Nationalist Congress in Florence in 1910, and Boccioni and Marinetti both traveled to Rome and likely participated in the Second Nationalist Congress, December 20–22, 1912. See Gino Agnese, Vita di Boccioni (Florence: Camunia, 1996), 287 note 7. 74 Marinetti, “Our Common Enemies” (March 1910); reprinted in Marinetti, Critical Writings, 51–2. Among Marinetti’s texts expressing his antipathy for the parliamentary democracy in Italy at the time are “The First Futurist Political Manifesto” (1909), “Against Sentimentalized Love and Parliamentarism” (1911) and “The Necessity and Beauty of Violence” (1910); all appear in ibid., 49–50, 55–9 and 60–72 respectively. Another futurist criticism of representative forms of governance appears in Italo Tavolato, “Bestemmia contro la democrazia,” Lacerba 2, no. 3 (February 1, 1914): 44. 75 Balla, “Appunto autobiografico” (1924–5), in Scritti futuristi, 52–4. 76 Ibid., 53. 77 On art-action, see note 5. 78 For more on the works and views of Italian futurist Carlo Carrà, which shifted to a more pro-military position by June 1914, see David S. Mather, “Carlo Carrà’s

132

79

80

81

82 83

84 85

Futurist Conditions Conscience,” in Nothing but the Clouds Unchanged: Artists in World War One, eds. Philipp Blom and Gordon Hughes (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2014), 88–95. Also, writing to Giovanni Papini in October 1913, Marinetti succinctly explained his artistic appeals to nationalist politics: “There are many, many millions, who demand with anguish and faith a directive, an enthusiastic cry, not only in the artistic, but also in the political and national field. Art is tied up with politics!” This undated letter responds to Papini’s text of October 1, 1913, and it was sent with a draft of the “Futurist Political Program,” published on October 15 (Primo Conti Archive, Fondo Papini, Florence); the letter is cited and translated, in part, in Berghaus, Futurism and Politics, 70. There is disagreement concerning the extent to which the interventionists, in general, and the futurists, in particular, were responsible for Italy’s military involvement in the First World War. Poggi argues that the interventionists influenced the declaration of war in 1915. See Poggi, Inventing Futurism, 54. Martin Clark claims the opposite: the idea that a small number of interventionists drove Italy into the war is powerful, but faulty conclusion; see Martin Clark, Modern Italy, 1871–1995 (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1996), 185. An example of the same undulation can be found in Balla’s study Interventionist Demonstration (c. 1915), which contains a comparable emblem of the crowd (discussed later in this chapter). In a seminar presentation from 2005, philosopher Giorgio Agamben briefly sketched the history of movement as a sociopolitical term, which in the modern era of Europe has been distinguished from both the state political apparatus and a general population. Giorgio Agamben, “Movement,” seminar sponsored by Nomad University, Padua; English translation by Arianna Bode available online (as of July 2020): www​.g​​enera​​tion-​​onlin​​e​.org​​/p​/fp​​agamb​​en3​.h​​tm. Giacomo Balla, “The Anti-Neutral Suit,” reprinted in Balla, Scritti futuristi, 32. A prominent interpretation of the patriotic images suggests that Balla presented the crowds as a natural force or element—the swathes of color functioning organically. On Balla’s painting Patriotic Song (1915), Poggi writes: “dynamic circular patterns that figure forth the voice of the multitude as if it were a force of nature.” Poggi, Inventing Futurism, 55. On Balla’s work September 20th Demonstration, Lista notes: “The crowd looks like a huge mass in motion, similar to the wave continuity of a marine surface.” Lista, Balla (2008), 200. Giacomo Balla, “Futurist Manifesto of Men’s Clothing” (1913), in Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, 132. Regarding this image, Lista commented on its similarities with Balla’s earlier Speeding Automobile works; however, he also astutely noted that the shapes are “extended in an architectonic key into three-dimensional space.” Lista, Balla (2008), 199.

Balla’s Transformation

133

86 The idea of forked tongues was proposed by Lista: “To obtain relief, he adds more color or subtracts the white, creating three-dimensional shapes that are like forked and flamboyant tongues, flexed wedges, rigid and darting spines, sharp points, irregular undulations.” Lista, Balla (2008), 200. 87 Balla, “How Does One Create the Work of Art?” (1920); reprinted in Balla, Scritti futuristi, 48. Whether consciously or not, Balla was reiterating an idea expressed years earlier in Scipio Sighele’s essay “Art and the Crowd,” in which artworks can be deemed collective achievements, because artists benefit from the accumulated labors of everyone in a society. Sighele, L’intelligenza della folla (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1903), 142. 88 Balla, “How Does One Create the Work of Art?” (1920), reprinted in Balla, Scritti futuristi, 48–9. 89 Balla, “Fascism and Art” (1929); reprinted in Balla, Scritti futuristi, 66. 90 Balla, “To Feel Futurist” (1927); reprinted in Balla, Scritti futuristi, 63.

134

3

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

In early Italian futurism, kinetic motion signified an inherent, but intangible, dimension of modern experience, which could be revealed, paradoxically, through artistic images composed using traditional, static mediums. In spite of this inert materiality, many of the futurists’ fixed images of movement are historically important signposts for what they took to be the emerging conditions of modernity—what was as-yet unknown or unprecedented, what may exist beyond normative perception, or what could be inferred about this perception. For the futurists, the modern world demanded new types of imagery to show different kinds of awareness, as well as to demonstrate their unfamiliar approaches to making temporality visible.1 As one of the most enduring and indelible expressions of futurist time and motion, in tune with an accelerating pace of life, Umberto Boccioni’s sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) (Figure 3.1) was described by the artist as his “most liberated” sculptural work.2 Displaying more activity than a walk, though less than an outright sprint, the figure’s swift action unfolds like a march in double-time—with an agile gait, an accelerated rhythm, as well as an accentuated potential for motion. Originally constructed in plaster and then cast posthumously in metal, this freestanding figure pulses with a sense of its own physical exertion, migrating from mercurial calves and massive thighs to the complex musculature of torso and upper body. In lieu of a face, several rectilinear planes converge behind a thick horizontal bar that seems to pull the entire mass forward. Along with the jarring absence of a face, its nonnaturalistic elements allude to what would be recognized in retrospect as a visual manifesto to profound epochal changes. Its mode of temporality rooted in psychophysical activity bespeaks both the artaction principle that guided futurist activities and a broader sense of vitalistic sentiments those activities mirrored. Although similar in certain respects to other futurist bodies-in-motion, such as the Bragaglias’ photodynamic portraits and Balla’s serrated figure in Piedigrotta in Velocity + Noise (c. 1914), Boccioni’s

136

Futurist Conditions

Figure 3.1  Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 (cast in 1950). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

137

version of this same motif highlighted the unpredictable and adaptable qualities of the modern, mobile subject. When first exhibited at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in the summer of 1913, Boccioni’s sculpture garnered widespread praise, as well as some apprehension, and it soon attained an almost legendary status for its unusual solutions to several of the artistic problems posed by futurism: how to represent life unfolding, and how to depict figures or objects integrated with their environment. Given this semi-abstracted figure seems to flicker and breathe life into its surroundings, one critic claimed this artwork “testifies, after 400 years of death, to the resurrection and the liveliness of the Italian genius.”3 Although the identity of this figure remains uncertain—with its face obscured by rudimentary geometric planes—it would be recognized as an icon of futurism and as a harbinger of psychophysical transformation, whose familiar but mysterious silhouette later appeared on the 20-cent euro coin.4 When viewed against the backdrop of the intensifying dispute in futurist circles about the role of photography in creative practices, Unique Forms reveals itself to have been at once consistent with Boccioni’s fierce criticisms of the regularized mechanical motion and emblematic of the artist’s new visual language of temporal awareness, which imagined what it might feel like to become more fully modern, as the artist identified himself. More than a century after Boccioni’s death, this work continues to symbolize an enigma concerning identity, locality, and temporality—the careful untangling of which can lead us to a timely rethinking of the artist’s sculptural efforts and their place in the history of modern European art and culture. Over the years Unique Forms has been characterized as having a machine aesthetic, typifying futurism’s ideology of technological speed and violence.5 Historian Jeffrey Schnapp has described it as being “machine-like” and as a privileged example of Boccioni’s “savage machine-like warriors” that presaged a “genuinely fascist subjectivity.”6 For Schnapp, this figure’s mechanicity yields an unusual ensemble of visual and tactile effects that capture a seemingly inhuman combination of speed, virility, and aggressiveness, with its strange roving contours projecting a colonial fantasy of overstepping one’s national boundaries. To him, the work’s instinctual and automated qualities convey qualities of machinelike determination, an interpretation that does not address its inherently human qualities or provide a satisfying explanation for its unfamiliar appearance (i.e., its facelessness).7 The supposedly machinic qualities of the figure contribute to the belief that its identity is solely or primarily mechanical. What has largely remained absent from interpretations of Boccioni’s iconic work and what will be addressed in this chapter are the qualities of a heightened, embodied awareness,

138

Futurist Conditions

which suggest that its implied motion and nonspecific identity did not originally express such savage, machinic connotations.8 A preliminary assessment, to be explored in much greater depth, is that this artwork does not refer to machines or machinelike forms, but rather it possesses sinuous biomorphic contours intertwined with static architectural forms. Due to an unexpected combination of mobile and immobile elements—of a body and a building—the interpretive challenge will be to articulate how Boccioni formulated Unique Forms as a model of early twentieth-century urban subjectivity, as well as to supply evidence to help revise some of the lingering fallacies about the temporal and material dimensions of Boccioni’s solutions.

“New Man” In the mid-nineteenth century, the Italian statesman and artist Massimo D’Azeglio emphasized a collective past when alluding to the possibility of creating a cohesive national identity from the distinct populations living in this country’s diverse geographical regions: “Italy has been revived, [and] the Italian character will be revived as well.”9 This massive ideological project would aim to instill the people only recently designated as Italians with the qualities that would predispose them to undertaking an arduous path toward achieving greater moral, civic, and physical education. Like the young nation itself, Italians would first be imagined and then nurtured or, more bluntly, constructed to fulfill this patriotic function. Yet, this newly created identity, a unique subject position composed from disparate fragments, also manifested a seemingly insurmountable tension between active and passive roles in a set of discourses that often equivocated between making and being made into Italians.10 Stretched inconclusively between the poles of individuality and collectivity, the resulting national body (and its self-image) would value physical agility as much as mental acuity in its constitution. In the early twentieth century, the futurists unveiled their own updated version of this model citizen, one deftly recalibrated to meet the social and economic pressures of an industrial society and one acclimated to physical culture, athletics, and other early twentieth-century regimes of bodily movement.11 The futurists made vociferous appeals to an increasingly restless populace, encouraging it to respond collectively to social and economic conditions.12 By adopting another rendition of the seductive myth of the “new man”—which, to various modernist artists and writers throughout Europe, symbolized an escape from the stifling weight of history—a basic template of

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

139

the well-prepared futurist emphasized above all masculine vigor, decisiveness, and youthful impertinence.13 Among the several competing visions of modern collectivity, the futurists and their vocal supporters pursued the interwoven projects of urban and national revitalization in Italy, while trying to relegate cumbersome traditions to the distant past. In his text “The Discourse of Rome” (1913), the recently affiliated futurist writer Giovanni Papini exemplified this reform-minded attitude when evoking a protean image of “the man, the naked man, the man who knows how to walk by himself.”14 Without technical appendages or mechanized parts, and apparently without a need for clothing, this mythic figure emerged into the world psychophysically prepared to chart an alternate course through a continuously unfolding, unpredictable temporality. Mimicking and implicitly challenging the persistent civilizing “discourse” historically rooted in Roman classicism, with its premium placed on publicly performing the role of a good citizen, Papini articulated a distinctly modern directive: “We want to create a man who chooses decisively between the duties of the citizen and the rights of the artist.”15 No longer thought to be limited to serving the greater good in a traditional manner, Papini’s “new man” chose the creative spirit of individual artistic struggle and, by doing so, argued that sheer physical prowess could outweigh moral bearing in this rejuvenated body.16 Appropriately, Papini’s influential text was recited publicly in late February 1913 to a packed audience at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome: the antiquated discourse of civic refinement and restraint brazenly returned to its place of origin, deformed and unrecognizable. In the months after he attended this memorable recitation, Boccioni began work on his “most liberated” sculpture, imagining just such an anticlassical figure of free thought and unencumbered action. If an earlier model of classical figuration presupposed that well-demarcated, stable identities of individual subjects could aid the composition and maintenance of a lawful, well-ordered society, Boccioni’s sophisticated response to this humanistic legacy, by contrast, envisioned the unclothed mobile figure—similar to Papini’s naked man—to be better acclimated to an era of increasing speeds. His resistance to reproducing legible individual traits led him to explore figural illegibility, in which the essential qualities of non-individuated bodies fill the modern city. However, the pictorial theme of the anonymous body-in-motion also marked the culmination of several of his artistic tendencies that rejected the visual conventions of portraiture, underwritten by physiognomy and legible social types.17 By eschewing conventional portraiture and trying to express the physical potentiality of bodily motion, Boccioni envisioned a less rehearsed

140

Futurist Conditions

mode of figuration that nonetheless exaggerated such stereotypically masculine qualities as physical exertion and assertiveness.18 By intentionally avoiding the visual cues that denote fixed identity and convey social status, Boccioni’s shadowy figures oscillate between curvilinear and rectilinear principles, as if sensitively probing their surrounding space and adjusting on the fly to the local conditions. While many of his hand-drawn figures exist in a similar two-dimensional schematic framework of partial designation, the malleable materiality of his three-dimensional Unique Forms transformed those pictorial cues into solid, interconnected volumes that can appear to shift unsettlingly before one’s eyes. The molten forms surge and slacken atop a smooth, horizontal base, akin to skating over a groomed surface or gliding along precisely engineered tracks. Yet, even if this unrecognizable figure captures qualities of unstoppable forward momentum, it should be clearly distinguished from those qualities of an adjacent, more overtly mechanized figural motif. In Mafarka the Futurist (1909), a novel by futurism’s founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the eponymous main character builds a “son” named Gazurmah, who is part human and part airplane.19 When challenging the principles of human biology as much as those of gravity and history, Mafarka uses technical ingenuity to circumvent a woman’s role in the process of human reproduction. As the product of a semideified mode of technological conception and birth, which rhymes genetic patrimony with artistic production, this machine-child defiantly (even misogynistically) rejects the role of motherhood. Equipped with aerodynamic appendages in place of arms, this industrialera Icarus aggressively augments the human subject with machinic qualities that rather literally embody one of Marinetti’s goals for Italian futurism: “We aspire to the creation of a nonhuman species.”20 Unlike Papini’s naked man, Marinetti’s mechanical child signals a more radical revision of humanity using machinery.21 Since this hybrid machine-body was not the same for Boccioni, distinguishing between this machine-child motif and the broader “new man” myth helps relegate the purportedly mechanical or cybernetic qualities of Boccioni’s Unique Forms. Revising this machinic interpretation will proceed over the course of this chapter, but some initial confusion about the identity of Unique Forms can be resolved by acknowledging an uncanny, but misleading, resemblance between Marinetti’s machine-child and another prevalent motif at the time concerning uncertain origins: the motherless child. This explicitly non-technological figure of one stranded in an uncertain, threatening world provides a crucial motif for elucidating Boccioni’s nonmechanized vision of the modern body-in-motion.

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

141

If being orphaned typically means having an unknown family lineage, the orphan can be designated as “son of unknowns” (figlio di ignoti in Italian) or simply “father unknown” (padre ignoto). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, population growth and poverty in Italy and across Europe contributed to the devastating societal problem of abandoned children, even though the orphaned child carried more optimistic connotations as well—for instance, as a symbol of urbanites who had, by choice, severed their familial ties to the countryside and to traditional ways of life.22 Such optimism about urban rootlessness fits easily with futurist attitudes, whether rallying young, male citydwellers or glorifying the “unknown man,” and, more specifically, when Boccioni repeatedly used the term “unknown” (ignoto in Italian) in his writings. The most illuminating examples of the latter appear in his free-word poem “Small Dress Shoe + Urine” (1913), which begins with a monetary transaction between a male narrator and a prostitute in London.23 As the scene shifts indoors to chronicle their subsequent sexual encounter, this fragmented, paratactic text magnifies ever-smaller details of the rainy, nocturnal scene until its roving perspective results in a vertiginous fusion of microscopic and macroscopic scales. Finally, the male narrator ponders the chances that their sexual act will result in offspring, and the widening gap between his sated desire and an unplanned future carries seemingly cosmic significance for him as he returns again and again to the same word, ignoto (unknown)—which appears fifteen times in the handwritten manuscript (varying only according to the nouns modified), plus an additional four instances of manual elision (Figure 3.2). Like a talisman that can evoke and dispel danger, his mantra-like repetition of this term suggests a condition into which the resulting child (or children) might be born.24 Due to its recurrence in this text, the term ignoto subtly anchors Boccioni’s image of the modern, mobile subject, and it suggests that his fascination with anonymous bodies-in-motion revolves around the same parentless child motif. At this juncture, it is less important to determine whether this specific poetic imagery (and its episodic mulling of human existence) had immediate bearing on Boccioni’s visual works than it is to underscore that his artistic efforts aimed to represent (and to appeal to) a youthful population. In his 1914 book Futurist Painting Sculpture, Boccioni glorified the qualities of rootlessness and unclear lineage when asserting, with unmistakable futurist bravado: “We modern Italians have no past. . . . We Futurists are the only primitives of a new and completely transformed sensibility.”25 At once disavowing the historical past and embracing an undefined potential, he reimagined the restless urban (and patriotic) populace to be neophytes who are innately prepared to experience

142

Futurist Conditions

Figure 3.2  Detail of Boccioni’s manuscript of poem “Scarpetta da società + orina” (“Small Dress Shoe + Urine”), 1913. Courtesy Getty Research Institute (880380).

the unsettling intensities of modernity.26 As the moving, masculine figure gradually emerged as the central theme in Boccioni’s visual works, the arrival of this unidentified, faceless figure would synthesize a complicated set of visual propositions that culminated with Unique Forms and that depicted an embodied subject adapting to chaotic conditions. Over the years, its amorphous body has been variously described—as the fusion of human and nonhuman elements, as an exemplar of socioeconomic ambition, and as the herald of military might and authoritarianism—but what remains unexplained is why this mobile body remains so defiantly unrecognizable. As a historically significant variation on Boccioni’s idiosyncratic visual language of bodies-in-motion, Unique Forms developed a striking formal repertoire that would revolve around three interconnected, formal propositions: its qualities of bodily movement, its relation to architectonic forms, and its posthumous casting in metal. Together these distinct, but interrelated, aspects will present additional evidence to demonstrate how this sculpture framed a potent analogy for mass collectivity.

Bodily Motion By the early twentieth century, recent advances in photographic processes had led many avant-garde European artists to defy long-standing, naturalistic

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

143

visual conventions—by formulating a visual aesthetic directly correlated with mechanical reproduction.27 While some futurists such as the Bragaglias and Balla presupposed that mechanized visual mediums could reveal immaterial, vitalistic forces, other artists such as Boccioni sought to renew methods of image-making that were not governed by mechanical means. From 1912 to 1913, Boccioni began to dispense with the accepted anatomical schema used to indicate motion in human figures. In an important series of works on paper on bodily motion, which reaffirmed aspects of his sculpted figures in motion, he depicted patterns of energetic pulses rippling across loosely defined bodily armatures.28 In Muscular Dynamism (1913) (Figure 3.3), for example, a frenzied conjunction of bulges and hollows composes a torso in mid-stride for which dark lines etch a staccato calligraphy of exertions, with its sharp, linear coordinates overlaying a patchwork of shaded masses and empty spaces. The resulting athletic physique reveals oddly abbreviated appendages—remaining without hands, feet, or even head. Running perpendicular to the presumed outline of

Figure 3.3  Umberto Boccioni, Muscular Dynamism, 1913, pastel and charcoal on paper, 34 × 23 1⁄4 in. (86.3 × 59 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala / Art Resource, NY.

144

Futurist Conditions

the body, other seemingly errant vectors at the waist and shins cross this outline, suggesting that the corporeal volumes spill into its surrounding space. Then, a straight white line enters from the right edge of the picture and prods the muscular figure to continue forward despite possible exhaustion. Initially, this assortment of probing, indefinite forms may appear disjunctive or tangential, but the aggregated sum of the disparate micro-pulsations suggests reserves of energy. As the figure blends into its environs, external forces seem to enter the interior reaches of the body and mind. Using a futurist term from this period, the overlapping interior and exterior realms can be said to interpenetrate.29 Unlike more predictably mechanical trajectories, this chaotic rendition of a futurist body-in-motion calculated a diagrammatic structure suited to absorbing and choreographing complex relations among material forms and immaterial forces. For Boccioni, bodily motion marked a continuous process rather than simply denoting a series of adjacent, mechanistic slices of reality. He embraced a vitalist approach to visualizing motion, which he outlined in the preface to the catalog published on the occasion of his Paris exhibition in the summer of 1913: A body in motion is not therefore, for me, a body studied still and then rendered as if in movement, but a body truly in motion, that is a living reality, absolutely new and original. To render a body in motion, I certainly do not give its trajectory, that is, its passage from a state of rest to another state of rest, rather I strive to fix the form that expresses its continuity in space.30

His phrase “body in motion” implies a condition not precisely defined by its spatial or temporal measurements or by the aid of mechanical instruments. Also, if precise measures and the formal language to specify them gives one definition of actual, material conditions, his idea of “a living reality” accords with more elusive, perhaps immeasurable, phenomena that do not conform to mechanically defined instants. What he terms “a body truly in motion” presupposes an expanded concept of motion—the melding of internal and external processes encompassing not only what is physically actualized but also what may be actualized in the near future.31 Being quite real, but beyond precise measure, an expanded concept of bodily motion could include such psychophysically rich activities as planning one’s route across a city or adapting in real time to the changing environment, for instance, or it could entail mapping the possible paths branching from a specific figural position. Considering the two competing methods for explaining motion (mechanically measured and vitalistic), Boccioni’s formulation about “continuity in space” characterizes an interconnected version of vitalistic reality that coheres not only from one

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

145

moment to the next (i.e., as interdependent temporalities) but also according to the physical proximities among various micro- and macroscopic scales (i.e., as adjacent, spatial domains).32 His visual works embraced the artistic challenge of revealing figural motion without unnecessarily restricting its hidden potentials due to pictorial over-specification.33 In 1914, the budding Italian art historian Roberto Longhi published a persuasive account of Boccioni’s sculptures and works on paper made from 1912 to 1913, in which Longhi attributed their stirring visual power to “unhinged” contours.34 With their aim of expressing agitation, the linear elements created “dangerous” and “imperious” curves, the lineage of which Longhi traced back to Italian Renaissance painting: “Reward to those who will know how to stop the movement of a single line of Botticelli or Boccioni.”35 By pairing Botticelli and Boccioni, Longhi identified lyrically curving linearity to be an irrepressible feature of figural vitality, one that defied more regularized geometrical progressions. In effect, the futurist’s works were “spontaneously archaic, but not, mind you, archaistic,” signaling to him the reemergence of transhistorical figural vitalism.36 Even when placed within this distinguished lineage of artmaking, the vitality of Boccioni’s figures was hardly redundant. To escape an anatomically correct or otherwise regulated mode of figuration, for example, Boccioni had undertaken a conceptual shift in representing motion visually: his open contours introduced an abstracted latticework of figural possibilities that rejected naturalism. Longhi’s contemporaneous interpretation of these visual solutions formed part of the evolving critical response to these works, which, in turn, had sparked deep reflection on the part of the artist himself. In addition to one-on-one discussions with Longhi about his work, Boccioni exchanged correspondence in which he lauded the critic for his informed sensibility.37 In a letter to the art dealer Giuseppe Sprovieri in late 1913, Boccioni memorably referred to these works on paper as “relating to the sculptural dynamic,” which followed from the artist’s desire to apply his most successful visual solutions to other mediums: “In sculpture as in painting, renewal is impossible without looking for the STYLE OF MOVEMENT.”38 Boccioni contended that the sculpted figure could avoid finite lines and could be “split open” by placing the surrounding environment inside them.39 But, even as Longhi supposed that this renewal was historically continuous with an earlier epoch of cultural rebirth, the artistic problem of depicting vitalistic, nonmechanical motion changed rather dramatically when translated into three dimensions. While the technical solutions he calculated in his two-dimensional works might suggest how moving bodies can avoid well-defined spatial coordinates and precisely

146

Futurist Conditions

rendered anatomies, the specific syntax of sculpting open-ended figures emerged as a distinct challenge. There were no direct equivalents in sculpture for their sketchy outlines, aggregated marks, and semiopaque smudges. In the same vein, the freestanding sculpted figure cannot easily fade or spill over into its ground. Continuing his search for a “style of movement” in sculpture led him to explore indeterminate trajectories through an adjacent set of formal concerns in three dimensions. But instead of replicating the same open-ended, two-dimensional schema, he would use plaster to compose surfaces that alluded to complex threedimensional interpenetration of a figure with its environment. Imagining and representing bodily motion were at the forefront of Boccioni’s artistic endeavors in February and March 1913 when he visited Rome to participate various futurist events that garnered press coverage—an exhibition at Teatro Costanzi and a series of performances with theatrical skits, musical acts, and literary readings, including Marinetti’s brash vocalization of Papini’s “Discourse of Rome.” Often followed by late-night discussions among the futurist artists, writers, and musicians, these raucous gatherings inspired and reinvigorated Boccioni’s art-making, while reaffirming his underlying commitment to the evolving futurist project. Writing to a close friend following his return to Milan, he described his recent trip to Rome as triggering a feeling in him of rebirth, which was also tinged with symptoms of mania and anxiety: Thinking that I can communicate in Italy with Italian friends in my own language, and to penetrate together the mysterious and tragic labyrinth of plastic evolution, I feel a thrill of a real physical tremor, of delicious anxiety, of a deep feeling that goes to tears, and I feel reborn, I see everything resolved, everything seems virgin to me, renovated, enriched. . . . It is marvelous!40

Returning with “delicious anxiety” to his studio in late March, the artist proceeded to construct four full-length plaster figures during an intensely productive period that followed, lasting until early June when he shipped the artworks to his gallery in Paris.41 Boccioni and his assistants fabricated each of the works in this series by applying plaster to a metal armature attached to a wooden base, and, while they made the works in rapid succession, each sculpture seized upon a distinct rhythm of movement—from the lento of Synthesis of Human Dynamism (1913) to the adagio of Spiral Expansion of Muscles in Motion (1913), from the andante of Muscles in Speed (1913) to the allegro of Unique Forms (1913).42 Such shifts in tempo arrived through the varying amounts of plaster used in and around the figures: those with greater material volume conveyed slowness and lethargy, while those with lighter and smoother forms communicated quickness and agility.43

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

147

Having eliminated precise anatomical features, Boccioni nonetheless retained the figural core as he dispensed with the visual and tactile qualities associated with light reflecting off of naturalistically rendered surfaces.44 That is, his use of plaster did not attempt to render the resulting shapes solely by reproducing shaded surfaces corresponding exactly with external, physical features, but rather this unfamiliar mode of figuration approximated internal forces being externalized, akin to bands of electromagnetic activity radiating from its core, whether voluntarily or involuntarily.45 As material analogies for the psychophysical relations between a figure and its surroundings, the physical, sculptural surfaces can also function as an alternate spatial definition of its figural identity—by delineating various ranges of motion and inherent instability.46 Boccioni helpfully explained the intended effect on viewers in the preface to his Paris exhibition catalog (June–July 1913): “The spectator must ideally construct a continuity (simultaneity) that is suggested by the form-forces, equivalent to the expansive power of the bodies.”47 By extrapolating from the formal patterns in his work, a viewer could arrive at the psychic and emotional equivalents of living motion. In particular, this intention to establish formal qualities to allude to the perceived continuity between internal and external domains explains how a viewer might recreate mental images appropriate to the accelerated attitudes depicted: as a phenomenon’s internal conditions are externalized, environmental stimuli are simultaneously internalized. As an abstract, nonliteral mode of mimetic transference, environments can be imprinted onto the objects depicted, and those resulting sculptural solutions can likewise be imprinted onto the viewer’s awareness. As such, the material qualities of the four plaster figures would allude to distinct, spatialized temporalities. However, not long after the artist’s death in August 1916, three of the four artworks were destroyed—Synthesis of Human Dynamism, Spiral Expansion of Muscles in Motion, and Muscles in Speed—while the sole surviving work, Unique Forms, displays the swiftest, most spontaneous qualities of motion in the series.48 To better appreciate how the shift from two to three dimensions altered the artist’s conceptualization of kinetic human forces, it can be helpful to recall some physical qualities of the medium itself. Plaster begins as a moldable compound, but hardens with exothermic haste, which means that sculpting with it would have occurred, for Boccioni and his assistants, in both additive and subtractive phases: the wet material was modeled or poured into molds, and, once the resulting masses dried, they could be carved, joined, and finished.49 Due to its ease of use and its cost relative to stone, this medium has been used for centuries to decorate

148

Futurist Conditions

architectural interiors, though it remains fragile—suffering discoloration and damage from physical contact or even from moisture in the air. Perhaps owing to this material fragility, the first works in Boccioni’s series (now destroyed) contained thick, trunk-like deposits rooting each bulky figure firmly to its base. Then, as if to counteract the heaviness implied by these earlier accumulations, his final work in the series fashioned more agile-looking forms that heightened the implicit effects of levity and rapidity. It is notable as well that, over the course of making these full-length figures, the degree of anatomical specification decreased noticeably, so that, by the time he made Unique Forms, he favored a much greater degree of abstraction that almost entirely dispensed with identifiable body parts (such as facial features, hands, and feet). Also, when increasing its sense of motion by reducing the amount of plaster used, the artist inadvertently compromised the integrity of the material structure. Yet, if the importance of Unique Forms derives, in part, from its place in this sculptural series (viz., his search for the formal equivalents to bodily time-motion), this particular free-form figural mass takes its place as well within the wider chronology of modern sculpture. Using improbable postures and exaggerated bodily torsion to bypass anatomical specificity, Boccioni continued an approach to modeling, casting, and recasting figures initiated and mastered by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. In particular, Unique Forms extended several of the compositional strategies elaborated in Rodin’s The Walking Man (1877) (Figure 3.4). To emphasize the figure’s lower body, its arms were eliminated, “because a man walks on his legs,” as the sculptor responded when asked about their absence by the French artist Edgar Degas.50 If Boccioni later continued Rodin’s vision of reimagining the moving figure, the futurist treated the sculpted surface from a divergent perspective.51 For Rodin, surface variations and inconsistencies originated from the process of fabrication, during which he subjected his figures to twisting, gouging, and tearing, as well as to the sheering off of their parts. Alongside the impressions left by his or an assistant’s hands were more accidental effects of the production process, as when the materials bubbled, burst, crusted, or crumbled.52 By altering their tangible, material forms, Rodin alluded to the psychic and physical traumas that befall actual bodies, sometimes catastrophically, similar to how plaster impressions of the human and animal remains at Pompeii provide modified indexes of that historical disaster53 (Figure 3.5). The torso of The Walking Man retains its overall anatomical shape in spite of the gouges, interruptions, and deformations found on its finished surfaces. By contrast, Boccioni’s

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

149

Figure 3.4 Auguste Rodin, L’Homme qui marche (The Walking Man), 1877. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Figure 3.5  Giorgio Sommer, Photograph of plaster casts from archaeological remains, Pompeii, c. 1875. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

150

Futurist Conditions

sculptural surfaces (especially in Synthesis of Human Dynamism, if only judging from photographs taken prior to its destruction) were initially quite rough and without a high degree of finish, but he gradually altered his techniques to achieve greater smoothness in Unique Forms. Assessing the qualities of the materials and treatments of their surfaces provides a powerful measure of the futurist’s effort to reimagine—and even to put into a new context—the timehonored artistic motif of the body-in-motion.54 When revisiting the full-length sculpted figure, Boccioni gravitated toward a distinct register of human experience: his nonanatomical, smooth surfaces avoided the material conditions implied by Rodin’s distressed, traumatized bodies, and they circumvented the traditional visual qualities associated with idealized male bodies. Responding to the desire—really, the necessity—for embodying free-form, nonsequential motion, the sweeping curves traced a psychophysiological attitude permanently inclined toward action.55 During its fabrication, the plaster version of Unique Forms (Figure 3.6) was constructed from separate cast plaster elements that would have been carefully smoothed and joined to eliminate incidental deviations from the broadly contoured shapes. The resulting surfaces reduced the visual and tactile resistance implied by the more accidental and arbitrary treatments of the human form, so the futurist’s principled departure from literal contours had symbolic value of escaping from the material constraints (and historical contingencies) connoted by Rodin’s rougher treatments. According to Boccioni, his sculpted figures were among the works that captured “the violent desire to escape and lose ourselves in space.”56 As a template for a body-in-motion that seemingly contorts and reconfigures in response to its surroundings, Unique Forms generated a semi-abstracted, three-dimensional model of a modern body. If this version of masculine vigor and virility produces an erotic charge, its movement remains rooted in the anticlassicism of Papini’s naked man and traces the same imagined or speculative paths, which could be uncoupled from the material actualities of humanness implied by Rodin’s walking figure. Rather than revealing a hybrid human-machine fusion, as many art historians still presuppose, the analogical associations between plaster and such human qualities as agility, adaptability, and modern psychophysical impulses unexpectedly relied on architectural stability to frame its formally and conceptually daring solutions.

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

151

Figure 3.6  Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913, plaster. Courtesy Museu de Arte Contemporânea, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil (1963.3.81).

152

Futurist Conditions

Architectural Ambit In the preface to the catalog accompanying his 1913 sculpture show in Paris, Boccioni characterized an essential difference between two of his artistic mediums of choice: “Architecture is to sculpture what composition is to painting.”57 As the formal equivalent to his two-dimensional painting practice, architecture provided a foundational principle for his three-dimensional sculpted works that depicted constructed features of the urban environment.58 In addition to referring to physical, built structures, the terms “architecture” and “architectonic” indicated for this artist a vertiginous combination of internal and external structures, such as when describing a “spiral architectural construction.”59 In a slightly later text “Futurist Manifesto of Architecture” (1913–14), his similar rhetoric intimates an expansive field of spatial relations when noting “an architectonic environment that develops in all directions,” and then matter-of-factly stating: “We live in a spiral of architectonic force.”60 Swelling to incorporate wider levels of spatial awareness, the concept also slipped toward hidden registers of internal, mental processes: “PLASTIC DYNAMISM = DYNAMIC ARCHITECTURAL CONSCIOUSNESS.”61 He then concludes this text with a mythic formulation concerning human-architectonic extensibility: “The future prepares us for an endless sky of architectonic armors.”62 Within this extended field, Boccioni’s concept of architecture includes multiple, interwoven registers of psychophysical and material significance, and this idiosyncratic terminology offers another means of approaching his bodiesin-motion. An important clue about how and why his full-length plaster figures featured architectural elements may be discerned in that same catalog preface: Boccioni wanted to abolish the figural profile and the system of identification that historically accompanied it.63 Implicitly rejecting the pictorial traditions of portraiture, architectural elements would come to efface his figures, rendering their bodily movements and psychophysical routines less identifiable. While the practical effects of this directive for his art-making shifted according to his two- and three-dimensional material practices, the artist’s thinking remained consistent: architecture subverted visual conventions by undermining those systems that established (or sought to establish) fixed individual identities based on specific facial and gestural traits. As part of the formal lineage relating to Boccioni’s resisting the conventions governing recognizable traits, his visual works manifested a series of formal substitutions that culminated in his use of architectural elements in and around the figural area typically reserved for a face. As art historian Laura Mattioli Rossi has shown, this formal substitution was derived from the pictorial

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

153

techniques for representing contre-jour lighting in earlier works, such as Controluce (1910), in which strong backlighting supplied a formal justification for making his figures less distinguishable from their grounds.64 In these years, intense light streaming through windows and past buildings often acted to diffuse the perceived contours of women’s heads. As Boccioni experimented with several adjacent solutions, again hinging on the spatial proximity of a solitary, seated figure to an architecturally delineated ground, he repeatedly juxtaposed his mother with a window casing in Fusion of a Head and a Window (c. 1912–13; destroyed) (Figure 3.7) and in his ink studies for this sculpture (1912) (Figure 3.8), among other examples. If, at first, this radical fusion of a recognizable person with her surroundings carried some unavoidably literal associations, such as “splitting open” the naturalistic shapes and reassembling them into new composites of figure and architecture, his 1913 catalog preface helpfully explains how a sculpted figure can reflect its environment to the extent that near and distant phenomena can become merged into a single, continuous image based on “the necessary abolishment of the distance . . . between a figure and a house 200 meters away.”65 Wanting to remove the distance between a body and a building, near and far, he calculated another precise formal operation: “If a spherical cap (a plastic equivalent of a head) is traversed by the façade of a building, the interrupted semi-circle and the square of the façade interrupting it together form a new figure, a new unity composed of environment + object.”66

  Figure 3.7 (left)  Umberto Boccioni, Fusion of Head and a Window, c. late 1912–13 (original work destroyed). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (920092). Figure 3.8 (right)  Umberto Boccioni, Study for Fusion of Head and a Window, c. late 1912–13. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

154

Futurist Conditions

Here the curves of a spherical head shape combined with the rectilinear elements of a building facade to compose an aggregate of straight and rounded lines, referring to static and moving elements respectively. As an inhabitant of the city, his mother was frequently depicted in his paintings and sculptures as fused with the static features of her surroundings. However, rather than simply and directly contradicting the free-motion of his male figures, these immobile features also participated in the removal of the traces of individual identity— and inaugurated his radical shift to a more expansive understanding of human motion and vitality. Boccioni then decided to replace entirely the heads of figures in his twodimensional works Unique Line of Continuity in Space (1912–13) (Figure 3.9) and Figure in Movement (1913). In each drawing, a solitary figure is partially obscured by a distinct wedge shape, whose darkened grid represents the facade of a housing bloc with evenly distributed windows (both of which are distorted by perspectival diminution).67 This unusual motif likely continues his earlier idea to circumvent physiognomic recognition—by fusing near and far elements— though it has been formally extrapolated into the more complete erasure of facial features. As another technique for far-near compositing, the windowed facade

Figure 3.9  Umberto Boccioni, Unique Line of Continuity in Space, 1912–13. Collection Civico Gabinetto dei Disegni, Castello Sforzesco, Milano (Inv. AG 568).

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

155

offered a radical visual solution to supplement his ongoing interest in representing dynamic corporeal experience, and this negation of individual qualities reaffirmed a more general mode of figuration. Yet, this graphical solution was further complicated when it reemerged in the sculptural milieu. In his Muscles in Speed (1913) (Figure 3.10), a cubic block was perched conspicuously atop the twisting, muscular ensemble. Features of the cityscape have been directly imprinted onto Boccioni’s malleable corporeal material—with the resulting complex threedimensional volumes registering the distinct, but anonymous, features of an urban environment: windows and facades. Using the same poetic fusion, this dramatic formal substitution served, above all, to conceal the figure’s identity by combining a moving body with the improbable girth of a tenement building. In Boccioni’s increasingly sophisticated formal language, futurist artistic and societal renewal became more focused on the experiential qualities of a highly adaptable, itinerant subject. As the continuation of his earlier strategy of combining fixed and mobile elements, this anonymous subject developed from a rich history of figuralenvironmental fusions. In the early twentieth century, the desire to blend figures with their grounds led some visual artists to rely on increasingly muted, diffuse, or blurred elements

Figure 3.10  Umberto Boccioni, Muscles in Speed, 1913 (original plaster destroyed). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (920092.22.6).

156

Futurist Conditions

in portraits, as with Eugène Carrière’s Woman Seated (1901) and Medardo Rosso’s Ecce puer (Behold the Child) (1906–7). In each image, a haunting presence emerges from the murky depths of its atmospheric surround. When addressing similar pictorial premises, French cubist painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque used exaggerated formalistic reductions to render figures that intentionally defied naturalistic shading and contouring. Nonnaturalistic framing associated with sensory confusion resulted in the explicit motif of facelessness in Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem “The Musician of Saint-Merry” (c. 1913–16), in which a mysterious man without visage lures a crowd of people into the street through his music.68 An anonymous populace spontaneously gathers around and, in effect, mirrors the unidentified human presence. Highly individuated portraiture offered ample grounds for another type of pictorial refusal before the First World War—when Marcel Duchamp eclipsed recognizable features by subverting figural expressivity with intentionally, and humorously, reductive forms in Sad Young Man on a Train (1911), Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 1 (1911), and Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912). The nonnaturalistic use of photography underwrote similar qualities of inscrutability in the Bragaglias’ A Gesture of the Head (1913) (see Figure 1.8), in which expressive movements appear to break free from their inert, material counterpart. In a general sense, a human body without a face might represent a specific someone whose identity is cloaked or temporarily unknowable, but it might also refer to a more general anybody who remains entirely removed or abstracted from the particulars of sociohistorical specificity. Although facelessness later assumed chilling literalness in Georges Duhamel’s First World War memoir on the dehumanizing effects of war, effacement carried different significance when, prior to that destructive conflict, Boccioni composed a complex variation on modern Italian subjectivity using the structure of a non-individuated body-in-motion.69 Boccioni’s words shed light on what remains a counterintuitive merger of human anatomy and architecture: “Our works of painting and sculpture consist of calculation because emotion stems from internal construction (architectonic) and escapes visual accidentality.”70 In effect, his formal solutions in traditional artistic mediums intentionally rejected the frozen qualities of photographic processes (i.e., stills, instants, or, in the parlance of the era, “accidents”) in favor of unseen or unpredictable aspects of the human mind and body. Again, the term “architectonic” traces a process of ongoing interpenetration between a body and its environment, during which external phenomena are internalized as distinct behaviors and inner processes are externalized as embodied, situated activities. His model locates the modern mind-body in a rapidly changing

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

157

environment. As a mature version of his idiosyncratic visual language, the resulting configuration amounted to a rather ambitious revision of his early pictorial strategies. Having started with fairly literal references to the constructed environment (e.g., facades and windows), Boccioni introduced an analogical mode of figuration that revolved around several complicated internal and external associations. Crucially, an important motivation behind this series of artistic solutions was, as he indicated, an escape from the visual accidents offered by photographic imagery, which did not, in his view, convey the living essences of depicted phenomena.71 To take the artist at his word means that many of his works from this period would have aimed to show a nonphotographable internal or emotional architecture. Through plastic analogies and his belief in continuity among varying scales, the formal and material qualities of his artistic mediums interacted with and encoded features of his carefully cultivated conceptual and thematic structure: when meeting the challenge he set for himself to avoid individual identity, the artist would discover that certain features of his urban milieu could be used to suggest collective modes of human activity. Boccioni’s concept of internal-external fusion markedly contrasted with naturalistic conventions when he further altered the relative scales of the near and far phenomena—by miniaturizing the building in relation to the enlarged human figure. Still seeking “a new unity composed of environment + object,” these other figural fusions replaced the window motif with a shrunken housing bloc.72 This revised ensemble of mobile figure and static architecture accomplished similar aesthetic and conceptual ends, but also softened the jarring effects of his earlier head-window composite, becoming at once less literal and more poetic. In the sculptures Head + Houses + Light (1912) and Anti-Graceful (1912–13) (Figure 3.11), miniature architectural elements erupt from the cranium of each of these depictions of the maternal figure. Rescaling the head-house motif in these cases had notably preserved the identity of the sitter, so a gendered dichotomy would emerge in his work between seated, identifiable women and full-length, unidentifiable male figures. Boccioni’s scalar shift from actual window to miniaturized building followed from a relatively straightforward formal principle, which complicated the literalness and legibility of the symbolic references; however, his subsequent formal extrapolations proved still more enigmatic and inaugurated another drastic formal and conceptual shift in Unique Forms—from miniaturized building to enlarged or abstracted building elements. Comprising an ensemble of flat, rectangular planes that completely efface the identity of the figure, the merger of a solitary figure with its surroundings in Unique Forms also reduced the identifiable shape of the housing bloc to more simplified

158

Futurist Conditions

Figure 3.11  Umberto Boccioni, Anti-Graceful, 1912–13. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.

Figure 3.12  Detail of Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913. Museu de Arte Contemporânea, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.

architectural forms.73 What was a bulky head-building in Muscles in Speed (constructed in the weeks or even days before Unique Forms) would become in the later work a bizarre rectilinear “profile” that protrudes sharply forward from this collection of flat, geometric planes set at right angles (Figure 3.12). At the leading edge of this bio-architectonic ensemble is an imposing horizontal crossbar with

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

159

a curved, upward barb, what reads as an enduring aesthetic riddle likely derived through successive revisions to hand-drawn, diagrammatic figural templates.74 In the case of Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Boxer (1913) (Figure 3.13), the figure’s schematic face employs curvilinear lines intersecting at a right angle to produce an upward barbed shape, which closely resembles the one found in Unique Forms. Pointing outward and upward, these lines defy the closed, hermetic contour and perhaps allude to indefinite sensory openings onto the world. The enigmatic application of his same head-house motif represents an apotheosis of his other formal strategies—the lack of literalness, the abolition of profiles, the far-near confusion, and the figural-architectural substitutions. While not as disconcerting as Boccioni’s earlier mother-window fusions, the straight, architectural lines in the curved cranial region of Unique Forms achieve a particular goal spelled out

Figure 3.13  Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Boxer, 1913. Museo Nacional ThyssenBornemisza, Madrid.

160

Futurist Conditions

in his 1912 manifesto: to fuse a person or object with its environment. At the end of 1912 and early 1913, his intentionally unrecognizable figures were the framework on which he asserted the new patterns and altered rhythms associated with those people who lived in such places: city-dwellers.75 When envisioning a bodily medium to play in and across the cityscape, Boccioni defined the qualities of a mode of subjectivity that neither necessitates mechanical means nor requires technological explanation: no machinery resides within its formal and conceptual structure, except in and through its wider analogy to the built landscape.76 Rather, he rendered psychophysical vitality according to this architectural fusion—as anonymous bodies-in-motion. If a key premise underlying this interpretation is that Boccioni developed unexpected formal and conceptual solutions to the interconnected issues of representing modern perception and modeling action, his radical figuralarchitectural fusions arrived only as the result of painstaking effort. In correspondence from December 1912 sent to his closest friend and fellow futurist Gino Severini in Paris, Boccioni noted some of the challenges of sculpting in plaster: Today I worked for six hours straight on that sculpture and I don’t understand the result. Planes upon planes, sections of muscles, of a face, and then what? What about the total effect? Do my creations have a life of their own? Where am I ending up? Can I expect enthusiasm and comprehension from others when I, myself, wonder what emotions spring from what I do? Enough. I can always find a pistol, yet I am very calm.77

During this period of artistic experimentation, creative ambition was indistinguishable to him from incomprehension, while his resulting sense of despair could be framed (jokingly, one assumes) as a reference to suicide. Another letter to Severini likewise conflated his sculptural work with hardship: “Sculpture is a real struggle for me! I am working, working, working, and don’t know what I’m accomplishing. . . . Form upon form . . . confusion.”78 Overworked and frustrated, Boccioni soon set off for Rome with Marinetti—before Christmas 1912, returning to Milan after the new year and, again, from mid-February to late March 1913, when the activities among the futurists reached a fevered pitch.79 In the summer of 1913, Boccioni’s plaster figures were made public in Paris, accompanied by the works on paper of the same subject matter and by the sculpted busts of his mother merged with buildings. Fortunately for Boccioni, several friends and critics were sympathetic to his compositional aim to integrate architecture into human figures. In an effusive review of this exhibit, Severini observed that Boccioni “first introduced into sculptural works the architectural

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

161

elements of the sculptural milieu where the subject lives.”80 To Severini, this formal maneuver related to and reaffirmed urban conditions, and it supported his claim that Boccioni was “the first sculptor who finally finds a style corresponding to our modern sensibility.”81 Severini was also the first reviewer to equate the strides of the sculpted bodies with artistic achievement when stating: “in the pure and synthetic expression of a walking man’s movement, Boccioni arrives at style.”82 For the art critic Polidoro Benveduti, the bodily volumes with architectonic lines exemplified by this sculptural practice confirmed “the resurrection and the liveliness of the Italian genius.”83 According to this reviewer, Boccioni accomplished nothing less than being the first artist in the wake of Michelangelo to reassert national genius and vitality in sculpture. Later, describing these same sculptural works in a book published in 1914, art historian Roberto Longhi keenly observed that the mobile and immobile elements have been carefully combined to compose the “body and architecture of the body unified.”84 In Longhi’s informed estimation, the bodies and buildings do not form an unfamiliar dichotomy of oppositional elements, but rather they comprised a single, unified concept—a body-building—whose mode of speculative compositing introduces the space of a modern city into a revised template for the generalized subject. While some people appreciated the mobile bodies fused with immobile architecture, other viewers were completely perplexed. The Italian composer and musician Ferruccio Busoni, who collected Boccioni’s paintings both before and after this show, wrote to his wife from Paris in June 1913, remarking on these curious architectonic figures: “There is a lot of study, but the result is ugly and incomprehensible, especially if the man in place of the head carries a toy-house, for reasons that Boccioni explained to me with a great display of theories.”85 For him, the house-head fusion—most likely referring to the lost work Muscles in Speed—exemplified a failed aesthetic experiment based on abstruse theories. In a photograph of that sculpture installed at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, the house made for a prominent, if also unexpected, feature of its uppermost section (Figure 3.14). Similarly, the influential Paris-based art critic Guillaume Apollinaire used his popular column for the newspaper L’Intransigeant to announce dismissively: “[Boccioni’s] effort to restore to architecture all the importance that is its due must also be considered almost totally lost.”86 Neither Apollinaire nor Busoni felt these static, architectural elements had been successfully integrated with the moving figures, so Boccioni’s body-buildings— however conceptually rich—proved to them to be visually underwhelming. Soon after the Paris opening of his sculpture show in June 1913, Boccioni sent a letter to his friend Vico Baer, enthusiastically detailing a recent conversation he

162

Futurist Conditions

Figure 3.14  Italian futurist installation at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915, with Umberto Boccioni’s Muscles in Speed in foreground. Private collection.

had with Apollinaire.87 The illustrious poet and critic affirmed (if only in private) the importance of his sculptures and even suggested that certain sculptures should be cast in metal.88 Yet, Boccioni’s use of plaster may not have been as transitional or as incidental to his artistic solutions as Apollinaire’s casual suggestion may have presumed. One might even suspect the writer offered his advice to cast these sculptural works prior to reading the artist’s statement, which prescribes intentionally departing from “the nature and the homogeneity of the material used (marble or bronze).”89 By adopting materials intentionally devoid of associations with classical traditions, Boccioni overtly rejected bronze and marble, and he did not cast any of his plaster works during the remaining three years of his life. No direct evidence has come to light to suggest that he intended to do so, even if he no doubt relished Apollinaire’s remark in private concerning the historical significance of his works.90 The decisions to cast Boccioni’s sculptures arrived only after his death: at first, when making several copies in metal, Marinetti claimed the deceased artist intended to do so, and, years later, the futurist leader’s widow Benedetta Capa Marinetti made an additional casting in 1950 as she carefully cultivated and greatly expanded the market for Boccioni’s works, successfully placing several of his surviving sculptures (both casts and original plasters) in collections around the world.91 Now at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea at the University of São Paulo (MAC USP) in Brazil, the plaster version of Unique Forms possesses qualities absent from the variously patinaed and burnished metal replicas—all of which

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

163

were produced posthumously. Rather than presenting machinelike resolve, as many observers have supposed, the plaster surface—molded as separate parts that have been attached together—reveals a surprising degree of warmth and subtlety. Its off-white, grainy surfaces absorb and reflect light to create a soft, matte quality that reads more like undyed muslin or raw silk than a dense metallic core (Figure 3.15). As an aggregation of multiple forces playing across and through this homogeneous material (atop a metal armature), this figure registers a distinct temporality that, due to its rapid fabrication, resists the connotations of duration and durability associated with traditional stone and metal practices (Figure 3.16). While layers of beige paint have been added over the years, following several instances of material conservation due to the work’s fragility, the subtleties of its untreated plaster surfaces remain visible in the small cavities and concavities formed by its organic folds (Figure 3.17). From behind, the torso flares up from a narrow waistline into a series of adjacent overlapping segments—akin to a custom, fitted armor that protects any sensitive tissue beneath (Figure 3.18). From an overhead view, the radiating central axis reveals a schematic curvilinear figure, swathed in and interpenetrated by geometric forms, which model the figural-architectural volumes by following

Figures 3.15–18  Details of Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913. Courtesy Museu de Arte Contemporânea, University of São Paulo, Brazil.

164

Futurist Conditions

an alternating rhythm of curving and rectilinear planes. Around the front, this body-building fusion successfully sublimates those qualities that, in works depicting his mother, previously (and unintentionally) triggered grotesque connotations of a violent cleaving. Now its chest cavity opens to an interior space modified by rudimentary architectonic elements that simultaneously inhabits a body and habituates its experience to its environment. Instead of connoting an indestructible, molten presence, as with the metallic renditions, the quick-drying plaster inherited the severe structural limitations of its medium: the material he and his assistants used to model and carve this complex figural-architectural composite remains fragile—chipping easily and absorbing dirt and moisture. Although largely ignored in art historical literature, these material differences between the plaster and metal versions of this same figure offer several points of departure for analyzing Boccioni’s radical conceptualization of the anonymous moving body, as well as for examining the complicated reception and legacy of his sculptural works.

Material Afterlife In August 1916, eight days after Boccioni died from the injuries he suffered in a fall from a horse while practicing military maneuvers near Verona, Marinetti published a short, free-word eulogy (Figure 3.19) memorializing Boccioni as a fallen national hero, an honorific easily secured amid the ongoing hostilities of the First World War: UMBERTO BOCCIONI is dead dear grand strong best divine futurist genius yesterday denigrated today glorified overcome it overcome it overcome it toughness heroism speed come on young futurists everything everything painblood-life for grand Italy cleaned out magnified the most agile electric explosive no tears steel steel!92

Moving from denigration to glory, Boccioni overcame challenges in his life and work, both of which came to symbolize the patriotic qualities of ambition, strength, agility, and speed, according to Marinetti. This elliptical, nearly punctuation-free text concluded with an evocation of material strength in order to urge emotional resilience in the face of tragedy: “no tears steel steel!” By imitating the artist’s heroic “toughness,” he implies that the artist’s family, the surviving futurists, and the wider public could learn how to respond to this heartbreaking event and to a decidedly uncertain future. After Boccioni’s sudden death, Marinetti

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

165

Figure 3.19  Front page of L'Italia futurista, August 25, 1916. Kunsthistoriches Institut, Florence.

166

Futurist Conditions

assumed responsibility for the artist’s estate, which entailed organizing shows, selling artworks, and sending money to his family, but also included authorizing the first metal casting of Unique Forms in or before 1933. Over the years, seven metallic casts have been fabricated using molds from the plaster original, with an additional edition of ten unauthorized copies made in bronze from one of those casts.93 Literally and figuratively, Marinetti recast Boccioni for the interwar era—with the subsequent metal versions of Unique Forms generating a range of connotations not fully available to the plaster version. Apart from their obvious similarities, the plaster and bronze versions of Unique Forms remain materially and conceptually distinct.94 For all its visual bravado, the plaster sculpture requires extreme care, while the bronzes are able to resist, though not indefinitely, many of the most immediate physical effects of damage and degradation. (Figure 3.20). When Boccioni’s warm, porous surfaces were translated into metal—that is, remade as metallic, militarized forms—some of the original qualities were redirected or eliminated altogether

Figure 3.20  Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913. Museu de Arte Contemporânea, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

167

(Figure 3.21). For instance, the material stability of the metalized forms— including their density and weight—contrasts noticeably with the material intimacy and fragility of the manually finished plaster, whose delicate qualities reveal a range of textures (untranslatable into metal) and invite the viewer to linger over the fluidity of motion implied. Even though some of the resilient metal versions are not as highly reflective as others, all of them convey the qualities of material rigidity and solidity that suggest the distinctly psychological effects of decisiveness and determination. The bronze versions were considered to be sufficiently different from the plaster that, when one of the metal casts was offered in 1948 to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the museum director Alfred Barr Jr. responded that the acquisition committee had expressed its concern that it was “not touched by his [the artist’s] hand.”95 Apart from any other issues contributing to the museum’s decision (such as its pricing relative to other works), the material differences between plaster and bronze were considered significant. Simply put, Boccioni’s body-building motif reads differently in metal

Figure 3.21  Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 (cast in c. 1933). De Agostini Picture Library / G. Cigolini / Bridgeman.

168

Futurist Conditions

than in plaster, and what was suppressed or lost by remaking them in metal may be recovered, at least in part, by reevaluating the plaster version alongside its poured metal replicas. As this material and formal comparison continues, it is notable that the artwork’s complicated material history resonates as well with the physical and psychic qualities of the modern subject-in-motion, which came to be closely associated with collective identity, especially (but not exclusively) with Italian nationalism. As early as May 1914, the Italian critic Ugo Tommei published a lengthy positive review of Boccioni’s sculpture show (which had traveled to Rome and Florence after its Paris debut), in which the critic made a spirited case for Italian nationalism and renewal.96 In spite of their modest scale, the fulllength sculptural works exceeded all previous national, religious, and heroic efforts, according to this writer, an assessment on par with Benveduti’s idea of the resurrection of Italian genius.97 Among his vivid descriptions of Boccioni’s show, Tommei compared seeing the works to standing mesmerized in front of a waterfall, and he referred poetically to Unique Forms as “a hint, a shiver, the most agile continuity, an unwinding vortex of muscles, an untying—as a solidification of the atmospheric wake that leaves a material form in flight.”98 Alongside its inferences of swift, hypnotic motion, this aggressive, forward-leaning attitude was applauded for instilling in its viewers an energetic sense of psychophysical activity consistent with a muscular display of patriotism that would later find a more literal collective equivalent in massive public demonstrations in June 1914 and again in May 1915.99 In the final paragraphs of his review, Tommei struck an exceptionally strident tone when observing that, while Boccioni achieved a measure of success outside of Italy, he nonetheless decided to stay and fight for his ideas, and that, despite all of the critical abuse received, “young Italy is with them [the futurists].” Finally, as if rallying a crowd of rebellious youths, he made this dramatic appeal (quoted at length to preserve its breathless cadence): There is a whole generation that deafly fights for them [the futurists]. In the school, in homes, in institutions: good and burning eyes that you meet when mostly you think you are one against all, strong and loving arms support you when you think you are succumbing to the enemy. Meanwhile, here there is a futuristic feeling today; a desire for light and speed, a pledge to make, to create, to overcome ourselves. Believed to be a release-valve of skeptical and inconsolable men, futurism is, instead, the new faith, the new hope of faith in oneself and in the world. The art of Umberto Boccioni, I repeat, is an incitement, a lesson. It is not about stopping the fugitive impression on the canvas or in plaster, [as with] the chaotic and many-souled fragment that arises over the brush or that

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

169

supports it [the impression] in an instant, but that lives only for an instant. It [the impression] appeals, instead, to a new order and to new laws to ensure it.100

Symbolizing futurism at large, Boccioni’s sculptures demonstrated vitality and faith, and they implied “new laws” and “a new order.” But, rather than discussing these futurist works in the context of modern art or in relation to their rejection of long-standing cultural traditions, Tommei described a nation divided into “enemy” camps, and concluded ominously: “But at any rate, I recognize that this fever of will exists, and it bears marvelous fruits.”101 For Tommei, the bold plasticity of Boccioni’s full-length sculptures enacted a rejuvenated political and moral attitude that rebellious youths could emulate. By following their demonstrative designs, he noted, any lingering doubts about modern society could be channeled into the strength of patriotic conviction, and any remaining uncertainty could be forged into a provisional certainty—a fever bearing the fruit of collective agency. If this call to strengthen Italy reads as both extreme and all-too-common for the period, it articulated a vision of social change that was shared by many of the futurists, who employed similarly hyperbolic language to describe artistic struggles as “fights” and public appearances and private quarrels as “battles.”102 Pushing this pugilistic self-regard further, however, Tommei enlisted Boccioni’s plaster figures into a rehearsal of a more vitriolic mode of Italian nationalism. Having recently published a book, while attending closely to his burgeoning career, Boccioni did not mention Tommei’s review in his letters or other writings, but one contemporaneous observer who did was obviously troubled. In a postcard from May 1914 advising the futurist painter Carlo Carrà to leave futurism altogether, the cubist painter Sergie Jastrebzoff claimed the article by “poor Tomei” [sic] made him want to vomit103 (Figure 3.22). At this fractious moment for Italian

Figure 3.22  Postcard from Sergei Jastrebzoff to Carlo Carrà, postmarked May 7, 1914. Centro Internazionale Studi sul futurismo, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Rovereto and Trento (CAR.I.74.1). Photographed by author.

170

Futurist Conditions

politics—culminating the following month (in June 1914) with a national strike, organized by revolutionary socialists and joined by workers throughout Italy— many futurists and their acolytes adopted increasingly polemical views in their public activities and in their artistic practices, and Boccioni’s sculptures already anchored various instantiations of patriotic zeal.104 Fifteen years after Boccioni’s death, Italian futurist Thayaht (born Ernesto Michahelles) presented a speech in 1934 that strongly evoked the memory of the artist’s life and work.105 The deceased futurist expressed a prophetic vision of Italian modernity, one “suited perfectly to express and synthesize the enormous effort of transformation and overcoming that Fascism imposes on the Country.”106 As a patron saint for modern industry, according to Thayaht, Boccioni was clearly present in spirit at a large national exhibition of agricultural and industrial machinery in Florence.107 As if broadly surveying the exposition, the speaker then asked rhetorically, “Is this not, perhaps, what Boccioni had dreamed of?”108 Forming a retrospective analysis of Boccioni’s ideas and works, this presentation noted that Boccioni’s vision of societal renewal largely hinged on his sculptural legacy.109 If Boccioni’s artistic ideas originally announced Italy’s ambition on the international stage, the speaker conjectured, they continued to lend support to the present-day circumstances of national expansion and industry—such as through reclaiming agricultural lands and increasing colonial trade, as well as “in the mapping and reshaping all kinds of the most disparate elements, to create new expressive, incredible unities never before seen.”110 For Thayaht, Boccioni’s desire to remake material reality logically extended to Italy’s expanded industrial output, and even justified its colonial policies in Africa.111 Akin to Marinetti’s recasting of the deceased futurist as a national hero, Thayaht used the memory of Boccioni and his sculpted figures to condone an unbounded form of nationalism, and this fascist-era reinterpretation of the roaming male subject necessarily suppressed some of the qualities of the Unique Forms plaster. Complicating efforts to assess the social and political valences of these materially distinct versions of Unique Forms, Boccioni expressed his own ambivalent feelings about Italian nationalism. Prior to accompanying Marinetti to Rome in December 1912, for instance, he shared this uncomfortable suspicion in a private letter to a close friend: “Italian nationalism wakes up only with the rhetoric of ancient Rome. When it comes to recognizing the efforts and courage of an Italian intellectual, nationalism is silent or murmured softly. Half conscience!”112 Also, his modernist principles grew increasingly out of step with the classicist rhetoric of the nationalist party, led by Enrico Corradini and Scipio Sighele until their decisive public split in early 1913.113 After mass patriotic

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

171

demonstrations attended by the futurists and punctuated by Italy’s late entry into the First World War, Boccioni volunteered to fight—as did many other futurists and numerous other artists on both sides of the conflict—but, amid his several deployments as an enlisted soldier, he expressed disappointment in his diary: “Anguish! Rage! Instincts of rebellion repressed for the idea of Country.”114 Likely exacerbated by the harsh living and working conditions he encountered, such as passing an uncomfortable winter of 1915–16 in the Alps, and alongside his earlier support for a strong national identity, his idealistic vision of modern Italy, within which to pursue highly individualistic artistic practices, diverged with the inhumane actualities of the war he experienced.115 If his bodies-in-motion can signify a protean Italian subject, they also chart an escape from the material contingencies that restricted actual, living bodies to their specific sociohistorical milieu, so the grim conditions of a conflict he ostensibly supported served to counteract or even contradict his vitalistic imagery of energetic bodily potentials. While it’s unclear how he might have reacted to the rise of fascism had he lived, the details of his life and work were aggressively reaffirmed following his death as symbols of nationalistic identity and military strength, and, in the case of the two versions of Unique Forms, these important historical revisions have yielded divergent connotations, which prove crucial to reevaluating Boccioni’s creative ambition. Whether intentionally or not, the posthumous bronze casts of Unique Forms altered the formal and conceptual significance of the plaster version. By subtly reaffirming material qualities consistent with an ideology of national strength, technological speed, and industrial might, the casting process relocated that sculptural image from its native habit of energetic bodily activities (analogized in plaster) into a domain of disciplinary routines redolent of institutional forms of violence. With more of an inclination toward showing menacing, unstoppable force, the striding metallic figures would buttress a range of aesthetic and historical associations that culminated in the now-dominant interpretation of this sculpture as a frighteningly mechanized figure. What strikes some scholars as being aggressive and militaristic and others as agile and athletic, the lack of individualizing features in Unique Forms signals the artist’s ambition to create an anonymous subjectivity, devoid of the traditional markers of identity and social status. Comprising a loosely defined type of anybody-in-motion, whose lack of facial legibility strongly suggests a generalized template of collective urban agency, the same sculptural image had been pushed toward more disciplined and domineering connotations by its posthumous castings. In addition to the fascistera casts in metal, which still play an important role in the work’s provenance

172

Futurist Conditions

and critical reception, acknowledgment of the exceptional fragility of the plaster object augments those other historical interpretations. By foregrounding the unpredictable, aggregated rhythms of a restless mobile subject, this fragile figure registers a different range of psychophysiological effects than the metallic renderings. Boccioni’s indeterminate figure remains open to various outcomes, symbolizing (and even self-identifying as) a terminus a quo, a point of departure without fixed itinerary or destination. In this sense, its wider psychosocial potentiality (with broad visual and tactile analogies for a modern sensibility) is not necessarily complicit with violence or physical harm—present or posthumous, real or imagined. With the possibilities for mishap and disaster directly encoded into, and enacted by, its material structure, Boccioni’s sculpture enacts an enduringly aesthetic response to the perceived encroachment by automated visual processes into the domain of artistic expressivity and bodily vitality. Unfortunately, the plaster version of Unique Forms was severely damaged in 1971, when a storage shelving-unit at MAC USP collapsed, shattering the forward-most leg entirely and injuring the rear leg and head area.116 Photographs made while assessing the damage show the resulting fragments carefully collected onto a blanket and the damaged torso of the work detached from its metal structure and propped into position against a wall (Figures 3.23–25). A major conservation effort was undertaken in São Paulo soon after, and the figure was expertly reconstructed in plaster with the aid of the bronze copy in the museum collection, after which the original was (again) painted beige to disguise any color variation due to different mixtures of plaster. Given the extensive conservation undertaken at that time, along with other documented repairs undertaken both during and after the artist’s life, the current plaster may be considered to be materially different from the sculpture Boccioni shipped to Paris in 1913—that is, a reconstructed original.117 The 1971 damage and conservation of the plaster version of Unique Forms resonate with and expand on the already complicated legacy of an object conceived and fabricated using an exceedingly fragile medium. In September 2018, an exhibition and conference on Boccioni’s sculpture at MAC USP reemphasized the historical import of this plaster version, whose exterior surfaces continued to show ample evidence of its distressed physical condition, including numerous abrasions, cracks, and gouges, as well as noticeable discoloration and percolation, and the work continues to remain extremely susceptible to its surroundings.118 This materially distressed reconstruction triggers a range of analogical meanings that read differently due to the underlying weakness and the porosity of the plaster medium. What was

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

173

Figures 3.23–25  Photographic documentation of the damage to Umberto Boccioni’s, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), December 1971, photographer unknown. Museu de Arte Contemporânea, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.

174

Futurist Conditions

a symbol of Italian renewal and vitality for Longhi, Severini, and Benveduti can accommodate a different set of associations than its better-known bronze versions. Far from showing invulnerability and unyielding psychophysical ambition, the plaster Unique Forms has rather too adeptly responded to its environmental conditions, and such transitory (and temporal) qualities of the original plaster precipitate a revised interpretation of the body-building motif.

Plastic Impulses Growing out of Marinetti’s advice that futurist writers should embrace sprawling literary analogies, the aesthetic concept of visual and plastic analogies appeared in the writings of several futurist visual artists over the course of 1913.119 In a general sense, futurist analogies for Boccioni, Severini, and Carrà meant that the physical materials used to make artworks could allude to adjacent meanings or ideas, such as when two symbols are composited to form a third meaning or when colors in futurist imagery signify smells or sounds, for example.120 In the specific case of Boccioni’s full-length sculptures, his composites of bodies and buildings were not to be taken literally or to be considered only referentially; rather, the plaster medium insinuated other phenomena and concepts, and it could manifest a set of poetic associations for depicting embodied experiences in an urban milieu.121 Before shifting away from recognizable or individually identifying traits, Boccioni initiated a mode of analogization, in which the mother-window fusions (with their confoundingly split-open heads) could not avoid entirely the literalness of its symbolic condensation. When continuing his formal and conceptual departure from conventional portraiture in sculpture, the artist had been seeking alternative strategies to combine multiple, disparate images, especially by eschewing overly legible or literal symbolism.122 Consequently, in addition to complicating or removing the facial features in various figural works, he developed a revised mode of plastic analogy (in 1913) that suppressed what had been up until that point overt references to architecture. There would be no more full housing blocks in place of heads, as semi-abstracted shapes of architectural features appeared in or around the head and then migrated into other areas of the figure (such as the chest, shoulders, and torso). As Boccioni’s desire to embody “eternal renewal of life” was recalibrated through this type of productive illegibility, the modern subject-in-motion physically manifested in and through a quick-drying plaster whose intrinsic structural limitations supplemented the formal qualities associated with its “unhinged” motion,

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

175

anticipatory temporality, and other analogical content.123 Alongside the poetic analogy of the body-building motif—the physical facts of the plaster material contributed formal and conceptual valences that diverged dramatically from those found in his other artistic media. Although showing a capacity to rapidly (though not quite instantaneously) render three-dimensional shapes, plaster poses an interpretive challenge related to how this delicate, notoriously impermanent material translated the conceptual logic of bodily motion and architectural fusion? Recent X-ray analyses of this reconstructed original have revealed slight differences among the temporally separate instances of replication in metal.124 Whatever other interpretative revisions to ensue from these specific technical analyses, its compromised materiality signifies an inconvenient, but essential, detail that should not be explained away, painted over, structurally reinforced, or replaced altogether by other materials. Its structural weakness remains a physical fact, and Unique Forms continues to enact its inherent vulnerabilities as well. The practical effects of its plastic analogization on the spectator elicit one or more types of compensation—whether as rhetorical justification, material reinforcement, ritualized destruction, and symbolic commemoration. In short, one often wishes to come to its aid. At the same time that these three-dimensional forms gesture toward vitalistic essences, the inherent flaws of the artist’s chosen material coexist with its other formal, referential, or mythologizing content. An obvious fissure opens between its materiality and conceptualization underscoring an immanent quality of impermanence, which governs a productive equivocation between the inescapably physical qualities of this structurally unstable object and the virtual qualities of its energetic reserve, implied motion, and imagined escape.125 Another conclusion to be drawn from Boccioni’s enigmatic body-building composite concerns the artist’s abiding distrust of mechanical mediums. To him, photographic mediums symbolized a reduction of living motion, which contrasted with his own artistic efforts to allude to the energetic forces of the human body.126 At one point, the artist framed his understanding of how futurist artworks differed from photographic mediums: “Our work of art . . . leaves the task of the verisimilar reproduction of objects and figures to illustrators and, above all, to photographers; it leaves it [the task] to every mechanical means of reproduction.”127 The underlying premise of irreducibility suggests that his exploration of sculptural depth and modeling exploited the medium’s capacity to demonstrate material effects quite distinct from mechanical visual mediums and to contradict the flatness and symbolic legibility of much photographic imagery. In light of his body-building motif, an irreducible fullness revolved around

176

Futurist Conditions

illegibility. Boccioni’s analogical method of compositing disparate images into a single, unified structure originally appeared in his earlier painting Simultaneous Visions (1912) (Figure 3.26), in which a woman’s face is mirrored on a building facade across a busy Milan street.128 Although this pictorial technique initially depicted a recognizable person and resembled multiple photographic exposures printed on a single surface, it was later applied to faceless, nameless figures in two and three dimensions. But, with the shift into the sculptural milieu, this compositing technique became a new avenue to assert a nonphotographic process. The added dimensionality of the figure in its environs could not be represented by photographic processes, with their flimsy illusions of habitable space. With a healthy dose of historical irony, Boccioni’s groundbreaking fusion of human and architectural elements—articulated in and through its opposition to “verisimilar reproduction” in mechanical mediums—later reemerged as a popular pictorial structure in painted and photographic portraits of the early 1930s.129 In Mario Castagneri’s Depero among the Skyscrapers (1931) (Figure 3.27), an immense built structure in New York City creates a rectilinear backdrop for the futurist artist Fortunato Depero, with its reversed, double-exposed imprint of the skyscraper cleverly mirroring his cerebral anatomy. Unlike the cryptic presence of Unique Forms, Castagneri highlights the legibility of the sitter Depero, whose

Figure 3.26  Umberto Boccioni, Simultaneous Visions, 1912, oil on canvas. Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal, Germany.

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

177

Figure 3.27  Mario Castagneri, Depero among the Skyscrapers, 1931, black-and-white photograph. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (860189).

visual persona appears to absorb and master the experiential effects of the burgeoning American metropolis. While this photograph’s analogical structure is reminiscent of Unique Forms, its pictorial significance, by contrast, accrues to a specific, recognizable individual. Repeatedly revisited during the interwar years by Castagneri and other futurists, Boccioni’s body-building composite came to function as a template for an emerging genre of Italian male portraiture.130 Even so, Boccioni’s three-dimensional nameless, faceless plaster figure cannot be so easily reduced to the qualities of flat, easily readable imagery—whether photographic, chronophotographic, or cinematic. Due to its sculptural depth and symbolic illegibility, Unique Forms configures a deeply embedded plastic analogy for a general case of the futurist body-in-motion, whose anonymous framework reserves a place within which features of the “new man” later emerged. In this analogical interpretation, Boccioni’s non-individuated subject, who traversed the expanding urban, architectural milieu, extended the prominent early futurist theme of collective imagery that included productive, agitated, commercial, and patriotic crowds. If this body-in-motion template alludes to

178

Futurist Conditions

broad social forces at play that inform diverse possible outcomes, any presumed opposition between individual and collective forms tends to obscure the dependent relationships that developed in the early twentieth century among the anonymous population, the average person, and the recognizable individual. For instance, Giovanni Papini noted that, due to numerical probability, there are likely unrecognized geniuses who lived in cities among the multitudes.131 A similar assumption motivated futurist poet Luciano Folgore to consider plot summaries on book jackets to be an uncredited source of literary creativity, and he tracked down one such author who served the public in this way, but otherwise eschewed publicity.132 As one among innumerable, non-individuated bodies— that is as a synecdoche for an increasingly mass society—the unknown or average person carried populist connotations in futurist art and literature during the First World War. In what suggests an unfortunate, but perhaps unavoidable symptom of the inscrutable populace’s potentiality, a strong correlation between illegible crowd and legible leader appeared in Giovanni Papini’s hauntingly prescient text “The Unknown Man” from 1918. Describing how the general public distinguishes among recognizable and unrecognizable individuals, Papini noted: “If they [worshippers] do not know the name and the features of the man who has achieved, they cannot fix toward him the current of their affection or their enthusiasm.”133 For Papini, the symbol or image of the leader (i.e., the man with a face and a name) absorbed and redirected the sentiments of a people. The reciprocity that Papini proposed among an illegible population, an unknown figure, and a legible leader was succinctly, if also inadvertently, paraphrased by another writer in 1923: “Benito Mussolini is not a man: he is the man. He is the one the Nation has been waiting for.”134 As the apotheosis of inchoate collective desires, the identifiable individual supplanted its indefinite designation and emerged to fulfill a national promise of collective identification— for which the iconic visage was simply affixed atop a blurred or faceless mass subject. The painting Dynamic Portrait of Il Duce (c. 1934) (Figure 3.28) by futurist artist Tato (born Guglielmo Sansoni) positions an enlarged portrait of Mussolini atop a parade of nameless followers, who carry both political banners and a cluster of architecturally rendered, portable fasces (ancient symbols used to refer to the modern Italian state). This variation on the core body-building structure of the modern urban subject combines architectonic structures and innumerable, anonymous parts with the leader’s visage to comprise a unified individual and collective identity. While the sociopolitical valences of this collective mode of figuration converged on the nebulous boundaries between illegibility and recognizability, Boccioni’s bodily template configured an

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

179

Figure 3.28  Tato, Dynamic Portrait of Il Duce, c. 1934, oil on canvas. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (920092).

aggressive mode of illegibility that enacts a variation of the modernist ideology of incognito, in which an unrecognizable identity fits comfortably with its chaotic, crowded environment.135 Did Boccioni’s body-building create a placeholder for a mythic mode of collectivity that anticipated the emergence of the identifiable male leader in the decade that followed? Or, did this composite assert a mode of illegibility that resisted such direct connections to nationalist attitudes and the idealized male bodies of the fascist state? By intentionally sidestepping symbolic legibility, the insistent anonymity of Unique Forms structures a counterargument to the recurring interpretation that this work presaged a distinctly fascist subjectivity. In one sense, Boccioni’s Unique Forms captures an escapist tendency that eschews specific material outcomes. In another sense, the psychophysical effusiveness of this sculpture demonstrates a myriad of domineering, masculine traits that were later adopted by Mussolini as part of his kinetic model of sociopolitical movement and mass mobilization. Just as its formal and conceptual structure insinuates general qualities of artistic renewal and national regeneration, its ensemble of anonymous forms depicted

180

Futurist Conditions

how to accommodate and adapt to unfamiliar psychosocial rhythms. According to its complex dualities, Boccioni’s template for collective identification manifests an open-ended, analogical framework that informed a wide range of early twentieth-century social types—athlete, performer, political activist, daredevil, average guy, soldier, and authoritarian. By suggesting a range of athletic, demonstrative, and violent behaviors, the body-building motif functions as a kind of blank slate, a naked man, a three-dimensional screen onto which artists and spectators alike have projected diverse psychosocial, economic, and political associations. At the same time that the illegibility of Boccioni’s figure cannot be entirely comprehensible as an embryonic symbol of sociopolitical and economic dominance, its visual and conceptual structure nonetheless imagines a restless collective identity, whose anticipatory motion rushes to catch up with its ostensibly more fully articulated historical visage. Before the First World War, Boccioni’s semiabstract body-building framework signaled a new mode of mass collectivity, but also mirrored the artist’s suspicion toward mechanized mediums, which increased over the course of 1913, just as Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s writings and the Bragaglia brothers’ visual works were more widely circulated.136 Unlike those “lifeless” images that to him represented an intolerable reduction of life and living systems due to fragmentary views provided by an inhuman apparatus, Boccioni invented an adaptable, corporeal framework calibrated to supplement or counteract a sociohistorical perceptual shift associated with mechanized visuality.137 Instead of composing a visual analogy for cinema or other mechanical media, as some scholars have claimed, his radical figural fusion in Unique Forms was a rejection of cinematic and photographic principles (as he understood them): his three-dimensional medium does not record “visual accidents” so much as it captures a unified, multidimensional space that photographic mediums cannot reproduce.138 Due to its symbolic illegibility, the figural-architectural structure rejected specific verisimilar identifications, mechanically reproduced, in order to address the challenge of imagining the general case of a futurist body-inmotion, who signifies a modern, revitalized Italian subject. In its current, materially distressed condition, Unique Forms composes a nonphotographic, plastic analogy that presupposes decay, impermanence, and human finitude and that departs significantly from the (analogical) qualities of its metallic casts. More than a century after its initial appearance Boccioni’s full-length sculpture continues to enact an unusual set of formal and conceptual solutions that have remained surprisingly effective at capturing the qualities of mass agency—in whichever mediums it has been or may be rendered.139

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

181

Notes 1 See Introduction for an explanation of a central premise in this book: to make invisible forces visible. Following from Marey’s widely circulated time-motion studies, the Italian futurists adopted nonnaturalistic compositional strategies for artistic purposes removed from nineteenth-century physiological and psychphysiological research and scientific photography. 2 Umberto Boccioni, letter to Giuseppe Sprovieri, September 4, 1913; see Boccioni, Lettere futuriste, ed. Federica Rovati (Egon and Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, 2009), 87–8 and 268–72. 3 Polidoro Benveduti, “La scultura futurista,” Il tirso: Cronache d’arte 10, no. 24 (December 28, 1913): 2. 4 In 2002, the iconic outline of Unique Forms was reintroduced as a symbol of Italian artistic achievement on the 20-cent euro coin, imprinted with low-relief silhouette of this sculpture using a metal alloy. 5 Among various examples, art historian Christine Poggi describes Unique Forms as “the becoming-machine of the male subject, in what might retrospectively be called a Futurist cyborg.” Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 170–2. Also see Marianne Martin, Futurist Art and Theory, 1909–1915 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 172; and Giovanni Lista, Le futurisme: Création et avantgarde (Paris: Éditions de l’Amateur, 2001), 161. 6 Jeffrey Schnapp, “Forwarding Address,” Stanford Italian Review 8, nos. 1–2 (1990; special issue: “Fascism and Culture,” eds. Jeffrey Schnapp and Barbara Spackman): 60 and 70. For his broader summary on machinelike futurist bodies, see ibid., 66. 7 Ibid., 57. 8 An exception to this machinic interpretation is Maria Elena Versari’s “Recasting the Past: On the Posthumous Fortune of Futurist Sculpture,” Sculpture Journal 23, no. 3 (2014): 355. Versari mentions Boccioni’s emphasis on bodily forms in his paintings in her discussion of the posthumous casting of his sculptures (not only Unique Forms), intimating that his figural plaster sculptures were not originally metallic or mechanical. 9 Massimo D’Azeglio, I miei ricordi, Vol. 2 (Florence: G. Barbèra, 1867), 31; my translation. The same sentence appears in his Consigli al popolo italiano (Florence: G. Barbèra, 1869), 67. Other scholars have identified an important variant of this same sentiment in D’Azeglio’s description of the project of “making Italians” to inhabit the recently unified nation of Italy; for example, see Suzanne StewartSteinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). For discussion of the instances of the phrase

182

Futurist Conditions

“making Italians” in D’Azeglio’s writings, see Stephanie Malia Hom, “On the Origins of Making Italy: Massimo D’Azeglio and ‘Fatta l’Italia, bisogna fare gli Italiani,’” Italian Culture 31, no. 1 (March 2013): 1–16. 10 See Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect, 1–20. 11 “Physical culture” is a period term for what is now referred to as physical education, exercise, and, more literally, bodybuilding. For instance, see E. B. Houghton, Physical Culture: First Book of Exercises in Drill, Calisthenics, and Gymnastics (Toronto: Warwick, 1891). 12 In “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” F. T. Marinetti simultaneously rallied artists and the general public. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909); reprinted in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (Boston: MFA Publications, 2001), 19–24. The futurist painters appealed to the power of the multitude in early 1910. Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini, “Manifesto of the Futurist Painters,” 1910; reprinted in ibid., 24–7. 13 See Giovanni Papini’s book Maschilità (Florence: Libreria della Voce, 1915), and George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 107–32. 14 Giovanni Papini, “Il discorso di Roma,” Lacerba 1, no. 5 (March 1, 1913); republished in Maria Drudi Gambillo and Teresa Fiori, eds., Archivi del futurismo, Vol. 1 (Rome: De Luca Editore, 1958), 141; my translation. 15 Ibid, 141. 16 Papini’s dichotomy between the individual and the crowd follows the suggestions by Italian criminologist Scipio Sighele that individual artworks can be considered collective achievements; see Scipio Sighele, L’intelligenza della folla, second edition (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1911), 39. 17 For Boccioni, the qualities of anonymity appeared in his manifestos and other writings as an aspect of modern life and eventually touched his artistic efforts more directly. Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism), trans. Richard Shane Agin and Maria Elena Versari (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2016), 66. In addition to a complete translation into English of Boccioni’s book Pittura scultura futuriste (dinamismo plastico) (Milan: Ed. Futuriste di “Poesia,” 1914), this volume offers a substantive introduction by Maria Elena Versari, along with several other translations of texts authored by Boccioni. 18 On Boccioni’s descriptions of bodily motion as expressions of energetic potential, see Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture, 116, 117, and 156. 19 F. T. Marinetti, Mafarka the Futurist: An African Novel, trans. Carol Diethe and Steve Cox (Middlesex, UK: Middlesex University Press, 1998). 20 F. T. Marinetti, “Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine” 1910–15; published in translation in Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus and trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006), 86.

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

183

21 Variations on this machine-child motif were taken up with abundant irony a few years later in Marcel Duchamp’s “headlight-child” and Francis Picabia’s Girl Born without a Mother (c. 1915). 22 Geographic displacement marks a fortuitous break with bloodlines in Charles Duveyrier’s utopian poem “New City”: “No more motherhood! . . . Freed from the law of blood.” Charles Duveyrier, “New City,” published in his book Le Livre des Cent-et-un (1832). 23 Umberto Boccioni, “Scarpetta da società + orina” (Small Dress Shoe + Urine), published in Lacerba 1, no. 22 (November 15, 1913), 254–6. The original manuscript from 1913 is housed at the Getty Research Institute; Boccioni papers, 1899–1986; accession no. 880380, box 3, folder 12. 24 Boccioni’s poetic device of repeating the same term may have carried more literal connotations as well. Art historian Gino Agnese cites evidence that Boccioni may have fathered a son, named Pietro Berdnicoff, who never met his father, but whose birth was purportedly recorded in Boccioni’s diary (April 5, 1907) following his 1906 visit to Russia. Gino Agnese, Vita di Boccioni (Florence: Camunia, 1996), 120–1 note 7. 25 Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture, 100; emphasis in the original text. While the ellipsis in the citation accentuates the slippage between the first-person plurals “We modern Italians” and “We Futurists,” this section of the text similarly makes use of this same rhetorical device. 26 Art historian Marianne Martin describes “the cathartic and resuscitative aims of Futurism, which demanded not only a new world with new values, but a new man as well.” Marianne, Futurist Art and Theory, 1909–1915, 172. 27 On the visual artists applying the results of the chronophotography of French physiologist Étienne-Jule Marey and his assistant Georges Demenÿ, see note 16 in the Introduction to this volume. 28 In personal correspondence in late 1913, Boccioni described his recent works on paper in relation to his sculptures. Boccioni’s letter to Giuseppe Sprovieri, September 4, 1913, in Boccioni, Lettere futuriste, 87–8 and 268–72. For discussion of Boccioni’s works on paper in relation to his sculptures, see Laura Mattioli Rossi, ed., Boccioni: Pittore scoltore futurista (Milan: Skira, 2006), especially the texts by Laura Mattioli Rossi and Alessandro Del Puppo. 29 Deriving from a philosophical concept used by French philosopher Henri Bergson, the phrase “interpenetration of planes” appeared in Boccioni’s “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture” (April 1912); reprinted in Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, 52. In 1889, Bergson employed the term “interpenetration” to describe a continuous, indivisible duration; see Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001); originally published in French as Essai sur les données immédiates de la

184

Futurist Conditions

conscience (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1889). Unlike Bergson, Boccioni investigated the physical and material consequences of interpenetration, which led him to make various formal pronouncements about its significance, which tried to sustain the original opposition with mechanistic analysis. 30 Since Boccioni’s preface was translated into French (with different words and phrases in italics), I’ve retained the emphases from the Italian version of the same text, published a few weeks later. Boccioni, “La scultura futurista,” Lacerba 1, no. 13 (July 1, 1913): 140. For comparison, see Boccioni, preface to catalog Première Exposition de Sculpture Futuriste (Paris: Galerie La Boëtie, 1913), 5. 31 Italian critic and artist Polidoro Benveduti slightly reformulated Boccioni’s idea in his review of Boccioni’s sculpture and drawing show, which traveled from Paris to Rome in December 1913: “This means that to construct or to compose a dynamic whole it is necessary to study reality in movement or in its possibility of movement.” Polidoro Benveduti, “La scultura futurista,” 2. For Benveduti, “reality in movement” (similar to Boccioni’s living reality) does not need to be fully actualized per se, but it may have a latent dimension as well. 32 In handwritten notes, Boccioni directly transcribed passages from Bergson’s Matière et mémoire: Essai sur la relation du corps à l'esprit (Paris: F. Alcan, 1896); see Boccioni Papers, Getty Research Institute, accession no. 880380 and box 3, folder 29. For extensive analysis of Boccioni’s use of the term “continuity” relative to his interest in Bergson’s philosophy of movement, see Flavio Fergonzi, “The Question of ‘Unique Forms’: Theory and Works,” in Italian Futurism, 1909–1944; Reconstructing the Universe, ed. Vivien Greene, exhibition catalog (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2014), 127–30. An important clarification about the use of the Italian term uniche appears in Maria Elena Versari’s notes accompanying Boccioni’s Futurist Painting Sculpture, 279 note 42. On Bergson’s influence on Boccioni, see Brian Petrie, “Boccioni and Bergson,” Burlington Magazine 116, no. 852 (March 1974): 140–7; Mark Antliff, “The Fourth Dimension and Futurism: A Politicized Space,” Art Bulletin 82, no. 4 (December 2000): 720–33; and Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1993), esp. 155–68 and 178. 33 For Boccioni, movement is not only defined literally, kinetically, but is also a figurative concept equated with potential or potentiality. Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture, 89, 111, and 117. 34 Roberto Longhi, “La scultura futurista di Boccioni” (1914); reprinted in Longhi, Scritti Giovanili, 1912–1922 (Florence: Sansoni, 1961), 133–62. On “unhinged” contours of Boccioni’s sculptures, see ibid., 156–7. 35 Ibid., 155, 157, and 160. 36 Ibid., 135.

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

185

37 Boccioni’s correspondence both to and from Longhi occurred in April 1913, March 1914, and May 1914; Boccioni, Lettere futuriste, 70, 114–15, 121–2, 253–4, and 297–8. 38 On “the sculptural dynamic,” see Boccioni, letter to Giuseppe Sprovieri, September 4, 1913, in Boccioni, Lettere futuriste, 87–8 and 268–72. On “style of movement,” see Boccioni, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture” (dated April 11, 1912), in Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, 62. 39 Ibid., 63. The verb spalancare has been rendered “to split open,” though, in other contexts, it can be translated as “to throw open” or “to open wide.” 40 Boccioni, letter to Ardengo Soffici, March 24, 1913; reprinted in “Umberto Boccioni ad Ardengo Soffici: 13 lettere + 2 cartoline,” Fabio Vittucci, ed., L’uomo nero 3, nos. 4–5 (December 2006), 517. 41 According to Boccioni’s letter to an unidentified woman on June 12, 1913, his works had recently left the studio to be shipped to Paris. Boccioni, Lettere futuriste, 71–2 and 255–6. For more information on the chronology of Boccioni’s sculpture fabrication, see Mattioli Rossi, ed., Boccioni: Pittore scoltore futurista, and Luigi Sansone, “Le sculture in gesso di Umberto Boccioni: Storie e documenti inediti,” in Umberto Boccioni, La rivoluzione della scultura/Die Revolution der Skulptur, ed. Volker W. Feierabend (Milan: Silviana Editoriale, 2006), 24–58. 42 On the posthumous fortunes of the four full-length plaster figures, see Luigi Sansone, “Le sculture in gesso di Umberto Boccioni,” 24–58. 43 Giovanna Ginex and Maria Elena Versari have used photogaphic documentation of his studio to reconstruct how Boccioni and a studio assistant translated his figural ideas into plaster, including the use of plaster molds. Giovanna Ginex, “L’artista Narciso: Boccioni, Picasso e la fotografia,” L’uomo nero 1, no. 2 (2004): 79–99; Giovanna Ginex, “Boccioni e la fotografia,” in Boccioni: Pittore scoltore futurista, ed. Mattioli Rossi, 137–55; and Maria Elena Versari, “‘Impressionism Solidified’—Umberto Boccioni’s Works in Plaster,” in Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand, Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 331–50. 44 In his sculptural manifesto from 1912, he refers to needing to start from (partire) “the central nucleus” of the depicted object, in order to discover nonliteral formal principles. Boccioni, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture”; reprinted in Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture, 179. This same question of the core in sculptural representations has been a source of astute criticism relating to his formal and conceptual limitations as an artist. For instance, art historian Rosalind Krauss identifies the qualities of the sculptural core (extending from neoclassicism to Boccioni’s three-dimensional works) as a primary feature that later sculptors needed to overcome during the search for more modern solutions to specific

186

Futurist Conditions

sculptural concerns. Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 106. In a similar vein, art historian Alex Potts describes Boccioniʼs sculptures as exemplifying a mode of modeling: “For all his theoretical radicalness, his own sculpture never quite broke out of the limits of the sculptural lump.” Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 106–7. 45 After commenting on “the central nucleus” (see note 44), Boccioni mentions a desire to redefine the represented object by revealing “mysterious sympathies and affinities.” Boccioni, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture,” reprinted in Futurist Painting Sculpture, 178. In lieu of representing the literal surfaces of a body, his “plastic sensibility” elsewhere alluded to the invisible forces behind the effects of human motion. Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture, 152 and 156. 46 Maria Elena Versari describes the “unstable identity of Boccioni’s plaster works.” Versari, “Recasting the Past,” 365. Elsewhere, she highlights Boccioni’s use of plaster due to its “mutable, evolving form,” which creates a sense of “invisibleness” and “incorporeality.” Versari, “‘Impressionism Solidified’—Umberto Boccioni’s Works in Plaster,” 331–50. 47 Boccioni, preface for his exhibition catalog Première Exposition de Sculpture Futuriste, 1913; my translation. The term “form-forces” appears in other futurist texts as “force-forms.” 48 Sansone, “Le sculture in gesso di Umberto Boccioni,” 28. The interview appears in the same text; ibid., 52 and 54. 49 On Boccioni’s use of plaster molds during fabrication, see note 43. 50 On Auguste Rodin’s comment reportedly spoken to Edgar Degas, see Leo Steinberg, “Rodin,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with 20th-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 363. Art historian Laura Mattioli Rossi discusses the similarities between Boccioni’s Unique Forms and Rodin’s L’Homme qui marche (The Walking Man), in Laura Mattioli Rossi, “Dalle scultura d’ambiente alle forme uniche dalla continuità nello spazio,” in Boccioni: Pittore scoltore futurista, ed. Mattioli Rossi, 60–7. Also see Fergonzi, “The Question of ‘Unique Forms,’” 127–30. 51 The premise of Boccioni’s continuation of Rodin’s sculptural thinking about bodily motion is discussed in Fergonzi, “The Question of ‘Unique Forms,’” 127. 52 Steinberg, “Rodin,” 393. 53 In the 1860s, Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli invented and implemented a method for preserving the three-dimensional imprints made by the bodies buried beneath the volcanic ash at Pompeii (when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in August 79 AD). The Fiorelli process involved pouring wet plaster into the impressions left by deteriorated human and animal remains and then excavating those castings. Neither idealized nor realistic, the resulting shapes of eroded, distorted, partial, or

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

187

oozing bodies provide modified indexes of that historical event, and, by connoting human tragedy and contingency with rough plaster, they yielded in the field of archaeology a contemporaneous analog to Rodin’s figural distortion and material distress in the arts. Giuseppe Fiorelli, La descrizione di Pompei (Naples: Tigografia italiana, 1875). 54 When first taking up sculpting in the autumn of 1912, but after proposing to incorporate diverse or everyday materials into sculpture, Boccioni literally embedded real-world objects into the wet plaster, and he created two sculptural busts—Fusion of a Head and a Window (1912–13) and Head + House + Light (1912–13)—that combined plaster with an unusual array of foreign elements, such as imitation hair, a window casing, and a section of a metal railing. Adding nontraditional materials to those works no doubt complicated the finishing process. Since the surfaces of those late-1912 experiments necessarily remained roughly modeled, he likely came to appreciate that the plaster used on its own was more conducive to an expanded range of formal and technical manipulation, including carving and finishing. While Boccioni’s attempts to mix materials with plaster appear to have been less successful than his works with plaster in a homogeneous state, the artist returned to this same formal innovation in 1914, when using more diverse materials (though without any plaster) in his sculpture Dynamism of Horse + Houses (1914–15). See also note 105 in the Introduction to this volume. For a perspective on the differences between carving and modeling in British sculpture before the First World War, particularly in Vorticism, see Penelope Curtis, “How Direct Carving Stole the Idea of Modern British Sculpture,” in David J. Getsy, ed., Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain, c. 1880–1930 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 291–318. 55 In his 1913–14 manifesto on architecture, Boccioni calculated what he took to be a basic equation for modern life: “NECESSITY = SPEED.” Umberto Boccioni, “Futurist Architecture Manifesto,” Lacerba 2, no. 15 (August 1, 1914); reprinted in Boccioni, Altri inediti e apparati critici, ed. Zeno Birolli (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1972), 37. 56 Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture, 119. 57 Boccioni, preface to Première Exposition de Sculpture Futuriste, 6; my translation. 58 For extensive discussion of Boccioni’s painted, drawn, and sculpted figures in relation to architectural forms, particularly windows and window casings, see Mattioli Rossi, “Dalle scultura d’ambiente alle forme uniche dalla continuità nello spazio,” 17–81. 59 Boccioni, preface to Première Exposition de Sculpture Futuriste, 7. 60 Umberto Boccioni, “Futurist Architecture Manifesto”; reprinted in Boccioni, Altri inediti e apparati critici, 40. 61 Ibid., 36; emphasis in the original text.

188

Futurist Conditions

62 Ibid. 63 Boccioni, preface to Première Exposition de Sculpture Futuriste, 9. According to my translation, the text reads, “The profile is abolished [in his sculpture] as a value in and of itself, every profile contains the hint of the other (preceding and following) profiles that form the sculptural ensemble.” Also, in notes for his 1912 sculpture manifesto, he wrote and then crossed out: “It is necessary to consider the human body outside of physiognomic logic.” Boccioni, Altri inediti e apparati critici, 64. On facial expression as “the sensible index of a mental condition,” see Wilhelm Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1907), 382. 64 Mattioli Rossi, “Dalle scultura d’ambiente alle forme uniche dalla continuità nello spazio,” 27–9. Elsewhere, Mattioli Rossi chronicles the architectural dimension in his sculptural works, though noting that Unique Forms “has abandoned the heavy interference of urban architecture.” Ibid., 68; my translation. 65 Boccioni, preface to Première Exposition de Sculpture Futuriste, 10. On “splitting open,” see note 39. 66 Ibid. 67 This architectural patterning borrows features from his earlier paintings of newly constructed buildings in Milan (such as Dusk, 1909, and Factories at Porta Romana, 1909–10), which chronicled the artist’s experience of rapid urbanization and population growth along the Milan periphery. 68 Dating from c. 1913 to 1916, this poem was published in Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes: Poèmes de la paix et de la guerre; 1913–1916 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1918), 44–9. It describes the faceless man as “a man without eyes without nose and without ears” (ibid., 44) and “dark with a strawberry color on his cheeks” (ibid., 45). 69 Georges Duhamel, Civilization: 1914–1918, trans. E. S. Brooks (New York: Century, 1919), 48 and 55. 70 Boccioni, “Futurist Architecture Manifesto” (1913–14) in Boccioni, Altri inediti e apparati critici, 37–8. 71 Boccioni thought the photographic camera generates haphazard or accidental imagery, while an artist makes lasting or essential imagery. Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture, 88, 110, and 125. Notably, art historian Leo Steinberg considered material accidents to play an important role in Rodin’s artistic process. Steinberg, Other Criteria, 393 and 395. 72 On “new unity,” see Boccioni, preface to exhibition catalog Première Exposition de Sculpture Futuriste, 8. 73 Despite this formal reduction, architecture remains central to Unique Forms—as a crucial synecdoche for identifying an anonymous type of modern subjectivity. This interpretation diverges from Mattioli Rossi, “Dalle scultura d’ambiente alle forme uniche dalla continuità nello spazio,” 68.

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

189

74 This odd cruciform shape resembles a simplified version of the window casing, aligned with the anatomical region associated with sight, but it might also allude to the underlying dimensional axes of facial anatomies, a recurring feature of Boccioni’s works illustrating schematic diagrams for shaping heads. 75 The formal substitution of architectural elements for parts of a human figure mimics in certain respects the strong correlation between anonymous, urban bodies and a cluster of tenement building found in Luigi Russolo’s painting The Revolt (1911). Due to Boccioni’s scalar reversal (described previously), the parts of one or more buildings have been grafted onto a body that appears to be oversized relative to the architectural forms. 76 Given Boccioni’s anti-photographic leaning, his figures suggest a desire to revise what it means to be a modern human apart from technology (which, of course, was used to construct modern cities) and apart from any clear indications of cybernetic or prosthetic supplementation. 77 Gino Severini, The Life of a Painter: The Autobiography of Gino Severini (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 112. Also reprinted in Boccioni, Lettere futuriste, 58. 78 Severini, The Life of a Painter, 113. 79 Arriving in Rome before Christmas 1912, Marinetti and Boccioni likely attended II Congresso dell’Assoziazione nazionalista italiana (The 2nd Congress of the Italian Nationalist Association; December 20–22, 1912), according to one press account; Agnese, Vita di Boccioni, 287 note 7. Also see Boccioni’s letter from Rome on January 1, 1913; reprinted in Boccioni, Lettere futuriste, 60. 80 Gino Severini, “Le sculpture futuriste de Boccioni,” L’Action d’art (July 23, 1913), unpaginated; my translation. If the author’s second use of sculptural may have been avoided (to alleviate confusion), its inclusion poetically reframes the city (in a general sense) as an ongoing sculptural project. 81 Severini, “Le sculpture futuriste de Boccioni,” unpaginated; my translation. 82 Ibid. 83 Benveduti, “La scultura futurista,” 2. 84 Longhi, “La scultura futurista di Boccioni,” 156. 85 Ferruccio Busoni letter to his wife (dated June 23, 1913) in Maria Drudi Gambillo and Teresa Fiori, eds. Archivi del Futurismo, Vol. 2 (Rome: De Luca Editore, 1962), 275–6; my translation. 86 Guillaume Apollinaire, “First Exhibition of Futurist Sculpture by the Futurist Painter and Sculptor Boccioni,” L’Intransigeant (June 21, 1913); reprinted in Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews, 1902–1918, ed. Leroy C. Breunig and trans. Susan Suleiman (New York: Viking, 1972), 320–1. 87 Boccioni, Gli scritti editi e inediti, ed. Zeno Birolli (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971), 369; reprinted in Ester Coen, Umberto Boccioni: A Retrospective, exhibition catalog (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988), 204.

190

Futurist Conditions

88 Despite this apparently positive response, Apollinaire’s review a few weeks later gave carefully circumscribed appreciation of Boccioni’s sculptural works, whose success was said to be highly dependent on earlier innovations by Parisian artists. Apollinaire, “First Exhibition of Futurist Sculpture by the Futurist Painter and Sculptor Boccioni”; reprinted and translated in Apollinaire, Apollinaire on Art, 320–1. 89 Boccioni, preface to Première Exposition de Sculpture Futuriste, 5; my translation. Gino Severini echoed Boccioni’s dissenting attitude toward traditional materials in his short review of this same show; Severini, “Le sculpture futuriste de Boccioni,” unpaginated; my translation. 90 This point is also mentioned in Versari, “‘Impressionism Solidified’—Umberto Boccioni’s Works in Plaster,” 345. After Boccioni’s death following a military training exercise in August 1916, Apollinaire revised his published views on the importance of Boccioni for modern sculpture, penning remarks for the journal Mercure de France that were more in keeping with Boccioni’s firsthand report: “The persistent labor of Boccioni retains its importance in the history of young sculpture, which he is undoubtedly one of the innovators.” Guillaume Apollinaire, Anecdotiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 222; my translation. 91 On Benedetta’s important role in the postwar reception of Boccioni’s work, as well as in shaping his legacy, see Rosalind McKever, “Benedetta Marinetti and the Postwar Market for Umberto Boccioni Sculptures,” Getty Research Journal 9 (2017): 111–26. 92 F. T. Marinetti, “È morto UMBERTO BOCCIONI . . .,” L’Italia Futurista 1, no. 6 (August 25, 1916): 1; my translation. 93 Metal casts from the plaster include at least two made in or before 1933 by Luigi Ciampaglia at Fonderia Chiurazzi, Rome; at least two in 1950 by Fonderia Giovanni and Angelo Nicci, Rome; and, following the arrival of the work in Brazil, one in 1960 by Fundiçao Benedeto Metelo, São Paulo, and another produced in 1972 (based on the reconstructed original) for Tate Britain (now in the collection of Tate Modern) by Fundiçao Artística em Bronze Alberta Luiza Lazzeroni Benedetti, São Paulo. An unauthorized edition of eight surmoulages (plus two Hors de Commerce proofs, by one account) was made in 1972 from one of the 1950 casts by Fonderia Francesco B., Rome, for Paolo Marinotti and Galleria La Medusa. Rosalind McKever made me aware of an elusive seventh cast from the plaster original, though its date of fabrication remains unconfirmed at present. Also see McKever’s “Benedetta Marinetti and the Postwar Market for Umberto Boccioni Sculptures.” 94 On the posthumous castings of Unique Forms in the context of Italy’s 1930s machine aesthetic, see Versari’s “Recasting the Past.”

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

191

95 Alfred Barr Jr., letter to Benedetta Marinetti (dated June 19, 1948); reproduced in Boccioni, La rivoluzione della scultura/Die Revolution der Skulptur, 51. This document postdates the two posthumous bronze casts from around 1933, but it predates additional castings of the work, which are believed to render the texture of the plaster more accurately. It is worth noting that MoMA did receive one of those two initial casts of the sculpture (c. 1933) later the same year as the letter (1948). 96 Ugo Tommei, “Scultura futurista,” Lacerba 2, no. 11 (May 1, 1914): 140–1. The fulllength plaster figures symbolized, for Tommei, a bold Italian political and moral attitude, such that radical youths should imitate their rejuvenating plasticity. 97 Ibid., 140; my translation. 98 Ibid.; my translation. The final words of this quotation “in flight” refers to escape, not to flying. 99 On the relation between Boccioni’s Unique Forms and fascism, see Schnapp, “Forwarding Address,” 53–80. On the links between futurism and fascism more generally, see Claudio Fogu, The Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); and Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 100 Tommei, “Scultura futurista,” 140–1; my translation. 101 Ibid., 141; my translation. 102 Marinetti’s rhetoric was particularly violent and kinetic when describing futurist resistance to the traditionalists. See Marinetti, “The Battles of Rome,” in Critical Writings (2006), 173–4. Also, Boccioni referred to his battles and to the energy required to fight, as well as describing negative critical responses as more serious than falling on stairs. See Boccioni’s letters, dated February 1912, January 1913, and mid-June 1913; see Boccioni, Lettere futuriste, 33, 62, and 71. 103 Sergei Jastrebzoff, postcard to Carlo Carrà, postmarked in Rome on May 7, 1914. Centro Internazionale Studi sul futurismo, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto; accession no. Car.I.74.1. 104 The period of mass socialist strikes across Italy in June 1914 was called Red Week; see Mario Visani, La Settimana Rossa (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1978). After these unsuccessful general strikes, Carrà made an explicit shift toward more patriotic imagery, inaugurated by his work Free-Word Painting—Patriotic Festival (1914). See Willard Bohn, “Celebrating with Carlo Carrà: ‘Festa patriottica,’” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 57, no. 4 (1994): 670–81; Oliver Shell, “Cleansing the Nation: Italian Art, Consumerism, and World War I” (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1998), 90–5 and 132–5; William Valerio, “Boccioni’s Fist: Italian

192

Futurist Conditions

Futurism and the Construction of Fascist Modernism” (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1996), 63–73 and 85–91; and David S. Mather, “Carlo Carrà’s Conscience,” in Nothing but the Cloud Unchanged: Artists in World War I, eds. Philipp Blom and Gordon Hughes (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012), 88–95. 105 Ernesto Thayaht’s speech “Sviluppo dei Principi Boccioniani” (c. 1934) is preserved as a three-page typewritten manuscript at Centro Internazionale Studi sul futurismo, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy; accession no. Tha.III.2.2. 106 Thayaht, “Sviluppo dei Principi Boccioniani,” 1. 107 Thayaht refers (in the past tense) to the opening in Florence on May 19, 1934, of the Third National Exhibition of Agriculture (Terza Mostra dell’Agricoltura), a large exhibit that ran until June 10, 1934. 108 Ibid., 2. 109 Thayaht reprints Boccioni’s words concerning “the virginity of a new architectonic construction of masses and sculptural areas” (from the 1912 text “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture”), and Thayaht later states: “The intelligent observer can acknowledge without a shadow of a doubt how precise was the prophecy of the great Boccioni when he declared that there could be no renewal except through the sculpture of the environment.” Ibid., 1. 110 Ibid., 2. 111 Ibid. Thayaht’s phrase of “the development of colonial trade” reflects on earlier and ongoing Italian occupation of Eritrea and Somalia, but also it anticipates a time, in the near future, when Italy undertakes and succeeds at colonizing Ethiopia and forming Italian East Africa. 112 Boccioni, letter to Vico Baer, dated November 9, 1912; reprinted in Boccioni, Lettere futuriste, 56. 113 Berghaus sees Boccioni’s prewar involvement in nationalism as not very consequential, in light of “the patriotic and nationalist sentiments which were also wide-spread in the anarcho-syndicalist movement.” Günther Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909– 1944 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996), 60. On the split within the Italian Nationalist Party, see John Thayer, Italy and the Great War: Politics and Culture, 1870–1915 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 224–5. 114 Umberto Boccioni, Diari, ed. Gabriella Di Milia (Milan: Abscondita, 2003), 130. 115 On Carlo Carrà’s unfortunate wartime experience, see Shell, “Cleansing the Nation,” 90–5 and 132–5; and Mather, “Carlo Carrà’s Conscience,” 88–95. 116 Based on photographs and condition reports in the archive of Museu de Arte Contemporânea, University of São Paulo, Brazil; accessed by the author March

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

193

2010 and September 2018. Also see Zeno Birolli and Marina Pugliese, “I gessi di Boccioni e le successive traduzioni in bronzo,” in Il futurismo nelle avanguardie: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Milano, ed. Walter Padullà (Rome: Ponte Sisto, 2010), 417–39. 117 In 1986 the sculpture was loaned to a large futurist exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, after which it was reported to have suffered additional damage during its return voyage to Brazil. See letter dated November 20, 1986, from museum director Aracy Amaral to Swedish curator Pontus Hulten; in the archive of the Museu de Arte Contemporânea, University of São Paulo, Brazil. Material analysis of this work has revealed evidence of various material interventions over the lifetime of the artwork; see note 124 in this chapter. 118 The exhibition “Boccioni: Continuidade no Espaço” (Boccioni: Continuity in Space), curated by Ana Gonçalves Magalhães and Rosalind McKever, documented the material history of Boccioni’s Unique Forms ran from September 2018 to July 2019 at Museu de Arte Contemporânea, University of São Paulo, Brazil. In association with this exhibition, the conference “O dilema de Boccioni—Em busca de sua obra escultórica” (Boccioni’s Dilemma—In Search of His Sculptural Work) was held at MAC USP in São Paulo September 27–28, 2018, and it covered many aspects of the material history and significance of Boccioni’s sculpture Unique Forms, as well as research on his life, writings, and other sculptural works. 119 F. T. Marinetti, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” (dated May 1912; revised August 1912); reprinted in translation in Critical Writings (2006), 107–19. Marinetti writes: “Analogy is nothing less than the deep love that connects objects that are distant in kind, seemingly different and hostile. . . . The more wide-ranging relations the images contain, the longer they retain their power to amaze” (ibid., 108–9). 120 On visual analogies in futurist Gino Severini’s texts and images, see David S. Mather, “Analogies,” in Caroline Jones, David Mather, and Rebecca Uchill, ed., Experience: Culture, Cognition, and the Common Sense (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, in conjunction with Center for Art, Science, and Technology), 57–71. Carrà described an expansive concept of analogies in his manifestos “Plastic Planes as Spherical Expansions in Space” (March 1913) and “Painting of Sounds, Noises, and Smells” (August 1913); both of which appear in translation in Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, 91–2 and 111–15, respectively. 121 While the body-building motif was Boccioni’s artistic solution, the underlying analogy between inner and outer expressions was conceptually prefigured in Henri Bergson’s text Time and Free Will. When distinguishing between the anticipation of material events and mental states, Bergson noted: “The qualities of things are thus set up as actual states, somewhat analogous to those of our own self; the material universe is credited with a vague personality which is diffused through space and

194

Futurist Conditions

which, although not exactly endowed with a conscious will, is led on from one state to another by an inner impulse, a kind of effort” (ibid., 213; emphasis in original text). 122 According to Maria Elena Versari, the disjunction between Boccioni’s creative ambition and the plaster’s material limitations led to an “embarrassing paradox,” in which vitalist ideas were expressed in and through material deficiency. Versari, “‘Impressionism Solidified’–Umberto Boccioni’s Works in Plaster,” 341 (“paradox”) and 339–41. Versari emphasizes an apparent incapacity to accurately refer to those (living) phenomena or their vitalist interpretations. Elsewhere, she discusses Boccioni’s use of the terms “plastic” and “plasticity” to signify a synthesis of three-dimensional reality and pure painting. Maria Elena Versari, introduction to Umberto Boccioni’s Futurist Painting Sculpture, 48. 123 As Boccioni argued, “[I]n this extremely modern sensibility, which strives constantly for the future, we find the superhuman strength to keep reproducing within ourselves the eternal renewal of life to the utmost!” Ibid., 66. 124 Spectroscopic data collected by Museu de Arte Contemporânea, University of São Paulo and presented in 2018 has shown that the angles of the legs relative to the torso are slightly different in the 1972 cast version (now at Tate Modern) than in the earlier casts from c. 1933, 1950, and 1960. 125 Boccioni described futurist artworks as aiming to capturing “the violent desire to escape and lose ourselves in space.” Ibid., 119. 126 Through the “plastic sensibility” (ibid., 152) Boccioni alluded to invisible forces culminating in human motion: “All around us roam energies that are being observed and studied; from our bodies emanate fluids of potentiality, of attraction or repulsion” (ibid., 156). 127 Ibid., 71. Unlike mechanical media of visual reproduction, Boccioni claimed: “The essential reality of the object can only be expressed as the plastic outcome of the interaction between object and environment.” Ibid., 93. Among the other references to mechanized forms, see ibid., 84, 102, 105, 110, 125, 128, 133, and 139. 128 An active woman spectator interacting with those in the street may have pertained to the sexual assertiveness of the modern, urban women, later humorously caricatured in Boccioni’s short theatrical sketch “The Body Rises” (c. 1914–15) performed as part of a futurist variety show. Originally published alongside other theatrical sketches by Boccioni in L’Italia Futurista 1, no. 6 (August 25, 1916): 4; reprinted in translation in Michael Kirby and Victoria Nes Kirby, Futurist Performance (New York: Dutton, 1971), 236–7. The theatrical sketch’s title “The Body Rises” (“Il corpo che sale” in Italian) follows the accepted English translation of his painting titled The City Rises (from La città che sale in Italian).

Boccioni’s Body-Buildings

195

129 An early variation on the body-building theme was created by Pablo Picasso in his design for a costume for the character of the American Manager in the ballet Parade (1916–17; music by Erik Satie and scenario by Jean Cocteau). Added to Cocteau’s original scene by Picasso, this outlandish caricature of an American businessman (rising to around eight-feet tall) presaged a postwar fascination with the American skyscraper, while also seeming to subtly caricature the Italian futurists themselves. 130 Other examples from the same period of Italian artists rendered composite portraits include Tato’s photographic Dynamic Portrait of Marinetti (1930), Tato’s Mechanical Portrait of Futurist Poet Remo Chiti (1930), and Quirino De Giorgio’s Self-Portrait as the Architect of the City of Raum (1932), in which he superimposes a photographic self-portrait atop his painting made for the cover of Ruggero Vasari’s play Man and Machine. Raun. Spectacle (Milan: Ed. La Lanterna, 1932). 131 Giovanni Papini, “The Unknowable Genius” (n.d.) in Papini, Maschilità (Libreria della Voce, 1915). 132 Luciano Folgore, “Ritratto di un ignoto” (unpublished five-page typescript, c. 1930s). Getty Research Institute, Special Collections, Luciano Folgore Papers, Accession #910141; box 14, folder 42. 133 Giovanni Papini, “The Unknown Man,” 1918; printed in Papini, Four and Twenty Minds, trans. Ernest Hatch Wilkins (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1922), 6. 134 Guido Podrecca, “Il fascism,” in Vittorio De Fiori and Guido Podrecca, Mussolini e il fascismo (New York: Il Carroccio, 1923); cited in Renzo De Felice and Luigi Goglia, Mussolini: Il mito (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1983), 110. Additional citation in Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Musolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 50. 135 In a well-known critique of modernist literature, Marxist philosopher and literary critic György Lukács described an ideology of incognito in certain avant-garde literary works, which represented a sense of disaffection with historical actualities and an ensuing disengagement with social and materialist concerns. György Lukács, “The Ideology of Modernism” (essay orig. published in 1958), in Marxism and Human Liberation: Essays on History, Culture and Revolution (New York: Dell, 1973), 278–307. 136 In spite of mentioning cinema among the various modern phenomena to rejoice, Boccioni repeatedly described his objections to photographic mediums. Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture, 65. For instance, he noted: “our work of art . . . leaves the task of the verisimilar reproduction of objects and figures to illustrators and, above all, to photographers; it leaves it to every mechanical means of reproduction” (ibid., 71). Among his other references in his text to mechanized forms, see note 127.

196

Futurist Conditions

137 Boccioni equated plastic value with human consciousness. Boccioni, “Futurist Architecture Manifesto,” reprinted in Boccioni, Altri inediti e apparati critici, 36. On “lifeless” images, see Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture, 93. 138 One of the rare exceptions is a photographic process developed in the midnineteenth century by the French artist François Willème, which aimed to reproduce the unified, three-dimensional space of a figure by fusing together a series of profiles into a single photosculpture. Robert Sobieszek, “Sculpture as the Sum of Its Profiles: François Willème and Photosculpture in France, 1859–68,” The Art Bulletin 62, no. 4 (December 1980): 617–30. 139 During the opening ceremony for the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, a massive motorized replica of Unique Forms entered the stage alongside Italian dancer Roberto Bolle, during a mesmerizing homage to the lively spirit of futurism, titled “From Futurism to Future.”

Conclusion Collective Conditioning

In the founding manifesto of Italian futurism, F. T. Marinetti presented a series of striking images in which people flood into the city streets with revolutionary intensity. His use of the sweeping, first-person plural “we” refers to a band of artists, writers, and musicians who express their shared interest in enacting social, political, economic, and cultural renewal at a grand scale: “We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals.”1 This speculative appeal to an ambiguously defined mass audience offered a bold assessment of pent-up collective energies, while its exuberant style, boisterous tone, and stirring cadences imitated the incendiary speech of political agitators who projected their voices across packed meeting halls.2 But not simply dreamed or imagined, the large crowds were also a tangible phenomenon—in the boulevards, at political demonstrations or riots, and at raucous futurist performances. When the futurist painters launched their visual program in early 1910, they mimicked Marinetti’s language of collectivity. After a “cry of rebellion” to confirm their “violent desire” to “rise up,” to “declare war,” and to “rebel against” cultural stagnation, they claimed, “Italy is being reborn. Its political resurgence will be followed by a cultural resurgence.”3 Alongside this combative populist premise, the authors recommended that painters employ compositional strategies that convincingly communicate collective ideals to viewers. Accordingly, the first exhibit of futurist paintings in February 1912 included diverse types of crowd imagery: Umberto Boccioni’s The City Rises (1910–11) explores a mainstream socialist commitment to socioeconomic productivity by depicting a crowded worksite; the agitated crowd in Carlo Carrà’s Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1911) portrays street violence in the name of sociopolitical radicalism; and the mosaic-like pattern of Gino Severini’s The Dance of the Pan-Pan (1911) depicts the multisensory pleasures of a late-night, leisure crowd. From 1913 onward, using the same premise of societal rejuvenation, the futurist artists embraced increasingly strident displays of Italian nationalism in the form of patriotic

198

Futurist Conditions

crowds.4 Through multiple, at times incompatible, ideological valences for presenting collectivity—whether productive, agitated, commercial, or patriotic—futurist crowd paintings may be distinguished from late nineteenthcentury crowd psychology, which often attributed only unpredictable, atavistic, and violent tendencies to mass urban populations.5 Early twentieth-century artists and intellectuals alike confronted the sociohistorical suspicion that the behaviors of crowds appeared to limit or suspend the individual will. Italian criminologist Scipio Sighele published several books portraying crowds as a criminal threat, a claim not entirely at odds with a futurist belief in their transformational power. Sighele also penned a supplemental collection of essays The Intelligence of the Crowd (1911) that portrayed mass society in a far more positive light by suggesting the general populace represents “the true protagonist of history” that needs to become more worthy of its role.6 Expanding on this concept of shared responsibility, Sighele argued that, just as artists benefited from everyone’s accumulated labors, artworks can be considered collective achievements that facilitate the moral elevation of a multitude that remains inexpressive on its own.7 Employing a starkly socialist analogy, he compared artistic talent to money that needs to remain in circulation (and not stockpiled), and then reiterated that artists, like millionaires, should return their riches to society to nurture a shared feeling of prosperity.8 Similar to Sighele’s idea that artworks manifest collective sentiments, the futurist painters claimed their works could express the latent potentiality within crowds.9 In “The Exhibitors to the Public” (1912), they described a desire to harmonize “violently revolutionary” art-making with disruptive social and political activities, so that their visual forms would be able to express, rather than repress, the forces of social conflict.10 Identifying the multiple aims of futurist crowd imagery demonstrates a salient feature of their shared desire to picture modern collectivity, which did not simply reiterate crowd theory, but rather imagined adjacent modes of mass agency.

“Plastic Problems” When reviewing that early 1912 painting exhibition, the illustrious Paris-based reviewer Gustav Kahn noted that futurist crowd imagery—with its wide range of ideological associations—figured prominently in their contribution; however, soon after this show opened, more pointed criticism was leveled against their

Conclusion

199

painting style.11 According to poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, the futurist works on display did not seriously engage with the “plastic problems” of modern painting, an allusion to the latest French cubist techniques that offered a point of such obvious comparison it did not even need to be named directly.12 Although this unvarnished response to the futurist efforts was previously mentioned when the artists had visited the French capital in October 1911, Apollinaire’s admonition assumed the force of a command directing them to investigate the formal and technical aspects of their craft more thoroughly and carefully.13 By mid-1912, most of the futurist visual artists had undertaken a dramatic shift toward cubist-inspired techniques, suggesting they likely agreed to turn their attention to “plastic problems.”14 While continuing to anchor their revised modes of visuality in actual, discernible phenomena—such as crowds, individual figures, motor vehicles, and other aspects of the bustling metropolis—the futurists gradually expanded on these symbolic references to include different qualities associated with kinetic movement. Their visual languages gradually endorsed more distended modes of referentiality to indicate less literal forms of movement that could not otherwise be depicted, for instance, when emphasizing how the perception of time and motion complicated the clarity of pictorial references. Over the course of 1912, another major technical challenge arose alongside Apollinaire’s formal criticism: photographic processes. By the middle of 1913, any hope for a cohesive identity based on a shared set of stylistic techniques dissipated due to creative differences that arose over the appropriate artistic uses of the media of mechanical reproduction. During a crucial period of experimentation (1912–13), the futurists systematically considered the effects of photographic media, which constituted, for them, a rather broad category of scientific and technological invention covering assorted devices, chemical processes, and the accumulated know-how of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century practitioners of mechanical reproduction.15 As discussed in the preceding chapters, they applied the findings of scientific photography to their own idiosyncratic visual syntaxes by using the effects of kinetic motion to allude to other invisible or immaterial forces.16 When responding to the dual challenges of Apollinaire’s “plastic problems” and photography, these artists identified various qualities associated with unfolding temporality: the Bragaglias referred to spiritual essences in blurred photographs of bodily motion; Giacomo Balla developed and applied energetic motifs across various scales and types of stimuli; and Boccioni depicted anticipation in and through his semi-abstracted bodies-in-motion. As key episodes in an historical shift toward greater visual abstraction—without fully negating referentiality—

200

Futurist Conditions

these interrelated artistic solutions sought to counter unflattering criticism concerning the referential literalness in their early works (c. 1910–12). By 1913, several futurist artists were examining the effects of visual analogization—in which pictorial representations departed from the most literal associations with kinetic and kinesthetic forces, in order to suggest more abstract, analogical content, correlated with a range of invisible or imagined phenomena. The futurists’ efforts to picture invisible forces moving in, through, and beyond the human body involved developing techniques to represent, model, or even anticipate new perceptual modalities produced in modern subjects, which directly responded to Marey’s chronophotographic techniques. In Marey’s 1886 portrait of his lab assistant Demenÿ wearing an electrical harness (Figure C.1), the test subject awaits further instruction as he submits himself to specific visual and scientific procedures through which his “natural” qualities would be translated into unfamiliar inscriptions (as evidentiary data), the results of which would later be applied by military trainers, medical professionals, and

Figure C.1  Étienne-Jules Marey, Demenÿ in Electrical Harness, 1888, black-and-white photograph. Musée Étienne-Jules Marey, Beune, France.

Conclusion

201

educators—toward achieving more directly ideological ends.17 In addition to symbolizing mechanical effects on human perception and demonstrating a nonnaturalistic method of visual transcription, Marey’s indexical techniques inaugurated an unexpected direction in the visual arts.18 Its productive illegibility became a method by which the futurists could resist classical symbolism and naturalistic renderings, while addressing the formal problem of overly literal visual references. By way of visual analogies strongly informed by photographic processes, the Bragaglias’ evanescent traces, Balla’s force fields, and Boccioni’s enigmatic figures all connoted vitalistic forces that—once set into motion—were able to migrate into adjacent discourses and domains, whether psychic, social, cultural, economic, or political.19 These visual syntaxes share a basic supposition that the invisible, energetic patterns stretching across physical scales and orders of magnitude can develop analogical connotations as well. Whether considered linear or nonlinear, real or imagined, the futurist visual languages of imagining time introduced a shift in temporal awareness from fixed sequences and linear temporalities to other qualities of motion, including a key aspect of anticipating events to come.20 This shared sense of conditional time, akin to the subjunctive mood in spoken and written languages, grew out of a set of compositional strategies that imagined unseen potentialities, virtual forces, and even broader sociohistorical processes. While each artist continued to maintain distinct intellectual, emotional, and ideological investments, this principle of conditional time corresponds with a heightened sensitivity for the expanded syntaxes of kineticism across diverse visual media.21 That is, visualizing actual and imagined temporalities enabled these futurist artists to expand their repertoire beyond crowd imagery and revolutionary rhetoric (c. 1910–11) and to synthesize updated visual languages for expressing collectivity: Boccioni composed the body-building as a proxy for an anonymous mass subject; the Bragaglias enacted dramatic scenarios evoking emerging modes of mass spectatorship (as with The Slap and The Greeting); and Balla identified specific energetic motifs to spark commercial demand and to portray mass political demonstrations. Initially one among the diverse, interrelated qualities of collective agency, patriotism emerged by mid-1914 to became the most prominent futurist artistic theme that resonated with Marinetti’s increasingly strident advocacy of Italian strength—as a country and as a race.22 After honing a distinctive style of oration at the turn of the twentieth century, Marinetti directed his alarmingly powerful voice toward endorsing a mediasavvy brand of demagogic nationalism. Although not unrelated to the same invisible forces surging through futurist bodies-in-motion and flowing into their

202

Futurist Conditions

surroundings, Marinetti’s vocalizations helped redirect the visual artists’ efforts to express collectivity toward more volatile psychosocial and political outcomes. His vision of national regeneration and purgative violence would inspire a range of actors who ushered in an era of hyperbolic, authoritarian attitudes in the political sphere, while this style of performative masculinity found ways to intervene in and to dominate the public conversations about Italian cultural identity.23 Without detailing the long-standing acquaintance between Marinetti and Benito Mussolini, as other scholars have done, the two men notoriously joined forces in an ill-fated futurist-fascist political party (1918–20), and the futurist leader’s template for domineering male bravado reemerged under the banner of direct political action, culminating in the fascists’ seizure of state power in October 1922.24 By anchoring their close personal history and deep ideological confluence in a distinctly gendered project of Italian modernization, the myths and traits of masculine domination reverberated through the sociopolitical landscape, propagating a distinctly modern (and modernist) creed that power resided as much in the production and mass dissemination of images and sounds as in more overtly coercive measures.25 Before the First World War, Marinetti’s larger-than-life personality reinvigorated the syntax of demonstrative male power, and he advocated violence as both a means and an end. Art historian Hal Foster has identified the psychic mechanisms at play in Marinetti’s literary works, which can explain how volatility and violence contributed to the development of a fully fledged fascist subjectivity.26 Becoming ever more tightly constricted, but haunted by arbitrarily explosive actions, the unstable male subject responds to psychic traumas with both aggression and paranoiac fear, which seek to subdue others and armor itself respectively.27 Oscillating between repressive and counterrepressive impulses, Marinetti’s literary and performative imagination offered a conceptual and historical precursor to the populist tactics and vindictive policies undertaken during Mussolini’s authoritarian rule.28 To the extent that futurist artworks resonated deeply with Marinetti’s domineering, disruptive agenda, they too supported a narrative of violence and militarism within sociocultural and political spheres. But, to the extent futurist visual languages explored adjacent forms of collectivity, beyond (or not limited to) violently masculinist traits, a wider spectrum of not exclusively fascistic associations developed— even when those visual structures endorsed stupefying displays of energetic discharge. Better understanding of the analogical dimension in futurist works— to visualize unseen forces animating the modern world—can elucidate how futurist denotations of kinetic and kinesthetic forces were so readily extended

Conclusion

203

into such disparate fields as political action, cinema, athletics, performing arts, health regimes, and commercial and product designs.

Mass Mediation Revisiting the paragone debate during the interwar period, the German critic Walter Benjamin reconsidered the psychosocial effects of diverse visual media, and highlighted the types of shock experienced by the viewers of avant-garde painting and early twentieth-century cinema. According to Benjamin’s “The Work of Art” essay, the moral outrage in avant-garde images migrated into the more immediate sensory shocks in popular films.29 This mechanical version of shock entailed the lessening or absence of critical distance for spectators— since the cinematic projection fused psychic and behavioral responses into a single, unified awareness “with regard to the screen.”30 In one sense, filmic shock succeeded where traditional visual mediums failed to supply a mass population with recognizable visual analogies for large-scale, historical processes.31 Viewers adapted more easily to the disruptive effects of industrial modernization as their perception was aggressively remade through cinema’s “dynamite of the tenth of a second,” which transformed society into “far-flung ruins and debris.”32 Comparing the recorded and imagined temporalities of filmic perception to “a muscle of the body,” Benjamin saw the audience’s shared reflexes without contemplation as a type of psychophysical automatism through which a nascent mode of sociopolitical criticality might emerge. Even if the mass-mediated perception of film spectators, at times, resulted in anesthetized, defensive responses, he remained convinced this mass medium carried a strong potential for social revolution.33 For Benjamin, the modification of human perception by film entailed a shift from outmoded, contemplative forms of critique and moral outrage to more automatic sociopolitical behaviors. In the concluding section of his “The Work of Art” essay, Benjamin punctuated his sociohistorical interpretation of visual media under capitalism by highlighting Marinetti’s bold assertions about the beauty of war and the “metallization of the human body.”34 After citing a memorable extract authored by the futurist leader, Benjamin admires the clarity of his writing and offers this uncharacteristically high praise: “The question it [Marinetti’s quotation] poses deserves to be taken up by dialecticians.”35 Given that war symbolized, for Marinetti, “the artistic gratification of a sense perception altered by technology,” a desire for physical annihilation (according to Benjamin) represented both the tangible result of

204

Futurist Conditions

human-machine perception and a useful measure of capitalist alienation at that historical moment.36 Amid Benjamin’s analysis of mass-mediated perception amid socioeconomic disruption, a term conspicuously missing from his conclusion is “cinema,” an ideological medium of the first order that purportedly razed and remade the known world for spectators. By emphasizing Marinetti’s prophecy of war and destruction, Benjamin avoided more directly implicating film and its popular reception into the violent and destructive effects unleashed by capital. In spite of his optimism about its mass revolutionary potential, film also would have qualified as a sociotechnical means of domination that participated in the same “aestheticizing of politics” he attributed to the futurist influences on fascist spectacle.37 Remaining absent from Benjamin’s conclusion, the collective experience of cinema—with its altered perception, cognitive disruptions, and hypnotized audience—reinforced many of the same spectacular impulses and domineering effects that animated Marinetti’s caricatural brand of futurism. With mass spectacle as an important, but repressed, concept interposing between mass audiences and identifiable individuals, Marinetti’s program of demonstrative masculinity and violence rhymed virulent nationalism with ancient rites to tap expertly into a deep-seated desire among a new generation of Italians to band together to achieve collective aims.38 In a spoken-word performance in February 1913 at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome, where Italian films regularly premiered, Marinetti described futurism as “a great mass of shining metal . . . from deep within the volcano.”39 According to him, this shiny metallic ore, purportedly dug out by hand, manifested an essential mode of futurist collaboration: Now we [futurists] are walking closely, with our arms raised, holding it in our burnt hands, up along the rough path, and we are breathing in unison, not watching to see whether any of us outstrips the others by virtue of their more powerful muscles and the strength of their tireless lungs. What does it matter if our footprints are continually being wiped out by those who come after us?40

Unlike the vehicular imagery of Marinetti’s founding manifesto, this vision of futurist collectivity paradoxically portrays a primitive hoard compelled to act by atavistic forces beyond their comprehension or control. The implied response to his rhetorical question arrives in the negative: no, it doesn’t matter that their footprints are washed away, because the group anticipates temporal passage and accepts death. Rather than seeking notoriety, he claimed (half facetiously), their only desire was to “not let the great, fiery mass . . . fall to the ground, so that the world may have greater thirst for novelty, more fires of violence, more light

Conclusion

205

of heroism, and more love of freedom!”41 Carrying the metal aloft like a sacred artifact or totem, these artists and activists formed a ceremonial procession that materialized their commitment to shared beliefs. As a weighty encumbrance analogous to their collectivity, the amorphous mass of metal demonstrates material properties—of physical resilience and malleability—that underscore shared qualities of psychosocial strength and transformative potentiality, though its faceless materiality may have also reserved a place for recognizable traits to appear. In the context of the emerging mass media in the early twentieth century, however, not all futurist art-making strategies were equally complicit in the rituals of sociopolitical, economic, and physical domination, as envisioned by Marinetti and his creative ken and later applied by Mussolini.42 If Marinetti’s demonstrative masculinity presaged aspects of fascist beliefs and behaviors—such as machinic qualities, domineering ambition, and threats of violence—adjacent psychosocial qualities of mass agency grew out of the Bragaglias’ photographic blurring, Balla’s energetic imagery, and Boccioni’s bodies-in-motion. At the same time, futurist visual language of time and motion can pose interpretive challenges for identifying the political and economic valences of their works. As a particularly acute example of this challenge, the posthumous castings of Boccioni’s Unique Forms reinforce certain qualities associated with fascism, yet its illegibility carries lingering questions about its relation to more identifiable imagery of domineering futurist and fascist leaders.43 Did this moving figure successfully resist the imprint of an individual face or profile, thereby implicitly rejecting that specific form of symbolic currency (or “face value”), or did its absence of recognizability mark a crucial hinge between futurist potentiality and fascist eventuality—that is, between a generalized belief in unforeseen outcomes and the traits attending to a specific leader’s rise to power?44 Since the sculpture’s anticipatory motion presupposes a high degree of analogization (both formally and conceptually), the vitality of the body-building composite is not entirely comprehensible as fascist or even exclusively Italian, but rather it buttresses a broader range of connotations. When interpreting Boccioni’s body-building as a template for an anonymous modern subject, spilling forth with idiosyncratic fervor, it can be instructive to consider how his technique of effacement both anticipated and resisted the imprint of a recognizable leader. Unlike Marinetti’s explosive rhetoric, violent temperament, and identifying marks, the illegibility of Unique Forms adeptly undermines the symbolic clarity in much fascist-era imagery, whether futurist-inspired or not, whereas its implied motion connotes unidentified collective activity that can assume various guises.

206

Futurist Conditions

The same aesthetic issue of symbolically legible masculinity was revisited in 1933 with an unusual fascist-era object designed by Renato Giuseppe Bertelli (Figure C.2). Initially produced in a ceramic medium and later manufactured in metal for large-scale distribution, this modestly sized, semi-abstracted representation of a human head reproduces the profile of Mussolini along the length of its vertical circumference. The periphery of the object uncomfortably usurps its center as the bearer of the significant, identifiable trace, and its distorted visage turns anxiously away from the viewer, as if obsessed with who might be approaching from behind. Its rotation around a fixed point resembles the Bragaglias’ Polyphysiognomic Portrait of Boccioni (1913), whose illegible forms inhabit the murky interstices between more legible edges. Suspended in a state of acute paranoia, Bertelli’s strange figure resists the symbolic clarity found in more classicizing portraits of the fascist leader. Approved by Mussolini for manufacture and dissemination, this complex negotiation of masculine identity—that is, as a form of legibility that surprises viewers—implies such autocratic qualities as

Figure C.2 Renato Bertelli, Continuous Profile of Il Duce, 1933, black majolica (fabricated by Giuseppe Mazzotti). Private Collection / De Agostini Picture Library / A. Dagli Orti / Bridgeman Images.

Conclusion

207

stealth, surveillance, and unpredictability. As if arriving without warning and departing without justification, such a capricious figure may, in certain respects, formally and conceptually extend the qualities of Boccioni’s Unique Forms. However, unlike that faceless body-in-motion, the legible profile of Bertelli’s object deftly stages a vigorous defense of individual identity against the perceived threat of unrecognizability (i.e., effacement as a symbolic death). Given that the vitalist forces and anticipatory structures in futurism had played a crucial role in the emergence of fascist-era ideology and imagery, illegibility permits Boccioni’s figural work to shift fluidly among the disparate visual languages of cultural and socioeconomic rejuvenation, revolutionary political action, and state-sanctioned violence. If such illegibility might have served a fascist agenda—whose opportunistic symbolism accommodated both individual and collective traits and both ancient and modern associations—the futurist bodiesin-motion also allude to collective forces that fill stadiums, cinemas, department stores, factories, and voting booths, and they reveal a capacity to participate in a range of mass activities, not exclusively antagonistic or authoritarian ones. Since the futurist visual program was originally premised on expressing social and political conflict and on resisting the media of mechanical reproduction, its complex responses to vitalist discourses helped facilitate the visualization of alternate modes of mass agency, some of which were productive or benign and some of which embraced exceedingly destructive forces. The versatility and variability of futurist visual analogies attest to a collective imagination that is not limited to a narrower range of fixed historical outcomes.

“Savage Joy” By correlating Italian futurism with the forces of political and economic domination, Benjamin had strongly implied that, by supporting the disruptive effects of modernization, the futurists were uncritically mimicking the tools of mechanical reproduction. Other early twentieth-century critics similarly described futurist artworks as creating analogs for cinematic motion (as some art historians continue to do), and this recurring interpretation typically implied (and still implies) an aesthetic deficit due to overly literal representations, a lack of vitality due to mechanical or inhuman processes, or both.45 Even as Boccioni stridently denied this characterization, his spirited defense of futurist ideas did not, however, include dissuading the futurists from advocating for and participating in intensely negative or violent outcomes, as Benjamin surmised.46

208

Futurist Conditions

Within this complicated worldview of collective renewal, Boccioni often paired exuberant activities with death and destruction. In a 1911 lecture in Rome, he framed untapped, vitalistic potentiality in terms of biological finitude: “Everything moves toward an ultimate catastrophe! We should therefore have the courage to go beyond ourselves until the moment of death.”47 Following Marinetti’s advice to seek out dangerous experiences—part of a futurist outlook extending beyond any specific riot, vehicular accident, or military engagement— futurist art-making should involve making sacrifices, according to Boccioni.48 At one point, he gleefully proclaimed a disconcerting sense of vitalistic destruction: “We [futurists] have always acted with the savage joy of destroying.”49 He believed catastrophe and negation were compatible with, or even necessitated by, creativity.50 In a Benjaminian sense, futurist artworks presented a deluge of alienating effects that might assist people preparing for radical socioeconomic and political upheavals. For this brand of destructive modernity, sacrificial violence and even death furthered the project of vitalization, and the futurist logic of modernization reframed conflict and war among the many kinds of energetic force that fueled its imagined social and cultural rejuvenation.51 When considering the futurist notion of destructive revitalization, it can be instructive to recall that, in late 1914, the philosopher Henri Bergson presupposed a close link between vitalism and death when he described the First World War as a conflict between the opposing views of mechanism and vitalism. In Bergson’s estimation, German industrial progress manifested a false promise (vigorously disputed by the French and English and, later, the Italians), which willingly sacrificed humanity’s spiritual dimension for economic growth. Although he believed the war would claim numerous young victims, it offered an historical reconciliation of those incompatible beliefs.52 Despite the grim toll, he claimed, the vitalists would triumph against the mechanists: “To the force which feeds only on its own brutality, we are opposing that which seeks outside and above itself a principle of life and renovation. . . . Have no fear, our force will slay theirs.” Such human destruction was considered the necessary result of bravely confronting a mistaken ideology. For the futurists, who volunteered to fight in the war at the service of Bergson’s promised victory, their resistance to mechanism, machines, and mechanized visual media seems tragically misplaced, if only because the era of mass mediation arrived decades earlier with the inventions of photography and cinema. By living, working, and eventually dying to counter the perceived threat to the human spirit posed by mechanization, some futurists imagined making good on another Bergsonian wager to preserve vitalistic essences: “The idea of the future, pregnant with an

Conclusion

209

infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.”53 Reminiscent of Lessing’s pregnant moment, Bergson’s ephemeral trajectories of possible futures seemed to offer valid responses to, or even defenses against, unacceptable actualities. As variations on this “infinity of possibilities” and as vitalistic responses to the perceived threats of overwhelmingly disruptive forces, the anticipatory visual structures in early futurism constructed a diverse set of artistic solutions, in order to preserve invisible human qualities and to envision virtual collectivities. The early futurist desire to integrate collective aims, kinetic forces, psychophysical adaptability, and literal destruction would achieve disturbing results in Paolo Buzzi’s satirical sketch “The Futurist Prize” (c. 1914).54 This brief theatrical scenario opens with a jury deciding who should win a prize for achieving the most futurist feat. One jury member nominates the French aviator Louis Blériot, who flew across the English Channel in 1909; another one suggests the poet who invented winged humans (meaning Marinetti); and a third jury member proposes the sculptor who made spirals in space (referring to Boccioni). Their deliberation is interrupted by the arrival of a late entrant, a man hideously disfigured by an explosion in his chemistry laboratory. Described as a human reconstructed with rubber, glass, rope, and cork, the deformed figure is immediately declared the winner as the curtain falls. In this short comedic work, the disorienting effects of modernity have been pushed to the point of absurdity, and the effects of chemical explosion underscore (and effectively caricature) the futurist desire to understand and adapt to the violent, even incomprehensible, forces endemic to industrial modernity. Here violence connotes an inherent aspect of progress that may be rewarded, if it can be survived. Highlighting artistic attempts to come to terms with the implications of societal transformation, the futurists’ interest in imagining modern bodies and minds played out as an accelerated return to the paragone debate of earlier centuries, for which the human figure became a privileged site for registering and mediating among the different invisible forces of mass agency. By drawing attention to the disruptive conditions inflicted on modern, often anonymous, bodies, the daring futurists were almost too conveniently blamed for instances of actual violence purportedly unleashed by their imagining collective forms, though certain dialecticians might not agree. Boccioni readily acknowledged the open-ended outcomes of his own artistic attempts to redefine individual and collective identities: “I’m still proud to have charted the way to an evolution in plastic sensibility whose end is impossible to

210

Futurist Conditions

determine!”55 For him and his futurist colleagues, vitalistic premises necessarily entailed preparing for an uncertain future, and the directions forward for both art and society could not be precisely anticipated. Amid this search for new paths, their material forms alluded to vitalistic human essences, which some artists perceived to be endangered by endless mechanical repetition. Futurist artistic solutions to the mechanist-vitalist confrontation would bring specific material qualities to bear on the somewhat abstract issues of symbolic legibility and lifeless repetition. When rejecting the fixity of classical symbolism, for instance, futurist images of motion contended with the inherent limitations of their chosen artistic mediums, as with the Bragaglias’ photographic paper, Balla’s short-lived clothing designs, and Boccioni’s plaster fragility. Marking an uncomfortable divergence between vitalistic conceptions and material properties, the futurists’ aim of representing immaterial essences carried the uncomfortable truth that unreproducible qualities necessitated their eventual demise. As Boccioni, in particular, reckoned with literal and analogical limits of his media of choice (in writings, works on paper, and fragile plaster works), he embraced a deeply entrenched logic of sacrifice, which suggested that collective futures—culturally, socially, economically, or politically—required confronting finite temporality (i.e., death). By resisting overly rationalistic or mechanically produced interpretations, the futurist concept of vitalistic temporalities may have originally revolved around expressing the pent-up forces of societal conflict, and later helped propel Italy toward both war and the fascist rejection of parliamentary paralysis; however, this same concept facilitated a broader sociohiostorical shift in the awareness of conflicting interests and competing desires within the populace. The symbolic violence encapsulated by many of the most productive futurist works implies that newly defined collectivities demanded new visual languages, while outdated ones were relinquished. Reflecting back on the tumultuous era of his youth, the Italian author, filmmaker, and film producer Emilio Cecchi described the futurist penchant for physical motion as part of a widespread sociocultural shift toward kinetic forms of visuality. As a self-proclaimed advocate of any medium’s attempts to capture life in motion, Cecchi noted that Boccioni’s sculpted figures (and the Bragaglias’ photographs) introduced “the corollaries and analysis of a cinematographic visuality.”56 Despite airing the same criticism that tormented the artist during his life, while elsewhere suggesting that futurist artworks were analogous to multiple photographic exposures, Cecchi makes other unexpected connections to its highly contingent relation to unfolding time: the kineticism in futurist bodies-in-motion resembles the vitalistic philosophy of Bergson, the films of

Conclusion

211

Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd (and all societies that love film), the shifting financial fortunes of various countries, and democratic ideas.57 For Cecchi, as with Benjamin before him, kinetic and mechanized imagery alerted people to the emergence of powerful, but capricious, economic and political forces. If the reception of futurist artworks has been haunted by their analogy to cinema, Cecchi’s poetic formulation articulated some of the adjacent aspects of futurist visual languages, which may not be as easy to explain by comparisons with other means or mediums. Such kinetic vitality gave formal qualities and material properties to the deeper, perhaps invisible, forces that have fed the modernist myths of sociopolitical and economic transformation. In this sense, the filmic analogy for futurist visuality might otherwise disguise a significant societal change that manifested in and through its anticipatory frame of reference— the premise of unfolding, vitalistic time supplementing overly mechanical interpretations of temporality. Rather than tracking literal and kinetic trajectories in a rationally transparent medium, their virtual, invisible forces presupposed more opaque qualities of time, in which the multiple converging or diverging possibilities alluded to illegible figures and imagined collectivities that may even seek material expressions. Contrary to interpretations that foreground an obsession with machines in early futurist visual art, a revised understanding of these complex visual and temporal structures pivots around the seeming paradox that the futurists approached cinema quite hesitantly prior to the First World War. Aside from a text by Bruno Corra, drafted prior to his joining the movement, and the few passing references to film in futurist texts before 1916, there is little evidence to suggest these artists considered this mechanized visual medium to be intrinsically futurist.58 The first film directed and authorized by a futurist, Vita futurista (directed by Arnaldo Ginna) began production the same month Boccioni died (August 1916), and it was projected publicly for the first time in December 1916.59 “The Futurist Cinema” manifesto, which was signed by multiple authors and dated less than a month after the tragedy (September 11, 1916), asserts the primacy of film over more traditional artistic mediums.60 If Boccioni had still been alive, it’s unlikely he would have endorsed a collective vision so blatantly contradicting his own, and it’s difficult to imagine him even remaining a futurist. With his death, the futurist goal of preserving unique human essences amid the increasingly automated routines of modern life was symbolically affirmed and conveniently superceded. However, in light of the dispute about the artistic uses of cinema and photography, the futurists’ interest in imagining time outside the scientific and technical parameters of mechanized imagery generated multiple

212

Futurist Conditions

paths for composing new, adaptable visual languages in static mediums. As the futurist principles and formal structures filtered more widely into the massmediated society, the qualities of sociopolitical conflict and competing ideologies of mass society—which propelled futurism into the First World War and toward authoritarianism—reemerged to fuel new myths about societal rejuvenation, rooted in adaptable collectivities that have the capacity to accommodate diverse, at times, incompatible desires. The futurist impulse to rally multicolored crowds and to envision various modes of mass agency would find particular resonance in the expanding design and leisure industries in Italy during the interwar period when the invisible forces of the mass populace were directed toward a spectrum of collective forms emerging within the competitive, commercial marketplace. As part of this far-reaching sociohistorical and economic development, the surplus forces of the nameless and faceless futurist subject-in-motion would need to be relinquished, and, with this symbolic negation of immeasurable, expressive qualities, a potential psychophysiological source for futurist critique of an abstract, free-market ideology was effectively foreclosed.

Notes 1 F. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909); reprinted in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (Boston: MFA Publications, 2001), 22. 2 For example, Marinetti’s text “The Necessity and Beauty of Violence” (1910) was originally delivered as a speech to workers’ organizations. See F. T. Marinetti, Critical Writings, ed. Günther Berghaus and trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 60–72. In his article “Our Common Enemies,” published in the anarchist journal La demolizione (March 16, 1910), Marinetti mentions forming a coalition between intellectuals and proletariat revolutionaries; reprinted and translated in Marinetti, Critical Writings, 51–2. Even though Marinetti spoke to various socialist groups, prominent Italian socialist leaders never thought that futurism was seriously engaged with their concerns. 3 Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini, “Manifesto of the Futurist Painters” (1910); reprinted in Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, 24–5. This last passage carries an unmistakable echo of Massimo D’Azeglio’s statement about reviving Italian character Massimo D’Azeglio, I miei ricordi, Vol. 2 (Florence: G. Barbèra, 1867), 31; my translation. Also see note 9 in Chapter 3 of this volume.

Conclusion

213

4 After a period of unsuccessful socialist strikes across Italy called Red Week (June 1914), the futurist visual artists made a dramatic shift toward more patriotic imagery. See Chapter 3 note 104. 5 Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi discusses how crowd theory was a countermeasure to forestall or even prevent democratic voting in Italy. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California, 1997), 5–6, 20, and 29. On the Italian social and political contexts of futurist ideas and attitudes, see Günter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1996). 6 Originally published in 1903, Scipio Sighele’s L’intelligenza della folla was intended to make his crowd research more complete, according to its author. Scipio Sighele, L’intelligenza della folla (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1911), ix (preface to the second edition). On “true protagonist” and latent worthiness, see ibid., 3 and 6, respectively. 7 Ibid., 29. 8 Ibid. 9 The futurist painters assumed, like Sighele, that art could guide public opinion: “In order that the crowd may enjoy our marvelous spiritual world, of which it is ignorant, we give it the material sensation of that world.” Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini, “The Exhibitors to the Public” (1912); reprinted in Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, 50. 10 Ibid., 45. In addition, viewers who were thrust to the center of these futurist crowd images might learn how rebellious content corresponds with specific formal qualities, such as when a depiction of a riot contains “sheaves of lines corresponding with all the conflicting forces.” Ibid., 48. This description of a riot image with “sheaves of lines” referred to Carrà’s Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1911). 11 Gustave Kahn, “Les Futuristes italiens,” Mercure de France 96, no. 353 (March 1, 1912), 184–6. 12 Apollinaire criticized the futurist painters for neglecting “plastic problems” and “purely plastic concerns.” Guillaume Apollinaire, “Chroniques d’art: Les futuristes,” Le Petit Bleu (February 9, 1912); reprinted in Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews, 1902–1918, ed. LeRoy Breunig and trans. Susan Suleiman (New York: Viking, 1972), 203. 13 When corresponding with Apollinaire in December 1911 (following his October 1911 trip to Paris), Boccioni acknowledged taking interest in Picasso’s “truly strange style” of painting. Boccioni, Lettere futuriste, ed. Federica Rovati (Rovereto, Italy: Egon and Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, 2009) 31–2 and 217–18. 14 Among the early futurist painters, only Luigi Russolo seems to have not progressed visually after February 1912, though his artistic impact was strongly felt in his experimental work with sound composition and performance.

214

Futurist Conditions

15 The futurists were hardly alone in responding to the historical and epistemological challenges posed by the widespread use of the mediums of photographic representation. For extended discussion of the artistic and scientific engagements with these challenges at the turn of the twentieth century, see Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 16 On the use of the phrase “visual syntax,” see the Introduction to this volume, 24–5; and Nelson Goodman, The Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1968). 17 Marta Braun has discussed this image of Demenÿ in an electrical harness in the context of Marey’s desire to apply the results to prosthetics, and she cites applications of this research for gymnastics and military training. Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 104 and 109. Rabinbach’s extensive discussion of the science of work links Marey’s research to a panoply of related fields that emerged over the next three decades; Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 119, 185–7, and 240–4. 18 Mary Ann Doane has described Marey’s “obsession with indexicality” in The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 48. Stewart-Steinberg reiterates the bodily index to be an essential aspect of Marey’s inventions; see Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 143–4. Not restricted to Marey’s chronophotography, or even photography in general, indexicality gained prominence in the late nineteenthcentury with Charles Sanders Peirce’s tripartite distinction in his semiological system among icon, index, and symbol, though these categories, are not mutually exclusive. See, for example, The Collected Works of Charles Sanders Peirce, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), Vol. 2, 287, Vol. 4, 544. However, Josh Ellenbogen identifies a bias toward indexicality among scholars of photography, which may prevent them from appreciating the emergence of new phenomena: “Whereby their [photographs’] indexicality, the causal link between them and the world, has exhaustive importance in understanding the images and their visual form. As Marey’s photographs make clear, giving indexicality such a role can require imagining that the visual forms in the photographs precede the artifices that bring them into being, as though they possess a form of anterior existence that only needed to mark the plate.” Josh Ellenbogen, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The Photography of Bertillon, Gaston, and Marey (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 21–2. On how Marey’s research may have resisted indexicality, see Ch. 2 note 28. 19 This basic futurist supposition concerning overflowing energetic forces also fits into a continuous topological principle, as described by Brian Massumi, which governs spatiotemporal proximities, which permits extrapolations from kinetic motion to

Conclusion

20

21

22

23

24

215

multiple other energetic referents or milieus, and which can reveal adjacent, virtual forces. See Brian Massumi, Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 134–5. As part of an extensive lineage in European art of indicating time and motion in static mediums, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing described time-dependent modes of representation in earlier eras (based on succession and simultaneity), which informed a sense of virtual motion: what could be alluded to, but not shown directly. On the concept of anticipation at the turn of the twentieth century, also see the Introduction. Art historian Mark Antliff decribes how many vanguard visual artists (including some Italian futurists) embraced “a plurality of temporal typologies.” Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson (Princeton, NJ: Princetone University Press, 1993), 13. Intellectual historian Peter Osborne observes that modernity constitutes “an abstract temporal structure which . . . embraces a conflicting plurality of projects, of possible futures.” Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time (London: Verso, 1995), 13–14. Osborne also refers to “a qualitatively new, self-transcending temporality” (ibid., 23), which manifested multiple interpretations of time and presence in distinct material practices in the early twentieth century. Marinetti maintained acquaintance with prominent members of the Italian Nationalist Party; see notes 9 and 10 in Introduction. In 1919 and 1920, Marinetti formed alliances with Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party, and Mussolini credited Futurism with being an important inspiration for Italian Fascism. Berghaus, Futurism and Politics, 110–24. Some of the foremost examples include Berghaus, Futurism and Politics; FalascaZamponi, Fascist Spectacle; Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); and Claudio Fogu, The Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). A more recent overview can be found in Andrew Lyttleton, “Futurism, Politics, and Society” in Italian Futurism, 1909–1944; Reconstructing the Universe, ed., Vivien Greene, exhibition catalog (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2014), 58–76. On the logic of Marinetti’s literary and performative style in relation to both Mussolini and futurist visual artists, see David S. Mather, “F. T. Marinetti’s Vocalizations,” California Italian Studies 6, no. 1 (2016): 1–22. The political context of Italian futurism is extensively explored in Berghaus’s Futurism and Politics; Emilio Gentile’s The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Gentile’s The Struggle for Modernity; and Andrew Hewitt’s Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). On Mussolini’s visual and performative modes of masculinity, see Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle.

216

Futurist Conditions

25 For art historian Christine Poggi, Marinetti’s writings established a set of discursive continuities between futurism and fascism, while the futurist visual arts presaged, lent support to, and then gradually moved away from fascism. Christine Poggi, “The Return of the Repressed: Tradition as Myth in Futurist Fascism,” in Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum, eds, Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 203–21. For a fuller picture of how futurist compositional strategies presaged aspects of fascist society, see Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 2009), Chapter 7 (232–65). According to art historian Günter Berghaus, futurist and fascist worldviews shared “infantile regressive fantasies” that located the dominant male subject position within a corporatist structure, which manifested an early twentieth-century version of collectivity based on national industrial output. Günther Berghaus, “Futurism and the Technological Imagination Poised between Machine Cult and Machine Angst,” in Berghaus, ed., Futurism and the Technological Imagination, 28. 26 Hal Foster, “Prosthetic Gods,” Modernism/Modernity 4, no. 2 (1997): 5–48. 27 Ibid.: 8. 28 On links between futurism and fascism, see note 24. Historian Emilio Gentile observes: “Futurism and fascism are both . . . manifestations of political modernism that belong to a common cultural terrain.” Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity, 44. What Gentile terms “the conquest of modernity” was a common aim for both futurism and fascism—“the aspiration to have the capacity and the power to master the process of modernization” (ibid.). Despite the strong correlation between futurism and fascism, this author warns against making direct causal links between them amid a complex sociohistorical milieu, which included disparate factors such as mass sociopolitical activities in Italy before the war, Italian military intervention in the First World War, the conditions of the resulting peace accord, and the interwar political spectacles of the cult of the fallen soldier and the occupation of Fiume. 29 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 238. He also stated, “There was no way for the masses to organize and control themselves in their reception [of avant-garde painting]. Thus the same public which responds in a progressive manner toward a grotesque film is bound to respond in a reactionary manner to surrealism” (ibid., 235). Cultural historian Rae Beth Gordon has argued the reverse—that types of bodily and psychic automatism in the café concert and early cinema directly informed (rather than contradicted) spectatorial responses to early twentieth-century avant-garde practices. Rae Beth Gordon, Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 128 and 202.

Conclusion

217

30 Benjamin noted: “With regard to the screen, the critical and the receptive attitudes of the public coincide.” Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 234. 31 Film historian Miriam Hansen chronicles the emergence of mass subjectivity in the early film industry: “The cinema rehearsed new modern forms of subjectivity and intersubjectivity at the same time that it addressed older needs and more recent experiences of displacement and deprivation.” Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 105. Hansen also suggests that silent film “allowed for the experience of competing temporalities, especially on the part of people who bore the brunt of modernization.” Ibid., 124. 32 Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 236. An alternate translation can be found in Benjamin, “The Work of Art” (second version), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 3; 1935–1938 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press at Harvard University Press, 2002), 117. 33 On the revolutionary potential of film, see Benjamin, “The Work of Art” (second version), in Benjamin, Selected Writings, section VI, especially 108 and 124 note 10. Theodor Adorno considered Benjamin’s idea that film could turn the masses into revolutionaries to be overly generous in its estimation of the general populace. Adorno, letter to Benjamin, dated March 18, 1936; Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence: 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz and trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 127–34. 34 Benjamin cites Marinetti’s newspaper article supporting an Italian colonial war in Ethiopia, but Marinetti’s glorification of violence was apparent in various pre–First World War texts, such as “The Necessity and Beauty of Violence” (1910) and “War: The Sole Cleanser of the Universe” (1911). 35 Benjamin, “The Work of Art” (second version), in Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 3; 1935–1938, 121. 36 Benjamin wrote: “Its [humankind’s] self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.” Ibid., 122. 37 Ibid. Alongside Benjamin’s optimism about mass-mediated politics, Adorno formulated a less optimistic axiom: “If indeed the advances of technology largely determine the fate of society, then the technicized forms of modern consciousness are also heralds of that fate.” Theodor Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 2001), 96. 38 Prominent Italian socialist Arturo Labriola thought cinema could instill its mass audiences with a sense of shared purpose. “La crisi nella Cinematografia” Interview with Arturo Labriola, Lux 2, no. 11 (October 1909): 1; cited in Davide Turconi, La stampa cinematografica in Italia e negli Stati Uniti d’America dalle origini al 1930 (Pavia, Italy: Amministrazione provinciale di Pavia, 1977), 11.

218

Futurist Conditions

39 Marinetti, “The Battles of Rome,” in Critical Writings, 173. The second section of this text, titled “The Divine Comedy Is a Fleapit of Commentators,” was presented at Teatro Costanzi on February 21, 1913, according to Berghaus’s editorial note accompanying that text (ibid., 174). 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Andrew Hewitt uses the concept of social choreography to describe aspects of a dominant social order that becomes imprinted onto or modifies the psychophysiological routines of certain privileged subjects. Hewitt, Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 43 In spite of its illegibility, Unique Forms also inspired a genre of interwar portraits that were reminiscent of Boccioni’s body-building composite in the fusion of human bodies and architecture. Examples in this vein include Mario Castagneri’s portraits of Fortunato Depero (1931 and 1933), Tato’s Dynamic Portrait of Il Duce (c. 1934), various portraits by Thayaht (c. 1930s), Gerardo Dottori’s An Italian for Mussolini, Aerial Portrait of Mario Carli (1931) and Dottori’s Portrait of Maestro Salta (1937), and various other figure-city superimpositions in the futurist genre of aeropittura (aeropainting) during the interwar years. 44 One commentator claimed in 1923: “Benito Mussolini is not a man: he is the man. He is the one the Nation has been waiting for.” Guido Podrecca, “Il fascismo” in Vittorio De Fiori and Guido Podrecca, Mussolini e il fascismo (New York: Il Carroccio, 1923); cited in Renzo De Felice and Luigi Goglia, Mussolini: Il mito (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1983), 110. 45 Framing the futurist visual arts in terms of cinema, Marianne Martin writes: “The continuous motion of the cinematic form . . . underlies the entire Futurist aesthetic.” Marianne Martin, “The Ballet Parade: A Dialogue between Cubism and Futurism,” Art Quarterly 1, no. 2 (Spring 1978): 110. A recent example comes in Hal Foster, Rosalind E. Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004): “Futurism tried to construct an analogue between pictorial signification and existing technologies of vision and representation, such as those being developed by photography—particularly in its extended forms such as chronophotography— and by early cinema” (ibid., 90–2). Examples of commentators responding negatively to filmic representations of life in Maxim Gorky, “The Lumière Cinematographe (Extracts)” (1896); Piero Antonio Gariazzo, Il teatro muto (Turn: S. Barres, 1919), 100; and Terry Ramsaye, “Color Photography and the Motion Picture,” Photoplay 15 no. 4 (March 1919): 84–6. See Introduction, note 46 in this volume.

Conclusion

219

46 Seizing on the widespread view that cubism was dispassionate and analytical, Boccioni leveled the same charge against the cubists, whose works he claimed lacked vitality and extracted life from depicted subjects, thus killing them. Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism), trans. Richard Shane Agin and Maria Elena Versari (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2016), 92 and 101. On cubism’s lack of chromatic vitality see, ibid., 99. Apollinaire had noted a few months prior to Boccioni’s critique that “Picasso studies an object like a surgeon dissecting a corpse.” Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters, trans. Peter Read (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 13. 47 Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture, 94. 48 The futurist sensibility is broadly outlined in F. T. Marinetti, “Destruction of Syntax—Untrammeled Imagination—Words-in-Freedom” (June 1913); reprinted in Marinetti, Critical Writings, 120–31. 49 Boccioni, “Il cerchio non si chiude!,” Lacerba 2, no. 5 (March 1, 1914): 68. This statement came in his response to Giovanni Papini’s suggestion that, since any cycle of renewal presupposes destruction and reconstruction, futurism would eventually return to reaffirming an established visual and cultural order. Boccioni’s phrase resembles a similar phrase concerning “the wild joy of color” in his letter to Soffici (undated; July 17–22, 1913); reproduced in Boccioni, Lettere futuriste, 76–7 and 258–60; my translation. 50 Boccioni noted: “In dynamic masterpieces, this same aspiration for nothingness is conveyed by formal disintegration, by the violent desire to escape and lose ourselves in space.” Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture, 119. For Boccioni, radical transformation required confronting grave danger: “Deaths are foreseen from hundreds of kilometers away; presentiments fill us with force or annihilate us with terror.” Ibid., 156. 51 On the sacrificial violence in various myths and social structures, see René Girard, La Violence et le sacré (Paris: Grasset, 1972). Girard’s investigation of the destructive aspects of the (male) psyche suggest that, in many historical and literary episodes of literal and sacrificial violence, vitality and violence are inextricably linked. 52 Bergson, The Meaning of the War; Life and Matter in Conflict (London: Ballantyne Press, 1915). This slim volume reproduces transcriptions of two lectures Bergson delivered after the beginning of the First World War (in November and December 1914 respectively). 53 Bergson, Time and Free Will (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001), 10. 54 Michael Kirby and Victoria Nes Kirby, Futurist Performance (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1971), 242–3. 55 Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture, 152. 56 Cecchi, Taccuini, eds. Niccolò Gallo and Pietro Citati (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1976), 502. Cecchi observed as well: “The statues of Boccioni are the result of superimposition of several statues, such as Balla’s centipede-dogs.” Ibid.

220

Futurist Conditions

57 Ibid. 58 In Marinetti’s published responses to a set of questions about film, he remarked that film shared “futurist conceptions and intentions”; see “Inchiesta sul cinematografico,” Il Nuovo giornale 328 (November 30, 1913); cited in Giovanni Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista (Milan: Skira, 2001), 30. Also, in late 1915 Balla declared: “watching a cinematographic performance we find ourselves in front of a painting in movement.” Giacomo Balla, “The Late Balla—Futurist Balla” (December 1915); reprinted in translation in Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, 206. 59 Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista, 45. 60 F. T. Marinetti, Bruno Corra, Emilio Sentimelli, Arnaldo Ginna, Giacomo Balla, and Remo Chiti, “The Futurist Cinema” (1916), in Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, 207–8 and 217–19. At one point, this manifesto reads: “The cinema, being essentially visual, must above all fulfill the evolution of painting.” Ibid., 208. Elsewhere, painting’s lowered status is strongly implied; ibid., 207–8.

Acknowledgments

This book represents a collective effort by numerous people who contributed or otherwise made it possible for me to undertake and complete. I have been the beneficiary of assistance from curators and specialized personnel at the museums, libraries, and other cultural and educational institutions to the colleagues, friends, and family members who have directly enhanced its content and advised me during this process. While any errors or misunderstandings in this text are mine alone, this book would not exist without those who have given input or worked on my behalf, and I’d especially like to acknowledge my colleagues at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC USP). Among those who made important contributions to this project, my mentors at UC San Diego John Welchman and Norman Bryson guided my work over several years, and I aspire to be as generous with, and committed to, the scholarship of others as they have been with mine. During my time at the Getty Research Institute, Gail Feigenbaum and others in the GRI Publications Department demonstrated that art history can still be a noble, collective pursuit, while those at the Library and Special Collections, the Scholars Program, and Director’s Office showed incomparable professionalism. A postdoctoral fellowship at MIT, made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, included my gaining inspiration and encouragement from Caroline Jones, and I also enjoyed working with Leila Kinney, Philip Khoury, Evan Ziporyn, and the staff of MIT’s Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST) and the Department of Architecture. At Stony Brook University, I received support from FAHSS, AHLSS, UUP, and the Department of Art. At various stages in preparing my manuscript, I received valuable feedback from numerous scholars, including Ana Gonçalves Magalhães, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Maria Elena Versari, Marina Pugliese, Fae Brauer, Douglas Kahn, Rosalind McKever, Raffaelle Bedarida, Vanessa Bortulucce, and Fernando Lofredo, as well as conference respondents and attendees and some thoughtful anonymous reviewers. I’ve also benefited from discussions with Ester Coen, Andrew Hewitt, Marta Braun,

222

Acknowledgments

Philip Rylands, Jennifer Peterson, Jimena Canales, Cécile Guédon, Jennifer Josten, Natilee Harren, Julie Louise Bacon, Amy Teschner, Rebecca Uchill, Emily Verla Bovino, Bryan Hempel, Sylvia Tidwell, and Eric Weidt. I am grateful for the love and support of my wife Pam, who appreciates that words and images are sometimes inadequate to convey the full range of one’s experience. My love and gratitude extend to our family in Southern California, New Mexico, and Oregon, as well as our second “family” abroad—Yves and Michele Louche, Laurence and Pascal Cellario, Sylvie Louche, and Gerard and Marie Catherine Ravera. Finally, Ken Bobele passed away before the completion of this project, but I’d like to believe that aspects of his enthusiasm for knowledge, experience, and heightened perception found their way into these pages.

Illustrations

Plates   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9 10 11 12 13

Giacomo Balla, Automobile Velocity + Light, 1913 Giacomo Balla, Speeding Automobile, c. 1913 Giacomo Balla, Noise Forms of a Motorcycle, c. 1913–14 Giacomo Balla, Speed Sky Noise, c. 1913–14 Giacomo Balla, Colored Complex of Noise + Velocity, 1914 Giacomo Balla, Line of Speed, Form, and Sound, 1915 Giacomo Balla, Abstract Velocity, 1914 Giacomo Balla, Piedigrotta in Velocity + Noise, c. 1914 Giacomo Balla, Men’s Suit for Morning, 1914 Giacomo Balla, polychrome majolica plate, c. 1928 Giacomo Balla, Waving—Patriotic Demonstration, 1915 Giacomo Balla, Parade + Crowd, 1915 Giacomo Balla, Perils of War, 1915

Figures I.1 Crowd gathers at Lux bookstore window displaying Boccioni’s painting Deconstruction of Figures at a Table (1912), Rome, 1913 I.2 Étienne-Jules Marey, Demenÿ Wearing Black Costume with White Lines and Points, 1884 I.3 Étienne-Jules Marey, Jump in Place, 1884 I.4 Hagesandros, Polydoros, and Athenodoros of Rhodes, Laöcoon and His Sons, c. first century BCE (or first century CE) I.5 Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, The Walking Man, 1911 I.6 Umberto Boccioni, Muscular Dynamism, 1913 I.7 Giacomo Balla, Piedigrotta in Velocity + Noise, c. 1914

3 9 10 19 30 30 30

224

Illustrations

1.1 Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, Polyphysiognomic Portrait of Umberto Boccioni, c. 1912–13 1.2 Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, Greeting, 1911 1.3 Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, The Bow, 1911 1.4 Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, Searching, 1911 1.5 Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, Changing Position, 1912 1.6 Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, The Walking Man, 1911 1.7 Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, Polyphysiognomic Portrait of Futurist Poet Luciano Folgore, 1911 1.8 Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, A Gesture of the Head, 1911 1.9 Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, The Slap, 1912 2.1 Giacomo Balla, Car + Speed + Light, 1913 2.2 Étienne-Jules Marey, The Walking Man, 1886 2.3 Giacomo Balla, Plastic Complex of Noise + Velocity, c. 1914–15 (metal reconstruction from 1968) 2.4 Giacomo Balla, Line of Velocity + Vortex, 1911 2.5 Francesco Cangiullo, Balla in Action on the Scene, 1915 3.1 Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 (cast in 1950) 3.2 Detail of Boccioni’s manuscript of poem “Scarpetta da società + orina” (“Small Dress Shoe + Urine”), 1913 3.3 Umberto Boccioni, Muscular Dynamism, 1913 3.4 Auguste Rodin, L’Homme qui marche (The Walking Man), 1877 3.5 Giorgio Sommer, Photograph of plaster casts from archaeological remains, Pompeii, c. 1875 3.6 Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 3.7 Umberto Boccioni, Fusion of Head and a Window, c. late 1912–13 3.8 Umberto Boccioni, Study for Fusion of Head and a Window, c. late 1912–13 3.9 Umberto Boccioni, Unique Line of Continuity in Space, 1912–13 3.10 Umberto Boccioni, Muscles in Speed, 1913 3.11 Umberto Boccioni, Anti-Graceful, 1912–13 3.12 Detail of Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 3.13 Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Boxer, 1913

51 54 55 57 58 63 64 68 73 99 100 107 110 118

136 142 143 149 149 151 153 153 154 155 158 158 159

Illustrations

Italian futurist installation at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915, with Umberto Boccioni’s Muscles in Speed in foreground 3.15–18 Details of Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 3.19 Front page of L’Italia futurista, August 25, 1916 3.20 Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 3.21 Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 (cast in c. 1933) 3.22 Postcard from Sergei Jastrebzoff to Carlo Carrà, postmarked May 7, 1914 3.23–25 Photographic documentation of the damage to Umberto Boccioni’s, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), December 1971 3.26 Umberto Boccioni, Simultaneous Visions, 1912 3.27 Mario Castagneri, Depero among the Skyscrapers, 1931 3.28 Tato, Dynamic Portrait of Il Duce, c. 1934

225

3.14

C.1 C.2

Étienne-Jules Marey, Demenÿ in Electrical Harness, 1888 Renato Bertelli, Continuous Profile of Il Duce, 1933

162 163 165 166 167 169

173 176 177 179 200 206

Index abstraction  7, 17, 63, 102, 103, 105–6, 110, 148, 199–200 Académie des Beaux-Arts (Paris)  7 accident  5, 19, 26, 29, 38 n.40, 45 n.103, 45–6 n.106, 148, 150, 156–7, 180, 208 Agamben, Giorgio  132 n.81 agency (artistic)  4 agency (collective or mass)  28, 33 n.9, 115, 119, 122, 169, 171, 180, 198, 201, 205, 207, 209, 212 Allard, Roger  38–9 n.45, 48 analogies  2, 14, 15, 23, 24–5, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 48, 62, 142, 147, 150, 157, 171–2, 174, 176–7, 198, 202, 205, 210, 211, see also plastic analogies; visual analogies analysis  7, 12, 13–14, 16, 21, 47–9, 54, 70, 71, 100, 102, 112, 127 n.37, 175, 193 n.117, 219 n.46 anonymous  29, 120, 130 n.61, 139, 141, 155, 156, 160, 164, 171, 177–9, 201, 205, 209, see also illegibility; unrecognizability anticipation  21–3, 29, 193–4 n.121, 199–200, 201 Antliff, Mark  38 n.44, 215 n.21 Apollinaire, Guillaume  25–6, 156, 161–2, 188 n.68, 190 nn.88, 90, 199, 213 nn.12, 13 architecture  29, 138, 147–8, 152–3, 156, 157–64, 174–8, 218 n.43 Arditi (Daring Ones)  33 n.9 Arnheim, Rudolf  20–1 art-action  2, 96, 117 automatism  34 n.16, 35, n.22, 48, 62, 79, 81, 99, 102, 108, 111, 203, 216 n.29 automobile  1–2, 95–9, 103–5, 113, 119, 132 n.85, Plate 1, Plate 2, see also transportation automobilism  32 n.5, 98, 128 n.44

avant-garde  21, 25, 34 n.16, 38 n.44, 39 n.48, 48, 88 n.69, 90 n.88, 115, 124 n.17, 129 n.58, 130 n.62, 142, 195 n.135, 203, 216 n.29 Balla, Giacomo  15, 17, 20, 28, 34 n.16, 38 n.42, 82, 83 n.5, 95–133, 135, 143, 200–1, 220 n.58 Abstract Velocity (1914)  111–12, 127 n.37, Plate 7 “Action of Colors” (1914)  104 Automobile Velocity + Light (1913)  99, Plate 1 ceramics production  114, 129 n.56 Colored Complex of Noise + Velocity (1914)  107, Plate 5 Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912)  30, 97 “Everything Moves” (1913)  104 First Studies of Vortexes (1913)  109–10 futurist clothing  28, 112–14, 115, 116, 120, 210 Girl Running on a Balcony (1912)  97, 124 n.19, 125 n.23 Hands of the Violinist (1912)  97 “How Does One Create the Work of Art?” (1920)  110, 112, 121 “The Late Balla” (1924–5)  102–3, 122–3 n.1 Line of Speed, Noise, and Form (1915)  107, Plate 6 Line of Velocity + Vortex (1913–14)  110 Noise Forms of a Motorcycle (c. 1914)  105, Plate 3 Parade + Crowd (1915)  119–20, Plate 12 Patriotic Song (1915)  120 Perils of War (1915)  121, Plate 13 Piedigrotta in Velocity + Noise (c. 1914)  30, 113, 114, Plate 8, 136

Index Plastic Complex of Noise + Velocity (1914)  107 Shout of “Viva l’Italia” (1915)  120 Speeding Automobile (c. 1913)  103–4, 119, 132 n.85, Plate 2 Speed Sky Noise (c. 1913–14)  106, 107, Plate 4 suit designs  113–14, 120, 129 n.55, Plate 9 Waving—Patriotic Demonstration (1915)  119, Plate 11 Barr Jr., Alfred  104, 167, 191 n.95 Bazin, André  76, 91 n.93 Belin, Éduoard  73 Benjamin, Walter  92 n.106, 203–4, 207, 208, 211, 217 n.33 Benzi, Fabio  126 n.29, 129 n.50 Berghaus, Günther  130 n.69, 192 n.113, 216 n.25, 218 n.39 Bergson, Henri  12–14, 15, 19, 22–3, 26, 38 n.41, 45 n.103, 75–6, 77, 88 n.72, 89–90 n.80, 183–4 n.29, 208–9, 210 Bertelli, Renato  206–7 Blériot, Louis  209 Boccioni, Umberto  3, 6, 14–17, 19–20, 26, 29–30, 47–53, 65–6, 72, 74, 75, 80–1, 95–7, 102, 113, 117, 135–80, 199, 201, 205–8, 209–12 Anti-Graceful (1912–13)  157–8 body-building  161, 164, 167, 174–5, 177–80, 201, 205 Dynamism of a Boxer (1913)  159 Figure in Movement (1913)  154 Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism) (1914)  38 n.40, 44 n.101 Muscles in Speed (1913)  146, 147, 155, 157–8, 161, 162 Muscular Dynamism (1912)  29–30, 143 Polyphysiognomic Portrait of Umberto Boccioni (c. 1912–13)  51–2, 65–6 Simultaneous Visions (1912)  176 “Small Dress Shoe + Urine” (1913)  141, 142 Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913)  135–40, 146, 148–51, 156–60, 162–4, 166–70, 171–7, 179–80, 201, 205, 207

227

Unique Line of Continuity in Space (1912)  154 Bonzagni, Aroldo  96, 123 n.4 Botticelli, Sandro  145 Bragaglia, Anton Giulio  20, 28, 47–82, 97, 180 Bragaglia brothers, Anton Giulio and Arturo  6, 15, 16, 27–30, 47–82, 96, 97, 113, 135, 143, 156, 180, 199, 201, 205, 206, 210 The Bow (1911)  54, 55, 56 Changing Position (1911)  57, 58, 63 A Figure Under the Stairs (1911)  57 A Gesture of the Head (1911)  67–9, 156 Greeting (1911)  53–4, 56–7, 201 “In the Year 2000” (1913)  73–4, 75 Making a Turn (1912)  63 The Nod of Greeting (1913)  54 Polyphysiognomic Portrait of Luciano Folgore (1912)  64 Polyphysiognomic Portrait of Umberto Boccioni (c. 1912–13)  51–2, 65–6 Searching (1912)  57, 63 The Slap (1912)  73–4 The Typist (1911)  57 The Walking Man (1912)  29, 30, 63 Braque, Georges  156 Braun, Marta  85 n.27, 88–9 n.76, 91 n.94, 214 n.17 Busoni, Ferruccio  161 Buzzi, Paolo  209 camera  5–6, 8, 14, 15, 21, 26–8, 30, 48, 51, 60, 62, 76, 78–81, 100, 188 n.71 Cangiullo, Francesco  117, 118 Canudo, Ricciotti  16, 50, 93 n.110 Carrà, Carlo  41 n.61, 44–5 n.102, 96, 120, 131–2 n.78, 169–70, 174, 193 n.120, 197, 213 n.10 Free-Word Painting–Patriotic Festival (1914)  120–1, 191 n.104 Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1911)  197 Carrière, Eugène  156 Castagneri, Mario  90 n.88, 176–7, 218 n.43 Cecchi, Emilio  210–11

228

Index

Celant, Germano  115, 130 n.62 chronophotography  3, 8–15, 18, 24, 27–8, 30, 47, 54, 61, 62, 71, 75, 97–102, 106, 108, 109, 113, 177, 200, 218 n.45 cinema, see film cinematograph  16, 17, 37 n.35, 39 n.46, 49, 74, 90 n.86, 210, 220 n.58 Cines  16, 50, 75 classicism  139, 162, 201, 206, 210 cognitive process  7, 8, 21–2, 24, 25, 27, 46 n.107, 204 color  11, 17, 41 n.61, 104, 105, 107–8, 113, 116, 119–20, 172, 174, 219 n.49 commerce  2, 15, 50, 112–16, 119, 121, 122, 177, 198, 202, 203, 212 Corra, Bruno  17, 211 Corradini, Enrico  117, 170 criticality  115, 195 n.135, 145, 203, 207, 212 crowd  3, 75, 111, 117–22, 133 n.87, 177, 197–9, 212 cubism  16, 32 n.7, 49, 76, 83 n.8, 85 n.27, 91 n.90, 96, 123 n.7, 156, 199, 219 n.46 da Vinci, Leonardo  109 d’Azeglio, Massimo  138, 212 n.3 Degas, Edgar  148 dematerialization  102 Demenÿ, Georges  6, 9–11, 97, 200 democracy  117, 131 n.71, 211, 213 n.5 Depero, Fortunato  115–16, 129 n.56, 176–7 determinism  12–14 Divisionism  7, 35–6 n.25, 96–7, 123 n.6 Doane, Mary Ann  27, 214 n.18 Duchamp, Marcel  21, 34 n.16, 39 n.48, 91 n.90, 124 n.17, 156, 183 n.21 Duhamel, Georges  156 emotion  16, 19, 26, 34 n.15, 43 n.93, 48, 49, 56, 62, 71, 74–5, 77–81, 117, 147, 156, 157, 160, 164, 201 essence  5, 9, 12–13, 14, 19, 28, 29, 30, 59, 65–7, 70–4, 76, 80, 103–4, 139, 157, 175, 199, 208, 210, 211 expressivity  7, 14, 19–20, 21, 29, 34 n.16, 48, 50–4, 55, 60–9, 70–5, 80–2, 101, 156, 170, 172, 198, 212

fascism  2, 137, 170–1, 179–80, 191 n.99, 201–3, 204–7, 210, 216 nn.25, 28 Ferrero, Guglielmo  23 film  4–6, 13–14, 15–18, 20–1, 27, 48–50, 52, 62, 72, 75, 76–82, 177, 180, 203–4, 207, 208, 210–11 “The Futurist Cinema” (1916)  17, 52, 211 Fiorelli, Giuseppe  186–7 n.53 First World War  3, 5, 16, 17, 20, 50, 95, 97, 111, 116, 118, 122, 156, 164, 171, 178, 180, 202, 208, 211, 212 Folgore, Luciano  64, 178 Frémont, Charles  89 n.78 Freud, Sigmund  66 Galerie Bernheim-Jeune  48, 95, 137 Gallese, Vittorio  42 n.78 Gatti, Riccardo  114 Gentile, Emilio  216 n.28 gesture  53–62, 64–5, 67–9, 71, 75, 82, 156 Gianni-Corradini, Arnaldo, see Arnaldo Ginna Gianni-Corradini, Bruno, see Bruno Corra Ginna, Arnaldo  17, 211 Gombrich, Ernst  21–2 Goodman, Nelson  24–5, 214 n.16 Gorky, Maxim  39 n.46, 218 n.45 graphical method  8, 35 nn.20, 22, 72 Hansen, Miriam  217 n.31 Hewitt, Andrew  218 n.42 human-machine interaction  51, 69, 72–3, 75, 77–82, 140, 150, 203–4 Husserl, Edmund  22 illegibility  27, 64, 69, 82, 139, 174, 176–80, 201, 205–7, 211, see also anonymous; unrecognizability immaterial causes  12–13, 15, 61, 62–3, 72, 108, 143–4, 199, 210 immobility  4, 12, 14, 29, 86 n.46, 89–90 n.80, 91 n.92, 102, 138, 154, 161 individuality  16, 28, 31, 64–9, 80, 111, 138–9, 154–5, 171, 174, 177–8, 198, 204, 205, 207, 209 industrialization  1, 23, 29, 78, 89 n.78, 96, 106, 114, 138, 170–1, 208, 209

Index innate complementarity  123 n.6 interpenetration of planes  123 n.6, 144, 146, 163 intuition  16, 38 n.41, 47, 49, 52, 56, 67, 111, 112, 116, 121 invisible phenomena  7–8, 12, 15, 24, 27–8, 30, 62–4, 70–1, 72, 76, 81–2, 99–103, 106, 108, 111–12, 122, 199–200, 209, 211–12 Italian film industry  16–17, 50 Italian historical epic film  16, 75 Italian Nationalist Association  33 n.10, 189 n.79 Jastrebzoff, Sergie  169 Kahn, Gustav  198 kineticism  1, 4–6, 7, 10, 13–15, 20–1, 25–30, 47, 49, 62, 67, 95, 96, 97–9, 103–8, 109–10, 112, 115, 116, 119– 22, 135, 147, 199–201, 209–11 kinetic velocity, see kineticism Kittler, Friedrich  77 Kupka, František  34 n.16, 88 n.69, 124 n.17 labor  33 n.10, 89 n.78, 94 n.116, 115–16, 124 n.15, 129 n.52, 170, 198, 212 n.2 Labriola, Arturo  16–17, 217–18 n.38 Lacerba (journal)  28, 47 Laocoön and His Sons (c. 1st century BCE)  18–19, 22 legibility  10, 27, 61, 64, 139, 157, 171, 174, 175–6, 205–7, 210 leisure  115–16, 119, 197, 212 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim  18, 22, 42 n.67, 43 n.86, 209, 215 n.20 Lewis, Wyndham  32 n.5, 98, 128 n.44 Lista, Giovanni  32 n.7, 33 n.11, 40 n.58, 41 n.61, 76, 83 n.8, 85 n.27, 88–9 n.76, 101, 124–5 n.9, 125 n.23, 127 nn.37–8, 133 n.86 Lombroso, Cesare  70, 88 n.72, 89 n.77 Longhi, Roberto  145, 161, 174 Lumière brothers (Auguste and Louis)  49 machine-child  140 McKever, Rosalind  190 nn.91, 93, 193 n.118

229

Magalhães, Ana Gonçalves  193 n.118 Man Ray  90 n.88 March on Rome  202 Marey, Étienne-Jules  3–4, 6–15, 24, 27–9, 47, 50, 61–2, 67, 70–1, 72, 95–6, 97, 99–102, 104–8, 112, 113, 122, 181 n.1, 200–1 The Walking Man (1886)  100 Marinetti, Benedetta Capa  162, 191 n.95 Marinetti, F. T. (Filippo Tommaso)  1–3, 17, 23–4, 25, 95, 96, 98, 116–18, 120, 140, 146, 160, 162, 164–6, 170, 174, 197, 201–2, 203–5, 208, 209 Mafarka the Futurist (1909)  32 n.6, 140 masculinity  7, 32–3 n.8, 93 n.10, 113, 116, Plate 9, 138–41, 150, 154, 157, 168–9, 170, 177, 178–9, 180, 202, 204, 205–7, 220 n.51 mass audiences  1–2, 75, 179, 197–8, 201, 202, 203–5 mass society  17, 33 n.9, 112, 114–15, 119, 142, 170–1, 178, 180, 198, 208, 212 material qualities  15, 21, 31, 34 n.13, 45 n.105, 147, 157, 171, 205, 210–11 Matisse, Henri  19 Mattioli Rossi, Laura  152–3, 186 n.50, 188 n.64 mechanical reproduction  4, 13–14, 15, 20, 41 n.60, 47–53, 75, 76–82, 140, 142–3, 175, 176, 199, 207 mechanicity  2–3, 53, 66, 75, 77, 80, 97, 101, 137 mechanism (philosophy)  12–14, 24, 72, 76, 90 n.86, 183–4 n.29, 208, 210 memory  22, 42 n.80, 156, 170, 175 Merjian, Ara  39–40 n.51, 93 n.110 Michelangelo  161 mind-body  13, 70, 71, 72, 77, 144, 156, 209 Mitchell, W. J. T.  109 modernism  1, 32 n.5, 138, 170, 179, 202, 211 modernity  1, 4, 5, 29, 31, 78, 82, 96, 98, 122, 135, 142, 170, 202, 203, 208, 209, 215 n.21 Molinari, Aldo  17 Mosso, Angelo  70, 88 n.72

230

Index

Museu de Arte Contemporânea at the University of São Paulo  158, 162– 3, 173, 193 nn.117, 118, 194 n.124 Mussolini, Benito  2, 33 n.9, 178, 179–80, 202, 205, 206 nationalism  3, 32 n.7, 33 nn.9, 10, 38 n.44, 96, 116, 117, 119–22, 131 n.73, 131–2 n.78, 138–9, 164, 168–71, 177, 178–80, 197–8, 201–2, 204, Plate 11 naturalistic  7, 8, 9, 11, 19, 29, 60, 97, 102–3, 104, 121, 142–3, 147, 201 nonnaturalistic  4, 7, 11–12, 59, 95, 99–101, 135, 145, 156, 201 orphan  140–1 Palazzeschi, Aldo  17 Panama-Pacific Exposition  161–2 Papini, Giovanni  16, 50, 81, 131–2 n.78, 139, 140, 146, 150, 178, 219 n.49 “The Discourse of Rome” (1913)  139, 140, 146, 150 “The Philosophy of the Cinematograph” (1907)  50 “The Unknown Man” (1918)  178 paragone  18–19, 203, 209 patriotism, see nationalism Peirce, Charles Sanders  125–6 n.28, 214 n.18 Pelonzi, Giuseppina  53 perception  5, 7, 8–9, 14, 15, 16, 20–3, 27, 31, 48, 52, 59, 61, 76–9, 81, 101–2, 105, 135, 160, 199, 201, 203–4 phantom  70, 73–5, 93 nn.109, 114 photodynamism  53–6, 59–67, 69–71, 74–5, 76–7, 80–2, 125 n.23, 135 photography  4–7, 8, 13–15, 18–21, 24, 25, 26–8, 47, 48, 50–4, 56–7, 59–63, 65, 66, 69–72, 75–7, 81–2, 97, 101–2, 108, 137, 142, 156–7, 175–7, 180, 199, 201, 208, 211, see also chronophotography Picasso, Pablo  34 n.13, 156, 195 n.129, 213 n.13, 219 n.46 Pirandello, Luigi  77–80, 81, 93–4 n.114 plaster  45 n.105, 146–51, 160, 162–4, 166–8, 170–4, 175, 187 n.54, 210

plastic analogies  25–6, 28, 157, 174–5, 177, 180 plastic qualities or plasticity  26, 29, 45 n.105, 127 n.37, 146, 169, 191 n.96, 194 nn.122, 126, 198–9 Poggi, Christine  32 n.7, 101, 125 n.23, 130 n.62, 132 n.79, 181 n.5, 216 n.25 polyphysiognomic portrait  51, 64, 65–7, 206 population  29, 111, 115, 117, 132 n.81, 138, 141–2, 156, 178, 188 n.67, 198, 203, 210, 212 positivism  6, 12, 28, 70, 72, 109, 127 n.37 potentiality  19, 26, 29–30, 50, 61, 66, 74, 139–40, 141, 171, 172, 178, 194 n.126, 198, 201, 203–5, 208 Pound, Ezra  128 n.43 pregnant moment  18, 22, 208–9, see also potentiality; temporality psychophysical parallelism  13, see also mind-body psychophysical qualities  22, 30, 47, 64, 72, 98, 100–1, 108, 135, 139, 144, 147, 150, 152, 160, 168, 174, 179, 203, 209 referentiality  7, 15, 102–3, 104–6, 110, 115, 120, 157, 174, 199–200, 201 Rodin, Auguste  148–50, 186–7 n.53, 188 n.71 Romani, Romolo  96 Rosso, Medardo  156 Russolo, Luigi  96, 189 n.75, 213 n.14 Sander, August  65 Schnapp, Jeffrey  32 n.8, 137–8 sculpture  6, 18, 22, 44 n.101, 51, 135–42, 145–50, 152–7, 160–4, 166–72, 174–80, 205–7 sensation  7, 8, 20, 22, 27, 28, 44 n.102, 55, 60, 75, 95, 97–8, 99, 101, 103, 104–8, 119, 120–1, 159, 197, 203, 213 n.9 Severini, Gino  44–45 n.102, 95, 96, 97, 160–1, 174, 190 n.89, 197–8 The Dance of the Pan-Pan (1911)  197 Sighele, Scipio  117, 131 nn.71–3, 133 n.87, 170, 198

Index Società Italiana Cines, see Cines Soffici, Ardengo  83 n.4, 129 n.57 spectator  16, 74–5, 77, 80, 94 n.121, 147, 175, 180, 194 n.128, 203, 204 spectatorship  201, 203–4 speed, see velocity sphygmograph  8 spiritualism  37 n.37, 38 n.44, 69–70, 71, 74, 89 n.77, 90 nn.81, 88 spiritual medium  67, 90 n.81, 90 n.88 Sprovieri, Giuseppe  83 n.9, 145 Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne  34–5 n.18, 88 n.72, 89 n.77, 214 n.18 subjectivity  6, 19, 28, 29, 30, 32 n.8, 76, 77, 80, 98, 127 n.36, 137, 138, 139, 141, 155, 156, 160–1, 168, 170–2, 174, 178–80, 188 n.73, 200, 201, 202–3, 212, 216 n.25 Tantalus  74 Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni)  178–9, 195 n.130 Taylor, Frederick Winslow  89 n.78 temporality  5–6, 8–11, 18, 20–4, 26–9, 31, 42 n.67, 53, 62, 74–5, 80, 100, 103, 105–6, 111, 113, 128–9 n.49, 135–7, 139, 144–5, 147, 163, 174–5, 199, 201, 203, 205, 210–11 Thayaht (Ernesto Michahelles)  170, 218 n.43 time-motion  5, 6, 9–13, 21, 23, 135, 148, 181 n.1, 199, 205, 215 n.20 Tommei, Ugo  168–9 transportation (motorized)  4, 27, 96, 98 uncanny  77, 92 n.106, 140 unpredictable  22–3, 110, 137, 139, 156, 172, 198 unrecognizability  67, 71, 102, 140, 142, 160, 178–9, 207, see also anonymous; illegibility

231

urbanites  29–30, 117, 119–20, 138, 141–2, 171, 178, 198 Veblen, Thorstein  130 n.64 velocity  1, 45 n.104, 98–9, 101–2, 103–8, 109–14, 119 Versari, Maria Elena  44 n.101, 45 n.105, 181 n.8, 182 n.17, 186 n.46, 190 n.90, 194 n.122 Vertov, Dziga  80–1 violence  1, 3, 74, 98, 109, 117, 118, 121, 122, 137, 171–2, 180, 197–8, 202, 204, 205, 207–10 virtual  18, 22, 23, 24, 26–7, 77, 175, 201, 209, 211 visual accident, see accident visual analogies  15, 23–31, 82, 126 n.31, 180, 193 n.120, 201, 203, 207 visuality  6, 15, 21–2, 27, 31, 76, 89 n.79, 97, 122, 199, 210–11 visual language or system  4, 6, 11, 23, 24–5, 28, 31, 53, 60, 65–6, 95, 97, 102, 107, 113, 120, 121, 137, 142, 157, 199, 201, 202, 205, 207, 210–12 visual media  5, 14, 17, 20, 28, 67, 72, 74–5, 77, 203–4, 208, 211 visual perception  5, 7–8, 14–17, 20–3, 27, 31, 48, 52, 59, 61 visual qualities  5, 61, 150 visual reproduction, see mechanical reproduction visual syntax  25–6, 98, 199, 201 vitalism (philosophy)  6, 12–15, 19–20, 27, 69, 71–3, 75, 90 nn.86–7, 144, 194 n.122, 207–8, 210 volcano  117, 186–7 n.53, 204 vortex  108–12, 113, 119, 121, 168 Wundt, Wilhelm  23, 55–6, 57, 61, 76, 87 n.64, 188 n.63 Zeno’s Paradoxes  13–14



Plate 1  Giacomo Balla, Automobile Velocity + Light, 1913, oil on canvas. Collection Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden. Courtesy Peter Willi / Bridgeman Images. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

Plate 2  Giacomo Balla, Speeding Automobile, c. 1913. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

Plate 3 Giacomo Balla, Noise Forms of a Motorcycle, c. 1913–14. Collezione G. Palazzoli, Milan / Scala. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

Plate 4  Giacomo Balla, Speed Sky Noise, c. 1913–14. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

Plate 5  Giacomo Balla, Colored Complex of Noise + Velocity, 1914. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

Plate 6 Giacomo Balla, Line of Speed, Form, and Sound, 1915. Courtesy Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy / Alinari / Bridgeman Images. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

Plate 7  Giacomo Balla, Abstract Velocity, 1914. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

Plate 8  Giacomo Balla, Piedigrotta in Velocity + Noise, c. 1914. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

Plate 9  Giacomo Balla, Men’s Suit for Morning, 1914. De Agostini Picture Library / Scala. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

Plate 10  Giacomo Balla, polychrome majolica plate, c. 1928. Private Collection. De Agostini Picture Library / A. Dagli Orti / Bridgeman Images. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori SIAE), Rome.

Plate 11 Giacomo Balla, Waving—Patriotic Demonstration, 1915. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

Plate 12  Giacomo Balla, Parade + Crowd, 1915. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.

Plate 13  Giacomo Balla, Perils of War, 1915. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), Rome.