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"Kaleidoscope"
Musing on a Future Centennial
Being one that does not normally dwell on the past, I totally missed the 100th Anniversary of Futurism. Founded in 1909 with the publication of Italian writer Fillippo Tommaso Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto" this bombastic, violent, somewhat misogynistic art movement has served as a touchstone, of sorts, for my understanding of what art and modern culture has become. Today we think of a "Futurist" as a predictor of where things are headed, but back in 1909 Futurism was as much about assaulting the past in order to get society to look at the present. A "present" that is now one hundred years in our current past. And, yet, there are things that Futurism set in motion then that still seem to be on track for our tomorrow.
But, imagine, if you will, what it must have been like in 1909 when the industrial revolution was only several decades old and much of the civilized world was coming to grips with the first results of so many technological changes. The new noises, the new pollutions, the new speed with which things and ideas traveled; all of this assaulted the way everything had been done in the past. Little wonder that in just a few years World War I was to begin and the Futurists who glorified war as "the world's only hygiene" joined the performance and died. After the conflict, Marinetti (who oddly survived the art-of-war) revived the movement, but by that time the overarching Modernist movements (DaDa, Cubism, Post Impressionism, Surrealism, Constructivism…) had absorbed and adopted so many of the futurist tenants and ideals that "Futurism" itself was but a transparent overlay or patina to what was then more current and emerging.
Way back in the 70's, as a Kinetic artist making abstract video compositions which were accompanied by sound tracks of my own making that were more or less "concrete" sound compositions, I had several reason to be attracted to and study Italian Futurism. If for no other reason than to recognize the roots of what it was I was attempting to do. The Futurist concept of dematerialization is one idea that has stayed with me from those early studies. To a 1909 Futurist "dematerialization" was tied to the wholly new dynamics and speed in which people traveled. Futurists noticed that as people sped by in recently mechanized transportation devises things which had formerly been experienced as solid, unmovable and monolithic (such as buildings or forests) now appeared visually to be plastic, transparent and interpenetrating in fluid and ever changing ways. Indeed, one of the unintended results of high-speed travel was a new way of seeing. Today, we can barely even imagine what this "new" experience must have felt like. But, it was the Futurists who noticed and proclaimed that humans and therefore everything that humans do was being changed by our embrace of ever increasing dynamic technology.
"Serenidad 1"
"Musing on a Future Centennial," continued...
By the time I had gotten into mass media and technologically created art many other aspects of "then" modern life had faced dematerialization. For example film was a very new phenomenon to original Futurists. I recall that one experimental Futurist film of the 1920's featured a fistfight. (Imagine thinking anyone would watch violence on a 2D screen and consider it art. Preposterous!) By the 1930's film in this country had begun, in a sense, to dematerialize Vaudeville and Burlesque and was threatening the so-called legitimate theatre. We were viewing shadows in favor of real performers. The invention of television continued the trend toward dematerialized performances. The social rituals of preparing, traveling, arriving at a specific time, buying a ticket and being seated in a common space in the dark with a group of people to share the experience of watching a film had begun to dematerialize onto smaller, low resolution screens situated in familiar surroundings. Our projected entertainments were no longer shared by small intimate groups who paid for admission, but by mass audiences who shared no common space other than the dimensions of their TV screens and who paid for this experience by allowing commercial indoctrination to enter their private living space. Social gatherings dematerialized into water cooler discussions of programs shared privately the previous evening by millions of viewers. Newspapers dematerialized into nightly news reports. . "Big Band" no longer described a touring organization of musicians but a "sound" to be reproduced and sent out in individual recordings. In general, direct experience dematerialized in favor of wide distribution and a watered down, private yet demographically more significant mass culture experience.
Up until the mid-century visual art in its material form remained solid and immediate, but since the onset of Modernism allegory and meaning attached to cultural or historical events had dematerialized into an emphasis on the tools and materials themselves. Acquisition of feeling and meaning for this sort of art depended less on depiction of recognizable subjects attached to known topics, stories and places and became a much more personal and abstracted process. Form, which had acted as the conduit toward the meaning in art, dematerialized in favor of a more visceral and private feeling/experience. Then, Pop Art, which can be seen as a return to more figurative artwork after an orgy of abstraction, actually dematerialized the culture it fed upon into slick ad-like iconography. And, by the late 60's and mid-70's art's solidity and materiality itself was facing challenges from Conceptual, Performance, Photography and Video artworks.
Today I, and most who will read this, are interested in using digital computers to make art. As such, the dematerialization of artwork seems to have reached a zenith. While the tools used to create digital art have changed and multiplied the art itself consists of no more material than is required to make a magnetic imprint on a field of electrons. At the same time, this art can be conveyed and experienced instantaneously to a global gallery of individual viewing terminals. In addition, the digital file can be materialized in the form of prints on paper, canvas or other substrates. But, the original art remains as ephemeral and fluid as a dream.
No, I normally do not dwell on the past. Rather I see myself as a person with one foot in the past and one foot in the present with another foot dangling in air above what might be a future. This forms the image of a very different kind of human being. And while, I may not subscribe to all the beliefs held by today's "transhumanism" movement (a philosophy which, by the way, owes its roots to Futurism and Marinetti's dream of the "metalization of the human body") I do wonder how changing the way we do things will change what we are, as well as what we make.
The change our future holds is no less immense than what the early futurists saw or imagined. In a hundred years from now where will our gadgets of today take us? Could we have looked at Edison's phonograph in 1877 and seen the i-Pod? The current trends of miniaturization, dematerialization, interfacing more and more with machines, favoring more and more simulations above actualities seem to form a somewhat veiled and perhaps inhospitable and murky path toward a mysterious future. Will there be fewer professional artists and musicians at the same time there are more people making art and music? Will artists license the use of electronic files rather than produce and sell art objects? Will we become the cyborgs of our long held mechanical fascination? As each individual searches for and finds their own niche for news and facts designed to tell them what they already believe will such things as truth, science, math and justice become matters of opinion?
In this light, a quote from the Futurist Manifesto of 1909 seems appropriate and while it may sound extreme consider what has become of us since Marinetti wrote: "Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed… Let us leave reason behind like a horrible mine shaft. Let us throw ourselves into the Unknown, not because we are desperate but simply to enrich the bottomless reservoirs of the Absurd."
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"Entity"
Significant contributors to the Futurism Movement:
To view artwork by these artists visit the Guggenheim Collection
This page posted 30 August 2010
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