Brief Comments on Futurism & Fascism

Personal connections aside, I am pleased that the Queen of Eyes over at the Glass Hotel picked up on my somewhat inconclusive dazzle-post yesterday and brought the Italian Futurists into play. She is right to put forward that the Futurists were unique in the scope of their ambitions, and I am with her in being unable to name (allowing for my limited art historical training) any other avant-garde movement that combined that all-encompassing, revolutionary outlook with cultural and political power well outside of their coterie. Arguably the Futurists share with Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Soviet Russia (e.g. Magnitogorsk -- see Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain) and Nazi Germany the ambition to take at least one aspect of civilization (the city) and apply modern engineering to reshape it after their own designs. Indeed, the among the Futurists was an architect, Antonio Sant'Elia, who until his combat death in 1916 sketched out different urban complexes that would comprise the Futurist city. All of these movements sought in some way to rearrange the relationships of individual with individual and individual to authority; the so-called totalitarian states were obviously most successful in realizing this desire. But while Le Corbu and Wright were able to "merely" produce manifestations of their architectural designs, the Futurists could claim an active working-class following shortly before World War One: their words were conveyed to tens of thousands through the newspaper Lacerba (Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism, 1977. p. 166) and their performance seen at large "Futurist Evenings" held at music-halls throughout Europe. There was, finally, a Futurist Political Party by 1918, and F.T. Marinetti, the Futurist ringleader, stood as a Fascist parliamentary candidate in 1919 (Tisdall and Bozzolla, 203-204).

But the link between Futurism and Italian Fascism has been, I am convinced, overstated, and has done the movement a great deal of harm. The Futurists' pioneering forays into typography (in Lacerba, mimicked by the Vorticists in Blast, then by the Dadas, and copied innumerable times, if unconsciously, in recent years with the advent of computer publishing), music, performance art, and cinema seem to be buried under the off-handed dismissals to which their association with the Fascists has condemned them. As Tisdall and Bozzolla point out, the veneration of technology, violence, and youth that the Futurists shared with Fascism enabled the two movements to draw inspiration from one another (200). But the Mussolini that Marinetti admired was not yet Il Duce, and the street-fighting, revolutionary Fascism that drew upon Futurist rhetoric was not the Fascism that eventually ascended to power. Surely Tisdall and Bozzolla are correct in stating the incompatibility of Futurism's individualistic, chaotic, anarchic program with Mussolini's historicizing, authoritarian government. As the avant-garde in Bolshevik Russia and Weimar Germany (and perhaps elsewhere?) experienced, the artistic love of modernity and desire to overhaul society lost out to its competitor and perverse sibling, the authoritarian state, which hated profoundly the demands for individual freedom, and which, in a grand and terrible paradox, used modernity (in the form of mass culture, industry, and technology) to wrench back the clock on Modern culture and bourgeois democracy -- although the latter was not worth very much to the Futurists.