Futurist Conditions

Imagining Time in Italian Futurism

David Mather

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501343117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Técnicas fotográficas

Italian futurism visualized diverse types of motion, which had been rooted in pervasive kinetic and vehicular forces generated during a period of dramatic modernization in the early 20th century. Yet, as David Mather's sweeping intellectual and art historical scholarship demonstrates, it was the camera-not the engine-that proved to be the primary invention against which many futurist ideas and practices were measured. Overturning several misconceptions about Italian futurism's interest in the disruptive and destructive effects of technology, Futurist Conditions provides a refreshing update to the historical narrative by arguing that the formal and conceptual approaches by futurist visual artists reoriented the possibly dehumanizing effects of mechanized imagery toward more humanizing, spiritual aims. Through its sustained analysis of the artworks and writings of Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, and the Bragaglia brothers, dating to the first decade after the movement's founding in 1909, Mather's account of their obsession with kinetic motion pivots around a 1913 debate on the place and relative import of photography among traditional artistic mediums-a debate culminating in the expulsion of the Bragaglias, but one that also prompted a range of productive responses by other futurist artists to world-changing social, political, and economic conditions.

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 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 mod ern 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 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 self-definition—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 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 anti-technological 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 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...