Word: futuristic
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...universal snobbishness and stupidity . . . We want to prepare the birth of an industrial and military Venice. Let us fill the stinking little canals with the rubble of the tottering, infected old palaces! Let us burn the gondolas, rocking chairs for idiots." Thus Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his friends, the futurist painters, in a manifesto from 1910. It is a delicious irony that the most important exhibition in Europe this summer (or indeed anywhere else) should be a giant display of futurist paintings, sculpture, books, pamphlets, posters and memorabilia in a palace, no longer tottering, on the Grand Canal. Titled "Futurismo...
With its dignified rooms, passing from grand to aedicular scale and back again, Palazzo Grassi is an excellent place to look at art. The show has art and a good deal else, including such totems of futurist affection as a 1911 Bleriot monoplane and a World War I Spad hanging from the cortile roof, and a vintage Bugatti by the canal entrance, to remind one of Marinetti's belligerent and much quoted dictum that "a roaring motorcar that seems to run ( on shrapnel is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace...
...exhibition has ever made a stronger case for the quality of futurist art or gone into more detail about its roots. Futurism was the most influential art movement Italy produced in the early 20th century. Indeed, the word futurist became synonymous with modernity itself to people in America, England and Russia until around 1925. The movement took an aggressively internationalist stance, looking to a future world unified by technology. Yet its rhetoric was bedded deep in Italian life. The core of the futurist group, which coalesced in the early 1900s, was made up of the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra...
Such weights evoke violent reactions. The futurists set out to create the image of an Italy that did not yet exist, a utopia of tension and transformation whose god was the machine. Its architecture would not be the old cellular stone hill town but the dream environment conjured up by Sant'Elia: all girders and concrete cliffs, with glass elevators zipping up the exterior walls. Its painting would try to encompass not just sight but noise, heat and smell; above all, it would depict movement. To fix this industrial mode in Italian (and European) culture, the pastoral mode...
Among the younger designers, jokes tend to be about the future, but a future as it was conceived in a more hopeful past. It is a neat trick. This strain of the new-wave sensibility is an ironic mixture of nostalgia and contempt, simultaneously mock futurist and mock historicist. The allusions are to old television and B movies. At the Whitney, Dakota Jackson's UFO-shaped Saturn stool (1976) and R.M. Fischer's enormous, intimidating Max lamp (1983) are like fakey props from 1950s science-fiction films. Burton's saw-toothed aluminum chair (1980-81) seems to be a throne...