The Futurist Manifesto
F. T. Marinetti, 1909
|
F. T. Marinetti, 1909 Futurism was an international
art movement founded in Italy in 1909. It
was in strict contrast to the weepy sentimentalism
of Romanticism. The Futurists loved speed,
noise, machines, pollution, and cities; they
embraced the exciting new world that was
then upon them rather than hypocritically
enjoying the modern worldís comforts while
loudly denouncing the forces that made them
possible. Fearing and attacking technology
has become almost second nature to many people
today; the Futurist manifestos show us an
alternative philosophy. There have been authors
like Karen Pinkus who recently tried to describe
Futurism with the notion of "Proto-Punk"
(in an article in Speed Kills magazin). The
musical output of futurism is quite negligable.
The musical works often cling to romantic
musical forms and rarely reach the radical
consistence of the manifestos. It is therefore
worthwhile to study the Futurists' manifestos.
|
We have been up all night, my friends and
I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas
are bright as our souls, because like them
they were illuminated by the internal glow
of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot
our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets,
we have been discussing right up to the limits
of logic and scrawling the paper with demented
writing. Our hearts were filled with an immense
pride at feeling ourselves standing quite
alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels
in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars
encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone
with the engineers in the infernal stokeholes
of great ships, alone with the black spirits
which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives,
alone with the drunkards beating their wings
against the walls.
Then we were suddenly distracted by the rumbling
of huge double decker trams that went leaping
by, streaked with light like the villages
celebrating their festivals, which the Po
in flood suddenly knocks down and uproots,
and, in the rapids and eddies of a deluge,
drags down to the sea. Then the silence increased.
As we listened to the last faint prayer of
the old canal and the crumbling of the bones
of the moribund palaces with their green
growth of beard, suddenly the hungry automobiles
roared beneath our windows. `Come, my friends!'
I said. `Let us go! At last Mythology and
the mystic cult of the ideal have been left
behind. We are going to be present at the
birth of the centaur and we shall soon see
the first angels fly! We must break down
the gates of life to test the bolts and the
padlocks! Let us go! Here is they very first
sunrise on earth! Nothing equals the splendor
of its red sword which strikes for the first
time in our millennial darkness.'
We went up to the three snorting machines
to caress their breasts. I lay along mine
like a corpse on its bier, but I suddenly
revived again beneath the steering wheel
- a guillotine knife - which threatened my
stomach. A great sweep of madness brought
us sharply back to ourselves and drove us
through the streets, steep and deep, like
dried up torrents. Here and there unhappy
lamps in the windows taught us to despise
our mathematical eyes. `Smell,' I exclaimed,
`smell is good enough for wild beasts!' And
we hunted, like young lions, death with its
black fur dappled with pale crosses, who
ran before us in the vast violet sky, palpable
and living. And yet we had no ideal Mistress
stretching her form up to the clouds, nor
yet a cruel Queen to whom to offer our corpses
twisted into the shape of Byzantine rings!
No reason to die unless it is the desire
to be rid of the too great weight of our
courage! We drove on, crushing beneath our
burning wheels, like shirt-collars under
the iron, the watch dogs on the steps of
the houses. Death, tamed, went in front of
me at each corner offering me his hand nicely,
and sometimes lay on the ground with a noise
of creaking jaws giving me velvet glances
from the bottom of puddles. `Let us leave
good sense behind like a hideous husk and
let us hurl ourselves, like fruit spiced
with pride, into the immense mouth and breast
of the world! Let us feed the unknown, not
from despair, but simply to enrich the unfathomable
reservoirs of the Absurd!' As soon as I had
said these words, I turned sharply back on
my tracks with the mad intoxication of puppies
biting their tails, and suddenly there were
two cyclists disapproving of me and tottering
in front of me like two persuasive but contradictory
reasons.
Their stupid swaying got in my way. What
a bore! Pouah! I stopped short, and in disgust
hurled myself - vlan! - head over heels in
a ditch. Oh, maternal ditch, half full of
muddy water! A factory gutter! I savored
a mouthful of strengthening muck which recalled
the black teat of my Sudanese nurse! As I
raised my body, mud-spattered and smelly,
I felt the red hot poker of joy deliciously
pierce my heart. A crowd of fishermen and
gouty naturalists crowded terrified around
this marvel. With patient and tentative care
they raised high enormous grappling irons
to fish up my car, like a vast shark that
had run aground. It rose slowly leaving in
the ditch, like scales, its heavy coachwork
of good sense and its upholstery of comfort.
We thought it was dead, my good shark, but
I woke it with a single caress of its powerful
back, and it was revived running as fast
as it could on its fins. Then with my face
covered in good factory mud, covered with
metal scratches, useless sweat and celestial
grime, amidst the complaint of staid fishermen
and angry naturalists, we dictated our first
will and testament to all the living men
on earth.
MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM
1. We want to sing the love of danger, the
habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will
be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive
immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want
to exalt movements of aggression, feverish
sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous
leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
4. We declare that the splendor of the world
has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty
of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet
adorned with great tubes like serpents with
explosive breath ... a roaring motor car
which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is
more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man at the wheel,
the ideal axis of which crosses the earth,
itself hurled along its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with warmth,
glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic
fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There
is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive
character. Poetry must be a violent assault
on the forces of the unknown, to force them
to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the
centuries! What is the use of looking behind
at the moment when we must open the mysterious
shutters of the impossible? Time and Space
died yesterday. We are already living in
the absolute, since we have already created
eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war - the only cure
for the world - militarism, patriotism, the
destructive gesture of the anarchists, the
beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt
for woman.
10. We want to demolish museums and libraries,
fight morality, feminism and all opportunist
and utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated
by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored
and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern
capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the
arsenals and the workshops beneath their
violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway
stations devouring smoking serpents; factories
suspended from the clouds by the thread of
their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts
flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny
rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the
horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing
on the rails like enormous steel horses with
long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight
of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like
the flapping of a flag and the applause of
enthusiastic crowds.
It is in Italy that we are issuing this manifesto
of ruinous and incendiary violence, by which
we today are founding Futurism, because we
want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of
professors, archaeologists, tourist guides
and antiquaries. Italy has been too long
the great second-hand market. We want to
get rid of the innumerable museums which
cover it with innumerable cemeteries. Museums,
cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister
juxtaposition of bodies that do not know
each other. Public dormitories where you
sleep side by side for ever with beings you
hate or do not know. Reciprocal ferocity
of the painters and sculptors who murder
each other in the same museum with blows
of line and color. To make a visit once a
year, as one goes to see the graves of our
dead once a year, that we could allow! We
can even imagine placing flowers once a year
at the feet of the Gioconda! But to take
our sadness, our fragile courage and our
anxiety to the museum every day, that we
cannot admit! Do you want to poison yourselves?
Do you want to rot? What can you find in
an old picture except the painful contortions
of the artist trying to break uncrossable
barriers which obstruct the full expression
of his dream? To admire an old picture is
to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn
instead of casting it forward with violent
spurts of creation and action. Do you want
to waste the best part of your strength in
a useless admiration of the past, from which
you will emerge exhausted, diminished, trampled
on? Indeed daily visits to museums, libraries
and academies (those cemeteries of wasted
effort, calvaries of crucified dreams, registers
of false starts!) is for artists what prolonged
supervision by the parents is for intelligent
young men, drunk with their own talent and
ambition. For the dying, for invalids and
for prisoners it may be all right. It is,
perhaps, some sort of balm for their wounds,
the admirable past, at a moment when the
future is denied them. But we will have none
of it, we, the young, strong and living Futurists!
Let the good incendiaries with charred fingers
come! Here they are! Heap up the fire to
the shelves of the libraries!
Divert the canals to flood the cellars of
the museums! Let the glorious canvases swim
ashore! Take the picks and hammers! Undermine
the foundation of venerable towns! The oldest
among us are not yet thirty years old: we
have therefore at least ten years to accomplish
our task. When we are forty let younger and
stronger men than we throw us in the waste
paper basket like useless manuscripts! They
will come against us from afar, leaping on
the light cadence of their first poems, clutching
the air with their predatory fingers and
sniffing at the gates of the academies the
good scent of our decaying spirits, already
promised to the catacombs of the libraries.
But we shall not be there. They will find
us at last one winter's night in the depths
of the country in a sad hangar echoing with
the notes of the monotonous rain, crouched
near our trembling aeroplanes, warming our
hands at the wretched fire which our books
of today will make when they flame gaily
beneath the glittering flight of their pictures.
They will crowd around us, panting with anguish
and disappointment, and exasperated by our
proud indefatigable courage, will hurl themselves
forward to kill us, with all the more hatred
as their hearts will be drunk with love and
admiration for us. And strong healthy Injustice
will shine radiantly from their eyes. For
art can only be violence, cruelty, injustice.
The oldest among us are not yet thirty, and
yet we have already wasted treasures, treasures
of strength, love, courage and keen will,
hastily, deliriously, without thinking, with
all our might, till we are out of breath.
Look at us! We are not out of breath, our
hearts are not in the least tired. For they
are nourished by fire, hatred and speed!
Does this surprise you? it is because you
do not even remember being alive! Standing
on the world's summit, we launch once more
our challenge to the stars! Your objections?
All right! I know them! Of course! We know
just what our beautiful false intelligence
affirms: `We are only the sum and the prolongation
of our ancestors,' it says. Perhaps! All
right! What does it matter? But we will not
listen! Take care not to repeat those infamous
words! Instead, lift up your head! Standing
on the world's summit we launch once again
our insolent challenge to the stars!
|