Baldessari e Depero. Futurismi a Confronto
May 11 – July 13, 2008
Fondazione Dino Zoli
Forli(Emilia Romagna)
Related Events:
June 6 – Performance: Parole e Musica in liberta
June 18 – Futurist Performance
June 24 – Il Futurismo visto dai Bambini
This exhibit examines 70 works of Fortunato Depero and Roberto Marcello Baldessari in a chronological span of 30 years and which highlights the stylistic differences of these two Futurist artists.
Italy’s Divisionist Painters 1891-1910
June 18 – September 7, 2008
National Gallery, London
Approximately 60 paintings including Futurist works by artists Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini will be on display in order to illuminate the complex relationship between Italian Divisionism and Futurism in the early 20th century. Both movements shared an interest in new research regarding optics and the physics of light.
The Return of FUTURISTI by BellaLuna
May 31, 2008 – June 7, 2008
Frederic Wood Theatre
University of British Columbia
Directors Gerald Vanderwoude and Susan Bertoia bring together for the second time performers, designers and artists to re-create 23 Italian Futurist Sintesi in both English and Italian. Alongside these short plays based on original work by F.T. Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, and Giacomo Balla are original Futurist-inspired works by BellaLuna.
Video trailer on the blog Zero For Conduct
BellaLuna website
I’d never imagined a conversation where it would be declared that “Marinetti thought we could just rub the toast on the butter” but here we are, in the midst of the”Web of the Futurist”, 4 episodes which are part of the “Dodge Intrepid” series of radio programs by Mike Rubino and James Catullo. As Mike Rubino says in an article on PittsburghLive.com, “We’ve taken an obscure modern art movement and embodied it in this villain called The Futurist. It’s a hilarious way to learn about the movement and everything it stood for.”
Genius.
In “Web of the Futurist,” Dodge Intrepid, a librarian-cum-time-traveler, and his intern, Pluck Gumption, battle for their library’s honor against their Italian nemesis, The Futurist.
Episodes and updates are available as podcasts on iTunes and via their blog.
Dodge Intrepid blog
Listen to the Web of the Futurist trailer.mp3
Article on PittsburghLive
Luca Buvoli
Inner and Outer Space [group exhibition]
Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh
[April 26, 2008 – January 11, 2009]
Text below from the Mattress Factory Blog:
Based on the car crash that inspired Marinetti’s revelation of the Futurist Manifesto in 1909, Luca Buvoli has created a sculptural work that depicts the 1908 Fiat in motion, the instant before the impact. Marinetti’s famous “crash” has been the subject of various critical interpretations (some even questioning the accidental nature of the event, apparently all set up in a theatrical way). This project gave Buvoli the opportunity to explode myths of masculinity and velocity associated with Futurism. While utilizing a futuristic form for the piece, Buvoli is, at the same time, pointing out his ambivalence about the cult of heroism that has grown out of this and associated art/historical event(s).
The sculpture is depicted in futuristic form; there is dynamism created by the multiple views of the same vehicle, as if captured frozen in time and motion, moving along a trajectory. This is the moment when physical, aesthetic and ideological barriers were broken. The car is breaking the speed limit of what it can maintain to hold the road. The red steel and the automobile form refer to Pittsburgh’s industrial past and pre-eminence in this material’s fabrication (around the same years of Futurism’s foundation) while the fiberglass has a more organic quality. It is translucent almost like green algae, giving the car a more “natural” skin.
The car and its occupant, the artist (not represented here), have broken free of gravity and catapulted into the unknown. The sculpture is freed from the floor and takes flight off the floor and out the gallery window. Buvoli also sees associations between the form of the work—the multiple cars—one following another and the fascination humans have with charismatic leaders. The cars follow the lead car out the window, like a flock of sheep or the blind followers of a totalitarian regime.
Buvoli, who works in a variety of media, created a single-channel video for this exhibition. Ave Machina: Instant Before Incident uses what he calls a “meta-futuristic approach.” The video is an intricately edited collage of images. Using visual tricks taken from early experimental film syntax, Buvoli intercuts straight photography, superimposed hand-drawn animation, archival footage and interviews with the art historian Christine Poggi and cultural historian Jeffrey Schnapp as they discuss Futurism’s birth in relation to the desire for exhilaration, speed and projection both physical and psychological.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
11:30 a.m.
Futurism in Italy: Painting a Mechanical Universe
With Laura Beiles
Ms. Beiles gave an engaging and insightful tour of the Futurist works on display in the 5th floor Futurism gallery. The museum has recently reinstalled the space with new works by Severini and Boccioni’s The Laugh (pictured here).
Learn more about Adult Programs at MoMA
View all upcoming Gallery Talks
Review of “Noise + Speed” by Deborah Jowitt, originally published in the Village Voice, May 20, 2008
Hilary Easton + Company
Danspace at St. Mark’s Church, NYC
May 8 – 10, 2008
Hilary Easton approaches contemporary horrors by devising movement structures that mirror social disintegration. In Noise + Speed, she revisits the Italian Futurists, who, between two world wars, preached the violent disruption of art traditions, embraced technology, and glorified combat. Making use of texts such as F.T. Marinetti’s “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909) and seasoning their rants with Doris Humphrey’s prescriptive The Art of Making Dances, Easton attempts to show how oversimplification and institutionalization can corrupt theories so gradually that we fail to notice the malignancy. Noise + Speed may be her most complex and ambitious piece, and, engrossing as it is, it sometimes has a hard time conveying all that it must through dance.
Three of Marinetti’s artworks, enlarged, show black-painted words and letters exploding. Actor Steven Rattazzi delivers the texts, fairly screaming Marinetti’s call to destroy museums and libraries. The choreography focuses on conformity, erosion, and limited violence. Wearing drably handsome gray costumes by Madeleine Walach and eloquently lit by Carol Mullins, Easton’s expert dancers (Alexandra Albrecht, Michael Ingle, Joshua Palmer, Emily Pope-Blackman, and Sarah Young) often pause to check one another, very aware of any deviations from an apparently decreed pattern. Thomas Cabaniss’s terrifically effective original score for string ensemble, keyboard, and percussion underlines the tensions.
In the beginning, confined to corridors of light, the five performers wheel, lunge, and twist in shifting contrapuntal patterns. Everything looks deliberate, except the casual lifting of one person by another that presages more vicious handling. Rattazzi and Easton arrive together—he to articulate Luigi Russolo’s enthusiastic “The Art of Noise” (1913), she to dance. She’d like Rattazzi to understand her, to imitate her bold, sensate movements, and he—nimble, though clearly not a dancer—obliges fitfully. Later, Humphrey’s ideas about well-made dances inhibit Albrecht, Young, and Pope-Blackman—the first two usually in synch and Pope-Blackman exploring new territory. When Young thinks to join the latter, Albrecht calls her to order with an “Ahem!”
The dancing gradually becomes more distorted. The performers wiggle and shake. They turn on one another, and in the appalling duet that accompanies Valentine de Saint-Point’s 1912 manifesto on the righteousness of lust, Palmer attacks Albrecht and hauls her around in painful ways. After this, Easton stares sternly at Rattazzi, like a mother expecting an explanation from an errant child. She demonstrates some curious, wobbly movements, along with echoes of bold affirmative ones. Rattazzi tries to duplicate this deteriorated version of something that was once brave and new. In the end, drums are heard, and the dancers march, although not in lockstep. Marinetti, it must be remembered, embraced fascism. What “ism” do we dance to now?
Futurismo
20 February – 24 May 2009
Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome
To mark the 100th anniversary of the Manifesto – published by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in Paris daily Le Figaro on 20 February 1909 – the Scuderie del Quirinale, in conjunction with the Musée National d’Art Moderne / Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and with the Tate Modern in London, is planning to devote a major exhibition to Futurism to celebrate the movement’s historical and international role.
The exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale will be bringing together a remarkable number of works from the early Futurist period, weaving a path around a central core consisting of a careful and accurate reconstruction of the famous Futurist exhibition held at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris in February 1912. That spectacular exhibition caused quite a stir in its day, particularly on account of the striking contrast between the works on display there and everything else going on in the art world at the time. Indeed, it was only a matter of time before the notions of ‘speed’ and ‘dynamism’ spread to other countries and other continents, helping to reformulate the vocabulary of art and pegging it to a resolutely modern vision.
The Scuderie exhibition will also be shining the spotlight on the extraordinary cultural ties and the close formal relationship between Cubism and Futurism, with a wide selection of Cubist paintings bearing witness to the complex game of similarities and differences between the two artistic movements, right up to and including their formal cross-contamination and the development of Russian Cubo-Futurism and British Vorticism.
The coordinator for the Italian exhibition is Ester Coen, while Didier Ottinger will be coordinating the exhibition in Paris (October 2008 – January 2009) and Matthew Gale will be coordinating the event in London (June – September 2009). This unprecedented example of close cooperation among cultural institutes of such immense prestige and tradition is designed to underscore the thoroughly European cultural importance of this celebration. The Scuderie del Quirinale exhibition will be opened by the President of the Republic on 20 February 2009, thus marking in appropriately grand style the anniversary of the Futurist Manifesto 100 years after its first publication.
American Academy in Rome Prizes 2008-2009
Paul Mellon Post-Doctoral Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies
MARGARET FISHER
Video Director and Publisher, Second Evening Art / BMI
Through the eyes of children: a re-assessment of the role of futurism in the development of early Italian Radio under Fascism
Italian futurists who broadcast and theorized about radio from 1929 to 1941 are often credited with an historic role in shaping the style and character of early Italian Radio. Children’s programs offer a stunning view of the progressive agenda of early Italian Radio before futurist involvement with broadcasting, and an excellent vantage point from which to open new lines of inquiry into futurist radio activity and writing. To establish the condition of Italian Radio before the futurists, I will examine Italian Radio’s pioneering phase which partnered children with technology. I will compile a data base of broadcast activities and texts related to both groups, children and futurists, and publish a bi-lingual sourcebook of previously unavailable texts and scripts. With this foundation in place, I will continue with a critical overview and essays on special topics: child protagonists in futurist radio dramas; government policy and futurism; the global vision of early Italian Radio as one prototype for the Internet; and a survey of the embrace of futurism by early Italian Radio to the present day.
Spring 2009 Semester
Graduate Level course at Wesleyan University
“Fascism, Futurism, Feminism: Forces of Change in 20th.-c Italy”
tought by Prof. Ellen Nerenberg
This course investigates three forces at work in Italy in the first half of the 20th century. We explore Italian Fascism, Futurism, and Feminism through a variety of media, including literary, cinematic, and artistic expressions and consider each movement in its socio-historical context. How does the radical annihilation of standard mores and culture proposed by the Futurists help pave the way for Italian Fascism? How does feminism in the first half of the century offer examples of resistance to both Fascism and Futurism? The texts we will consider include the paintings, sculpture, manifestoes and poetry of Futurism; Sibilla Aleramo’s early feminist novel Una donna as well as the writings of other Italian feminists resistant to the ultra violence and misogyny of Futurism and the instrumentalization of gender under Italian Fascism. We explore similarly varied texts representative of the Fascist era: examples of rationalist architecture and urban planning, Alberto Moravia’s novel of social mores during Fascism, Gli indifferenti, selections from political prisoner of the Regime Antonio Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere and Lettere dal carcere, and at least one film made under the conditions (economic, industrial and propagandistic) of Fascism. Our goal is an understanding of the ideological dis/connections between Fascism, Futurism and Feminism in the Italian collective unconscious in an historical juncture of profound social, economic, and political transformations. By focusing on the interconnections of these forces we strive for a panoramic understanding of Italy as it moves to embrace modernity in the first half of the last century
Italian Futurism News 