For this next instalment of the bower books workshop series, we will be looking at Futurism as a branch of modernism, but also as a social theory of modern life. One that was built around speed, destruction, invention and the refusal of the past.
These are guided, interactive and discussion-led workshops rather than lectures. Together we will read and respond to manifestos, poetry, artworks, films, propaganda, music, advertising and other cultural artefacts. We will also have a number of interactive elements; food, play, engage. There is no prior knowledge of Futurism required.
There will be three sessions in total, attendance of one, two or all three is entirely up to you. Tickets will be available for Zoom and in-person.
Sessions will be held on Tuesdays, across the 22nd of September, 29th of September & the 6th of October. They will run for two hours, 6pm to 8pm, in Brunswick, Melbourne.
Information on the workshop below.
Emerging in the early twentieth century amid new machines, cities, mass media, political upheaval and the gathering violence of modern Europe, the Futurists wanted far more than a new style of painting or poetry, they wanted to re-haul everyday life so it aligned with a world they believed had already fundamentally changed. They touched on everything they could to do so; food, noise, architecture, gender, war, technology, leisure and revolution, all were subject to the vision.
Beginning with the manifesto, we will look at the movement’s distinctive language of provocation and disruption, before moving outward into its attempts to reinvent ordinary experience: what people ate, heard, built, wore and did. The final session turns toward politics, following the radically different paths Futurist ideas took through Italian Fascism, Russian revolutionary culture, gender politics and competing ideas of social transformation.
session one | manifesto
Futurism announced itself through one of the twentieth century’s great rhetorical technologies: the manifesto.
We will read early Italian and Russian Futurist manifestos by figures including F. T. Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo, David Burliuk, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov, asking how the manifesto became both an artistic form and a weapon.
Why does Futurism speak in commands? What does provocation allow that ordinary argument does not? And what kind of world requires its artists to declare war on the one already existing?
Alongside the texts, we will look at Futurist painting, sculpture, typography, film and poetry, tracing the movement as it develops across Italy and Russia.
session two | the revolution of everyday life
If Futurism had remained a style of painting, it would have failed on its own terms.
The Futurists wanted to redesign ordinary existence itself. Through texts including The Futurist Cookbook, The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe and Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noises, this session moves from the gallery into the kitchen, the street, the home and the ear.
We will consider Futurist experiments in food, sound, design, advertising and leisure, including listening to reconstructions of Russolo’s extraordinary noise instruments and — pending the survival of everyone involved — sampling several Futurist dishes.
What happens when avant-garde aesthetics become instructions for living? Where does utopian experimentation tip into absurdity, coercion or spectacle? And what might these experiments tell us about our own attempts to make everyday life feel adequate to technological change?
session three | politics and legacy
Futurism’s demand for cultural revolution quickly became political.
In Italy, Futurism became entangled with nationalism, militarism and Fascism. Elsewhere, Futurist and avant-garde movements aligned themselves with communism and revolutionary transformation. Women within and around the movement responded to its notorious misogyny in ways that complicate any simple account of Futurist politics.
Reading texts from Marinetti, the Soviet Left Front of the Arts and Valentine de Saint-Point, we will examine the political fractures running through Futurism: revolution versus reaction, emancipation versus domination, destruction versus creation.
The series concludes by returning to the present. Futurism understood modernity as a condition of permanent acceleration: technologies change, inherited institutions lag behind, and people are left trying to invent forms of life capable of keeping pace. A century later, that problem has hardly disappeared.
