Filippo Marinetti’s breathlessly excited Futurist manifesto is one of the founding texts of modern art. Rooted in rabid disgust for the past and an equally crazed enthusiasm for the future, it is an inflamed paean to the iconoclastic energies of the early twentieth century. Composed as a series of manically effusive ejaculations, it is a text that aspires to the condition of a multiple orgasm.
The author begins by recalling a sleepless vigil followed by an excursion, at dawn, into the centre of Milan: “An immense pride swelled in our hearts because we felt ourselves alone at that hour, alert and upright like magnificent beacons and advance guard posts ... alone with the stokers working before the infernal fires of the great ships; alone with the black phantoms that poke into the red-hot bellies of locomotives launched at mad speed...”
Various urban adventures follow, including a sado-masochistic coupling between a man and a double-decker tram, as well as a car crash caused by two weaving cyclists which leaves Marinetti – every inch the Toad of Toad Hall of Italian modernism – briefly trapped under his car in a state of bemused ecstasy. After all that comes the manifesto proper: “We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched with a new form of beauty, the beauty of speed ... a race-automobile which seems to rush over exploding powder is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace... There is no beauty except in struggle ... No masterpiece without the stamp of aggressiveness... We will glorify war – the only true hygiene of the world ... We will destroy museums, libraries .. We will sing the multicoloured and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals... greedy stations devouring smoking serpents ... factories hanging from the clouds by the threads...
The author begins by recalling a sleepless vigil followed by an excursion, at dawn, into the centre of Milan: “An immense pride swelled in our hearts because we felt ourselves alone at that hour, alert and upright like magnificent beacons and advance guard posts ... alone with the stokers working before the infernal fires of the great ships; alone with the black phantoms that poke into the red-hot bellies of locomotives launched at mad speed...”
Various urban adventures follow, including a sado-masochistic coupling between a man and a double-decker tram, as well as a car crash caused by two weaving cyclists which leaves Marinetti – every inch the Toad of Toad Hall of Italian modernism – briefly trapped under his car in a state of bemused ecstasy. After all that comes the manifesto proper: “We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched with a new form of beauty, the beauty of speed ... a race-automobile which seems to rush over exploding powder is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace... There is no beauty except in struggle ... No masterpiece without the stamp of aggressiveness... We will glorify war – the only true hygiene of the world ... We will destroy museums, libraries .. We will sing the multicoloured and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals... greedy stations devouring smoking serpents ... factories hanging from the clouds by the threads...
