Politics as art

Abstract

Italian Futurism emerged in the first decade of this century as a movement of both art historical and political significance. Led by impresario poet and propagandist F T. Marinetti, Futurism inaugurated the avantgardist attack on the autonomous status of art in modern bourgeois society, the repudiation of tradition, and the emphasis on formal innovation that would characterize modernist movements for decades to follow. As Renato Poggioli said, "the Futurist moment belongs to all the avant-gardes and not only to the one named for it."2 The specific political affiliations and activities of the Futurists are by now well known. In "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" of 1909, Marinetti upheld the glory of war, "the world's only hygiene," as an announcement of the imminent crisis that would reveal the radical foundation of a new social and aesthetic world order. Futurist art, Marinetti declared, would act as an incendiary device, upholding the new values of speed, destruction, and violence necessary for a new age of Italian national grandeur. Active propagandists and campaigners for Italy's entry into the first World War, members of the movement formed a Futurist volunteer group to the front where several were wounded and killed, as Marinetti himself often boasted.3 In 1919, Marinetti not only led a group of arditi in the burning of the offices of the Milanese Socialist newspaper Avanti but appeared, as a member of the Central Committee alongside Mussolini, on the first list of Fascist candidates. In 1929, Marinetti accepted the prestigious appointment from Mussolini to the Accademia d'Italia.4