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San Francisco to Celebrate Hundredth Year of Futurist Manifesto

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Written by Glenda Hydler   
Saturday, 25 July 2009 02:35

Fortunato Depero - Numeri 5-0, 1927; - Courtesy Studio 53 Arte, Rovereto, Italy

SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- From October 14 to 18, 2009, the legacy of Futurism—one of the seminal and most controversial avant-garde art movements of the twentieth century—will be celebrated in San Francisco in a citywide project entitled Metal + Machine + Manifesto = Futurism's First 100 Years. This year marks the hundredth anniversary of Futurism's founding document, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's "Manifesto of Futurism" (1909), which boldly denounced nineteenth-century nostalgia for the past and instead embraced the noise, technology, and rapid change of modern life. This series of performances, lectures, and events will examine Futurism's relationship to innovative artistic forms, radical and regressive politics, and performance work today.

Anton Giulio Bragaglia - Thais (still),1916 Courtesy George Eastman House Motion Picture Department Collection.The project also marks the West Coast preview of Performa 09, curator RoseLee Goldberg's acclaimed New York City biennial of visual art performance. In an unprecedented collaboration between Performa and a consortium of Bay Area cultural institutions (spearheaded by SFMOMA as part of its Live Art series), Metal + Machine + Manifesto will premiere two projects commissioned by Performa, offering the first chance to see them outside of New York.

"We've been talking with Performa about a cross-country collaboration between our institutions for some time," says Frank Smigiel, associate curator of public programs at SFMOMA. "We're incredibly pleased that San Francisco will be the first city to preview new work commissioned by Performa for its 2009 biennial. It's exactly this kind of innovative partnership among cultural organizations that seems pivotal for the success of each institution, and also for the benefit of the communities we serve."

Program highlights include a rare screening of the only surviving futurist film; a rowdy futurist banquet inspired by Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook (1932); decidedly unscholarly talks and a panel discussion among Futurism scholars; a concert of music written for futurist composer Luigi Russolo's bizarre instruments called intonarumori (noise intoners); a special lecture by literary critic Marjorie Perloff, author of the seminal text The Futurist Moment; an open-house printing and performance of an early futurist poem by Aldo Palazzeschi; and an exhibition of artworks by Italian futurist designer Fortunato Depero.

Futurism came into being with the appearance of a manifesto published by the poet Filippo Marinetti on the front page of the February 20, 1909, issue of Le Figaro. It was the very first manifesto of this kind. Marinetti summed up the major principles of the Futurists. He and others espoused a love of speed, technology and violence. Futurism was presented as a modernist movement celebrating the technological, future era. The car, the plane, the industrial town were representing the motion in modern life and the technological triumph of man over nature. Some of these ideas, specially the use of modern materials and technique, were taken up later by Marcel Duchamp (French).

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