Marinetti’s Manifesto Futurista has this anarchic energy and I want to talk about it for a bit simply because of how brash it was. From what I understand, he speaks of driving a car and crashing it in a ditch while the world looks on in horror at the scene. He speaks of speed and power, the rejection of the past, and this embracing of machinery, violence, and youth. My assumption is that he believe this was the future of art and intelligence. He believed technology wasn’t just going to shape the future, it was the future and with technology came the future of rashness and chaos. He says that “beauty exists only in struggle” as if the true art of the future can only be captured in wars, anarchy, and completely rejecting the knowledge that came before. There is this audacious aggression through out the entire manifesto.
Marinetti, Rodchenko, and Lissitzky all had a similar view point on 1) technology being the future of art and design and 2) the necessity to push way from the art knowledge of the past. I do believe however that Lissitzky’s push from the old into the new is the least violent of the 3. He speaks about the past in a tone that’s almost informative, as if to show the reader “this is where we came from and why”. Rodchenko speaks of the past in a way that draws the line a little more clearly, but he speaks less about the past being something inherently negative, and focuses more on the vision of constructivism. Marinetti, however, has a “burn it all” mentality to the past as if there’s nothing to learn or pull from.
I think all 3 artists knew that technology was going to change the world. I enjoyed Marinetti’s manifesto the most, but I didn’t agree with most of it. I do believe that about 100 years later we can clearly see how much technology has become not just the future, but our every day present. This whole world operates on speed because of the modern technology we have. The world has moved faster than ever before, and in a lot of ways the energy of Marinetti’s manifesto is the energy our world operates in today. However, I think the violence that is almost idolized in this passage is unnecessary and doesn’t necessarily benefit anyone. I also think it’s stupid to think that just because you don’t want to draw knowledge from the past you feel the need to destroy it all and hate it so much. Even Rodchenko recognizes that the tools of the line, the grid, and the point aren’t “new” concepts, they’ve just been rediscovered and used in a new way that embraces the mechanics of [at the time] modern technology. Lissitzky’s Our Book was the least interesting to me, even a little confusing, but I found it very interesting because in being able to talk about the patterns and development of art and technology in the past, we’re able to see how thing’s ended up playing out after. We have the answer for the next one to two question marks that he proposes on “Inventions in the Field of Thought-Communication” because we live in an age that has given us screens and audio books, and thus see “the new fundamental inventions in the field of book production”.
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