Giovanna Qu – Assignment 3 for September 16

Futurism was an artistic and social movement founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti In Italy in the early 20^thcentury. His Futurist Manifesto celebrates speed, youth, danger, violence and war. Love is expressed for objects like cars, airplanes and the latest in industrial technology. He wants to eradicate libraries, museums, history, and anything considered antique to be freed from the obsolete past and fully embrace the notion of Futurism. Women and feminism are looked down upon as impediments to Futurism. Although Futurism is quite progressive in terms and celebrating technology and futuristic ideas, I find that violence and hate towards history and women are regressive ideas and should not be such. History and feminism do not obstruct the progress of technology because they are part of how technological achievements came to be. 

In Russia, Aleksandr Rodchenko, alongside with Varvara Stepanova and Aleksei Gan, was a founding member of the Constructivist Group. Their manifesto calls for artists and designers to abandon the traditional representational arts and embrace new technologies to create work for functionalism and mass production. Art making is professional labor like any other and artists should use everyday materials like metal and wood to create objects for the mass. Artists are at the center of a new world dominated by technology. 

El Lissitzky was an ambassador of Constructivism. He traveled across Europe and the U.S.A. in the early 1920s and spread the ideologies of Constructivism. In the essay “Our Book” he complains about how the technology of art books has not and can’t be developed any further than it already has. A book is a cover with a spine and pages and nothing else can be done about it. Artists are like books; they are limited to creating artwork to please the eyes with no real function. With the advancement and continuous development of digital technology, Lissitzky sees the internet as the solution to freeing artists to create for purposes other than a painting for someone’s viewing pleasure.