Futurism

Futurism:
Histories and Afterlifes, from Tech Bro Mystics to AfroFuturism

On the occasion of the publication of:

Fragments of Totality:
Futurism, Fascism, and the Sculptural Avant-Garde
(2024, Yale University Press)

Futurism:
A Very Short Introduction
(2025, Oxford University Press)

by Ara H. Merjian, NYU

The author in conversation with:
Lauren P. Bernard, Columbia University
Anthony White, University of Melbourne

In ENGLISH

About Fragments of Totality
A new history of Futurism and its fraught ideological ambitions, centered on sculptural experimentation. As the first comprehensive avant-garde of the twentieth century, Italian Futurism sought to integrate modern life with every imaginable aesthetic medium. The detached materiality of sculpture offered a singular proving ground for the drive to merge art and existence. Sculpture’s theory and practice offers a distillation of Futurism’s larger aims and frustrations: a will to mechanize haunted by the tradition of craft; the liberation of flight burdened by mass and gravity; the lyrical mutiny of form chastened by the exigencies of design; and a dream of totality splintered by the contingency of the fragment. Centered on avant-garde sculpture in Italy and other European countries between the world wars, Fragments of Totality ventures a new history of Futurism and its fraught ideological ambitions. Illuminating understudied works by prominent artists like Giacomo Balla, Enrico Prampolini, Fortunato Depero, and Bruno Munari alongside the efforts of many lesser-known figures, this first major study of Futurist sculpture opens onto wider questions: from labor and leftist Futurism, to the politics of aesthetic autonomy, to the intersections between race, imperialism, and materials. The medium—and the idea—of sculpture sets into relief the demands of any project of modern cultural totality. Futurism’s shifting definitions of “plasticity” underscore the volatile political economy not only of interwar Italy, but also perhaps of a wider Western epoch.

About Futurism: A Very Short Introduction
From the motorcar to the radio, modern technology radically transformed urban life by the first decade of the twentieth century. As one of Western Europe’s least industrialized countries, Italy appeared impervious to such developments. It was this state of affairs at which the Futurist movement took aim. With its founding in 1909, the poet and impresario F.T. Marinetti called for a revitalization of aesthetic expression by means of “movement and aggression.” A growing cadre of Futurist painters, poets, authors, and musicians exchanged Italy’s cultural patrimony for new technologies, media, and metaphors, championing machine-propelled speed and its salutary hazards. Cubist painting, collage, and sculpture lent the Futurist campaign a revolutionary style to match its rhetorical fervor. Yet whereas Cubism remained a revolution of artistic form, Futurism sought to shatter the boundaries between art and life itself. Indeed, the movement’s challenge to twentieth-century culture lay not in any specific set of images or objects, but a more comprehensive revolution of sensibility. By the mid-1910s there circulated several dozen Futurist proclamations on everything from men’s clothing to set design, photography to film, dance to politics. That political impetus proved relentlessly paradoxical in origin and upshot. From its base in Milan, Futurist activity spread throughout the entire peninsula, while related movements emerged almost immediately in Moscow, Lisbon, Tiblisi, and Tokyo. Prefiguring and then propagandizing Fascist imperialism, Futurism also galvanized a range of progressive modernist phenomena. More than a century later, the “activist model” of the Futurist avant-garde remains deeply fraught in its historical implications.