The first comprehensive avant-garde of the twentieth-century, Italian Futurism sought to integrate modern life into every imaginable medium and format, from painting to politics, photography to dance, architecture to music. In particular, sculpture’s theory and practice offered a singular proving ground for the drive to merge art and existence. Sculpture 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.
A phenomenon as widespread and enduring as Futurism – outlasting Dada, Constructivism, the Bauhaus, and nearly every other ‘historical’ avant-garde it influenced in one way or another – is bound to be shot through with all manner of incongruities. Art historian Ara H. Merjian presents new publications on the Futurism movement and its relationship to twentieth century avant-garde aesthetics and modern politics. The talk will focus on the many paradoxes of Futurism and its afterlives: the tensions between technology and transcendentalism, matter and metaphysics, nationalism and internationalism. Notwithstanding the vast ideological chasm between F.T. Marinetti’s racist and imperialist imperatives and the phenomenon of Afrofuturism, what progressive elements might be salvaged from the movement?
Despite a rhetorical wish for cultural oblivion, Futurism persists as the paradigm – and the unconscious – of twentieth-century avant-gardism at large: an ideological crusade as much as an artistic project; a relentless assault upon the boundaries separating art from life; a drive for some invigorating futurity greater than the sum of its aesthetic and ideological parts.
Ara H. Merjian is Professor of Italian Studies at New York University, where he is an affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History. He has recently published two books on Futurism: Fragments of Totality: Futurism, Fascism, and the Sculptural Avant-Garde (Yale, 2024) and Futurism. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2025). He has written and edited several books, including Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting (2023), Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art and Neocapitalism (2020), and Blueprints and Ruins: Giorgio de Chirico and the Architectural Imagination from the Avant-Garde to Postmodernism (forthcoming 2025). He has taught at Harvard University, Stanford University, and the San Quentin State Penitentiary College Education Program.
In English
Organized by
Filippo Bosco
Image credit: Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Soccer Player, 1913, oil on canvas, 193.2 x 201 cm. The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York, via Wikipedia Commons.