Two of the most representative authors of European and Anglo-American modernism, Eugenio Montale and Wallace Stevens, can shed new light on the complex intermedial relationship between cinema and poetry. The analysis of their poems as well as the reading of their notes on cinema reveal the multifaceted relationship of modernist poetry (a supposedly conservative and elitist movement) with mass culture. Indeed, this relationships much more ambivalent than is usually thought.

In her 1926 essay, The Cinema, Virginia Woolf claims that ‘some residue of visual emotion which is of no use either to painter or to poet may still await the cinema’ (381). Similarly, Montale and Stevens seem to understand that new media can shape new imaginaries and therefore modify the ones built with already existent techniques. Although the relationship between Modernist poetry and cinema has become a central topic in the last few decades of literary debate, we still seem unable to grasp something: that is, the emergence of a new medium does not always result in a polarised reception of the latter (i.e. avant-garde vs arrière-garde, futurism vs modernism).

The two authors’ concern for the effects cinema has over its spectatorship allows their reader to appreciate the way new cultural environments affect one’s poetics. ‘Once irrational vitalism and the new technique of communication will have reached the highest level of their development’, writes Montale in 1956, ‘art will be arranged on two levels: a utilitarian and almost sporty art for the great masses; and a true art, not too different from the one of the past […]. Only those who are isolated will be able to speak, only they will be able to communicate. The others – the men of mass communication – will repeat, echo, vulgarize the words of the poets. (1996b: 56). In a similar way to Woolf’s “common reader”, Montale and Stevens ask their audiences to both unravel the complexity, if not the difficulty, of their poems and to participate in preserving it. While these authors formally refuse that they are courting an élite of highbrow readers, they nevertheless show great contempt towards larger, middlebrow audiences. They do not ignore, however, that it is mostly modern mass audiences that are responsible for deciding the evolution of a medium and not the other way round: poetry, just as cinema, can thus be seen as a moment in the ever-changing process of organising the imagination of its own audience.

Is this modern mass audiences?

Hartford’s Motion Picture Palace (Hartford Collection, Hartford Public Library)

L'articolo “Poi, come s’uno schermo”: Modernist Poetry and Cinema sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

The most engaging discourse on the social function of garments is found in Gadda’s major work, La cognizione del dolore, first published in serialised form between 1938 and 1941. Set in the imaginary South American country of Maradagàl, an allusive criticism of fascist Italy, the novel establishes an opposition between neurotic individuality, embodied by the intellectual protagonist, Gonzalo, as Gadda’s alter ego, and a boastfully grotesque society. This dichotomy, reinforced through Gonzalo’s vestimentary choices, is reminiscent of the struggle in fashion between “individual difference” and “social homogeneity” theorised by sociologist Georg Simmel in his 1905 treatise, Philosophie der Mode (Simmel 2020: 202). Consumed by a mysterious melancholia, the highly civilised Gonzalo is extremely attentive to his immaculate wardrobe, comprised of a formal suit, custom-made shirts, suspenders to avoid irregularities in the fit of his pants, and a pair of pointed-toe, lace-up shoes made of the blackest goat leather. A master of sartorial subtraction, he expresses a firm repudiation of the pullover sweaters, which are certainly a subtle reference to Mussolini’s late-1920s informal style (Billeri 2019: 92).

In a remarkable passage of the novel, Gonzalo also evokes the social scene with which he feels incompatible, a universe populated by ostentatious parvenues who closely resemble the members of the Lombard rising bourgeoisie. Adorned in lavish evening clothes, they conceitedly exhibit a hyperbolic inventory of ornaments, such as “fripperies, toggles of cornelian or polished bone, assorted haberdashery.” Silk merchants and pompous engineers cannot wait “to put on their heavy furs from beyond the polar circle, of the strangest bears, sables, seals from Pitt Land, kangaroos from Australasia, and opossum” (Gadda 2017: 147-148). In his sarcastic depiction of sartorial kitsch, Gadda focuses purposefully on the phenomenon of men’s furs, which had come into vogue in Italy at the beginning of the 20^th century, when fur coats began to be produced for car drivers. Quickly adopted by men of high society to be worn over their dinner jackets (Figure 2), furs were indeed made from the pelts of various exotic animals heavily exploited by Milanese furriers (Municchi 1988: 14-36; Figure 3).

In Gadda’s sociology of fashion, an unusual preoccupation emerges with the modalities and appearance of men’s clothing. In the context of Italian literature, the singularity of Gonzalo’s obsessive minimalism brings Gadda’s reflection on masculine apparel interestingly closer to an influential, although controversial, antecedent, that of Adolf Loos’s essays on the dangers of ornamentation. In writings such as “Men’s Fashion” (1898) and the seminal “Ornament and Crime” (written in 1908 but first published in Italian by the magazine Casabella in January 1934; Figure 4), Loos aims his modernist battle at Art Nouveau decorativism while promoting a unilateral, Eurocentric celebration of sobriety and understatement in fashion, seen as the peak of modern civilisation. Loos equates dressing well with the adoption of a correct dress code exemplified by ascetic British standards in menswear (Loos 1993: 10-12). Gadda’s rejection of exhibitionism and ornamentation, which is paradoxically counterposed by his baroque literary style, should thus be understood within the frame of a wider debate on stylistic purity initiated decades earlier by certain theorists of European modernism.

* This contribution draws upon my doctoral dissertation on “Fashion and Literary Modernism in Italy: Palazzeschi, Marinetti, Gadda,” defended in 2019 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and currently under revision for publication.

Figure 1                                                                                                                                                Figure 2

Figure 1) Gadda (second from left) upon his departure for Argentina on November 30, 1922. Full page from Fabio Pierangeli, Carlo Emilio Gadda. Turin: Gribaudo, 1995.

Figure 2) A men’s evening fur coat with an astrakhan collar. From the 1907 privately printed catalogue of Sartoria “E. Giorgetti,” Milan.

Figure 3                                                                                                               Figure 4

Figure 3) Advertisement for the Milanese furrier “Brivio Giuseppe,” early 1920s. Courtesy Civica Raccolta Stampe Bertarelli, Milan.
Figure 4) Index page of the January 1934 issue of Casabella, with Adolf Loos’s “Ornamento e delitto.” Courtesy Mondadori Media S.p.a.

Bibliography

Billeri, Matteo. 2019. “Gadda, Mussolini e l’orango. Una fonte per Eros e Priapo,” Paragone, vol. LXX, no. 144-145-146, August-December, pp. 83-95.

Bruno, Giuliana. 2002. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso.

Gadda, Carlo Emilio. 2017. The Experience of Pain, translated by Richard Dixon. New York: Penguin.

Loos, Adolf. 1993. Parole nel vuoto, translated by Sonia Gessner. Milan: Adelphi.

Maraini, Dacia. 1973. E tu chi eri? Interviste sull’infanzia. Milan: Bompiani.

Municchi, Anna. 1988. Homo in pelliccia. Modena: Zanfi.

Simmel, Georg. 2020. Stile moderno: saggi di estetica sociale, edited by Barbara Carnevali and Andrea Pinotti. Turin: Einaudi.

L'articolo Ornament as Crime: Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Sociology of Fashion sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Like the French naturalists, Verga adapted his novelle for the stage. This intersemiotic translation from page to stage had a significant impact on the portrayal of his female characters. As soon as his stories are transposed from the narrative genre to the theatrical (a genre which predominantly relies on speech), more emphasis is inevitably placed on the characters’ ability to articulate their thoughts, and subsequently, their individual voices – and right to express an opinion – get ‘louder’. While men have been typically associated with words and women with silence, the additional use of dialogue introduced in theatrical adaptations enable women to break away from their traditional identification as the antithesis of logocentrism. As a result of this shift in emphasis, Verga’s theatre thus prioritizes the female perspective – a perspective embodied by the grande attrice Eleonora Duse who first interpreted his plays: Cavalleria rusticana (1884) and In portineria (1885). Through close comparison of Duse’s performances and that of her contemporaries, I show that, at a time when Italy still lacked a common spoken language, the grandi attori were able to exploit their use of gestures to break linguistic barriers and, together with Verga’s scripts, to shape Italy’s cultural identity in and outside the peninsula.

So in relation to one of the research questions posed for Interart/Intermedia (that is: how did artists – in this case Verga and Duse – push the boundaries between the arts in the 20th Century?), I would argue through theatre translation. The intriguing process that Verga’s novelle underwent when adapted into plays coincided with the emergent ‘new women’ debates epitomised by the heroines in Ibsen’s oeuvre, especially in A Doll’s House (1879). Indeed, early actresses who performed Verga’s ‘new’ female stage roles, above all the divina Duse, specifically chose to perform unconventional roles like Ibsen’s Nora at a time when women were gaining a political voice of their own – both on and off stage. My book thus investigates the wider cultural context which saw the rise of a ‘new’ type of female stage role in order to help assess how Ibsen might have influenced the development of Verga’s theatre, drawing attention to the ‘real’ women who are instrumental in the passage from page to stage. Without the presence of Duse, characters like Nora might not have been able to make their voices heard in auditoriums around the globe, and who knows how Verga’s (and later Pirandello’s) newly vocalised female figures would have developed had it not been for theatre translation and the emergence of Nora’s radical voice?

(Presented at the International Conference Interart/Intermedia Experimentation in Italy through the Ages, Royal Holloway, 12-13 April 2019)

L'articolo Verga and Duse: Shaping an Italian Identity on Stage sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

In the midst of the Second World War, a series of military defeats laid bare old rivalries within the Axis alliance, such that the patronage of prestigious cultural events became a crucial site of competition between fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. In autumn 1942, the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture sponsored a festival of contemporary operas and ballets scheduled in both Milan and Rome. According to Carlo Gatti, the artistic director of La Scala, this event demonstrated the ‘stupendous power of Italian musical Art’ in establishing a ‘new cultural order’ in Europe.

The festival took place from 3 October to 10 November 1942, and, although the majority of the composers performed were Italian, included four foreign works: Berg’s Wozzeck, Honegger’s Amphion, Orff’s Carmina Burana and Bartók’s ballet The Miraculous Mandarin. The choreographer of Hungarian origin, Aurél M. Milloss, who had emigrated from Germany to Italy in the mid-1930s, was one of the main protagonists of the festival. Having successfully directed the Italian premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1941, he decided to stage Wozzeck in Rome and The Miraculous Mandarin in Milan.

Musicologists have long pointed out the exceptional significance of the Italian premiere of Wozzeck – at that time Berg’s music was virtually forbidden in Nazi Germany, following the scandal provoked by the 1934 Berlin premiere of the Lulu Suite. The premiere of Bartók’s ballet, however, could be considered just as much an act of cultural dissent from Nazi hegemony as the performance of Berg’s opera. In my doctoral thesis, completed in 2017 at the EHESS (Paris), I investigated Bartók’s political reception in Italy. The performances of Bartók’s stage works during the fascist period (i.e. the opera Bluebeard’s Castle in 1938 and the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin in 1942) constitute excellent examples of intermedial practices and noteworthy points of reference in Italian cultural history.

After its world premiere in Cologne in 1926, The Miraculous Mandarin had been banned by the mayor of the city, the later famous Konrad Adenauer, for the ‘amorality’ of its story, which revolves around physical violence, murder and sex. Subsequent attempts to perform the ‘pantomime’ (as the work is described on its title page) were unsuccessful, and during the 1930s the Mandarin was known only through its orchestral suite. In 1936, after hearing the suite in Vienna, Milloss had the idea to transform the work into a full-scale ballet and even met the composer in Budapest to advocate a new staging. This opportunity came true only on 12 October 1942 in Milan by virtue of the support of the fascist authorities.

It is worth noting that, despite his hostility to fascist violence, Bartók had made many concert tours to Mussolini’s Italy: the last one in December 1939. In the early 1940s, however, after his move to New York, the composer adopted an openly anti-Nazi stance and momentarily became the president of an organisation lobbying for an anti-Nazi Hungarian government-in-exile. The author of the ballet’s libretto, Melchior Lengyel, had also emigrated to the United States in 1937. What is more, in 1942, Ernst Lubitsch adapted one of Lengyel’s stories for his anti-Nazi satirical film To Be or Not to Be.

Fig. 1 Aurél M. Milloss as The Mandarin, Teatro alla Scala, 1942 – Still photography

Courtesy of Archivio Aurél M. Milloss, Istituto per il Teatro e il Melodramma, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice

The Milanese premiere of The Miraculous Mandarin proved to be a success and, according to the conductor János Ferencsik, received ten curtain calls. The press unanimously exalted the soloists’ performance: Attilia Radice as the Girl and Milloss in the title role (Fig. 1). In the art magazine Emporium, the sets and costumes by the futurist painter Enrico Prampolini were courageously likened to Robert Wiene’s expressionist chef-d’oeuvre The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Fig. 2). Furthermore, in the musical guide printed on the occasion of the premiere by the publisher La Lampada, the musicologist Luigi Rognoni glorified the ‘coherence of Bartók’s moral world’: Bartók belonged to those artists who have tried ‘to affirm and defend the most noble and civil human aspirations.’

Fig. 2 Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin, Teatro alla Scala, 1942 – Still photography

Courtesy of Aurél M. Milloss, Istituto per il Teatro e il Melodramma, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice

Can the Italian premiere of Bartók’s Mandarin in 1942 be understood as a political gesture or even (as suggested above) an act of cultural dissent? One could emphasise the fact that Bartók’s Mandarin shared a triple bill with Orff’s Carmina Burana and Honegger’s Amphion: the presence of a contemporary work by a German composer on the programme may well have helped to deflect attention away from the political impact of Bartók’s work. Nevertheless, the decision to perform a scandalous expressionist masterpiece by an anti-Nazi composer – even one who had emigrated to an enemy country – in a world-famous theatre, and in the midst of a human catastrophe, can hardly be considered as an insignificant act. It is worth remembering that on 24 October 1942, two weeks after Mandarin’s premiere, Milan was bombed twice by British Royal Air Force. In the same year the anti-fascist movement had started to re-organise and in October there was a spontaneous strike in the Milanese factory of Magnaghi. From this perspective, the Milanese Mandarin suggests not only the exuberance of the Italian cultural landscape in a catastrophic moment of its history, but could be interpreted as a significant event for the cultural legitimisation of the Italian resistance movement.

*I would like to thank Ben Earle for his help in revising the text

Bibliography:

Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. 2001. Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bloch, Ernst. 1991. ‘Jugglers’ Fair beneath the Gallows’ (1937). In Heritage of Our Times, translated by Neville and Stephen Plaice, 75–80. Cambridge: Polity.

Earle, Ben. 2013. Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gatti, Carlo, ed. 1942. Stagione di opere contemporanee. Milan: Istituto di alta cultura.

Palazzetti, Nicolò. 2016. “The Bartók Myth. Fascism, Modernism and Resistance in Italian Musical Culture.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 47 (2): 289– 314.

———. “Bartók against the Nazis. The Italian Premieres of Bluebeard’s Castle (1938) and The Miraculous Mandarin (1942).” In The Routledge Companion to Music under German Occupation, edited by Erik Levi and David Fanning, forthcoming. Routledge: London.

Randi, Eva. 1942. “La stagione di opere contemporanee alla Scala. La realizzazione scenica.” Emporium, no. 576: 545–47.

Rognoni, Luigi. 1942. “Il Mandarino meraviglioso.” In Carmina Burana. Il Mandarino meraviglioso. Anfione, by Massimo Mila and Luigi Rognoni, 15–30. Milan: La Lampada.

L'articolo Modernist Art during the Catastrophe: The Italian Premiere of Bartók’s Ballet ‘The Miraculous Mandarin’ in 1942 sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

In the last few years especially, the interest on Munari has been growing internationally, as the significant number of recent exhibitions, publications and educational initiatives on his work testifies. Capturing this resurgent attention, Bruno Munari. The Lightness of Art collects eleven newly commissioned essays by international scholars, organized around four thematic sections. The first section, Experiment and the Avant-Garde (with essays by Merjian, White and Rubino) engages with the key role of experimentation in Munariâ€s career not just as an aesthetic and conceptual guiding principle, but also as a mode of making and thinking. The second section, Designing and Subverting the Page (with contributions by Schnapp, Pelizzari and Zanoletti) focuses on Munariâ€s incessant and multifaceted engagement with the page, as both a physical space upon which visual graphic elements can be arranged and as a privileged medium for the communication of ideas. The third section, The Everyday Spectacle of Art (including essays by Lucchi, Nardelli and Antonello), is about Munariâ€s fascination with the seemingly opposed and contradictory poles of the spectacular and the everyday, with which the artist dealt throughout his entire career. Finally, the last section, Political Munari (Golan and Kittler), offers revealing and provoking answers to an issue which to this date has often been rejected or considered not pertinent to an unaffiliated artist, who generally strove to present himself as quintessentially a-political.

As the title Bruno Munari. The Lightness of Art suggests, these four overlapping thematics are unified by one common thread: the levitas that characterizes Munariâ€s opus. As the monograph proposes, it is ‘lightness†above all that encapsulates Munariâ€s persona and work most effectively and concisely. As Italo Calvino understands it in his posthumous American Lessons, ‘lightness†is not frivolity nor superficiality, but agility and lack of worthiness. It is not a lack, but a kind, of thoughtfulness, which aims at the ‘subtraction of weightâ€. This Calvino-like concept of removal of weight powerfully evokes one of Munariâ€s guiding principles and crucial objectives. Series of works such as the Macchine inutili (Useless Machines), Concavo-convesso (Concave-Convex), the Libri illeggibili (Illegible Books), the Sculture da viaggio (Travel Sculptures), not to mention the light projections, films and design projects, hint to the fact that for Munari, too, the subtraction of weight was a consistent preoccupation. Something that he pursued literally and materially, as well as figuratively and conceptually.

The empirical ‘Lightness of Art†offered by Munariâ€s emphatic rejection of sculptureâ€s traditional heavy materials in favour of humble everyday materials such as cardboard and paper, and the ephemeral and impalpable materiality of light itself as a crucial component – if not a central medium – of his works, is also an intellectual and conceptual quality. Lightness as a mode of thoughtfulness in the sense evoked by Calvino, through which Munari performs a radical critique of the very category and the objects of art.

L'articolo Material and Intellectual Lightness: Reading Bruno Munari à la Calvino sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

During the first two decades of the 20^th century, in Italy and elsewhere, aesthetic communication and artistic language started to depart radically from old forms. Futurist artists were at the forefront of this movement in their refusal of traditional forms of artistic expression, striving to overcome the past. However, this did not necessarily imply inventing a new future. It became soon clear that Futurism could encourage artists to deal with those issues that would later become the basis of contemporary literature, e.g. the speed, globalisation and industrialisation of literature. The advent of Futurism led to a new avant-garde period that would later allow authors to search and subvert ‘old traditions†as well as seek authorial ‘multiplicationâ€. This change was felt as necessary since it would help the literary world to survive the frantic innovations that those years brought about, amplifying speed in everyday life and especially in writing.

Some futurist examples

Futurist poetry, painting and theatre are by now well known; in contrast, Futurist narrative and co-written novelistic production in particular have received limited attention. The peculiar way of writing and the themes dealt with by Futurist authors helped to make the complex phenomenon of authorial depersonalisation easier to grasp. This process was frequently used by Futurist authors, allowing them to merge single and multiple selves. They created plenty of Futurist co-authored novels. Among the many co-authored novels, I have selected two which I will illustrate two case studies below.

Un ventre di donna: romanzo chirurgico (1919), a joint epistolary novel by F.T. Marinetti and E. Robert. This novel is based on an event that occurred to Enif Robert during World War I. She had to undergo a hysterectomy, which prompted her to write about this painful experience and the several operations related to it. Marinetti, at that time on the battlefield at the Italian front, wrote letters, warnings, slogans and suggestions to his friend Robert so as to comfort her while she was forced to lay in bed. As a result, narration in this novel proceeds according to the scheme of dialogic narrative, meaning that one author replies to the other so as to complete and transform the text. Consequently, there is a continuous flow and exchange of information, which contribute to a change in perspective; in other words, one single narrative subject can be transformed and shaped according to the point of view from which an author looks at it. This is a literary work written by a man and a woman which shows its two authors†differences in terms of style, even though they both belong to the same avant-garde movement. Some parts display a strong subversive, experimental style including the words-in-freedom technique; conversely, some other parts convey some sort of intimacy. The two authors actively contributed to writing the text and this is demonstrated by the fact the it is based on a conversation that engages and helps both authors to develop their ideology. With Marinettiâ€s help, Enif Robert wrote about her relationship with pain and the way her intimacy was violated. Marinetti helps Robert with his letters, advising her to accept his ‘futurist cure†in order to overcome a difficult moment and, at the same time, to become a ‘real†woman.

Il Novissimo segretario galante: 400 lettere dâ€amore per ogni evenienza (1928) by I Dieci is a ‘Handbook of Seductionâ€, a practical guide, imbued with malice and irony, which explains to the hypothetical reader the futuristic techniques to succeed in seducing a woman. The guide is made of twenty hypothetical exchanges between lovers, in which are explained the ways to woe a woman through personal tales and experiences. Even if only the first volume was written, I Dieciâ€s original plan was to write six different books representing the stages of love: approaches, first dance, jealousy, love troubles, memories, breaking up.

Further reading:

F. Medaglia, La scrittura a quattro mani, Lecce-Brescia, Pensa MultiMedia, 2014.

L'articolo Collaborative Artistic Theory and Practice. ‘Le ragioni dei gruppi’. Collective Writing in Futurism sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Within the framework of difficult heritage, it is worth reflecting on the debate surrounding the architectural heritage of Italian Fascism and in particular how the media have been displaying and reconfiguring the cultural legacy of the fascist regime, by igniting a debate that has forced alliances between disciplines in the attempt to deal with some of Italyâ€s most problematic heritage. A recent example has been the debate surrounding plans to restore and reuse the Casa del fascio in Predappio, Mussoliniâ€s birthplace. In April 2014, the newspaper Il Giornale reported an interview in which the Mayor of Predappio announced the townâ€s administrationâ€s intention to turn the Casa del Fascio into a museum of Fascism. The news immediately unleashed a barrage of contrasting reactions in the national press and online media, sparking a debate that is still going on, with a number of high-profile contributions, particularly by prominent historians, in an attempt to provide intellectual legitimation to the different positions expressed and almost to reclaim such a difficult subject from the realm of shouted headlines and oversimplified interpretations. The issues tackled in the responses to the idea of a museum of Fascism have been multiple: from the risks of the monumentalisation of Fascism through its museification, to the need to move beyond the notion of Fascism as a historiographic taboo, to whether Predappio would be an appropriate site for such a project and the differences between temporary exhibitions and a permanent museum. The debate mobilised concepts pertaining not only to history and politics, but also identity, memory, the shape of knowledge and the definition and management of collective heritage.

Beside an obvious sense of anxiety surrounding the history of Fascism and how it is transmitted, these interventions have highlighted a number of uncertainties regarding a perceived weak sense of national identity, which might come under threat by the creation of a museum devoted to Fascism, leading to further divisions. They underscore a lack of confidence in the role of the museum interpreted as “celebratory” rather than informative, a subsequent anxiety regarding the place of the historian as the gatekeeper of national identity, and a sense of threat coming from a popularised and hypertrophic memorial culture crystallised by musealization.

The town of Predappio has attempted to address and disperse these anxieties by re-elaborating and rephrasing the purpose of the buildingâ€s restoration and re-use. Subsequent announcements and press releases regarding the project have been downplaying the idea of the museum of Fascism, stressing instead the intention to create a study centre, featuring libraries and exhibition spaces and, more recently, stating that the restoration of the Casa del fascio would be framed within a larger European project aimed at assessing the legacy of totalitarian regimes, which would analyse the relationship between history, memory and museal representation.

While at this stage it is not possible to draw any conclusion on the discussions and activities surrounding the Casa del Fascio in Predappio, the case is evidence of the current debate on the difficult heritage of fascist Italy. This involves a reflection on unresolved memory, on heritage and identity, on the coexistence of different memory cultures and historical narratives and on the role of museums, in the awareness that the way we negotiate our relationship with our contested past is crucial in shaping notions of citizenship in 21^st-century Italy and Europe.

 

L'articolo Dealing with Difficult Heritage: Interdisciplinarity and the Afterlife of Fascist Architecture in Italy sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Join us in London, at Tate Modern, on Monday 13 February for an interactive workshop on Italian Futurism. The event is part of Interdisciplinarity in the classroom, a range of projects and activities with teachers and schools which will take place throughout the life of Interdisciplinary Italy and beyond.

When Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the Manifesto of Futurism, in 1909, he put Italy back on the map of European and International art and culture. Of course Italy had a very illustrious cultural tradition: it had been for centuries a place of undisputed excellence in the arts and a major contributor to European literature, thought and science. Yet, Marinetti and the Futurists rejected, in often belligerent terms, Italy’s past, or better, they pointed out that modern Italy had much to offer and that focusing exclusively on Italy’s past contributed to the idea that Italy was a land of the past, a living museum.

The Futurists proclaimed their love of speed, technology, youth, and violence. They turned objects such as cars and aeroplanes into the beauty icons of the new age. They sang the excitement of life in the new industrial cities, teaming with masses of people. They also, importantly, aimed to reach out to the masses. Art and culture for the Futurists were not the preserve of a small elite. The Italian Futurists wanted to engage with a much larger public. The arts were seen as highly relevant to politics because they were best placed to exercise a positive power over society; they were the vehicle through which to engage the masses; and they had the potential to affect radical change.

Above all the Futurists called for sweeping changes; they wanted to transform the universe as they knew it. The manifesto published in March 11, 1915, and entitled “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe” is a good example of this. In this manifesto, and in many others, the Futurists offer us a vision of transformation and radical innovation that touched all artistic disciplines and reached out to the world of science and technology.

Yet, even when approaching a movement so openly and programmatically interartistic, we still tend to study it by focusing on single disciplines and from individual disciplinary perspectives. A small-scale interdisciplinary project led by Prof Giuliana Pieri, Dr David Brown (The Sixth Form College Farnborough) and Mr Thomas Cooke (Queen Margaret’s School, York) aims precisely at showing that boundaries between disciplines need not be an obstacle but can be used as an advantage for some innovative classroom activities and collaboration between schools, departments within schools, and universities.

The students who are taking part in this project, and who will attend a workshop at Tate Modern on Monday 13 February, have been studying Italian Futurism from a multiplicity of perspectives and for different reasons. Historians from Farnborough encounter Futurism when they study the roots of Italian nationalism and the rise of the Fascist movement. Students of art history at Queen Margaret’s engage with Futurism when they study early 20^th-century Avant-Garde movements. Students at Royal Holloway in the School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, encounter Futurism in their study of Fascist Italy, and at specialist final year level in a course on European art and culture in the period between1880-1940.

The workshop at Tate will offer us a forum for discussion, a space in which we can exchange ideas and perspectives. To find out more about this event and for details to attend the session, which is open to all, follow this link.

Keep following us on these webpages over the next few weeks and read more about Interdisciplinary Futurism, from the teachers and students who took part. And if you like the idea and would like to get involved contact us. We have resources and ideas that we can share with you and your school.

L'articolo Interdisciplinary Futurism at Tate Modern sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

The work shows the debt towards Futurism of Italian (and especially Roman) Pop Art, which traced its roots back to the movement of Marinetti & Co. (and to De Chirico’s Metafisica) rather than to coeval American Pop Art. The very combination of text and painting and the predominant collage technique in Futurismo rivistato-Balla, for example, seem to hint at tavole parolibere, probably the most original and famous outputs of Futurist art. Being a mix of poetry, visual arts and sounds (expressed by onomatopoeias), the tavole constituted the first attempt in Italy and in Europe to integrate different artistic disciplines and media – and for a short time in the Twenties they even evolved into tavole tattili, i.e. boards made of different materials to be touched, thus expanding the artistic domain to a new sense.

Schifano’s choice of focusing on a group picture is also quite meaningful. Although specialising in different fields, Futurist artists often worked together as a single entity on different projects, at times even signing each other’s works and manifestoes. This strong group identity was a key factor for the development of the movement’s interdisciplinary nature, and represented a pivotal model for subsequent groups of artists, including the Roman so-called Scuola di Piazza del Popolo to which Schifano belonged and which formed a predominant section of Roma Pop City 60-67.

The interdisciplinary fibre of the Futurist movement reflected its will to reach not only every corner of artistic expression (Futurists published manifestoes for literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, music, etc.) but also of everyday life itself. This aspiration to a “total art” (almost a renewed version of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk) was the core point of the manifesto Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo (1915) published by two painters based in Rome, Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero. The manifesto claimed that Futurist art should go beyond traditional media (pages and canvasses) and focus instead on reshaping the actual spaces where people live and work (thus forerunning, to some regards, twentieth-century environmental art). From the late 1910s Rome’s public spaces were therefore ‘reconstructed†by Futurist artists: Balla refurbished the bar Bal Tic Tac with wall paintings and Futurist décor (1921), Depero showed his Balli Plastici – a revolutionary theatrical piece performed by dancing mechanical puppets – in a similarly retransformed Teatro dei Piccoli (Palazzo Odescalchi, 1918) and decorated the bar Il Cabaret del Diavolo (1921), whilst in 1921 the architect Virgilio Marchi restored the Teatro Sperimentale degli Indipendenti, (situated in the Roman baths of Settimio Severo in via degli Avignonesi) according to the same environmental project, making it thus one of the hubs of Rome’s cultural ferment in the early Twenties.

This was the little miracle of Roman Futurism in the late 1910s-early 1920s: in less than a decade Rome abandoned its initial image of a passatista, bureaucratic and rotten city (as for example in the manifestoes Contro Roma passatista and Contro Roma e contro Benedetto Croce), to become the centre of an aesthetic revolution aimed at refashioning the very concept of art through combining it with people’s everyday life. The word “Balla” at the centre of Futurismo rivisitato-Balla shows not only Schifano’s gratitude towards the painter, but reconnects Italian art of the Sixties to the extraordinary season of Roman Futurism.

Further reading

– Enrico Crispolti, Casa Balla e il futurismo a Roma (Rome: Istituto poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato: Libreria dello Stato, 1989)

– Claudia Salaris, La Roma delle avanguardie: dal futurismo all’underground (Rome: Editori riuniti, 1999)

L'articolo (Re)constructing Futurist Rome sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

The association between colour and music is linked to theories of colour and emotion that were much discussed in avant-garde circles at the time. These same theories also gave birth to one of the modernist masterpieces on the relationship between colour and music, Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43 (MOMA, New York). Mondrian’s painting was the visual translation of his encounter with the city of New York and jazz music. Russolo’s Music can also be described as an encounter or, to use Russolo’s term, a translation of sorts.

In 1920, in the Futurist journal Poesia, Russolo described the painting as “a kind of pictorial translation of the melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, polyphonic and chromatic impressions forming the complex musical emotion”. Russolo asks us to focus on the boundary between the aural and the visual by exploring the commonalities between music and painting. Russolo also interestingly uses the concept of translation as a metaphor for artistic and interartistic exchange.

As Florian Mussgnug has noted in another post on our site (7 December 2015, Elephants in the Dark: Towards a theory of Interartistic Practice), translation in the 21^st century has emerged as a powerful metaphor for cultural and artistic exchange. Russolo shows us that a century earlier the same concept was used to reflect on the encounters between the arts. Translation was the metaphor and the tool which helped to formulate new artistic theories and new practices of interartistic exchange.

One key Futurist principle is central to Russolo’s painting: dynamism. Closely bound to this is also the idea of synaesthesia, which became a central preoccupation for the Futurists in their attempt to break the boundaries of tradition and meaning. Music for Russolo is rhythm and harmony but it is also pattern and colour, and so it is closely linked to painting. La musica has always seemed to me to capture the embodied experience of both music and painting. Russolo describes the impression music leaves on the body as chromatic. It is this visual essence of music that allows the boundary between the two arts to dissolve. What Russolo seems to suggest is that if music is experienced by our bodies as colour, in turn colour and pattern in painting are essentially linked to rhythm and sound.

In 1913, Russolo’s theories developed further. Music was replaced by the art of noises, in an attempt to go beyond the limitations of music and traditional musical training, whilst recapturing the primordial and essential power of sound.

Further reading:

More than Meets the Eye. New Research on the Estorick Collection, cat. of the exhibition (London, Estorick Collection, 2015).

L'articolo Interartistic Exchange in Luigi Russolo’s La Musica sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.