The Futurist Environments as ‘Opera d’Arte Totale’

[This post gathers some preliminary ideas developed during the RHUL Research Training Programme in Interart/Intermedia methodologies]

The Futurist opera d’arte totale (or ‘total work of art’) consisted of the decoration of environments as a mix of art and craft. The Futurists borrowed this idea from the Wagnerian concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, which is the artistic synthesis of the media into one ‘supermedium’ that supposedly is more than the sum of its parts. This formulation had remained central to late 19th and early 20th century aesthetic discourse and artistic production, and it appealed to the Futurists primarily because of their aim to break the barriers between high and low arts. Disregarding the separation between art categories was a regenerating shift for the Futurists. It was exciting, refreshening, and allowed them to create a new original language, which is the ultimate intent of any avant-garde.

The artwork-environment, however, offered to the Futurists also a more capacious and penetrable space than the artwork-object, allowing them to express their eclecticism and multi-disciplinary activity at their best. By acting on the entire environment, the Futurists were able to re-create artificial realities that literally surrounded the viewer, and involved physically and emotionally. A famous example is the Cabaret del diavolo in Rome (‘The devil’s cabaret’), a multi-leveled underground restaurant that hosted occasional theatrical performances, realized in 1922 by Fortunato Depero. Depero designed each level according to the three sections of Dante’s Divina Commedia (hell, purgatory, and heaven), combining lighting, furniture, and artworks to stage a ‘descendant to the underworld’ until the visitors reached the hell, which was the center of the venue.

Other Futurist opera d’arte totale were staged in private homes, stores, public buildings, or in the big structures that Italy built for the exhibitions of the late 1920s and the 1930s. They offered to the viewer a playful and easy way to escape from reality, and to be projected, even everyday, in another time in the past (e.g. Dante’s Divina Commedia), or in the future. A significant but lesser-known example is the Taverna del Santo Palato (‘holy palate tavern’) in Turin, which was realized in 1931 by Nicolaj Diulgheroff and Luigi Colombo, alias Fillia. The place was designed as a futuristic dwelling all covered in steel, and with big lighted eyes on the walls and lighted columns. Everything, from the furniture to the menu, appeared to belong to the future, and was meant to project the guests into a futuristic dining experience, with real futuristic dishes, such as ‘intuitional appetizer’, ‘solar soup’, or ‘Fiat-chicken’ (a roasted chicken stuffed with metal ball bearings). Although some of the courses might have been hard to digest, the Futurists were able to re-create a real Futurist atmosphere (see the article Dal brodo solare al pollo d’acciaio, ‘from the solar soup to the steel chicken’, for the full menu here).