(Re)constructing Futurist Rome

A work by Mario Schifano shown at the recent exhibition Roma Pop City 60-67 at Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MACRO) is a creative remaking of a famous photograph portraying five members of the Futurist movement: Marinetti, Boccioni, Russolo, Carrà  and Severini. The work, entitled Futurismo rivisitato-Balla (1965-1966), reproduces the artists’ outlines but with a couple of additional details: the word “Balla” stands out at the centre of the image, and at the bottom Schifano writes three times Gratitudine! Gratitudine! Gratitudine!

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)