The Futurist Roots of Fascism
"to admire an old painting is to pour our sensitivities into a funeral urn"
May 16
“What is the use of looking behind us, since our task is to smash the mysterious portals of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We live already in the absolute, since we have already created the eternal omnipresent speed.”- FT Marinetti
Historical understanding of the relationship between modern art and fascism is often oversimplified. It’s commonly understood that fascism, explicitly, is inherently anti-modernist and modern art is, implicitly or explicitly, anti-fascist. The modernist roots of fascism have become obscured.
There are endless statue avatar trad accounts dedicated to denigrating modern art and extolling “traditional” art. ( By which they invariably mean Greco-Roman statuary and the neoclassical revival inspired by it. Some accounts are dedicated to classical and neoclassical architecture. But that’s about it. I’ve never seen a statue avi trad recommend a play.) The delineation is clear: traditional art (statues) good: modern art bad. Depending on the account there will be different levels of crypto-fascist claims of the degeneracy and decadence of modern art. Their understanding of art is, obviously, incredibly limited, and would be barely worth mentioning (though I hope to do a deeper dive into these accounts as I go forward). However, the traditional art- modern art binary is often reinforced by those trying to rebuke trad art fetishists. [Both implicitly work from the idea that traditional art is the domain of fascism. No one thinks modern art is inherently anti-fascist, but they do seem to think that fascism is inherently anti modern art.
However, the relationship between modern art and fascism is more complicated. . Modernism, even progress itself, are not inherently anti-fascist. Modern art played a much deeper role in the creation of fascism than most people think. The modernist, futurist, roots of fascism have largely been forgotten by both the left and the right. I’m hoping that this will be the first entry in a series exploring the relationship between modern art and fascism, with an emphasis on avante-garde poetry. There are a lot of things to cover, and I can’t cover all of it in this post. For example, I’m not going to be able talk about Ezra Pound and his speeches for musssolin in this entry, but I plan to come to this as this series goes on. With this post I want to assert the relationship between the two, focusing on the writer of the Fascist Manifesto, FT Marinetti, who was an avante garde poet best known for the his futurist manifestos.
Read the rest at:
https://poetryisbarbaric.substack.com/p/the-futurist-roots-of-fascism
