The Futurist Movement: Illusion and Truth on the Psychoanalytic Stage
materer, Timothy
tendency to slip away from the main plot. Some of the asides are hilarious, and a running gag involving a gangster and his moll provides a superb scene of mock-erotic fun. But the net effect...
...14 August 1987:459 The ordinary objects (scraps of newspapers, tobacco pipes, nails) glued to Futurist canvases or incorporated into sculptures proclaimed the artificiality and not the realism of art...
...These horrors come later in the novel however...
...they fall for the bawdy charms of middle-class Bob (George Costigan), who has been repelled by his frigid wife...
...Perloff's critical terminology is sophisticated but clearly grounded in a wealth of specific and lively details...
...Meaning in this tradition is ambiguous because clear and direct statements are evaded...
...Perloff finds in Futurism some of the most crucial developments in modern art and literature, such as the breakdown of the prose/poetry distinction and questioning the power of art to represent reality...
...the ethos ofavant guerre has its counterpart in the contemporary dissolution of LOVERS & °DESAPARECIDOS ° the boundaries between art and science, between literature and theory, between the separate genres and media, ours is what we might call a disillusioned or cool Futurism...
...Readers with diverse interests in national literatures and artistic genres will enjoy this book...
...Attention is given to the surface of the work, the play of the words and phrases, rather than to thematic or symbolic meaning...
...But the net effect of all the tangents is to flatten interest in the main story...
...This handsome, colorful book comes with more than seventy illustrations and with enthusiastic blurbs from avant-garde artists like John Ashbery and John Cage, as well as many distinguished academics...
...by analyzing the "anti-monuments" of Robert Smithson...
...The challenge is to get beyond the layers of associations and "meanings" it has acquired to see it afresh --a problem Andy Warhol addressed when he used a stationary camera to film the skyscraper for eight hours...
...In the slightly comic, slightly surreal mode that characterizes much of the early novel, Allende describes the Will of God Manor, a home for the wealthy, aged, and senile that Beatriz unwillingly maintains in the lower floor 460: Commonweal...
...Such fare is traditional but classic...
...Some of the asides are hilarious, and a running gag involving a gangster and his moll provides a superb scene of mock-erotic fun...
...In an age of mechanical inventions that were transforming human experience --the automobile and airplane, typewriter and telegraph --both the space of the canvas and of the book-page were reconceived...
...The key concept of "The Invention of Collage" (Chapter II) is related to the verbal art of the Futurist Manifestos and to the experiments of major poets like Ezra Pound...
...This is what so many artists from Oscar Wilde on have meant by saying that their works are mere surface and what Warhol meant when he told those who want to "understand" him: "just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am...
...Rita (played by an elfin-faced Celt, Siobhan Finneran) and Sue (Michelle Holmes) are late teens and lower class...
...The nationalist barriers of language and politics had to be overcome to assess a moment in history when a genuine international community of art was a reality...
...Their ultimate lesson is to beware smooth-talking males, both suburbanites and lyrical Pakistanis, whose subculture is treated in an aside...
...To measure the changes that have overtaken us, Perloff compares Blaise Cendrars's poetic treatment of the Tower to Roland Barthes's post-modern version...
...The final chapter shows us how the Futurist revolution lives on in the present...
...A vivid account of the pre-World War I period of Futurist art, it shows us how the art of our time developed...
...Collage art thus became one of the prime modernist achievements...
...the stadium of the capital city is used as a political prison...
...TOM O'BRIEN The past & present of futurism arjorie Perloff's The Futurist Movement . is the kind of scholarly book that should be bought in bookstores as well as checked out of libraries...
...The acting and feisty screenplay (by Andrea Dunbar) make the girls' exuberance and suffering compelling...
...To insist on meaning is to miss the significance...
...But the Futurists welcomed it as the sign, ambiguous, banal, but somehow magnificent, of the modern age...
...Barthes is as moved by the monument as Cendrars, but far more ambiguous about the technology that created it: "even as Barthes echoes Cendrars's themes, he ionizes and problematizes them...
...The Tower is to Paris what the Empire State Building is to New York --originally a great technical achievement, it became a symbol for the city itself, and finally an endlessly reproduced, cliched image...
...l i OF LOVE AND SHADOWS Isabel Ailende Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden Knopf, $17.95, 247 pp...
...The art of collage was appropriate to an age of bewildering juxtapositions during the transition from hand-labor and horse-drawn transportation to the world of the machine, as well as to the ambiguity of an age of radically changing values...
...and bodies bearing the marks of torture are stacked up in the city morgue...
...Perloff thinks that the seminal importance of Futurism has not been recognized because the Italian Futurists were later associated with Fascism, and so their innovations in collage, manifesto, sound poetry, typography, and poetic forms have been neglected by later critics who disliked the tone or politics of their declarations...
...and every page seems to bring up some new facet of a work or author or an unexpected comparison...
...Its BOOKS novelty is point of view: the title's m~nage d trois is seen from a feminine perspective...
...One of the major images in Futurist art is the Eiffel Tower, which is the focus of Perloff's last chapter...
...Perloff relates visual collage to Marinetti's famous performances of his manifestos and "soundpoems," when he would reproduce the sounds of siege guns and airplanes as "performance art...
...But the reasons for the family's initial resistance and final submission seem inscrutable...
...Allende, niece of the slain Chilean president Salvador Allende, never names the country of her fiction, but her novel, based on the actual discovery of a cache of bodies in an abandoned mine, is clearly about her native land: a general in dark glasses rules following a military coup...
...the dark underside is the squalor of lower-class British life...
...Language and morals are both loosein this English blend of bedroom farce and coming-of-age...
...The Whistle Blower puts stars Michael Caine, John Gielgud, and Nigel Havers (the lordly hurdler of Chariots of Fire) through a maze of moral ambiguities worthy of Le Cane...
...While the acting and subject are appealing, the film just doesn't grow on you...
...A still more important reason for this neglect is that prior to this book there has been no critic ambitious enough to synthesize the materials in English, Italian, French, and Russian in order to assess Futurism's influence...
...Chapters on Ezra Pound's prewar writings and the Russian Futurist book focus on the "rupture" of literary categories...
...Rita, Sue, andBob Too is audacious, vulgar, equally offensive and delightful...
...A chapter on the "Manifesto as an Art Form" explores a genre of art in which the categories of the literary and the theoretical breakdown in a mode characterized by improvisation and theatricality...
...Art that adhered to classical genres --portraits, landscapes, the novel, lyric poetry --was thrown over for an art that questioned the power of paint or words to represent the world...
...i Timothy Maturer tradition even for the avant-garde...
...The original Futurists welcomed the technological age unreservedly, which is scarcely possible now...
...Sheen is spunky, and her struggle to get the relatives to accept "hyphenation" is apropos...
...Perloff explores this disillusion...
...Soniu Gernes 66 he ones they take away never come back," the peasant woman says, telling Irene Beltrdn of her missing daughter, and it is these missing ones, the political victims, the desaparecidos of a Latin American dictatorship, that form the underlying link in Isabel Allende's tale of lovers who come together in a dangerous and vertiginous search for the truth of these vanishings...
...Tracing such a concept back to the period before 1914 reveals that there is a long THE FUTUNIST MOVEMENT AVANT-GARDE, AVANT GUERRE, AND THE LANGUAGE OF RUPTURE Marjorie Perloff University of Chicago, $24.95, 288 pp...
...To read the obituaries of Andy Warhol is too see how badly we need the kind of perspective on contemporary art that a study of the Futurist movement gives us...
...In the case of the Eiffel Tower, turn-of-the century aesthetes repudiated it as a "monstrous" erection among the city's churches and museums and as the folly of an "ironmonger...
...Ping Pong has more substance but also disappoints...
...Without denying Warhol's talents, one may be surprised to see him praised (as Newsweek did) as the artist who saw that modern culture consisted of massproduced images (from Campbell's soup cans to photographs of an assassination...
...There's nothing behind it...
...A young Anglo-Chinese lawyer (Lucy Sheen) in London's Chinatown must execute an old businessman's will that requires his family to come to terms with their ethnic heritage...
...Marinetti published his 1909 Futurist Manifesto not in Italy but in the Paris Figaro, and conversely Apollinaire's L'Antitradition futuriste (1913), with its poster-like arrangement of typography and its call for the suppression of "poetic grief.., syntax, punctuation, lines and verses, houses, boredom," was published, not in Paris, but in Milan in a bilingual edition...
...Futurism.lasted for only a moment of prewar experiment and enthusiasm, but The Futurist Movement expands that moment and shows how it permeates our own...
...It begins slowly, introducing us first to the genteel, upper-class world of Irene, a fiery-haired journalist whose maverick social habits are a cause of distress to her aristocratic mother, Beatriz Beltr~n...
...a Chinese-American version of the same subject occasioned last year's The Great Wall...
...The noodles are finally all properly cooked, but they have no place to go...
...His "Great Pipes Monument" --lengths of pipes crossing an industrial wasteland -is heavily ironic but also open to a new sense of aesthetic form (and one might say much the same about some of Warhol's works...
...More standard English film noir comes from the spy thriller, The Whistle Blower, so elegant in texture that I kept waiting for George Smiley to show up...
Vol. 114 • August 1987 • No. 14
