UC San Diego

In the early work and theory of the Italian futurists, physical motion constituted a modern and modernizing condition that informed their visual ideas and signaled a new mode of subjectivity associated with mass, urban collectivity. In particular, energetic discharge served as both a central visual analogy and as a conceptual framework for representing social and cultural renewal. Using a range of methodologies including visual and textual analysis, historicism, intellectual and cultural histories, and interdisciplinary comparison, one of the leading revisionisms of this research in an attempt to re- adjudicate both the nature and the critical centrality of the machine metaphor as an interpretational key to the first phases of futurism. In contrast to contemporaneous images of motion based on precise linear progressions or mechanical sequences, early futurist visual works employed various strategies often centered on the complex interaction among internal and external forces generated in that through the human body to indicate psychic, physical, and social processes. Physical exertion, for example, came to signify mobility across a wide spectrum of literal and abstract connotations. Although mechanical reproduction influenced their approaches, artists such as Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, and Carlo Carrà responded with nonmechanical imagery that was formally and conceptually rooted in action, agitation, and sensorial intensity--that is, in psychophysical and social automatism. The seven chapters address specific motifs, media, and contexts that shaped these ideas, including futurist crowd imagery, futurist photography, mechanomorphic imagery, the convergence of early futurism and early Italian cinema, futurist sculpture (especially Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space), and avant-garde theories of color. Instead of simply demonstrating mechanical, linear, or chronological sequences in their imagery, many of their most inventive and convincing works represent immaterial forces manifesting in material forms and associated with the feeling anticipation, in which the future seems to unfold in the temporal present