Anarcha-feminism, also known as anarchist feminism or anarcho-feminism, is a system of analysis which combines the principles and power analysis of anarchist theory with feminism. It closely resembles intersectional feminism. Anarcha-feminism generally posits that patriarchy and traditional gender roles as manifestations of involuntary coercivehierarchy should be replaced by decentralizedfree association. Anarcha-feminists believe that the struggle against patriarchy is an essential part of class conflict and the anarchist struggle against the state and capitalism. In essence, the philosophy sees anarchist struggle as a necessary component of feminist struggle and vice versa. L. Susan Brown claims that "as anarchism is a political philosophy that opposes all relationships of power, it is inherently feminist".
History
Background
Anarchism first emerged as a political current at a time when gender inequality was systematically enforced and women were excluded from public life. Their existence was confined to the traditional gender roles of mothers and wives, within the construct of the nuclear family. In particular, working class women were both politically and economically disenfranchised, which drove them closer to socialism and political militancy. They began to agitate for reproductive rights and free love, which formed the basis for an anarchist feminism.
Teresa Mañé, one of the first proponents of the anarcha-feminist synthesis
During the 1880s, a current of anarchist feminism was first developed by the Catalan activists Teresa Mañé and Teresa Claramunt. By the 1890s, anarchist feminism had spread across the globe, brought by immigrants to and from Europe. The anarchist press started to publish feminist analyses on gender equality and critiques of marriage, the nuclear family and prostitution. Through Errico Malatesta's La Questione Sociale, Teresa Mañé's pamphlets on female education and gender inequality received widespread publication. Anarchist feminism was further taken up by the American anarchists Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman, the latter of whom came to be considered a "founding mother" of anarcha-feminism. Lucy Parsons also established the Working Women's Union in Chicago and ensured women's participation in the Industrial Workers of the World as one of its founding members. In England, the anarchist Charlotte Wilson became an advocate for "equal pay for equal work" and promoted women's education.
Anarchist women took prominent positions within the editorial boards of magazines (such as Mother Earth), in the publication of books, and as public speakers. Specifically feminist publications were also circulated, including Germinal, El Oprimido and La Voz de la Mujer, in which anarchist women defended a revolutionary form of feminism. As a way to counter the Culture of Domesticity, which upheld the private property
of the nuclear family, anarchist women like Charlotte Wilson opened
their homes into "quasi-public spaces" for political meetings and
communal meals. Anarchist women even took part in violent direct actions, including Vera Zasulich's attempted assassination of the Russian police chief Fyodor Trepov; Germaine Berton's murder of the French far-right politician Marius Plateau; and Kanno Sugako's plot to assassinate the Japanese Emperor Meiji.
The rise of anarchist feminism provoked an anti-feminist reaction among many of the men of the anarchist movement, who deemphasised the struggle for women's rights as secondary to the class struggle. In turn, La Voz de la Mujer denounced these men as "false anarchists" who prioritised their own liberation over that of women. In the Chinese anarcha-feminist journal Natural Justice, He Zhen also criticised what she saw as "men's pursuit of self distinction in the name of women's liberation".
Anarcha-feminists generally concluded that male hostility to feminism
proved them unreliable to the cause for women's rights, and began to
organise their own movement to address their own needs.
First-wave feminists established women's groups as flat organizations that used consensus decision-making, reflecting an "unconscious libertarian consciousness".
Anarchist women's groups were established throughout the United States,
largely by Italian immigrant women, with the goal of pursuing "women's
emancipation" through mutual aid and self-organization. In Paterson, New Jersey, the Gruppo Emancipazione della Donna formed women's theater and music clubs, and publicised works of anarchist feminism that linked the struggle against the patriarchy with the struggle against the patria. In contrast to the Italian anarchists, Jewish anarchists rarely formed specific women's groups, with anarchists of the journal Fraye Arbeter Shtime declaring themselves to all be feminists.
One of the most notable libertarian women's groups was the Mujeres Libres, an anarchist feminist organisation that aimed for women's liberation from their "triple enslavement" by ignorance, exploitation and discrimination. Founded during the Spanish Revolution of 1936 by Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Mercè Comaposada and Amparo Poch y Gascón, the Mujeres Libres implemented programmes of women's education that taught women technical skills and increased female literacy.
Sánchez Saornil herself wrote poetry that called for women to take
action against their oppression, which attracted Emma Goldman to visit
Spain and participate in the work of the Mujeres Libres as an advocate.
But the anarchist feminism of the time, focused more on developing small activist groups than creating a mass movement, lacked a precise strategy for achieving women's rights, so little action in that way was taken. During the early 20th century, anarchist feminism was progressively supplanted by socialist feminism, which took a reformist approach towards achieving women's suffrage.
By this time Charlotte Wilson had herself abandoned anarchist activism,
becoming involved in women's suffrage advocacy and later joining the Independent Labour Party.
Anarchist feminist critiques of the family and authoritarianism went
into remission, only to be reformulated when a new wave of feminism
emerged.
By the late 1960s, second-wave feminism had emerged from the New Left, as part of a broad wave of anti-oppression activism that included the civil rights movement and culminated with the protests of 1968. Drawing from socialist feminism, this second-wave sought to encourage solidarity between women, bringing them together into a "sisterhood" based on their shared experiences. During this period, feminists rediscovered the work of first-wave anarchist feminists like Emma Goldman and before long the women's liberation movement began to reshape the anarchist movement.
Many second-wave feminists came to consider anarchism to be the
"logically consistent expression of feminism", due to its synthesis of
the struggle for individual liberty with that for social equality. Peggy Kornegger
claimed that feminists had already been "unconscious anarchists in both
theory and practice" and were the only activist tendency to be
"practic[ing] what anarchism preaches".
The pervasive environment of sexism within many sections of the
New Left gave an impulse to the establishment of women's groups as part
of a strategy of feminist separatism, which led to the coining and adoption of the term "anarcha-feminist" by anarchist women. Second-wave anarchist feminists developed their own affinity groups according to cooperative, decentralist and federalist principles, as an alterative to both patriarchal and structureless organisations. The anarcha-feminist drive to reckon with these hierarchical forms of organisation was particularly influenced by Jo Freeman's 1972 essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness, which encouraged an organized egalitarian tendency within the movement.
The second wave of anarchist feminism was also characterised by an often violent militancy, as displayed in the SCUM Manifesto. Anarcha-feminists such as Ann Hansen participated in the bombing attacks by the urban guerrilla group Direct Action, which targeted companies that produced parts for weapons of war and a chain video store that was distributing snuff films and paedophilic pornography.
By the 1980s, the feminist sex wars
had caused a divide within second-wave feminism, which fragmented into
multiple different tendencies, while many former feminists moved into academic careerism.
Third wave (1990s–2000s)
Collection of anarcha-feminist protests
The beginnings of the anti-globalization movement spurred the development of a new wave, with reflections on the earlier second-wave and the influence of postcolonial feminism leading to an integration of identity politics into the framework of anarchist feminism. The emergence of a third-wave of anarcha-feminism brought with it a new focus on intersectionality, as anarcha-feminists came together to address the intersecting issues of poverty, racism and reproductive rights, among many others. The early feminist conception of a "New Woman"
also formed part of the foundation for third-wave anarcha-feminism,
which encouraged women to practice equality rather than to demand it. In Bolivia, the Mujeres Creando carried out direct actions that challenged poverty and traditional gender roles. In the United States, anarcha-feminists within the anarcho-punk scene spurred the development of the Riot grrrl subculture.
With the turn of the 21st century, there was a concerted effort
to rethink approaches to anarcha-feminist histories, placing value in collective, open and non-hierarchical methods of gathering and exchanging knowledge.
Collective research projects were carried out by groups such as the
Dark Star Collective, which in 2002 published an anthology of
anarcha-feminist works titled Quiet Rumours. In 2010, the feminist historian Judy Greenway elaborated five different methodologies of anarcha-feminist historiography:
The "additive approach", which incorporates elements otherwise overlooked in existing historiography;
The "Emma Goldman Short-Circuit", which centres the contributions of Emma Goldman above all others;
The "women's issues approach", which is chiefly concerned with issues of sexuality and reproductive rights;
The "inclusive approach", which focuses on the role of women in famous historical events;
The "transformative approach", which takes a critical look at the
erasure of women and privileged position of men in gendered histories.
Greenway concluded that a complete anarcha-feminist historiography
needed to actively challenge hierarchical biases within dominant
historiographies, rather than merely reincorporating erased aspects of
history or focusing excessively on one or two individuals.
Fourth wave (2012–present)
The fourth wave of feminism emerged through the development of postfeminism, taking concern with the objectification of women by market forces and characterised by its use of social networking. The fourth wave of anarchist feminism was particularly influenced by postmodern feminism.
In a 2017 article, Chiara Bottici
argued that anarcha-feminism has been the subject of insufficient
discussion in public debate and in academia, due in part to a broader
hostility to anarchism but also due to difficulties in distinguishing
between the tendency of anarcha-feminism and the broader philosophy of
anarchism. Bottici argued that the risk of economic reductionism that appears in Marxist feminism,
in which women's oppression is understood solely in economic terms,
"has ... always been alien to anarcha-feminism"; as such, she argues,
anarchism is better suited than Marxism for an alliance with feminism.
Anarcha-feminists see the patriarchy and the state as two expressions of the same system of oppression, and concluded that the destruction of all forms of patriarchy would necessarily include the abolition of the state. Emma Goldman herself took an intersectional analysis of the state which saw it as an instrument of sexual repression, and thus rejected the strategy of reformism. As such, the first-wave of anarchist feminists criticised calls for women's suffrage, considering them to be insufficient for achieving gender equality. He Zhen was skeptical of the limited gender equality achieved in western liberal democracies,
which she described as "false freedom and sham equality", even
criticising the women's suffrage movement and male feminists for
espousing an "empty rhetoric of emancipation".
Anarchist feminists have developed a non-coercive approach to
interpersonal relationships, which particularly upholds the value of consent. Anarchist feminists such as Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman fiercely criticised the institution of marriage, as they considered it to be inherently oppressive towards women due to its lack of consent.
Their critiques of marriage led them to advocate for and practice free love, which they held to be a remedy to women's social alienation. With its basis in freely-given consent, free love provided room for women to reconstruct their sexuality in a way that centered their own agency and autonomy. Emma Goldman herself saw sexuality as a "critical social force" of free expression, She extended this to a public defense of gay rights, with some scholars even speculating about her own sexuality.
On the other hand, free love was opposed by Lucy Parsons, who criticised it as being inconsistent with anarchism and for its increased risks of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, instead arguing for a form of "monogamy without marriage".
Intersectionality
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, one of the pioneers of intersectional anarcha-feminism during the 1970s
From the inception of anarcha-feminism as a current, anarchist
feminists have engaged with other struggles that intersect with women's
issues, participating in a number of different anti-racist and
anti-colonial movements. A specifically anti-racist anarcha-feminism was pioneered during the 1970s by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and her organization Cell 16.
In 1976, a statement produced by the Combahee River Collective lay the groundwork for the development of intersectionality.
Since the third-wave, intersectionality has formed one of the core
concepts of anarchist feminism, which has used it as a method to develop
a feminist ethics of self-organization against all forms of oppression. Groups within the activist network No one is illegal
(NOII) have since engaged in an anti-racist anarcha-feminism as part of
their anti-border advocacy, which was itself rooted in an anti-statist
critique of institutional sexism and racism within state immigration
regimes.
Drawing from post-structuralism, postcolonialism and critical theory,
Deric Shannon has proposed a contemporary construction of
anarcha-feminism that engages with each of these theories, combining anti-capitalism with a comprehensive intersectional stance against all forms of oppression.
Anarcha-feminism holds the principle that "the personal is political", developing a critique of everyday life that aims to erode social and political power, in pursuit of a society where each individual had control over "[their] own life, and no others". Anarcha-feminists considered the nuclear family to be the root of all gender inequality, and thus that equality could only be achieved through the extension of personal autonomy and economic independence to women. Although the institution of private property was roundly critiqued by anarcho-communists such as Emma Goldman, it was upheld as a means of women's economic emancipation by Voltairine de Cleyre.
Anarchist feminists such as Itō Noe have upheld the ideal of a "New Woman", encouraging women to assert their own individuality and develop independent thought. Emma Goldman conceived of a revolution that takes place within individual minds, as well as in society.
Goldman advocated for women to exercise their autonomy by overcoming
their own "internal tyrants", whether that be the opinions of their
family members or traditional Social norms. According to Martha Hewitt, the anarcha-feminist conception of revolution is "as process, transformative praxis of thought, feeling, and collective social activity."
During
the late 19th century, anarchist women were among the earliest to take
up the call for reproductive rights, as part of the anarchist feminist
opposition to the nuclear family. Anarchist feminists have distributed
information about and resources for birth control, for which many were
put in jail. While working as a midwife during the 1890s, Emma Goldman became a prominent advocate of women's reproductive rights, calling for women's rights to practice family planning and publicly rallying support for Margaret Sanger. In contrast, other anarchist feminists such as Itō Noe opposed abortion from a humanist perspective, as she believed that life began at conception.
Anarchist advocacy for birth control increased following World War I,
as the practice was banned in countries like France and the United
States, which anarchist feminists criticised a means to continue
increasing the population in order to wage war.
Anarchist feminist direct action for birth control continued even after
the partial legalisation of abortion, as "feminist outlaw" groups like
the Jane Collective provided food and medical care for women without access to safe methods of birth control. Anarchist feminists have also participated in the movement for reproductive justice, which has prioritised bodily autonomy and the reproductive self-determination of women of color.
Anarcha-feminists have been at the forefront of advocacy for sex workers' rights since the late-19th century, when anarchist women in Germany and France campaigned for the decriminalisation of sex work. Louise Michel blamed capitalism
for creating the economic conditions that drove women towards sex work,
which she claimed could only be brought to an end by means of a social revolution. Itō Noe
likewise argued that the root cause of women taking up sex work was
poverty, and that instead of campaigning to abolish sex work, people
should address the root causes of poverty.
Emma Goldman also publicly criticised sex work abolitionists for using
male legal systems to criminalise women, which she held to be a form of class discrimination.
Following the second-wave of feminism, sex worker advocacy was
taken up by anarchist feminists that themselves engaged in sex work. Grisélidis Réal
organised sex workers and carried out a series of direct actions for
sex workers' rights, going on to establish an archive for the history of
sex work. Canadian anarchist sex workers were also involved in an
advocacy campaign, culminating with the declaration of an "International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers".
Although Futurism was largely an Italian phenomenon, parallel movements emerged in Russia, where some Russian Futurists
would later go on to found groups of their own; other countries either
had a few Futurists or had movements inspired by Futurism. The Futurists
practiced in every medium of art, including painting, sculpture,
ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, urban
design, theatre, film, fashion, textiles, literature, music,
architecture, and even cooking.
Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913)
Futurism is an avant-garde movement founded in Milan in 1909 by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti launched the movement in his Manifesto of Futurism, which he published for the first time on 5 February 1909 in La gazzetta dell'Emilia, an article then reproduced in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro on Saturday 20 February 1909. He was soon joined by the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini and the composer Luigi Russolo.
Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially
political and artistic tradition. "We want no part of it, the past", he
wrote, "we the young and strong Futurists!" The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature,
and they were passionate nationalists. They repudiated the cult of the
past and all imitation, praised originality, "however daring, however
violent", bore proudly "the smear of madness", dismissed art critics as
useless, rebelled against harmony and good taste, swept away all the
themes and subjects of all previous art, and gloried in science.
Publishing manifestos was a feature of Futurism, and the
Futurists (usually led or prompted by Marinetti) wrote them on many
topics, including painting, architecture, music, literature, theatre,
cinema, photography, religion, women, fashion and cuisine.
In their manifestos, Futurists described their beliefs and
appreciations of various methods. They also detailed their disdain for
traditional Italian Renaissance works of art and their subjects.
According to the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters (1910) by Umberto
Boccioni, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, and Carlo Carrà,
"We want to fight implacably against the mindless, snobbish, and
fanatical religion of the past, religion nurtured by the pernicious
existence of the museums. We rebel against the spineless admiration for
old canvases, old statues, and old objects, and against the enthusiasm
for everything worm-eaten, grimy, or corroded by time; and we deem it
unjust and criminal that people habitually disdain whatever is young,
new, and trembling with life."
The Futurists believed that art should be inspired by the modern
marvels of their newly technological world. “Just as our forebears took
the subject of art from the religious atmosphere that enveloped them, so
we must draw inspiration from the tangible miracles of contemporary
life."
The founding manifesto did not contain a positive artistic
programme, which the Futurists attempted to create in their subsequent Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (published in Italian as a leaflet by Poesia, Milan, 11 April 1910).
This committed them to a "universal dynamism", which was to be
directly represented in painting. Objects in reality were not separate
from one another or from their surroundings: "The sixteen people around
you in a rolling motor bus are in turn and at the same time one, ten
four three; they are motionless and they change places. ... The motor
bus rushes into the houses which it passes, and in their turn the houses
throw themselves upon the motor bus and are blended with it."
The Futurist painters were slow to develop a distinctive style and subject matter. In 1910 and 1911 they used the techniques of Divisionism, breaking light and color down into a field of stippled dots and stripes, which had been adopted from Divisionism by Giovanni Segantini
and others. Later, Severini, who lived in Paris, attributed their
backwardness in style and method at this time to their distance from
Paris, the centre of avant-garde art. Cubism contributed to the formation of Italian Futurism's artistic style. Severini was the first to come into contact with Cubism
and following a visit to Paris in 1911 the Futurist painters adopted
the methods of the Cubists. Cubism offered them a means of analysing
energy in paintings and expressing dynamism.
They often painted modern urban scenes. Carrà's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli
(1910–11) is a large canvas representing events that the artist had
himself been involved in, in 1904. The action of a police attack and
riot is rendered energetically with diagonals and broken planes. His Leaving the Theatre (1910–11) uses a Divisionist technique to render isolated and faceless figures trudging home at night under street lights.
Boccioni's The City Rises
(1910) represents scenes of construction and manual labour with a
huge, rearing red horse in the centre foreground, which workmen struggle
to control. His States of Mind, in three large panels, The Farewell, Those who Go, and Those Who Stay, "made his first great statement of Futurist painting, bringing his interests in Bergson,
Cubism and the individual's complex experience of the modern world
together in what has been described as one of the 'minor masterpieces'
of early twentieth century painting."
The work attempts to convey feelings and sensations experienced in
time, using new means of expression, including "lines of force", which
were intended to convey the directional tendencies of objects through
space, "simultaneity", which combined memories, present impressions and
anticipation of future events, and "emotional ambience" in which the
artist seeks by intuition to link sympathies between the exterior scene
and interior emotion.
Boccioni's intentions in art were strongly influenced by the ideas of Bergson, including the idea of intuition,
which Bergson defined as a simple, indivisible experience of sympathy
through which one is moved into the inner being of an object to grasp
what is unique and ineffable within it. The Futurists aimed through
their art thus to enable the viewer to apprehend the inner being of what
they depicted. Boccioni developed these ideas at length in his book, Pittura scultura Futuriste: Dinamismo plastico (Futurist Painting Sculpture: Plastic Dynamism) (1914).
Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912) exemplifies the
Futurists' insistence that the perceived world is in constant movement.
The painting depicts a dog whose legs, tail and leash—and the feet of
the woman walking it—have been multiplied to a blur of movement. It
illustrates the precepts of the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting
that, "On account of the persistency of an image upon the retina,
moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like
rapid vibrations, in their mad career. Thus a running horse has not
four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular." His Rhythm of the Bow
(1912) similarly depicts the movements of a violinist's hand and
instrument, rendered in rapid strokes within a triangular frame.
The adoption of Cubism determined the style of much subsequent
Futurist painting, which Boccioni and Severini in particular continued
to render in the broken colors and short brush-strokes of divisionism.
But Futurist painting differed in both subject matter and treatment from
the quiet and static Cubism of Picasso, Braque and Gris.
As the art critic Robert Hughes observed, "In Futurism, the eye is
fixed and the object moves, but it is still the basic vocabulary of
Cubism—fragmented and overlapping planes".
Futurist art tended to distain traditional subjects, specifically those
of photographically realistic portraits and landscapes. Futurists
thought of "imitation" art that copied from life to be lazy,
unimaginative, cowardly, and boring. While there were Futurist
portraits: Carrà's Woman with Absinthe (1911), Severini's Self-Portrait (1912), and Boccioni's Matter (1912), it was the urban scene and vehicles in motion that typified Futurist painting; Boccioni's The Street Enters the House (1911), Severini's Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin (1912), and Russolo's Automobile at Speed (1913)
The Futurists held their first exhibition outside of Italy in 1912 at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, Paris, which included works by Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo and Giacomo Balla.
In 1912 and 1913, Boccioni turned to sculpture to translate into three dimensions his Futurist ideas. In Unique Forms of Continuity in Space
(1913) he attempted to realise the relationship between the object and
its environment, which was central to his theory of "dynamism". The
sculpture represents a striding figure, cast in bronze posthumously and
exhibited in the Tate Modern. (It now appears on the national side of Italian 20 eurocent coins). He explored the theme further in Synthesis of Human Dynamism (1912), Speeding Muscles (1913) and Spiral Expansion of Speeding Muscles (1913). His ideas on sculpture were published in the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture
In 1915 Balla also turned to sculpture making abstract
"reconstructions", which were created out of various materials, were
apparently moveable and even made noises. He said that, after making
twenty pictures in which he had studied the velocity of automobiles, he
understood that "the single plane of the canvas did not permit the
suggestion of the dynamic volume of speed in depth ... I felt the need
to construct the first dynamic plastic complex with iron wires,
cardboard planes, cloth and tissue paper, etc."
In 1914, personal quarrels and artistic differences between the Milan
group, around Marinetti, Boccioni, and Balla, and the Florence group,
around Carrà, Ardengo Soffici (1879–1964) and Giovanni Papini
(1881–1956), created a rift in Italian Futurism. The Florence group
resented the dominance of Marinetti and Boccioni, whom they accused of
trying to establish "an immobile church with an infallible creed", and
each group dismissed the other as passéiste.
Futurism had from the outset admired violence and was intensely patriotic. The Futurist Manifesto
had declared, "We will glorify war—the world's only hygiene—militarism,
patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful
ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman."
Although it owed much of its character and some of its ideas to
radical political movements, it was not much involved in politics until
the autumn of 1913. Then, fearing the re-election of Giolitti, Marinetti published a political manifesto. In 1914 the Futurists began to campaign actively against the Austro-Hungarian empire,
which still controlled some Italian territories, and Italian neutrality
between the major powers. In September, Boccioni, seated in the balcony
of the Teatro dal Verme in Milan, tore up an Austrian flag and threw it
into the audience, while Marinetti waved an Italian flag. When Italy
entered the First World War in 1915, many Futurists enlisted.
The experience of the war marked several Futurists, particularly
Marinetti, who fought in the mountains of Trentino at the border of
Italy and Austria-Hungary, actively engaging in propaganda.
Italian futurists included "visual poetry in futurist periodicals” to
promote their cause or campaign, thus swaying public opinion in their
favor after the war. The combat experience also influenced Futurist music.
The outbreak of war disguised the fact that Italian Futurism had
come to an end. The Florence group had formally acknowledged their
withdrawal from the movement by the end of 1914. Boccioni produced only
one war picture and was killed in 1916. Severini painted some
significant war pictures in 1915 (e.g. War, Armored Train, and Red Cross Train), but in Paris turned towards Cubism and post-war was associated with the Return to Order.
After the war, Marinetti revived the movement. This revival was called il secondo Futurismo (Second Futurism) by writers in the 1960s. The art historian Giovanni Lista
has classified Futurism by decades: "Plastic Dynamism" for the first
decade, "Mechanical Art" for the 1920s, "Aeroaesthetics" for the 1930s.
The main style of painting was Cubo-Futurism, extant during the 1910s. Cubo-Futurism combines the forms of Cubism
with the Futurist representation of movement; like their Italian
contemporaries, the Russian Futurists were fascinated with dynamism,
speed and the restlessness of modern urban life, however, were the
complete opposite of them ideologically, as many embraced the political
and social visions of the emerging communist movement in Russia.
The Russian Futurists sought controversy by repudiating the art of the past, saying that Pushkin and Dostoevsky
should be "heaved overboard from the steamship of modernity". They
acknowledged no authority and professed not to owe anything even to
Marinetti, as they abhorred his commitment to fascism, and most of them
obstructed him when he came to Russia to proselytize in 1914.
The movement began to decline after the revolution of 1917. The Futurists either stayed, were persecuted, or left the country. Popova, Mayakovsky and Malevich became part of the Soviet establishment and the brief Agitprop
movement of the 1920s; Popova died of a fever, Malevich would be
briefly imprisoned and forced to paint in the new state-approved style,
and Mayakovsky committed suicide on April 14, 1930.
The Futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia expressed his ideas of modernity in his drawings for La Città Nuova
(The New City) (1912–1914). This project was never built and Sant'Elia
was killed in the First World War, but his ideas influenced later
generations of architects and artists. The city was a backdrop onto
which the dynamism of Futurist life is projected. The city had replaced
the landscape as the setting for the exciting modern life. Sant'Elia
aimed to create a city as an efficient, fast-paced machine. He
manipulates light and shape to emphasize the sculptural quality of his
projects. Baroque curves and encrustations had been stripped away to
reveal the essential lines of forms unprecedented from their simplicity.
In the new city, every aspect of life was to be rationalized and
centralized into one great powerhouse of energy. The city was not meant
to last, and each subsequent generation was expected to build their own
city rather than inheriting the architecture of the past.
Futurist architects were sometimes at odds with the Fascist state's tendency towards Roman imperial-classical
aesthetic patterns. Nevertheless, several Futurist buildings were built
in the years 1920–1940, including public buildings such as railway
stations, maritime resorts and post offices. Examples of Futurist buildings still in use today are Trento railway station, built by Angiolo Mazzoni, and the Santa Maria Novella station in Florence. The Florence station was designed in 1932 by the Gruppo Toscano (Tuscan Group) of architects, which included Giovanni Michelucci and Italo Gamberini, with contributions by Mazzoni.
Futurist music rejected tradition and introduced experimental sounds
inspired by machinery, and would influence several 20th-century
composers.
Francesco Balilla Pratella joined the Futurist movement in 1910 and wrote a Manifesto of Futurist Musicians
in which he appealed to the young (as had Marinetti), because only they
could understand what he had to say. According to Pratella, Italian
music was inferior to music abroad. He praised the "sublime genius" of Wagner and saw some value in the work of other contemporary composers, for example Richard Strauss, Elgar, Mussorgsky, and Sibelius. By contrast, the Italian symphony was dominated by opera in an "absurd and anti-musical form". The conservatories
was said to encourage backwardness and mediocrity. The publishers
perpetuated mediocrity and the domination of music by the "rickety and
vulgar" operas of Puccini and Umberto Giordano. The only Italian Pratella could praise was his teacher Pietro Mascagni,
because he had rebelled against the publishers and attempted innovation
in opera, but even Mascagni was too traditional for Pratella's tastes.
In the face of this mediocrity and conservatism, Pratella unfurled "the
red flag of Futurism, calling to its flaming symbol such young composers
as have hearts to love and fight, minds to conceive, and brows free of
cowardice."
Luigi Russolo (1885–1947) wrote The Art of Noises (1913), an influential text in 20th-century musical aesthetics. Russolo used instruments he called intonarumori, which were acousticnoise generators that permitted the performer to create and control the dynamics and pitch of several different types of noises. Russolo and Marinetti gave the first concert of Futurist music, complete with intonarumori, in 1914. However they were prevented from performing in many major European cities by the outbreak of war.
Futurism was one of several 20th-century movements in art music that paid homage to, included or imitated machines. Ferruccio Busoni has been seen as anticipating some Futurist ideas, though he remained wedded to tradition. Russolo's intonarumori influenced Stravinsky, Arthur Honegger, George Antheil, Edgar Varèse, Stockhausen and John Cage. In Pacific 231, Honegger imitated the sound of a steam locomotive. There are also Futurist elements in Prokofiev's The Steel Step and in his Second Symphony.
Most notable in this respect, however, is the American George Antheil. His fascination with machinery is evident in his Airplane Sonata, Death of the Machines, and the 30-minute Ballet Mécanique. The Ballet Mécanique was originally intended to accompany an experimental film by Fernand Léger,
but the musical score is twice the length of the film and now stands
alone. The score calls for a percussion ensemble consisting of three xylophones,
four bass drums, a tam-tam, three airplane propellers, seven electric
bells, a siren, two "live pianists", and sixteen synchronized player
pianos. Antheil's piece was the first to synchronize machines with human
players and to exploit the difference between what machines and humans
can play.
Dance
The Futuristic movement also influenced the concept of dance. Indeed,
dancing was interpreted as an alternative way of expressing man's
ultimate fusion with the machine. The altitude of a flying plane, the
power of a car's motor and the roaring loud sounds of complex machinery
were all signs of man's intelligence and excellence which the art of
dance had to emphasize and praise. This type of dance is considered
futuristic since it disrupts the referential system of traditional,
classical dance and introduces a different style, new to the
sophisticated bourgeois audience. The dancer no longer performs a
story, a clear content, that can be read according to the rules of
ballet. One of the most famous futuristic dancers was the Italian Giannina Censi [it].
Trained as a classical ballerina, she is known for her "Aerodanze" and
continued to earn her living by performing in classical and popular
productions. She describes this innovative form of dance as the result
of a deep collaboration with Marinetti and his poetry. Through these
words, she says,
I launched this idea of the
aerial-futurist poetry with Marinetti, he himself declaiming the poetry.
A small stage of a few square meters;... I made myself a satin costume
with a helmet; everything that the plane did had to be expressed by my
body. It flew and, moreover, it gave the impression of these wings that
trembled, of the apparatus that trembled, ... And the face had to
express what the pilot felt."
Futurism as a literary movement made its official debut with F. T. Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism
(1909), as it delineated the various ideals Futurist poetry should
strive for. Poetry, the predominant medium of Futurist literature, can
be characterized by its unexpected combinations of images and
hyper-conciseness (not to be confused with the actual length of the
poem). The Futurists called their style of poetry parole in libertà
(word autonomy), in which all ideas of meter were rejected and the word
became the main unit of concern. In this way, the Futurists managed to
create a new language free of syntax punctuation, and metrics that
allowed for free expression.
Theater also has an important place within the Futurist universe.
Works in this genre have scenes that are few sentences long, have an
emphasis on nonsensical humor, and attempt to discredit the deep rooted
traditions via parody and other devaluation techniques.
There are a number of examples of Futurist novels from both the
initial period of Futurism and the neo-Futurist period, from Marinetti
himself to a number of lesser known Futurists, such as Primo Conti,
Ardengo Soffici and Bruno Giordano Sanzin (Zig Zag, Il Romanzo Futurista
edited by Alessandro Masi, 1995). They are very diverse in style, with
very little recourse to the characteristics of Futurist Poetry, such as
'parole in libertà'. Arnaldo Ginna's 'Le locomotive con le calze' (Trains with socks on) plunges into a world of absurd nonsense, childishly crude. His brother Bruno Corra wrote in Sam Dunn è morto
(Sam Dunn is Dead) a masterpiece of Futurist fiction, in a genre he
himself called 'Synthetic' characterized by compression, and precision;
it is a sophisticated piece that rises above the other novels through
the strength and pervasiveness of its irony. Science fiction novels play
an important role in Futurist literature.
Most of the futuristic-themed films of this period have been lost, but critics cite Thaïs (1917) by Anton Giulio Bragaglia as one of the most influential, serving as the main inspiration for German Expressionist cinema in the following decade. Thaïs was born on the basis of the aesthetic treatise Fotodinamismo futurista
(1911), written by the same author. The film, built around a
melodramatic and decadent story, actually reveals multiple artistic
influences different from Marinett's futurism; the secessionist scenographies, the liberty furniture, and the abstract and surreal moments contribute to create a strong formal syncretism. Thaïs is the only surviving example of the 1910s Italian futurist cinema to date (35 min. of the original 70 min.).
When interviewed about her favorite film of all times, famed movie critic Pauline Kael stated that the director Dimitri Kirsanoff, in his silent experimental filmMénilmontant "developed a technique that suggests the movement known in painting as Futurism".
Female Futurists
Within F. T. Marinetti's The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,
two of his tenets briefly highlight his hatred for women under the
pretense that it fuels the Futurist movement's visceral nature:
9. We intend to glorify war—the
only hygiene of the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive
gesture of anarchists, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and contempt for
woman. 10. We intend to destroy museums, libraries, academics of
every sort and to fight against moralism, feminism, and every
utilitarian opportunistic cowardice.
Marinetti would begin to contradict himself when, in 1911, he called Luisa, Marchesa Casati a Futurist; he dedicated a portrait of himself painted by Carrà to her, the said dedication declaring Casati as a Futurist being pasted on the canvas itself.
In 1912, only three years after the Manifesto of Futurism was published, Valentine de Saint-Point responded to Marinetti's claims in her Manifesto of the Futurist Woman(Response to F. T. Marinetti). Marinetti even later referred to her as "the 'first futurist woman.'" Her manifesto begins with a misanthropic tone by presenting how men and women are equal and both deserve contempt.
She instead suggests that rather than the binary being limited to men
and women, it should be replaced with "femininity and masculinity";
ample cultures and individuals should possess elements of both.
Yet, she still embraces the core values of Futurism, especially its
focus on "virility" and "brutality". Saint-Point uses this as a segue
into her antifeminist argument—giving women equal rights destroys their innate "potency" to strive for a better, more fulfilling life. In 1913, Saint-Point further expressed her desire for women to have erotic freedom when writing the Futurist Manifesto of Lust.
However, it has also been noted that both manifestos favored men,
specifically those deemed heoric, contrasting with her ideas about
shared human characteristics also present in the manifestos.
In Russian Futurist and Cubo-Futurist
circles, however, from the start, there was a higher percentage of
women participants than in Italy; examples of major female Futurists are
Natalia Goncharova, Aleksandra Ekster, and Lyubov Popova. Although Marinetti expressed his approval of Olga Rozanova's
paintings during his 1914 lecture tour of Russia, it is possible that
the women painters' negative reaction to the said tour may have largely
been due to his misogyny, as well as his explicit support for fascism.
Despite the chauvinistic nature of the Italian Futurist program,
many serious professional female artists adopted the style, especially
so after the end of the first World War. Notably among these female
futurists is F.T Marinetti's own wife Benedetta Cappa Marinetti,
whom he had met in 1918 and exchanged a series of letters discussing
each of their respective work in Futurism. Letters continued to be
exchanged between the two with F. T. Marinetti often complimenting
Benedetta – the single name she was best known as – on her genius. In a
letter dated August 16, 1919, Marinetti wrote to Benedetta "Do not
forget your promise to work. You must carry your genius to its ultimate
splendor. Every day." Although many of Benedetta's paintings were exhibited in major Italian exhibitions like the 1930-1936 Venice Biennales (in which she was the first woman to have her art displayed since the exhibition's founding in 1895), the 1935 Rome Quadriennale
and several other futurist exhibitions, she was oft overshadowed in her
work by her husband. The first introduction of Benedetta's feminist
convictions regarding futurism is in the form of a public dialogue in
1925 (with an L. R. Cannonieri) concerning the role of women in society. Benedetta was also one of the first to paint in Aeropittura, an abstract and futurist art style of landscape from the view of an airplane.
Many Italian Futurists supported Fascism
in the hope of modernizing a country divided between the
industrialising north and the rural, archaic South. Like the Fascists,
the Futurists were Italian nationalists, laborers, disgruntled war
veterans, radicals, admirers of violence, and were opposed to parliamentary democracy. Marinetti founded the Futurist Political Party (Partito Politico Futurista) in early 1918, which was absorbed into Benito Mussolini's Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in 1919, making Marinetti one of the first members of the National Fascist Party.
He opposed Fascism's later exaltation of existing institutions, calling
them "reactionary", and walked out of the 1920 Fascist party congress
in disgust, withdrawing from politics for three years; but he supported
Italian Fascism until his death in 1944. The Futurists' association with
Fascism after its triumph in 1922 brought them official acceptance in
Italy and the ability to carry out important work, especially in architecture. After the Second World War, many Futurist artists had difficulty in their careers because of their association with a defeated and discredited regime.
Marinetti sought to make Futurism the official state art of
Fascist Italy but failed to do so. Mussolini chose to give patronage to
numerous styles and movements in order to keep artists loyal to the
regime. Opening the exhibition of art by the Novecento Italiano
group in 1923, he said, "I declare that it is far from my idea to
encourage anything like a state art. Art belongs to the domain of the
individual. The state has only one duty: not to undermine art, to
provide humane conditions for artists, to encourage them from the
artistic and national point of view." Mussolini's mistress, Margherita Sarfatti,
who was as able a cultural entrepreneur as Marinetti, successfully
promoted the rival Novecento group, and even persuaded Marinetti to sit
on its board. Although in the early years of Italian Fascism modern art
was tolerated and even embraced, towards the end of the 1930s,
right-wing Fascists introduced the concept of "degenerate art" from Germany to Italy and condemned Futurism.
Marinetti made numerous moves to ingratiate himself with the
regime, becoming less radical and avant-garde with each. He moved from
Milan to Rome to be nearer the centre of things. He became an
academician despite his condemnation of academies, married despite his
condemnation of marriage, promoted religious art after the Lateran Treaty of 1929 and even reconciled himself to the Catholic Church, declaring that Jesus was a Futurist.
An example of Futurist design: "Skyscraper Lamp", by the Italian architect Arnaldo dell'Ira, 1929
Although Futurism mostly became identified with Fascism, it had a
diverse range of supporters. They tended to oppose Marinetti's artistic
and political direction of the movement, and in 1924 the socialists,
communists and anarchists walked out of the Milan Futurist Congress. The
anti-Fascist voices in Futurism were not completely silenced until the
annexation of Abyssinia and the Italo-German Pact of Steel in 1939.
This association of Fascists, socialists and anarchists in the
Futurist movement, which may seem odd today, can be understood in terms
of the influence of Georges Sorel, whose ideas about the regenerative effect of political violence had adherents right across the political spectrum.
Aeropainting (aeropittura) was a major expression of the
second generation of Futurism beginning in 1926. The technology and
excitement of flight, directly experienced by most aeropainters, offered aeroplanes and aerial landscape
as new subject matter. Aeropainting was varied in subject matter and
treatment, including realism (especially in works of propaganda),
abstraction, dynamism, quiet Umbrian landscapes, portraits of Mussolini (e.g. Dottori's Portrait of il Duce), devotional religious paintings, decorative art, and pictures of planes.
Aeropainting was launched in a manifesto of 1929, Perspectives of Flight, signed by Benedetta, Depero, Dottori, Fillìa, Marinetti, Prampolini, Somenzi and Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni).
The artists stated that "The changing perspectives of flight
constitute an absolutely new reality that has nothing in common with the
reality traditionally constituted by a terrestrial perspective" and
that "Painting from this new reality requires a profound contempt for
detail and a need to synthesise and transfigure everything." Crispolti
identifies three main "positions" in aeropainting: "a vision of cosmic
projection, at its most typical in Prampolini's 'cosmic idealism' ... ;
a 'reverie' of aerial fantasies sometimes verging on fairy-tale (for
example in Dottori ...); and a kind of aeronautical documentarism that
comes dizzyingly close to direct celebration of machinery (particularly
in Crali, but also in Tato and Ambrosi)."
Futurism influenced many other twentieth-century art movements, including Art Deco, Vorticism, Constructivism, Surrealism, Dada, and much later Neo-Futurism and the Grosvenor School linocut artists.
Futurism as a coherent and organized artistic movement is now regarded
as extinct, having died out in 1944 with the death of its leader
Marinetti.
Nonetheless, the ideals of Futurism remain as significant components of modern Western culture; the emphasis on youth, speed, power and technology finding expression in much of modern commercial cinema and culture. Ridley Scott consciously evoked the designs of Sant'Elia in Blade Runner.
Echoes of Marinetti's thought, especially his "dreamt-of metallization
of the human body", are still strongly prevalent in Japanese culture,
and surface in manga/anime and the works of artists such as Shinya Tsukamoto, director of the Tetsuo (lit. "Ironman") films. Futurism has produced several reactions, including the literary genre of cyberpunk—in which technology was often treated with a critical eye—whilst artists who came to prominence during the first flush of the Internet, such as Stelarc and Mariko Mori,
produce work which comments on Futurist ideals and the art and
architecture movement Neo-Futurism in which technology is considered a
driver to a better quality of life and sustainability values.[58][59]
A revival of sorts of the Futurist movement in theatre began in 1988 with the creation of the Neo-Futurist
style in Chicago, which utilizes Futurism's focus on speed and brevity
to create a new form of immediate theatre. Currently, there are active
Neo-Futurist troupes in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Montreal.
Futurist ideas have been a major influence in Western popular music; examples include ZTT Records, named after Marinetti's poem Zang Tumb Tumb; the band Art of Noise, named after Russolo's manifesto The Art of Noises; and the Adam and the Ants single "Zerox", the cover featuring a photograph by Bragaglia. Influences can also be discerned in dance music since the 1980s.
Japanese Composer Ryuichi Sakamoto's 1986 album "Futurista" was inspired by the movement. It features a speech from Tommaso Marinetti in the track 'Variety Show'.
In 2009, Italian director Marco Bellocchio included Futurist art in his feature film Vincere.
In 2014, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum featured the exhibition "Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe". This was the first comprehensive overview of Italian Futurism to be presented in the United States.
Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art
is a museum in London, with a collection solely centered around modern
Italian artists and their works. It is best known for its large
collection of Futurist paintings.
Futurism, Cubism, press articles and reviews
Photos, in descending order: Carlo Carrà, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo. Paintings, in descending order: Luigi Russolo, 1911, Souvenir d'un nuit, 1911–12, La révolte (two versions are depicted here); Umberto Boccioni, 1912, Le rire; Gino Severini, 1911, La danseuse obsedante. Published in The Sun, 25 February 1912
Paintings by Gino Severini, 1911, La Danse du Pan-Pan, and Severini, 1913, L'autobus. Published in Les Annales politiques et littéraires, Le Paradoxe Cubiste, 14 March 1920
Paintings by Gino Severini, 1911, Souvenirs de Voyage; Albert Gleizes, 1912, Man on a Balcony, L'Homme au balcon; Severini, 1912–13, Portrait de Mlle Jeanne Paul-Fort; Luigi Russolo, 1911–12, La Révolte. Published in Les Annales politiques et littéraires, Le Paradoxe Cubiste (continued), n. 1916, 14 March 1920
People involved with Futurism
This is a partial list of people involved with the Futurist movement.
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