He was the brilliant yet alarming writer of the Futurist Manifesto, a bohemian poet jailed with Mussolini who helped forge the modern world. As a new show re-examines his troubling legacy, we explore the Italian troublemaker’s extraordinary life
ilippo Tommaso Marinetti was the Elon Musk of the early 20th century, combining a joy in technological innovation with an appetite for illiberal politics. Where Musk builds rockets, Marinetti celebrated those shiny new inventions, the aeroplane and the motor car.
The show is a chance to reconsider this brilliant yet alarming figure at a time when his brand of politics may be making a comeback. In photographs, he looks a mixture of dictator and dandy, his moustache an emphatic black flourish with martial upturned points, as he poses like an orator or lounges at a cafe table, appearing every bit the bohemian poet he was. Born in Egypt in 1876 to Italian parents, he was educated in Paris and wrote poetry in French.
Futurism and fascism only fell out because Marinetti was too radical for Mussolini’s middle-class supporters. Hating the grip of the church on Italy, he made a speech attacking the papacy at the first Fascist Congress. This was not what Mussolini needed as he built a conservative hegemony. Marinetti became instead a tame artistic icon of the dictatorship, appointed to Mussolini’s Academy of Italy in 1929.
Marinetti invented the artistic manifesto itself, a rhetorical form later copied by surrealism, Fluxus and others. By extension, he also created the idea of the art movement as a quasi-ideological group. Where previous “isms” were facetiously named by their critics, futurism announced itself. To give him his due, Marinetti didn’t just sit in a cafe praising war. His dazzling battlefield of words, Zang Tumb Tuuum, depicts the Siege of Adrianople, a 1912-13 battle in the first Balkan war that he witnessed. He even persuaded a London paper to publish his war reporting. Zang Tumb Tuuum is a disjointed text that includes appropriated elements, from newspaper reports to crazy poster lettering.
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