Lenin a futurist?

Of course, given the nature of of the times and the agressive speach of contemporary artists, Early Twentieth-Century Futurists (and Dadaists, and Surrealists) can often easily get lumped with major (often currently unpopular) political movements of the time. These artists were active in being important figures in their society. They weren't artists purely for personal gain but also they often thought they were bettering mankind's existential health. They were radical thinkers in art, and since art is a natural part of life, they were radical thinkers in the social realm as well.

The Futurists might have been afraid of Europe sinking into another dark-ages. At the turn of the century there was such a huge surge in science and new ideas, the Futurists saw themselves as a catylist for encouraging an even faster pregression.

It's not fair, really, to sit back today and call Lenin a Futurist. Just as it is misleading to call Tatlin a Communist. Many of the major ideals line up on both sides because these ideas for change in the new Century were so important to so many thinking people. Still, there is a large gap between the action of men of power and the written words of men of thought.

Marcu, a young Roumanian was living in Zurich at the same time as Tzara, Janco, Jung, Ball, and Lenin (who was in exile there). Marcu gives us this from his memoirs:

When we left the restaurant, it was late in the afternoon. I walked home with Lenin.
"You see," he said, "why I take my meals here. You get to know what people are really talking about. Nadezhda Konstantinovna is sure that only the Zurich underworld frequents this pleace, but I think she is mistaken. To be sure, Maria is a prostitute, but she does not like her trade. She has a large family to support - and that is no easy matter. As to Frau Prellog, she is prefectly right. Did you hear what she said? Shoot all the officers!..."

"Do you know the real meaning of this war?"
"What is it?" I asked.
"It is obvious," he replied. "One slaveholder, Germany, who owns one hundred slaves, is fighting another slaveholder, England, who owns two hundred slaves, for a 'fairer' distribution of the slaves."
"How can you expect to foster hatred of this war," I asked at this point, "if you are not, in principle, against all wars? I thought that as a Bolshevik you were really a radical thinker and refused to make any compromise with the idea of war. But by recognizing the validity of some wars, you open the doors for every opportunity. Every group can find some justifications of the particular war of which it approves. I see that we young people can only count on ourselves..."
"Lenin listened attentively, his head bent toward me. He moved his chair closer to mine... Lenin must have wondered whether he should continue to talk with this boy or not. I, somewhat awkwardly, remained silent."
"Your determination to rely upon yourselves," Lenin finally replied, "is very important. Every man must rely upon himself. Yet he should also listen to what informed people have to say. I don't know how radical you are, or how radical I am. I am certainly not radical enough. One can never be radical enough; that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself..."

............

Another interesting interchange between radical artists of the Early Twentieth Century and political power mongers happened in 1948. Marinetti personally invited Moholy-Nagy and Kurt Schwitters to accompany him to a banquet with the German Press Association. Goebbels was there, as was Goring, August Wilhelm of Hohenzollern, Hess, Roehm, and Nazi underlings. Moholy, Schitters and Moholy's wife were sandwiched between the head of the National Socialist Organization for Folk Culture, and the leader of the "Strength Through Joy" movement. Moholy-Nagy's wife Sibyl writes:

The disharmony between the guests was accentuated by the absence of speeches and an unlimited consumption of excellent German Rhine wine. Moholy was silent. His face was shuttered, and when our eyes met I saw that he was full of resentment. The more Schwitters drank, the more fondly he regarded his neighbor.
"I love you, you Cultural Folk and Joy," he said. "honestly, I love you. You think I'm not worthy of sharing your chamber, your art chamber for strength and folk, ha? I'm an idiot too, and I can prove it."
Moholy put his hand firmly on Schwitters' arm and for a few minutes he was silent, drinking rapidly and searching the blank face of his neighbor with wild blue eyes.
"You think I'm a Dadaist, don't you," he suddenly started again. "that's where you're wrong, brother. I'm MERZ!" He thumped his wrinkled dress shirt near his heart. "I'm Aryan - the great Aryan MERZ. I can think Aryan, paint Aryan, spit Aryan."
He held an unsteady fist before the man's nose. "With this Aryan fist I shall destroy the mistakes of my youth - if you want me to," he added in a whisper after a long sip."
There was no reaction at all from the Strength Through Joy man while the official from the Folk Culture Organization nodded droolingly, his round cheeks puffed up with wine and amazement. Schwitters took a sudden liking to him.
"Oh joyful babyface," he muttered, tears running down his cheeks. "You will not prohibit me from MERZing my MERZ art?"
The word 'prohibit' had finally penetrated the foggy brain of the Strength Through Joy man.
"Verboten ist verboten," he said with great firmness and a heavy tongue, "Heil Hitler!"
Schwitters looked wildly at Moholy, at me, at Marinetti, but before he could incite anyone to action, Marinetti had risen from his chair. he swayed considerably and his face was purple.
"My friends," he said in French, "after the many excellent speeches tonight, I feel the urge to thank the great, courageous, high-spirited people of Berlin. I shall recite my poem "The Raid on Adrionople."
There was polite applause. Some nice poetry would break the embarrassing dullness of the dinner.

Adrianople est cerne de toutes parts SSSSrrrr zigzigzigzigz PAAAAAAAAAAAAAAghrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

roared Marinetti

Ouah ouah ouah, depart des trains suicides, ouah ouah ouah

the audience gasped; a few hushed giggles were audible

Tchip tchip tchip -fEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEElez

he grabbed a wineglass and smashed it to the floor

Tchip tchip tichip - des messages tlegraphiques couturieres Americaines Piiiiiiiiiiiiiing, sssssssssrrrrrr, zitzitzitzit toum toum Patrouille tapie -

Marinetti threw himself over the table.

Vanite, viande congeleeeeeeeee - veilleuse de La Madone

expiring almost as a whisper from his lips.
Slowly he slid to the floor, his clenched fingers pulling the tablecloth downward, wine, food, plates, and silverware puring into the laps of the notables.
Schwitters had jumped up at the first sound of the poem. Like a horse at a familiar sound the Dadaist in him responded to the signal. His face flushed, his mouth open, he followed each of Marinetti's moves with his own body. In the momentary silence that followed the climax his eyes met Moholy's.
"Oh, Anna Blume," he whispered, and suddenly breaking out into a roar that drowned the din of protesting voices and scraping chair legs, he thundered:

Oh, Anna Blume
Du bist von hinten wie von vorn
A-N-N-A

Stockhausen and the future(ists) (part 4 of 4)

If one were to pick an object of the world and express what that object means to us in the human experience we could see more clearly how the work of Stockhausen and the Futurists relate. For example, when a Futurist wishes to express a table he or she would immediately want to know how the table would move, or under what circumstances it would move and it would show the entire movement of that table in one flat space. Simultaneity might also provoke a Futurist artist to express other things moving in relation to the table at the same time. Stockhausen can view this table with the knowledge gained in the last fifty years. The atomic age lets us know that the table is no longer merely a table but it is an object which is composed of millions of atomic materials in constant motion. If all materials are composed of fundamental elements it is possible to imagine that object being transformed into a different object with the elements added, subtracted, or rearranged. In other words the Futurists might want to exhibit the simultaneous motion of a train smashing through the table with passengers dining comfortably on similar tables in their cabins, and Stockhausen could conceivably express a transformation from the table into the locomotive itself. The Futurists idea of simultaneity is the expression of the movement of the table and its modern environment at the same time. Stockhausen’s idea of expressing simultaneity is to express the table becoming the environment, or perhaps to show various degrees of the elements between the table and its environment. Stockhausen’s music is often essentially a decomposition or deconstruction of melodic and harmonic elements and new permutations of these elements. Using electronics he can create these permutations almost infinitely in ways the human body can not comprehend without the knowledge of mechanical or electronic devices.


Karlheinz Stockhausen’s work can clearly be seen as an extension of the Futurist aesthetic that motivates us towards thinking above and beyond the limitations of our natural body. They both use a simultaneous expression of time that is free of the body’s limitations, they both believe in the potency of the future compared to the latent perceptions of the past, and they both rely on the machine’s ability to do what the body naturally cannot. Stockhausen has similar views of expressing the simultaneity of the human experience and the relationship between man and machine but he applies what we have learned from science and technology in the last fifty years. Stockhausen shares the Futurists’ wish to “hurl their defiance to the stars,” and proclaim the age of the machine as a necessary step in human evolution. He also uses technology to heighten our perception of the world and escape from what he calls the prison of our organic limitations.


It is a constant desire of mankind to learn as much as we can about the world and it is also the constant need of the artist to express our experiences. Therefore it is inevitable that the learning and the expressing combine to push mankind further in its evolution. Both the Futurists and Stockhausen struggle with the possibility of escape and transcendence from the limitations that were imposed upon us from birth, and both wish to express the possibility of a malleable reality which would allow us to evolve into a freer and more perfect entity.

Russolo and Marinetti - men of the future (part 2)

Luigi Russolo was another Italian Futurist who had ideas for Futurism in music. In 1913 he wrote, “We take greater pleasure in ideally combining the noises of trams, explosions of motors, trains, and shouting crowds than in listening again, for example, to the ‘Eroica’ or the ‘Pastorale.’”4 He describes the pleasure of listening to a large modern capital with its “gurglings of water, air, and gas inside metallic pipes, the grumbling of motors that breathe and pulse with an indisputable animality, the throbbing of valves, the rising and falling pisons, the screeching of mechanical saws, the jumping of trams on their rails.”5 Russolo’s idea is to form a new orchestra with a new classification of sounds. Instead of strings, brass, and woodwinds he envisions screams, thumps and explosions. These are sounds of the machine; essentially Russolo was describing a type of electronic music in 1913. The exact technology for performing these sounds was not yet possible but the Futurists envisioned a music that was free of the organic sounds of human performers. Russolo envisioned a new orchestra that would obtain sonic emotions by imitation of life but by a “fantastic association of various timbres and rhythms.”6 Russolo’s idea of Futurist music was the glorification of factory and machine simultaneously using new mechanical sounds as the orchestra of tomorrow. In other words Futurist music was music which neglected the organic human body while reveling in the power technology and its ability to do what the body could no longer match.

Marinetti’s motivation was somewhat political when he founded Italian Futurism; he wanted an Italy free of its archeological sleep and an Italy of vitality. His glorification of the new and avant-garde was a way of drawing attention to the future rather than the past. Neitzsche said, “there can be no nostalgia! No pessimism! There’s no turning back! Boldly, let us advance! Forward! Faster! Further, Higher! Let us lyrically renew our joy in being alive!”7 Like Neitzsche the Futurists believed in the potency of the future. They affirmed that “the future is a malleable entity in perpetual creation and is the only authentic dimension of reality,” and they believed that, “the past does not actually exist except in the memory.”8 What only exists in this latent fraction of the mind cannot be conceived of as reality instead absolute truth was to be found in the future.9 In 1909 Marinetti published the novel Mafarka the Futurist, the story of the birth of a mechanical winged superman. The author created a mythology of the future and set it in the past. This convergence of the past and future allowed the past to exist as a symbol of mysticism and the future to be exalted as the only truth. Marinetti wrote that only the machine could deliver us from our biological and genetic fate and, at the same time, assure the irreversibility of history.

The Futurist’s conception of time is one that further expresses the desire to escape from the human organic body. Futurist artists used simultaneity as the expresses the desire to escape from the human organic body. Futurist artists used simultaneity as the expression of the incredibly complex rhythms of life. Essentially Simultaneity is the perception of many different events and meanings at the same time. Simultaneity is movement beyond the body and a display of all things in the human experience, but exhibiting and comprehending this movement can only truly happen without the limited perceptions of the human body.

Stockhausen and Marinetti - men of the future (part 1)

The modern world is an age of reliance upon the machine. The relationship that has evolved between the organic and the mechanical modifies the way we as humans perceive the world because we no longer view the world as it relates specifically to the body. In fact one might argue that we have neglected our organic body. Only in sickness, or when the body does not function, is the average person consistently aware of his body. Instead we view the world in relation to the machines that have become necessary to our daily life.

Before the inorganic intrusion of the modern world we perceived the entire world only as it related to our organic body. Every form we recognize has a natural relation to our body. Even the way we perceive time is as it relates to the linearity and length of our body’s life span; and a three dimensional form can only be something that our body can get inside or around. In other words, if we did not have a body that has a finite time of life, we could not view time linearly and if our body did not move in space our perception of all three dimensions would be radically different.

The Futurist artists of the early part of the century were dedicated to applying themselves to the future, and to affirming the belief in an evolution of the human spirit that has no further use of the organic body. Karheinz Stockhausen is constantly experimenting with pushing our perceptions free of what he calls the “prison of our body.”1 Because of its glorification of technology and desire to express time independently of humans’ natural perception, Futurism was essentially expressing the desire for and escape from (or an evolution beyond) the limitations of the physical and organic human body. Karlheinz Stockhausen is a composer who uses technology to reexamine the way we perceive rhythm, time, and pitch. Stockhausen’s work attempts to push our evolution towards an escape from the limited perceptions imposed by the organic human body; therefore, his works are an extension of the Futurist aesthetic.

The Italian poet F. T. Marinetti founded Futurism in January 1909. Futurism was an attempt to express a glorification of speed and the dynamism of the modern mechanical world. Marinetti would often converge the Organic with the Inorganic in his work in order to express the unique symbiotic relationship between man and machine that had begun to evolve in the beginning of this century. In his Manifesto of Futurism, the Italian author refers to his automobiles (a modern addition to the world in 1909) as a living things.

"I went up to the three snorting beasts, to lay amorous hands on their torrid breasts. I stretched out on my car like a corpse on its bier, but revived at once under the steering wheel, a guillotine blade that threatened my stomach.”2

In this passage Marinetti expresses and inadequacy of our natural body when compared to the mechanical automobile. He compares the vitality and speed of the car to the weak and dependant corpse of the body. Later in the same work Marinetti speaks of his love for this new relationship of the modern world.

“O maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black beast of my Sudanese nurse… When I came up – torn, filthy, and stinking – from under the capsized car. I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart.”3