From: gtaylor@vme.heurikon.com (Gregory Taylor)
Newsgroups: rec.music.industrial
Subject: Re: Sex + Cars + Critics on Acid == Art!
Date: 11 Nov 92 21:10:41 GMT
Reply-To: gtaylor@vme.heurikon.com (Gregory Taylor)
Organization: Heurikon Corporation, Madison, WI

gallen@nyx.cs.du.edu (Geoff Allen) writes:
>I lost the previous posts - but who was it who was arguing that our
>technofetishism (and carrying it to extremes) was part of some
>fascist artistic movement (the Futurists) and therefore it was inherently
>fascist?

Ah...I am not certain that you were reading very carefully - either
the historical documents *or* the postings. You'd be quite hard pressed
to claim that technofetishism [nice term, eh?] *isn't* present in a
form which *isn't* already pretty extreme even if the only documents
you were able to get your hands on were the translations in the appendices
of Michael Kerby's "Futurist Performance" [the old tried-and-true volume
itself]. The manifestos themselves argue for the practice of "carrying
it to extremes" themselves. I expect you've not really read much of
the primary documents in Italian Futurism, which does a really wierd
balancing act between the kind of "volk" worship of agricultural values
and the worship of the products of industry which is an artifact of
Futurist progress. Heck, even the British intellectuals of the 30s who
voiced some respect for Mussolini early on (remember "The Prime of Miss
Jean Brody?") did so out of the claim that Mussolini did wonderful things
for Italian industrial development.

But *inherently* fascist? I don't think I've heard *that* claim. I've
argued quite regularly against a facile "Well, so what if Boyd Rice
dallies with the Aryan Nation? It's only *music*" type of analysis which
attempts to cast Marinetti and his poor widdle fwends as being co-opted
by the i nasti fascisti, because I don't think that it squares with the
historical record [this has been researched much more fearlessly by 
recent Italian critics during the 1980s than by Americans, so you'd 
have to be able to do some research in the primary language]. For me,
the question involves trying to get your average nonreflective suburban
industrial geek to proceed from the more historically accurate position
of saying "Well, yes. Russolo and Marinetti were in with the Fascist
art establishment up to their eyeballs, from the glowing essays on the
primacy of Fascism in futurist thought from the 1933 Novocento exhibition
catalogs all the way to the government stipends. But what kinds of 
currents in futurist thought might have impelled them in that direction?
Stuff that you couldn't reconstruct futurism *without*, perhaps?
This whole program would for me be much more like looking at feminist
reconstructions of Freud. What I've regularly spoken out on here is
the "deny or excuse" stance of your average rmi junior futurist.

>Anyway, I really beg to disagree on both counts... Like the people
>who drool over race cars etc. today, the Futurists were NOT a typically
>fascist movement.  I remember reading somewhere (a long time ago really)
>that it was Mussolini that liked them, and not the other way around...

We'll leave aside the equation which places futurists as mere worshippers
of race cars [perhaps a little critique of technology and power might
serve us better. How about computers instead of race cars?], since that's
only a straw man argument. Again, I'd suggest that your reading might be
a little out of date in terms of current scholarship. Besides, it's not
like its being regularly written about in English. The last thing we
saw here was the publication and translation of "The Futurist Cookbook."
In fact, lots of the recent publication on the subject comes explicitly
from the fact that futurism had been so thoroughtly discredited by the 
Italian public after the fall of Mussolini that it was actually difficult
to *find* some of the original documents (M. Kerby told me that he had
several experiences while researching "Futurist Performance" of finally
finding a relative or friend who had turned out to have thrown out or
burned the original documents in disgust after the war). From my reading,
I'd be inclined to think that it's most charitable to conculde that
the boys embraced il Duce because they really didn't care *what* it took
to guarantee them success and support, and that one searches their manifestos
in vain for the merest hint of a futurist ethic which doesn't outright
condone their worst excesses. I think you're also off the track to suggest
that futurist art is a monolithic form. After all, folks like that old
FM-classical weenie Respighi (that's right, "The Pines of Rome" and all
that) was *also* in the fascist pantheon.

>In my understanding the Bauhaus also made concessions to the Nazis, yet
>they were originally and officially representative of the Weimar Republic.
>Their school in Germany eventually ended up getting destroyed by Nazi forces
>_because_ some of them were still anti-0nazi.

Ah - that doesn't really work well unless you credit the batch of them
that turned expatriate and fled well in advance. Unlike the Bauhaus,
the folks on the Fascist payroll weren't the leftovers. They were the
regulars (Hey - I just remembered that Sachs' "Music in Fascist Italy"
*is* in English and doesn't spend much time on Russolo and Marinetty,
but I think that he does list stipends and years along with the rest
of the composing Italian population. The source of a lot of Sachs' stuff
is, unfortunately, in Italian).

>My point is, why make the generalization that all Futurists were fascist,
>or especially the statement that Futurism is inherently fascist?  Just
>because some were forced into submission and cooperation with Mussolini
>doesn't have anything to do with whether today's Futurists have anything
>to _do_ with fascism.  One must take circumstances into account, is what
>I'm really trying to say.  

I'm not making that generalization, as I've argued above. However,
Italian futurism (unlike, say, German realism in the 30s) was sufficiently
narrow in scope and limited to a small group of people whose movements
and writings can be researched that one can claim that, indeed, most
if not all of the futurists seem to be voluntarily tangoing with il
Duce's pals and loving every minute of it [indeed, what might arguably
have been their biggest contemporary exhibition happens with the imprimitur
of the Fascist government - that Novocento thing]. They do not appear to
have been forced. As to the question of historical continuity, well....
it now appears that your nice old uncle Luigi Futuristi was buggering the
hell out of all three of your cute little cousins. When you go home for
a visit after a long time away, someone in the cafe looks across the 
counter at you and says, "Hey. You're a Futuristi, ain't ya? Your kin
are a bunch of child molesters, ain't they?" I'd call "taking circumstances
into account" as the business of admitting to the fact that it's happened
and being willing to seriously interrogate your own committments in light
of what happened to your nice old uncle Luigi (who is, after all, *family.*)

>Artists are people too, and when 99.9%of the
>people are forced into compliance with a fascist government, you'd better
>bet that most of the artists will be too, especially those taking such an
>apolitical stance.

This is a great sop if you work from an ethic which allows you to 
overlook personal culpability in light of fashion or statistics. I'd
think that the brave and individualistic and alienated rmi sort would
sneer bigtime at those toadies who run with the pack.

>This kind of crypto-generalization is why I'm disgusted with 90% of the PC
>movement anyways..

And your response seems salted enough with assumptions that you seem
freely willing to admit to [I've not read up recently] and saddled with
enough assumptions about distinguishing between what constitutes and
induvidual decision and the relationship between that choice and one's
associations (desired or imputed) with larger groups that I'm not surprised
at all to have hit your last paragraph and thought "How come I'm not 
surprised that he'd lob this lame little grenade at the end?" Heck,
why not apply all this wonderful analysis you've lavished on the futurists
on "the PC movement" (whatever *that* is)? Share the wealth. If you
can swallow this "artists are people, too" stuff for Marinetti, why
not for your straw PC folks? 

And just to show that there's no hard feelings, here's some stuff to
hunt down through interlibrary loan: a master's thesis from the University
of Wisconsin and a real live Eye-talian bibliography which I personally 
know to be chock full of cool (if somewhat unfortunate) stuff.

Jay T. Nelson "The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution: Fascism,
Futurism, and the Novecento", 1986, [call no. AWO N427 J382]

Claudia Salaris "Bibliografia del Futurismo" 1981, Stampa Alternitava,
Rome

After you've worked your way through these, that "Crypto-generalities"
line will sound better. 

Have a nice day (I'll just bet that Matthew answers this post, too. My
money's on the "ethical" angle - were they opportunists or cowardly
toadies?)
--
-The world exhausts everything except my eyes/because it is a long walk to the
world/begun before I was born. In the far corner/the dead woman bows off stage
The television/crumples into a white dot as the last/train of the evening - my
train, is announced/I lived in one place. I want to die in another 608-828-3385
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