Book Review: Italian Futurism and the Machine

Tim Clarke, University of Ottawa

Katia Pizzi, Italian Futurism and the Machine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019)

Like the industrial machines that fired the imaginations of modern artists throughout the early twentieth century, Katia Pizzi’s (University of London) recent monograph is a work of many moving parts and impressive dynamism. Rejecting the view that Italian futurism was simply assimilated into the ideological agenda of Fascism after the First World War, Pizzi argues that post-war futurism was in fact defined by its heterogeneity and transnational dispersal. One of the cardinal virtues of this book’s historical-cultural approach is its sensitivity to the ambivalences of futurist aesthetics and politics, which Pizzi examines not only through the familiar provocations of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti but through a host of lesser-known figures. From the revolutionary proletarianism of Vinicio Paladini’s paintings to the ‘gendered hybridization of human body and machine’ (p. 234) in Giannina Censi’s aerodancing, futurism appears in Pizzi’s book as a movement characterized by the same startling multiplicity of perspective that it strove to represent in its contributions to literature, painting, sculpture, photography, cinema, theatre, and dance.

Italian Futurism and the Machine is made up of six chapters framed by a contextualizing introduction that explores the intellectual and political underpinnings of futurist machine culture, and a forward-looking conclusion that assesses futurism’s influence in the post-industrial present, where the machine appears in progressively more abstract and digitalized forms. Chapter 1 positions the futurists at the intersection of an array of machine discourses, from cautiously optimistic analyses of the revolutionary potential of mechanization by Marx and Gramsci to the alienating techno-rationalism of Taylorist workplace management and Fordist mass production. Pizzi here establishes the book’s central argument that the First World War marked a shift in futurist priorities from an aesthetic of speed and automobility to ‘a new and nuanced set of values’ that included the ‘arcane, malevolent, and dystopian’ (p. 31). This post-war futurism appears as ‘a complex, polyvalent and networked phenomenon,’ diasporic in character and international in scope (p. 42).

Chapters 2 and 3 focus on individuals, namely Marinetti, the founder, bankroller, and arch-propagandist of the futurist movement, and Fortunato Depero, famous for his ‘plastic groupings’ of mobile multi-media objects and his theorization of a futurist ‘style of steel’ that could synthesize the human and the machine (p. 111). Chapter 2 provides a nuanced account of Marinetti’s ambivalence toward Fascism and scrutinizes the machismo that underpins his sexual politics and that led him to devise ‘a hetero-directed cyborg identity located in the female body and in the machine qua female.’ Chapter 3 focuses on Depero’s persistent efforts to mediate between artisanal and industrial modes of artistic production and, by extension, between high and low culture.

The remaining chapters investigate different formations and tendencies within Italian futurism. Chapter 4 examines the work of a diverse group of artists—Avgust Cernigoj, Paladini, Ivo Pannaggi, Ruggero Vasari, Luigi Russolo, and Silvio Mix—who Pizzi terms ‘frontier futurists’ because of ‘the transnational spread of their collaborative activities, fringe status within futurismo and ideological orientation toward Eastern Europe’ (p. 125). The discussion of Paladini, whose unrepentant communist sympathies led to his eventual excommunication from Marinetti’s circle, is of particular interest. Chapter 5 charts the futurists’ transition from an aesthetic emphasizing the materiality of machines to increasingly spiritualist or mystical strains of ‘cosmic idealism’ in the work of Enrico Prampolini and Fillia (born Luigi Colombo). Chapter 6 continues this trajectory into an analysis of aerofuturism, a late manifestation of futurism that drew inspiration from the state-encouraged vogue for flying machines and aviators in 1930s Italy in order ‘to re-humanise, “elevate” the machine’ (p. 219). Pizzi ranges widely from discussions of visual art (Benedetta Cappa Marinetti and Barbara, born Olga Biglieri) and dance (Censi) to photography (Anton Giulio Bragaglia) and machine design (Bruno Munari).

Pizzi’s chapter divisions neatly reflect the book’s recurring theme of post-war Italian futurism’s expansionary, internationalizing impetus. The experience of reading sequentially from the Marinetti and Depero chapters, with their tight focus on individual personalities, to the looser thematic investigations of frontier futurism, cosmic idealism, and aerofuturism imparts a sense of futurism’s restless geographic and aesthetic diffusion, its growing fascination with machine-inspired forms of abstraction, and its constant efforts to negotiate between aesthetic innovation and its relationship with the Fascist regime.

On a stylistic level, Italian Futurism and the Machine is an accessible piece of academic prose that synthesizes an impressive array of archival and secondary research. Pizzi allows her subjects to speak for themselves where possible and provides clear, evocative descriptions of performances and visual pieces where necessary. Especially praiseworthy is her account of the rise and fall of Censi’s dancing career, brought to an early end in 1935 by injury and single motherhood. In its balance of argumentative vigour and tragic pathos, Pizzi’s prose here attains a resonance that I only wish was more common in academic writing. Though I sometimes found myself wanting more exegesis and somewhat less description (e.g., in the account of Munaro’s aesthetic practices in Chapter 6), Pizzi generally strikes an appropriate middle ground. At an editorial level, the text itself would have benefited from another round of copy editing to catch stray textual blemishes and inconsistencies, which appear with some frequency (e.g., Louis Aragon’s name rendered occasionally as ‘Luis’ on pp. 32, 261, and in the index, Marinetti’s date of first service in the First World War given as 21 July 2015 on p. 49, and Aryan rendered as ‘Arian’ on p. 224). Nevertheless, while these issues sometimes distract from Pizzi’s argumentation, they do not seriously endanger it.

All told, Italian Futurism and the Machine is a significant contribution not only to scholarship on the Italian futurists but to modernist studies more generally. This book will be especially valuable to scholars of modernist visual and performing arts, though anyone invested in discourses about modernist machine culture and technology will find much to admire in Pizzi’s book.