ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
From the beginning, Marinetti was aware of the need to reach a broad
audience to realise his cultural and political goals of overthrowing the
ruling bourgeoisie and promoting a patriotic, industrialised nationalism.
To this end he aligned himself with populist strategies of communication.
According to Marinetti, ‘Articles, poems and polemics were no longer
adequate. It was necessary to change methods completely, to go out into
the street, to launch assaults from theatres and to introduce the fisticuff
into the artistic battle.’ 4 The fact that the first Futurist manifesto was
printed in its entirety on the front page of Le Figaro (20 February 1909) –
as well as in several Italian newspapers – is a staggering feat of publicity.
The manifesto eulogised the crowd as an aspect of modernity to be
embraced alongside technology and warfare: ‘We will sing of great crowds
excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot . . .’. 5 Christine Poggi has argued
that the Futurist conception of spectatorship was indebted to contemporaneous
theorists of the crowd such as Gustave Le Bon’s Psychologie des
foules (1895) and Scipio Sighele’s L’intelligenza della folla (1903). 6 Le Bon
had written about the importance of images rather than logical discourse
for communicating with crowds – and this precisely paralleled the Futurist
adoption of visual performance as the primary vehicle with which to
connect with large audiences. It was also a medium ripe for reinvention, as
the collaboratively authored ‘Futurist Synthetic Theatre Manifesto’ (1915)
makes clear:
For Italy to learn to make up its mind with lightning speed, to hurl itself
into battle, to sustain every undertaking and every possible calamity,
books and reviews are unnecessary. They interest and concern only a
minority, are more or less tedious, obstructive, and relaxing. They
cannot help chilling enthusiasm, aborting impulses, and poisoning with
doubt a people at war. War – Futurism intensified – obliges us to march,
and not to rot in libraries and reading rooms. THEREFORE WE
THINK THAT THE ONLY WAY TO INSPIRE ITALY WITH THE
WARLIKE SPIRIT TODAY IS THROUGH THE THEATRE. In fact
ninety percent of Italians go to the theatre, whereas only ten percent read
books and reviews. But what is needed is a FUTURIST THEATRE,
completely opposed to the passéist theatre that drags its monotonous,
depressing processions around the sleepy Italian stages. 7
Here, then, we see the beginning of the active/ passive binary that holds
such sway over the discourse of participation throughout the twentieth
century: conventional theatre is derided as producing passivity, while
Futurist performance allegedly prompts a more dynamic, active spectatorship.
In this regard, it is important that the ideal model of the Futurist serate
was not theatre based on traditional conventions of plot, character, lighting,
costumes, etc., and produced by and for middle- class audiences; rather,
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