Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

notes to pages 43– 6
plays Sphinx and Strawman (1909) and Murderer Hope of Women
(1909). Kokoschka’s plays were composed of theatrical images and
focused on the aural quality of words rather than on conventional
acting techniques.
3 Performance historian Günter Berghaus points to Marinetti’s ten- year
experience reciting Symbolist and anarchist poetry in various French and
Italian theatres, ‘causing altercations and agitated audience reactions’,
and notes this infl uence on Futurist recitation. See Berghaus, Avant- garde
Performance: Live Events and Electronic Technologies, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, p. 32.
4 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘Prime battaglie futuriste’, Teoria e invenzione
futurista, Milan: Mondadori, 1968, p. 201; translation in Milton Cohen,
Movement, Manifesto, Melée: The Modernist Group 1910– 1914, Lanham,
Maryland: Lexington Books, 2004, p. 136.
5 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘Futurist Manifesto’, Le Figaro, 20 February
1909, reprinted in R. W. Flint (ed.), Marinetti: Selected Writings, New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971, pp. 39– 44.
6 Christine Poggi, ‘Folla/ Follia: Futurism and the Crowd’, Critical Inquiry,
28:3, Spring 2002, pp. 744– 5.
7 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Emilio Settimelli, Bruno Corra, ‘The Futurist
Synthetic Theatre’, in Marinetti: Selected Writings, p. 123. Passéist is
the conventional English translation of passatista, an old- fashioned,
conservative person.
8 See Marinetti, ‘The Variety Theatre’ (1913), in Marinetti: Selected Writings,
pp. 116– 22.
9 Futurist Painters (Balla, Boccioni, Carrà, Russola, Severini), ‘Exhibitors
to the Public’ (1912), Exhibition of Works of the Italian Futurist Painters,
London: Sackville Gallery, 1912, pp. 2– 15, cited in Christina Taylor,
Futurism: Politics, Painting and Performance, Michigan: Ann Arbor, UMI
Research Press, 1974 (second edition 1979), p. 20.
10 Marinetti, ‘The Variety Theatre’, p. 118.
11 Ibid., pp. 33– 4. These ideas were translated into Russian Futurist theatre
following an Italian tour there in 1913– 14: at a Cubo- Futurist recital in
Moscow in October 1913, the poet Aleksei Kruchenykh spilled hot tea on
the front row of the audience and demanded to be booed off stage.
12 Marinetti apparently replied, ‘If I deserve a bullet of lead, you deserve a
bullet of shit!’ Reported in Berghaus, Avant- garde Performance, p. 37.
13 As Christine Poggi argues, Futurist texts have a strong gender subtext,
aiming to infuse a ‘feminised’ audience with a ‘masculine’ will to
power. In Futurist writing as well as in painting, the crowd is
frequently figured as feminine in its ‘malleability, its incapacity to
reason, its susceptibility to flattery and hysteria, and its secret desire
to be seduced and dominated’. (Poggi, ‘Folla/ Follia: Futurism and
the Crowd’, p. 712.)
296