Aesthetics and politics

1
Aesthetics and politics

• Manifesting the New

2
Speech acts

• Do not describe or narrate
• They make happen, instigate, produce
• These goals are desirable for both political and
  aesthetic reasons
• Manifestoes cause things to occur, usher newness
  into the world
• The poetry of the future is political and
  aesthetic at once

3
But there are real differences

• Political manifestoes tend to come from the Left
• Socialist
• politicize art

• The art manifestoes were looking at are from
  the Right
• Socialism co-opted
• aestheticise politics

the manifesto, now situated in politics and in
art, became a genre through which art and
politics could communicate, a kind of membrane
that allowed for exchange between them even as it
also kept them apart. (Martin Puchner)
4
Why art manifestoes?

• The old ways have become official
• Academic art (Neoclassicism, Romanticism)
• Collective need to break loose
• Politicise the field of Art
• Modernism needed manifestoes, to militarize the
  terrain

5
Signor Marinetti

• Futurist Manifesto (1909, etc., etc.)
• Cult of the machine
• Modernity as speed
• The beauty of speed
• Enriches the worlds magnificence!
• We want to hymn the man at the wheel

6
Marinettis violence of language

• We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit
  of energy and fearlessness.
• Lets break out of the horrible shell of wisdom
  and throw ourselves like pride-ripened fruit into
  the wide, contorted mouth of the wind! Lets give
  ourselves utterly to the Unknown, not in
  desperation but only to replenish the deep wells
  of the Absurd!
• faces smeared with good factory muckplastered
  with metallic waste, with senseless sweat, with
  celestial soot.

7
Violence to and of language

• War with the decorum of polite expression
• Transvaulation topsy-turvy values
• Oh! Maternal ditch fair factory drain
  nourishing sludge
• Unpredictable locutions and images

8
Futurist Art

• Follows manifesto!
• Energy, aggressiveness, violence and heroism
• Anti-Nature pro-machine
• Fascist, anti-feminist
• We will glorify warthe worlds only
  hygienemilitarism, patriotism, the destructive
  gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas
  worth dying for, and scorn of woman.

Carlo Carrà Funeral of the Anarchist Galli
Umberto Boccioni Unique Forms of Continuity (1913)
9
More Futurism
10
C19th is a Woman

• Victorian culture is effeminate
• Sentimental
• The spectral vampire of tradition
• It must be conjured away!

11
Futurism is a Phallus

• The poet must spend himself with ardor,
  splendor, and generosity, to swell the
  enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
• We will destroy the museums, libraries,
  academies of every kind, will fight moralism,
  feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian
  cowardice.

12
Toward the post-human

• Man machine Centaurs of modernity
• Cyborgs men-machines
• Beyond sexual difference, beyond erotics
• Thus the technophilic typefaces, etc.

13
Against all rules

• Printed page has material properties
• These could be exploited, played with
• The text performs its argument against prescribed
  forms

14
Advertising?

• Promotional zeal
• Rhetoric of salesmanship
• Shameless hucksterism
• Variety shows
• Futurist underpants

15
Marinetti in London

• The great Futurist metropolis
• In the audience Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis
• Resent being told what to do by an Italian
• But inspired anyway

Ezra Pound
Wyndham Lewis
16
Pounds Imagism

• A manifesto of Donts (1911) thou shalt not
• Proscriptions and prohibitions
• no superfluous word
• go in fear of abstractions
• Dont be viewy
• Etc., etc., etc

17
Modernism taboos!

• In order to make it new the poet has to avoid
  every trap laid by the C19th
• Tradition unequivocally repudiated
• The recent past becomes inauthentic

18
Voice of the drill-sergeant

• Artistic cadres must be disciplined
• Hard, muscled bodies
• Hectored and instructed
• Imperative mood, unflagging vigilance

19
Victorianism effeminacy

• blurry, messy, sentimentalistic, mannerish
• perdamnable rhetoric, luxurious riot
• fewer painted adjectives impeding the shock and
  stroke of it the poem?! austere, direct, free
  from emotional slither

NO!
YES!
20
Wyndham Lewis

• Editor of BLAST (1914-15)
• Review of the Great English Vortex
• Manifesto of Vorticism
• English avant-garde proper
• Post-futurist (already)
• The genre of the art manifesto comes into its
  own

21
BLAST, no. 1 (1914)

• Big, puce cover!
• Enormous swaggering arrogance
• The true home of the artistic revolution is
  England!
• Tongue-in-cheek appropriation of genre

22
Extremity beyond extremes

• Accepts the manifestic we
• Accepts the division of the field into divided
  camps
• But then goes further
• Opportunist primitive mercenaries
• The only point of BLAST is the aggravation of
  Civil War between apes

• Beyond Action and Reaction we would establish
  ourselves.
• We start from opposite statements of a chosen
  world. Set up violent structure of adolescent
  clearness between two extremes.
• We discharge ourselves on both sides.
• We fight first on one side, then on the other,
  but always for the SAME cause, which is neither
  side or both sides and ours.
• Mercenaries were always the best troops.
• We are primitive Mercenaries in the Modern World.
• Our Cause is NO-MAN'S.
• We set Humour at Humour's throat. Stir up Civil
  War among peaceful apes.

23
Graphic design as provocation

• Variable font size
• Variable tabs
• Variable CAPS
• Vertical and horizontal lines
• Text as text
• Imperative, arresting, intemperate

24
Serio-comic mode

• Humour
• Dont take it all seriously
• But accept the basic thrust
• Nature must be made war against
• We need clean arched shapes and angular plots
• Geometry vs. organicism

25
Violent remedies

• Rigid and purified forms
• No truck with conventions of expression or
  representation
• Militarism of outlook
• Masculinism of view

Wyndham Lewis, Portrait of an Englishwoman
26
Sexual politics, again

• Victorian era dismissed as feminine
• Vampiric, sucking life-blood out of healthy,
  modern men
• Terror of castration
• Horror of Eros