International Yearbook of Futurism Studies

The Futurist art movement, founded by F. T. Marinetti in 1909, had a worldwide impact and made important contributions to avant-garde movements in many countries and artistic genres. Volume 16 of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies is an open issue and looks at how Futurism shaped local, regional, national and individual aesthetics in Italy, Russia, Britain, Germany, Belgium, Poland, Yugoslavia and Mexico. The ten essays are followed by a regional report on Japan, critical responses to exhibitions, conferences and publications, and an annual bibliography with details of 225 new books on Futurism.

• Interdisciplinary research on Futurism
• With reviews and exhibition reports, and a comprehensive report on new publications on Futurism   

Der Futurismus, gegründet 1909 von F. T. Marinetti, hatte Einfluss auf die avantgardistischen Bewegungen in zahlreichen Ländern und in allen künstlerischen Genres. Band 16 des International Yearbook of Futurism Studies hat kein bestimmtes Thema, sondern untersucht, wie der Futurismus lokale, regionale, nationale und individuelle Ausdrucksformen in der Kunst Italiens, Russlands, Großbritanniens, Deutschlands, Belgiens, Polens, Jugoslawiens und Mexikos geprägt hat. Zehn Beiträge werden ergänzt durch einen Bericht über Japan, kritische Reaktionen auf Ausstellungen, Konferenzen und Publikationen sowie eine Jahresbibliographie mit Angaben zu 225 neuen Publiaktionen zum Futurismus.

• Interdisziplinäre Forschungen zum Futurismus
• Mit Rezensionen und Ausstellungsberichten sowie einem ausführlichen Bericht zu Neuerscheinungen über den Futurismus

 

In the past 20 years, there has been a remarkable upsurge of interest in Futurism in most countries formerly situated east of the Iron Curtain.

Although Russian Futurism was always well-known, the multifaceted extensions of Futurism in other Eastern countries were not much reported on in Italy and became nearly forgotten after 1945. However, since 1989 a wealth of original material has been rediscovered, both in the literary and the artistic field. In this volume, sixteen experts are presenting a wide spectrum of new findings on artists who operated within the shifting coordinates of the international avant-garde and contributed to the often osmotic relations between Futurism, Dada and Constructivism.

The essays in this volume include a discussion of the multi-national character of Futurism in Central and Eastern Europe and the colonialist absorption of avant-garde practices in the Soviet Union; the Berlin directorate of the Futurist movement and its modes of operation in the international avant-garde scene of the 1920s; the infiltration of Futurism in the typographical practices of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland; the hitherto almost unexamined contacts between Latvian artists and Futurism; Polish Responses to Italian Futurism; the similarities and differences between Zenitism and Futurism; the artistic ambitions of the Ukrainian Pan-Futurists in the 1920s; the Futurist experience in Transcaucasian Georgia; the reception of Futurist ideas in the Activist circles of Hungary; the public presence of a "mute Futurism" in the Czech avant-garde; Marinetti's visits to Bucharest and Budapest in the 1930s; the hybrid identity of the Bulgarian artist Diulgheroff and his career as an architect and designer in Turin; the role of Italian Futurism in the Slovenian interwar avant-garde; the aesthetic affinities and political divergences between Italian and Romanian Futurism.

The International Yearbook of Futurism Studies was founded in 2009, the centenary year of Italian Futurism, in order to foster intellectual cooperation between Futurism scholars across countries and academic disciplines. The Yearbook does not focus exclusively on Italian Futurism, but on the relations between Italian Futurism and other Futurisms worldwide, on artistic movements inspired by Futurism, and on artists operating in the international sphere with close contacts to Italian or Russian Futurism.

Volume 4 (2014) is an open issue that addresses reactions to Italian Futurism in 16 countries (Argentina, Armenia, Brazil, Egypt, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Holland, Hungary, Japan, Portugal, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, USA), and in the artistic media of photography, theatre and visual poetry.

The special issue of International Yearbook of Futurism Studies for 2015 will investigate the role of Futurism in the œuvre of a number of Women artists and writers. These include a number of women actively supporting Futurism (e.g. Růžena Zátková, Edyth von Haynau, Olga Rozanova, Eva Kühn), others periodically involved with the movement (e.g. Valentine de Saint Point, Aleksandra Ekster, Mary Swanzy), others again inspired only by certain aspects of the movement (e.g. Natalia Goncharova, Alice Bailly, Giovanna Klien).

Several artists operated on the margins of a Futurist inspired aesthetics, but they felt attracted to Futurism because of its support for women artists or because of its innovatory roles in the social and intellectual spheres. Most of the artists covered in Volume 5 (2015) are far from straightforward cases, but exactly because of this they can offer genuinely new insights into a still largely under-researched domain of twentieth-century art and literature. Guiding questions for these investigations are: How did these women come into contact with Futurist ideas? Was it first-hand knowledge (poems, paintings, manifestos etc) or second-hand knowledge (usually newspaper reports or personal conversions with artists who had been in contact with Futurism)? How did the women respond to the (positive or negative) reports? How did this show up in their œuvre? How did it influence their subsequent, often non-Futurist, career?

Volume 6 (2016) is an open issue with an emphasis on Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, Iceland). Four essays focus on Russia, two on music; other contributions are concerned with Egypt, USA and Korea. Furthermore there are sections on Futurist archives, Futurism in caricatures and Futurism in fiction.

Futurism Studies in its canonical form has followed in the steps of Marinetti's concept of Futurisme mondial, according to which Futurism had its centre in Italy and a large number of satellites around Europe and the rest of the globe. Consequently, authors of textbook histories of Futurism focus their attention on Italy, add a chapter or two on Russia and dedicate next to no attention to developments in other parts of the world. Futurism Studies tends to sees in Marinetti's movement the font and mother of all subsequent avant-gardes and deprecates the non-European variants as mere 'derivatives'.

Vol. 7 of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies will focus on one of these regions outside Europe and demonstrate that the heuristic model of centre – periphery is faulty and misleading, as it ignores the originality and inventiveness of art and literature in Latin America. Futurist tendencies in both Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries may have been, in part, 'influenced' by Italian Futurism, but they certainly did no 'derive' from it.

The shift towards modernity took place in Latin America more or less in parallel to the economic progress made in the underdeveloped countries of Europe. Italy and Russia have often been described as having originated Futurism because of their backwardness compared to the industrial powerhouses England, Germany and France. According to this narrative, Spain and Portugal occupied a position of semi-periphery. They had channelled dominant cultural discourses from the centre nations into the colonies. However, with the rise of modernity and the emergence of independence movements, cultural discourses in the colonies undertook a major shift. The revolt of the European avant-garde against academic art found much sympathy amongst Latin American artists, as they were engaged in a similar battle against the canonical discourses of colonial rule. One can therefore detect many parallels between the European and Latin American avant-garde movements. This includes the varieties of Futurism, to which Yearbook 2017 will be dedicated.

In Europe, the avant-garde had a complex relationship to tradition, especially its 'primitivist' varieties. In Latin America, the avant-garde also sought to uncover and incorporate alternative, i.e. indigenous traditions. The result was a hybrid form of art and literature that showed many parallels to the European avant-garde, but also had other sources of inspiration. Given the large variety of indigenous cultures on the American continent, it was only natural that many heterogeneous mixtures of Futurism emerged there.

Yearbook 2017 explores this plurality of Futurisms and the cultural traditions that influenced them. Contributions focus on the intertextual character of Latin American Futurisms, interpret works of literature and fine arts within their local setting, consider modes of production and consumption within each culture as well as the forms of interaction with other Latin American and European centres. 14 essays locate Futurism within the complex network of cultural exchange, unravel the Futurist contribution to the complex interrelations between local and the global cultures in Latin America and reveal the dynamic dialogue as well as the multiple forms of cross-fertilization that existed amongst them.

The eighth volume of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies is again an open issue and presents in its first section new research into the international impact of Futurism on artists and artistic movements in France, Great
Britain, Hungary and Sweden. This is followed by a study that investigates a variety of Futurist inspired developments in architecture, and an essay that demonstrates that the Futurist heritage was far from forgotten after the Second World War. These papers show how a wealth of connections linked Futurism with Archigram, Metabolism, Archizoom and Deconstructivism, as well as the Nuclear Art movement, Spatialism, Environmental Art, Neon Art, Kinetic Art and many other trends of the 1960s and 70s.

The second section focuses on Futurism and Science and contains a number of papers that were first presented atthe fifth bi-annual conference of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM), held on 1–3 June 2016 in Rennes. They investigate the impact of science on Futurist aesthetics and the Futurist quest for a new perception and rational understanding of the world, as well as the movement’s connection with the esoteric domain, especially in the field of theosophy, the Hermetic tradition, Gnostic mysticism and a whole phalanx of Spiritualist beliefs.

The Archive section offers a survey of collections and archives in Northern Italy that are concerned with Futurist ceramics, and a report on the Fondazione Primo Conti in Fiesole, established in April 1980 as a museum, library and archive devoted to the documentation of the international avant-garde, and to Italian Futurism in particular.

A review section dedicated to exhibitions, conferences and publications is followed by an annual bibliography of international Futurism studies, exhibition catalogues, special issues of periodicals and new editions.

The ninth volume of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies is dedicated to Russian Futurism and gathers ten studies that investigate the impact of F.T. Marinetti’s visit to Russia in 1914; the neglected region of the Russian Far East; the artist and writers Velimir Khlebnikov, Vasily Kamensky, Maria Siniakova and Vladimir Mayakovsky; the artistic media of advertising, graphic arts, cinema and artists’ books.

Volume 10 examines how the innovative impulses that came from Italy were creatively merged with indigenous traditions and how many national variants of Futurism emerged from this fusion. Ten essays investigate various aspects of Italian Futurism and its links to Austria, Georgia, France, Hungary and Portugual and in fields such as Typography, Olfaction, Photography. Section 2 examines seven examples of caricatures and satires of Futurism in the contemporary press, followed by Section 3, reporting on the Archiv der Avantgarden (AdA) in Dresden. Section 4 communicates bibliographic details of 120 book publications on Futurism in the period 2017-2020, including exhibition catalogues, conference proceedings and editions.

This volume explores the fraught relationship between Futurism and the Sacred. Like many fin-de-siècle intellectuals, the Futurists were fascinated by various forms of esotericism such as theosophy and spiritualism and saw art as a privileged means to access states of being beyond the surface of the mundane world. At the same time, they viewed with suspicion organized religions as social institutions hindering modernization and ironically used their symbols. In Italy, the theorization of "Futurist Sacred Art" in the 1930s began a new period of dialogue between Futurism and the Catholic Church. The essays in the volume span the history of Futurism from 1909 to 1944 and consider its different configurations across different disciplines and geographical locations, from Polish and Spanish literature to Italian art and American music.

The first part of the yearbook contains ten essays on Futurist art and literature in Italy, France, Russia, Poland, Portugal and the former colony of Goa. Among other things, early Futurist publishing and propaganda initiatives by means of manifestos, press releases, and newssheets are examined, as well as Athos Casarini's artistic and political work undertaken in Italy and the USA. Articles in the second part deal with the 30th anniversary of the international Academy of Zaum as well as various conferences, exhibitions and publications celebrating the centenary of Zenitism in Serbia and Croatia. Critical responses to exhibitions, conferences and publications as well as a bibliographical section with information on 139 recent book publications on Futurism conclude the yearbook.

This thirteenth volume of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies explores some of the many facets of Neo-Futurism from the second half of the twentieth century to the present day. It looks both at the revival and the continuation of Futurist aesthetics, whether in explicit or palimpsest form, in a variety of media: literature, visual art, design, music, architecture, theatre and photography.

The essays delve into the broad spectrum of artistic research and offer a good dozen case studies that document, with a transnational and interdisciplinary orientation, the manifold forms of Neo-Futurism in various parts of the world. They investigate how historical Futurism's intellectual and artistic perspective was appropriated and developed further in a more or less conscious, faithful and original way, all the while confronting its progenitor's cultural, social and political misconceptions.

• Interdisciplinary contributions to neo-futurism as a global phenomenon

The first part of Volume 14 of the Yearbook presents ten essays concerned with Futurism in Italy, Russia, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Germany, and two focusing on dance and typography. Among other things, this publication provides analysis of the futurist manifestos from late 1910 and 1911 and Velimir Khlebnikov’s futurist essays, as well as the networks of Futurism in Odessa. In the second part, a section on Caricatures and Satires of Futurism in the Contemporary Press　examines five humorous images from five countries, in which the movement and its leader were lampooned. This section is followed by nine reviews of recent exhibitions, conferences and publications, and an annual bibliography with details of 128 new books on Futurism.

• Futurism from international, comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives
• Transcultural view of international avant-gardes