E' uscito in questi giorni il primo volume degli INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK OF FUTURISM STUDIES, a cura di Günter Berghaus.
Sul sito dell'editore tedesco De Gruyter si trova
1) Günter Berghaus
Aims and Functions of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies
This editorial discusses some of the key trends in Futurism scholarship in the past decades, its strengths and weaknesses, and offers a perspective for future research.
2) Giorgio Di Genova
The Centenary of Futurism: Lame Duck or Political Revisionism?
The essay reviews the most important exhibitions held in Italy during the centenary year of Futurism and analyses some of its glaring shortcomings. The author criticises the persistent repetitions of factual errors, the lack of attention devoted to the propagation of the Futurist movement outside Italy and the disregard for its influence after 1944. He considers it an embarrassing failure that the relationship between Futurism and Fascism, so crucial for the history of the movement, has not been dealt with adequately in the exhibition catalogues and has been largely ignored in the shows themselves.
3) Antonio Saccoccio
WE MUST KILL FUTURISM! Net.Futurist Manifesto, 20 February 2009
This manifesto was written in January−February 2009 as a remonstration against the official celebrations of “100 Years of Futurism”, primarily as a means of stimulating a debate on the topical relevance of Marinetti’s ideas. It opposes the majority of activities undertaken during the centenary and expresses dissatisfaction with the ways in which Futurism has been defused and robbed of its creative potential. This manifesto therefore demands the death of Futurism itself.
4) Chris Michaelides
FUTURISM 2009: Critical Reflections on the Centenary Year
The essay reviews some twenty exhibitions held in Italy during the centennial year of Futurism. The vitality of the movement over a period of 35 years was celebrated with a variety of shows, most of them focusing on a particular figure, a collection of Futurist works, or an historic exhibition.
5) Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj
Ukrainian Futurism: Re-Appropriating the Imperial Legacy
This article surveys the research on Ukrainian Futurism that appeared just before and after Ukrainian independence (1991), and offers critical annotations of these publications. It deals with the literary as well as the visual arts, with works that appeared in Ukraine and in the West. The literature review is preceded by a short outline of Ukrainian Futurism and its fate in scholarship from the 1930s. The author shows that the research discussed here highlights the multi-national character of avant-garde practices in the Russian and Soviet Empires and delineates a 'Ukrainian' Futurist movement on the basis of cultural capital that is generally still called 'Russian'.
6) Sonia de Puineuf
Quicksands of Typography: The Futurist Experience in Central Europe during the 1920s
The question of the Futurist typography in Central Europe is discussed here in relation to the layout of books and avant-garde magazines as well as to other kind of works of art in which letters of the alphabet play a role. Futurist typography is presented as a poetic-artistic practice rather than a serious professional activity. The Futurists avoided rigid rules and preferred to present modern subjects in a playful and inventive manner. These
models were of major importance to artists in Central Europe, a territory with moving boundaries and blurred national identities, until about 1924/25 when they came under the sway of International Constructivism.
7) Przemysław Strożek
“Marinetti is foreign to us”: Polish responses to Italian Futurism, 1917-1923
After 1909, the Polish press published a number of articles that reflected on Italian Futurist manifestos, but the 'practical' side of Futurism remained practically unknown to Polish artists in the years before the Great War. A limited number of reproductions of paintings, translations of poems and short plays could not convey a rounded picture of Marinetti's movement. Until 1923, the Italian Futurists had no personal contacts in Poland and did not exhibit there. Under those circumstances, the phrase "Marinetti is foreign to us", taken from A Nife in the Stomak, was indeed an apt description of the attitude taken by the early modern art groups in Poland towards the first avant-garde current in Europe, Italian Futurism.
8) András Kappanyos
The Reception of Futurism in Nyugat and in the Kassák Circle of Activists
The essay examines the reception of Futurist ideas in Hungary in the circles of Nyugat, and that of Kassák and the Hungarian Activists. The attitude of Nyugat was rather open-minded, but the review's assumed task – the modernization of Hungarian mainstream culture – did not allow the adaptation of Futurist ideas. The ideological differences between the Futurists and the Kassák circle included such issues as militarism versus pacifism; nationalism versus internationalism; individualism versus collectivism; and figurative painting versus abstraction. In spite of the long and fiery debates, Hungarian Activism made good use of many of the Futurist ideas and inventions.
9) Marina Dmitrieva
“A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Futurism”: The Ukrainian Panfuturists and Their Artistic
Allegiances In 1922, the Ukrainian Panfuturists published the first (and only) issue of A Semaphore into the Future. Like many other publications of the Ukrainian modernists of the early post-revolutionary time, this document provides evidence of a fruitful interaction with the Italian Futurist movement in the Eastern outskirts of Europe. The movement of Panfuturism, founded by a small group of Ukrainian writers, saw itself as the only legitimate successor of Italian Futurism, which, in their eyes, was already declining and passé. Leftist and radical, they perceived Panfuturism, like Communism, as “the end of all –isms”. The multiple activities of the Ukrainian Panfuturists ranged from crude manifestos and public disputes to sophisticated theoretical essays, visual poetry and “poetry-films”.
10) Ilona Gwóźdź-Szewczenko
Futurism: The Hidden Face of the Czech Avant-garde
This paper considers the unique position of Futurism in Czech culture and examines the current view that Futurism did not make any inroads into Czech literature. It questions the established literary-historical 'labels' and seeks to uncover the often negated role that Marinetti's movement played in the formation of the Czech avant-garde. In doing so, the author demonstrates that although Futurism did not have a conspicuous public presence, it nevertheless did have an important influence on the Czech avant-garde and was a major element in
the artistic programmes of S. K. Neumann and the “Devětsil” group.
11) Emilia David Drogoreanu
Aesthetic Affinities and Political Divergences between Italian and Romanian Futurism
In the period 1909−1930, Romanian avant-garde literature was heavily influenced by Italian Futurism and responded to the Italian movement in a complex process of adaptation and critical reflection. This paper discusses Marinetti’s relations with the Romanian literary world after 1905 and examines a number of Futurist texts that appeared in the Romanian national press after 1909. The second part focuses on the development of an avant-garde literature in Romania after 1924 and shows how a variety of modernist trends were synthesized in an “Integralist” aesthetics. The third section analyses the reception Marinetti was given when he visited Bucharest in 1930.
12) Irina Subotić
Zenitism / Futurism: Similarities and Differences
Zenitism was an avant-garde movement centred on the Balkans, with roots in Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Constructivism, Suprematism, Surrealism and a socially committed art for the people. In its mature phase (after 1922), it possessed an autonomous character and propagated the Balkanization of Europe by means of the “barbarian genius” (Barbarogenius) of the Slavic race. This stood in marked contrast to the then dominant ideology of the Europeanization of the Balkans by means of classical and modernist culture. Zenitism incorporated many Futurist elements such as dynamism, simultaneity, fragmentation, machine cult, etc., yet also guarded its independence, particularly in ideological terms, at a time when Futurism became fatally aligned to Fascism.
13) Aija Brasliņa
Latvian Modernists in Berlin and Rome in the 1920s: Encounters with secondo futurismo The essay provides an insight into the hitherto largely unknown contacts of Latvian artists with Futurism. During the rise of Latvian Modernism in the 1920s, a number of artists, among whom the sculptor and publisher of Latvian avant-garde journal Laikmets (Epoch), Kārlis Zāle, and the painter, stage designer and graphic artist, Niklāvs Strunke, developed, from Berlin and Rome respectively, closer connections with representatives of secondo futurismo. These are outstanding pages in the history of Latvian Classical Modernism characterized by the artists' direct contacts with the avant-garde, participation in the artistic life of Germany and Italy, creative impulses, concrete artworks and publications.
14) Marijan Dović
Anton Podbevšek, Futurism, and Slovenian Interwar Avant-garde Literature
This paper discusses the influence of the Futurist movement on Slovenian poetry and other arts. Early echoes of
Italian Futurism before the First World War (in the works of Vladimir Levstik, Fran Albreht, Anton Debeljak, and others) were followed by more provocative enterprises undertaken by Anton Podbevšek (1898-1981), whose short and energetic poetic creativity (from 1915 to 1919) and his avant-garde actions in the early 1920s represent the most radical version of the Slovenian interwar literary avant-garde. After exploring the traces and sources of Futurism in Podbevšek's work, the general role of Futurism for the Slovenian interwar arts is assessed in this paper.
15) Maria Elena Versari
Enlisting and Updating: Ruggero Vasari and the Shifting Coordinates of Futurism in Eastern and Central
Europe
This essay analyses the international alliances established by Ruggero Vasari, the leader of the section of the Italian Futurist movement in Berlin, with several artists and intellectuals active in the German capital at the time, such as Ivan Puni, Karlis Zale, Viktor Shklovsky and Viking Eggeling. It retraces the way in which Vasari’s conception of radical art and his attitude of stylistic ecumenism succeeded in attracting to Futurism several artists who, as a result of their condition as political exiles, rejected the more overtly politicized tenets of Constructivism. It concludes by outlining the repercussions that this large avant-garde network had on the fate of Vasari's own activity as a dramatist.
16) Bela Tsipuria
H2SO4: The Futurist Experience in Georgia
In the 1920s, a short-lived Futurist group, H2SO4 was active in Transcaucasian Georgia. They published several
literary journals and reviews, such as H2SO4, Literatura da Skhva, Memartskheneoba and Drouli, which presented their poetry and literary essays, graphics and stage designs. Aesthetically, the group was influenced by the theoretical principles and artistic creations of Italian and Russian Futurists, as well as other European and Russian avant-garde movements. From the late-1920s onwards, Soviet colonialism and Stalinist totalitarianism destroyed the short flourishing of a modernist culture in democratic Georgia. All avant-garde authors, including all H2SO4 members, were forced to renounce their cultural identity and to adapt to the dictates of Socialist Realism.
17) Irina Genova
The Hybrid Artistic Identity: Nicolay Diulgheroff and the Second Phase of the Italian Futurist Movement
The Bulgarian artist Nicolay Diulgheroff was active in the Turin group of Futurists in the years 1928 to 1938. Throughout his artistic career, he produced paintings, collages and drawings hand in hand with architectural projects, interior designs, design of everyday life objects and advertisements. Diulgheroff called for the transformation of human life in accordance with demands of the machine era and developed a highly characteristic aesthetics in a distinctive artistic milieu at a unique moment in time, when the machine world, having enchanted the Futurists with its novel and revolutionizing potentials, established new concepts of everyday life in the modern metropolis.
18) Ilona Fried
Marinetti’s Visits to Budapest, 1931, 1932 and 1933: Archival Documents and the Memoirs of Margit Gáspár The writer, dramatist and translator Margit Gáspár (1905−1994) claims, in her memoirs Invisibile Reign (1985), to have pursued between 1931 and 1935 an amorous affair with F. T. Marinetti. Her book offers interesting insights into Marinetti’s character and opinions, which are complemented in this essay by archival documents, press reports and the memoirs of Hermann Kesten, related to Marinetti’s participation in the Tenth International Congress of the P.E.N. Club in Budapest in 1932. The last part addresses Marinetti's invitation to the Hungarian
painter Hugó Scheiber to participate in the Mostra Nazionale d’Arte Futurista in 1933.
19) Günter Berghaus
Conferences Held on the Occasion of the Centenary of Futurism, 2009
The information provided here documents scholarly activities undertaken in conjunction with the 2009 centenary of Futurism. Some of these events started already in 2008, others followed in 2010. The list includes 66 conferences and study days geared towards a scholarly audience, and the titles of some 1,000 papers delivered on those occasions.
20) Günter Berghaus
A Bibliography of Publications Commemorating 100 Years of Futurism
It is intended that the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies will publish in each volume a bibliography of recent publications in the field of Futurism studies, which will serve as an annual addenda to the Bibliographic Handbook of Futurism published by De Gruyter. Yearbook 1 (2011) has taken the Centenary year 2009 as one of its thematic focuses and therefore provides a list of some 380 publications issued in the centennial, or published as a result of conferences and exhibitions held in that year.
http://dinamitecreativa.splinder.com/post/25778533/international-yearbook-of-futurism-studies-vol-1-2011