Talks
Poetry + Painting + Politics × Professors = Futurism Past
Saturday, Oct 17, 2009
1 p.m.
Participants
Luigi Ballerini, UCLA
Claudio Fogu, UC Santa Barbara
Laura Wittman, Stanford University
Benjamin Martin, San Francisco State University
Jennifer Bethke, independent scholar
Barbara Spackman, UC Berkeley
Harsha Ram, UC Berkeley
Image: Archival still of Angelo Caviglioni, Tato (pseudonym of Guglielmo Sansoni), and F. T. Marinetti, 1920 – 22;
© Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Archivio del ‘900, Fondo Tullio Crali.
Futurism’s 1909 founding manifesto called for the destruction of museums and libraries. The 1910 manifesto “Against Professors” deplored the “professorial passion for the past.” The Futurists gleefully tarred professors as “pedantic passéist pachyderms.” So how does one address the irony of organizing a symposium about an anti-symposium movement? In anything-but-lumbering talks and a panel discussion, Futurism scholars assess the movement’s contributions to the modernist avant-garde, its controversial political affiliations with fascism and anarchism, and its violent reshaping of bodies and subjectivities.