Spencer Alley: Futurists at the Tate Gallery

Thursday, June 7, 2018

Futurists at the Tate Gallery

Gerardo Dottori
Explosion of Red on Green
1910
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

Wyndham Lewis
Composition
1913
watercolor
Tate Gallery

Giacomo Balla
Abstract Speed - The Car Has Passed
1913
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

Gino Severini
Suburban Train Arriving in Paris
1915
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

from a journal article by Walter Benjamin published in 1937 –

"A program was due, but failed to materialize. That failure sealed a process characteristic of the past century: the bungled reception of technology. The process has consisted of a series of energetic, constantly renewed efforts, all attempting to overcome the fact that technology serves this society only by producing commodities. At the beginning, there were the Saint-Simonians with their industrial poetry. Then came the realism of Du Camp, who saw the locomotive as the saint of the future. Finally there was Ludwig Pfau: "It is quite unnecessary to become an angel," he wrote, "since a locomotive is worth more than the nicest pair of wings." This view of technology is straight out of the Gartenlaube [a mass-market family magazine of the time]. It may cause one to ask whether the complacency of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie did not stem from the hollow comfort of never having to experience how the productive forces had to develop under their hands. This experience was really reserved for the following century, which has discovered that the speed of traffic and the ability of machines to duplicate words and writing outstrip human needs. The energies that technology develops beyond this threshold are destructive. First of all they advance the technology of war and its propagandistic preparation. One might say that this development (which was thoroughly class-conditioned) occurred behind the back of the last century, which was not yet aware of the destructive energies of technology. This was especially true of the Social Democrats at the turn of the century. Though they occasionally took a stand against the illusions of positivism, they remained largely in thrall to them. They saw the past as having been gathered up and stored forever in the granaries of the present. Although the future held the prospect of work, it also held the certainty of a rich harvest."

– quoted from Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian, originally published in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, translated by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (2008)