Quin Mathews, whose new video piece "movement s" is on display in The MAC lobby, is giving an Art Talk next Wednesday, March 4, at 7 pm. He was here today rehearsing. Besides showing and discussing his own work, there is going to be a special reading of The Futurist Manifesto (1909) of F. T. Marinetti in its original italian.
(here shown with Marinetti's piece of lucky hay)
http://www.internetculturale.it/genera.jsp?id=894&l=en
On 20 February 1909 Marinetti, pretending to be in love with the daughter of a rich Egyptian who was joint-owner of the Parisian newspaper “Le Figaro”, managed to get a piece entitled “Le Futurisme” published on the front page of the paper. It was the manifesto for the foundation of Futurism and it provoked amazement everywhere. It was made up of these eleven points: “1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and of temerity. 2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, daring, and rebellion. 3. Up to now thoughtful immobility, ecstasy, and sleep have been exalted by literature. We want to exalt the aggressive gesture, feverish insomnia, the athletic step, the perilous leap, the slap, and the punch. 4. We declare that a new beauty has enriched the splendour of the world: the beauty of speed. A racing car with its trunk adorned by great exhaust pipes like snakes with explosive breath ... a roaring car that seems to be driving through machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. 5. We want to sing the praises of the man who holds the steering wheel, whose ideal flagstaff pierces the Earth, itself launched on the circuit of its orbit. 6. The poet must try his utmost, with warmth, pomp, and generosity, to increase the enthusiastic zeal of the primordial elements. 7. There is no more beauty except in struggle. No work without an aggressive character can be considered a masterpiece. Poetry must be a violent attack against the unknown forces, summoning them to lie down before man. 8. We stand on the far promontory of the centuries!... What is the use of looking behind us, since our task is to smash the mysterious portals of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, since we have already created the eternal omnipresent speed. 9. We want to glorify war - the only hygiene of the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchist, the fine ideas for which one dies, and the scorn of women. 10. We want to destroy museums, libraries, and every type of academy, fight against moralism, feminism, and all opportunistic and utilitarian cowardice. 11. We shall sing the great crowds agitated by work, by pleasure, or revolt; the multi-coloured and polyphonic tide of revolution in modern capitals; the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the building sites lit up by violent electrical moons; the gluttonous railway stations swallowing smoky serpents; the factories hung from the clouds by the ribbons of their smoke; the bridges like gigantic gymnasts straddling rivers, glinting in the sunshine with blade-like reflections; the adventurous steamships that sniff the horizon; the broad-chested locomotives, prancing on the rails like great steel horses bridled by long pipes, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propellers flap like a flag in the wind, like the applause of an enthusiastic crowd.”
