The Futurists

The Futurist Manifesto

F. T. Marinetti, 1909

We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing.

Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone with the engineers in the infernal stokeholes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wings against the walls.

Then we were suddenly distracted by the rumbling of huge double decker trams that went leaping by, streaked with light like the villages celebrating their festivals, which the Po in flood suddenly knocks down and uproots, and, in the rapids and eddies of a deluge, drags down to the sea.

Then the silence increased. As we listened to the last faint prayer of the old canal and the crumbling of the bones of the moribund palaces with their green growth of beard, suddenly the hungry automobiles roared beneath our windows.

`Come, my friends!' I said. `Let us go! At last Mythology and the mystic cult of the ideal have been left behind. We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is they very first sunrise on earth! Nothing equals the splendor of its red sword which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness.'

We went up to the three snorting machines to caress their breasts. I lay along mine like a corpse on its bier, but I suddenly revived again beneath the steering wheel - a guillotine knife - which threatened my stomach. A great sweep of madness brought us sharply back to ourselves and drove us through the streets, steep and deep, like dried up torrents. Here and there unhappy lamps in the windows taught us to despise our mathematical eyes. `Smell,' I exclaimed, `smell is good enough for wild beasts!'

And we hunted, like young lions, death with its black fur dappled with pale crosses, who ran before us in the vast violet sky, palpable and living.

And yet we had no ideal Mistress stretching her form up to the clouds, nor yet a cruel Queen to whom to offer our corpses twisted into the shape of Byzantine rings! No reason to die unless it is the desire to be rid of the too great weight of our courage!

We drove on, crushing beneath our burning wheels, like shirt-collars under the iron, the watch dogs on the steps of the houses.

Death, tamed, went in front of me at each corner offering me his hand nicely, and sometimes lay on the ground with a noise of creaking jaws giving me velvet glances from the bottom of puddles.
`Let us leave good sense behind like a hideous husk and let us hurl ourselves, like fruit spiced with pride, into the immense mouth and breast of the world! Let us feed the unknown, not from despair, but simply to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the Absurd!'

Ogden Nash

Very Like a Whale
Ogden Nash

One thing that Literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and metaphor.
Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,
Can't seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to go out of their way to say it is like something else.
What does it mean when we are told
That the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold?
In the first place, George Gordon Byron had had enough experience
To know that it probably wasn't just one Assyrian, it was a lot of Assyrians.
However, as so many arguments are apt to induce apoplexy and thus hinder longevity,
We'll let it pass as one Assyrian for the sake of brevity.
Now then, this particular Assyrian, the one whose cohorts were
gleaming in purple and gold,
Just what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a wolf on the fold?
In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy there are great many things,
But I don't imagine that among them there is a wolf with purple
and gold cohorts or purple and gold anythings.
No, no, Lord Byron, before I'll believe that this Assyrian was actually like a wolf I must have some kind of proof;
Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red mouth and big white teeth and did he say
Woof woof?
Frankly I think it very unlikely, and all you were entitled to say, at the very most,
Was that the Assyrian cohorts came down like a lot of Assyrian cohorts about to destroy the Hebrew host.
But that wasn't fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me no, he had to invent a lot of figures of speech and then interpolate them,
With the result that whenever you mention Old Testament soldiers to people they say,
Oh yes, they're the ones that a lot of wolves dressed up in gold and purple ate them.
That's the kind of thing that's being done all the time by poets, from Homer to Tennyson;
They're always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison,
And they always say things like that the snow is a white blanket after a winter storm.
Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a six-inch blanket of snow and
I'll sleep under a half-inch blanket of unpoetical
blanket material and we'll see which one keeps warm,
And after that maybe you'll begin to comprehend dimly
What I mean by too much metaphor and simile.

Japser Johns

A frequently cited passage from Jasper Johns' notebooks reads:

Take an object.
Do something to it.
Do something else to it.
" " " " ".

Portrait of a Lady

She appeared to have, in her experience, a touchstone for everything, and somewhere in the capacious pocket of her genial memory she would find the key to Henrietta's virtue. "That is the great thing," Isabel reflected; "that is the supreme good fortune: to be in a better position for appreciating people than they are for appreciating you."
-Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady.

Waller and Pound

"Go, Lovely Rose!"

Go, lovely rose!
Tell her, that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.

Tell her that's young
And shuns to have her graces spied
That hadst thou sprung
In deserts, where no men abide
Thou must have uncommended died.

Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired:
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.

Then die! that she
The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee:
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous, sweet and fair!

-Edmund Waller (1600-87)

Envoi

Go, dumb-born book
Tell her that sang me once the song of Lawes:
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie
And build her glories their longevity.

Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air
Recking naught else but that her graces give
Life to the moment
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one colour
Braving time.

Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth
May be as fair as hers,
Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers
When our two dusts with Waller's shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings into oblivion
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.

-Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

Matthew Arnold

"The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next."
-Matthew Arnold. 1822-1888.

Jasper Johns The Seasons

Spring

Winter

FOR some months now, the recent four-part cycle of paintings by Jasper Johns called ''The Seasons'' has been spoken of by those who have seen it in private as a benchmark in the history not only of American art, but of American autobiography. Now that ''The Seasons'' can be seen through March 7 at the Leo Castelli Gallery, 420 West Broadway, at Spring Street, it is clear that this was not an exaggeration.

After the exhibition is over, the four big paintings will go their separate ways. The same is true of the large group of drawings, watercolors and prints, all of them closely related to ''The Seasons'' and many of them of capital importance. It therefore goes without saying that this show is a one-time-only event and should on no account be missed. It proves, among much else, that difficult and demanding major art can still be made in an age that loves to flirt with work that is as flimsy as it is immediate.

Like everything else that Johns has done over the last 30-and-more years, ''The Seasons'' is sometimes oblique and riddlesome and at other times disconcertingly direct. The four big paintings - each of them measuring 75 by 50 inches - deal with the given, as distinct from the invented. The given, in this sense, has preoccupied Johns. Ever since, he made his debut in 1955, he has painted subject matter that was not merely given but immutable, like the American flag. Even the title of his new cycle is given, after all, for what could be closer to tradition than a series of paintings called ''Spring,'' ''Summer,'' ''Fall'' and ''Winter''? Nor does Johns stint on seasonal details that likewise can be taken for granted, like the look of the leaves on the tree in ''Spring'' and ''Summer'' and the outline of the snowman in ''Winter.''

As Leo Steinberg pointed out as long ago as 1962, Jasper Johns has constantly relied for his subject matter on ''commonplaces of our environment, which possess a ritual or conventional shape, not to be altered.'' But what was read at the time as an

annihilation of the self, or as an anti-autobiography, has turned out with time to be fraught with private meaning. More recently, and notably in the paintings that made up his last New York show in 1984, he has undertaken what might be called a symphonic stocktaking. Things dear to him are listed, pored over, set down on the canvas in an idiom that is both rich and dense, and thereafter combined and recombined.

The notion of the given is still very much there, and never more so than in ''The Seasons'' and its related smaller works. It is, however, presented in a new context. As both Judith Goldman and Barbara Rose have pointed out in print, ''The Seasons'' is about a moving house, and is directly related to a painting by Picasso, dated 1955, called ''The Minotaur Moving His House.''
As Johns has recently acquired two new houses, there was an evident aptness about the image of Picasso's Minotaur piling his possessions on a cart and hauling it along. On that cart are a large painting, secured with rope, and a ladder. (The Minotaur is not usually thought of as an ardent collector, but Picasso told the photographer David Douglas Duncan that this particular painting was one he couldn't bear to leave behind.) Both rope and ladder recur throughout ''The Seasons,'' together with paintings or parts of paintings by Johns himself. There are also echoes and reprises of material already familiar to students of his work but here given a whole new significance. He does not, however, double as the fresh-faced Minotaur that we see in the Picasso. Instead, and with characteristic obliquity, he portrays himself in terms of an outline drawing of his shadow that was prepared for him by a painter friend.

-"The Seasons": Forceful Painting by Jasper Johns. By John Russell. In the New York Times February 6, 1987

Fall