Silly Punks And Modern Punk Wannabes--the Futurists Had Your Number A Long Time Ago.
And before the Futurists, the French Incoherents.
It always amazes me that in terms of sheer outrageousness or originality, no matter how new art movements or social movements or political movements or whatnot try and outdo themselves, we haven't really moved forward from the 1870s-80s. The crest of the high Victorian period in England--the time people tend to look back on with condescension and dismiss as prissy and staid and so dreadfully old-fashioned--and yet still, here we are. Radical political movements, from anarchism to nihilism (not to mention communism and socialism, but we all know that), etc--all started or gained ground around that time period. Veganism and utopian free-love polygamous communes? Yup, that time period. And of course the first wave of feminism, where, while we now have weathered the evolution of second and third wave editions, some of the ideas propounded even by the first wavers would be seen as pretty damn radical by the average layman today. (The destruction of the institution of marriage, for one.)
But back to the outrageousness of art, and the Futurists. The Futurists came a bit later, mainly acting in the 1910s-1915s, but I'll return to that. They were still a good 50 years before any Andy Warhol (I mention him as an influence and precursor to punk), and 60-70 years before punk visual art itself. And yet, despite punk's ideals of shock and the aesthetic of the jarring and "ugly," I really don't think anything they or anyone else has done since has topped the sheer outrageousness of the Futurists. Punk music was meant to be loud, angry, and discordant, and open to be produced by people who were not musicians? Ha! The Italian Futurists invented "The Art of Noise" as their music, and it was a painter who wrote the manifesto, declaring "I am not a musician... therefore...I have been able to initiate the great renewal of music by means of the Art of Noises." Futurist concerts were great cacophonies of electric and man-made sounds, composed of arrangements of explosions, hisses, crackles, crashes and shrieks.
Punk's anti-authoritarian stance seems only a reflection of the Futurists' declaration that "we will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind." They weren't any more accepting of political authority, of course, being mainly anarchists. (They were also, however, quite sexist and chauvinist and wanted to glorify "scorn for woman," but honestly, punk was not the most feminist thing ever, either. And the Futurists did want to do away with gender roles.) Punk fashion? Pff! Oh yes, ripped up plaid and safety pins and sheared off hair and dayglo makeup are shocking and all, but the Futurist (men) smeared yellow eyeshadow all over their faces, went to clubs wearing brightly colored high heels and with spoons tucked into bowties, and cut up their clothes to create asymmetrical, mis-mash colored patterns. They wanted to destroy the traditional lines of the figure at the same time as creating a mode of dress that banished class distinctions and frivolity, and used materials such as straw and metal and plastic. (More practically, they made clothes with geometric shapes but less confining tailoring and freer movement than accustomed to in the era.) And they had the most ridiculous hats.
Futurist poetry and its ideology of "Words in Freedom" was... well... I think it has to be seen to be truly appreciated, and Futurist theatre was possibly more absurd than the later-coming Theatre of the Absurd. The Russian Futurists' "Victory Over the Sun" was a very good example of such theatre, wherein the actors threw tomatoes at and insulted the audience, broke the fourth wall in all manner of ways imaginable, and in general carried on. It was also written in a made up nonsensical language and featured Futurist music and set design and costumes, of course.
So right, the Futurists were pretty damn amazing in their way, and totally had punk covered. (Oh look, I found an online article on a similar theme. Damn, beat me to it.) But what's more amazing to me is that they were preceded by the Incoherents, back in the.... oh yes, the 1880s.
The Incoherents set up dadaism and avante-garde more thank punk, but still, the point is, they were doing stuff in the late 19th century that would be billed as provocative and outrageous decades later. They set up an exposition of art by "by people who don't know how to draw" and experimented with primitivism. They made art from "found objects" and put up statues made of bread and cheese and paintings made on sausages, and one of the Incoherents presented a modified Mona Lisa--
'
way before Duchamp's famous version. (In fact, this first variation was made in the year of Duchamp's birth.)
Before Malevich's (a Futurist, of course) "White square on a white background," there was the Incorerents' series of one-toned paintings, such as a black rectangle entitled "Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night" or a red rectangle called "Tomato Harvest by Apoplectic Cardinals on the Shore of the Red Sea."
They also went about in rather eye-catching fashions, painting their heads blue (or green) or wearing some specific "trademark" clothing items (less obviously shocking than the Futurists, it is true). They prefigured surrealism with their photos of ears stuffed with cotton and so on, and they created a collaborative collage avante-garde wall journal called "le Mur." As for theatre, Alfred Jarry's hugely controversial play "Ubu Roi" introducing Pere Ubu is widely hailed as the first step towards absurdist theatre and that almost outright refuted traditional staging. (Alfred Jarry was just weird. After the success of Pere Ubu--or rather, its infamy--Jarry began to always walk around in the character of Ubu, pronouncing all his words in an exaggerated staccato, calling himself by the royal "we" and referring to the bicycle he rode everywhere only as "that which rolls." He supposedly wrote the first cyborg sex novel, The Supermale, described by Amazon.com as combining Jarry's three obsessions of "sex, alcohol, and bicycles." And uh, he also kinda looked like PotC's Will Turner. Not that that's weird all by itself.)
To go way way back (or rather way way forward), then, to punks again--I'm gonna quote wikipedia for a bit here. "Punk had a unique and complex aesthetic. It was steeped in shock value and revered what was considered ugly. The whole look of punk was designed to disturb and disrupt the happy complacency of the wider society. [...] Punk visual art can include anything from crudely scribbled letters to shockingly jarring figures drawn with sharp points everywhere. Often images and figures are cut and pasted from magazines to create a scene and the colors are often two tone and deeply contrasting."
Shock value! Unique and jarring! Ha! Quite a number of decades too late, I'm afraid.
(P.S. yes, the title is tongue-in-cheek, mostly.)
It always amazes me that in terms of sheer outrageousness or originality, no matter how new art movements or social movements or political movements or whatnot try and outdo themselves, we haven't really moved forward from the 1870s-80s. The crest of the high Victorian period in England--the time people tend to look back on with condescension and dismiss as prissy and staid and so dreadfully old-fashioned--and yet still, here we are. Radical political movements, from anarchism to nihilism (not to mention communism and socialism, but we all know that), etc--all started or gained ground around that time period. Veganism and utopian free-love polygamous communes? Yup, that time period. And of course the first wave of feminism, where, while we now have weathered the evolution of second and third wave editions, some of the ideas propounded even by the first wavers would be seen as pretty damn radical by the average layman today. (The destruction of the institution of marriage, for one.)
But back to the outrageousness of art, and the Futurists. The Futurists came a bit later, mainly acting in the 1910s-1915s, but I'll return to that. They were still a good 50 years before any Andy Warhol (I mention him as an influence and precursor to punk), and 60-70 years before punk visual art itself. And yet, despite punk's ideals of shock and the aesthetic of the jarring and "ugly," I really don't think anything they or anyone else has done since has topped the sheer outrageousness of the Futurists. Punk music was meant to be loud, angry, and discordant, and open to be produced by people who were not musicians? Ha! The Italian Futurists invented "The Art of Noise" as their music, and it was a painter who wrote the manifesto, declaring "I am not a musician... therefore...I have been able to initiate the great renewal of music by means of the Art of Noises." Futurist concerts were great cacophonies of electric and man-made sounds, composed of arrangements of explosions, hisses, crackles, crashes and shrieks.
Punk's anti-authoritarian stance seems only a reflection of the Futurists' declaration that "we will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind." They weren't any more accepting of political authority, of course, being mainly anarchists. (They were also, however, quite sexist and chauvinist and wanted to glorify "scorn for woman," but honestly, punk was not the most feminist thing ever, either. And the Futurists did want to do away with gender roles.) Punk fashion? Pff! Oh yes, ripped up plaid and safety pins and sheared off hair and dayglo makeup are shocking and all, but the Futurist (men) smeared yellow eyeshadow all over their faces, went to clubs wearing brightly colored high heels and with spoons tucked into bowties, and cut up their clothes to create asymmetrical, mis-mash colored patterns. They wanted to destroy the traditional lines of the figure at the same time as creating a mode of dress that banished class distinctions and frivolity, and used materials such as straw and metal and plastic. (More practically, they made clothes with geometric shapes but less confining tailoring and freer movement than accustomed to in the era.) And they had the most ridiculous hats.
Futurist poetry and its ideology of "Words in Freedom" was... well... I think it has to be seen to be truly appreciated, and Futurist theatre was possibly more absurd than the later-coming Theatre of the Absurd. The Russian Futurists' "Victory Over the Sun" was a very good example of such theatre, wherein the actors threw tomatoes at and insulted the audience, broke the fourth wall in all manner of ways imaginable, and in general carried on. It was also written in a made up nonsensical language and featured Futurist music and set design and costumes, of course.
So right, the Futurists were pretty damn amazing in their way, and totally had punk covered. (Oh look, I found an online article on a similar theme. Damn, beat me to it.) But what's more amazing to me is that they were preceded by the Incoherents, back in the.... oh yes, the 1880s.
The Incoherents set up dadaism and avante-garde more thank punk, but still, the point is, they were doing stuff in the late 19th century that would be billed as provocative and outrageous decades later. They set up an exposition of art by "by people who don't know how to draw" and experimented with primitivism. They made art from "found objects" and put up statues made of bread and cheese and paintings made on sausages, and one of the Incoherents presented a modified Mona Lisa--
'
way before Duchamp's famous version. (In fact, this first variation was made in the year of Duchamp's birth.)
Before Malevich's (a Futurist, of course) "White square on a white background," there was the Incorerents' series of one-toned paintings, such as a black rectangle entitled "Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night" or a red rectangle called "Tomato Harvest by Apoplectic Cardinals on the Shore of the Red Sea."
They also went about in rather eye-catching fashions, painting their heads blue (or green) or wearing some specific "trademark" clothing items (less obviously shocking than the Futurists, it is true). They prefigured surrealism with their photos of ears stuffed with cotton and so on, and they created a collaborative collage avante-garde wall journal called "le Mur." As for theatre, Alfred Jarry's hugely controversial play "Ubu Roi" introducing Pere Ubu is widely hailed as the first step towards absurdist theatre and that almost outright refuted traditional staging. (Alfred Jarry was just weird. After the success of Pere Ubu--or rather, its infamy--Jarry began to always walk around in the character of Ubu, pronouncing all his words in an exaggerated staccato, calling himself by the royal "we" and referring to the bicycle he rode everywhere only as "that which rolls." He supposedly wrote the first cyborg sex novel, The Supermale, described by Amazon.com as combining Jarry's three obsessions of "sex, alcohol, and bicycles." And uh, he also kinda looked like PotC's Will Turner. Not that that's weird all by itself.)
To go way way back (or rather way way forward), then, to punks again--I'm gonna quote wikipedia for a bit here. "Punk had a unique and complex aesthetic. It was steeped in shock value and revered what was considered ugly. The whole look of punk was designed to disturb and disrupt the happy complacency of the wider society. [...] Punk visual art can include anything from crudely scribbled letters to shockingly jarring figures drawn with sharp points everywhere. Often images and figures are cut and pasted from magazines to create a scene and the colors are often two tone and deeply contrasting."
Shock value! Unique and jarring! Ha! Quite a number of decades too late, I'm afraid.
(P.S. yes, the title is tongue-in-cheek, mostly.)