The early 20th century was an era of dramatic social and political upheaval. Futurism, the art movement that began in Italy, embodied a love affair with speed and new technology that ‘aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past’.
Europe was on a war footing, and Italy was on a mission for imperial glory. The Italo-Turkish War of 1911 and Italy’s participation in World War One were the result. The car, the aeroplane, and the machinery of the industrial age were all seen to glorify modernity. Umberto Boccioni’s 1931 bronze sculpture of a figure dynamically powering through space entitled Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, and Giacomo Balla’s abstract painting, Landscape, evoking the sensation of a passing automobile, its crisscrossing lines of paint representing the sound of a racing car, are prime examples. The Futurists became involved in every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphic and industrial design, theatre, film, fashion and music but it was a poet – Filippo Tommaso Marinetti – who founded the movement, claiming in his 1909 manifesto that ‘The world’s splendour has been enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed…A roaring automobile…that seems to run on shrapnel is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.’
Common to all Futurists was the belief that traditional modes of expression were no longer adequate to describe the dynamism of the new industrial age. This hunger for modernity led to an uneasy alliance with Fascism that shared a similar credo. Both were nationalistic movements opposed to parliamentary democracy, both glorified strength and violence, and both were attracted to the power of modern mechanisation. Marinetti promoted Futurism as a proto-fascist movement in order to gain official commissions from the Fascist Party, and many Italian Futurists supported Fascism in the hope of modernising Italy. Yet, despite Futurism’s murky political bedfellow, this fascinating two-part exhibition focuses on the evolution of Futurist poetry that reflected the movement’s desire to ‘redouble the expressive force of words’. In later decades, it would influence artists such as the Scottish Ian Hamilton Findlay and the English ‘concrete’ poet Bob Cobbing.
Marinetti thought of poetry not as a space for considered rational reflection but as a spontaneous, lyrical expression. (It’s perhaps no coincidence that Freud had just published The Interpretation of Dreams, in which he proposed dreams are the means by which the unconscious mind expresses hidden desires and conflicts). It was during the movement’s initial phase in the literary salons of fin de siècle Paris that Marinetti honed his craft into the favoured technique of ‘free verse’ unconstrained by academic metres and rhyme schemes. Considered too rooted in the 19th century, he soon abandoned the flowing rhythms for violent linguistic fragmentations and a brutal dismembering of traditional grammar and syntax, along with the elimination of adjectives and punctuation. In the first gallery, we see how he harnessed typography and used multiple fonts to create visually expressive texts. There’s an anarchic, scatter gun feel to these black and white images that look as if a bomb has been placed in the midst of words and sentences and, then, violently blown them open to leave shards and fragments of language. On display is a rare copy of the British Vorticist Wyndham Lewis’s – author of the Fascist-flavoured novel Tarr – manifesto BLAST, with its bellicose black and white cover decorated with jagged rifle butts, abstracted cannons and tall factory chimneys. Alongside this, the letters on the posters declaring Parole in Liberià – words in freedom – make arcs, snaking chains, strange buildings and faces.
The second room is largely dedicated to the typewriter ‘drawings’ of the poet-priest, theologian and Benedictine monk Dom Sylvester Houédard – also known by the initials ‘dsh’ – who made his mark as an iconoclast in the swinging 60s writing on new approaches to art, spirituality and philosophy, in collaboration with artists such as Gustav Metzger, Yoko Ono and John Cage. Here, we see some of his beautiful, yet obsessive, ‘typestracts’ as he called his ‘drawings’ made with the use of blue, black and red typewriter ribbons on his Olivetti Lettera 22. Born in Jersey and educated in Rome and at Jesus College Oxford, it is no surprise looking at these meticulous lines of dashes and dots, painstakingly made by taping and retaping typewriter keys, to learn that before joining the community in Prinknash Abbey, Gloucestershire, in 1949 to become a Benedictine monk, he had been a military intelligence officer during the war.
Despite being made on a typewriter, the works are not there essentially to be read. There’s something Zen about the meditative repetition of dots, dashes and commas that suggest architectural drawings, spirals and ziggurats. Though the possibility of a hermetic language remains, as it does in the mescaline-induced typographical poems of the French surrealist poet and artist Henri Michaux with which they have a certain affinity. Also included here are works by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, and the sometime accountant turned concrete poet Bob Cobbing, whom I remember seeing perform in the early 80s when his highly expressive, disparate sounds were accompanied by his wife waving and swirling a sinuous chiffon scarf behind him, à la Isadora Duncan. Houédard’s work, in comparison, is much more mediative. Perhaps a silent language born out of the long hours of contemplation being a monk?
It’s clear that the artists here believed in Ezra Pound’s famous modernist credo to ‘Make it New’ – a rallying cry that suggested words could be set free from syntax, music from traditional harmonies, colour and lines from a traditional perspective, in a renewal of style and form suitable for the landscape of a brave new 20th century. Yet, looking back now, though much of it is beautiful, especially the meticulous works by Houédard, there seems to be a certain naivete in the belief that art can ever really be the vehicle to lead us into a Utopian age and a realisation that all ‘isms’ are fundamentally flawed, intrinsically planting the seeds of their own destruction.
Breaking Lines – Futurism and the Origins of Experimental Poetry, Dom Sylvester Houédard and Concrete Poetry in Post-war Britain, Estorick Collection, 15 January – 11 May 2025
Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and freelance art critic. She has published five collections of poetry, a book of short stories and four novels, which have been translated into French and Mandarin.
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