Thinking about Futurism

For my FMP, I focused on the influence of technology on art, hence I’m going to collect more research about Futurism. Futurism was popular from early 20 century, which be influenced by the development of technology and industry.

How artist look through new technology

Industry evolution introduced human go into a new era, it also inspired artist to think about some completely new elements which just pop-up in public sight, such as machine, building, sounds from unnatural.

Before futurism was popular, the most famous genre could be expressionism. Expressionism artist like to use emotional brush and sensitive colors to express their feeling. As well as Cubism, artist began to think objects with different way, or they divided object and reconstruct them. These genre showed the method of expressing of abstract meaning.

When industry era was coming, more new products were made from factory, and there were more knowledges and objects had became difficult be understood by public. People were impact by high-speed cars, they were confused because the noise of machine, they were exciting because the new weapon which showed strong force of army. That’s why futurism became popular.

In these pictures, we can see the form of Futurism could be concluded as repeatedly, geometrical，segmental. Artist use these style to show the abstract things like wind or speed. For paining building, they generally use exaggerated perspective to show the magnificence of building, because the industry supported stronger structure, and efficiency of construction, which amazed public, and artist showed that by their visual elements.

Futurism and Fascism

Futurism promoted the mechanisation and modernisation of popularisation in western countries, especially in Italy. Italian society focused on industry with a high-level because the effect of Futurism. In this context, which like ‘human can control machine’ , ‘speed is force’ , etc, the thought of Fascism inspired in Italy. People desire more resource to do industry producing, so some left-wing people want to grab resource from other country by invasion.

Be enthusiastic with material and science, people could lost some own thinking, they follow other, like cult of personality. In a high concentrate society, each person became a part of group, just like the screw in the country machine. People admire consolidation, they focused on the force and honour of country even race. For more efficiently call people to concentrate together, Fascist created a kind of aesthetic to serve their concept, which we can call that Fascism aesthetic.

Fascist glad use repeat,united elements to make people decrease the position of own and enhance the group. This format is similar with Futurism, we can see these genres have strong visuals on emotional effect. The repeat format shows the energy of group, it seems support a safe feeling for individuals. In this environment, individual given their character up, and become similar with other component in the group. By this way, the specials and differences of individuals became doesn’t ever important. So we can the see the force of stack and concentration though it could be extreme and aggressive or dictatorship, individuals got a satisfied situation as they combined in a group.

In visuals aspect, when people focus on a group of elements, they generally see the structure and format of that, the multiply-style of elements always be ignored. But actually each elements would have different character, even it is tiny, but we still should not ignore that.