Luigi Russolo, Futurist

by Luciano Chessa

  Prampolini believed that one could, by using different materials, compose a painting as a heterogeneous universe. This was a way of injecting reality into a work of art so as to achieve an “absolute realism.”82 By absolute realism Prampolini did not mean the positivist realism of the late nineteenth century but rather Boccioni’s occult realism of the simultaneity of states of consciousness.83

  Prampolini followed this direction with great orthodoxy. As late as 1938 he still maintained that “the polymateric compositions’ power to impress and represent is the power to spiritualize matter.”84 Soffici had written something similar in his “Primi principi di una estetica futurista,” datable somewhere between 1914 and 1917: “The matter used by the artist stays entirely and always inert, dead, inexpressive if it is not led by the genius to SPIRITUALIZE ITSELF; to become what is pure element of symbolic lyrical representation. That is equivalent to disappearing as matter.” In this statement, italicized for emphasis, Soffici confirmed the “necessity of spiritualization of expressive means.”85

  In his article “La cromofonia—Il colore dei suoni,” published in Gazzetta Ferrarese on August 26, 1913, Prampolini dealt with the well-known theory according to which a sound source can generate a light vibration, explaining how this vibration can influence the “atmospheric aura that surrounds a body.”86 Certainly relating to this article is the subsequent synesthetical manifesto by S. A. Luciani, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, and Franco Casavola titled “Le sintesi visive della musica,” first published in the Prampolini-edited periodical Noi, and later republished with the more convincingly synesthetical title “Le atmosfere cromatiche della musica.”87

  In the manifesto “L’arte meccanica,” written in 1922 by Prampolini, Pannaggi, and Paladini and appearing in Noi in May 1923, which hews closely to Marinetti’s 1916 manifesto “La nuova religione-morale della velocità,” the machine is not a simple material object but rather a sacred and spiritual element, the “most exuberant symbol of the mysterious human creative force.”88 The Noi manifesto, which invites the machine to “tear itself from its practical function, rise up to the spiritual and disinterested life of art, and become a lofty and fecund inspiration,” further exhorts the reader to distinguish between “exteriority and spirit of the machine” and attack artists who in their work have until then contemplated only the exterior aspects of the machine, or have added to their compositions purely decorative mechanical elements without expressive and spiritual ambition. The manifesto confirms the futurists’ intention to render the spirit and not the exterior form of the machine, turning the machine into the authentic place of the sacred, a vengeful divinity toward whom to direct their pagan prayers. The manifesto closes on this note: “The Machine is the new divinity; in our futurist time, that is, time devoted to the great Religion of the New, the Machine illuminates, dominates, distributes its gifts and punishes.”

  One year later, in an article titled “Orientamento spirituale contro ogni reazione,” published in July 1923, Prampolini invited artists to turn toward the spiritual world as a wellspring of inspiration, now that they had “exhausted the plastic and pictorial possibilities of the physical world.”89 He added:

  The evolution of the plastic arts demands [. . .] a spiritual orientation, and if yesterday we explored and discovered the new values of human sensitivity by eternalizing them in new plastic symbols, today we must turn ourselves to the spirit [of these values], understand their intimate spiritual meaning, their internal and occult physiognomy, gather from them the misunderstood echo of a thousand different voices and find in these voices the unique faculty of expression of the art of tomorrow.

  In other works as well Prampolini lauded the machine as the spiritual reality from which to draw inspiration. In an article written for the Little Review in 1926 and titled “The Aesthetic of the Machine and Mechanical Introspection in Art,” Prampolini amplified the ideas of the writings cited above.

  In Prampolini’s animistic conception, the machine exists on a level that is metaphysical, ideal, spiritual, and mythic. The machine became the new source of artistic inspiration because nothing else can offer symbols with such archetypal force and inspiring function as those that the religious symbols of the Assumption, the Deposition, and the Crucifixion had for the artists of the past. Criticizing a materialistic portrayal of machinery, Prampolini in 1926 still reaffirmed this position: “The plastic exaltation of the Machine and of mechanical elements must not be conceived of in its exterior reality, that is, in the formal representation of the elements that compose it, but rather in the plastic-mechanical analogy that the Machine itself suggests to us in relation to the various spiritual realities.” And again: “The machine marks the rhythm of the human psychology and beats the time for our spiritual exaltations.”90 As in Pratella’s Dro, the machine is for Prampolini the principal means to attain spiritual elevation.

  PAOLO BUZZI FLYING HIGH

  The works of Paolo Buzzi, though marked by stylistic inconsistencies and crossover among literary genres, were classified by Glauco Viazzi into four creative periods encompassing: the adoption of a late-classicist learned style; the conquest of the symbolist expressive world; futurist experimentation; and the return to free-verse prosody.91 All of these categories, undoubtedly attributable to a restless personality and constantly oscillating between symbolism and futurism, and between tradition and novelty, can be found within a single work. Buzzi’s spiritualist-esoteric interest, sometimes extending into the realms of the occult sciences or alchemy, seems the only common denominator in his oeuvre and provides continuity to his work.

  From 1902 onward, well before the Poesia adventure began, Buzzi was Marinetti’s friend and comrade-in-arms. Some literary topoi flow freely between Marinetti’s and Buzzi’s writings, revealing the nature of their exchange. Compare, for example, a passage about the “sunset-conductor” in Marinetti’s Battaglia di Tripoli (1912) with the “very strange concert of noises” in the chapter “La diana enarmonica” in Buzzi’s L’ellisse e la spirale of 1915, and “La diana enarmonica” with the vegetable orchestra in Marinetti’s Indomabili of 1922.

  The case of the “diana enarmonica” demonstrates Buzzi’s intent to describe and re-create musical suggestions through the medium of the word, and it points to the omnipresent synesthetic aspect of his work, which is evident in the numerous references to the sonorous world but also in the associations of images and sounds in his poetry.92

  I shall begin this synesthetic survey with the long poem A Claude Debussy from 1908, written on the occasion of the first performance of Pelléas et Mèlisande at La Scala in Milan. Already its first lines reveal the neoplatonic theme of the illusoriness of the world—only a shadow of the ideal, which Buzzi harmonizes with a transposition in the occultist key (for Viazzi “rosacrociana”) of Democritean atomism. The poem closes with a further triangulation between the music of Debussy and the hypermusical poetry of Mallarmé that inspired it (L’après-midi d’une faune). The erotic languor of Mallarmé and Debussy—the symbolist and Wagnerian dialectic of Eros and Thanatos—comes to be framed in fitting metaphysical, spiritualist terms.

  In Canto di Mannheim of 1913, Buzzi invokes as inspirational muse “the musics of the future song or orchestra” that produce the “shiver that assassinates the souls and the spheres,” and, borrowing lines from his own Inno alla Poesia nuova, he sings (with a motif derived from Russolo—the first manifesto on the art of noises that was published in March of that year) of the “Machine” as the new “Lyre”—a lyre that could accompany the bard of the new poetry, but also the lyre as “vortex of different gigantic invisible wheels,” the only one that can produce the music of the present day.93 The harmony of the spheres, (re)produced by the chaotic noise of mechanical parts, will resound with spiritual implications in Russolo’s intonarumori.94

  These themes return in Concerto di Cetre of 1952, in which Buzzi evokes the vortices of dream to attempt to send the listener’s soul flying through the ether with the velocity of
electric discharge, to attain what he called the “Planet of Music,” the celestial sphere where the concert of an orchestra of angels takes place. Buzzi finds the Paradise alluded to in the poem in the canvases of a recently deceased friend, in the

  waves [of the paradisiacal echoes] and the admirable swimming ghosts,

  like in the plastic trigonometries

  by Rùssolo [sic],

  iridescent on the large canvas-space.95

  The reference to Russolo’s La musica, a painting often cited by Buzzi and one of his favorite paintings, is almost obligatory. In the next chapters I will discuss the complex relationship between Buzzi and Luigi Russolo, who were close friends and became even closer during the last years of Russolo’s life; their common interest in spirituality and the occult brought them together.96

  In Buzzi, occultist themes like those just described mingle with others, equally occultist, of alchemical thrust. In Luna di Cannocchiale of 1933, the quintessential alchemical experiment—the union of sulfur and salt—becomes the center of the poem, a metaphor for the creation of art (poetry, in this case) as the production of an organism by means of the synthesis of opposites.

  On the synesthetic side, “Aereopoesia per Aereopittura” (in Poema di radioonde, 1933–1938) describes the intoxication of flying, celebrating noted heroes of the air (Lindberg, Balbo, Agello, Stoppani) and exhorting painters to become flying aces. Evoking the elegant trajectories of forms and colors observable from an airplane taking off, the poem connected with the young genre of aero-painting (the “Manifesto della aeropittura” was published in 1929) and served as a commentary on the works of such aeropainters as Benedetta, Dottori, and Tato, to whom the poem indirectly alludes.

  An inattentive reader could mistake the poem “Aereopoesia per Aereopittura” to be merely the result of Buzzi’s having aligned himself with the diktat of Marinetti’s “Manifesto dell’aeropoesia” of 1931. In truth, the “Manifesto della aeropittura” provided a questionable chronology in dating the “lyrical exaltation of flight by means of free verse” to Marinetti’s Le monoplane du Pape (The pope’s airplane) and claiming that that work was from 1908, even though Le monoplane du Pape was first published in 1912 by Sansot in Paris and the Italian translation, published by the Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia,” did not appear until 1914.97

  Aereopoesia per Aereopittura was thus more of a revindication, since in Buzzi this aerial, “lyrical exaltation” is documentable at least from Aeroplani (Canti alati), a volume of poems in free verses written between 1906 and 1909, and published in 1909 by the Edizioni di “Poesia” with a “Futurist Proclamation” by Marinetti. (Marinetti eventually fully exploited aerial aesthetics, as in the opening of his Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista of May 11, 1912.)

  Already in Volo, Buzzi’s Words-in-Freedom, published in the Lacerba issue of January 1, 1914, perceptions that originated in visual, auditory, tactile, and even gustatory fields were vigorously forced to overlap and, well over fifteen years before the manifesto of aereopoetry, associated with aviatory inebriation. Further, the will to reproduce the suggestion of flight, and the accompanying sense of the sublime, gave Buzzi the opportunity to free himself from the constrictions even of free verse and unhinge syntax, thus giving life to one of the most visionary poems in his entire body of work and an authentic tour de force whose ultimate aim is to capture the pilot’s emotion and allow the reader share it by reproducing the pilot’s bravery with poetic audacity.

  The consumption of absinthe gives the starting signal for spirals of free associations, with synesthetic, protopsychedelic images that produce verbal expression that resembles the tone of a mediumistic trance as well as that of hallucinatory delirium. The technological, mystical-spiritualist, and psychedelic universes could not be more thoroughly entangled than in this poem. Analyzing the work consequently helped me to frame futurist aesthetics from a new point of view, for which reason I shall now take this narrative on a short yet pertinent detour.

  FUTURIST ALTERED STATES OF MIND

  Just as it was the main goal of futurism to understand the essence of reality, so the futurists believed that this comprehension could be obtained by way of extracorporeal experience aimed at reaching an altered state of consciousness, and that there were three avenues to achieve such an altered state: through experimentation with the instruments of technology, metapsychics, or chemistry. These three avenues harmonized with one another, and probably the futurists’ experience of altered states of consciousness went hand in hand with their interest in the occult sciences and the study of the latest scientific and technological discoveries. All three avenues (including technology) were no more than means for achieving extracorporeal experiences; the ultimate goals were to understand reality at a deep level, understand Creation, and try to imitate its process.

  An investigation of the futurists’ use of drugs (not only alcohol, with which, according to Boris de Schloezer, Scriabin experimented to attain spiritual peaks otherwise inaccessible, but also, and especially, the absinthe dear to many French intellectuals, the hashish associated with Baudelaire, and such drugs as opium, laudanum, and morphine), goes beyond the scope of this work.98 I will simply mention that absinthe was cited not only by Buzzi, in Volo, but also in 1919 by Armando Mazza, in Tormenti, and that it was the subject of a painting by Carrà titled La femme et l’absinthe of 1911. Similarly, hashish inspired Cangiullo’s poem Narcosi d’haschisch of 1919, and until 1921 Evola made use of narcotic substances (on which he was dependent for a time), allegedly as a support to meditation.

  Russolo was not immune to the attraction of drugs, as documented by an early etching titled Morfina. In a document from 1909, in which Russolo promised to send three prints to the tenth Internationale Kunstausstellung (1909) in Munich, he indicates that this work was then lost.99 In the MART catalog, Tagliapietra has suggested that the sleeping figure portrayed in Morfina is the same as that portrayed in an etching and aquatint on the back of the plate of Russolo’s 1910 etching Mamma che cuce.

  This is an interesting hypothesis, but I would rather propose that Morfina was Russolo’s explicit title for an earlier etching of 1906–07, which, by the time it was reproduced in MART, was circulating with the alternative titles Testa e fiore and Donna fiore. Because of the exceptionally realistic portrayal of two opium poppy flowers in two different stages of blooming—this in my opinion makes a compelling iconographical case—and even more so because of the sweetly seductive gaze of the young woman depicted, I am convinced that this 1906 etching was Russolo’s prosopopeia of morphine.

  Opium was present in a phase that may be considered the “prehistory” of the futurist movement. In February 1905 a cartoon appeared in the Florentine periodical Leonardo, showing a man listening to a gramophone and smoking a pipe, which Martin has identified as an opium pipe. In August 1906 Prezzolini published, also in Leonardo, the story of a young man possessed by a mysterious voice inviting him to take part in a quest for spiritual purification and personal and communitarian elevation. Prezzolini later recognized in this story the inspiration for the decision to found the new periodical La Voce.

  The second wave of futurism in Florence, the cerebralist group, was interested in the study of science and occult sciences but equally dedicated to the use of narcotic substances, which helps to demonstrate that these three passions went hand in hand.”100 It is not by chance that the interest felt by this group of intellectuals in the work of Marinetti and the Milanese group around Poesia actually occurred primarily through the poetic (and narcotic) work of Paolo Buzzi.101 Settimelli, in Sinfonia of 1912, and Corra, in the Talismano Giallo of 1913, both mention morphine addiction, and the protagonist in Corra’s Sam Dunn è morto reaches the most elevated state of meditation after having “gulped down three liters of whisky, five bottles of champagne, and twenty-seven shots of espresso, together with fifteen doses of opium and hashish: all that while smoking a hundred cigarettes and inhaling frequently from a small bottle of ether.”102
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  BOCCIONI VS. BALLA

  The list of futurists interested in the occult sciences is long, and there are others I could include in this context.103 I hope that those I have discussed here suffice to bring into focus the preoccupations of a spiritual, ontological order within the futurist thinking. The idea that futurist art does not intend to represent the exterior and sensory reality of the world—which the futurists believed had characterized the aesthetic of the impressionist painters—recurs in many of their theoretical writings.104 Futurism, the futurists claimed, instead sought to re-create in art the true essence of reality, as spiritualized by the subject observing it.

  If impressionism allowed itself to be enchanted by the illusoriness and sensuality of the surface, and cubism, prisoner of a coldly static aesthetic (and therefore from a Bergsonian point of view, evoking death images), was a “frozen fabrication of images,” then futurism, in exalting (psychic) energy, placed itself in opposition to both those currents as a movement of spiritual vitality and depth.105 The eye of the futurist artist adopted various cognitive strategies with the goal of sounding out the diverse densities of matter; perceiving and reproducing the aura that emanates from bodies (and, influencing it, thereby influencing mood); penetrating bodies themselves to reach the ideal and perceiving in the world cues of the beyond.

  In the futurist context, the ambition of re-creating reality through the work of art carries with it magical implications. Most of the divergences within the futurists’ theorizations (principally pictorial) can be reduced to the contrast between Boccioni’s subjective synthesis and Balla’s objective analysis of, a contrast that Calvesi proposed and discussed at length in his writings, and one which we can adopt as a useful critical paradigm throughout this book.106 Whereas Balla reconstructed and reproduced the harmony of natural phenomena by extracting from them the ideal, platonic, abstract forms, Boccioni aspired to re-create the dynamic chaos of nature by using techniques of interpenetration of planes and simultaneity to produce grandiosely conceived figurative works.107