Technical Manifesto of Futurist Scripture

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Technical Manifesto
Of Futurist Sculpture

Umberto Boccioni

April 11, 1912

The sculpture in the monuments and exhibitions of every single city in
Europe offers such a pitiable spectacle of barbarism, stupid
clumsiness:s, and monotonous imitation that my Futurist eye turns away
with profound disgust!

What dominates in every country:s sculpture is the blind and dull-witted
imitation of the formulas inherited from the past, an imitation
encouraged by the double cowardice of slavish submission to tradition
and of getting by with the least effort. In the Latin countries we have
the infamous heavy hand of Greece and Michelangelo, something endured
with a certain seriousness of mind in France and Belgium but with
grotesque imbeciles in Italy. In the Germanic countries we have an
inspired Hellenising, psuedo-gothic ragbag, cranked out on an industrial
scale in Berlin or sapped of all backbone by the effeminate finicking of
the German professorial lot in Munich. In the Slavic countries, on the
other hand, one finds a confused collision between the creatures of
archaic Greece and monsters spawned in the Nordic Islands and the East:
a formless accumulation of influences that range from the excess of
abstruse details typical of Asia to the infantile and grotesque
inventiveness of Laplanders and Eskimos.

In all these manifestations of sculpture, but also in those with a
somewhat greater breath of innovative daring, the same ambiguity is
perpetuated: The artist copies the nude and studies classical statuary
with the naive conviction that he will be able to light on a style that
somehow fits the way people feel nowadays, yet without straying ever so
little from the traditional conception of sculptural form: a conception,
with its famous Qideal of beautyf that everyone speaks of on bended
knee, and that simply never breaks away from the period of Phidias and
its subsequent decadence.

And it is all but inexplicable that the thousands of sculptors who
continue from generation to generation to turn out their silly puppets
have, so far, not asked themselves why the sculpture halls are visited
with boredom and even revulsion (when they are not simply deserted), and
why monuments are inaugurated in all the public squares of the world
amid either their miscomprehension or general hilarity. Nothing of a
sort happens with painting. Thanks to its continual renewal, slow as it
may be, painting stands as the most crystal clear - clear condemnation
of the plagiaristic and sterile work of every single sculpture of our
epoch!

Somehow the sculptures simply must convince themselves of this absolute
verity: To go on constructing and trying to create with Egyptian, Greek,
or Michelangiloesque elements is like trying to draw water with a
bottomless bucket from a dried-up well!

There can be no renewal whatsoever in an art if its very essence is not
renewed, that is, the vision and conception of the line and of the
masses which give form to the arabesque. It is not merely by reproducing
the outward aspects of contemporary life that art can become the
expression of its own time. Yet sculpture, as it has been understood so
far by the artists of the last and present centuries, is a monstrous
anarchism! Sculpture has not progressed because of the very limited
field allotted to it by the academic concept of the nude. An art that
has to undress a man or a woman to the buff in order to act on our
feelings is dead art! Painting, however, has been given a transfusion of
fresh blood, has deepened and broadened itself by letting the landscape
and surroundings act simultaneously on the human figure or on objects,
arriving by those means by our Futurist compenetration of planes
(Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting: April 11, 1910). Sculpture
likewise will find a new fountainhead of emotion, and therefore of
style, but only when it extends to plasticity to what our barbarous
primitiveness has made us consider, up to our day, as subdivided,
impalpable, and consequentially not expressible through
three-dimensional means.

As a point of departure we must proceed fro the central nucleus of the
object we wish to create, and from that basis discover the new laws-that
is, the new forms-that link it invisibly but mathematically to the
visible plastic infinite and to the inner plastic infinite. That new
plastic art will therefore involve translating the atmospheric planes
that link and intersect things into plaster, bronze, glass, wood, and
any other material one may wish. This vision, which I have called
plastic transcendentalism (lecture on Futurist painting at the Circolo
Artistico in Rome, May 1911), is capable of rendering in
three-dimensional forms the attractions and mysterious affinities that
create the reciprocal influences that give form to the planes of the
objects represented.

Sculpture must therefore make objects come to life by rendering their
prologations into space perceivable, systematic, and three-dimensional.
No one can still doubt that one object leaves off where another begins
and that there is nothing which surrounds our own body-bottle,
automobile, house, tree, street ,- that does not cut through it and
slice it into cross-sections with an arabesque of curves and straight
lines.

There have been two attempts at a modern renewal of sculpture: one
decorative and concerned with style, the other simply plastic-
sculptural- and having to do with material as such. The first remained
anonymous and disorganised. It lacked any overall technical and
coordinated spirit, and overly bound up as it was with the economic
demands of the building trades, it produces no more than pieces of
traditional sculpture more or less decoratively synthesised and framed
within architectural or decorative motifs or mouldings. All the
buildings and houses constructed with a claim to modernity provide
examples of such efforts carried out in marble, cement, or metal
plaques.

The second attempt was more inventive, less commercial restricted, and
more poetic, but it was also too isolated and piecemeal. It lacked the
synthesising thinking behind it that could impose an overall principal.
And this because, when embarking on a process of renewal, it is not
enough to believe with all ones heart: One needs to set up and champion
some norm that will mark out clearly the path to be taken. I am alluding
to the genius of Medardo Rosso, to an Italian, to the only great modern
sculpture by rendering in three-dimensional art the influences of an
environment and the atmospheric links which bind it to the subject. Of
the three other great contemporary sculptures, Constantin Meunier has
brought absolutely nothing new to the sculptural sensibility. His
statues are almost always masterly fusions of Greek heroics with the
athletic humbleness of the longshoreman, sailor, miner. His plastic and
constructional approach to sculpture in the round or in low relief is
still tied to the Parthenon or the classical hero, though he did attempt
for the very first time to create and impart an air of divinity to
subjects that had been disdained or left to the cheap sort of realistic
reproduction.

Bordelle brings to the sculptural block a virtually irascible of feeling
for abstractly architectonic masses. A passionate, stern, sincere,
creative temperament, he is unfortunately incapable of liberating
himself from a certain archaic influence of the swarm of stonecarvers of
the Gothic Cathedrals. Rodin is possessed of a vaster spiritual and
intellectual agility which permits him to move from impressionism of his
Balzac to the irresolute expressions of his Burghers of Calais and to
all his other sins committed in the name of Michelangelo. He brings to
his sculpture a wayward inspiration. a grandiose lyrical impetus, and
these would be well and truly modern had Michelangelo and Dnatello not
had them, in virtually identical forms, four hundred years ago, and if
Rodin himself had used them to put life into reality conceived in
entirely new fashion. Thus in the work of these three great geniuses we
have three influences from different periods: Greek in Meunier, Gothic
in Bourdelle, Italian Renaissance in Rodin.

Medardo Rosso:s work, on the contrary, is revolutionary, utterly modern,
more profound though, necessarily, limited. No heroes or symbols stir
his works, the plane of a woman:s or child:s forehead suggests a
liberation into space that, when the history of the human spirit comes
to be written, will be understood as of greater importance than has been
recognised in our time. Unfortunately the Impressionistic approach he
has been trying out has limited Rosso:s efforts to a kind of high or low
relief, which shows that he is still conceiving the figure as a would in
itself, on a traditional basis and with storytelling intentions. Medardo
Rosso:s revolution, for all its great importance, is rooted in an
outwardly pictorial conceptand neglects the problem of a new
construction of planes. The sensual modelling with the thumb is meant to
imitate the lightness of impressionist brushwork and does not convey a
feeling of lively intimacy. Unfortunately, however, it requires a rapid
execution working directly from life,. and this deprives a work of art
of a feeling of universal creation. Which means that it has the same
merits and defects of pictorial Impressionism, and of our own aesthetic
revolution grew out of that movement:s efforts and explorations, it has
carried them further and is moving, instead, to the opposite pole.

In sculpture as in painting there can be no renewal except through
seeking the style of movement, that is, through rendering systematic and
definitive-thus synthesising- what Impressionism offered as fragmentary,
accidental, and consequentially analytical. And it is out of precisely
that systemisation of the vibrations of lights and the interpretation of
planes that Futurist sculpture will come into being. The basis of that
new sculpture will be architectonic, not only as regards construction of
masses but also because the sculptural block will contain with itself
the architectonic elements of the sculptural environment in which the
subject has its existence. The natural result will be a sculpture of
environment.

A futurist sculptural composition will contain within itself the kind of
marvellous mathematical and geometrical elements that make up the
objects of our time. And these objects will not be disposed alongside
the statue as explanatory attributes or separate decorative elements
but, in accord with the laws of a new conception of harmony, will be
embedded in the muscular lines of a human body. Thus the wheel of some
piece of machinery might project from a mechanic:s armpit: thus the line
of a table could cut right through the head of a man reading: thus the
book with its fan of pages could slice the reader:s stomach in
cross-sections.

Traditionally the statue is clearly cut out and its form stands out
against the atmospheric background of the setting in which it is
displayed. Futurist painting, for its part, has gone beyond the
conception of the rhythmical continuity of lines in a figure and of the
figure as something isolated from the background and from the invisible
enveloping space. QFuturist poetryf, accordingly to the poet Marrinetti,
Qhaving destroyed traditional meter and created free verse, is now
destroying syntax and phrases and sentences constructed in the Latin
manner. Futurist poetry is an uninterrpreted spontaneous flow of
analogies, each summed up intuitively in the essential noun.f Whence,
Qunfettered imagination and words in liberty.f Balilla Pratella:s
Futurist music shatters the tyrannical regular succession of rhythmic
beats.

Why should sculpture have to lag behind, fettered by laws no one has the
right to impose on it? Let us overturn the whole lot of them, then, and
proclaim the absolute and total abolition of the finite line and of the
statue complete in itself. Let us fling open the figure and let it
incorporate within itself whatever may surround it. We proclaim that the
environment must become part of the sculptural block conceived as a
world in itself and with its own laws; that the sidewalk can climb up on
your table and that your head can cross the street while your table lamp
suspends its spider web of plaster rays of light between a house and
another.

We proclaim that the entire visible world must come sweeping down with
us, become one with us, and thereby create a harmony whose only guiding
principal will be creative intuition: that a leg , an arm, or an object-
in themselves unimportant except as elements, of the sculptural rhythm-
can be abolished altogether, not as an imitation of a Greek or Roman
fragment but so as to fit the harmony the author himself aims to create.
A sculptural entity, in the same way as painting, can only resemble
itself, because the figures and things must have their existence in art
over and beyond the logic of what objects look like.

Which means that a figure can have one arm clothed and the other bare,
and the various lines of a vase of flowers can play a nimble game of tag
between the lines of a hat or neck.# And it means that transparent
planes, panes of glass, sheets of metal, wires, street lamps, or indoor
electric lights can indicate the planes, tendencies, tones, semitones of
a new reality.

And it means too that a new intuitive coloring of white, grey, black can
intensify the emotional force of the planes, while the introduction of
the colored plane can accentuate the abstract significance of the
sculpture itself. What we have said about force lines in painting
(preface - manifesto to the catalogue of the first Futurist exhibition
in Paris, October 1911) is no less pertinate to sculpture where the
dynamic force-line can bring life to the static line of a muscle,
however, the straight line will predominate because it is the only one
which matches the inner simplicity of the synthesis we counterpose to
the outward baroque effect that results from analysis. But the straight
line will not induce us to imitate the Egyptians, primitives, and
savages, as an occasional modern sculpture has done in a desperate
attempt to free himself from the Greeks. Our straight line will be alive
and palpitating, will lend itself to all the necessities of the infinite
expression of matter, and its fundamental naked severity will symbolise
the severity of steel in the lines of modern machinery.

We can, to end with, affirm that in sculpture the artist should not
shrink from any or every means that might help to achieve a reality. No
fear is more stupid than that which makes us afraid of straying even
ever so little from the confines of the art we practice. There is no
such thing as painting, as sculpture, as music, as poetry: there is only
creation! And so if a sculptural composition suggests the need for a
special rhythmic movement that might reinforce or contrast with the
rhythm fixed within the sculptural whole (something indispensable in any
work of art), on can attach it to some sort of contrivance that could
impart an appropriate rhythmic movement to the planes or line.

We should not forget that the pendulum and the rotating spheres in a
clock, and the movement of a piston in and out of a cylinder, that the
meshing and umeshing of two cogwheels with the continuous appearing and
disappearing of their little steel rectangles, that the fury of a
flywheel, or the whirling of a propeller are all plastic are pictorial
elements that a Futurist work of sculpture should exploit to the full.
The opening and closing of a valve creates a rhythm no less beautiful
but infinitely newer than that of an animals eyelid!# Conclusions:

1. To proclaim that sculpture aims at the abstract reconstruction of
planes and volumes that determine forms and not at what they may be
meant to represent figuratively.

2. To abolish in sculpture, as in every other art, the traditional
Qsublimityf of the subject matter.

3. To deny that sculpture should in any way aim at reconstructing real
life episodes, while affirming instead the absolute necessity of
utilising any and every element of reality itself as a means to return
to the essential factors that account for plastic sensibility. Thus by
thinking of the body and its parts as Qplastic zonesf, we will introduce
into a Futurist sculptural composition planes made of wood or metal,
immobile or et into motion mechanically, as a means of characterising an
object: hairy spherical forms to stand for heads of hair; semicircles of
glass for a vase; iron wires and netting for an atmospheric plane;
etc.,etc.

4. To destroy the merely literal and traditional Qnobilityf attributed
to marble and bronze. To deny that a single material has to suffice for
the entire construction of a sculptural ensemble. To assert that even
twenty different materials can be used together in a single work where
the purpose is to arouse plastic emotion. We enumerate a few of these:
glass, wood, cardboard, iron, cement, horsehair, leather, cloth ,
mirrors, electric lights, etc., etc.

5. To proclaim that the intersection of the planes of a book with the
corners of a table, in the straight lines of a match, in a window frame,
there is more truth than in all the tangles of muscles, in all the full
breasts and bulging buttocks of the heroes or Venuses that inspire our
present-day sculptural idiocy.

6. That it is only out of an utterly modern choice of subjects that we
can arrive at the discovery of new plastic ideas.

7. That the straight line is the only means that can lead to a primitive
virginity of a new architectonic structuring of sculptural masses or
zones.

8. That no renewal can be looked for except through the sculpture of
environment, because that is the only approach through which sculpture
will develop, prolong itself into space so as to shape and model itself.
Which means that, from today on, even clay can be used to model the
atmosphere that surrounds all things.

9. The thing as we create it is nothing less than the bridge between the
external plastic infinite and the internal plastic infinite, and so
objects never come to an end in themselves but intersect with infinite
combinations arising out of either attractions or collisions.

10. The urgent task is to destroy the systematic recourse to the nude,
the traditional concept of the statue or the monument!

11. And therefore we must refuse, courageously, any and every
commission, no matter how lucrative, which does not by its nature
involve a pure construction of sculptural elements that have been
completely rethought and renewed.

Umberto Boccioni

Painter and Sculptor

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