Re: [microsound] art of noise

[david turgeon <david.t@xxxxxxxx>]

> > >This is certainly not something ive ever seen overtly
> > covered at exhibitions
> > >of Futurist works at Esoterik.
> > it's usually well hidden, the futurist-fascist link. and if
> > talk about,
> > it's usually in terms of how different fasciscm is from national
> > socialism...
> I must admit I'd mainly appreciated Futurist art on an aesthetic level and
> the way it has influenced Modern graphic art, but thats also generally the
> way it has been presented to me in the past. From the imagery alone I had
> thought the ideology was more Socialist or possibly Communist.

art is always a naive & idealistic thing, & its best ideas usually end
up subverted.  i think in the beginning of the century one could still
believe that fascism was a good thing.  obviously mussolini, hitler &
all fascists since did much to give it the bad name that it now has. 
fascism _is_ about "superior beings" (unlike communism which is about
"all being equal") but its historical applications (italy, germany,
france...) only allowed certain people (based on race, sex, orientation,
etc.) to be considered as "superior", & there is no room for people to
"become" something more unless they are aryan, & there is certainly no
will that people go by without leaders either.

the "fascism" most futurists agreed with probably had more to do with
anarchism than actual fascism, & now that i'm thinking of it, so did
early communism.  (to continue the symmetry, one could argue that the
main flaw of applied communism was that some people, i.e. the leaders,
were granted the power to be "superior" than the rest, though not on
genetic grounds.)

all this to say that it's probable early futurists were thrilled about
the "personal empowerment" aspect of fascism & not about the (properly
despicable) eugenic features its practice brought forth.  i am, of
course, only grossly extrapolating, but one has to remember that we're
talking about something which happened almost a hundred years ago, at a
time when the most pressing thing was to get rid of... monarchy.

~ david