[microsound] futurists and fascists (was us citizens... (OT)

[Gregory Taylor <gtaylor@xxxxxxxx>]

It could be and has been argued that the futurists were willingly
co-opted by the Fascists (I believe that a lot of this concerns
their participation in... um... I think it's the Quattrocentro exhibition
in um... 1933 or so? (Sorry. I'm in Miami a great ways away from
my library.), and the extent to which one could read the earlier
work and see or not see this co-optation as something inevitable
is, similarly, posited and debated by historians and scholars.

Such work is, apparently, complicated by the fact that the view of
some futurists as collaborators was sufficiently widespread in the
years following the second world war that the participants' work
fell into fairly serious obscurity. I heard an interesting talk by
Richard Kerby (who authored the very interesting and, happily,
back in print book "Futurist Performance," which to my knowledge
featured the first English translations of a number of theoretical
writings of the futurists) about the circumstances under which he
found and gathered the research that informed "Futurist Performance."
While people generally in groups like this bemoan the "loss" of
the intonarumori (and some basic idea of what was actually IN
some of those boxes), much more has been lost to us.

While I can's say I've really got a dog in this fight at this point
(although I was somewhat more committed to the notion that
the co-optation of futurism was important during the first heady
days of industrial music, when a fair number of persons who
were largely ignorant of the movement's history appeared to
uncritically embrace futurism), I would probably hazard a
guess that the larger lesson to be drawn might lie in considering
if (and how) their work *was* co-opted, and how such might also
be *our* lot.





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