Essays on Dante Book

An excellent written trail of art gone mad and down the rabbit's hole into the abyss of nearly abolishing, all the cultural heritage of Italy in an attempt for social re-engineering right down to the very detail for abolishing knives and forks with the only condiments allowed, a selected poetry piece or music to refine the senses and flavours of food in meditated silence. Language was not immune for restructuring.

One really needs to have at least a rudiment of Futurist Art prior to being hit continuously on the reader's senses. Otherwise every page or so, the flow of the reading has to stop to look for some known markers for it to make sense in context.

Saying this, it is an enjoyable and clear book to read, to how many things we recognise today; vitamin foods, super heroes, personal fitness, minimal music, automatic writing, cells, protons, electricity, velocity, television, teletactile, telesmells (the later waiting for science to catch up), etc.....

The dark side to this was from the automatic writings, dreams, utopian visions by an artist, who creates an art movement to celebrate everything modern upon the rubble plinth of history. With beckoning the destruction of museums, archaeology, historical sites, all art, church, schools, middle classes, family nucleus, army etc... to be substituted by the individual. The strong and creative to prostrate for the good of a strong society where the democratic values to be extended only to the winners. With these philosophical measurements, they pushed the Italian government into the first World War, welcoming war as a necessity cleansing for a strong society.

The residue from the Futurists branched out into various forms - in Italy to the Fascists black shirts of el Duce for social structuring; In Germany into social engineering away from altruistic visions and narrowed down against selective individual groups of people by the Nazis; In America the ideas of Superman, diet pills, mechanisation of the home started to take off; In Russia, Mexico and lesser extent Spain, the social art continued and morphed in Russia, 'Russian Constructivism'. The rest of western Europe, shell shocked and sickened from the World War I, didn't want to celebrate art that danced to not just mechanical innovation but the violence of the new.

Marinetti himself not only insults everybody with his fellow 'artists' as being superior to everyone else, was a loose cannon of nuts, as a Daliesque showman with Wagnerian pretentions and William Blake's visions; not too big to organise street fights as good as the Fight Club combined with Football Hooligans to have his exulted spiritual art illustrated in a manly world.

This book really delves to clarify the manifestos by the Futurists. A must for anybody interested in art and social history.

Sadly a real mad hatter's tea party seapping out from the subconscious into the real world.