Luigi Russolo, Futurist

by Luciano Chessa

  Sam Dunn releases a flux of occult energies that initiate what Corra calls a “psychic revolution”: he primes a chain reaction of bizarre events centered around the city of Paris. But when opposing energies resist this revolution, Sam Dunn, despite having the strength to fight them, chooses to sacrifice himself; he is barbarously slaughtered, his head repeatedly struck by his maid’s voluminous butt. On the mysterious location that Corra called the Norwegian Keidelstruk, his sacrifice produces a mountain of phosphorescent waters in the form of buttocks, from which once a year, on the sixth of June, a series of greenish elliptical stones erupts, which bear Sam Dunn’s initials incised on one side.

  Like Corra’s other writings from these years, this brief, bizarre novel is an allegory of the futurist revolution that Corra’s group was calling for, a revolution in which the unforeseeable, irrational, occult, spiritual, and fantastic would shake to its foundations bourgeois science and society. In the last chapter of the novel, Corra prophesied: “It is unavoidable that our entire lifestyle will soon be crumbled, fluidified, and lyricized by an invasion of fantastic energies. The fantastic revolution of Sam Dunn was only a sign. We live above a powder magazine of fantasy that will not be long in exploding.”58

  An accurate picture of the Florentine L’Italia futurista group is presented in the manifesto “La scienza futurista,” published in the June 15, 1916, issue and signed “Bruno Corra—A. Ginanni—Remo Chiti—Settimelli—Mario Carli—Nerino Nannetti.” Here the attack on bourgeois science is more explicit than the call for renewal of art criticism of the preceding “Pesi, misure e prezzi del genio artistico” and extended to the field of scientific and philosophical discoveries. The new futurist science being promoted here is an aggressive thirsting for the unknown, which hurls itself against both acquired certainties and the yawning pedantry of an official science that is suspicious of the occult forces that animate the universe. The eighth point of the manifesto reads: “We attract the attention of all the audacious minds toward that less probed zone of our reality that comprises the phenomena of mediumism, psychism, water-divining, divination, telepathy.”59

  Particularly from 1917 onward, when Ginna took over from Corra as codirector of L’Italia futurista, the journal’s occultist focus intensified. In the issues edited by Ginna and Settimelli, a motto from the Corradini brothers, presumably chosen by Ginna, was placed under the title to confirm the journal’s occult and synesthetic gospel: “Words, the sounds, colors, forms, lines are means of expression. The essence of the arts is one.”60

  In the May 6, 1917, issue, Ginna published a short article titled “Il coraggio nelle ricerche di occultismo,” in which he aimed to explode the myth that “occultist research” must stay secret. He wrote the article with the goal of popularizing science, in pure Blavatskian style. In this contribution, although a few years and some brawls have passed, the legacy of the Florentine group that produced the earlier periodical Leonardo is summed up by the paraphrase of Leonardo’s Leonardine motto “He does not turn who is fixed on a star” (Non si volge chi a stella è fisso): “To those who counsel me prudence I respond that he who set out on a road by night fixing upon his own guiding star, sees nothing but the splendor of that star and will never be able to see anything else.”61 At the end of the article, Ginna promises to dedicate space in L’Italia futurista to articles concerning “occult science and art”; his own Pittura dell’avvenire was thereafter published in its entirety (in installments), and a brief but highly significant contribution by Irma Valeria titled “Occultismo e arte nuova” (Occultism and New Art) appeared in the June 10, 1917, issue.

  Valeria’s article opens with the lapidary affirmation that “in short, we are all occultists.” This alone reveals the cultural climate in which the entire group operated. Valeria was convinced that the supremely subtle sensations felt by a modern artist in the process of creation are comprehensible only to particularly sensitive individuals. Excited by the hyperreal noise of the lighting of a wax match during a noisy dance party, a noise amplified by her auditory hypersensitivity, Valeria dispenses pearls of occult wisdom in a brief article that unfolds in a literary register encompassing the most sensual and the messianic.

  Valeria believed that the artists of the new generation have the duty to penetrate and fuse the “perfectly neat, rigid and glaze-like polished surface” of reality with “the luminous rays of the spirit” so as to “reconnect the mysteries of the universe with those of art [in] a single harmonic and majestic music.” Adopting the animistic theses of panpsychism, she also asserts that “the newest art” seeks to penetrate “the soul of the objects [. . .] and to make them live not through the observer’s personal sensations but through sensations that belong to [the life of] the objects themselves.” This statement is a reference to the theatrical syntheses of Marinetti, but also to the drammi d’oggetti (object-based dramas) in Ginna’s, Settimelli’s, and Corra’s lost film Vita futurista.62

  In line with the Florentine group’s agenda, Valeria toward the end of her article attacks materialist and positivist science, declaring that it is incapable, because of its skepticism, of understanding “an art made of inner, musical, subtle, complex, and mysterious tremors,” which can only be understood by the occultist. Microcosm and macrocosm are mutually identified in an effort to understand the hidden soul of the universe: “The occult atom of our being and that of the world unify: they mingle because they are nothing but the same thing.” Her exalted writing style reaches its apex in the closing sentence: “I firmly believe that the new art will attain this simple and immense result like the fall of a luminous drop of ruby in the crystal vase of an ecstatic and timorous night.”

  Another important exponent of L’Italia futurista’s Florentine group was Maria Ginanni.63 Her interest in the occult sciences can be documented from her first years in Rome, when she attended the lectures at the Roman Theosophical Society and read assiduously both theosophical and other French occultist texts. Following her move to Florence, she came into contact with the group around L’Italia futurista. In 1917 she published Montagne trasparenti in Edizioni dell’Italia Futurista, a series of publications of which she later became the editor in chief. Passages such as the following are in line with the cultural beliefs of the group:

  I rose up thinly in the air to the maximum limit of the atmosphere, whose last stratum tangentially caressed my head. I could have leaned out into the emptiness. [. . .] I preferred to peep out into the Universe with the most ironic fragility: holding out my little index finger immersing it and stirring it around in the ether, with a grimace on the nose of all the Secrets.64

  The kind of interest aroused by Montagne trasparenti can be seen in the L’Italia futurista issue of April 1, 1917, which includes a page of opinions about Ginanni’s book:

  “[Maria Ginanni is a] poet ascended on the trapezes of the sky, engaged in genius matches with the beyond. [. . .] Nothing is more cerebrally enharmonic and more cordially melodic at the same time, as if the genius of the most modern Italian musicians were soaking in a bath of prose.”—Paolo Buzzi (Gli Avvenimenti)

  “Your transparencies see the infinite!”—Giacomo Balla

  “[. . .] for two hours I lived, saturating myself with her vibrations [. . .]”—Mario Carli

  “Maria Ginanni gathers all the infinite sensations. [. . .] futurism! Maria Ginanni more than a futurist; she is a profound clairvoyant . . .”—Robertson (Gazzetta di Torino)

  “Everything is transparent for Maria Ginanni because her brain is a veritable mine of radium.”—F. T. Marinetti

  Ginanni’s writing style did not change with her second effort. The following passage, from an extract of her novel Luci trasversali published in the L’Italia futurista issue of April 8, 1917, includes all the key words of esoteric literature: “The night is the ethereal soul of space, it is the soul of the light, hidden and elusive like our soul. Spiritual constellations of ether break and escape. . . .”

  FUTURIST OUTSIDERS

 
Occult sentiments can be identified in the work of several other futurist painters, even those who were futurists for only a limited time or not centrally connected to futurist activities. Romolo Romani was the only painter from the prefuturist Milanese “Poesia” group to join the futurist movement, and he was also the first futurist to retract his allegiance and break ranks with the futurist group; although he decided to defect only one month after signing the painters’ first manifesto, his influence on the futurist group in its initial phase was decisive. Most of his output, cut short in 1916 by his early death from an incurable disease, has a spiritual character, aiming to capture what occult reality can reveal only to the perceptive effort of the patient eye of the initiated.

  Silvia Evangelisti has written on the connections between Romani and the Milanese occultism of both the Società per lo studio dei fenomeni psichici and the Salone delle conferenze Spiritualiste, the circle around Marzorati; at the same time she has emphasized the influence of Lombroso’s Turinese group and its interest in the examples of Palladino’s materialized will, both ideoplastic and ectoplastic.65 Among Romani’s earliest works, the series titled Sensazioni (1903-04) and Simboli (1906) have been considered “remarkable examples of representation of the more spiritual states of consciousness.”66 Other works, too, testify to Romani’s interest in these theme: L’incubo (1904–05), an intriguing altered projection of reality; Ritratto di Dina Galli (1906), in which the corporeal figure is portrayed by means of a ghostly luminous emanation, diaphanous and fluctuating, while behind it can be seen a menacing demonic mask; Riflessi sonori (1907–08), which unveils Romani’s synesthetic interest; Prismi (1908), a study on the diffraction of luminous waves, which Balla must certainly have known; and finally a series of works including La goccia che cade sull’acqua and La goccia (both 1911), a study of the vibration generated by a drop falling on water and the concentric waves that thereupon emanate at regular intervals from the center. These works suggest a familiarity with the experiments of Chladni, and perhaps even with Thought-forms, where Chladni’s experiments are reproduced.

  The propagation of vibrations, together with its implicit synesthetic value, would interest Russolo as well: in fact, concentric circles representing waves are found in Russolo’s La musica, also painted in 1911.67 Marianne Martin has detected several tropes, both pictorial and literary, that Romani shared with other futurists, including Munch’s sense of anguish, and Poe’s taste for the macabre, adding that Romani’s paintings show elements of Redon’s psychoanalytic symbolism mixed with Piranesi’s perverse perspectives.68

  A trace of occult frequentations is surely also present in Carrà’s work, though more in his theoretical writings than in his paintings. Perhaps no more than a second-hand reflection of the activities of other futurists, this trace is still worth investigating. Carrà’s most important theoretical contribution about the futurist years, the manifesto “La pittura dei suoni, rumori e odori,” published on August 11, 1913, is essentially an exposition of synesthetic theories and the energy-based theory of vibrations, both of which have a likely theosophical provenance. The manifesto affirms that “sounds, noises, and odors are nothing but diverse forms and intensities of vibration” and that “a succession of sounds, noises, and odors imprints in the mind an arabesque of forms and colors. It is therefore necessary to measure these intensities and intuit this arabesque.”69 Carrà continued with the following passage:

  THE PAINTING OF SOUNDS, NOISES AND ODORS REQUIRES: [. . .]

  17. The continuity and simultaneity of the plastic transcendences of the animal kingdom, the vegetable kingdom, the mechanical kingdom.70

  18. Plastic abstract installations, that is, installations resulting not simply from the sense of sight but from sensations born of sounds, noises, and odors and produced by all the unknown forces that envelop us.71

  Point 17 shows links to pantheism, whereas point 18 unquestionably reveals associations with Leadbeater, an association that is also evident in the Though-forms reference contained in the phrase “arabesque of forms and colors,” quoted above. These references to the occult are not isolated cases in Carrà’s writings. Guerrapittura, a volume he published in 1915, contains a section of Words-in-Freedom by the eloquent title “Mediumistic Digressions,” in which the fragmentation of the text and the associations that spring from it are related to the revelations of a medium in a state of trance.72

  A differently colored spiritual attitude and investigation pervade the work of Gino Severini. The beginning of his “Analogie plastiche del dinamismo,” a manifesto drawn up in 1913 but unpublished for many years, provides a good example of his views. In it he claims emphatically that

  we want to enclose the universe in the work of art. Objects no longer exist. It is necessary to forget exterior reality and the knowledge that we have of it [. . .] because by now exterior reality and knowledge [. . .] no longer have any influence on our plastic expression, and, if we consider the action of memory upon our sensitivity, only the memory of the emotion persists, and not that of the cause which produced it.

  Severini continued:: “The abstract forms and colors that we draw belong to the Universe outside of time and space.73

  These propositions show an aesthetic vision linked to scientific theories about the fourth dimension, which Severini cites in his next work, La peinture d’avant-garde, published on January 1, 1917.74 Theories about the fourth dimension, as well as the study of non-Euclidean geometries, offered avant-garde artists the possibility of (re)formulating alternative systems of representing the world. Invitations to observe the world in depth and overcome the illusoriness of exterior reality, which accompanied such reformulation, were leitmotifs in all futurist poetics; they betray familiarity with that critique of materialism that was likewise omnipresent in futurist discourse.

  Severini’s spirituality soon thereafter became redirected toward Christian mystical religiosity. Calvesi later recalled the painter’s friendship with Jacques Maritain, to whom he was devoted.75 Severini’s leaning toward spirituality was, however, already present in his Maternità of 1916, a madonna with child in Godardesque clothes, and in his “futurist frescoes [. . .] in Swiss churches,” which Marinetti and Fillía mentioned in their “Manifesto dell’arte sacra futurista” of 1932.76 Notwithstanding—and perhaps to honor a fashion of the time that spared neither D’Annunzio nor Russolo—Severini’s wife, Jeanne, claimed that she and her husband, though devoted Christians, participated in numerous séances.77

  Spiritually remote from Severini—though sharing with him Balla’s training—was Baron Julius Evola, who, more than any of the other artists closely associated with futurism, cultivated the study of occult sciences and eventually even made the writing of esoteric texts his profession. “Practically a student” of Balla’s, whose studio he visited regularly, along with Prampolini, Depero, and the Corradinis, as of the tender age of seventeen (in 1915), he continued painting with great dedication until 1921.78 A contributor from 1922 to 1927 to Ultra, the periodical of Gruppo Teosofico Roma, Evola was also the aristocratic author of various volumes (some published by Bocca, others by Laterza) on subjects ranging from race theory to occultism, mysticism, alchemy, and political and moral philosophy. He had complex relationships with Fascism and Nazism, being opposed to both regimes but at the same time became an important theoretician for the right wing during and following World War II, which earned him a considerable cult following. Early on he was close to the Roman futurist circle, but later he became one of the few Italian dadaists.

  Following the example of Balla, who in 1915, the year he met Evola, began calling himself “futurist abstract painter” (astrattista futurista), and Ginna, who had by then been producing abstract paintings for several years, Evola favored abstraction from the start.79 In this early phase, which the artist himself defined as one of “sensory idealism,” and which lasted from 1915 to 1918, abstract painting was Evola’s escape from reality, which permitted his intuiting the transcendent.

&nb
sp; In Evola’s second phase (he called it “mystic abstraction”), which lasted from 1918 to 1921, he brought into focus, always using abstract pictorial formulation, astral and cosmological signs, and, especially, alchemical symbols. In this phase he adhered to dadaism, of which he was possibly the most important Italian exponent. Evola had made contact with the dadaist group as early as 1918, maintaining in those years a fruitful correspondence with Tzara, Arp, and Schad. The esoteric overtones, sometimes collected through altered states of consciousness, are accentuated and harmonize surprisingly with the automatisms (and the depersonalization) of dadaist poetics.

  Toward the end of this phase, Evola turned increasingly to philosophy, politics, meditation, occultism, and the study of race, and these were to occupy him for the rest of his life.80

  PRAMPOLINI’S SPIRITUALIZING MACHINES

  The polymateric compositions of Enrico Prampolini offer yet another interesting point of contact between Futurism and the occult. The first polymateric experiments in futurism were conducted by Boccioni between 1911 and 1912, in a series of sculptures now lost. His subsequent theoretical formulation can be found in his manifesto of futurist sculpture of April 11, 1912. Prampolini may have derived not only the polymateric idea but also the spiritual aim itself (of Bergsonian inspiration) from Boccioni; regardless, Prampolini in time became the principal theoretician of futurist polymateric art.

  Prampolini was influenced by Boccioni, but even more so by his mentor, Giacomo Balla, who discovered him and in whose spiritual orbit he spent his formative years, until a quarrel over polymateric theorization eroded their friendship. Calvesi describes a series of letters from May 1915—a couple of months after the publication of Balla’s and Depero’s manifesto “La ricostruzione futurista dell’universo” (March 11, 1915)—in which Prampolini accused his mentor of plagiarism and maintained that he had been the first, in an article published in March 1915, to lay down the theoretical foundations of noisy sculptures, or toys, which he too had called “plastic complexes.”81