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To go through this show is to realize how close futurism is to us in its cultural postures, even though its machine worship is dead. Anticipating punk rockers, Marinetti urged nightclub singers to dye their hair green and their cleavages sky blue. The worst mannerisms of late nouvelle cuisine were foreshadowed by his cucina futurista, with its "completely new, absurd combinations" of ingredients, its sauces of chocolate, red pepper, pistachio and eau de cologne. But above all, it is the futurists' genius for scandal and hype that makes them seem so modern, or rather, postmodern. As a provocateur, not as a poet, Marinetti turned himself into one of the key figures of 20th century culture. He was the prototype of avant-gardist promoters. For how do you create interest in something as utterly marginal to the public as new art? By turning it into fresh copy. The futurists, unlike the cubists, realized that the newspapers wanted to run sensational stories about weirdos, not virtuously tolerant reviews of the avant-garde. Marinetti brilliantly used this appetite by trumpeting an art movement as a broad "revolution" in living that aims to change life itself, embracing everything from architecture ) to athletics, politics and sex.
The futurist word spread far and wide, taking hold especially in Russia, whose primitive state of industrialization, like Italy's, favored exalted myths of machine progress among intellectuals. The futurist influence on the Russian avant-garde before the Bolshevik revolution was immense, and the show traces it through the works of such artists as Vladimir Tatlin, Natalia Gontcharova and Kasimir Malevich. Futurism linked up with a similar movement in England, named vorticism by its leader, the painter-critic Wyndham Lewis. Lewis, however, was critical of Marinetti's operatic cant about war as the hygiene of civilization and highly skeptical about paintings that illustrated movement. His own masterpiece, A Battery Shelled, 1914-18, turns whatever is mobile, even smoke, into a stiff-plated fossil of itself.
In their zeal, the curators of the Venice show have tracked futurist cells and influences to the most unlikely haunts, even Mexico and Japan. The result is a staggeringly compendious show, except in one area: relations with Fascism. Here the treatment suddenly becomes very bland indeed. Most of the futurists licked Mussolini's jackboots with their eloquent tongues, from the march on Rome through the end of World War II. Fascism and futurism were not identical, but Marinetti's praise of the metallization of the human body, of speed, war and domination represented, as Walter Benjamin put it, "the consummation of art for art's sake," a rampant aestheticization of war. To say, as the catalog does, that "Marinetti and futurism were never supported by the Fascist regime, but merely tolerated" is to miss the point. A glance at the catalog of the 1933 "Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution" in Rome, jammed with reproductions of futurist-style murals, montages and sculpture in praise of the regime, would have put such sophistries in perspective: "The artists had from il Duce a clear and precise order: to make something MODERN, full of daring." Just so. But this document is not in the show.