APPROACHES - In The Words Of . . . .
From: Ferrier, Jean-Louis, Director and Yann le Pichon, Walter D. Glanze [English Translation]. Art of Our Century, The Chronicle of Western Art, 1900 to the Present. New York: Prentice-Hall Editions. 1988.
Exerpt from the proclamation published inLe Figaro of February 20
1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and of temerity.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, daring, and revolt.
3. Literature having until now magnified a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep, we want to exalt the aggressive movement, the insommnia, the double-time march, the somersault, the slap in the face, and the punch.
4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched with a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car, its trunk decorated with large pipes like snakes with an explosive breath . . . a roaring automboile that give the impression it is running on a hail of bullets, is more beautiful than The Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to praise the man who holds the steering wheel, whose ideal column goes throuh the Earth, which itself is launched in the circuit of its orbit.
6. The poet must exert himself with warmth, brilliance, and lavishness in order to increase the enthusaistic fervor of primoridal elements.
7. There is no beauty except in struggling. No masterpiece without an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault agaisnt unknown forces to summon them to lie down before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! . . . What good is there in looking back as long as we have to bash in the mysterious doors of the Impossible! Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, since we have already created omnipresent spred.
9. We want to glorify war--the sole hygiene in the world--militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas that kill, and a contempt for the female.
10. We want to demolish the museums, the libraries, fight moralism, feminism, and all the opportunistic and utiliatarian cowardices.
11. We will sing the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure, or revolt: the m ulticolor and polyphonic undertows of revolutions in the modern capitals; the vibration by night of the arsenals and the job sites under their violent electric moons: gluttonous railroad stations, swallowers of smoking snakes; bridges jumping like gymnasts crossing the diabolical cutlery of sunny rivers; adventurous steamships sniffing the horizon; locomotives with their large breastplate, fidgeting on the rails, like enormous steel horses tied up with long pipes; and the gliding flight of airplanes whose propellers have flappings of flags and clappings of an enthusiastic crowd.
It is in Italy that we launch this procalmation of tumbling and incendiary violence, through which we are fnding this Futurism because we want to free Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, guides, and antique dealers.
Italy has been for too long the great market of the secondhand dealer. We want to rid it of the unnumerable museums that cover it with innumerable cemeteries.
Museums, cemeteries . . . Really identical in their sinister contact of bodies that do not know themselves.
[An Exerpt From: Ferrier, Jean-Louis, Director and Yann le Pichon, Walter D. Glanze [English Translation]. Art of Our Century, The Chronicle of Western Art, 1900 to the Present. New York: Prentice-Hall Editions. 1988. p. 99]
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