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Introduction: The Zeitgeist of Speed
- University of Wisconsin Press
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I n a 1914 lecture, the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky remarked on a new aesthetic arising throughout the contemporary urban landscape: “Telephones , airplanes, express trains, elevators, rotary presses, sidewalks, factory smokestacks, stone monstrosities, soot, and smoke—these are the elements of beauty in the new urban environment. . . . We, city dwellers, do not know forests, fields, or flowers—we are more accustomed to the tunnels of the streets with their movement, noise, clatter, flashing, and eternal swirl. Most significantly , the rhythm of life has changed. Everything now has become lightning quick, rapidly flowing like on a film strip.”1 Mayakovsky, an outspoken member of Russia’s avant-garde futurist movement, marveled at the sounds and rhythms unique to the “lightning quick” modern city. As the poet noted, technology, transportation, and industry had dramatically altered the pace of everyday urban reality at the start of the twentieth century. For Mayakovsky, whose verse delved into the“elements of beauty”constituting this fast-moving reality, modernization offered a dizzying cinematic swirl of rapid motion, a new aesthetic for the contemporary urban dweller and, it follows, the contemporary poet. Five years earlier, in 1909, the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, leader of the Italian futurists, voiced a similar artistic philosophy. “We affirm,” Marinetti declared, “that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.”2 Promoting more than just a desire to outpace all predecessors , Marinetti and his fellow futurists articulated a cult of speed that ampli- fied the uniqueness of their epoch’s conspicuous velocity. For the futurists, modern speed was to be aestheticized and transformed from an ordinary, physical concept into a dynamic, original component of art. In setting forth such an assertive doctrine of speed,Marinetti seized on an unmistakable feature of modernization . From Milan to Moscow to Manhattan, the rise of the modernist era Introduction The Zeitgeist of Speed 3 coincided with a precipitous acceleration in the pace of life that artists could hardly ignore. It was this fast pace, this intoxicating joy of speed that many avant-garde poets, painters, and filmmakers chose to examine and celebrate. Speed, while an invigorating force in the West, came as more of a shock to early twentieth-century Russia. Many people in czarist Russia at first resisted or questioned the modernizing forces on the rise in Western Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century. Yet when modernization and technologies of speed did finally arrive in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, they elicited distinctively Russian aesthetic forms and achievements. By the second decade of the twentieth century, painters, poets, sculptors, and filmmakers in Russia had begun to seek out innovative artistic means for conveying the velocity of their rapidly industrializing, urban landscape. With science, technology , and Western European art providing vital stimuli, many of Russia’s “left” (i.e., avant-garde) artists devised speed-inspired techniques, styles, and theories of art that came to constitute a crucial yet oddly underappreciated facet of Russia’s revolutionary contribution to European modernist culture. It is the Russian avant-garde’s multifaceted and far-reaching exploration of speed that is the subject of this book. Proceeding from early in the second decade of the century, when Russian cubo-futurism arose, to the late 1920s, when formal innovation in the arts was overtaken by Stalinism and a call for rapid Soviet industrialization, I demonstrate that the idea of speed helped move the nation’s arts toward nonobjectivity (i.e., abstraction) as well as toward the ideal of a dynamic, streamlined future. Used as a powerful means for breaking down the conceptual stasis of traditional representational art, speed provided a critical basis for many Russian avant-garde artists’ comprehensive reevaluation of everyday reality; it also emerged as a quintessential force in the development of the Russian avant-garde as a cohesive artistic movement across various media. In the futurist verse of the poets Mayakovsky, Aleksey Kruchenykh, and Vasily Kamensky; the cubo-futurist and nonobjective work of the painters Mikhail Larionov, Natalya Goncharova, and Kazimir Malevich; and the silent movies of the Soviet filmmakers Lev Kuleshov, Sergey Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov—to name some of the most prominent Russian avant-garde artists— speed prompted unprecedented investigations of time, space, and other key issues ranging from urban flux, athleticism, and eroticism to war, revolution, and utopia. Although certainly not all avant-garde artists embraced speed,“dynamism ,” as it was often more broadly labeled, nevertheless augmented a fundamental con...