Wednesday 30 March 2011

MarinE.T.

'This fetishism of the future crops up on almost every page of 100 Artists’ Manifestoes ... Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909, which as Danchev points out founded not only Futurism but the very idea of the artistic manifesto, celebrates “the beauty of speed”. “A racing car, its bonnet decked with exhaust pipes like serpents with galvanic breath ... is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace” ... Like Romanticism, the revolutionary avant-garde was staffed by the young, full of contempt for their experimentally challenged elders. In its more flamboyant moments, of which it had more than a few, it raised adolescence to an ideology.' [Terry Eagleton, ‘Fast Forward’, TLS March 25 2011]

So, too, SF! (Raising adolescence to an ideology ... very good) What’s cool about the Marinetti image is the way its ‘future’ is now so very retro ... exhaust pipes on the bonnet, ‘galvanic’ instead of ‘electric’ and so on. This in turn is, we might say, ‘steampunk’.

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