"Women Artists and Italian Futurism."

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Friday, September 24th, 2021
10:00 AM to 11:30 AM

Over a century ago, not far off from another devastating global pandemic, and on the cusp of a new kind of globalized warfare that would restructure not just the political economy of Europe but also its very way of seeing and picturing the world and the self that inhabits it, the Italian poet, editor, and art theorist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote and published the Manifesto del Futurismo (1909) - a strident paean to machines, speed, industry, and war, and a rejection of the ossified past and stale traditions, both in terms of aesthetics and society. Marinetti thereby founded an influential artistic movement that took its name from his manifesto’s title: Futurism. Marinetti wrote his manifesto in the first-person plural – “We want to sing the love of danger,” he begins, and the rest of the document follows in this centripetal vein. But this “we” is not especially inclusive, particularly when it comes to questions of gender. The Future, at least as Marinetti understands it, belongs to men. The new kind of aesthetics that would supposedly usher in this future is resolutely masculine, with poetry lauded as a “violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.” The only time Marinetti mentions women in his manifesto, it is with scorn: “We want to glorify war,” he rails, with “the only cure for the world” being “militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.” (Unsurprisingly, this means “demolish[ing] … feminism,” along with all “museums and libraries.”) Marinetti’s ostensibly extreme position here is in fact part of a larger issue. As art historian Griselda Pollock has argued, even though gender was a key topic within the modernist avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century, and despite the fact that women were major players in this movement, their contributions remain marginalized within art historical narratives – including those surrounding Italian Futurism, whose inherent masculinity, even misogyny, is not exactly hard to spot, and thus continues to animate scholarly discussions of the movement. As recently as 2004, the American art critic and historian Hal Foster bemoaned “the absence of women in futurism” in his book Prosthetic Gods. Yet women at the time defied and challenged this marginalization – as will Dr. Griffiths’ Colloquium presentation, which sets out to answer a number of key questions about this fascinating and influential artistic movement: Who were the women of Futurism? What did they say and do? Why have they often been disregarded? Dr. Griffiths will discuss several international and Italian women artists who were involved with the movement in Italy, including Rosa Rosà, Frances Simpson Stevens, Mina Loy, Rougena Zatkova, Alexandra Exter, Olga Rozanova, Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, and Marisa Mori. She will elaborate on questions of how and why they continue to be unknown figures of the avant-garde focusing on the interrelated issues of absence and inferiority. In particular, the disappearance and destruction of these women’s art and archives continues to be a major impediment to recuperative research and criticism. This dearth of material evidence in the archive has fed many misconceptions, including the idea that such women were unproductive or inferior to their male counterparts. Ultimately, thinking through the limits and potential of a century-old vision of the future has a lot to teach us in a 21st-century moment similarly haunted by the spectre of fascism and deeply enamoured of technology, speed, and manifestos. Jennifer Griffiths has a PhD in the History of Art from Bryn Mawr College. She previously taught for the American University, Iowa State University, and the University of Georgia in Italy. She was a staff writer for the American Academy in Rome between 2013-15. Her research has been published in Design Culture, Woman’s Art Journal, Woman’s Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her first monograph, Marisa Mori and the Futurists: A Woman Artist in an Age of Fascism, will be published by Bloomsbury next year. NOTE: For this presentation, the VIU Arts and Humanities Colloquium will welcome a maximum audience of 150 to the Malaspina Theatre. If you plan on attending in person, please register for the event by visiting www.eventbrite.ca/e/arts-and-humanities-colloquium-series-tickets-172166473557. All guests will be required to wear masks inside the venue and must show proof of Covid-19 vaccination.

Dr. Griffiths’ presentation will also be streamed online via Zoom. If you would rather attend the presentation virtually, you can join via Zoom from your PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android device at https://viu.zoom.us/j/66412958287?pwd=czFuY2lXQjhZL0QvQTBJOFFkSDhmUT09 (Password: 298471, Meeting ID: 664 1295 8287).

Email [email protected] for more information.