It is our contention that Modernist and 1930s avant-garde production, when framed within the concept of State Art, embodied an aesthetic approach, which originated from a set of artistic practices and ideological orientations, which were both autonomous and heteronomous. This hypothesis is supported by several of the artefacts selected for this project. More precisely, the debate both on the construction of l'arte di Stato and on modern art in general in Italy, shows how the autonomization of the field of cultural production, typical of the avant-gardes and of Modernism, was challenged by the totalitarian and universalist politics of the regime.
Across all of its areas of influence - political, social and cultural – the regime sought to establish its identity in negative terms against a vaguely defined notion of the 'past', through a dialectic, which functioned in each of these three fields. To this end, the regime needed to formulate an artistic theory and create a form of State Art, the result of which was a strange mixture of innovation and passéism, combining a desire for modern aesthetics and social modernisation with the promotion of anti-liberal politicies and revolutionary aspirations. The regime had no choice but to present itself as a revolution against previous political systems and configurations and, in so doing, it had to deny the value of all the previous political, social and cultural developments that had taken place across the country, along with any subsequent such developments elsewhere in the world. Rather paradoxically, however, in the aesthetic and political spheres, the regime continued long after its initial stabilization phase to behave as a quasi-avant-garde phenomenon, an attitude which mirrored the similar trajectory that the avant-gardes themselves had been following from the early days of the 1909 Futurist Manifesto in order to consolidate their position within the regime.
Our central hypothesis concerning the profile of the Italian totalitarian regime, as seen through the prism of the avant-garde arts, is the following: the predominantly political and social changes effected by the regime, which were characteristic of the Italian path to totalitarianism, could not rely on economic or social structures alone to guarantee their appeal; they needed to extend their reach into the sphere of the arts and the aesthetic domain in order to ensure political stability and foster social modernization.
At the core of the regime's cultural and political project lay the construction of the New Man, citizen of the new society forged by a new political system where the State embodied an ethical principle. The art world had to be included in this grand scheme. When addressing the same problem within a dictatorial context, the integration of art and life is conditioned by constraints ranging from censorship and ideological prescriptions, to the workings of institutions. If autonomy is never achievable as a modus vivendi, it nonetheless remains a challenging issue. Aesthetic experimentation demands autonomy while the ideological and political spheres call for heteronomy. More specifically, the subjectivity of the avant-gardes would be reconfigured within the collective ethos of l'arte di Stato and the regime's collectivist project. Architecture, film, painting, sculpture, advertisment and theatre therefore had a major role to play in this shift by deploying aesthetic mechanisms and theorizations capable of balancing the degree of autonomy and heteronomy within the artistic sphere (Fortunato Depero, RAM, Thayhat, Fillia, Enrico Prampolini, Angiolo Mazzoni, Mino Rosso, Filippo Marinetti, Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, Bruno Munari, Lucio Fontana and Aerofuturism). Speed, technique, modernization, rationalization and dynamism were reinscribed as aesthetic principles within State doctrine, and were thus able to maintain, as forms of artistic expression, a sustainable degree of autonomy.
The aesthetic modernization of the Italian artistic landscape centred around a series of overarching principles. Predominant among these, and cutting across various artistic fields - spanning architecture, the visual arts, advertisement, photography - was the attempt to rationalize compositional lines, and indeed fashion a more rational and conceptual approach to form and content through the geometrical dynamism of the line itself. In order to create a rational, pure form, lines had to be reduced to a clear geometrical pattern, which allowed reality to be reproduced in its totality and in a self-contained form, while simultaneously enabling anti-representational forms of artistic expression. Such a conceptualization could not only be found in the work of various artists from futurist to abstract artists to architects and designers but also characterized entire movements (Futurism again, rationalist architecture, the Novecento movemebt). What all these artworks had in common however, was their attempt at reformulating the relationship between reality and representation, beginning to move away from an idea of art as representation to an idea of art as a reproduction of the inner mechanisms of the artwork, understood as a cogent whole. The straight line as a conceptual architext also marked an attempt to reclaim experimentation against practices perceived as traditional in their principles and excessively neoclassical in their execution. The straight line was to be read as an aesthetic, which aimed at conceptual complexity and the reformulation of the idea of materiality and of the materiality of the artwork. Theorizing such a shift in the understanding of the relation between form, geometry and technique called for a constructive synergy, which ultimately aimed to produce the total work of art.
It is the inherent tendency for the dialectical experience to dissipate the semblance of eternal sameness, and even of repetition, in history. Authentic political experience is absolutely free of this semblance. [N9, 5] (Benjamin, 473)
It is our contention that modernist and 1930s avant-garde production, when framed within the concept of State art, embodied an aesthetic approach, which originated from a set of artistic practices and ideological orientations, which were both autonomous and heteronomous. This hypothesis is supported by several of the artefacts selected for this project. More precisely, the debate both on the construction of the arte di Stato and on modern art in general in Italy, shows how the autonomization of the field of cultural production, typical of the avant-gardes and of Modernism, was challenged by the totalitarian and universalist politics of the regime.
Critica fascista, L'Italia letteraria La fiera letteraria, Orpheus, Il Saggiatore, Primato, Corrente, I lupi, Interpalnetario, Impero, La Ruota dentata, Roma futurista, Noi, Futurismo, Dinamo futurista, Stile futurista, Futurismo (subsequently renamed Artecrazia and Sant’Elia) and Nuovo futurismo.
Across all of its areas of influence – political, social and cultural – the regime sought to establish its identity in negative terms against a vaguely defined notion of the ‘past’, through a dialectic, which functioned in each of these three fields. To this end, the regime needed to formulate an artistic theory and create a form of State art, the result of which was a strange mixture of innovation and passéism, combining a desire for modern aesthetics and social modernisation with the promotion of anti-liberal politicies and revolutionary aspirations. In this respect, The regime felt an imperious need to place its political stamp on the Italian nation in a truly bombastic fashion, and had no choice but to present itself as a revolution against previous political systems and configurations. In so doing, it had to deny the value of all the previous political, social and cultural developments that had taken place across the country, along with any subsequent such developments elsewhere in the world, namely in the USSR and in the USA. Rather paradoxically, however, in the aesthetic and political spheres, the regime continued long after its initial stabilization phase to behave as a quasi-avant-garde phenomenon, an attitude which mirrored the similar trajectory that the avant-gardes themselves had been following from the early days of the 1909 Futurist Manifesto in order to consolidate their position within the regime. In short, this was a context in which modernity was synonymous with technical progress and experimental aesthetics within a repressive political apparatus, while modernization was often associated with social projects centring around a set of aesthetic principles. This said, the relationship between those two fields is often based on ‘heteronomous as well as autonomous’ principles and expressions, allowing for pluralism and eclecticism within aesthetic practices, which thereby often went beyond the boundaries of State art and art for art’s sake.
Our central hypothesis concerning the profile of the Italian totalitarian regime, as seen through the prism of the avant-garde arts, is the following: the predominantly political and social changes effected by the regime, which were characteristic of the Italian path to totalitarianism, could not rely on economic or social structures alone to guarantee their appeal; they needed to extend their reach into the sphere of the arts and the aesthetic domain in order to ensure political stability and foster social modernization. In the first instance, as far as regime-sponsored art was concerned, this meant propaganda in the most general and obvious of terms, but the broader question was that of creating a State art of more enduring significance across the public and personal spaces of the individual. The Fascist system of the arts had to be constructed in the interstices between the political and the aesthetic spheres in such a way as to reconfigure the boundaries between the two realms and thus re-define the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, between autonomous and heteronomous practices (see Hypotheses 1, 2, 4). In analysing the artefacts specifically linked to this hypothesis, we will again consider this connection from the point of view of the avant-gardes as one of the ultimate expressions of the relationship between innovation and tradition, between the individual and the collective, and between autonomous and heteronomous stances. We will do so by exploring the theoretical debate surrounding the ideas of autonomy and heteronomy in relation to the debate on State Art, and by examining how certain aesthetic principles, such as a new relationship between subjectivity and objectivity and the rationalization of line and rhythm, were encapsulated in the second wave of the avant-garde, as well as considering the broader picture delineated by the arts under a totalitarian regime.
Much has already been written about the idiosyncratic profile of the regime’s artistic and political affiliations of the regime over its lifespan, especially with respect to the political origins of the dictatorship, and there is an overwhelming consensus regarding the politically and aesthetically pluralistic character of Fascism’s origins. Laura Malvano and Marla Stone, for instance, have both identified the pluralistic nature of the regime’s artistic inclinations. To be precise, while Stone talks of ‘plurality’, Malvano uses the term ‘eclecticism’; however, both definitions accurately describe an artistic system, which only functioned thanks to the multiplicity of directions and orientations simultaneously at play within its workings. Eclecticism, however, seems to indicate a more conscious process of selection of what might have been considered the most refined form of artistic expression, and such a disposition was particulary clear in the artworks of the avant-gardes. In short, we believe that the attitude of the regime towards the arts was that of a functional eclecticism through which the artistic sphere could be exploited to shape the social domain and that is was productively embodied in avant-garde art beyond the boundaries of Futurism.
One of the key problems to address when dealing with the aesthetic sphere during a dictatorship is the delimitation of its boundaries, especially given that the 1930s avant-garde did not strive for autonomy but for social impact. If one accepts that in a democratic political system autonomy of expression is foundational to its existence, the same cannot be said for a dictatorship, which needs to exercise a profound control over the freedom of its citizens, including the institutions and artists associated with them. The key notions of autonomy and heteronomy therefore need to be defined. Autonomy can be described as an independent, self-standing practice, which assumes a separation between two or more given spheres. Heteronomy, by contrast, is the condition according to which one is subject to an external law and is therefore not capable, or not suitably placed, to act independently. Autonomy, in other words, is concerned with boundaries. As we have already seen, the attitude adopted by the regime towards the system of the arts was generally 'liberal', in the only sense that it did tolerate a certain degree of autonomy as well as demanding a degree of heteronomy, and it acted in this way simply because it could not have done otherwise. The interplay between the need to experiment on the one hand, and to channel aesthetic responses according to a certain political viewpoint on the other, is the key factor in determining the very essence both of State Art and of autonomous artistic responses. The connection between these two attitudes is, once again, the idea of art as a form of construction, the aesthetic principle of building according to a set of rationalist and modernizing principles (see Hypotheses 1, 2). Crucially, as far as our general argument is concerned, autonomy and heteronomy become fundamental questions when their relationship is addressed in terms of the straight versus the errant line, or indeed as a continuous versus a broken rhythm between the arts and politics, and specifically between the arts per se and what it is understood as State Art according to a political and cultural apparatus.
At the core of the regime’s cultural and political project lay the construction of the New Man, citizen of the new society forged by a new rgime where the State embodied an ethical principle. The art world had to be included in this grand scheme. First of all, it was imperative to reformulate the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity with respect to the total work of art and the avant-gardes were of course at the forefront of this project, often radicalized to the point of egotism. Many of the accounts of the relationship between autonomy and heteronomy, such as those by Richard Murphy, Peter Bürger and Andrew Webber, have tried to locate and explain the autonomy of the avant-gardes in terms of the superstructure of aesthetic production and the constraints that society necessarily imposes upon the artist and upon artworks. Bürger defined the avant-garde above all in terms of its integration of art into life and stressed the theoretical self-consciousness of the avant-garde embodied in its desire to act politically in the social sphere; owing to this concern, he sees its aesthetic practices as opposed to those of Decadentism. When addressing the same problem within a dictatorial context, the integration of art and life is conditioned by constraints ranging from censorship and ideological prescriptions, to the workings of institutions. If autonomy is never achievable as a modus vivendi, it nonetheless remains a challenging issue. Aesthetic experimentation demands autonomy while the ideological and political spheres call for heteronomy. More specifically, the subjectivity of the avant-gardes would be reconfigured within the collective ethos of the arte di Stato and the regime’s collectivist project. Architecture, film, painting, sculpture, advertisment and theatre therefore had a major role to play in this shift by deploying aesthetic mechanisms and theorizations capable of balancing the degree of autonomy and heteronomy within the artistic sphere (Fortunato Depero, RAM, Thayhat, Fillia, Enrico Prampolini, Angiolo Mazzoni, Mino Rosso, Filippo Marinetti, Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, Bruno Munari, Lucio Fontana and Aerofuturism). Speed, technique, modernization, rationalization and dynamism were reinscribed as aesthetic principles within State doctrine, and were thus able to maintain, as forms of artistic expression, a sustainable degree of autonomy.
The aesthetic modernization of the Italian artistic landscape centred around a series of overarching principles. Predominant among these, and cutting across various artistic fields - spanning architecture, the visual arts, advertisement, photography - was the attempt to rationalize compositional lines, and indeed fashion a more rational and conceptual approach to form and content through the geometrical dynamism of the line itself. In order to create a rational, pure form, lines had to be reduced to a clear geometrical pattern, which allowed reality to be reproduced in its totality and in a self-contained form, while simultaneously enabling anti-representational forms of artistic expression. Such a conceptualization could not only be found in the work of various artists from futurist to abstract artists to architects and designers but also characterized entire movements (Futurism again, rationalist architecture, the Novecento movement). What all these artworks had in common however, was their attempt at reformulating the relationship between reality and representation, beginning to move away from an idea of art as representation to an idea of art as a reproduction of the inner mechanisms of the artwork, understood as a cogent whole. The straight line as a conceptual architext also marked an attempt to reclaim experimentation against practices perceived as traditional in their principles and excessively neoclassical in their execution. The straight line was to be read as an aesthetic, which aimed at conceptual complexity and the reformulation of the idea of materiality and of the materiality of the artwork. Theorizing such a shift in the understanding of the relation between form, geometry and technique called for a constructive synergy, which ultimately aimed to produce the total work of art.