TIL that the New Wave band DEVO was formed in response to the Kent State shootings.
In 1970, co-founders Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis got serious about their idea of the "de-evolution" of the human race after Casale's friends Jeffrey Miller & Allison Krause were killed by OH national guards.
Reminds me of how almost all the French dadaists and surrealists were WWI veterans of the trenches seriously exploring alternatives to conventional thought and language.
Futurists are largely pre-war WWI. Their whole “the future will be full of cool wars!” schtick took a hit with the war.
It made a comeback when allied with Mussolini and became the inspiration for fascist art.
In fairness to the Futurists they did at least all enthusiastically join up immediately (lots died), very much a case of putting their money where their mouth was. Of the ones who survived some doubled down & ended up in Fiume & later w/ the PNF. Others decided they’d been wrong.
The Vorticists too, only that served to kill the movement as so many of them died at the first Ypres and the Somme. There is a reason why there are only two issues of BLAST.
Yes - the Vorticists and the Futurists produced some fantastic work. Early 20th Century modern art is jam packed with incredible stuff everywhere you look.
Futurism is weird these days because you just don’t get that mixture of incredible artistic talent and far right ideologies these days.
They were the equivalent of Tesla stans - seeing the clean metal lines, propulsive speed, and kinetic energy as things they would wield on others.
& use it on themselves! Particularly in the early days Fascism was seen as THE modern thing - lots of emphasis on flight, especially record setting stuff, fast (very fast) cars etc. The Futurist Manifesto feeds in via Fiume, D’Annunzio, the Arditi & WW1 to Musso’s new politics.
