SPRING BREAK (PT 2)

Part two of my 95 day hiatus had me deep in the pages of obscurity. Your spring break came with reckless pandemic behavior and shirtless nights. Mine came with dusty books and lofty ideas. However, some of these pages are much like your room in Daytona Beach: Filthy.

Nerd!
I read a lot of books and listen to a lot of music. I like to study the world around me through the eyes of other creatives ...as long as they are not painters. I don’t really care what other painters have to say. As a follow up to my post from last week, here is what else I did during my spring break. It also appears, as I write this, I would be the guy they made fun of in an ’80’s spring break comedy. Or any comedy for that matter.

The Other Modernism
Cinzia Sartini Blum
I made a remark in a video in March about art movements that got it wrong, throughout history. One of those movements I tackle, was the Futurist movement. The father of the movement was a poet and writer, named Filippo Tommaso Marinetti or F.T. Marinetti. There are many publications about this movement and about Marinetti, but I wanted to examine a work that has a feminine look at a very hedonistic and male driven social movement, that was the dawn of Fascism when the Partito Politico Futurista political party merged with Benito Mussolini's Fasci Italiani di Combattimento. Now, before I lose you, remember, these words and this man's ideas collide on the world stage with drastic and horrible outcomes for Europe and the world abroad. Yes, this is a fascinating and often visceral exploration of Marinetti, through a very specific lens. However, I found myself wandering through pages as Blum begins to contradict herself. It gets long-winded, but some parts are brilliant, if not overly academic. In the early 2000’s many writers were going back to re-examine this era. This book, was one of many that, while interesting, was not definitive or frankly new at the time. However, at the time of publishing in 2002, F.T.'s ideas seemed a distant and long forgotten, never could happen again memory. Nearly 20 years later a re-examination proves otherwise and makes the book really relevant to the last 4 years of American social upheaval. Bonus: You can pat yourself on the back after reading it and bask in the self-righteous glory of intellectualism that leaps from every page. It's an insider book for the choir that already met the preacher. My snark and sarcasm aside, there are some interesting points and interpretations about what started off as an art movement of male narcissism and became something far more menacing.

Marinetti Dines with the High Command, Volume 35
Richard Cavell
As a follow up to the somewhat biographical and analytical takedown of Marinetti, this book offers a hypothetical fiction that is rather interesting. Shifting from fact, to fiction in almost essay form, this offers some interesting context to the ideas and the movement, from the supposed perspective of Marinetti. Deftly interweaved and rather interesting in scope and idea, it is a short read but is not meant to be the first time you learn of Marinetti. There is fictionalization in key parts for story, that a new reader could assume as fact. Start with the above book first, or at least an easily digestible biography of fact, before reading this.

Quiet Days in Clichy
Henry Miller
So now the sex. Well... actually Marinetti goes on in some of his works about his fascination and fear of a woman's vulva and vagina, so if you are reading in order, this will be a welcome break. Kind of. Henry Miller was a better writer but while some have seen him as a cliché of misogyny, I see him as a romantic searching for meaning, cleverly masked behind whisky and charm. Sort of. I chose this book for several reasons, mostly for the time period it was written and for the fact that I had never read it. Figures ...I probably just stopped at Tropic Of Cancer. I digress. The time period is Paris of the early 1930's and it is a series of life events and essay style notes turned into a novella. At the time Miller was an expat, playing the starving artist, while writing the book Black Spring. Quiet Days in Clichy, which you will come to find out were anything but quiet, represents a somewhat fictionalized yet autobiographical look at his life, while working and living in Paris, during this period. It is actually quite good and replete with all the trappings of starving artists in Europe on the precipice of global war, yet blithely unaware. I love this as a counterpoint to the Marinetti works. It is interesting to compare and contrast a new burgeoning artist in his early years, living and existing in a time and place, shaped so severely, by the ideas of an artist and writer a mere 15 years earlier. I get that that may be an ethereal concept for the uninitiated, but once you read these works, it becomes clear.

Seriously, Bro?
I know. I know. But, for all the years I had smart ass quips and was half in the bag on some afternoon heater at my gallery shows, besmirching the people who asked "what's your inspiration?", I now share, in an attempt to atone. Like music, books and their critical analysis of life around me, are a wellspring of inspiration. Maybe some of these titles will be interesting to you. I have hundreds more. Contact me and I will give you a list if you want.