Abstract
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.
The Relationship Between Modernity and Modernization as a Dialectical Project
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.
Central Hypothesis
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.
General Principles
5. The New Theorization of the Relationship Between Subjectivity and Objectivity
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.
6. The Rationalization of Aesthetics: The Straight Line and The Errant Line
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.