The Pleasure of Being Booed: Local Modern Art class dives into Futurism

“The more you know about art, the more interesting your enjoyment and understanding.” ~Kerry Cobb

By Sarah Cook

Kerry Cobb

“Here are some of the things [the Futurists] were against, which I find very amusing,” said Kerry Cobb during her “Modern Art” course on January 18th, part of a monthly series facilitated through the Mid-Columbia Senior Center in The Dalles. “It’s sort of far-reaching, and it's actually pretty ill-sorted:

sadness
moonlight
sentimentalized love
monotony
marriage
the papacy
modesty
museums
English art
paintings of nudes
pasta (and they’re Italians…so I don’t know quite how they got around that.)”

Cobb’s blend of accessibility and intellect guided participants through a lively discussion of the art movement of Futurism, which occurred more than 100 years ago. She describes Futurism as having “an edge that borders on being almost menacing,” and during class, she mapped out the absurdity and, at times, explicit aggressiveness of the movement alongside the mounting tensions of the pre-WWI state in which it emerged. 

With key players that included Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, Carlo Carrà, and Umberto Boccioni, Futurists advocated for “the pleasure of being booed,” a phrase that summarizes the contrarian loyalties so clearly illuminated in the list above. They valued denunciation, dislike, and working people up into a frenzy, though Cobb observes that it’s hard to tell if Filippo Marinetti, Futurism’s notorious founder, “actually believed what he was saying,” reflecting on the group’s indiscriminate interest in trouble-making and attention-garnering.

Artists within the Futurism movement Luigi Russolo, Carlo Carrà, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini in front of Le Figaro, Paris, February 9, 1912. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

An Italian poet born in Egypt, Tommaso Marinetti published the “Manifesto of Futurism” in 1909, marking the inception of the approximately ten-year movement. Cobb describes Marinetti as “like the Barnum and Bailey of Italian movements… I’m always fascinated by people who just decide they have a story to tell, and they’re gonna tell it.” Of special importance was his choice to publish the piece on the front page of Le Figaro, “the New York Times of France,” states Cobb, describing the choice as a “brilliant public stunt.”

Cobb’s class is part art lecture, part history lesson, and it took participants back in time as much as it challenged us to anticipate our own situated futures. One attendee, during the Q&A, shared observations about the “social unrest” plaguing society now as it did then, anticipating the ways our current cultural experience might be reflected upon 30, 40, 50 years from now.

Futurism is “an interesting ism in the art world,” stated Cobb, who is the retired Executive Director of the Columbia Center for the Arts. Futurists aimed to render all aspects of motion simultaneously, an attempt to capture dynamic movement within a single image that takes clear inspiration from Eadweard Muybridge’s “The Horse in Motion.”

Above - In June of 1878, just a few years after he was acquitted for murder, Eadweard Muybridge made history at a racetrack in Palo Alto, California. He invented the zoopraxiscope, a device that created the primitive gif-like image of a running horse. The endeavor proved once and for all, that all four horses’ hooves left the ground in a dead run. So, yes, horses do fly. This, in part, led the Futurist art movement to capture dynamic movement in a single image.

They valued what they saw as the beauty of increasingly modernized city life: replicable consumer products that were identical in appearance, heavy machines, ships, trains; they idolized a sense of “complete brute force and movement,” such as that conveyed in Boccioni’s massive sculpture, “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space,” representing the ultimate union of man and machine.

Cobb offered insight based on her own experience of having seen the 10-foot-tall behemoth in person: “You can almost see the sculpture feeling to lift its back foot up to move it forward, as though it’s trudging forward,” noting the sense of flight, wonder, and power that the piece instills in the viewer. 

Though Cobb’s current teaching revolves around delivering programs through organizations that serve senior populations, this particular series, hosted on the third Tuesday of every month, is open to folks of all ages and abilities.

Boccioni’s massive sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913. It measures 10 feet tall. The sculpture was groundbreaking in its ability to convey dynamic movement and brute force. What does it make you feel? Its creation was influenced by stop-motion photography in the late 1800s, the forbearer of filmmaking. Can you imagine a time when humanity was deprived of slow motion and the ability to see how things really work in the microsecond?

Such inclusivity carried a palpable significance in light of the context of this particular class. Here we were, a group of people with physical bodies gathering through the medium of online video technology, having a dynamic and engrossing conversation about the ways a previous generation made sense of industrialization and its accompanying technological advances. In addition to the meditations on social unrest, participants asked about subjective interpretations of distinctly challenging pieces, and they pointed out things they saw that sometimes transcended a given artist’s stated intent. 

Umberto Boccioni, 1913, Dynamism of a Cyclist - oil on canvas, 70 x 95 cm. Can you feel the movement? Does it move you?

By holding such wide space for both intellectual interrogation and vulnerable reflection—one brave participant spoke eloquently about her inability to see what we were being told was there—the group was a living enactment of the value of a democratic space that remains intentionally open to all voices. This is, of course, an extremely valuable reminder in light of the eventual role that Futurism would play in the rise of Fascism, a fact Cobb did not shy away from.

Though the goal of the class was to cover a particular time period and style, Cobb did so while challenging our understanding of art movements as separate entities in history, noting that many of the artists discussed over the course of this series “are overlapping with each other…Picasso spent time and hung out with Monet,” for example. In this way, Cobb articulates the useful divergences between one style and another while also demonstrating the movement between movements, so to say, keeping the room grounded in a real sense of time, place, and coincidence—in both senses of the word.

Three Questions with art educator, Kerry Cobb

Sarah Cook (SC): What’s one thing you’ve found most surprising about this series of classes so far?

Kerry Cobb (KC): The pure engagement of those attending the classes. Art is something people often shy away from, thinking they need to be experts. But when you make art accessible and validate people's own experience of—and thoughts about—art, then people get excited. Add to that putting art into the context of history, what was happening in society at the time, and the way art movements influence each other, and there's an excitement as a bigger picture emerges. Taking time to look closely at art that you then can put into context is a great feeling that people really respond to. And they learn to really look at art in new ways. As I often remind them: the more you know, the more interesting your enjoyment and understanding.

SC: What’s been challenging for you about the virtual format when it comes to community education?

KC: Well, it's much more fun to do these presentations in person. But the virtual format works better than I thought it would. Everyone is so used to being on Zoom or Facetime at this point that it feels okay, and there's a strong group feeling we've developed in this class. And by doing it virtually, anyone can join from any senior place or from their home, rather than having to go from senior center to senior center. Again though, I would rather be doing these in person because I love seeing these lovely people, and I hope we get to go back to that someday soon.

SC: Have the challenges of the virtual format led to any creative solutions or unique experiences that you wouldn’t have otherwise stumbled upon?

KC: Pre-COVID, I did these classes as one-offs. Each presentation was about a different art form or artist/artists that I thought would be of interest to these groups. But once we had to go virtual I realized it might be harder to hold a group together, so I hit on the idea of developing a series of classes based around the great Will Gompertz's book about modern art, What Are You Looking At? Each month, the class is asked to read about 50 pages, and then I make a presentation about one of the art forms they just read about, emphasizing the flow of modern art's history.

Another plus is being able to give the participants a "further study" sheet with links to articles and videos they can immediately link with because they are already online. I also give them assignments to deepen their studies and help them articulate their thoughts about the art and what they are learning. Over the course of the series, they will get a solid introduction to modern art--and I can see already that they are making connections about modern art history and art movements. It's turned out to be quite exciting.

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“Modern Art with Kerry Cobb” takes place on the 3rd Tuesday of every month from 11 a.m. to noon. The next four classes will cover, in the following chronological order, the Bauhaus school (February 15th), Abstract Expressionism (March 15th), Pop Art (April 19th), and Postmodernism (May 17th). To register, call 541-296-4788 or send an email to mcseniorcenter@gmail.com. The accompanying textbook, What Are You Looking At?, by Will Gompertz, can be borrowed for free or purchased directly from the Senior Center for $22. Her first two classes, in November and December, covered Impressionism and Primitivism, respectively.