The futurist manifesto argues for a diffedrent approach to the representation of life in art. They describe a vibrancy of things that they want to capture in painting. Essentially they are demanding a way to capture movement in painting. I’m sympathetic to their request. As a composer I deal with the problems of depicting movement on paper. Sound is movement, or it is experienced as movement, while paper is experienced as a static object. This is even true with static sounds, such as constant, unchanging textures. As a means of communicating my ideas, I usually write them down on paper before giving them to a performer to realize. Conceptualizing movement visually is however, very hard! I use many different methods of trying to do this, but so far the resulting sound is never exactly as I imagined. The challenge of depicting movement on paper is really stimulating because of its fundamental impossibility. The futurists seem overly dogmatic and zealous to their claims about what such painting can do. They seem convinced there is a correct way of drawing movement, which is where I take issue with their arguement. The results of the argument, manifest in the Futurist paintings, are more interesting than the text of the manifesto, but this is usually the case with artist statements.
Futurist Manifesto
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