Futurism & Four-Dimensional Fascism

(Mark Antliff)

I will argue that Boccioni did seek to generate fourth-dimensional form through the motion of a three-dimensional object through space, and that his notion of the fourth dimension owed more to his knowledge of the Bergsonian concept of "extensity" than to a reading of Hinton or other "hyperspace" philosophers. Moreover, in contrast to other proponents of the fourth dimension, Boccioni assimilated this spatial concept into the Futurists' highly politicized campaign to renew Italy. The Futurist correlation of the fourth dimension with a Bergsonian spatial-temporal flux made up of "force forms" and "force lines," unfettered by the limitations of three-dimensional space or measured "clock" time, fused with a political program premised on intuition and an antimaterialist call for national regeneration and imperialist expansion. The correlation of imperialism with national renewal was first propounded by the Bergsonian Georges Sorel and developed by his Italian followers Enrico Corradini and Mario Missiroli; the impact of Sorelian thought on the Futurists is well documented by historians such as Giinter Berghaus, Giovanni Lista, and Zeev Sternhell. [6] I will argue that the fourth-dimensional force lines and force forms emanating from works like Carlo Carrt's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1911) or Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) registered not only the artists' intuitive transformation of the self but also a desire to transform the audience who came to view such work and were intended to transmit the Futurist spirit of heroic violence and gendered will-to-power to the Italian public. [pp. 720-721]

SOURCE: Antliff, Mark. “The Fourth Dimension and Futurism: A Politicized Space,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 82, no. 4, 2000, pp. 720-733.