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Self-Representation in Futurism and Punk

1996; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 2/3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3190376

1549-3377

Karen Pinkus,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

The following is a series of remarks on the photographic portrait of the Futurist/Punk artist. Can the photograph strive to constitute representation when it always already becomes immediately selfrepresentation inasmuch as the camera remains potentially in the technical grasp of the subject? Photography is permeated by the dominant model of the amateur snapshot, even when a particular photographer is taken in a professional context. We could indicate a certain typical photographic portrait of the avant-garde artist. He stands at the picture plane, either alone or in a group, glaring pruriently into the lens, hyper-aware of the shutter capturing him, sneering at the bourgeois spectator whom he either identifies directly with the photographer, or whom he posits in that precise position (see figure 4, Marinetti and Depero in Milan, January 1924, in Blum, this issue, p. 92). Or, if the camera lens remains at an oblique angle with regard to the eye level of the subject, the photograph desires to make known that the subject himself has achieved this mastery through his own manipulation of the medium. Images that remain of the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde negotiate between the isolated ego and group identity, between the stillness of the photograph and the Movement itself, the stile di movimento (see figure 3, Luigi Russolo, Carlo CarrA, F. T. Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, and Gino Severini in Paris, 1912, in Perloff, this issue, p. 53). Of course this dialectic has been firmly inscribed in theories of the avant-garde since Peter Biirger posited the collectivity of the avant-garde producer-a concept that might appear radically contradicted by various portraits. The photograph speaks of presence and confrontation but is always saturated with melancholia and loss. Such an affective state-centered on lack, nostalgia and alterity-would appear incongruous with the of the avant-garde (to again invoke Biirger) inasmuch as this work exercises its function in the here and now of a given historical moment as a manifesto/declaration. Of course, lack (of movement) is also inscribed in any document of the movement, such as Umberto Boccioni's famous caricature of a Soiree (see figure 3, Umberto Boccioni, A Futurist Soiree, in Blum, this issue, p. 91).