Umberto Boccioni
Unique Forms of Continuity
in Space
This work I have chosen is a sculpture by
the Artist Umberto Boccioni born 1882 died 1916, the piece is entitled Unique Forms
of Continuity in Space, 1913. The composition of the sculpture is best
described as futuristic as the artist himself intended, the work is cast in
bronze measuring 121.3 x 86.9 x 40 cm a traditional choice of material and
method considering the futuristic imagination in concept and design.
The futurist movement that this work is
associated with was inspired and driven by the speed and pace of mechanical
power being developed in the modern world and was outlined by the futurist
manifesto written in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
and others, which included Umberto Boccioni who wrote the Technical Manifesto
of Futurist Sculpture. The futurist manifesto appears to take an aggressive
attitude to history and saw it as their natural enemy to a future world united
by technology, a world full of fantastic new machines such as motor cars,
trains and aeroplanes.
The work, Unique Forms
of Continuity in Space, depicts a figure unique
in form as the title suggests, the super human like form expresses movement and
the forces created by dynamism at speed, the fluid turbulent movement of air
being disturbed by an all powerful mechanical soldier marching swiftly, almost
leaving contact with the ground. The idea of including the disturbed and
turbulent air surrounding the subject in the sculpture was a radical and new
concept for sculpture in an era of new inventions like the camera at the time
was capable of seeing more than the naked eye, movement could be recorded and
slowed down frame by frame and studied for patterns in the movement of the
subject being studied, this kind of new insight provided by technology must
have been an important and welcome input fuelling their beliefs in technology
supplying answers and expanding our understanding, unfortunately not everything
in this surge of technology was positive it also contained more dangerous and
negative inventions like machine guns, tanks and long range bombs, all these
inventions designed for war of which Boccioni and his fellow futurist believed
in the destructive power of war and its cleansing potential and the need to
rethink and reengineer a new to replace the old.
The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture written by Boccioni could be considered to describe the framework that
made it possible to create this sculpture. This is a small extract from the
manifesto, Sculpture should give life to objects by rendering their extension into
space palpable, systematic, and plastic, because no one can deny any longer
that one object continues at the point another begins, and that everything
surrounding our body (bottle, automobile, house, tree, street) intersects it
and divides it into sections by forming an arabesque of curves and straight
lines (1). The manifesto continues to
describe what they believed to be key elements of the futurist movement that
can be incorporated into sculpture and how this could be achieved. I felt on
reading the technical manifesto that it contained everything that one could
expect to inform and support the sculptural work of the movement and alternatively,
the other way around, suggesting that the work Unique Forms of Continuity in
Space embodies the writings of the manifesto. In my opinion the sculpture and
manifesto still contains an alternative futuristic understanding and composition
of the idea of intersected realities and different planes of movement being
represented in a architectonic style.
Reference
Boccioni, U.B, 2001. The Futurist Manifesto. 1st ed.
New York: MFA Publications
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