Ara H. Merjian A Future by Design Giacom

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A Future by Design: Giacomo Balla and
the Domestication of Transcendence
Ara H. Merjian
A Future by Design: Giacomo Balla
and the Domestication of Transcendence
Ara H. Merjian
1. New York Daily Mirror, ‘Bathtub Bests In the extensive annals of art’s presentation to the public, the street has long
Surrealist Dali’, newspaper clipping, Friday 17 formed a readymade stage. Think of Duccio’s Maesta’, born aloft through the
March 1939, Dali scrapbook, Museum of Modern
Art Library, Department of Paiting and Sculpture. alleyways of Siena on its way from his workshop to the Duomo’s altar,
recapitulating, in its symbolic procession through the city, Christ’s procession
2. These two photographs are reproduced,

respectively, in Norbert Lynton, Tatlin’s Tower:
to Calvary. Avant-garde iterations of such rituals differ perhaps only in their
Monument to Revolution (Yale University Press: ideological upshot. Vladimir Mayakovsky’s anthem from 1917 – ‘the streets
New Haven, 2008) and Lewis Kachur, Displaying our brushes, the squares our palettes’ – suggests how much urban space
the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalı́, and metaphorised the avant-garde drive to merge art and life. Recall, in that
Surrealist Exhibition (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA,
2001). vein, Vladimir Tatlin’s planned monumental tower, the Monument to the Third
International, paraded in miniature form through the streets of Leningrad on
3. See Virginia Dortch Dorazion, Giacomo Balla:
An Album of his Life and Work (Wittenborn: May Day, 1925, in anticipation (or in effigy) of a construction that never
New York, 1969) note to image 85 (unpaginated). came to pass (Fig. 1). Or consider, to quite different ends, Salvador Dalı́’s
ill-fated shop window, commissioned by the New York City department
store Bonwit Teller in 1939, but ending in disaster after the artist sent a
bathtub crashing through the shop front’s glass (Fig. 2).1 In both the
photographs that document these events, the spaces of the city, whether
Bolshevik or bourgeois, mediate the rendezvous between avant-garde objects
and their audience.2
Both images record poignant failures. But if the former stands as the
avant-garde Passion, a secularised Via Crucis entailing some sort of aesthetic
or ideological redemption, the latter stands as modernism’s Judas’ kiss,
delivered through the shattered pane of storefront glass. The Russian
Constructivist project generally serves as an art historical paradigm for the
‘heroic’, twentieth-century avant-garde – a progressive model in which
artist-engineers attempted to eradicate the object’s alienation from its own
makers, an alienation intrinsic to commodity exchange. Surrealism, too,
started from a campaign to reconcile everyday existence with a more ludic
(un)consciousness, beginning with the ‘objective chance’ of mere things
encountered in the city, derailed and disrupted from their proper use or
place, wrested to new ends at once mental and material. But Dalı́’s
transactions with 5th Avenue, and his scripted scandals with passing fashion,
epitomised the selling out of subversion for profit – a point of no return,
after which modernism’s relationship with mass culture would never be quite
the same.
Quite some time before either of these two events, the streets of Rome
witnessed a different sort of secular evangelism. The Via delle Converite – the
Street of the Converted – intersects Rome’s Via del Corso not far from the
former Caffè Aragno and its famous terza saletta, where various literati
gathered to chat. Here, in 1913, a painting by the Futurist painter, Umberto
Boccioni, was displayed in the window of the Lux Bookstore (Fig. 3). The
poet Luciano Folgore reports that the painting was accompanied by a note,
urging the public to visit the current Futurist exhibition at the Teatro
Costanzi.3 An anonymous photographer immortalised this bowler-hatted
# The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved OXFORD ART JOURNAL 35.2 2012 121 –146
doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcs018
Ara H. Merjian

Fig. 1. Model of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, Leningrad, 1925.
Fig. 2. ‘Bathtub Bests Surrealist Dali’,

New York Daily Mirror, Friday 17 March 1939,
Dali scrapbook, Museum of Modern Art Library,
Department of Painting and Sculpture.
Fig. 3. A painting by Umberto Boccioni on display at the Lux Bookstore, Via delle Convertite, Rome,
1913.
public, clustered (perhaps theatrically) around the painting on display. Whether

those in the dapper crowd were inspired to see more, or else revolted by this
radical sample, we cannot be sure. At the very least, it seems likely that the
Futurists chose the Via delle Convertite for the auspicious (and ironic) ring of
its name, and the lay conversion that it promised. In light of the Futurist
tendencies that followed, it is fitting that Boccioni’s painting was displayed in
the shop window of a bookstore. For, in a few short years, Futurism would
assail the boundaries even between painting and book, image and object,
actively eliding every possible genre, medium, and material.
Of course, the project of modernism was no stranger to the shop window –
as either subject or stage – from its very beginnings. Following a rejection from
the Salon of 1877, Manet famously displayed his Nana on the Boulevard des
Capucines in the storefront of Giroux, a purveyor of ‘knicknacks, pictures,
124 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 35.2 2012

A Future by Design

Fig. 4. Carlo de Fornaro, ‘Seeing New York with Fornaro’, New York Evening Sun, 9 February 1914.
4. J.K. Huysmans, cited in Françoise Cachin, [and] fans’.4 The casual apposition of those terms anticipates a reciprocity that
Michel Melot, Charles S. Moffett, Juliet Wilson Futurism would increasingly rehearse as one of its chief contributions to the
Bareau, Manet, 1832–1883 (Metropolitan modernist project. From their earliest collectively signed manifesto, the
Museum: New York, 1983), p. 394.
Futurist artists had pledged to ‘put the spectator in the center of the
5. Umberto Boccioni and others, ‘Technical painting’5: rejecting the division between viewing subject and imagined
Manifesto of Futurist Painting’, 11 April 1910; scene, insisting upon even the planar metaphorics of oil on canvas as a site of
reprinted and translated in Umbro Apollonio,
ed., Futurist Manifestos (Viking Press: New York, kinetic participation, rather than the object of passive spectatorship. F.T.
1970). Marinetti – the movement’s founder, leader, and unflagging impresario in
6. F.T. Marinetti, ‘Inaugurazione della Prima every imaginable domain – vowed that Futurism would ‘introduce life
serata futurista al Teatro Lirico di Milano’, brutally into art’.6 Gino Severini’s pasting of a real moustache on one of his
February 1910, reprinted in In quest’anno Futurista painted portraits epitomised, for some critics, such an indecorous
(1914); reprinted and translated in Günter
Berghaus, ed., Marinetti: Critical Writings trans. by
introduction.7 But if these Futurist shibboleths suggest a projected entry into
Doug Thompson (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux: the space of the canvas, the photograph of the Via delle Convertite pictures an
New York, 2006); I have slightly altered the inversion of that same manoeuvre.
translation. Here, a work of art erupts into life, into its common places, its literally
7. See Christine Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: pedestrian passages. As intimated in some of Giacomo Balla’s pictures from
Cubism, Futurism, and the invention of Collage (Yale around 1914 – their unruly flecks flashing over their frames, seemingly
University Press: New Haven, 1992), p. 186.
eager to cross over into real time and space – the movement’s ambitions
quickly exceeded the parameters of the framed canvas. By this year, the
reception of Futurist ambition even on the other side of the Atlantic
registered prevailing anxieties that its forms portended more than mere
pictorial flourish. A caricature of New York’s landmark Montross exhibition
(Fig. 4) renders the bodies of its patrons transformed – at least sartorially –
by the modernist images on display, anticipating precisely the fashion designs
proposed by an artist like Balla not long after (Fig. 5; see also Figs 17 and
18). If the clothes make the man, an artist like Balla sought to arrogate that
creative power to Futurism’s quickly shifting venture, one that transcended
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 35.2 2012 125

Ara H. Merjian
the effete confines of gallery walls, as well as the institutional and aesthetic
precincts those walls were understood to define and contain.8
Futurist activity also came to swell beyond the genius loci of Milan, beyond the
Lombard capital’s seemingly exclusive purchase on a mechanised sensibility, in a
nation still largely unaffected by industrial modernity. It was Balla, the former
teacher of Boccioni and Severini, who anchored the Roman effort in Futurism.
Uncharacteristically for a Futurist, he practiced far more than he pontificated.
Balla’s written corpus is slim, consisting of a few fragmentary statements. By
contrast, his projects in a spectrum of media form perhaps the most
prodigious and wide-ranging corpus of the entire early Futurist group. His
influence as a teacher, too, extended from the early core of the movement’s
practitioners to a host of young artists grouped around his Roman atelier.
Along with young his young disciple-cum-colleague from Roveretto,
Fortunato Depero, Balla issued a manifesto in March of 1915 titled ‘La

Ricostruzione Futurista dell’Universo’ (‘The Futurist Reconstruction of the
Universe’) (Fig. 6).9 Though ostensibly signed in Milan, the manifesto
constituted the first substantial contribution of Roman Futurism, one that
assumed increasing importance after the Great War, particularly in the wake
of Boccioni’s early death, Carlo Carrà’s defection to other projects, and
Severini’s continued residence in Paris. Balla’s studio formed a home base for
numerous artists practicing in the capital and publishing in the journal, Roma
Futurista – individuals whose forays into a range of media actively drew upon
his and Depero’s manifesto, its proposed transformation of everything from
architecture and toys, to clothing and furniture.10 Beginning with the
Reconstruction manifesto, Balla’s work served as a node of continuity between Fig. 5. Giacomo Balla, Futurist Suit, c. 1918,
cloth, 150 × 60 cm. Ottavio and Rosita Missoni
the various phases of Futurism and its rapidly evolving ambitions: from the Collection.# 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
agitational, irredentist chaos of the War and anarchic nationalism, through New York/SIAE, Rome.
the movement’s ensuing – and no less ardent – contributions to the Fascist
regime.11
In what follows, I do not address the complex aetiology of the manifesto, nor
unpack its dense contents, something already undertaken by several scholars to 8. It should be noted that Balla edited and
fruitful ends.12 I aim, rather, to consider its rhetoric in relation both to Balla’s re-released his ‘Futurist Manifesto of Men’s
practice in particular, and of the Futurist movement more broadly. As its title Clothing’ just four months later, in September
would suggest, the ‘The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe’ 1914, as ‘The Antineutral Suit: Futurist
Manifesto’, thereby transforming his sartorial
hyperbolised earlier Futurist theories of inter-media experimentation, imperative into a vehicle of explicitly
whether Bruno Corra’s ‘Chromatic Music’ (1912), Carrà’s ‘The Painting of interventionist, war-mongering activism. See
Sounds, Noises, and Smells’ (1913), or Enrico Prampolini’s schemes for an Giacomo Balla, ‘Futurist Manifesto of Men’s
‘Atmosphere-Structure’ (1914 – 1915). Proposing everything from Clothing’, in Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos,
pp. 132–4; and ‘The Antineutral Suit: Futurist
transformable clothes to ‘noise-making’ buildings, a new material order and Maniteso’, in Lawrence S. Rainey, Christine
new perceptive faculties by which to apprehend it, the Reconstruction Poggi, Laura Wittman (eds), Futurism: an
manifesto stands as a concentration and metaphor for Futurism’s exponential anthology (Yale University Press: New Haven,
ambition.13 A wide swath of that ambition, this essay argues, overlapped with 2009), pp. 202–4.
burgeoning notions of modernist design, and anticipated aspects of its 9. Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, ‘The
subsequent transformation both in Italy and abroad – a transformation in Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe’,
translated and reprinted in Apollonio, ed., Futurist
which Futurism’s role has been somewhat overlooked.14 By now a Manifestos. For the sake of brevity, I will refer to
commonplace of commerce and art history alike, Italy’s association with this text hereafter as the Reconstruction manifesto.
design culture was a belated one. According to most accounts, it emerged 10. On Balla’s clothing design, see Emily Braun,
only definitively with Italy’s post-World War Two economic ‘miracle’, and ‘Futurist Fashion: Three Manifestoes’, Art Journal,
the widespread industrialisation of a previously (with few exceptions) agrarian vol. 54, no. 1, Clothing as Subject, (Spring,
nation.15 I will return to the definition of design later in the essay, but for 1995), pp. 34–41; on Balla’s wide influence in
Futurism between the World Wars, see Enrico
the time being note that it is not mass production by which the term is Crispolti (ed.), Casa Balla e il Futurismo a Roma
measured here, but rather more conceptual and integrative processes: the (Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato: Rome,
unifying of disparate elements in a comprehensive environment, atmosphere, 1989).

A Future by Design

Fig. 6. Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, ‘The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe’, 1915.
state of mind. Not, in other words, a streamlining of practical sense, but an

11. On Balla’s prominence in the transition and expansion of sensibility. Irina Costache has called Futurism’s blurring of
continuity between phases of Futurist activity, in genres ‘its most valuable yet overlooked legacy’.16 To the extent that the
conjunction with an astute historiographic present essay attends to that legacy – to its consequence for a history of
consideration of ‘Second Futurism’, see Guido
Bartorelli, Numeri innamorati: Sintesi e dinamiche
modern design culture – it also interrogates the aesthetic, social, and
del secondo futurismo (Testo & Immagine: Turin, ideological values entailed therein, rather than take them for granted.
2001). Early twentieth-century projects that undertook to merge aspects of art and
12. Maurizio Fagiolo Dell’Arco, Enrico life – from Constructivism to Dada, Esprit Nouveau to Surrealism – find, in
Crispolti, and more recently, Giovanni Lista have Balla and Depero’s work from the mid-1910s, a significant and understudied
meticulously analysed the manifesto, as well as its precedent. That precedence was first heralded, with typical Futurist hubris,
origins and echoes in the larger Futurist
movement. See, inter alia, Fagiolo dell’Arco, by the signatories themselves: ‘No artist in France, Russia, England, or
‘The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe’, in Germany has dreamed up anything similar or analogous before us. Only the
The New Italian Landscape (MoMA: New York, Italian genius, that is, the most constructive and architectural genius could
1972); Crispolti (ed.), Ricostruzione Futurista
dell’universo (Museo Civico: Turin, 1980);
sense the abstract plastic complex.’17 Leaving aside the manifesto’s rhetorical
Crispolti (ed.), Casa Balla e il Futurismo a Roma; swagger, how do such ‘constructive’ impulses square with Futurism’s
Lista, Balla: la modernità futurista (Skira: Milan, aggressively destructive imperatives, which championed and drew in turn
2008). upon the unprecedented violence of World War One? What place does the
13. As Guido Bartorelli notes, the title of the Reconstruction manifesto, and the work that it spurred, occupy in the early
manifesto has served as the rubric for several twentieth-century avant-garde venture of the total work of art? And how
exhibitions over the years – a kind of ‘umbrella
notion’ that serves ‘as a glue to bind together the
does that quixotic endeavour square with the more workaday discipline of
teeming multiplicity’ of Futurist activities, and of design? Aside from brief nods in scholarship, little sustained attention has
Balla’s practice in particular. Bartorelli, Numeri been paid to the wider art historical relevance – both practical and
innamorati, 17.
conceptual – of Balla’s output during these years, even though it epitomises
14. To cite just one telling example, the some salient avant-garde drives: the elimination of the autonomous work of
prodigious, comprehensive exhibition at the art, the sublimation of aesthetics into the practice of everyday life. Indeed,

Ara H. Merjian
despite its exemplarity in these regards, Balla’s early Futurist work has found
itself – like Futurism in general – largely excluded from histories of the
avant-garde quest for totality.18 Victoria and Albert Museum – Modernism:
The nature of that totality as played out in Balla’s work is by no means Designing a New World, 1914– 1939 – included
straightforward. His efforts lay not simply in the rarefied, transcendent realm only one Futurist suit by Balla as evidence of the
of abstraction or dematerialisation, but simultaneously in the homespun movement’s contribution to the sweepingly
interdisciplinary approach to design adumbrated
immanence of the domestic realm. His negotiation between these registers by the exhibition. See Christopher Wilk (ed.),
merits further attention, as does the tension in his work between utility and Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914– 1939
disorder, the disruptive promiscuity of publicity and the snug comforts of (V&A Publishing: London, 2007).
bourgeois materiality. We find in Balla’s work of the mid-1910s something of 15. This is a basic premise of Andrea Branzi’s
Tatlin’s valiant failure and Dalı́’s unctuous success. But more than the notable Introduzione al design Italiano (Baldini &
unsettling dialectic of those valences, it is their a priori synthesis within Castoldi: Milan, 1999). Further redressing what
Branzi deems a ‘lack of a proper historiography of
Balla’s work – even at the height of the War’s violence – that makes it at Italian design’ – something his own text remedies
once exemplary and anomalous in early twentieth-century avant-garde to a significant extent – a major forthcoming

practices. volume addresses the topic in a fittingly
interdisciplinary, case-study approach, filling in
major gaps in the record, and anchoring the
‘Everything is Architecture’: On Balla’s Futurist ‘Impurity’ development of Italian design in particular
historical context. Grace Lees-Maffei and Kjetil
The ‘Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe’ manifesto features photographic Fallan (eds ), Made in Italy: A Century of Italian
reproductions of six different objects by Balla and Depero – three sculpture/ Design (Berg Publishers: London, 2012).
assemblages by each artist (Figs 6 and 7). Made from materials as diverse as 16. Irina Costache, ‘Italian Futurism and the
wool and talcum, cardboard and iron, these so-called Plastic Complexes Decorative Arts’, The Journal of Decorative and
Propaganda Arts, vol. 20, 1994, pp. 183–95.
suggest autonomous explorations of those materials in themselves, as much Simonetta-Falasca-Zamponi writes, ‘What was
as formal compositions. Incorporating some sort of diminutive motor, two of different in the Futurists’ [avant-garde] proposal,
Depero’s works promise a certain kinetic effect, though not to any however, was the total character of their desire for
identifiable – and certainly to no practical – end (The ‘simultaneous change, a desire that they applied not only to the
whole domain of the arts, but also to every aspect
decomposition’ pledged in the title of one such object suggests its presumed of life.’ Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, ‘The Artist
use is hardly a functional one). Balla’s objects range from a shallow, to Power?: Futurism, Fascism and the
diagrammatic relief; to the torsion of forms by means of taut string; to an Avant-Garde’, Theory Culture Society, vol. 13, no.
exuberant, calligraphic homage to ‘dance and happiness’. All six objects 2, 1996 , p. 45. Oddly, however,
Falasca-Zampoini notes ‘However, no Futurist
appear liberated from any clear purpose. They serve here as touchstones for artist ever managed to produce works in more
the manifesto’s far-fetched proposals; not, in other words, summations of its than one field’ – a fact plainly contradicted by
pitches, so much as proleptic examples of its aims. They illustrate nothing Balla and Depero’s activities in everything from
less, as the manifesto’s title suggests, than the proposed refashioning of the painting and sculpture, to clothing and advertising
design, to experimental poetry.
entire universe. The ‘new Object’ of Futurist fabrication, beginning with
these experimental assemblages, proposes an architectonics in nuce – one 17. Balla and Depero, ‘The Futurist
Reconstruction of the Universe’, 200.
that would swell to form the environment at large.
Balla and Depero’s insistence upon the (Italian) ‘constructive and 18. Perhaps the most notable example in this
regard is Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde,
architectural genius’ is telling. Despite the escalating Futurist intervention trans. by Michael Shaw (University of Minnesota
into every imaginable domain by 1914, the main Futurist theorist, Umberto Press: Minneapolis, 1984 [1974]). There is a
Boccioni, had hesitated to publish his planned ‘Manifesto of Futurist difference, of course, between the art-into-life
Architecture’.19 Balla thus queried his colleague Boccioni, in a postcard dated agitation of a happening, and the commodified
totality of design ( just as there was a difference
7 February 1914, as to its absence from the Futurist panorama. ‘And between the synaesthetic, Wagnerian
architecture?’ reads Balla’s note, a query that sheds some light on some of Gesamtkunstwerk, and the reconciliation of material
his own work’s tacit preoccupations.20 To be sure, Fortunato Depero culture and daily life proposed by late
contributed significantly to the duo’s Reconstruction text. The final manifesto nineteenth-century craft movements). But it is the
intersection of the two former phenomena to
constitutes, in fact, a version of an earlier text written by the precocious which I attend here. For an incisive discussion of
twenty-two-year old in 1914, amended and expanded by the senior Balla. these issues, particularly with relation to Peter
But, as the scholar Giovanni Lista has noted, Balla also used the manifesto Bürger’s canonical (if flawed) Theory of the
expressly to respond to what he saw as unsatisfactory in Boccioni’s Avant-Garde and Italian modernism, see Christina
Kiaer, review of Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and
theorisations about the built environment.21 Though Futurist architecture Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism
would receive its due visionary illustration in the drafts of Antonio Sant’Elia (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2000),
– a young designer recruited by Marinetti as the group’s chief architectural The Art Bulletin, vol. 85, no. 2, June 2003, 399 –

A Future by Design
Fig. 7. Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, ‘The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe’, 1915.

Ara H. Merjian
theorist – Balla’s work sidestepped the vast scale of urban planning in favour of
more quotidian concerns. It is clear from the Reconstruction manifesto’s tectonic
allusions, in addition to the work that followed consistently in its wake, that
Balla intended an architecture of everyday objects as one of his primary
contributions to the Futurist project. While acknowledging the
accomplishments of ‘pictorial futurism’, Balla and Depero vow to transcend
the ‘flat plane of the canvas’, undertaking instead a ‘total fusion’, an
‘integral re-creation’.22
Boccioni’s own writings had assailed the ‘artificial subdivisions between
painting, sculpture, music, literature, poetry, philosophy . . . At bottom,
everything is architecture’.23 His frustration with the planar limitations of the
canvas, and his pursuit of direct interventions into real time and space, had
led to his temporary abandonment of painting in favour of an increasingly
adventurous sculptural practice. His Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses

(1914 –15) makes use of copper, iron, cardboard, wood, and gouache,
evoking not simply the eponymous animal, but its disarticulated trajectory Fig. 8. Giacomo Balla, Study for a Chair, c.
through a spatial and temporal environment. Boccioni notably objected to the 1912 –1914, charcoal, private collection. #
publication of the Reconstruction manifesto, particularly to the extent that it 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/
deviated from his own (architecturally informed) postulations, and detracted SIAE, Rome.
from his role as the movement’s primary theorist.24 Shortly before his death,
however, Boccioni authored a little-known text titled ‘Balla’s Supreme
Purity’ (1915 –16), heaping glowing praise upon his colleague’s anti-painterly
experiments.25 Balla’s rejection of the canvas, Boccioni writes, led the artist 401. On Futurism’s challenge to certain
paradigms of the ‘historical avant-garde’, see
to an exploration of material ‘purity’. By this, Boccioni means a material Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff, Introduction,
integrity not indentured to two-dimensional representation – a materiality in Affron and Antliff (eds), Fascist Visions: Art and
unspoilt by semiotic or representational deviation from its own, pure Ideology in France and Italy, (Princeton University
presence. Describing Balla’s latest works, Boccioni writes: ‘The make-believe Press: Princeton, NJ, 1997).
of the canvas disturbs him. It is another weakness. He turns to construction, 19. This cleared the way, incidentally, for
the construction of objects, imitates the craftsman.’26 Antonio Sant’Elia’s role as the group’s
architectural lightening rod. It is Sant’Elia’s
Boccioni likely refers here both to the objects reproduced in the Reconstruction (unrealized) designs that have received the lion’s
manifesto, as well as Balla’s other experiments carried out in various materials share of writing on Futurist architecture since
since 1913, whether his abstract paintings on netting, stretched over wooden Reyner Banham ‘resurrected’ Futurism in his
panels, or his designs for children’s furniture and other objects. But while Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (MIT
Press: Cambridge, MA, 1996 [1960]). See, in
the former stand as autonomous – or ‘pure’ – explorations of form and particular, Esther Da Costa Meyer, The Work of
material for their own sake, the latter serve explicit functions. Boccioni Antonio Sant’Elia: Retreat into the Future (Yale
declares of Balla at the end of his essay that ‘he goes on destroying’.27 By University Press: New Haven and London, 1995).
1916 this was, however, only a half-truth. If Balla destroyed, he destroyed, 20. Postcard to Boccioni, 7 February 1914;
increasingly and paradoxically, as a kind of craftsman. Balla soon returned to reproduced in Lista, Balla, on page 159.
the ‘impurity’ of two dimensions by the end of the decade, particularly as a 21. Lista, Balla, 133.
means of imagining interior spaces, objects, and accoutrements – a
22. Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, ‘The
preoccupation that would occupy him intermittently for the next twenty Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe’.
years. Of all the original Futurist painters, Balla was the first to push the
23. See Umberto Boccioni, Pittura e scultura
formal dynamism of Futurist painting over the edge into pure (and ‘pure’, in Futuriste (SE: Milan, 1997 [1914]), p. 80.
Boccioni’s terms) abstraction. Yet he also consistently yoked these
experiments back to material, and often practical, dimensions. 24. Lista, Balla, 135. The inclusion of
‘Force-Lines’ in the title of one of Balla’s
Consider, in this vein, a ‘Study for a Chair’ that appears in Balla’s sculpture’s conjures up Boccioni’s precedent; as
sketchbooks from 1912 to 1915 (Fig. 8). The treatment of this solitary, the most prominent theoretician of the original
everyday object recalls Boccioni’s contemporary drawing, related to his Futurists, Boccioni had made ‘force-lines’ one of
masterful sculpture, Development of a Bottle in Space (1912) (Fig. 9). Boccioni’s his pet terms.
preparatory represents his most architectonic work to date, breaking down 25. Umberto Boccioni, ‘Balla’s Supreme Purity’
the divisions between positive and negative space, stasis and transcendence, (1915–1916), translated and reprinted in Achille
Bonito Oliva, Minimalia: An Italian Vision in
object and environment.28 Balla, too, dynamises his object with diagonally 20th-century Art (Electa: Milan, 1999) 47– 9.
oriented lines that suggest less a site of repose, than a vortex of movement.

A Future by Design
Yet Boccioni’s bottle serves as the somewhat arbitrary vehicle for his theories of
‘physical transcendentalism’ and the ‘sculpture of environment’, whose static
banality is meant to underscore the work’s churning dynamism, and
Boccioni’s genius as its intuitive prophet.29 Balla’s homing in on a piece of
furniture, by contrast, is not so incidental. Everyday household objects
formed an integral part of Balla’s Futurist work from his earliest
experiments. In his sketchbooks, abstract evocations of speed and motion
take turns with studies for a shoe, a woman’s hat, a living room partition.
His eventual, repeated fabrication of this latter object is telling. That Balla
would create a means of shaping and containing interior space – rather than
shattering its confines – says much about his larger project. Rather than
transcend physical dimensions, Balla’s remains faithful both to the use value
of things (however, seemingly unfeasible) and to their material presence. His
chair, in short, figures something to be sat in. Significantly, and unlike

Boccioni’s corresponding examples, Balla’s earliest Futurist drawings
designate household objects to be realised (i.e. ‘Studio per una sedia’ [Study for
a chair’], ‘Studio per un paravento [Study for a room partition’], ‘Progetto per
Fig. 9. Umberto Boccioni, Table, Bottle, and vaso’ [Project for a glass (1916)], etc.).30 It is, I contend, the theological
Houses, 1912, pencil, 33.4 × 23.9 cm. Civiche crux of such projects – and teleology, we should recall, is as vital to the
Raccolte d’Arte, Gabinetto dei Disegni, Castello very word ‘design’ as the act of drawing31 – that distinguishes Balla’s work
Sforzesco, Milan.
from that his peers, already in the early days of the Futurist venture.
Balla’s residency in Düsseldorf in 1912, for which he designed and built an
interior for the Lowenstein family, and where he encountered Secessionist craft
26. Boccioni’s language here echoes that of the
Reconstruction manifesto itself: ‘After more than
innovations, undoubtedly helped shape his ideas about the ‘applied arts’.32 At
twenty painting exploring [the force-lines of first, the artist kept his experiments in painting separate from his
speed] [Balla] understood that the flat plane of the architectural and interior work. For example, he completed his agitated,
canvas prevented him from reproducing the triangular-shaped canvas, Hand of the Violinist (1912) in Düsseldorf during
dynamic volume of speed in depth.’
the same months that he was finishing the library for the Lowenstein house.
27. Boccioni, ‘Balla’s Supreme Purity’, p. 49. His sketches from this period reveal an attempt to merge the mounting
28. Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco writes that dynamism of his Futurist experiments with more practical concerns. In one
Boccioni’s bottle ‘is almost [identical to] an urban 1912 design for a Lowenstein interior, Balla has mapped diagonal Futurist
plan by [Antonio] Sant’Elia’. Balla Prefuturista shards onto wall, rug, and furniture surfaces in a largely decorative schema.
(Bulzoni: Rome, 1968), p. 70.
The library that he ended up building, by contrast, was a rigorously
29. Umberto Boccioni, ‘Technical Manifesto of symmetrical and tasteful wooden ensemble, in line with Secessionist and
Futurist Sculpture’ (1912), translated and
reprinted in Apollonio, ed., pp. 51– 65.On
Jugendstil precedents. Even in this early phase, however, we find an
Boccioni’s engagement with the philosophy of attempted conciliation of different areas of research, particularly between his
Bergson, and its consequences for his theoretical experiments in abstraction on the one hand, and designs for actual spaces and
disposition, see Marc Antliff, ‘The Fourth objects. Shortly after his Dusseldorf trip, Balla began to combine two- and
Dimension and Futurism: A Politicized Space’, Art
Bulletin, December 2000, 720– 33, and Brian
three-dimensional efforts.33 His plans for interior spaces throughout the mid-
Petrie, ‘Boccioni and Bergson’, Burlington to late-1910s suggest, like the Lowenstein drawings, a grappling with how to
Magazine, vol. 116, March 1974, pp. 140–7. reconcile individual objects with their surroundings, in a synthetic
30. Balla’s small, early sketchbooks of 1912 –25 transformation of space.
have been reproduced in their entirety; see Back in Rome by 1913, and painting abstract evocations of interventionist
Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco (ed.), Balla: I taccuini rallies, nationalist demonstrations, and Insidie di guerra (1915) as the war
(Martallo: Turin, 1982– 1985).
finally exploded, Balla came to apply these abstract motifs to functional
31. Oxford English Dictionary, ‘design’. (‘A plan or objects. He put even his self-contained speed studies, for instance, in the
scheme conceived in the mind and intended for service of a usable Screen with Line of Speed and Vortex (c. 1915). In this
subsequent execution; the preliminary conception
of an idea that is to be carried into effect by regard, he distinguished himself from Futurist colleagues, whose assimilations
action; a project.’ But also: ‘A preliminary sketch of Cubist collage remained largely in the realm of the representational. Carlo
for a picture or other work of art; the plan of a Carrà’s multi-media construction, Still Life: Noises of a Night Café (1914),
building or any part of it, or the outline of a piece
of decorative work, after which the actual
verges on actual objecthood, incorporating free-word poetry into an
aggressive assemblage that bursts its frame. Yet even this work refuses, in a
sense, to relinquish the superintending ‘make-believe’ of the canvas, which

Ara H. Merjian

Fig. 10. Balla, Futurist Interior, 1918, tempera, 35 × 46 cm, private collection. # 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome.
Boccioni had decried in favour of Balla’s experiments. By 1918, Balla had

structure or texture is to be completed; a
channelled his abstractions into designs for all manner of utilitarian objects, delineation, pattern.’)
most of which he actually built, including placemats, lampshades, vases, ties,
32. Maurizio Fagolio dell’Arco writes, ‘only in
jointed furniture, floor tiles, a woman’s purse, a credenza, and – not the atmosphere of the Secession could [Balla] have
coincidentally – Futurist chairs. Like his early abstract drawings, the flighty become aware of the abolition of barriers between
rhetoric of the Reconstruction manifesto fed increasingly into concrete plans the “major” and “minor” arts’. (‘The Futurist
Reconstruction of the Universe’, p. 296). On
for (and often realisations of) objects, interior environments, and their Balla’s Lowenstein work as a ‘prototype’ of
mutual integration. One of his 1918 designs for an interior specifies that subsequent Futurist projects, as well as an origin
‘Futurist paintings’ be hung at intervals on walls already painted with angular of ‘Second’ Futurism, see Bartorelli, pp. 25–8.
Futurist forms (Fig. 10). The visual boundaries between canvas and 33. A division between the two would only
surrounding panel would presumably be minimal, even when their respective reassert itself definitively only decades later, when
motifs clashed (as they likely would have). Another interior plan from this he began painting Roman nocturnes, divorced
from any practical application.
same year identifies a lamp nestled amidst the kaleidoscopic forms of a
room’s corner, its intersecting geometries and twirling whisps camouflaging 34. The art historian Richard Meyer has recently
made a compelling case for approaching modern
the lines between object and abstraction, gratuitous decoration and functional curatorial practice itself as a kind of interior
design (Fig. 11).34 decoration: an apposition meant neither to
Even as the War’s devastation reached its climax, and the more outlandish demean the prestige of the museum nor to
proposals of the Reconstruction remained unrealised, the notion of a new ennoble the putatively lower-brow domain of
decoration, but rather to consider how these
‘universe’ did not fade from Balla’s purview. He claimed, in fact, to spy vocations are, in a sense, always already
glimpses of it in and among the appurtenances of urban modernity, laid out intertwined. This might also help shed some new

A Future by Design
for display in storefronts. In a short, 1918 text, ‘The Futurist Universe’, Balla
articulated his own version of Marinetti’s infamous statement about a speeding
automobile being ‘more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace’. Not
surprisingly, Balla homes in (quite literally) on domestic appliances and the
metaphoric interiority of the shop window:
Any store in a modern town, with its elegant windows all displaying useful and pleasing
objects, is much more aesthetically enjoyable than all those passéist exhibitions which
have been so lauded everywhere. An electric iron, its white steel gleaming clean as a
whistle, delights the eye more than a nude statuette. A typewriter is more architectural
than all those building projects which win prizes at academies [. . .] Furs, traveling bags,
china – these things are all a much more rewarding sight than the grimy little pictures
nailed on the grey wall of the passéist painter’s studio.35
Le Corbusier famously expressed a similar sentiment in L‘Esprit Nouveau,

subsequently published in his 1925 book, The Decorative Art of Today. Struck
by the disparities between the Salon d’Automne and the Salon de l’Aéronautique
being held simultaneously in Paris’ Grand Palais in 1921, the architect vowed
Fig. 11. Balla, Futurist Interior, 1918,
to ‘unite the work of art, which was his goal, with the machine, which was
watercolour on paper, 29.8 × 22.9 cm. Private the object of his admiration’.36 It was this same goal that Balla had
collection. # 2012 Artists Rights Society undertaken nearly a decade earlier – to put ‘decorative art’ through the
(ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome. paces of modern technology, to unite the delight of the eye with the
functionality of a localised architectonics.37 Still, a less than logical
undercurrent runs through Balla’s work from this same period, one that
methodological light on the putatively feminine
chafes against the anodyne ‘usefulness’ of the machine.
dimensions of craft and decorative and ‘applied
arts’, with which Balla’s work notably engages.
See Richard Meyer, ‘Big, Middle-Class The Universe in a Room
Modernism’, October, vol. 131, Winter 2010,
pp. 69–115. The Reconstruction manifesto and its related objects anticipated aspects not only
35. Giacomo Balla, ‘The Futurist Universe’,
of Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant’s Purism, but also, as several art
originally published in the exhibition catalogue, historians have noted, of the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism.38 At the
Futurballa, 1918; reprinted in Apollonio, ed., same time, scholars have rightly identified in the same body of work an
Futurist Manifestos, 219; emphasis in original. anticipation of Dadaist spirit – one putatively antithetical to notions of
36. Le Corbusier (1998 [1925]) Decorative Art of rational practicality.39 Bruno Munari’s ‘Useless Machines’ find something of
Today, in Essential Le Corbusier: l’esprit nouveau their origin here as well.40 The Manifesto’s references to ‘miracle magic’,
articles (Architectural Press: Boston, 1998 ‘completely spontaneous laughter’, and ‘imaginative impulses’ suggest that its
[1925]), p. 109.
authors did not want their project to harden into a pedantry of its own.41
37. Significantly, some of Le Corbusier’s famous Andrea Branzi describes what he calls Balla and Depero’s ‘right-wing
arguments in Vers une architecture (1923) were
anticipated by Balla’s Roman colleague, Volt
Futurism’ as figuring ‘a new plastic and immobile reality, almost a Surrealist
(Vincenzo Fani Ciotti), in 1920: ‘We will presence enclosed in a still space’.42 The tensions implicit in such a
inaugurate the age of dynamic architecture. description appear already adumbrated in the artists’ wartime work.
Dreadnoughts, locomotives, airplanes, Depero’s plan for a Futurist cup (1914 –15) is as formally adventurous as it
dynamos. . . are the first exemplars of a new
architectural fauna, from which we will draw is impractical. The cup incorporates the wedges and diagonals typical of
inspiration in tracing the lines of our “speed Futurist ‘dynamism’, but its lack of a bottom renders it quite useless. A
houses” [“abitazione in velocita”].’ ‘La casa futurista: scene from the (now lost) 1916 film, Vita Futurista (Fig. 12), features Balla in
manifesto’ (May 1920), reprinted in Volt, La fine a sequence titled: ‘Balla marries a chair, and a stool is born’.43 ‘This
del mondo, ed. Gianfranco de Turris (Vallecchi:
Florence, 2003). marriage ceremony’, writes Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, ‘is already Dada’.44
The lack of any actual objects of Dadaist design in the history of early
38. See, for example, Fagiolo dell’Arco, Balla
Prefuturista, pp. 70– 9; Caroline Tisdall and
twentieth-century art should give us pause. The Dadaists derived much of
Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (Thames and Hudson, their animus from Futurist agitation, assimilating its destructive principles to
London, 1985), p. 70; Poggi, In Defiance of the very core of Dada’s (emphatically pacifist) nihilism. Yet the Dadaists’
Painting, xiii. radical negations, their ‘abolition of the future’,45 opposed the constructive
tendencies characteristic of numerous Futurist experiments. Whether those
of Balla, Enrico Prampolini, or Antonio Sant’Elia, Futurist projects for

Ara H. Merjian

Fig. 12. ‘Balla Marries a Chair and a Stool is Born’, still from ﬁlm Vita Futurista, 1916.
functional structures and objects (however impracticable) differ sharply from,

39. See Marianne Martin, Futurist Art and Theory,
say, the nails appended to the face of an actual iron in Man Ray’s Gift (1921) 1909– 1915 (Hacker Art Books, 1978); Tisdall
– as close an approximation of that oxymoron, ‘Dadaist design’, as we might and Bozzolla, p. 70.
find.46 For all of its mutinous recusancy, Futurism never entirely foreclosed 40. See Bruno Munari, Design as Art, trans. by
upon the purposive connotations of its products – even, as in the Patrick Creagh (Penguin: London, 2008 [1966]).
Reconstruction manifesto, when they announce certain ‘decomposition’. It thus 41. Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, ‘The
comes as less of a surprise that strains of mechanical, tectonic, rational Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe’.
design appear entirely reconciled in Futurism with unruly strains, even in
42. Branzi, Introduzione al design italiano, p. 74.
some of the movement’s earliest iterations. Balla’s proto-Dadaist nuptials
with an object of furniture forms a piece with the Reconstruction manifesto’s 43. Now lost, the forty minute film premiered at
the Niccolini Theatre in Florence in 1917. The
general conciliation of nonsense and earnest enterprise. Describing that text only extant accounts of the film are some notes by
and its related objects, the art historian Guido Bartorelli writes that they Arnaldo Ginna in the journal Italia Futurista, as
reveal ‘the explosive edge of movement, exercises aimed at transgressing the well as a few surviving film stills. For general
background on the film, see Giovanni Lista,
traditional institutions of painting and sculpture, to venture forth into real Cinema e fotografia futurista (Skira: Milan, 2001).
space and time, reasoning in terms of actual life. Yet even in the midst of
44. Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, ‘The Futurist
these serious, deliberative efforts, one is surprised by implosive infiltrations, Reconstruction of the Universe’ (1972), p. 300.
lyrical retreats, decorative flourishes’.47 Balla’s output during the later 1910s
accommodates wildly opposing affects, marrying utility with ironic 45. Tristan Tzara, ‘Dada Manifesto’, reprinted in
Robert Motherwell, ed. and trans., The Dada
subversion, the geometric and the biomorphic, the feasible and the fantastic. Painters and Poets (Belknap/Harvard: Cambridge,
A design titled Red Interior from 1918 (Fig. 13) – a climactic year in Balla’s MA, 1981 [1951]), p. 81.
production – condenses these opposing affects, just as it conflates the tranquil, 46. While Dadaist typography contributed
chromatic spatiality of Matisse’s interiors with the nervous dynamism of Balla’s prominently to the subsequent trajectory of
own images from the early 1910s. Shards of ‘force-lines’ intersect billowing graphic design, this was only after its more

A Future by Design

Fig. 13. Balla, Red Interior, 1918, watercolour, 44.5 × 56 cm. Private collection. # 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome.
contours. The Red Interior evokes aspects of Balla’s Complesso plastico colorato di
frastuono + danza + allegria (1915) (Fig. 7), an assemblage reproduced in the
Reconstruction manifesto, and composed – adventurously enough – of wire,
mirror, foil, cardboard, and talc. The assemblage’s swirling integration of
sharp and rounded forms echo in the Red Interior, though they are here
distended into an entire room, rather than circumscribed in one object. That
space appears further contiguous to a larger urban realm; the room’s jagged,
asymmetrical window looks out onto the presumed bustle of a city street,
and what appear to be a smartly dressed woman and another individual
walking a dog. The room and its objects – wall, ceiling, room, sofa,
sculpture, and decorative motifs – conspire to form a nearly seamless
environment. We find here the new Futurist ‘universe’, in nuce. Aspects of
Balla’s previous, autonomous formal studies (such as his Line of Speed +
Vortex, 1913 –1914) (Fig. 14) appear in the form of a detached stand or
Fig. 14. Balla, Line of Speed + Vortex, 1913– lamp, the lines of which thread seamlessly into the room’s walls. Angular
1914, scale drawing of sculpture, watercolour
window frames appear nearly impossible to differentiate from the room’s
on paper, 33.7 × 43.8 cm. Private collection.
# 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), ambient abstraction. A decorative panel bulges suddenly into a sofa. Just at
New York/SIAE, Rome. the moment when Balla seems to have integrated elements most completely

Ara H. Merjian

Fig. 15. Balla, Smoking Stand, c. 1916, painted wood, 112.5 × 46.5 cm. Private collection. # 2012
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome.
is the point at which the scene makes the least sense. Unlike the Fig. 16. Gustav Klutsis, Maquette for
interpenetrations of Boccioni’s ‘sculpture of environment’, however, Balla’s Radio-Announcer, 1922, painted cardboard,
designs from these years shuttle effortlessly between formal experimentation paper, wood, thread, and metal brads, 106.1 ×
36.8 × 36.8 cm. Museum of Modern Art,
and utilitarian application. Just as the lines of the Red Interior loop in and out
New York, Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection
of flatness and corporeality, Balla repeatedly undermines the boundaries Fund. # 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
between the purposeful and the pretend. New York.
Johanna Drucker’s observations on Futurist typographic design helps
elucidate something of that ambivalence, and its larger art historical
upshot. ‘Depero’, she writes, ‘was chiefly responsible for carrying the expressly impractical and impracticable aspects
Futurist aesthetic into the realm of commercial and public application, in had been siphoined off. Merret Oppenheim’s
a manner which paralleled (almost parodied) the activity of Object (Le déjeuner en fourrure) (1936) follows in the
Constructivists Rodchenko and Lissitzky’.48 The passing, parenthetical vein o Man Ray’s Gift, although it inflects its
fur-lined object with a different kind of sexual
phrasing here – ‘almost parodied’ – captures something particular not stakes.
simply about Depero’s work, but also that of his collaborator and
47. Bartorelli, p. 18.
mentor. While Balla prefigured (as much as paralleled) Constructivist

A Future by Design
experiments, his work often seems, in retrospect, to parody them avant la

lettre. His corpus from this period falls somewhere between a serious effort
48. Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: to restructure the world, and a tongue-in-cheek send-up of that same act.
Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–
1923 (University of Chicago Press: Chicago,
To compare his Smoking Stand (Mobiletto per il fumo) of 1918 (Fig. 15) with
1997), p. 107. Gustav Klutsis’ Radio Orator Stand from the same year (Fig. 16), underscores
the divergence – social, practical, and ideological – of Balla’s experiments
49. On the political significance of these affinities
and ambivalences, and their consequence for an from comparable Russian Constructivist efforts. The public, collective utility
understanding of modernism, see T.J. Clark, ‘The of Klutsis’ radio stand (intended to broadcast revolutionary speeches by
Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review, vol. Lenin throughout Moscow), differs sharply from the private, rather effete
2, March –April 2000.
function of Balla’s smoking stand. So, too, does the increasingly
50. Claudia Salaris remarks that the Founding of ‘productivist’ bent of Russian experimentation between the world wars
Futurism was itself a ‘pseudo-event’, to the
extent that Marinetti announced the movement’s
underscore the relative ingenuousness of Balla’s most earnest work. What
birth in advance of its actual existence. Marinetti is disingenuous, or at least ironically self-conscious, about that air of play
promoted Futurism, Salaris writes, ‘in much the is difficult to tease out from its attendant sincerity – just as the rowdy

way that one would promote an industrial product eccentricity of its forms contributes to an increasingly symmetrical weft.
that is to be introduced into the market and
publicized’. Claudia Salaris, ‘Marketing In that vein, Balla’s work sets into relief some of the larger paradoxes at
Modernism: Marinetti as Publisher’, trans. the heart of European modernism. The imagined redemption of
Lawrence Rainey, Modernism/Modernity 1.3 (1994) rationalisation and mechanisation becomes – at various moments and by
110. Consider the resonance between Salaris’
description and Manfredo Tafuri’s description of
various figures – conflated with a certain suspicion (or at least
industrial design as ‘a method of organizing ambivalence) toward those same trends. The unlikely affinities during the
production even before it is a method of late 1910s and early 1920s between works by Picabia and Léger, or
configuring objects’. See Manfredo Tafuri, Schwitters and El Lissitsky, gathers more sense in the light of Balla’s
Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist
Development, trans. by Barbara Luigia La Penta deadpan conciliations.49
(MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1999 [1973]), p. Like the later Casa Balla during the 1920s and 1930s, the artist’s so-called
98. Red Studio in Rome condensed and integrated the various dimensions of his
51. The resistance of Balla’s work to any one multifaceted enterprise. From armoire knobs and umbrella caddies, to bed
classification – reflected in the range of words quilts and window stoppers, hardly an inch of these spaces was left to chance
used by scholars to define his enterprise –
articulates the problem at hand: ‘arredo,
(though the Reconstruction manifesto had pledged its commitment to utter
oggetistica, moda’ (Gabriella Belli); ‘improvisation’). The conversion of painted caprice to actual objecthood
‘ambientazione’ (Crispolti); ‘arte applicati’ and found here an evolving laboratory, beginning with the tools of the painterly
‘ambiente’ (Benzi); ‘oggetto e vita quotidiana’ trade itself. The artist came to design and build even his own easel and paint
and ‘architettura applicata’ (Lista), etc.
caddy. We might think of these spaces as counterparts to the ‘total
environments’ of other artists, whether Mondrian’s studio in Paris’s Rue
Depart, or Schwitters’ Merzbau. But in ways different than these two
examples, the ‘Casa Futurista di Balla’ at Via Nicolò Porpora 2 (advertised
with its own business cards) anticipated what we would now consider a
design firm. To be sure, Balla, like all of his Futurist cohorts, might have
bridled against that term. Futurism aimed as much to interrupt the status
quo, as to design (in the sense of a deliberative program) any thing or space
in particular. But, as much as its explicit architectural affinities, the very
vagueness of Balla’s imagined future (evinced in the quixotic neologisms of
the Reconstruction’s text), along with its sweeping interdisciplinarity and
commercial savvy, aligns the broader intentions of his enterprise with what
we think of today as design: a transformation both empirical and existential,
formal and ideological, from graphic design to photography, poetics to
kinetics.50 As much as it signifies a practical application, design entails a
certain formal promiscuity and categorical fluidity. It means, nowadays, not
simply the objective, mulitipurposed utility of the iPhone, for example, but
the applications by which its consumer/user organises his world (and is, in
turn, organised by a larger social system). From object to ‘atmosphere’ to
the ritual of daily life, Balla made that reciprocity the core of his design
practice.51

Ara H. Merjian
I invoke the term ‘design’ here not in the sense of mass-produced industrial
objects and accessories, but rather in the art historical sense intended by Reyner
Banham in his Theory and Design in the First Machine Age: a sensibility that both 52. Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine
supplemented and superintended the revision of architectural practice in early Age.
twentieth-century modernism.52 In this sense, design applies architectural 53. Hal Foster, Design and Crime (and Other
principles to objects not strictly architectural in and of themselves. It Diatribes) (Verso: London, 2002), p. 17.
administers a realm at once diminutive and all-encompassing, empirical and 54. Gabriella Belli, ‘Aredo, oggettistica, moda:
ineffable in equal measure. I would add to this Hal Foster’s recent discussion l’avventura della Ricostruzione futurista, in
of design as a more widespread conflation of the aesthetic, the utilitarian, Futurismo, 1909–1944 (Mazzotta: Milan, 2001),
and the commercial: a social and economic state in which ‘everything – not p. 147; Foster, Design and Crime, p. 13. As
Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco notes in his excellent
only architectural projects and art exhibitions but everything from jeans to essay on the Reconstruction, Galante already
genes – seems to be regarded as so much design’.53 While we still largely pointed out this notion in his article, ‘Notes on
associate it with mass production, the term denotes processes that, in their Decorative Art’, published in the journal Noi in
1917. Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, ‘The Futurist
shifting multiplicity, give the lie to any singular definition, whether practical

Reconstruction of the Universe’, 295.
or philosophical, scientific or aesthetic. The same term is used to designate
both combinatorial mathematics and the creation of furniture, algorithmic 55. Reflecting on the recent Futurist centenary,
Kate Bolick writes: ‘the reinvention of everyday
implementations and the layout of typeface. To wit, the overlapping of those life doesn’t start with canvases but with the stuff
registers further underscores its relevance to the work of Balla, who, as the of quotidian experience. . .. Viewed from this
Futurist artist most attuned to the intersection of art and science, anticipated angle, the Futurists actually did predict the future:
Is not Target-sque “design for all” an outgrowth of
an interdisciplinary synthesis. If contemporary design is bound up with the the Futurist call for the immersion of art in
drive to refashion material existence from the ‘spoon to the city’, from everyday life? . . .. So why is this phase
‘architecture to ashtrays’, it finds a key early articulation in Balla’s practice overlooked?’; Kate Bolick, ‘Back to the Futurists:
and theory.54 In that vein, Ettore Sottsass’ Valentine typewriter for Olivetti Italy’s First Avant-Garde Turns 100’, Slate, 28
June 2009.
(c. 1969) – which marked a shift in the prominence of Italian design in the
postwar – derives not merely from Balla’s insistence upon the typewriter as 56. See, for example, The Thames & Hudson
Dictionary of Design Since 1900 (Thames and
an ‘architectural’ paradigm, but from the multifaceted example of his Hudson: London, 2004); Mel Byers, The Design
practice tout court.55 Encyclopedia (Museum of Modern Art: New York,
The resonance of Balla’s work with the practice of design – one reflected in 2004).
his frequent inclusion in twentieth-century design histories – is not as 57. See, for example, Christina Kiaer, Imagine No
anachronistic as it would seem.56 The Milan Triennale today bills its own Possessions (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2005), p.
37. Consider, too, Adrian Forty’s Objects of Desire:
archive as a ‘Museo del Design’, while scholars of Russian Constructivism, Design and Society Since 1750 (Thames and
too, often refer to the experiments of that avant-garde in terms of ‘design Hudson: London, 1992), which pushes the term’s
practice’.57 When the Museum of Modern Art held its landmark 1972 historical application back much further.
exhibition on ‘Achievements in Italian Design’, it was an essay on Balla and 58. The New Italian Landscape (MoMA:
Depero’s Reconstruction collaborations that anchored the show’s art historical New York, 1972).
bona fides.58 Even leaving aside historiographic invocations, Balla’s corpus 59. Branzi, Introduzione al design italiano, p. 76.
anticipates various dimensions of design culture. Donning Futurist clothing of While Branzi argues that the enclosure of Balla’s
his own making – the abstractions on his pants and jacket rhyming with his spaces is gratuitous, almost ‘accidental’, it seems
plain that the artist was far more concerned than
studio’s ambient abstractions – Balla’s mugging for the camera often seems Boccioni, Carrà, or Sant’Elia with the units of
to acknowledge that role (Fig. 17). Andrea Branzi has rightly noted the enclosed, domestic space, however metropolitan
continuity – or contiguity – of Balla’s interior motifs with the metropolis at their larger site and however contiguous to the
large. For Balla, architecture meant not monuments of grand, public scale, dynamism of that urban realm.
but rather the individual unit of domestic space, even as it is traversed by a

larger urban energy, by the ‘force-lines’ of the larger city in which they
sit.59 Futurist dynamism lay for Balla not simply in a disembodied sensibility,
but the example of his own body, his own family unit. Extending the
preoccupations of his aesthetics, Balla famously named his daughters Luce
(Light) and Elica (Propeller) (Fig. 18). If he could not, like subjects of our
not-too-distant-future, personally redesign his DNA, he could at least confer
upon its congenital fruits the buzz of modernity. His ‘marriage’ to a chair in
Vita Futurista was not entirely gratuitous after all.

A Future by Design

Fig. 17. Balla in his studio, 1927.
‘The Synthesis of a Thousand Dissonances’: The Crime of Futurist

60. Foster, Design and Crime, p. 5. Design?
61. Interestingly, Foster’s argument here echoes Writing on the politics of design, Hal Foster identifies contemporary design as
Michael Fried’s (in)famous polemics against ‘part of a greater revenge of capitalism on postmodernism – a recouping of its
Minimalism, in Art and Objecthood.
crossings of arts and disciplines, a routinization of its transgressions’.60 Design’s
colonisation of nearly every facet of contemporary urban life, Foster writes, has
constricted the ‘running room’ necessary for the production of an autonomous
(and critical) culture.61 Lamenting the loss of that autonomy, Foster longs for a
re-imposition of ‘objective limits’ to shore up the ‘regressive indistinction of

Ara H. Merjian
Fig. 18. Balla on his roof terrace with his daughters, Elica and Luce.

A Future by Design
things’.62 Futurism’s somewhat overlooked role in this process – not only the
eventual (i.e. early twenty-first century) ‘recouping’ Foster names, but also the
originary ‘crossings’, from within modernist trajectory – must, I think, be taken
into account. Once again, the ‘Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe’
epitomises these tendencies. Specifically, the indistinction that now appears to
Foster as ‘regressive’ (even reactionary), seemed to Balla and his peers
perhaps the most progressive aspect of their project.
Futurism was the first avant-garde to insist upon the breaking down of
genres, media, and disciplines, the first to claim a totalising hybridity as an
aim in its own right. Futurism – and especially Balla’s role in the
Reconstruction – thus appears exponentially guilty of contemporary design’s
‘crime’ in Foster’s terms: not only the fusing of aesthetic object and
consumable commodity, but the collapse of a utopian future into a cynically
materialist present. ‘Futurism is Now’ announces a fashion spread published

in the New York Times on the eve of Futurism’s centenary (Fig. 19).
Fig. 19. New York Times Magazine, 17 August
Juxtaposing a stylish shoe with vaguely utilitarian objects, set against a
2008. throbbing, colourful abstraction, the portfolio announces ‘Fall’s Manifesto:
Make Room for the Daring, the Dynamic, the Whirling Life of Steel.’63 In a
related vein, Estée Lauder’s baptism of its cutting-edge lipstick line as
‘Futurist’ is not, I think, a travesty of Balla and Depero’s intentions. It
62. Foster, Design and Crime, p. 17. suggests the fulfilment of their intended synchronism between the temporal
logic of fashion and the avant-garde. From its earliest manifestos, Futurism
63. New York Times Magazine, 17 August 2008.
undermined the boundaries between agitation and advertising, the critical
64. ‘Smoke Smoke Manoli Cigarettes!’ reads the and the consumerist – rendered them indistinguishable, in a sense, by
‘Futurist Manifesto of the Variety Theater’
(1913).
recruiting the latter to the former.64 If art was, like the wares on sale in
Milan’s shop windows, merely a passing fashion, then Futurism would pass
65. Giacomo Balla, ‘The Antineutral Suit:
Futurist Manifesto’ (1914); in Rainey et al.,
with them. Not coincidentally, Balla’s called his designs for changeable
Futurism: an anthology, 203. The notion of a clothing appendages ‘modificanti’ – evoking both the sense of spontaneous
ruthless obsolescence was inbuilt to the Futurist modification, and the word for fashion itself (moda).65
project, even its most ambitious, constructive Marinetti’s exhortation to ‘spit every day on the high Altar of Art’66 did not
ambition. The extent to which such planned
obsolescence fits perfectly into a model of entail the aesthetic nihilism that we might otherwise assume (or that it would
capitalist consumerism should be quite plain. become for the Dadaists). It entailed, in fact, an apotheosis of the machine as
‘Every generation will have to make its own city anew’, the new paragon of art, a displacement of art onto – or a sublimation into – the
writes Antonio Sant’Elia in his ‘Futurist
Architecture’ manifesto (1914; italics in original).
technological, even when the movement could not deliver the actual goods. On
Marinetti (who is rumored, incidentally, to have that process in the development of the European avant-garde at large, Manfredo
helped Sant’Elia in penning his own manifesto) Tafuri writes:
had declared in the ‘Founding and Manifesto of
Futurism’ (1909), ‘When we are forty, other
there is nothing surprising in encountering many points of tangency between the most
younger and stronger men will probably throw us
‘constructive’ and the most destructive avant-garde movements of the twentieth century
in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts—we
[. . .] Thus it is not surprising that Dadaist anarchy and De Stijl order converged and
want it to happen!’ See Rainey, Poggi, and
Wittman, eds., Futurism: an anthology. mingled from 1922 on, from the aspect of theory as well as that of practice, in which
the main concern was that of working out the means of a new synthesis.67
66. Marinetti, ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist
Literature’ (1912) in Critical Writings, 113;
emphasis in original.
Well before 1922, however, the Reconstruction manifesto already synthesised
these tendencies – at once ‘a method of formal control of the technological
67. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 93 –5.
universe’ and an enunciation of ‘its immanent absurdity’.68 The rendering
68. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia. ‘[T]he these valences indistinguishable was, perhaps its most insidious achievement.
necessity of a programmed control of the new The Reconstruction manifesto, and Balla’s oeuvre in the wake of it, epitomise
forces released by technology was very clearly
pointed out by the avant-garde movements.’ that process of acculturation, especially of the mechanisms of new
technologies: whether as apparatuses of war, or their more benign presence
in everyday urban experience.
‘Although it was a radically anti-bourgeois movement, Marinetti’s Futurism
seemed to find an ideal cradle in industrial Milan, which [Marinetti] saw as a

Ara H. Merjian
new Paris.’69 Very few scholars have paid much attention to this paradox, or to
how it played out in Balla’s practice (developed, ironically or not, in Rome
rather than Milan).70 If Balla and his peers rejected Art Nouveau (and its
offshoots in Italy’s Liberty style), as well as the medieval atavism of the Arts 69. Gaetana Marrone, Paolo Puppa, Luca
and Crafts movement in general, they expropriated its ‘blurred disciplines’ Somigli (eds), Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies
(Routledge: London, 2006), p. 1204.
and ‘aesthetic hybridity’ to new ends – in mechanised theory, if not
practice.71 That Balla’s objects were most often wrought from wood and 70. Walter Adamson’s essay, ‘Futurism, Mass
materials redolent of traditional craft in no way invalidates their modernist Culture, and Women’, forms a notable exception.
See Adamson, ‘Futurism, Mass Culture, and
utopia, any more than it does that of Gerrit Ritveld’s Red Blue Chair. Women: The Reshaping of the Artistic Vocation,
Rather, it forces us to think about the politics of the mutual accommodation 1909– 1922’, Modernism/Modernity, vol. 4.1,
of these registers in the context of interwar Italy, lacking as it did the means 1997, pp. 89–114.
by which modernism’s dreams (or nightmares) might be mass produced. The 71. The terms are Hal Foster’s, in relation to Art
Futurists saw no contradiction in conflating a mythical, pre-capitalist Nouveau and Style 1900.
organicism with the logic of capitalist production and exchange. Rather than 72. ‘If Minimalism could not control its

use design as a (subjectivist) bulwark against (coldly objectifying) industry, inadvertent analogies with corporate culture, then
the Futurists were the first avant-gardists to collapse such distinctions so Arte Povera fails in its weaker moments to build a
radically, or at least to call for their collapse.72 Depero, for his part, critical resistance against an affinity with the
luxurious eccentricities that have traditionally
designed not simply advertisements for Campari soda, but the very distinguished the rarefied objects of aristocratic
containers in which it was bottled after 1932. Yet instead of using consumption. (This apparent contradiction in
manufacturing paradigms as the yardstick by which to measure a notion of terms is of course at the heart of every Italian
design ambition).’ Benjamin Buchloh, review of
design, I want to consider how Balla’s work already pushed the envelope of ‘The Italian Metamorphosis’, Guggenheim
that – by now, a century later – capacious definition. Museum, Artforum, January 1995.
As Adrian Forty has noted, alongside the innumerable (almost
73. Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and
undistiguishable) electric kettles produced in the early twentieth century, Society Since 1750 (Cameron Books: London,
those designed by Peter Behrens for the AEG electrical company in 1909 1995), p. 272.
now command high prices on the auction block.73 Rather than simply proof 74. ‘The first laboratories of applied art,
of ‘good’ design, the afterlife of these objects gives the lie to a notion of organized by such right-wing Futurists as
industrial design as a consummately anonymous project: a standardised Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, were more
deskilling, immune to the pretentions of authorship and individual genius for like applications of the Futurist code to the home
than true design operations.’ Andrea Branzi,
which the plastic arts are considered – in some art historical circles – ‘Italian Design and the Complexity of
comparatively guilty. Balla’s authorial eccentricity complicated these Modernity’, in The Italian Metamorphosis:1943–
paradigms from the start of Futurism. The concurrence of his work with the 1968 (Guggenheim: New York, 1994), p. 598. In
consolidation of Fascist corporatism after 1922 begs further questions. How, his Introduzione al design italiano, Branzi does,
however, deem this practice ‘Futurist design’
we might ask, did the organic, guild-like ethos of Fascist corporatism (75). I dissent from Branzi’s characterisation of
influence – or else find itself echoed in – aspects of Balla’s studio practice? Balla’s practice as falling short of a ‘true design
At what point in Balla’s oeuvre may we locate the division between his practice’ to the extent that its benchmark, for
Branzi, is ‘the idea of industrialized production’ –
notably Socialist origins, and his status as the ‘right wing’ leader of a a qualification that I think reduces too narrowly
‘laboratory of applied arts’.74 Such questions perhaps also cast in a new light the exponential conception of design. The very
Tafuri’s identification of 1922 as a new point of departure for the notion that design can mean both everything and
avant-garde’s strange syntheses. While scholars have addressed the fate of nothing in particular – exclusive of
standardization or even implementation – is at
Constructivism’s totalising project, at odds with an increasingly suffocating the heart of much of Balla’s oeuvre and its
totalitarianism, the same has yet to be done in the case of Futurism, Fascism, peculiar contribution to design history. Bruno
and the politics of design.75 Perhaps part of this stems from the extent to Munari, an Italian designer with some origins in
which Futurism and Fascism – their abiding complicity – confound habitual later Futurism, and whose work has borne out far
greater industrial application than nearly any
accounts of modernism at large: a liberating dream of freedom from other artist from the movement, largely disavows
bourgeois propriety and corporate positivism alike. industrial production as the shibboleth of design.
The ‘perversion’ of modernist (and perhaps Marxist) purity to which Foster To be sure, Munari upholds ‘planning’ and
refers assumes a wholesome, unadulterated avant-garde as its paradigm – one ‘logical structure’ as the quiddity of (good)
design; yet he also insists upon the psychological
only later travestied by the cynical vitiations of postmodern culture and the dimension of that same process, a dimension that
capitalism that is its handmaiden and consequence. Futurism, however, upsets negotiates between the reconciliation of ‘pure’
the notion of an originary, modernist purity – a modernism that opened up and ‘applied’ arts that is the essence of design.
a generous, autonomous space of ‘running room’ from the start, rather than Munari, Design as Art, pp. 30, 34–5.
collapsing and compressing valences, beyond good and evil. The oneiric play

A Future by Design
of the Reconstruction rhetoric, like the hallucinatory theatrics of Balla’s Red

Interior, already suggests the ‘bad dream of modernism’ as much as it
75. See Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, and Maria
indulges in ingenuous reverie.76 The dismantling of divisions between high
Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism and low, framed canvas and mere object, aesthetic creation and defiant
in Revolution (University of California Press: Weltanschauung was not – or not simply – a libratory gesture. It facilitated
Berkeley, 2005). the eventual expropriation of avant-garde aesthetics and everyday life by the
76. T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a synthetic totality of contemporary, corporate design. As the one totality
History of Modernism (Yale University Press: capable of accommodating and sublimating all manner of contradictions, late
London, 1998), p. 306. Foster invokes this line as
further evidence of postmodernism’s betrayal of
capitalist commodity culture is not anathema to the ‘universal’
modernist ingenuousness/ingenuity (19). reconstructions proposed by Balla and his cohorts. It hews quite closely to
their spectacular proposals.
77. Volt, ‘La casa futurista: manifesto’, p. 177.
[‘L’armonia dello stile futurista sara’ la sintesi di Balla’s Roman colleague, Volt (Vincenzo Fani Ciotti), forecast that affinity
mille dissonanze’.] with striking economy. He predicted that the earth would soon be covered
by ‘a single city’, that ‘the harmony of the Futurist style will represent the

78. Foster, Design and Crime, p. 25.
synthesis of a thousand dissonances’.77 This resonates, I think with the
79. Marinetti, Le Futurisme, 1912, cited in description of design as a ‘routinization of [modernism’s] transgressions’.78
Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age,
p. 124. As much as it exploded genres and boundaries, Balla’s oeuvre consolidated
its multiplicity under a rubric anything but unruly. Already at the dawn of
80. ‘I Futuristi italiani all’Esposizione internaz.
d’arte decorative di Parigi (Intervista con
the Futurist project, Marinetti declared his proleptic jealousy of the
Giacomo Balla e Guglielmo Jannelli)’, L’impero, twenty-first-century Italian, who would be born in an age ‘shaken and tamed
21– 22 June 1925, p. 3. [‘Bisogna sapere che Balla by new electrical energies’.79 The transformative synthesis promised in the
ha un debole per le vetrine in cui sono esposte Futurist notion of design entailed a simultaneous taming of its own disruptive
scarpe. . . (Certo a Parigi i negozi di scarpe sono
centomila volte piu’ interessanti e piu’ vivi e piu’ and dialectical energies. To that end, it served almost like a mithraditic
artistici delle esposizioni di quadri al famigerato element from within bourgeois (if not capitalist) culture – seemingly
Salon).’] Getty Research Institute, Fortunato poisonous, but in fact inuring the system to radical threat, entering its
Depero Papers. bloodstream bit by playful, coloured bit. While the twenty-first century
81. Getty Research Institute, Fortunato Depero continues to be duly shaken by the innovations anticipated by Marinetti and
Papers. On Balla’s presence at the 1925 Co., it has also been tamed by them. If culture is now largely immunised to
Exposition Internationale, see Benzi, Balla: Genio
Futurista.
their shock and violence, it is in great part through the synthetic ineffability
of design.
82. Yve-Alain Bois, Art Since 1900: Modernism,
Antimodernism, Postmodernism, vol. 1 (Thames
& Hudson: New York, 2004), p. 196.
At Home in the Future
83. Janelli, L’impero. [‘L’arte decorativa moderna
cosi come ci appare a Parigi, si avvia a grandi passi It must be noted that Balla has a weakness for shop windows that display shoes . . . .
verso le piu’ ardite e le piu’ totali realizzazioni (Naturally, in Paris, shoe stores are a thousand times more interesting and lively and
futuriste. L’Italia giovane puo’ esserne artistic than the infamous Salon).
orgogliosa.’] Guglielmo Jannelli, L’impero, 21– 22 June 192580
Reporting back to the Italian public on their visit to Paris’s 1925 ‘Exposition
Internationale des Arts Décoratifs’, Balla and Depero claimed to have
recognised the Futurist influence everywhere. They spied it not only in the
Soviet pavilion by Konstantin Melnikov, but also in the Dutch, Czech, even
the Latvian contributions.81 They also proudly noted its echo in displays
exemplifying what would soon be deemed ‘Art Déco’ – that phenomenon
of middle-class kitsch that Yve-Alain Bois has called the ‘ideal of the
bourgeois private home as an overall ensemble for which everything had to
be custom made’.82 Balla and Depero’s companion on their Parisian jaunt,
Guglielmo Jannelli, noted in the newspaper L’impero: ‘Modern decorative art
as it appears in Paris is taking great strides toward the most daring and total
Futurist realizations. Youthful Italy should be proud.’83 Such strides, Jannelli
quipped, were the stuff as much of shoes as of any Salon display – an
intuition indebted to the senior Balla, who had long championed shop

Ara H. Merjian

Fig. 20. Fortunato Depero, Giacomo Balla, and Guglielmo Janelli at the Exposition des Art Décoratifs,
Paris, 1925.# 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome.
window wares over the ‘grimy little pictures nailed on the grey wall of the
passéist painter’s studio’. A photograph from the fair shows the latter artist
flanked by his two colleagues (Fig. 20). Except for their Futurist waistcoats
(designed by Depero), the men appear not so dissimilar from the public
huddled – in suit pants and bowler hats – a decade earlier in Rome’s Street
of the Converted. The custom-made Futurist fashion here – not bearing
Balla’s distracting ‘modificanti’, but instead assimilated seamlessly into
bourgeois sartorial conventions – suggests what Futurism offered to Art
Deco at large: a decorative veneer of modern sensibility.
By 1929, Balla was back in Rome, working in the playful confines of his now
legendary studio. Depero had settled in New York, making posters for Vogue and

A Future by Design

Fig. 21. Postcard from Balla to Depero in New York, 1929. Watercolour on photographic postcard, 9 × 13.5 cm, private collection.
for Macy’s (well before Dalı́ set foot in Manhattan). Futurism, too, had arrived
84. Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, ‘The space of
artifice’, in Balla the Futurist (Mazzotta: Milan,
at 5th Avenue – perhaps in a parody of its former anarchic intentions, perhaps
1987), p. 138. as the logical fruition of them. Some time that year, Balla mailed to his former
85. Boccioni, ‘Balla’s Supreme Purity’.
student a postcard, enlivened with Futurist trimmings (Fig. 21). Force-lines
carve into Milan’s Corso, thrusting parallel to the entablature of buildings;
coloured planes invade and agitate the boulevard’s poker-faced façades.
Looming in the distance is the city’s late Gothic Duomo. The anonymous
collectivity embodied in its medieval craftsmanship cedes, here, to a new
model of aesthetic integration, one that sweeps beyond the propriety of a
singular building to comprise the atmosphere itself. Fagiolo dell’Arco writes
of Balla’s quest for creating a ‘new environment’ that it entailed ‘leaving the
picture [behind] . . . to make the future explode in the streets’.84 As if on
cue, Balla has scrawled a valedictory ‘Triumph’ across the transformed
cityscape. Yet the street here is not entirely converted, as it were, only
preached to. Both its space and its temporality remain poised between
painting and architecture, between the city and its reconfiguration, between
matter and make-believe.
It has been rehearsed on numerous occasions that Balla was a deeply
anti-bourgeois artist – not only by scholars, but by his Futurist companions.
‘The bourgeois painter senses [in Balla] the anti-poetic destroyer’, Boccioni
argues of his colleague around 1915.85 Yet a look at Balla’s oeuvre reveals its
locus classicus to have been, in many ways, the bourgeois salon, however
embellished with poetic whim. Precisely during the time that Boccioni

Ara H. Merjian
proclaimed his colleague’s destructive compulsion, Balla was plotting the

transformation of every facet of the environment, beginning with his own
living room. Before distancing himself from Futurism in the mid-1930s, he
designed – in the name of the movement – all manner of objects geared 86. Adamson, ‘“Futurism, Mass Culture, and
toward the consolidation of Fascist subjectivity: from ‘aeroceramic’ plates Women’, p. 107.
(1925 –1930), to ‘Futurfascist [sic]’ tennis and golf apparel (c. 1930). Yet
Balla’s wartime production had already disciplined the radical violence of
Futurism, mixing violent adventurism and a general ethos of construction.
His work renders indistinguishable a sense of demolition and the
reconstructive imperatives of ‘plastic values’ – normally considered the
domain of interwar convalescence in the history of Europe’s art and
architecture. Balla’s corpus thus frustrates a handful of art historical
narratives: that the radicalism of the pre-war avant-garde was summarily
chastened by a return to order that drained it of revolutionary mordancy;

that the avant-garde’s relationship to bourgeois material culture was one of
utter negation; that Futurism’s loathsome ideological compromise lay chiefly
in its willing engagement with Fascism.
‘Just as Futurism was attempting to seduce a false master’, writes Walter
Adamson, ‘the true master [capitalist advertising] was seducing Futurism’.86
Adamson’s observation remains one of the few to distinguish between those
solicitations, while also recognising what they shared. The siren song of
capitalist advertising finds as striking a resonance in the echo chamber of
Balla’s interiors as any putatively Fascist ethos. To be sure, Balla’s planned
environments and objects from the mid-1910s – like his and Depero’s claims
in the Reconstruction manifesto – would have raised the eyebrow of nearly any
Italian in the first decades of the twentieth century. They departed
dramatically from the overwhelming majority of formal examples on offer.
Still, Balla did not demolish conventional domesticity, so much as reconcile it
with Futurism’s explosive volatility. Rather than a centrifuge of dynamism,
his future came to resemble a more centripetal present, gathering the
transcendent energy of the street into the fold of the domestic. Exemplary of
an understudied facet of Futurism, Balla’s oeuvre anticipated and abetted the
logic of post-modern design as much as the radical avant-garde innovations –
or the Fascist cultural imperatives – of his contemporaries. If he could not
‘put the spectator in the center of the painting’, he would at least put him in
the centre of his home. We remain, in more ways than we might think, still
in his living room.
An earlier and shorter version of this essay was presented at the conference, ‘Futurism:
Rupture and Tradition at the University of Pennsylvania’, as well as at the Fall Lecture
Series of MIT’s Department of History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art.
My thanks to Fabio Finotti, Christine Poggi, and Stephanie Tuerk for their invitations
and warm reception. Research for this essay was supported by the Lauro De Bosis Visiting
Professorship in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard
University. The essay benefited from lively conversation with Andrea Branzi; even
where I disagree with some of his conclusions, his work has been of significant
inspiration. Sincere thanks to Guido Bartorelli for his encouragement, and to Jennifer
Jane Marshall for her astute queries and criticisms, though I take responsibility for
any errors or oversights that remain. Thanks too to Valerie McGuire and Joanna
Sheers for their invaluable help with images. Unless otherwise noted, all translations
are my own.

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Fig. 2. ‘Bathtub Bests Surrealist Dali’,

public, clustered (perhaps theatrically) around the painting on display. Whether

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state of mind. Not, in other words, a streamlining of practical sense, but an

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Boccioni had decried in favour of Balla’s experiments. By 1918, Balla had

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Le Corbusier famously expressed a similar sentiment in L‘Esprit Nouveau,

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functional structures and objects (however impracticable) differ sharply from,

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experiments, his work often seems, in retrospect, to parody them avant la

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but rather the individual unit of domestic space, even as it is traversed by a

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‘The Synthesis of a Thousand Dissonances’: The Crime of Futurist

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of the Reconstruction rhetoric, like the hallucinatory theatrics of Balla’s Red

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proclaimed his colleague’s destructive compulsion, Balla was plotting the

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