FUTURISM IN POLAND

FUTURISM IN POLAND

FUTURISM was a movement based on a strong protest against established cultural values and the hierarchy of these values accepted by society and inherited from the past generations.

Major representatives of this movement include:

Jerzy Jankowski (1887-1941)

Bruno Jasienski (1901-1937)

Stanislaw Mlodozeniec (1895-1959)

Tytus Czyzewski (1880-1946)

All of the above were associated with the Krakow based group, founded in 1917 and called "Barrel-organ" (Katarynka).

The name of the group referred to "low art" aimed at the ordinary reader but identified only with an active minority within Polish society.

The second centre of futurist art was Warsaw; their main representatives being:

Anatol Stern (1899-1968)

Aleksander Wat (1900-1967)

Soon after 1920 the two groups co-operated closely and together "performed" poetry reading evenings. They recited their works, read out their manifestos and engaged in harmless scandalous behaviour. All their activity focused on getting maximum attention, offending the aristocracy and local authorities and destroying the existing deeply -rooted cultural habits and patterns of behaviour. Futurist artists wanted to occupy the central position in order to dictate new rules and mould the future according to their own vision.

What were the main elements of the futurist vision and their new poetics?

- total rejection of their cultural heritage. Innovation was compulsory for both artists and audiences. New life style, new codes of behaviour

- lack of originality was a mortal sin of modern art (by 'originality' futurists meant everything that was different from nineteenth-century poetics). New art was supposed to be created not ALONG WITH but INSTEAD OF "old art"

- Jasienski claimed that up till the present poetry has been "too literary and bookish" and, because it was based on the old system of values and followed old-fashioned poetic codes, it produced false images of life, no longer adequate and relevant to their current situation.

- new poetry was supposed to capture the momentum of life, focused on the "here and now".

Life like spoken words happens only once in a particular context, within a certain non repeatable chain of events and it is the role of poetry and the sincere desire of futurist poets to reflect this spontaneity in written form. Hence their numerous attempts to present real, relevant, realistic poetry that corresponded to the world's rapid changes and recognised the significance of the machine (the cult of industry)

- all futurists believed that creative acts should reflect the spontaneous nature of life, a search for the best way to express unity between the written text and life

- in order to capture the uniqueness of every moment, futurist poets proposed to simplify the Polish spelling system and rather than following rules (grammatical, syntactic, orthographic) they preferred to use a system of phonetic transcription and to apply Marinetti's idea of "liberated words". All futurist manifestos were created in this way and they exhibited the great inventiveness of their authors

- it was also important that writers use colloquial words and expressions, keeping in mind the basic communicative function of the language as their works were supposed to appeal to a wide, even though select, circle of readers. Hence the tremendous popularity of newspapers and radio followed by artistic attempts to imitate their "authentic" style

- the language of the press attracted poets not only because if its "authenticity" and "spontaneity" but also due to its anonymity (mass writer) as poetry meant to be anti-elitist and anti-bourgeois. Thus, Jasienski admired "poetry" produced by "the factory of mass media"

- their fascination with technology and technical innovations is well reflected in the titles of some poems, for example: "Electric Visions," "Mechanical Garden", "Hymn to the Machine of My Body"

- the above titles also reflect another futurist obsession: MATTER. Matter was understood in a very broad sense as matter in Nature, as the human body (biology), as products - results of human activity, including all technology (machines, trams, trains, planes, telegraph, cinematograph, etc.)

By focusing on matter, futurists wanted to express their protest against the hegemony of the spirit and "mystical lies". For them, man was made of flesh and blood not of spirit. They substituted matter for the soul, the machine for genius and the metropolis for the heavens/depths/abyss.

In other words, the futurists were not interested in metaphysical longings: Stern and Wat spoke of hungry stomachs, Jasienski spoke of different forms of hunger. Adam Wazyk suggested that this hunger resulted from the experience of WWI and the economic difficulties of Poland in the early period of independence. The have-nots were everywhere and this often became the ignored 'nation' with which the new poets could identify and for whom they could speak. Thus social radicalism was complemented by a new ELITIST (sic!) anti-cultural stance. (Until the 1920s, popular science held that matter at least was stable/not mysterious: after Einstein's revelations in his Theory of Relativity, though understood by very few, matter itself was shown to be the unknown. Marinetti for example suggested that poets should use their intuition to "understand" matter. Speed was equally seen as a mysterious reality and treated as a fetish by the new movement.

- along with their obsession with the modern city, human mass and various machines came also their permanent occupation with TIME, MOVEMENT and SPEED. It was their understanding that every present moment should focus on the future. As futurist artists violently opposed to all forms of tradition, they realised that things become "traditional" very rapidly and, as a result of this, they were willing to destroy their own works as well. In 1923 Jasienski announced that his poetry, written in 1917-20, could be used as wallpaper.

- all masterpieces are mortal, including futurist works. In his one-day manifesto Jasienski wrote: "We are not allowed to write poetry applying the same rules that Italian poets did in 1908. (...) In 1921 it is forbidden to create poetry the way it was done in 1909. Life goes on and does not repeat itself, neither should art. "

- this insatiable hunger for creating new artistic forms which would reflect the immediacy of life made Polish poets look for inspiration in folklore. While Italian and Russian futurists became ideologically involved and their words lost their "liberated character", Polish futurism -except for a few minor episodes - remained politically aloof and after 1923 each poet followed his own individual path of artistic development.

The avant-garde attempted in essence to present VISIONS of everyday life unhampered by the poetic habits inbred into inherited culture (convention). Hence the insistence on the rejection of regular, traditional verse. The new generation was desperate to avoid the clichŽs of nineteenth-century verse, but particularly anxious to escape the form and content of their immediate predecessors (Young Poland). Abandoning the symbols, metaphors and structures of tradition led to the presentation of a fragmented vision of the world, which was only partly their intention. Like a mosaic, it was hoped, the bits would coalesce to offer glimpses, dreams and by implication a more honest and truly bewildering picture of man's environment. In one sense the true avant-garde poets were those who were aware of the effects of their piecemeal presentation of reality: but in each work the recovery of a coherent vision (even if its message is one of incoherence) has to take place again and again. As Adam Wazyk concluded "While Skamander produced highly perfected formal poetry on banal subjects, the avant-garde produced superficially dull poems on the most crucial issues and ideas of the day."

All the battles to liberate literature from well-meaning bourgeois restrictions had been won; and therefore they now had a different task: to do something interesting with the new free-verse forms and unrestricted content.

One of the main themes found in their poetry after 1923 was that of folk elements, landscape, and the peasantry (always a more crucial element in Polish society in the 1920s and 1930s, even if not chic for the European cultural establishment) and the verse of Czyzewski returned to its creator's roots while the poetry of Jozef Czechowicz and Julian Przybos (the so called "second avant-garde') offers extraordinary visions of the world.