Useless Machines, Milk Dresses and Selective Memories

As foreshadowed at the Italian Abstraction show, the latest Estorick special exhibition focuses on Bruno Munari- or rather the early years of a long and productive artistic career which saw him end up as something of a Grand Old Man of Italian art.   These early years, however, are ones which he appears to have been rather uncomfortable with; asked about his artistic origins, he would admit to having had a Futurist past and change the subject.   The present show probes that past, presenting some of the reasons why he might have been evasive about it but without drawing the threads entirely together.

Munari was the kind of artist who dabbled in just about every medium imaginable- painting, sculpture, photography, graphic design all feature in the show. Looking at his career as a whole, he’s probably now best remembered for experimental work in “alternative” media- light sculptures using slide projectors, video art and so on.   For obvious technological reasons he was only just beginning to go down this road during the period covered by the Estorick show, which stops around 1950, though some early versions of his experimentation are on show.   The most “alternative” items on show there are a number of his “Useless Machines”.  These take a variety of shapes and forms and not all of them are advertised as being entirely useless- though their suggested uses are whimsical, to say the least (there’s a design for a machine to wag the tail of a lazy dog….).   Some of them look vaguely as if they ought to have a use if one could work out what it might be- they include bits and pieces taken from “real” machines put together in rather complex random ways, for instance.   Some, like the one at the top of the post, are simply pure shapes assembled from bits and pieces of wood, scrap aluminium and other waste material like pumpkin rinds.  Others again hang from the ceiling and throw shifting shadows as they twist round; indeed the show gives his most sophisticated creation in that mode, made of metal lattice work and called “Concave Convex” a gallery to itself to allow full appreciation of the complex light and shadow effects it creates (though for the record this isn’t the original piece, which came back from a show in Paris in 1946 in pieces having been disassembled by the gallery staff, who had no understanding of what they were dealing with).   This aspect of his artistic production obviously that being undertaken in the US by Calder- indeed Munari created his first “mobile” a few years before Calder’s better known “invention” of the form.  

How does this fit with Futurism?   Munari could hardly deny his links to that movement, at least in its Second Wave.  He’d left his home in the Po delta just south of Venice in the late 1920’s (when he was still under twenty years old) to go to  Milan, the capital of Futurism (though Soffici might have argued that Florence was co-capital….).  He rapidly gained access to Futurist circles and most of his exhibiting career in the 1930’s was undertaken in that ambit.   F T Marinetti picked up on his promise and clearly regarded him as one of the most talented figures amongst the Second Wave; they collaborated on a variety of projects, one of which I’ll talk about later.  Whether Munari found it altogether easy to sustain the obligatory attitude of unconditional loyalty to the Great Man is left unclear…..

It’s certainly possible to read Munari’s work from this period as constituting a very subtle critique of Futurism.   His paintings suggest that he found pure abstraction more appealing than Futurism’s sometimes slightly frantic attempts to render rapid movement in an inherently static medium like paint (I’m afraid my blind spot with regard to pure abstraction makes it rather hard for me to say much about this aspect of his work).  Some of his works look like slightly satirical appropriations of earlier Futurism themes.  The “Useless machines” can easily be interpreted as a critique of Futurism’s obsessive enthusiasm for the machinery-dominated modern age- Munari justified their existence as affording a moment of relaxation from daily engagement with useful ones.   On the other hand, if (heretically) you take a slightly wider view of Futurism than that defined by Marinetti’s own thunderings, one finds a manifesto for Futurist sculpture produced by Balla and Depero which called, amongst other things, for an art based on assembling the detritus of the modern age in unexpected ways.   Futurism was always in practice a rather broader church than Marinetti’s ex cathedra pronouncements might imply and one could find legitimisation in its canonical literature for a rather wider range of approaches to a given problem or art form than is sometimes allowed.

In other areas Munari was very much in tune with the obsessions of Second Wave Futurism.  Aircraft swoop and roar through his art.   He fantasised about human/machine combinations in sometimes disturbing forms- woman blends into aircraft, a misunderstood poet appears to be about to get a brain transplant with an aero engine.   It would be hard to say that he had really turned his back on Futurism.

The sometimes violent imagery in these works gives a clue as to why Munari might not have been so comfortable with his Futurist past.   This is reinforced by a look at the content of some of his graphic design work.  Obviously a lot of this work was more or less commercial in focus.   Like other Futurist artists, Munari produced advertising material for a range of companies- Campari appears to have commissioned a lot of advertising in overtly “modernist” styles in the 1920’s and 30’s, for instance.   In the Italy of the 1930’s, however, advertising work pretty rapidly also led to commissions from state and para-state enterprises.    

In this context Munari appears to have done quite a bit of work for SNIA Viscosa, the state artificial textile company.   The company had come into existence as part of the Fascist regime’s obsession with “autarchy”- trying to minimise the Italian economy’s reliance on imported products and raw materials as far as possible.  This push was strengthened by the League of Nations sanctions imposed on Italy after the invasion of Ethiopia; widely derided at the time and subsequently as ineffective (not least because the Soviet Union continued to sell oil to Italy, something rarely mentioned in the history books), they nevertheless imposed enough pain on the regime to prompt frantic efforts to cut back on cotton and wool imports.  One approach was to look to “non-traditional” animals and organic fibres (rabbit wool had a brief moment of glory; as did forms of hemp and even raffia).   A more high-tech response lay in developing artificial fibres. One of the most important of these was “Lanital”, which was derived from cow’s milk.   Not everybody was impressed with the product; garments made from it didn’t suffer from moths but it was almost impossible to iron without the fibre disintegrating (like ironing mozzarella cheese, according to those who tried to do it).   Clearly it was going to be a hard sell to a fashion-conscious nation.  Marinetti and Munari therefore were paid to collaborate on a rather strange project- a piece of Marinetti parole in liberta poetry called “The story of the milk dress” produced in a presentation booklet designed and illustrated by Munari.   The poetry is typical Marinetti, full of invented compound words and onomatopoeia, tracing the path from milk pail to loom and generally glorifying the new high technology world in which a cow’s udders give out cloth which enables Italy to resist a hostile world.   Munari’s illustrations and presentation are equally modernist and inventive, using photo montage, cellophane pages and other modern techniques to underline the message that Lanital was seriously modern and cutting edge.   Whether any of this persuaded the target market (Italian women of the urban upper and middle classes) to pop out and buy a Lanital frock is less clear.

This could be seen as pretty harmless propaganda work, as could Munari’s advertisement design for a guide book which included the then-Italian colony of Libya along with Southern Italy, Sicily and Sardinia.   Other pieces must have looked a good deal more uncomfortable after 1945; montaged aero engines labelled as “The Power of the Empire”, material published in the aviation propaganda magazine “Ala d’Italia” (“Wings of Italy”) and above all a fantasy depiction of New York being bombed which dated from 1942.  Even granted that the aircraft depicted performing this attack are massively in advance of anything on the roster of the Luftwaffe, let alone the Regia Aeronautica, there’s hint of relish in the depiction which leaves the viewer asking a lot of questions about Munari’s politics.  These questions become more insistent with a careful reading of the chronology of his career supplied with the show, which makes reference to work exhibited in Milan in 1944.   At this date Milan was nominally under the control of the “Italian Social Republic” (RSI), the regime run by Fascist hard liners set up after the Germans sprang Mussolini from prison.   Its main function was to put an Italian face on an increasingly brutal German occupation- and assist in the violent suppression of resistance, which its militias did with considerable zeal.   Taking part in a show which could only have been staged within the context of the corporatist structures imposed on artistic creation by the RSI could easily be read as implying at least some degree of identification with the regime.   This would not be something to boast about after 1945.

The exhibition simply slides round these issues.  They appear a bit more clearly in the catalogue, though the slightly frenetic denial by one of the contributors of the very possibility that Munari could ever have been a Fascist sets the alarm bells ringing.  The show’s curator, Miroslava Hajek (a long-time collaborator with Munari in his later years and clearly a personal friend), takes a subtly different tack.  She argues that the links between Second Wave Futurism and Fascism have been exaggerated (not least because of the residual anti-German tone of a movement which had propagandised long and loud for Italian participation in the First World War against Germany) and that Marinetti himself was at one remove from the regime by the 1930’s.   There’s some reality to this view.  By the time Munari joined up with Futurism it was increasingly clear that it was never going to be allowed the dominant role in Italian artistic life which it once aspired to and was rather less in favour than it had been in the days when Margherita Sarfatti used her position as Mussolini’s mistress to promote her friends.  On the other hand it was hardly a dissident coterie, as the SNIA Viscosa commission suggests.  

As far as the movement’s figurehead was concerned, Marinetti was far too much of an egotist ever to fit comfortably into the role of an obedient follower of anybody.  He had himself briefly entertained political ambitions, trying to turn Futurism into a political movement in the immediate post-First World war period; when this flopped he’d folded the Futurist Party into the very earliest version of the Fascists when they still looked like a movement of the dissident left.  Marinetti appears to have had a complex relationship with Mussolini and regretted the compromises with traditional power elites which the Duce had been obliged to make on the way to power.    No doubt he mumbled faintly disrespectful comments from time to time.  Again, though, none of this made him any sort of dissident.  He could be relied upon to write and speak in favour of regime policies (albeit putting a Futurist spin on them).  He was even trotted out to harangue soldiers setting off for Ethiopia on the high mission they were going to fulfil (Heaven knows what peasant conscripts from the deep south or the Po valley made of him…..) and went in the train of the Italian army which fought in Russia alongside the Germans in 1941.   The RSI gave him a state funeral when he died in 1944.  Awkwardly for Munari, perhaps, Marinetti was probably more in tune with the rhetoric of that regime (which cast itself as the reincarnation of the original, republican, anti-clerical, anti-capitalist, socially radical movement of the very early 1920’s) than he had ever been with that of Fascism in its 1930’s Imperial pomp.  Trying to make Marinetti into some kind of anti-Fascist dissident has been a minor academic cottage industry for some time; I simply don’t think it works.

Hayek’s really revealing comment is that she felt Munari related well to her because they had both grown up under dictatorships (she was born in then-Communist Czechoslovakia).   I take that to mean that he felt she would understand the complexities of life,  the insecurity and lack of trust, the grey zones between total commitment and outright dissent and the messy inglorious compromises involved in staying alive and artistically productive- and would perhaps be less judgmental in consequence.  My guess is that Munari, who seems to have been a man of great charm and gentleness, was not particularly interested in politics as such but was willing to go with the flow, whatever that flow might be, as long as it enabled him to create the art he wanted to create (he was perhaps lucky that the dictatorship he grew up with wasn’t interested in promoting an obligatory style of art…).   He was born a bit early to be caught up in the Party’s youth movements and I doubt if he was ever a true believer in the Burri mould but (like an awful lot of Italians?) he probably retained a degree of loyalty to the regime quite a bit longer than it became comfortable to admit after 1945.  Later he preferred to forget or minimise the more awkward bits of his past- like his association with Marinetti.   It’s all very human and I’m not overly inclined to sit in judgment on the man.