(Not done yet)
A project using Barnett Newman's The Stations of The Cross as a framework to examine the violent rise and decay of Futurism in the early 20th Century. The project considers the adoption of its radical ideology enshrined within its manifesto, to the perversion and abstraction of its original pursuit put to use within the World War era. Using quotes pulled from the Manifesto directly, each station is meant to contextualize the movement within its historical setting, and show how the dramatic burnout of Futurism was inevitable given its own definition of the movement. The radical adoption of "progress for progress's sake" and an exliplicit disregard for the foundations of which the art form was built upon necessitated the short life cycle the movement experienced.
Newmans work consisted of 15 abstract paintings and was origninally made to examine the broader scope of the religion notion of Jesus's ascent to Calvary and impose the central question of "Lema sabachthani" ("Why have you forsaken me?") in a secular manner to humanity as a whole. Over the course of the Stations, Christianity identifies 14 seperate moments (stations) for which to answer the question. Secularlizing the events, one can apply the same scrutiny to modernity to help identify where the loss of natural human tendencies was lost in favor of comtemporary society. Futurism, with its aggresive and fleeting nature, serves as a case study to apply this line of reasoning. Its self-proclaimed rejection of tradtion and demands of change propolled the movement down the line of self-perversion it defined for itself, granting a window into the effects of radical change with which to examine Newman's central question.
A copy of a translation of Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto can be found here.