Encrucijadas de la arquitectura.

World War I as a Cause of Ephemeral Hope in the Artistic Avant-Gardes

“…This happens both in the Russian artistic avant-garde, which joins, full of enthusiasm and hope, the October Revolution (Vázquez, 1972;Longoni and Davis, 2009), and in the rest of European avant-gardes, which make a synthesis between artistic form and machinism (Subirats, 1998), considering the person as a hybrid between human and machine (Martin;Hidalgo, 2021).…”

“…The hope that the artistic avant-garde deposited in the war is also based on temporality, one of its central axes, which is evident in the ideas of dynamism that we have just analyzed, as well as in those of simultaneity, fragmentation, or splitting (Alonso, 2000). They are aware that the past is in decadence and the present is exhausted and from there springs precisely the confidence that the contest represents, on the one hand, a break with History and the past (Vázquez, 1972;Subirats, 1998;Longoni and Davis, 2009;Barrón, 2017) or a longing to eliminate the present (Arnaldo, 2008;Olábarri-Gortázar, 2021). On the other hand, they also consider war as a "drug" (Isnenghi, 2007), as a cure and antidote against the many fears that circulated (Dogliani, 2013), and as a remedy for the present (Arnaldo, 2008: 75), as well as an escape from the gray everyday (Nouschi, 1999).…”

“…Furthermore, they are inclined to "become in the decline," to embody a promise of novelty, of a new era, and to become agents of indefinite progress, actors of future combat, "prophets of rebirth," "apostles of the future"-the futurists-and creative priests of new worlds and paradises. All this founded on the cumulative and linear development of industry, technology, and scientific knowledge (Subirats, 1998;Alonso, 2000;Shinner, 2004;Arnaldo, 2008;Hidalgo, 2021).…”

“…Concretely, what the German expressionists, the Italian futurists, and the Dutch neoplasticists thought was to break with the past, abandon tradition, deny bourgeois art, put an end to the false and oppressive, free themselves from power, and conquer freedom and the artistic capacity to shape the world from scratch. What they proposed, in the end, was a utopian hope for a historical world governed by human conscience (Subirats, 1989;Subirats, 1998).…”

“…Futurism, for its part, with its "naturalization of things -the bullets "meow"-and reification of bodies -considered as machines, as we have seen-" (Marinetti, 1912;Alsina, 2016) and with its sequence of momentarily fixed movements, in reality, instead of uniting art and life (Vázquez, 1972;Cortázar, 2014) becomes even more distanced, particularly in the everyday (Alonso, 2000). In this regard, the artistic avant-gardes impoverished human life in the world of machinism and under the imperatives of a rationalist culture (Subirats, 1998), as they were unable to recreate true movement. Thus, rather, they recall the "beat of a dead body," sinking "in the darkness of abstractions" (Gabo and Pevsner, 1979: p. 326).…”