https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AA_Slap_in_the_Face_of_Public_Taste_(full).pdf&page=1
This post is related to Neuberger’s discussion of Futurism. I hope to add a little bit more context to what she says by discussing the Futurist manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (1912). The text is publicly available in a number of places (links provided is to 391.org and the Russian-language original on Wikipedia Commons).
The main body of the text of “A Slap in the Face” articulates the Futurists’ discontent with the state of Russian art in 1912. It’s here that we encounter their (in)famous line about throwing Pushkin and Dostoevsky “overboard from the Ship of Modernity.” It’s worth pausing to appreciate the power of this analogy. On the one hand, the Futurists make the canon dead weight holding back progress. On the other hand, they create a notion of togetherness aboard the “Ship of Modernity.” Whether you agree with the Futurists matters less than the fact that we are all sailing together on the same vessel headed towards a future underpinned by the fragmented and chaotic present.
The text’s conclusion, a bill of Poet’s Rights of sorts, points towards the Futurists’ artistic and aesthetic programs. First, the manifesto underscores the Poet’s right to employ “arbitrary and derivative words (Word-novelty).” As the canon must be abandoned, so too must the revered language of the dying past. In fact, the subsequent “right” is to “feel an insurmountable hatred for the language existing” before the artist’s time. Next, the manifesto denounces the “Wreath of cheap fame” and ‘philistine capitalism’ upholding the unbearable aesthetic created by contemporaneous laws and markets. This critique of modern socioeconomic patterns, like that launched by the Hooligans (and numerous other groups we have encountered or will soon), reinforces Neuberger’s point that cultural conflict intersected with and reflected class conflict. While the Futurists were generally not from the working class, their fight against the bourgeois was nonetheless defined in class terms and aesthetics. Finally, the manifesto ends with a note of solidarity, pitting ‘us’ on the “the rock of the word” amid “the sea of boos and outrage.” Not everyone aboard the “Ship of Modernity” may have enjoyed the Futurists, but they were still all inhabitants of the same “sea.”