Page 48 - Wax Fusion Spring 2022 Issue 6 WIP v19

In the years before World War I, the Italian Futurists eulogized

the automobile, speed, and the mechanistic nature of war.
Their fractured paintings were meant to capture the fast pace

of modern life, and truly, the speed of technological change at
the turn of the century has had no competitor. The Futurists

screamed the need to burn down the museums and start all
over. Be careful what you wish for, fellas, because the human

nausea caused by the massive destruction of World War I led to
the absurdity of Dada, which preferred chance as an artistic

method – anything but the so-called rationalism that led to war
machines.

Russian modernism gave birth to two factions of avant-garde

artists – Constructivists and Suprematists. After working
through the Russian combination of French Cubism and Italian

Futurism (which they called Cubo-Futurism), Kazimir Malevich
painted his “royal infant” – Black Square. Like Picasso and

Mondrian, Malevich was not an inept painter. Rather, these
artists were emptying out all illusionistic painting traditions,

and for Malevich the result was as mystical and full as it was
formal and stripped bare.

How then, one hundred years after the heyday of Dada and the

birth of its even more fantastical of shoot Surrealism, do we
define “avant-garde?” The further we get from the Academy

and its powerfully tight grasp on of cial rules and
opportunities, the further we get from the bravery of those
original free radicals that are a defining feature of modernism.

Experimentation in art continues, however, and refreshes art

for its own time, but today there are no rules and everything is
an option.

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