Depero Futurista: Imbullonato (the “Bolted Book”) (1927/2017)

Depero Futurista: The Bolted Book (1927/2017) and Reader’s Guide (2017)
Fortunato Depero and Designers & Books (Steve Kroeter, editor-in chief)
Bolt-bound loose folios between textured, colored card stock. H242 x W320 mm. 240 pages. Edition of 2500, of which this is #. Purchased from Designers & Books, 18 October 2016. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Fortunato Depero’s Depero Futurista: Imbullonato (the “Bolted Book”) stands at the center of an uneasy off-rhyming of history. Where Depero and the avant-garde Futurists of the early 20th century rode the waves with Benito Mussolini and fascism, this 2016/17 facsimile edition of Depero Futurista coincided with the emergence of America’s “Tangerine Mussolini” and his MAGA movement.

In 2024, the original and facsimile editions of Depero Futurista appeared in an exhibition at the American Academy in Rome just as Trump was elected as the first Convict-in-Chief. And five days before he was sworn in, the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London presented its copy of the original edition in an exhibition devoted to the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, leader of the Futurist movement, good friend of Depero, and peripatetic pal to Mussolini.

Depero Futurista’s peculiar off-rhymings in history prompt questions about the intersection of art and our social contract. How is it that fascism weighs on Depero’s art but has not suffocated it, even when the association peeps out as it does in Imbullonato? How is it that communism weighs on El Lissitzky’s About Two Squares (1922) but has not buried it?

Günter Berghaus’ Futurism and Politics provides a nuanced view of Futurism, Marinetti, Depero and their links with fascism. Fabio Belloni traces the rise, fall and rise of Depero in his essay “The Critical Fortune and Artistic Recognition of the Work of Depero“, which appeared in the journal of the now defunct Center for Italian Modern Art. Gianluca Camillini’s 2020 doctoral thesis traces the disconnects and remaining connections with fascism in Depero Futurista after the 1924 break between Futurism and Mussolini.

Perhaps Depero’s case contrasts helpfully with that of Ezra Pound. Like Depero, Pound was an enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini. Pound coopted Marinetti’s and Depero’s Futurism into his and Wyndham Lewis’ Vorticism. Unlike Depero Futurista, however, Pound’s poetry — especially the Cantos –foregrounds that enthusiasm. The frequency of its appearance in Pound’s poetry and its ugliness weigh more heavily than the few mentions of Mussolini in Depero Futurista. Depero’s and Marinetti’s hero-worship appears mostly in their poetry and prose but without Pound’s anti-semitism. The connection with fascism that remains in Depero Futurista, however, appears in the bellicosity and glorification of war by this “book machine”.

In the American Academy’s exhibition, Depero Futurista sits alongside the anti-racism of William Kentridge’s Portage (2000) and Kara Walker’s Five Poems Rainmaker (2002). How does (can?) art deliberately associated with fascist, statist or authoritarian movements rise above them to be celebrated and fruitfully juxtaposed with the works of today’s artists more associated with progressive causes?

For the Books On Books Collection, Depero is also an important figure in the overlap of typography and the alphabet with architecture and the artist’s book. Depero defined typographic architecture as

that special architectural form suggested by typographie types which has been used with great efficacy in advertising artistic constructions, in pavilions, kiosks and advertising plastics of national and international exhibitions of decorative art and in industrial and commercial exhibitions. The painter Depero created, in 1927, the book pavilion of the Bestetti- Tumminelli and Treves publishing house at the international exhibition of decorative art at Monza, inspiring his work to this conception of typographie architecture.(p. 18)

And he reproduced an image of it in Depero Futurista.

From Depero Futurista: “Padiglione del Libro” (1927).

The book pavilion is not bellicose. It is bombastic as is much of what is in Imbullonato. The blast of its typography has much in common with that in Kurt Schwitters’ Die Scheuche Märchen (1925) and other artists’ works not associated with fascism, authoritarianism or statism. To focus on Imbullonato‘s innovation, technique, typography or cross-fertilization with architecture and compare and contrast them with that of other artists is not to forget its entanglements. In fact, the difficulty in focusing is a reminder of how art, too, can be bolted to the shameful.

Camillini, Gianluca. 2020. “Fortunato Depero and Depero futurista 1913–1927“. Dissertation thesis. Reading: University of Reading. “In the two reprints of Depero futurista 1913–1927 (1978 and 1987 by SPES Firenze), Luciano
Caruso also repeatedly writes ‘libromacchina imbullonato’ (bolted machine-book, Caruso, 1987, 36).” (p. 14).

Caruso, Luciano (ed.) and Fortunato Depero. 1987. Depero Futurista. Firenze: Studio per Edizioni Scelte Salembeni.

Caruso, Luciano (ed.) and Fortunato Depero. 1978. Fortunato Depero Futurista. Firenze: Studio per Edizioni Scelte Salembeni.

Depero, Fortunato, and Raffaella Lotteri. 1947. So I Think, so I Paint : Ideologies of an Italian Self-Made Painter. Trento [Italy]: Mutilati e Invalidi.

Lissitzky, El, and Patricia Railing. 1922. About 2 [Squares]. 1st MIT Press ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Tsimourdagkas, Chrysostomos. 2014. Typotecture: Histories, Theories and Digital Futures of Typographic Elements in Architectural Design. Doctoral dissertation, Royal College of Art, London.

Display of Ed Ruscha's Various Small Fires and Milk, 1964, at Pliure: La Part du Feu, 2 February - 12 April 2015, Paris. Photo by Robert Bolick. Reflected in the lower left hand corner is the display of Bruce Nauman's Burning Small Fires; in the upper right corner, the film clip of Truffaut's 1966 Fahrenheit 451; and in the upper left, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva's La bibliotheque en feu, 1974. — Display of Ed Ruscha’s *Various Small Fires and Milk*, 1964
*Pliure: La Part du Feu*, 2 February – 12 April 2015, Paris, Fondation Calouste-Gulbenkian.
Photo by Robert Bolick, 11 April 2015.
Reflected in the lower left hand corner is the display of Bruce Nauman’s *Burning Small Fires,* 1968; in the upper right corner, the film clip of Truffaut’s 1966 *Fahrenheit 451*; and in the upper left, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s *La bibliotheque en feu*, 1974.

The Studio Bibliografico Giorgio Maffei specializes in original texts and book art by twentieth century visual and literary avant-garde artists such Baldessari, Lewitt, Munari, Man Ray, Ruscha and Warhol among others. Recently the owner’s son – Giulio Maffei – “started making film as a side activity” and introduced a series of short animations “to put on the social networks and reach new potential customers”. An anonymous pair of hands displays a variety of the books and book art in stock.

But Giulio’s videos are not always the straightforward marketing effort intended. They provide an experience of book art or artists’ books that most of us will never hold or touch. And that may be Maffei’s point in his series “Le Vite dei Libri” (The Lives of Books) in which these usually glassed-off works are playfully handled, gently made fun of and still honored.

Some of the videos are derivative artworks in their own right in the same vein as Bruce Nauman’s Burning Small Fires, 1968. Nauman poked fun at Ed Ruscha’s Various Small Fires and Milk, 1964, by composing a book of photos recording the burning of a copy of Various Small Fires. Maffei’s Nauman-esque handling of Various Small Fires and Milk involves flash paper or its Photoshop equivalent. His celebration of Ruscha’s The Sunset Strip is still more endearing with its soundtrack and toy convertible. His cheeky animations of the pop-ups in Warhol’s Index (Book) and the ironically daring destruction of Papa Maffei’s copy of Some/Thing No.3 are even better. In the latter, the plastering of a Banksy-like mural with Warhol’s “Bomb Hanoi” stickers torn from the perforated cover is a sharp-edged example of the arch, reflective commentaries throughout Maffei’s videos.

Most of the films’ credits pay typographical homage to the work at hand, which is a nice self-deprecating and affectionate touch. At my last viewing, there were twenty-two works in the Lives series. They are listed below, but once you reach one on YouTube, the others follow. Giulio Maffei has also created a longer video catalogue for his father’s enterprise: Tra Libro e Oggetto (Between Book and Object). The Maffeis are a knowing team. The catalog title can be read as the beginning of a statement displayed on the cover.

BETWEEN BOOK AND OBJECT

The artists’ book, the multiple and the object

become an artwork

A statement that refers not only to the works in the catalog but to the video catalog itself and to the elder Maffei’s lifework of collecting, selling and writing about book art.

1 – An Unreadable Quadrat Print, Bruno Munari

2 – The Sunset Strip, Ed Ruscha

3 – Nine Swimming Pools, Ed Ruscha

4 – Various Small Fires, Ed Ruscha

5 – Andy Warhol’s Children’s Book, Andy Warhol

6 – Choosing Green Beans, John Baldessari

7 – Kleve 2009, Ettore Spalletti

8 – Made in Machine, Jean-François Bory

9 – Cieli ad Alta Quota, Alighiero Boetti

10 – Il Merlo Ha Perso il Becco, Bruno Munari

11 – Mémoires, Guy Debord, Asger Jorn

12 – Zang Tumb Tuuum, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti