A Collective of One: Umberto Boccioni’s I/We and Photography before Futurism

Sometime between 1905 and 1907, the artist Umberto Boccioni stepped into a photographic cabinet to sit for a “multigraph”: a fivefold (self-)portrait created with the aid of an unseen mirror.  Appealing to the general public as the twentieth century progressed, the format would also become a visual calling-card for several avant-gardists.  Yet Boccioni’s multigraph stands at odds with his subsequent artistic trajectory as the chief theorist of Italian Futurism; he would in fact eventually crusade against the inclusion of photography in the movement’s ever-expanding repertoire of media.

To what extent may we read back into this image the questions that would preoccupy Boccioni and his peers in painting, sculpture, and other formats after 1910?  For, the image anticipates various paradoxes central to Futurism’s theoretical enterprise: externalized multiplicity and singular insight; an air of scientism and its unlikely proximity to the occult; the cold objectification of the self and an investment in visionary subjectivity.   Taking Boccioni’s image as a touchstone, this talk examines Futurism’s fraught attitudes toward positivism and its perceived opposites.

Ara H. Merjian is Professor of Italian Studies at New York University, where he is Director of Graduate Studies and an affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts, the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, and Comparative Literature.  He is the author and editor of several books, including Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Paris Modernism (Yale University Press, 2014; MIT Press 2027), Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art and Neocapitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting (Verso, 2023).  He has just published two new volumes, Fragments of Totality: Futurism, Fascism, and the Sculptural Avant-Garde (Yale University Press) and Futurism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press), and is finishing a volume due out in the fall: Beat, Black, Queer: Pasolini’s ‘Other America’, to be published with Verso.  Before arriving at NYU, he taught at Harvard, Stanford, and the San Quentin State Penitentiary College Education Program.