Fragments on Future Anxiety, Velocity, and the Modernist Myth of Progress | By Leah Sandler
Fragments on Future Anxiety, Velocity, and the Modernist Myth of Progress in the Context of The Futurist Manifesto by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Lewis Colburn’s Sculpture, A Fountain For A Dark Future.
We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. [1]
Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
Dale Earnhardt died the day after my 9th birthday, about a month and a half after Y2K, and just 7 months before the events of September 11th, 2001. Dale was killed instantly in a final-lap collision in the Daytona 500, which takes place in Volusia county, a short drive from where I grew up in DeBary, Florida. On the day of his death, he is quoted as saying “if they don’t do something to these cars, it’s gonna kill somebody.”
In the sweaty tangle of my memories of Floridian life in the early aughts, echoes of the collision’s impact are audible. A sacrificial lamb to forward momentum, his visage and iconic “Number 3” still grace many back windows of trucks, faded t-shirts, and license plate frames along the I-4 Corridor in the year 2022. Dale’s death just turned 21, someone buy it a beer!
In After the Future (2011), theorist and critic Franco “Bifo” Berardi identifies 1977 as a year of cultural transformation, with our expectations moving from a promising utopian future to an apocalyptic dystopia. The shock of the oil crisis of the 1970s implied limitations to growth, as opposed to the eternal expansion fantasized by nearly all industrial political projects across the ideological spectrum at the time. Bifo points to this year as a symbolic end to the myth of progress that guided the forward momentum of Modernity. [2]
Disney’s EPCOT, or “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow” just outside of Orlando, opened in 1982, half a decade after Bifo’s described end of the Future. The park presents itself as a permanent World’s Fair, its signature structure a geodesic sphere housing a ghost train time machine themed attraction called “Spaceship Earth.” The ride guides passengers through a narrativized account of human communication and technology progressively building our future. In February 2020, the ride closed for refurbishments, and has not opened since due to COVID restrictions.
I think about 2001, and then 2021, and try to grasp at the cultural shifts and cycles that I am slowly perceiving as a millennial just entering their 30th orbit.
3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.
I have taken public transportation to work multiple precarious jobs across the Orlando urban sprawl for the past decade plus. It is not a city designed for pedestrians. I used to work part-time at Sea World as a caricature artist, and my commute there and back took as much time as my contracted hours. Getting there was like another part-time job. A bus trip across town meant multiple transfers and accounting for irregular schedules and connections, as well as many treacherous highway crossings (Orlando is ranked the #1 city for pedestrian fatalities, closely followed by Daytona Beach as #2.) Now I teach Drawing at a state college across town, and the commute isn’t too much different.
4. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
I can’t drive because I am scared of acceleration. The physical symptoms of anxiety I experience make it nearly impossible, and any pharmaceutical relief is off-limits for both financial, personal, and logistical reasons. I cope with slowness and a network of personal and community support. I take the Lynx bus and the Sunrail commuter rail and am grateful for rides from my partner.
There is one particularly anxiety-provoking turn against a high wall from I-4 onto the 408 in downtown Orlando. A passenger, I close my eyes and brace myself, every muscle in my body coiling in anticipation of crashing into that wall. I think maybe if I squeeze my ass cheeks tight enough I’ll just float there, an equal force taut against the forward momentum careening into impact.
5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.
I feel a similar anxiety about living through the next few decades. The implication of Futurism is hurtling forward at great speeds, assuming there is a positive trajectory (Progress)... what happens when our technologies allow us to see that things might be accelerating forward into a largely unlivable future? How can artists use this momentum, reroute it, or perhaps subdue it, in recognition of possible futures?
6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
Lewis Colburn, A Fountain for A Dark Future, 2021. Installation view at Locust Projects by Zachary Balber.
In October 2021, I was invited to speak in a Zoom roundtable discussion with artists Lewis Colburn and misael soto. The discussion centered around Colburn’s sculpture, commissioned for the Project Room at Locust Projects in Miami. It was a larger-than-life recreation of Unique Forms of Continuity In Space (Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni’s 1913 sculpture.) Colburn’s sculpture, made of gypsum forms scaled up from a 3D rendering, was braced by scaffolding all around and appeared to be periodically cleaned and maintained by automated robotic arms. It was standing in pans of water. I couldn’t make the 4-hour trip from Orlando to Miami to see it in person, but studied images and texts supplied by the artist.
Leading up to the discussion, we spoke about parallels between our contemporary moment and 1913, from the rise of fascism to the Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” ideology, in the context of locality in Florida, both Miami and Orlando.
7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!... Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.
In September of last year, SpaceX’s first private space tourism flight landed off the coast of Florida. The trip was led by Jared Isaacman, billionaire and CEO of Shift4 Payments Inc., and three other U.S. citizens without specialized training.
The future is here, though it is distributed unevenly.
8. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
9. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
I try to digest my own historical subject position through my art practice as the Head of Preservation Programs of the (parafictional) Center For Post-Capitalist History. The project weaves together fact, fiction, bodies, archives, bureaucracy, and collaboration, and presents the viewer with a glimpse into a fictional archaeology of a potential future.
10. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.
Laundromat Art Space (Miami) will be hosting a Center For Post-Capitalist History Staging Area in Little Haiti, Miami, running April 9th through May 5th 2022. The exhibition opens on April 9th, 6pm-9pm, and a conversation between artist Leah Sandler and Amy Galpin, Chief Curator of the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, will take place on May 1st.
[1] Marinetti, Filippo Tomaso, The Futurist Manifesto, 1909
[2] After the Future, Franco Berardi, 2011