On November 15, an unseasonably warm fall Sunday, a small crowd of artists and academics armed with pens, notebooks, and cell phone cameras, gathered on the second floor of the Bronx Museum. The afternoon began with a panel discussion on the topic of radio and Futurism followed by a sound installation presented by the artist Kabir Carter as part of Performa 09. As Sergio Bessa, Director of Programs, pointed out-- perhaps facetiously-- Futurism and the Bronx are temporally linked: Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto and the Grand Concourse are both celebrating their centennial this year.
The panel, featuring literary critics Marjorie Perloff and Richard Sieburth, and poet Charles Bernstein, served as a precursor to Carter's Trap [originally titled Drifts and Traps], locating the sound piece within the historical context of the Futurist movement. The live presentation also served as a more complex complement to Carter's current installation at the BMA.
The panel centered on the opposition of the Russian futurists, portrayed as optimistic idealists by Perloff, and the Italian futurists, a group of dystopian thinkers enamored of fascism presented by Sieburth. Perloff began by reading Velimir Khlebnikov's Radio of the Future, an essay predicting the potential of radio to act as a vast concert hall and to disseminate news to the masses. Sieburth, on the other hand, explored Ezra Pound's role in Italian Futurism, focusing on Canto LXXII, a poem of discordant strife describing the author's fictitious meeting with Marinetti in radio hell. Transitioning neatly to Carter's installation, Bernstein then performed a dramatic reading of sections of Marinetti's manifesto, as well as poems by Russian Futurists and the speaker himself.
After a short break, Carter positioned himself at a table with an array of devices: radio ...