Back to the Futurism…plus citizen Koons

The cultural capitals of the globe parade their art today in the way they once showed off their cathedrals and palaces. Those great reclaimed hunks of stone – Tate Modern – or shards of re-shaped metal – the Guggenheim in Bilbao – or the concrete snail shell that is New York’s original Guggenheim all represent an engaging alliance of style and content: monumental structures that contain and convey the treasures of the 20th Century’s magnificent creative adventure. The buildings lure you into their lair and then enchant you with their bounty.

I went art hunting this summer and caught me quite a bit; caught, that is, the pleasure and surprise of seeing a timeless Picasso and an eternal Matisse in the flesh at MOMA in New York City. Or Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural fantasies, some even realised, stretched out on paper and carrying his very own signature. Not to mention the splashes and flashes of pure colour – inspired by nothing more than the spectrum of the domestic paint chart – that formed the theme of Tate Liverpool’s current touring show.

Yet, to return to London after too long a gap is to encounter the place that seems most art-rich at present. If Paris once ruled the roost, if Manhattan took over for the two decades after World War II, it is the city on the Thames that has seized the initiative in the last 15 years. It has possessed the four key ingredients – galleries, dealers, auction houses and, yes, artists even – to bring the eye of the art storm back to Europe and into spaces, large and small, where painting and sculpture seem to be at their most active and fertile and inventive.

Plainly the public investment in Tate Modern, the continuing private enthusiasm of Charles Saatchi to sponsor new and untested talents, and the legacy of the YBAs – those Young British Artists who set the pulses racing over a decade ago with their Royal Academy Sensation show – have all combined to keep the London pot boiling.

Damien Hirst, the greatest name to emerge from that rush of fresh blood in the mid-1990s and now not only the most recognised creative force but also the most valuable under the hammer, has been a vital cog in this aesthetic machine, half fuelled by hard cash and half by bright ideas.

However, the two exhibitions which caught my immediate attention were the product not of the UK but other lands. They featured pieces – and ideas – around a century apart, both radical in their utterly contrasting manner: one political in purpose, the other about as far from notions of the political as you can imagine, at least in any reforming or revolutionary sense.

Futurism is a wonderful Tate Modern show, sited in the huge former power station of Bankside, opened in 2000 as the major shop window for great art of the previous hundred years. The exhibition gathers some fascinating canvases from the movement alongside an impressive body of documents and publications. But it also strives assiduously  to place this style in its wider context.

This is commendable because Futurism for all its verve, flair and energy – you can see it in the paintings, you can feel it in the sculptures – is a largely discredited moment. Why? Because its broadly Italian founders praised the technology of the new age with such intemperate indiscretion that war machines – the planes and tanks which represented the latest generation of combat hardware – were uniformly lauded alongside cars and trains, electricity and the ever-rising city.

Nor were the Futurists merely abstract in their praise of technology that brought such terrible destruction: in its carnage, these artists saw their twisted ideological dreams played out. They believed that on the battlefield, the power of their ideas – action over passivity, the masculine over the feminine, militarism over pacifism – could be literally – and viscerally – enacted.

Their particular doctrine of modernity – a faith in the sleek, the fast, the streamlined, the brutal even – would, they hoped, victor over the gentler, kinder aesthetic sermons of the past. And in the bloody struggles of the First World War this clique of artists were able to experience their aspirations vicariously as machines joined men in the fiercest conflict ever known. One, Umberto Boccioni, would even meet his red-meat fate within that barbed-wire abbatoir.

Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, a principal figure in the Futurist family, proposed “a total modernisation of contemporary culture in line with the advances in technology, philosophy and anarchist politics. Most controversially, he celebrated war as a means of political change and dismissed contemporary feminism,” as the gallery’s excellent supporting notes explain.

Fellow travellers Giacomo Balla,  Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini saw Nietzsche’s theories of the superman as appealing and it is little surprise that their philosophical and artistic concerns provided both inspiration and succour to the Fascist regime that Benito Mussolini would impose on the Italian people from 1922.

The ideas were terrifying yet the art is often thrilling, a paradox of the highest order. Yet the Tate, by connecting Futurist themes to the work of the France-based Cubists, the British Vorticists  and the Russian Cubo-Futurists, show how often the narrative of history all too often insists on black and the white tale-telling over the muddier waters of grey.

Arguably the most important artistic figure of the whole century, Pablo Picasso had a bearing on the art that Marinetti, Severini and Russolo produced and the Spanish painter even name-checked a number of participants in this dynamic, if misguided, movement in one of his famous collages of spring 1914 which also incorporates a copy of the Futurist newspaper Lacerba.

This revelatory Futurism exhibition, on until September 20th, reminds us that in the churning waters of art and politics, culture and ideology, there is always rather more than one story. Retrospection has largely condemned Marinetti and co to the dustbin; this show reconsiders their legacy with an intellectual dispassion.

Dispassion is also the order of the day for the cutting-edge contemporary artist Jeff Koons, an heir to neo-realism, a post-Pop giant, conceivably a latterday Warhol, presenting a show called Popeye Series, a reference, of course, to the spinach-eating strongman of cartoon strip fame who has just turned 80.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the diminutive though muscle-bound sailor. When I was three years of age, maybe just four, I would rise well before dawn to await the doormat arrival of my weekly fix of a kids’ mag called TV Comic, which showcased a curious mix of US and UK small screen stars when the medium was in its infancy. The cover king though was Popeye, battling the witless Bluto and holding on to the affections of Olive Oyl.

Simultaneously, as the monochrome Fifties turned into the Technicolor Sixties, Roy Lichtenstein was adapting comic book frames for his own, heavily pixellated blow ups and Warhol was sketching another strip hero, Dick Tracy, for his silkscreens. So Popeye’s turn was always likely to come and so it’s been proved.

Half a century on from my childhood obsession with the merchant-scrapper, Koons produces a show at the Serpentine Gallery that is high on eclectism if a little short on actual thread, though it was curiously reassuring to see the over-developed forearms, the corncob pipe and the excrutiating scowl take their place within a number of distracting, if over-busy, collage canvases. That said, Popeye is somewhat over-shadowed here in a way he never was on television or in newsprint. For the most fascinating thing about this display is surely the sculptures.

Koons has taken a number of children’s blow-up beach toys – a lobster, a whale, a bug as swimming ring – and recreated every curve and fold, every minute detail, of the inflatable in immaculately turned aluminium. The effect is deliciously disorientating: you want to squeeze each lilo, you want to feel the smoothness of the light metal. But you can do neither – the ‘do not touch’ police are particularly on their toes here; the tactile is terribly taboo on this occasion, which is something of a shame.

The artist has made – with the aid, for sure, of a crack and talented team – a set of delightful visual jokes. Banal and inane on one level, they are wonderfully entertaining on the other. They are both puns to delight the eye and optical illusions of sorts, a great use of the artistic imagination, reminiscent of Claes Oldenburg’s brilliant soft sculptures of the Sixties but with the conceit in exact reverse.

Do they say much about childhood? About ephemerality? About consumerism? About play? They may say a little about all of those things but this artist-as-trickster, this sculptor-as-mischief-maker, this craftsman-as-conman, is more concerned with art for its very own sake. The Futurists, in the their terrible naivety, thought they could change the world. Koons can only change our facial expression. And a smile definitely beats the prospect of a world governed by techno terror.