Cubism: Appropriation Of Mass Media

As previously mentioned, Cubism often utilized appropriation of mass media’s works. However, the words taken by Cubist artists often were used in very different contexts than what the words were originally meant to relate to when they were written for the mass media. “Through the fragmentary incorporation of letter and words, the legible nature of written language was also fractured in Cubist art, to be replaced by a more fluid, often illegible or decontextualized, language that is now far more materially evident as visual form. The collage technique also contributed to this disruption as it undermined the material homogeneity of the work, importing bits and pieces of apparently extraneous matter into the rectangle of the work. Against the

Cubism created a dialogue between artists and writers and led to many powerful collaborations such as poets and writers defending painting and other spatial art forms in their roles as art critics. For example such collaborating elevated art form when poets and artists such as Picasso and Max Jacob or Juan Gris and Apollinaire worked together to create something beautiful, and when poets and artists borrowed techniques from each other’s mediums to create more fluidity and uniqueness in their own pieces. Both writers and artists were able to gain new functions in their pieces through each other. Words now became commonplace in the visual artists’ domain and writers were also able to learn from artists and forged new types of literature. This new kind of literature shifted personal pronouns, destroyed syntax, fragmented space and attention to formal structure, and was often written from multiple perspectives, just as Cubist art was meant to do. Examples of this shift can all be seen in the works of many modernist writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Gertrude

Marinetti stated as follows: “We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. [We intend on having] Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry. 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.” (“The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism”) Those are the first three declarations of Marinetti’s manifesto and he continues to discuss further how “the beauty of speed” will be a focus of the Futurists, embracing the world’s advancement in technology, as well as glorifying war, calling it “the world’s only hygiene” and discusses destroying all forms of academies such as museums and