Back to the future

I went to see the Tate Modern's futurism exhibition at the weekend. Despite taking quite an interest in modern art, I was actually fairly ignorant about futurism, and what I thought I knew turned out to not be quite right.

Futurism was related to, and had some similar concerns as cubism. How to depict the age of light, speed and machines? An Italian invention, futurism rejected the veneration of the old, the fusty museums that covered Italy, and sentimentalism. Instead they gloried in the speeding train, the electric street lamp, but also nationalism and war. Marinetti, who wrote the futurist manifesto (and what is an art movement without a manifesto?) was also a thoroughly nasty misogynist.

Now if that all sounds a bit fascist, you might be surprised to learn that the early futurists were more interested in the anarchist riot than the fascist state, although in a thoroughly macho way of course. But beyond the political posturing, both what the futurists depicted and how they depicted it were revolutionary at the time and are still compelling today.

Futurism proper only lasted about 5 years, ending with the onset of the First World War. The Italian futurists agitated for Italy to end its neutrality and enter the war, yet those futurists who actually encountered the war for real quickly reassessed their views. CRW Nevinson, the only English futurist drove an ambulance during the war and soon rejected his pro-war positions. Perhaps fittingly, it's his picture of an exploding shell which ends this exhibition.

The exhibition doesn't deal with fascism at all, which took up the futurist aesthetic which suited it very well. But since that was the only bit I already knew, it was good to find it wasn't nearly the whole story. I'll finish with an extract from a futurist statement called Vital English Art, published by Marinetti and Nevinson. In the section titled 'Against' they write:

2. The pessimistic, sceptical and narrow views of the English public, who stupidly adore the pretty-pretty, the commonplace, the soft, the sweet, and mediocre, the sickly revivals of medievalism, the Garden Cities with their curfews and artificial battlements, the may-pole Morris dances, Æstheticism, Oscar Wilde, the Pre-Raphaelites, Neo-primitives and Paris.

If they'd been writing a century later, they may well have added ITV costume dramas to the list...

Save the Children turns Tory

Yesterday the Tories released their green paper on international development. It was pretty horrendous - a mix of ideological free market nonsense and silly gimmicks. The gimmicks included the suggestion that the public might vote for their favourite international development projects and only these would get money. Luckily this sounds like one of those stupid suggestions that we won't hear about again.

The support for trade liberalisation and privatisation is corporate welfare dressed up as development policy, but no more than you would expect from the Tories. More of a departure, and arguably therefore more worrying is the idea of 'aid vouchers' and assisted places at private schools - in other words, shifting aid money directly to private businesses.

The cherry on the top of the cake, by the way, was the Tory assertion that capitalism is Britain's gift to the world. As Nick Dearden of the Jubilee Debt Campaign commented "Given the problems which the unregulated global economy has recently subjected the world to, many countries might prefer to be removed from the Christmas list."

Most self-respecting development charities condemned the aid vouchers as a very bad idea, and many also rejected the other free market nonsense. Not so Save the Children, who hosted the launch of the Green Paper at their offices, and whose chief executive wrote a friendly comment piece in the Times yesterday in support of David Cameron's ring-fencing aid spending. The aim was clearly to position Save the Children as the Tories' international development charity, just as Oxfam was Labour's.

Not surprising, perhaps, given how much of Save the Children's budget comes from government, and will therefore be dependent on Tory favour if (when?) they win the next election. But problematic nonetheless, not least because its a pattern replicated across the NGO sector, albeit less obviously and less successfully. Despite being generally progressive in some way, the talk in charity-world has been for a good while that the 'smart money' is on 'engaging' with the Tories now.

Yet despite the fact that this has been going on, the Tories still come out with awful right-wing guff like this Green Paper. And they'll do it in government too. We need to be building a movement against them, not a dialogue with them - that way we might be able to replicate what's happened in France, where some of the most agregious of Sarkosy's policies have been headed off my social mobilisation. But there's no chance of that happening if NGOs avoid public criticism of the Tories, let alone giving 'development cover' to their anti-development policies as Save the Children are.