„NAGI CZŁOWIEK W ŚRÓDMIEŚCIU”. FUTURYSTÓW PRZYJEMNOŚĆ (W) PRZESTRZENI

Abstract

Futurism was an artistic movement, which can be concerned as a reaction to an experience of modernisation, a process that had a large influence on the shape of humans’ surroundings and, in the further perspective, on the human condition. The great city, masses that inhabit its area and the greatest technical invention of modernity: the machine, are the three apices of a triangle, which can be metaphorically used to describe the process of modernisation. All these three apices, marks of modern changes, have a great influence on the experience of space, which we find rendered in the works of Polish futurism. Hence, its artistic activity may be considered as an answer to the process of modernisation, in terms proposed by Richard Sheppard. I decided to focus on two aspects of futurist’s experience of space. The first one is connected with Henri Bergson’s utopian theory of the pure perception. The cognition of space can only be true when neither memories nor reflection interfere it, while the subject finds himself in the centre of the item being recognized. This kind of experience, which uses all senses of the subject’s body placed in a way that Bergson proposes, can be find in Anatol Stern’s poem Nagi człowiek w śródmieściu (A Naked Man In The City Centre). The second aspect of the experience of space is to be observed in Bruno Jasienski’s poems such as Miłość na aucie, Śnieg, Podróżniczki (Love in a car, Snow, Travellers), where scandalous, provocative eroticism indicates the sensual, bodycentred manner of experiencing the space. In fact, this type of experience can be treated as a pleasure in Lévinas’ terms due to it causes delight, which excludes the possibility to structurise a strong identity for the subject. The experience of space in futurist’s works becomes a pleasure with no further consequences for the subject’s interior. Its quality, which indicates the tendency to change the nature of experience into pleasure, points out the rule of pleasure, that is a major rule in nowadays culture.