The Role of Time in Art Reading: Cubism and Futurism

At the beginning of the Twentieth century, individuals experience a neurotic acceleration of daily time, particularly in metropolitan areas, which reduces the capacity for reasoning and understanding approaching the loss of Denkraum – the space of thinking – theorized by Aby Warburg (1923). This anthropological transformation, economizing the time of reasoning, leads to a progressive acceleration in the ways of communicating and understanding the simple social messages of daily life. The result is a progressive osmosis between the structural acceleration of society and the common language by deleting all grammatical structures to speed up the communication parameters. The aim of this essay is to reconstruct how the avant-gardes (Cubism, Italian and Russian Futurism) respond to this metamorphosis, analysing through the writings of Roman Jakobson, published between 1919 and 1921, the new pathology of the metropolis in figurative and alphabetical languages at the beginning of the century.