Development of a Bottle in Space
Development of a Bottle in Space (Italian: Sviluppo di una bottiglia nello spazio) is a bronze futurist sculpture by Umberto Boccioni. Initially a sketch in Boccioni’s "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture",[1]" the design was later cast into bronze by Boccioni himself in the year 1913. Consistent with many of themes in Boccioni’s manifesto, the work of art highlights the artist’s first successful attempt at creating a sculpture that both molds and encloses space within itself.[2]
Development of a Bottle in Space
1913
39.5 cm × 39.5 cm × 60.3 cm (15.6 in × 15.6 in × 23.7 in)
History and Inspiration[edit]
Much of Boccioni’s inspiration in creating the work can be accredited to the publication of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s "Futurist Manifesto". Marinetti, often credited as the founder of futurism as an artistic and literary movement, produced the manifesto in 1909, which would later serve as the foundation for Boccioni’s very own "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture".[3] Marinetti in his manifesto expresses a passionate loathing of everything old, especially classical and neo-classical artistic traditions. To break with traditional notions, futurists admired and emphasized elements of modern society: speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane, the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature.[4] Boccioni, in his manifesto pertaining to sculptural works, emphasized many of the same ideals as Marinetti, but unlike Marinetti applied the ideals discussed in his manifesto in the works he produced.
The subject matter of Boccioni’s work, a deconstructed glass bottle, fits into the framework of futurism, a movement largely obsessed with recent technological innovations. Technology to mass-produce glass bottles was first implemented in the latter portion of the 19th century and began rapidly expanding around the time Boccioni began to formulate his work in 1912.[5] Boccioni first provided a sketch of Development of a Bottle in Space in his manifesto, as an example of a work that deconstructs the three-dimensional space in and around itself.[6] A year later Boccioni would take his initial sketch and use it as the basis to produce the work’s recognizable form as a bronze sculpture. Once exhibited at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco (1915), Development of a Bottle in Space, has since become part of the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. An original bronze cast (1935) is displayed at the Museo del Novecento in Milan.
Other Interpretations[edit]
Various other interpretations have been made over the years by art historians regarding Boccioni’s intentions in creating the work. Donald Kuspit, Professor of Art and Philosophy, Ph.D, University of Michigan, theorizes that the sculpture’s rhythmic movement suggests a more sexual connotation that is “inherent rather than imposed.” He compares this sculpture to Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2” (1912) which symbolizes masturbation.[1] Marjorie Perloff, author of “The Futurist Movement” (1986) states in her book that the sculpture does not represent one single bottle, but rather a series of bottle shaped shells, hollowed out and fit into each other. She refers to the sculpture’s base as a “concave shape with a simple unbroken profile,” a description that supports Boccioni’s theory of a center within the object itself.[1] Conflicting with Boccioni’s concept of dynamism, Rosalind Krauss, author of Passages in Modern Sculpture (1981), describes the sculpture as a “symbol of invariance.” Krauss comments that “The sculpture dramatizes a conflict between the poverty of information contained in the single view of the object and the totality of the vision that is basic to any serious claim to know it.[1]”