The Fourth Dimension and Futurism: A Politicized Space

Absolute motion registers an object's potential movement and relative motion the material actualization of motion in the here and now, rather than some future development. Relative motion, therefore, is associated with "the object in movement," with our experience of "trains, cars, bicycles, and airplanes" as well as "a man running or a man in flight." Regardless of the difference in speed of an automobile in comparison with a human body, "it is still a question of a simple variation of forms and of rhythm." Above all, states Boccioni, it is "a question of time." [50] Through the plastic merger of relative and absolute motion, a temporal continuity composed of an ongoing present and of future potential movements is intuited by the artist. Dynamism, which is the synthesis of relative and absolute motion, is defined as a form of creative evolution:

Dynamism in painting and sculpture is thus an evolutionary concept of plastic reality. It is the affirmation of a sensibility that more than ever conceives of the world as the infinite succession of a diversity in evolution. In interpreting the mobility of this evolution, which is life itself, we Futurists, we have been able to create the form-type, the form of forms, the continuity. [51]

This "continuity" or "succession" is realized "through the intuitive research of the unique form which gives continuity in space"; indeed, "it is this form-type that makes the object live in the universal," that is, as part of the evolutionary process. [52] As "a sort of fourth dimension in painting and sculpture," works such as his Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (Fig. 1) both encompass "the three dimensions which give volume" and register the present and future development of these volumes in time. "With the unique form that gives continuity in space," argues Boccioni, "we create a form that is the sum of the potential unfolding of the three known dimensions." [53] As we have seen, Boccioni associated an object's potential development with absolute motion; the fourth dimension, as the intersection of time and space, is registered as a form of rhythmic extensity. "We interpret nature by rendering these objects on the canvas as the beginnings or the prolongations of the rhythms impressed upon our sensibi lity by these very objects," states Boccioni, quoting from the February 1912 preface to the Futurists' first Paris exhibition. [54] These rhythms are transformed into the "force lines" and "color forms" that are "the dynamic manifestation of form." Besides force lines there are also "force forms" to indicate "variation" in an object's "organic substance," its "gravity" and potential for "expansion." Starting with the "centripedal construction" of an object's material substance, intuition allows Boccioni to discern "the centrifugal direction of form," for "in these centrifugal directions are inserted force lines, force forms, force colors." Boccioni intuits such form through a "study of quantity," identified with an object's "centripetal construction," and a "study of quality," that is, "the relation of the object to its milieu" or its "centrifugal construction." The centripetal or quantitative aspect of an object is its material mass; the centrifugal or qualitative stands for its creative potential for expans ion. [55]