text by Oliver Misraje
War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony.
—Filippo Marinetti
Picture this: 20th century Italian poet and father of Futurism Filippo Tommaso Marinetti at an anonymous but grandiose convention center in 21st-century Abu Dhabi. Behind him are a neat procession of dildos of mass destruction: bombs and rockets erect with potential energy. Tar and rubber fumes waft off the newly minted aluminum heaven. Marinnetti is the appointed speaker for the International Defense Exhibition (IDEX) commencement. Sporting a bow tie and a foreboding mustache, he looks like a fascist Pee-wee Herman when he declares, “WAR IS THE HYGIENE OF THE WORLD.” And what a fitting environment for such a declaration—the AC on full blast, the shiny new guns on display, the sales associates for Lockheed Martin, sharply dressed and lint-free. Some dress for continental breakfasts, others for total annihilation (says my editor). And it’s true. Syria is only a day’s drive Northwest up the Arabian Peninsula, where these newly minted aluminum heaven bombs will be dropped, but not before being sold here.
In this scenario I imagine Marinetti is on a press tour for his newly published manifesto, Il Futurismo, where he, in so many words, argues that war is the final and only high-art. Like most closeted homosexuals, Marinetti suffered from melodrama and a misdirected hatred of women. Compare the libido of an obviously closeted Italian man to that of an unarmed hand grenade and you’ll find they have a lot more in common.
Some keystone points from his manifesto:
We want to glorify war—the only cure for the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideals which kill, and contempt for women.
We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and blow with the fist.
Let us leave good sense behind like a hideous husk and let us hurl ourselves, like fruit spiced with pride, into the immense mouth and breast of the world! Let us feed the unknown, not from despair, but simply to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the Absurd!
Marinetti, who served in the Eighth Italian Army during the Battle of Stalingrad, died of a heart attack at only sixty-four, in October of 1943. On his deathbed he wrote to Mussolini: “My cardiac condition (a degenerative pulmonary edema) that I contracted in four months of war on the Russian front, has withstood until now the lacerating pain of seeing the assassination of Italy, you, and Fascism… But I no longer have the strength to walk and eventually return to the battlefields…” Marinetti never made it to Valhalla.
Like Marinetti, I also seek to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the absurd, in this case, the unfathomable reservoir of the absurd is IDEX. Marinetti is dead and I am not actually in Abu Dhabi, instead, I repurpose the experiences relayed to me by Berlin-based artists Roman Goebel and Jelka Von Langen whose photographic essay we are discussing on a Zoom call. But no creative liberties or leaps of my imagination could match the absurdity of some of the keystone points from IDEX:
IDEX Keystone Point #1
As a result of the war between Russia and Ukraine, global defense
spending is on the rise. NATO member states in particular are
increasing their military budgets substantially. This gives momentum to
the global arms industry, which showcased its newest capabilities over
the course of the five-day IDEX exhibition.
The war in Ukraine is not just profitable, but good. War spurs innovation. New and creative ways to kill each other. People are getting rich off the war. Take it a step further: the fresh influx of American arms sent to Ukraine are mysteriously appearing on the black market, fueling civil wars in the Congo. Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari also reported American weapons sent to Ukraine have slipped into the Lake Chad Basin area. The same way grains of sand from the Sahara appear in Puerto Rico during hurricane season—war is a global ecosystem. At IDEX, however, Russia and Ukraine are in a competition to see who has sexier, blond-er escorts working their respective pavilions. Roman and Jelka suggest Russia is winning that war.
IDEX Keystone Point #2
At IDEX 2023, $21 billion dollars worth of deals were signed.
How many dead civilians and foot soldiers do you think they’ll fit into twenty-one billion dollars? They are incentivized to maximize that number, but only to a certain degree. Because, after all, EMTs and medic technologies are also being sold at IDEX. There’s a Goldilocks sweet-spot. Kill everyone and you’re out of a job. Kill no one and you’re also out of a job. The economy of the war machine is an ouroboros.
Pivotal to the conference experience is the gap between a weapon and its lived experience, made evident by a photograph of a woman in a gaudy Versace chain couture dress trying out a bazooka at the bazooka booth. I’ve noticed in Los Angeles, where I live, there’s a popular misconception that a fired gun makes a BANG, most likely arising from the prop guns used in Hollywood films. If you’ve ever witnessed a fired gun and the brief interval of silence that follows the smell of gunpowder, you know it actually makes a POP—a neat, efficient, compartmentalized, little pop that’s more akin to opening a champagne bottle than anything remotely connoting carnage or violence. In order to be sold, before a weapon is an object of death, it is something else. That something-elseness is usually sexual. Between the distance of the imagination of a weapon, its mechanized logistics and the lived experience, is an intrigue that borders on the erotic. For those at a shooting range for the first time, a common expression is “how good it feels in the hand.” To Roman, the grenades and missiles on display resemble sex toys of varying heights, suggesting that before a gun is a weapon it is a sex toy. The portraits of attendees also share a similar, vaguely erotic exuberance; their faces are a strange concoction of patriotism and glee that, in a different context, could be perceived as generalized horniness. At IDEX, the Disneyland of war plays itself out with a dazzling, if worn libido. With a softie, Marinetti says, Today, more than ever, art is not done but by those who do war. Worthy of glory nothing appears but the erect foreheads to rape Mystery, to challenge the monstrous temptresses of the Impossible. Only the asyntactic poet with loose words could penetrate the essence of matter and destroy the deaf hostility that separates it from us. Pasted on the terraformed backdrop, Abu Dhabi makes an ideal host city, because it can be nowhere and everywhere at once. Insert your desert landscape of choice (though I would have liked to see it in Los Angeles). It’s the same marketing strategies of the fashion industry: make the advertisement a mirror for the consumer to insert themselves.
At a panel titled Drones Challenging the Future, Professor Dr. Gert-René Polli says: “I strongly believe that adapted and specialized unmanned aerial vehicles will increasingly become an indispensable tool for law enforcement, as well as for the intelligence community who will start using these technologies on the operational level and on a tactical level. Later, Lieutenant General Richard G. Moore Jr. announces that the U.S. military’s approach to artificial intelligence is more ethical than adversaries’ because of its roots in a Judeo-Christian society. Marinetti nods in agreement: Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
After the panel, the crowd steps outside into blinding, scrutinizing sun to watch an aerial show. Marinetti knew how to have fun. At one point, afterall, he was a punk—a punk for the system; a fascist punk soldier, but a punk nonetheless. A high-speed jet shats out red tracer rounds, to which Marinetti shouts amidst a sound barrier torn to shreds, “Here is the very first sunrise on Earth! Nothing equals the splendor of its red sword, which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness.” Roman snaps a photograph and it is stunning.
IDEX Keystone Point #3
2023 marks the first year Israel opened a national pavilion at IDEX, showcasing more than sixty Israeli firms. The small nation had about as many firms there as China.
It’s the first year Israel opened a national pavilion at IDEX, in the hopes of fostering relations with buyers in the Gulf. “There is a very big difference between a mistress and a real wife,” quipped General Ariel Karo, executive vice president for marketing and business development for Raphael, an Israeli defense firm that showcased its Iron Beam—a high-energy laser weapon—at IDEX. “Israel knows how to deal with the same threats, the same weapon systems, the same doctrines, the same capabilities of the other side, and… therefore, here the neighborhood is really, really eager to buy Israeli systems.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “It will lead to the effective ending of the Israeli-Arab conflict—not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but the Israeli-Arab conflict.”
PICTURE THIS: Marinetti giving his closing speech to the patrons and peddlers of IDEX. He stands on a soapbox, and thanks said patrons and peddlers for their valiant, unyielding dedication to war, the final high art.
The representatives of Russia and Ukraine hold hands while he speaks; Biden and Xi-Jinping make out in the bathroom. Beauty exists only in struggle… He says as a red dot floats to the space between his brows. He raises his champagne glass and all the representatives of all the nations in the world raise theirs. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man. BOOM. Marinneti’s final performance art, an MK22 opens his 3rd eye chakra, red splays over the crowd. Everyone claps and the curtains close. The husk of a man hits the ground with a dull thud.
Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.
Marinetti