A new exhibition at the Wolfsonian-Florida International University, the museum in Miami Beach devoted to design, propaganda and the decorative arts, looks at a century of the modern idea of speed — and its limits.
“This exhibition reflects on the legacy of the Futurist movement’s celebration of speed and moves beyond art and literature into the realms of material culture, the built environment, popular entertainment and everyday life,” said Marianne Lamonaca, the Wolfsonian’s associate director for curatorial affairs and education.
“Speed Limits,” was co-organized by the Wolfsonian-FIU and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and curated by Jeffrey T. Schnapp, a history professor at Stanford.
Blending art and architecture with traffic and highway design, “Speed Limits” takes off from the Futurist Manifesto of 1909 and its famous declaration that “the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.”
That beauty quickly became one of the 20th century’s key fascinations, the subject not just of art but of advertising, as seen in the show’s 1938 advertising poster, which offers a heroic vision of the spark plug, from the Italian spark plug manufacturer Magneti Marelli.
The exhibition looks at several New York aspects of speed: the immense acceleration of building construction seen in skyscrapers in the 1920s and 1930s — the Empire State Building famously took just a year and 45 days to build — and efforts to manage traffic patterns in the city, as captured in photographs taken by John Veltri in 1938.
In the century since the Futurist Manifesto, however, such noble visions have been tempered by reality. Now that we live in it, the future of the Futurists appears considerably less attractive. While the dream of that sleek and speedy future inspired designers and artists, traffic jams have replaced visions of smoothly flowing freeways.
“The exhibition,” declared the summary from the Wolfsonian, “bears witness to the prevalent dream of an urban space with freely flowing traffic and illustrates the concept of the grid or network that governs the movement not only of objects and goods, but also of information. This is juxtaposed with the breakdown of circulation — the traffic jam.”
The offspring of the car and the wider need for speed included new kinds of businesses, like the drive-in theater and the motel.
Speed is seen as a mixed blessing, even in our cars. The new attitude is summed up by an Elmore Leonard character, Chili Palmer, played on screen by John Travolta. In the 2005 film version of “Be Cool,” he drives a Honda Insight hybrid. “But what about speed?” he is asked.
“If you’re important,” Mr. Palmer answers, “people will wait.”
“Speed Limits” runs through Feb. 20, 2011 at the Wolfsonian-Florida International University, (305) 531-1001, wolfsonian.org.
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