Words in Freedom

The Italian Futurists were deeply enamored of postcards. Postcards were, after all, everything that the Futurists loved. They were new, having been invented only in 1869. They were fast, and could travel through the mails at lightning speed, even quicker than letters. And they were transgressive, for postcards were bold and open --- no envelopes! --- and yelled out at anyone who happened to see them. The printed postcards that the Futurists made often came with a bold call to action. "March, Don't Rot! says the slogan on one of their most famous cards, with the words printed across the tricolore of the Italian flag.

So it comes as little surprise that Futurists like Balla took to hand-drawn postcards as part of the performance of being artistic, and political, revolutionaries. It's easy to imagine that the real audience for these cards was not the recipients, but the letter carriers and passers by who happened to see the cards. These are advertisements for the movement as much as, or more than, they are any sort of personal communication. The cards bear addresses, but otherwise there is no clear "front" or "back"; and the scrawled messages are hardly ones that members of the movement needed to hear. Rarely have artistic message and medium been so perfectly aligned.