Motion: Relative and Absolute

Giacomo Balla's "Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912)"

One of Boccioni’s goals in “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” was to convey his theory of plastic dynamism through the action of the animate object: the running man. Like Giacomo Balla, one of Boccioni’s contemporaries, some futurists attempted to achieve both motion and dynamics through repetition of a limb to display its multiple forms, but Boccioni did it through a single entity that expressed the various forms of each limb’s movement. When looking at each section of the statue, it is inconclusive as to what object the sculpture is reflecting. However, when looking at the piece in its entirety, there is plainly a man running. This was intended as Boccioni was not sculpting a man running, but the action of a man running. There is no still object being depicted, such as a leg or arm, so the wholeness of the piece can only be seen when all of the actions of the body work together in unison. This idea is further expanded when Eadweard Muybridge’s “Photo Sequence of a Running Man” is compared to Boccioni’s sculpture; the varying positions of the calf muscle and thigh muscle in the photo series, for instance, become clear through the definitions and curvature of the sculpture. There appear to be layered to each muscle that are the multiple forms of muscles, which would look similar to if Muybridge’s running man photos were stack on top of each other to create one man. Ironically, the muscles are locked in a dynamic state of constant motion. In the sculpture, there is no head to the man, but a tip or point that shows that it is not a man but rather the silhouette of the man’s trajectory. Muybridge was the first man to create the motion picture. Boccioni draws on this new technology to create a still sculpture that displays motion instead of the movie created out of a still image.