‘We discharge ourselves on both sides’: Vorticism: New Perspectives (A symposium convened October 29-30, 2010, at the Nasher Museum of Duke University, Durham, NC) ________ Michael Valdez Moses The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-1918 , the only major exhibition of Vorticist art to be held in the United States since John Quinn and Ezra Pound organized the first American show of Vorticist art at the Penguin Club of New York in 1917, opened at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University on September 30. Curated by Mark Antliff (Professor of Art History at Duke University) and Vivien Greene (Curator of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City), this major exhibition of England’s only ‘home-grown’ avant-garde art movement brings together many of the works exhibited at the three exhibitions organized by the various members of the Vorticist movement during its brief existence: the first Vorticist exhibition at the Doré Gallery in London in 1915, the 1917 Penguin Club exhibition in New York City, and the exhibition of Alvin Langdon Coburn’s ‘Vortographs’ (Vorticist photographs) held at the London Camera Club in 1917. The Vorticists runs at the Nasher through to the 2 nd of January 2010 before moving to the Guggenheim in Venice and then to Tate Britain. The exhibition displays sculpture, paintings, watercolours, collages, prints, drawings, vortographs, books, and journals produced by a group of artists and writers, including Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, David Bomberg, Lawrence Atkinson, Christopher Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Helen Saunders, Frederick Etchells, Jessica Dismorr, Dorothy Shakespear, William Roberts, and Ezra Pound, who loosely comprised, or were closely associated with, the Vorticist movement that briefly flourished in London and (to a lesser extent) New York in the second decade of the past century. 150 ‘We discharge ourselves on both sides’ In conjunction with the exhibit that showcases such epochal works as Epstein’s Rock Drill and Female Figure in Flenite, Gaudier- Brzeska’s (Hieratic) Head of Ezra Pound and Red Stone Dancer , Wyndham Lewis’s The Crowd , Helen Saunders’s Dance , and a first edition of BLAST 1, Mark Antliff and Scott Klein (Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at Wake Forest University) organized a symposium held on October 29 th and 30 th 2010 at Duke University entitled Vorticism: New Perspectives (from which an edited anthology of papers is currently being derived). Participants included Mark Antliff, Scott Klein, Paul Edwards, Fredric Jameson, Rebecca Beasley, Andrzej G Ċsiorek, Jonathan Black, Jonathan Wood, Allan Antliff, Miranda Hickman, Anne McCauley, Douglas Mao, Martin Puchner, and Sarah Stanners. In one of two keynote addresses, ‘ BLAST and Vorticism Exploded’, Edwards posed a series of questions that haunted the proceedings: Was Vorticism a coherent aesthetic movement? Was there anything that united the various works and projects of such a varied array of artists? Were there any integral or essential features that defined Vorticist painting, sculpture, photography, and literature? Was Vorticism anything more than (Wyndham Lewis’s) one-man movement? Edwards’s address emphasized the improvisatory and heterogeneous character of Vorticism as Lewis, Pound, and others developed it between 1913 and 1915. Edwards shed light on the byzantine and highly contingent manner in which the first issue of BLAST was assembled. As Edwards pointedly noted, the prints that appeared in the first July 1914 issue were set or commissioned long before the Vorticist manifestos that appeared in the volume were composed; indeed Lewis put together the issue in three distinct stages over six months, and it was only during the last phase of assemblage, some months after the initial plans for BLAST had been made and well after much of the first number had already been set, that Lewis introduced the critical terms ‘Vortex’ and ‘Vorticism’ into the issue. According to Edwards, ‘Vorticism’ was a kind of belated or last minute coinage that reflected Lewis’s response to immediate and rapidly changing circumstances, such as his break with Marinetti and Italian Futurism that had occurred in June of 1914, months after the assemblage of BLAST 1 was underway. The first exhibition of Vorticist art at the Doré Gallery in London in 1915 offers further evidence of the ad hoc, fluid, and internally conflicted character of a movement that reflected the shifting loyalties, tactical alliances, and widespread rivalries of its numerous participants. The 1915 Doré Gallery show included works not only by self-identified Vorticists du jour 151 Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies such as Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, Dismorr, Etchells, Wadsworth, Saunders, and Roberts, but also works by ‘invited’ artists, including Nevinson, who considered himself a Futurist (and who had fallen out with Lewis in June of 1914), and the Post-Impressionist painter, Duncan Grant, a representative of the Bloomsbury school that had come in for harsh treatment in the first issue of BLAST . To make matters even murkier, Epstein’s sculptures were conspicuously absent from the 1915 exhibition. Edwards thus made a persuasive case that Vorticism should be understood not so much as a theoretically consistent and internally cohesive literary and art movement, but rather as a revolutionary process the outcome of which could not be predicted even by those who were its principal architects and practitioners. But if Vorticism was not an ideologically coherent movement (whose chief theoreticians and promoters were Lewis and Pound), it was a literary and artistic practice deeply, even fatally, entangled with a profoundly theoretical approach to art and culture. In fact, the incoherent and inchoate character of the movement perhaps owed much to its (over) investment in many different and sometimes contradictory theories. Mark Antliff’s paper, ‘Politicizing the New Sculpture’, explored Pound’s and Gaudier-Brzeska’s indebtedness to the anarcho- individualist and nominalist theories of Dora Marsden (editor of the journals The Freewoman and The Egoist ), who was in turn inspired by the philosophic writings of Max Stirner and Henri Bergson. Alan Antliff, in his talk, ‘Man Ray – Vorticist’, likewise emphasized the indirect influences of Stirner’s anarcho-individualist philosophy and the aesthetic writings of Wilhelm Worringer and Friedrich Nietzsche on the early paintings of Man Ray, who in 1914 and 1915 followed a Vorticist trajectory before coming under the influence of Marcel Duchamp and moving off in the direction of an anti-formalist aesthetic. But these quite varied theoretical sources were by no means the only ideological wellsprings for Vorticism as the movement changed, developed, sub- divided, and ultimately expired between 1913 and 1919. As Fredric Jameson, in the second keynote address, ‘Odious Combinations: Visualizing the Political in Words’, emphasized, Wyndham Lewis’s extensive theoretical writings were indebted to a bewildering array of thinkers. Even a casual reader of The Art of Being Ruled (1926) and Time and Western Man (1927), both published some years after Vorticism had played itself out as a vital movement, can discern in Lewis’s thought the influences not only of Bergson, Nietzsche, William James, and Alfred North Whitehead – whose ‘time’ philosophies Lewis explicitly rejects – 152 ‘We discharge ourselves on both sides’ but also those of Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, de Tocqueville, Marx, Henry Maine, Proudhon, Vladimir Lenin, Le Bon, and Sorel, to name only a few of the most conspicuous thinkers whose writings exerted a fascination, though not always an attraction, for the ex-arch- Vorticist. Jameson’s critical assessment of Lewis’s political theorizing as ‘intellectual doodling’, while denying to it any stringent philosophic coherence, nonetheless emphasized that Lewis’s early opinionated, gossipy, and often satiric forays into aesthetic criticism, like his somewhat later ones into political philosophy, provide the necessary background for any informed appreciation of Lewis’s momentous contributions to avant-garde art in the 1910s and after. One important insight that thus emerged from the papers delivered was the notion that the aesthetic practices of the Vorticists crucially depended on their absorption and/or rejection of a multitude of competing theories about the nature of modern art and the relationship of the artist to modernity. In his talk, ‘Modern Art in England circa 1914: Hulme and Lewis’, Andrzej G Ċsiorek laid emphasis upon the ways in which Lewis’s negotiation of a unique space for Vorticism (between those already occupied by Cubism and Futurism) involved an intense exchange with the aesthetic and cultural criticism of T. E. Hulme. Lewis attempted retrospectively (and perhaps inaccurately or even disingenuously) to ally his own Vorticist paintings with Hulme’s celebration of geometric and abstract art. But whereas Hulme was committed to an anti-humanist, anti-progressive revolution in Western metaphysics, one that would shatter the hold of Renaissance humanism upon the European imagination, Lewis seemed intent upon creating an objective, geometric, and abstract art that directly confronted and made use of the forms of the contemporary machine age. As opposed to Hulme, who explicitly sought to overcome modernity, Lewis understood his Vorticist aesthetic as the means of representing (however critically) the distinctive forms of modern life. A decisive break with the modern age was, for Lewis, not possible, nor was its evasion desirable. But if, according to G Ċsiorek, Lewis ultimately distanced himself from Hulme’s critical pronouncements, his own art was no less a response to Hulme’s theoretical provocation. Even when seeking to practise his art, Lewis necessarily had to negotiate a cultural environment in which theory was inescapable. Unlike Elizabethan theatre or the Victorian novel, but very much in the germinal spirit of early seventeenth-century Italian opera or European romantic poetry, 153 Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies Vorticism was a movement that emerged from the theoretical debates and philosophical issues that provided the matrix of its birth.