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Casting Spells: the Vortex and the Absence of a British Avant-Garde

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Casting Spells: the Vortex and the Absence of a British Avant-Garde Casting Spells: The Vortex and the Absence of a British Avant-garde ________ Owen Hatherley SOME BLEAK CIRCUS, UNCOVERED, CAREFULLY-CHOSEN, VIVID NIGHT. IT IS PACKED WITH POSTERITY, SILENT AND EXPECTANT. POSTERITY IS SILENT, LIKE THE DEAD, AND MORE PATHETIC. Wyndham Lewis, Enemy of the Stars (1914) ( B1 51) 1929, London, capital of the Union of British Socialist Republics (U.B.S.R.). A decade after the end of a short and brutal Civil War, and fourteen years after the British Expeditionary Force was driven out of Europe by General Ludendorff’s victorious offensive. The capital of a devastated country, denuded of its Empire but now tentatively regaining some of its former prominence as the most industrially powerful of the Socialist Republics that now make up half of Europe. Trade between them is difficult, with the Baltic Sea cut off by the vast German Empire, its trade embargo assisted by the anti-communist United States. At the turn of the 1930s, the U.B.S.R. is starting to construct new cities. This is not happening without controversy. Through much of the country, pastoral garden cities are rising from the ruins, the towns destroyed first by Zeppelin raids and then by the Black and Tans. New towns like Connolly outside Dublin, Maxtonburgh in Strathclyde, or Morristown in Hertfordshire have been planned by Raymond Unwin using local materials, craftsmanship, and winding streets, to the splenetic derision of the Vorticist International. Based in London, Glasgow, Newcastle, and Leeds, but with corresponding branches in Budapest, Warsaw, Moscow, and Leningrad, this group has the ear of the more enlightened commissars of the U.B.S.R.’s four constituent republics. Edward Wadsworth and Frederick Etchells’s redesign of West Yorkshire into a model Vorticist metropolis is proceeding apace, with their intricate, jagged structures of concrete and glass sprouting walkways and towers that criss-cross the factory chimneys of Halifax and Huddersfield. Wyndham Lewis, the group’s chair, is finally completing his government commission to transform Regent Street, 1 Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies which was halfway through Reginald Blomfield’s neo-baroque redesign when interrupted by the 1919 Whitechapel Insurrection. Monumental sculptures by Jacob Epstein adorn the House of Soviets on the site of the demolished Houses of Parliament, though the ‘compromised’ classical-Vorticist design by Charles Holden was subjected to much Vorticist scorn on publication. Opponents of the Vorticists are keen to remind them of their roots in a pre-revolutionary art movement. Commissar Harry Pollitt told the Daily Worker that ‘not so long ago these were bohemians who sneered at the proletariat, who hoped to “kill John Bull with art” when John Bull was trying to kill the British bourgeoisie’. Some mutter darkly about counter-revolutionary activity during the Civil War on the part of some in the group, with Edward Wadsworth under particular suspicion. Although their eager participation in the reconstruction has allayed the suspicions of many in the Trades Unions and the Workers’ Councils, perhaps their antisocial reputation isn’t completely undeserved. Interviewed about his work on Regent Street, Lewis, dressed in a far from proletarian dinner jacket offset by a hammer and sickle pin, told the Daily Herald ‘when I say that I should like to see a completely transfigured world, it is not because I want to look at it. It is you who would look at it. It would be your spirit that would gain by this exhilarating spectacle. I should merely benefit, I and other painters like me, by no longer finding ourselves in the position of freaks’ ( CD 39). Old Vort This little attempt at a counterfactual sounds silly, perhaps more so than it should. Something in the notion of an artistic avant-garde engaged in the transformation of everyday life seems inherently un-English, hence perhaps the employment of a French term to cover experimental or advanced cultural practices. Avant-gardism’s connotations of war, Leninism, conflict, and upheaval don’t accord with how the English like to see themselves. Hence also the popularity of an Arcadian, pastoral aesthetic in that most urban, industrial, and warlike of nations. In the 1920s, aesthetic innovators usually had to follow the model of the lone eccentric – a Stanley Spencer, a Ronald Firbank, but no Mayakovsky, no Brecht. In the ferment that preceded the First World War, however, there were two groupings in Britain that necessitated the title of vanguard. Most famously, that upper-middle class clique of geniuses and 2 Casting Spells talentless toffs, the Bloomsbury Group, and more significantly the Vorticists, an extremely short-lived group of painters, propagandists, sculptors, and writers active for (at a stretch) about seven years, from 1913 to 1920 – Wyndham Lewis as its intellectual Cromwell, with a retinue including the brilliant Edward Wadsworth, Helen Saunders, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and, as chief cheerleader, Ezra Pound. But the collectivity that marked the avant-garde of the first half of the century was seemingly anathema to the individualistic Vorticist sensibility, with most of these figures assimilated into a history of literary modernism rather than the avant-garde, exemplars of a patrician ‘right modernism’ more sympathetic to fascism than to communism. Yet how much does this have to do with contingent political circumstances? A perusal of, say, the Russian Futurists’ 1913 manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste reveals a document no more or less ‘revolutionary’ than BLAST (1914). In fact, the latter embraced political turmoil more explicitly than soon-to-be Bolsheviks such as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Victor Khlebnikov. Both movements refused to share in the proto-fascist exaltation of the mechanized slaughter of colonial War that could be found in Marinetti’s pre-1914 texts, and neither were as enthusiastic as the Italian Futurists when European war arrived. And in aesthetic terms, Vorticism has far more in common with the Suprematists (most prominently, Malevich, El Lissitzky, and Nikolai Suetin) who would set about painting Vitebsk in the late 1910s than it does with any other movement. Like Vorticism, Russian Suprematism was a kind of frustrated architecture, a series of sketches towards a new urbanism that could not be realized in the present circumstances but which would, one day, be brought to fruition. ‘Casting spells’, Lewis called it in the mid-1930s in the essay ‘Plain Home-Builder: Where Is Your Vorticist?’ ( CHC 248). The point of my introductory fancy is to make clear how much the break-up of Vorticism owed to political circumstance, specifically to the success of cultural and political reaction in the countries that ‘won’ the First World War. While the losing side – Germany, Hungary, Austria, Russia – all had greater or lesser periods of rule by Workers’ Councils and intensive avant-garde experiments in the transformation of everyday life, France had the neo-classical ‘return to order’ and Britain had a disastrous period of architectural and artistic reaction from which it took decades to recover. It is not so extraordinary to imagine a different outcome, and Lewis, for one, hedged his bets until the late 1930s. As he wrote in 1934 in response to a questionnaire on writers’ 3 Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies political views: ‘Politically I take my stand exactly midway between the Bolshevik and the Fascist – the gentleman on my left I shake with my left hand, the gentleman on my right with my right hand. If there were only one (as I wish there were) I’d shake him with both hands’. 1 Anarchy and Degradation Certainly, the British cultural Establishment was profoundly unnerved by Vorticism, as press reports from the time attest. The sheer hostility of the Edwardian arbiters of taste towards the possibility of an artistic avant-garde can be seen in some of the press reports of the Post- Impressionist Exhibition of 1910 (rather mild: Gaugin, Van Gogh, Monet, with one or two more daring Kandinskys here and there). With all the jittery force of a moral panic, the press evoked political conflict, sexual licentiousness, and moral breakdown: ‘anarchy and degradation’ and ‘morbid excrescences’ in the Morning Post , ‘disease and pestilence’ in The Nation , and ‘of no interest except to the student of pathology and the specialist in abnormality’ according to the Connoisseur . Naturally, the ante was upped somewhat for the Vorticists themselves; and, equally unsurprisingly, their non-Englishness was commented upon, their infection with a continental cultural disease – a ‘corrupt intellectuality’ to the Daily Express , ‘Junkerism in Art’ for The Times .2 These reactions were in fact symptomatic of the terror generated by a supposedly uncharacteristic extremism creeping into English cultural and political life: the suffragettes’ move into direct action, the suppression of revolt in Ireland, and a wave of Trade Union militancy – all of which would find echoes in BLAST , the ‘journal’ of the Vorticist movement. BLAST ‘blessed’, among others, the suffragettes Lillie Lenton and Freda Graham; Unionist advocate of political violence, and prosecutor of Oscar Wilde, Edward Carson; and Trade Unionist Robert Applegarth ( B1 28). Note also the blessing of Cromwell ( B1 28), a reminder of how England precedes the continent in its penchant for revolutionary violence. Much of BLAST is taken up with a re-imagining of England as the centre of a technological primitivism that would supersede the Italian Futurism and French Cubism that preceded it. Given the Vorticists’ evident enthusiasm for the pre-War environment of strikes, syndicalism, and terrorism, it’s not unlikely that, had post-War politics taken a different turn, they would have been far from aloof from any upheaval. So what did this avant-garde consist of, and what 4 Casting Spells differentiated it from that other ‘vanguard’ in Bloomsbury and from the fascist avant-garde in Italy? The Great English Vortex “[Y]ou Wops insist too much on the Machine.
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