Vortex Out of German London 1
________ 2
3
Robert Bond 4
5
Focus on the ‘genuine’ hidden in the interstices between dogmatized 6
beliefs of the world, thus establishing a tradition of lost causes; giving 7
names to the hitherto unnamed. 8
Siegfried Kracauer1 9
10
The Action occurs in the Restaurant Gambetta, in German London, in October, 11
1914. […] 12
A very large brass vase in the middle, and a Russian wood-painting of a 13
Virgin and Child on narrow wall between the two windows, gives the German 14
cultured touch. 15
The peculiar situation of this Restaurant makes it indispensable to a few 16
people. 17
Wyndham Lewis, The Ideal Giant (1917) (CPP 123) 18
19
What is worse, they [‘these learned monsters’] do not know how to pass 20
over to us the energy implicit in any high work of the past because they 21
purposely destroy that energy as dangerous to the states for which they 22
work – which it is, for any concrete thing is a danger to rhetoricians and 23
politicians, as dangerous as a hard coin is to a banker. 24
Charles Olson2 25
26
Extraterritorial 27
28
I was like laid off the docks. 29
Mark E. Smith on why he launched The Fall in 19763 30
31
In his review of Fredric Jameson’s Fables of Aggression (1979), Alan 32
Munton suggests that Jameson’s ‘rule-making rather than rule-breaking’ 33
contemporary academic methodologies cannot supply us with an 34
understanding of the ‘transgressive and pleasurable’ qualities of 35
Wyndham Lewis’s work. The ‘oppositional spirit’ or spirit of joyful 36
rebellion within Lewis’s writings and thinking can be conveyed by a 37
method which situates him alongside ‘illegitimate groupings’, however: 38
Munton points to the ‘illegitimate tradition in nineteenth-century 39
European writing’ – singular social theorists such as Fourier, Stirner, 40
and Nietzsche.4 In the course of this exploration, I want to argue that 41
we warm to Lewis’s specifically Vorticist transgression and illegitimacy, 42
as well as to what Walter Allen called the generally ‘profoundly 43
unEnglish quality’ of Lewis’s ideas, when we see that he is floating free: 44
Lewis’s rebelliousness is enabled by an extraterritoriality which was a 45
centrally defining quality of the Vorticism within which his 46
consciousness matured.5 Such extraterritoriality found expression in his 47
social role as an unattached intellectual; it also became manifest in the 48
‘super-national’ character of Lewis’s activities. This essay sets out one 49
specific manifestation of the émigré extraterritoriality which – I would 50
suggest – fascinatingly characterizes contemporary neo-Vorticist activity 51
as well as the Vorticist-period radical culture in London: the 52
involvement in Anglo-German cultural phenomena. 53
My enquiry develops into a documentation – which is by no 54
means complete – of the points of affinity between the visionary 55
sensibilities of a range of extraterritorial cultural phenomena across the 56
twentieth century: Vorticism, the ‘Lukács circle’, and Expressionism 57
around the First World War, along with the London neo-Vorticism 58
developed by Iain Sinclair and Brian Catling during the mid-1970s and 59
after. A major subtextual concern of my work is that the floating social 60
position, as well as the visionary perspective and strategies, adopted by 61
these extraterritorial avant-gardes may turn out to be of considerable 62
relevance to our neo-liberal intellectual life increasingly riven by reliance 63
on the short-term academic contract and random redundancy. This 64
sociological interest of mine has biographical motivations – motivations 65
which, for the moment at least, my writing cannot help wearing on its 66
sleeve. In many ways this somewhat fraught and fragmentary research 67
constitutes a plain description of how it feels to have an intended 68
academic career terminated by the irrationally competitive market 69
system. What happens to scholarly energy, to academic intent, when 70
one’s department unexpectedly informs one that one can no longer 71
practise that energy, develop one’s intellectual impulses? I began to need 72
to understand spiritual violences: the strange fruit of this society’s 73
almost unbearable frustration. I had sensed that at the core of every 74
aggression expressive of today’s often selfish social behaviour there 75
might lie a more positive, natural form of violence: energies which I 76
could begin to historicize within locatable genealogies of spiritual 77
passion. If we can discern these hidden energies more clearly, perhaps 78
we can begin to redeem the violence to which our intellectual life is now 79
reduced. To transfigure academic egotism into mental vitalities. 80
Philip Head has connected Karl Mannheim’s idea of the 81
Freischwebender – the ‘free-floater’ or unattached intellectual – to T. S. 82
Eliot’s description of Lewis’s political status as a ‘detached observer’; 83
though Head does note too that Mannheim’s canonical sociological 84
conception of a ‘relatively classless stratum [of intellectuals] which is not 85
too firmly situated in the social order’, is not quite identical to Lewis’s 86
ideal of a creative ministry ‘possessing no concerted and lawless power, 87
coming indifferently from all classes’.6 But Lewis’s vaunting, in Rude 88
Assignment (1950), of ‘unofficial, or private, or outside criticism’ – versus 89
intellectual work ‘in the propaganda service of the State’, which is seen 90
as ‘merely fascism’ (RA 81) – is a clear expression of his role as a free-91
floating, disaffiliated commentator. Like Iain Sinclair, unofficial social 92
critic in outside publications from The Kodak Mantra Diaries (1971) 93
onwards, Lewis arguably joins Deleuze’s Spinoza in ‘that line of “private 94
thinkers” who overturn values and construct their philosophy with 95
hammer blows’: unlike ‘the “public professors” (who, according to 96
Leibniz’s approving words, do not disturb the established sentiments, 97
the order of Morality and the Police)’.7 98
Head endorses Michael Löwy’s suggestion that Mannheim’s 99
concept of a grouping of unattached intellectuals drew on his own 100
experience of the group around Georg Lukács, ‘with whom he had been 101
associated in the so-called Free School for Cultural Studies in Budapest 102
in 1917’.8 In her important, yet rarely cited, study of the Lukács circle, 103
Mary Gluck quotes from the diary of one of the group’s most 104
prominent Freischwebender, Béla Balázs, in 1916: 105
106
I am the descendant of a spiritual type which has never appeared 107
in history as a separate race of people, of whom only theosophy 108
gives occasional glimpses, and which has sent only isolated, 109
individual messengers like myself into the world, who even in 110
their isolation and orphaned state recognize their own kind.9 111
112
Though such otherworldly spirito-intellectual messengers may feel able 113
to recognize few of their own kind in the contemporary academic 114
system, Mannheim’s formulation of the concept of the marginal, 115
unattached intellectual, which was ‘more or less complete by 1918’, as 116
Gluck notes, once represented ‘what amounted to a generational 117
manifesto’ within central Europe.10 A case could be made that under 118
existing university conditions the nurture of a singular soul or intellect, 119
the fulfilment of a genuine spirit, has been replaced by the Adorno-120
derived condemnation of idiosyncrasy as bourgeois ideology, ineffectual 121
rebellion; a condemnation paradoxically twinned with a self-publicizing 122
cultivation of truly ersatz, anti-capitalist rebellion itself determined 123
largely by the hustle for tenure. Cultural Marxism as New Labour in 124
polysyllables. The maintenance of hierarchy in the university as 125
elsewhere: today’s mass production of thought is overseen by those who 126
will best promote a false democracy, our complacent populism where 127
the people remain the victims. But in history, the Lukács circle 128
emblematized a wider phenomenon of self-nurturing, intellectual free-129
floaters; a phenomenon which persisted within Weimar Germany. As 130
Martin Jay has written, such Frankfurt School-aligned figures as Adorno, 131
Benjamin, Bloch, and Kracauer ‘were all unaffiliated and experimental 132
leftists who could have merited Benjamin’s description of Kracauer’s 133
“consistent outsiderness”’.11 A 1931 essay of Kracauer’s, ‘Revolt of the 134
Middle Classes’, adds a Marxist inflection to Deleuze’s general 135
characterization of the philosopher as free-floating Luftmensch, as 136
frequenting ‘various milieus […] in the manner of a hermit, a shadow, a 137
traveller or boarding house lodger’.12 Kracauer’s essay, in observing that 138
‘it is the dispossessed middle classes that are rebelling’, hints how the 139
shadowy homelessness of the unattached intellectual prefigures a much 140
more widespread state of bourgeois dispossession within contemporary 141
capitalist society. ‘In economic terms, the middle classes today are to a 142
great extent proletarianized; in conceptual terms, they are homeless. 143
During the current crisis, this proletarianization has exacerbated their 144
resentment of capitalism.’13 145
Just as the paranoias of the Freischwebender are re-enacted in your 146
local Waitrose, Kracauer’s para-academic concept of extraterritoriality 147
has now become a mainstay of the global academic discourse of 148
German Studies – such as Weimar film studies – and critical theory. 149
Jay’s article ‘The Extraterritorial Life of Siegfried Kracauer’, which was 150
included in his collection Permanent Exiles (1985), records how Kracauer 151
filed a series of letters written in the 1960s under the heading of 152
‘extraterritoriality’. Kracauer’s marginality as an unattached intellectual 153
found expression both in his stammer – which, Jay wrote, ‘would 154
preclude, among other things, a teaching career at any time in his life’ – 155
and in his appearance. Jay notes that to Kracauer’s protégé Adorno, 156
‘who actually used the word “extraterritorial”’ when describing 157
Kracauer’s face, ‘he looked as if he were from the Far East’.14 The critic 158
Hans Mayer dubbed him a ‘Japanese painted by an Expressionist’, while 159
Asja Lacis added an ‘African’ allusion.15 Kracauer’s alien’s visage hence 160
alerted others to the way in which the extraterritorial unattached 161
intellectual is characteristically émigré. In his own History: The Last Things 162
Before the Last (1969), he remarked how the émigré (such as himself in 163
America) lives ‘in the near-vacuum of extraterritoriality’.16 Because he 164
saw that Germany itself in 1960 had become ‘no country but a place 165
lying somewhere in a vacuum’, Kracauer was happy to have escaped the 166
unreality of a space ‘frightening in its prosperity, politeness, sham depth, 167
and complete formlessness’.17 168
Extraterritorial Kracauer and Vorticist Lewis are connected 169
specifically by the way in which an émigré extraterritoriality of the 170
unattached intellectual, or artist, characterized London radical 171
modernism. In an essay for The Immigrant Generations: Jewish Artists in 172
Britain 1900-1945 (1982), Charles Spencer noted how Slade-trained 173
Jewish modernists such as David Bomberg ensured that ‘foreignness, so 174
to speak, had been injected into the British art scene not only by the 175
French and Italian avant-garde [Cubo-Futurism], but from within by 176
these Jewish practitioners’.18 Pointing out that Bomberg’s reputation in 177
particular is now ‘probably higher than that of any British artist of his 178
generation and as high as any in the present century’, Spencer went on 179
to approve Andrew Forge’s remarks that ‘not a single one of the 180
generalisations that are usually made about British painting can be 181
applied to Bomberg’s work. It is not graphic, not illustrational, nor 182
anecdotal, nor is it gentle or refined.’19 His was of course not a British 183
art but instead an immigrant London art: cutting his task down to 184
expression, Bomberg was less strictly Vorticist than Expressionist, as he 185
conveyed through In the Hold (1913-14) what Richard Cork called the 186
‘agitation and strain’ of the physical process of migration. Citing Mark 187
Gertler’s memory of disembarkation – ‘All is chaos, selfish and 188
straining. I am being pushed and hustled’ – Cork has suggested that ‘the 189
grid’s explosive effect on the figures in Bomberg’s painting may, 190
therefore, be seen as a metaphor for the broken lives of the immigrants 191
he knew so well’. In the Hold was displayed in the ‘Jewish Section’, 192
organized by Bomberg, of the Twentieth Century Art exhibition held in 193
May 1914 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.20 194
As Muriel Emanuel has observed, it was all the more remarkable 195
that – within a refined and conservative Britain, where ‘foreigners and 196
their alien ideas were regarded with equal scepticism’ – it was ‘precisely 197
in the successful marriage of their cultural backgrounds, and their 198
responsiveness to the major avant-garde artistic developments on the 199
European continent’, that Bomberg’s generation made ‘its impact on 200
British art’.21 What Spencer calls the ‘highly individual and disturbing 201
nature’ of Bomberg’s own art can be traced to its combination of an 202
‘alien’ Jewishness and an ‘alien’ modernism.22 It is indeed precisely the 203
alien quality – that is, the tensed and disturbing quality of émigré 204
extraterritoriality – which Spencer suggests bonded Vorticism with 205
Jewish London modernism. Highlighting the fact that Gaudier-Brzeska 206
shared Jacob Epstein’s 1913 exhibition and became close friends with a 207
number of Jewish artists, Spencer notes that ‘what is significant is that as 208
an alien, by birth and in the daring nature of his work, he allied himself 209
to these Jewish colleagues’.23 Similarly, while Bomberg’s aesthetic 210
alignment with the Vorticist Lewis was of course tense, since it was 211
more a confluence of alien disturbances than an alliance, Walter 212
Michel’s remark that Bomberg ‘consistently rejected’ (M 72) Vorticism 213
does seem extreme. Bomberg refused Lewis’s invitations to contribute 214
illustrations to both issues of BLAST, and further refused to join the 215
Rebel Art Centre in Spring 1914; but he also united with the Vorticists 216
in their dissociation from Marinetti’s and Nevinson’s Futurist polemics, 217
and Bomberg did appear in the special non-members section of the 218
1915 Vorticist Exhibition.24 Crucially, during Lewis’s visit to Bomberg’s 219
Whitechapel home in the winter of 1912, Bomberg had ‘recognized in 220
the conversation, a Slade man honouring the same pledge to which I 221
was staking my life – namely a Partizan’.25 The London Expressionist 222
and the Vorticist were both partisans of extraterritorial disturbance. 223
I am particularly interested in one specific manifestation of the 224
mode of émigré extraterritoriality which characterized the Vorticist-period 225
radical culture in London: the involvement in Anglo-German ‘super-226
national’ artistic endeavours. Writing of ‘the structure of ideas about 227
“super-nationalism” and “universalism” that Lewis had formulated with 228
Nietzsche’s help in 1915’, Paul Edwards cites Ezra Pound’s 1918 remark 229
that Lewis ‘is a collection of races’. As Edwards also notes, Lewis’s 230
thinking about super-nationalism in relation to his (Vorticist) self-image 231
influenced his work on Tarr around the time of the war.26 Unworried by 232
the likely unpopularity of its stance at that time, that novel’s 1915 233
preface hoped for future Anglo-German cultural manifestations, as a 234
concretization of an already-beneficent alien influence: 235
236
Germany’s large leaden brain booms away in the centre of 237
Europe. Her brain-waves and titanic orchestrations have broken 238
round us for too long not to have had their effect. As we never 239
think ourselves, except a stray Irishman or American, we should 240
long ago have been swamped had it not been for the sea. […] 241
Germany has its mission and its beauty. But I do not believe it 242
will ever be able to benefit, itself, by its power and passion. The 243
English may a little more: I hope Russia will. (T1 13-14) 244
245
Lewis’s suggestion here that English culture may continue to be 246
influenced by the ‘power and passion’ of German culture, hints that he 247
conceived of Vorticism and Expressionism, say, as twin artistic 248
movements in some way forming a unified aesthetic project. Looking 249
back on this experimental time so as to assert its essential super-250
nationalism, he indeed wrote that the conjoined ‘vorticist, cubist, and 251
expressionist movements’ had ‘presupposed a new human ethos, which 252
undoubtedly must have superseded, in some measure, modes of feeling 253
of a merely national order’ (WLA 306). The art-movements’ 254
revolutionary affinities meant that ‘in some measure’, for Lewis, the 255
international war could not happen. But it was also the war which, in 256
objectively terminating the movements prematurely, affined them. One 257
central resemblance between Vorticism and Expressionism was their 258
incomplete, speculative nature as cultural phenomena: the movements 259
after all only ‘aimed at a renewal of our artistic sensibility, and to provide 260
it with a novel alphabet of shapes and colours with which to express 261
itself’. Lewis’s crucial retrospective description of Vorticism as ‘a 262
program, rather than an accomplished fact’ (WLA 339), sees it to be as 263
much of a provocative spectre, a semi-formed cultural undercurrent, as 264
Ernst Bloch’s Expressionism. Expressionist architectural innovation – 265
in the form of Bruno Taut’s Glass House, and the surrounding 266
Werkbund Exposition in Cologne – had been shut down prematurely 267
already in August 1914 on account of the First World War.27 Yet as late 268
as 1938 Bloch commented that ‘the inheritance of Expressionism is not 269
yet at an end, because it has not yet been started on at all’.28 Sinclair’s 270
visionary tract ‘Slade & the Tyrannicides’ (in his Suicide Bridge (1979), the 271
text dedicated to Lewis) seems to launch a comparable conception of 272
neo-Vorticism, as a hyper-articulate aesthetic ‘potential’ locked within a 273
clot of inarticulacy and frustrated delivery: 274
275
They [‘Hand & Hyle’] are enclosed in personal sandstorms, 276
furious vortex: questions, accusations are latent, unspoken. 277
The tragedy cannot get into gear. The Miracle Play remains 278
a potential, without text. The craftsmen are absent. The audience 279
is distanced, complacent; egoic attention, half-hearing, repulsed by 280
syntactic crudities. It does not touch them. 281
But the speed: from car to Slade is frenzy, garbled rush of 282
Orphic Mysteries, messenger who cannot get the speech 283
performed in the allowed interval.29 284
285
286
Brian Catling himself stammers, as Kracauer did; and arguably the 287
impeded avant-gardes of Vorticism and Expressionism alike can be 288
placed in what Kracauer termed ‘a tradition of lost causes’. It is also 289
worth underlining the fact that, as such abortive aesthetic programmes, 290
Vorticism and Expressionism – and in particular what Timothy O. 291
Benson has called ‘the urban phase of early Expressionism, centred in 292
Berlin just prior to World War I’ – were affined too by a shared super-293
national quality.30 It seems that such extraterritoriality was precisely a 294
product of a distinctive ‘power and passion’ which marked a certain 295
mode of cultural production across Europe around 1912. Head has 296
noted, crucially, how ‘the implicit criticism of the orthodox critic, in 297
wartime, that Vorticism was un-English’ was ‘curiously paralleled’ by 298
‘German orthodoxy that found Expressionism un-German’. Head 299
argues that the critics believed that the avant-gardes ‘concentrated on 300
self-expression rather than the representation of the cultural values of 301
their national societies’; we could add that it was the peculiarly 302
passionate and severe quality of their expression – Ludwig Meidner’s 303
apocalypticism, for example, and what Head calls Vorticism’s ‘pictorial 304
intensity and implicit violence’ – to which the orthodox especially 305
objected.31 The clairvoyant expression of the frustrated can be troubling, 306
and today Sinclair’s writing – a writing ‘crazy, dangerous, prophetic’, in 307
Angela Carter’s apt words – continues to raise the hackles of those who 308
would delete passion from culture.32 In a sense it was precisely because 309
the force of Vorticist and Expressionist imagery powerfully registered 310
social tension and prophesized the coming war (and while the 311
newspaper critics looked the other way), that The Times could go on, in 312
1915, to accuse the Vorticists of an aesthetic violence worthy of the 313
Junker, ‘should the Junker happily take to painting, instead of disturbing 314
the peace of Europe’.33 As Lewis would write in Rude Assignment, 315
‘[s]everity [in visual art], like Satire, will only in the end be tolerated in 316
the foreigner’ (RA 132). In his 1978 essay ‘Servant to the Stars’, Sinclair 317
identified this extraterritorial passion, ‘solar’ disturbance, as the defining 318
feature of the neo-Vorticism of Catling’s Pleiades in Nine (1976). ‘The 319
same alienated “foreign” quality: solar men. The sun roaring beneath the 320
formal English surface: “Saxon or photon”.’34 321
As Head sees, Expressionism and Vorticism ‘shared what 322
Eksteins calls “a motif of violence – in theme, in form, in colour – 323
which was more intense than that to be found in either cubism or 324
futurism”’.35 This is just one of the affinities between Vorticism and 325
Expressionism recorded in Head’s brilliantly and extensively 326
documented article ‘Vorticist Antecedents’; yet, arguably, it is precisely 327
this affinity which most explains why, as Edwards has put it, ‘visual 328
Vorticism’s connections with Cubism and Futurism have been 329
acknowledged more fully than its no less important connections with 330
Expressionism’.36 As if seeking to develop Sinclair’s solar imagery into a 331
full-blown imagery of informal sunspot – or sunstream – passion, Head 332
contends that ‘Vorticism’s relationship to Expressionism is best 333
visualised as a flow of two streams fed, in part, and unevenly, from a 334
common proto-Expressionist, proto-Vorticist source, rather than as a 335
flow from one stream to the other’. Head points to the image of the 336
vortex, when adopted as a motif of ‘transcendental experience’ (or 337
P/passion), as a common source: this concept of the vortex was used in 338
Edwardian England by the Theosophical Society (which directly 339
influenced Kandinsky and Mondrian), and also within artistic Munich 340
around 1900, where the vortex – Head states – was ‘readily visualized in 341
the years preceding the emergence of the “new art” as a point of 342
experience at which the long-dominant traditions of naturalist art […] 343
could be supplanted by a creative vision which combined the ecstatic 344
with the geometric’.37 The suggestion is that Expressionism and 345
Vorticism sprang out as two trajectories from the ur-modernist project 346
of capturing transcendental passion within aesthetic form. 347
Neil H. Donahue has noted how within Hugo von 348
Hofmannsthal’s originary document of German literary modernism, 349
‘The Chandos Letter’ (1902), the vortex-image ‘represents the 350
concentration of his disordered vision into sudden visions of a higher 351
order’. ‘The figure of the vortex’ is ‘the only image to be repeated in the 352
letter’, Donahue observes, adding that ‘the figure of the vortex controls 353
the formal organization of the letter in its different stages and represents 354
its increasing density as a self-reflexive construction.’38 In his 355
introduction to the 1963 Penguin anthology of Twentieth-Century German 356
Verse, Patrick Bridgwater similarly summarized the work of early 357
Expressionist poet August Stramm, in terms of its ‘dynamic, […] highly 358
concentrated expressions of an inner state or vision’: 359
360
[Stramm’s poems] are dynamic, staccato, abstract, highly 361
concentrated expressions of an inner state or vision. By means of 362
neologisms (verbs formed from adjectives and nouns, etc.), an 363
absence of punctuation, more or less arbitrary line-breaks, 364
Stramm seeks – successfully – to convey the immediate dynamism 365
of the moment of sensation. […] Together with Arno Holz’s 366
impressionistic ‘central axis’ poetry, Stramm’s work is closest to 367
the work of non-German poets: Italian Futurism (Ungaretti and 368
the early Montale) and Anglo-American Vorticism.39 369
370
The preoccupation with art as a geometrical, ‘abstract’ capturing of 371
visionary dynamics arguably constituted the basis for what Bridgwater 372
calls the ‘closeness between Expressionist poetry and Vorticism, at least 373
in their theoretical substructure’.40 Head’s findings consistently 374
underline how this preoccupation was sourced in the proto-Expressionist 375
aesthetics of Munich around 1900. Recording that Hermann Obrist’s 376
unpublished papers include art criticism from 1895 titled Ecstatic Vortex, 377
and that Peg Weiss described this compilation as offering ‘an 378
astonishing anticipation of Vorticist poetry’, Head refers to Obrist’s idea 379
that (in Wilhelm Weber’s words) ‘the spiral is one of the basic forms 380
that visualize dynamic force’.41 Lewis’s susceptibility to this somewhat 381
subterranean notion – and its central significance as a fundamental 382
‘common proto-Expressionist, proto-Vorticist source’ for Vorticism – is 383
suggested by the six months he spent in Munich in 1906, when he 384
studied art at the Akademie Heymann, as well as by his remarks in the 385
editorial for the second volume of BLAST (1915) that ‘unofficial 386
Germany has done more for the movement that this paper was founded 387
to propagate, and for all branches of contemporary activity in Science 388
and Art, than any other country. It would be the absurdest ingratitude 389
on the part of artists to forget this’ (B2 5).42 390
It may well have been an idea of the visionary vortex that Lewis 391
had in mind when he defended, in this mid-war editorial, the historical 392
link between un-German, ‘unofficial’ cognition from Germany and un-393
English, equally spectral, Vorticist cognition from London. Elsewhere in 394
BLAST, it was Enemy of the Stars (1914) which represented – in 395
Edwards’s words – ‘English Modernism’s most concerted attempt to 396
come to terms with the Expressionist heritage of German culture’: 397
moreover ‘it [Enemy of the Stars] is, at least for Lewis, at the heart of the 398
Vorticist project’.43 Edwards also traces the spectral obscurity of Enemy 399
of the Stars within contemporary English studies to its (un-)German, 400
Expressionist heritage. ‘If Enemy of the Stars is not a well-known 401
modernist literary text, that is at least partly because its affiliations are 402
with Expressionism, and its intellectual lineage, correspondingly, is 403
through Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Max Stirner.’44 The relation of 404
Blast to Expressionist visual art is signalled most obviously by the fact 405
that the major Berlin Expressionist journal Der Sturm was, as Richard 406
Humphreys wrote, ‘clearly an influence on the title and contents of the 407
London magazine’.45 Der Sturm had a travelling show in London in 408
February 1914; Lewis contributed a ‘Note [on Some German Woodcuts 409
at the Twenty-One Gallery]’ to BLAST in 1914 (see B1 136).46 Still in 410
1921, in his foreword to the ‘Tyros and Portraits’ exhibition catalogue, 411
Lewis was comparing ‘the experiments of the 1914 Vorticists’ to 412
‘Kandinsky’s expressionism’ (CWB 354). Kandinsky had made regular 413
contributions to the Allied Artists’ Association Salons in London 414
throughout the period from 1909 to 1914; the first volume of BLAST 415
included ‘Inner Necessity’ (B1 119-25), the Vorticist Edward 416
Wadsworth’s substantial review of Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in 417
Art (über das Geistige in der Kunst; 1912).47 418
‘Inner Necessity’, in citing Kandinsky’s emphasis on the 419
inevitability of expression in the visual arts – ‘“the inevitable desire to 420
express the objective is the force which is here termed Inner Necessity”’ 421
(B1 120; trans. Wadsworth) – resonated with the proto-Expressionist 422
poetic theory of Arno Holz. As Bridgwater notes, Arno Holz’s Revolution 423
der Lyrik (1899) recommended the use of ‘“inevitable” inner rhythms’, 424
along with the assembly of images or lines on ‘an invisible central axis’; 425
Holz’s advocacy of a compulsive, if spectral, centralizing focus ‘suggests 426
a parallel with the theory behind the Vorticist movement of 1914, and 427
points to the later experiments of August Stramm’.48 This sort of 428
alliance between the driven objectives of visual art and writing was 429
exemplary of Expressionist production, which stressed what Sigrid 430
Bauschinger has called a ‘complementary interaction between a work of 431
visual art and poetry’: for example, the September 1912 issue of Der 432
Sturm featured both Franz Marc’s woodcut Versöhnung and Else Lasker-433
Schüler’s poem ‘Der Versöhnungstag’ (‘Reconciliation’; also ‘Yom 434
Kippur’). The aim ‘to represent a cohesive aesthetic vision by employing 435
a diversity of artistic media and methods’, Bauschinger points out, was 436
an idea ‘at the heart of Expressionism’ – typified by Herwarth Walden’s 437
gathering of Der Sturm itself.49 Rosemarie Haag Bletter has documented 438
that in 1914, while he was designing the Glass House, Taut published an 439
essay in Der Sturm proposing an ideal building ‘in which all the arts 440
would be unified’ – perhaps as if inevitably, on an invisible axis since, as 441
Bletter points out, Taut’s essay ‘reveals his awareness of the work of 442
Kandinsky and other Expressionist artists and sculptors’.50 443
If the Expressionist multi-media method is suggestive of the 444
Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, Vorticism – in its duality of visual and 445
literary impulses – harks back to Blake. Andrew Causey argues that 446
Lewis’s designs, like Blake’s, ‘reflect ideas arising out of his writing’ 447
because Lewis, like Blake, made his visual project the ‘representation of 448
ideas’ – or the representation of faculties such as reason and the 449
imagination. ‘Among painters Lewis was intellectually in a class of his 450
own, a philosopher-artist like William Blake, rationalizing issues through 451
writing and painting.’51 Vorticism expressed Lewis’s role as writer-artist. 452
As he later wrote of his ‘new philosophy called Vorticism’, it had 453
offered an ‘inflammatory doctrine [which] affected equally the images 454
which issued from its visual inspiration, and likewise the rather less 455
evident literary sources of its ebullience’ (CHC 378). In his memoir of 456
Gaudier-Brzeska, Pound agreed that with Vorticism ‘we wished a 457
designation that would be equally applicable to a certain basis for all the 458
arts’.52 Stressing that a meta-art historical perspective on Vorticism is the 459
most appropriate one to adopt – when we understand Vorticism to have 460
constituted ‘a program for all the arts’ – Reed Way Dasenbrock argues 461
that it ‘was not the isolated and abortive movement it might seem to be 462
to an art historian, for its impact and influence was primarily on 463
Modernist literature, not on the visual arts’. Dasenbrock points out, 464
referring specifically to Yeats, that ‘the dynamic formism Vorticism 465
advocated and represented became a formal pattern underlying central 466
works of modernist literature’.53 I am interested specifically in the neo-467
modernist, neo-Vorticist preoccupation with the formalization of 468
visionary dynamics. Indeed it is, as I have argued elsewhere, precisely 469
within the London neo-Vorticist oeuvre of the mid-1970s that the 470
dynamic formist ambition was most evidently and powerfully 471
recurrent.54 472
Writing of Catling’s ‘conceptual apparatus’, Allen Fisher has 473
remarked on how it ‘links directly to aspects of Expressionism, to ideas 474
of revealing the unseen and clasping an inner life into outer presence’.55 475
We could speculate that Brian Kim Stefans was thinking of the influence 476
of Expressionism on Sinclair, when he wrote that Veronica Forrest-477
Thomson, amongst contemporary poets, was ‘one of the few, along 478
with J. H. Prynne and perhaps Iain Sinclair, who appeared to engage 479
with the most difficult traditions of modernism’.56 (One thing shared by 480
Forrest-Thomson’s and Sinclair’s poetries of the mid-late 1970s is a 481
concern with the constitutive violence of the Cambridge intellectual 482
environment, and with the repression of spiritual energies – perhaps the 483
negative of the Expressionist project of revealing the unseen.) Probably 484
the most well-known indication of the Expressionist influence on 485
Sinclair’s work was the use of Meidner’s ‘Apocalyptic Landscape’ (1913) 486
as a dust-wrapper illustration for the millennial anti-epic Downriver 487
(1991): that fiction’s Dr Adam Tenbrücke (a Wapping-based collector of 488
Expressionist art) might be interested to learn that, coincidentally, this 489
‘Apocalyptic Landscape’ was the only colour illustration in the first 490
Meidner monograph, Lothar Brieger’s Meidner (1919).57 Sinclair’s first 491
novel, White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings (1987), had already featured on its 492
dust jacket ‘Time and the Raven’ by John Bellany – an artist later 493
labelled by Sinclair ‘the distinguished expressionist’.58 The ‘Time and the 494
Raven’ dust jacket was reproduced in the catalogue The Shamanism of 495
Intent (1991), a publication of Sinclair’s from the same year as Downriver 496
which also features his essay ‘The Shamanism of Intent: A Retrospective 497
Manifesto’.59 498
This essay saw the attempted renewal of Expressionist (and also 499
Neo-Romantic) apocalypticism to be a defining strategy of 500
contemporary art in need of enlivenment. ‘We somnambulated through 501
a house of mirrors, soliciting only those images capable of doubling as a 502
distortion of the familiar – Born Again Expressionism (without trauma), 503
or a second life for trembling Romantics, twilight garglers, playboys of 504
ruin.’ It is arguably just because such neo-Expressionism expresses 505
present-day spiritual disturbance (psychic tremble), that it represents a 506
not entirely depleted art for Sinclair, and can converge with what he 507
goes on to call ‘the visionary revival – deregulated shamanism’, such as 508
manifested in the work of Gavin Jones.60 Importantly, in another essay 509
published in 1991, ‘A New Vortex: The Shamanism of Intent’, Sinclair 510
presents Catling’s neo-Vorticist text The Stumbling Block: Its Index (1990) 511
as an aspect of the visionary revival – a ‘dictation from the furies’ – 512
which is as disturbed, convulsed, as Meidner’s apocalyptic, Expressionist 513
visual art.61 ‘This dictation from the furies could be blocked, seamlessly, 514
alongside Wyndham Lewis’s Enemy of the Stars: it re-defined the notion 515
of “prose-poetry” – as a rolling sequence of frantic, but disciplined, 516
convulsions of language.’62 Sinclair’s conception of Catling’s Spitalfields 517
neo-Vorticism seems to refer, extraterritorially, to an Expressionist 518
convulsive passion roaring (or gargling) beneath ‘the formal English 519
surface’ of prose poetry. These spiritual convulsions recall the ‘sequence 520
of pushes towards that silence in which THE THING can be made’ – 521
the involuntary regulation of breath in terms of which Sinclair described 522
Catling’s stammering action in the Lud Heat (1975) essay ‘A Theory of 523
Hay Fevers’. Here the convulsive pushes end in a moment of discipline 524
– of invocatory silence – rather as, in ‘A New Vortex: The Shamanism 525
of Intent’, Catling’s neo-Vorticist energies are held to achieve an 526
Expressionist ‘balance’ of visual and literary impulses. ‘Catling’s work 527
has achieved this balance, the ability to swerve between furnace-forged 528
speech and articulate objects, and to map a field of consciousness eager 529
to sustain them both.’ Sinclair here compares Catling to writer-artist 530
Lewis. He returned to the comparison in Lights Out for the Territory 531
(1997), when describing Catling’s neo-Vorticist poetry books of the 532
mid-1970s, such as Vorticegarden (1974), as ‘subliminal triumphs, 533
unreviewed by literary clubmen, ignored by the art establishment. 534
Catling’s gifts, like those of Wyndham Lewis, made him a leper at both 535
sets of tables.’63 536
537
538
Exilic Magic: A Genealogy 539
540
How all his words followed an unknown needle! 541
He was driven to the unborn from tyranny, persecution, 542
Driven from Prague, Vienna, 543
At last to Paris, the place of Heine’s exile. 544
-Vernon Watkins, ‘The Shooting of Werfel’64 545
546
it was an art & is now a function 547
-Anna Mendelssohn65 548
549
Lewis in ‘The Dithyrambic Spectator’ (1925) suggested a connection 550
between obscure artistic singularity and the supernatural, when he wrote 551
of how, ‘in touch in an organized way with a supernatural world of 552
whose potentialities we can form no conception, the art of Egypt is as 553
rare and irreplaceable a thing as would be some communication 554
dropped upon our earth from another planet’ (WLA 240). I would 555
suggest that this quality of being magically irreplaceable – of being ‘from 556
another planet’, leper-like, perhaps because tuned into a different, more 557
transcendental register or aesthetic tone – is deeply characteristic of 558
such neo-Vorticist work as ‘Servant to the Stars’, just as of such original 559
Vorticist productions as Enemy of the Stars. Arguably, combined ideas of 560
hidden intellectual excellence and of contact with another world are 561
particularly relevant to the present moment, when, following a religious 562
turn in the humanities, ‘it is not simply a matter of believing or not,’ – as 563
Žižek has argued – ‘but, rather, a matter of certain radical experience, of 564
the ability to open oneself to a certain unheard-of dimension’. In The 565
Puppet and the Dwarf (2003), Žižek sees present-day academics’ spirituality 566
to partake of leperdom: ‘what we are getting today is a kind of 567
“suspended” belief, a belief that can thrive only as not fully (publicly) 568
admitted, as a private obscene secret’.66 Neo-Vorticism, with its 569
hermetic spiritual violence and violent textual hermeticism, seems 570
peculiarly illustrative of an art that expresses the contemporary 571
experience of the spiritual as a private obscene secret, at a time when 572
spiritual passion is twinned by the media imagination with migrant 573
terrorist threat. 574
In The Verbals (2003), Sinclair suggested that he viewed the artists 575
he assembled for the 1991 exhibition at the Goldmark Gallery, The 576
Shamanism of Intent, as private, singular: ‘it wasn’t an aesthetic or political 577
movement’, he argued. ‘The Shamanism of Intent’, as a ‘blanket area 578
that I was trying to pitch’, signified instead ‘the notion of some kind of 579
possession or magic, outside the usual parameters’. Sinclair’s relation of 580
these extraterritorial creators, such as Catling, to magical practice recalls 581
the Lukács circle and the way in which, for Balázs in 1916, identification 582
with ‘isolated, individual messengers’ generated the adoption of a 583
magical stance and sensibility: recognition of his exilic status brought 584
him to align himself with ‘theosophy’.67 Gluck refers to Balázs’s 585
childhood sense, which she describes as being already ‘essentially 586
magical’, that ‘behind the appearance of everyday reality there lurked a 587
different secret sphere of life in which “all objects and people are totally 588
different from those here, and are connected to each other in totally 589
different ways.”’68 In Lud Heat Sinclair similarly propounded occult 590
connectivity, with a quote from J. G. Frazer: ‘things which have once 591
been in physical contact continue to act on each other at a distance after 592
contact has been broken’69. Gluck’s account of the Lukács group 593
stresses that the longing for connection was what underpinned its 594
members’ magical interests – as when she quotes from Anna Lesznai’s 595
diaries of the late 1920s. ‘What are the phenomena existing in society 596
and the individual psyche, which have retained strong magical 597
tendencies? These are art, certain facets of religion, erotic love, a whole 598
series of spiritual experiences such as presentiment, telepathy, déjà vu, 599
suggestibility.’ The group was fascinated by magical experiences since 600
such experiences, as Gluck writes, ‘seemed to give a premonition of a 601
radically new form of existence in which direct communion and identity 602
between subject and object would be possible’.70 603
Gluck stressed that ‘members of the Sunday Circle felt, both 604
individually and collectively, almost completely isolated in their own 605
country, and their sense of radical homelessness forms a constant 606
refrain in their letters, essays, and novels.’ With such an exemplarily 607
extraterritorial grouping of ‘radically disaffected or dislocated 608
individuals’, as Gluck notes, ‘it is hardly surprising’ that they ‘could not 609
translate their discontents into the conventional language of radical 610
politics’; she goes on to quote Lesznai: ‘in reality, our group had a closer 611
resemblance to a religious gathering than to a political club: the get-612
togethers had a ritualistic, quasireligious tone’.71 (This description will 613
strike a chord with anyone who has seen the photograph, in The Verbals, 614
of the Fieldgate Street launch party-ritual for Downriver.)72 Citing 615
Lukács’s remark that his circle’s ‘attempt at inner liberation from the 616
spiritual crisis of official Hungary took the form of extolling European 617
modernism’, Gluck emphasizes that for the group ‘cultural radicalism’ 618
seemed ‘not only more congenial but more fundamental than the 619
political radicalism of socialists and other oppositional groups’. Rather 620
as Sinclair has turned to the Burroughsian magico-aesthetic practice of 621
deconditioning of reflexes, for Lukács ‘the modernists stood for an 622
“inner revolution” whose intention was to transform the internal life 623
and the consciousness of individuals, not merely their external power 624
relationships in the social and political world’.73 But of course precisely 625
the internal exiles’ claim for inner revolution – what Balázs called his 626
‘lifelong longing for inner independence and freedom’ – can be seen to 627
affine them to a radical social project.74 To adopt some of David 628
Frisby’s words in relation to the German context, though Kracauer’s 629
(extraterritorial) position may rely on a ‘quasi-religious existentialism’ 630
and so offer a plain ‘existential critique of the existing social order’, it 631
nonetheless remains ‘based on the necessity of the fulfilment of a 632
human essence in the personality’ – a fundamental Marxist necessity.75 633
Free-floating thinkers have often noticed the reduction of 634
fulfilling professional life to hyper-competitive bureaucratic life, such as 635
in our university system now where the free creation of original 636
knowledges has become almost entirely supplanted by the 637
administration of pre-existing knowledges and the battle for status. 638
‘Sharp practice’ becomes an end in itself – so that little of reality is 639
actually practised. In 1986, Burroughs reminded an interviewer that 640
within society ‘at one time each person did have something to do, but 641
less and less as time goes on. You now have one role and a million 642
applicants, and not a very good role at that.’76 Kracauer too – during the 643
time of Vorticism and Expressionism – had sensed that, as Frisby puts 644
it, ‘the feelings and values of the individual can no longer be integrated 645
into the social functions that are available’. Kracauer’s first known 646
publication, ‘On the Experience of the War’ (1915), had taken up with 647
Georg Simmel’s wartime emphasis on the separation of an objective 648
material culture from ‘an unrealized subjective culture of the individual’ 649
(Frisby). ‘Above all else, the most important need of the soul, the 650
religious, lay broken; there were no living, universally binding beliefs, 651
that expressed our essence.’ Kracauer saw the curtailment of human 652
existence within social forms: for him it was precisely the professional 653
social roles of ‘the teacher, the artist and the politician’, what Sinclair 654
would call their parameters, which were ‘incapable of liberating essential 655
inner needs’. What attracts me is the suggestion, hinted at by Kracauer, 656
that a spiritual project of the articulation of inner needs – the fulfilment 657
of individuals – through the definition of ‘living, universally binding 658
beliefs’, or a pursuit of an absolute, could be twinned with a recoil from 659
wage economy and professional status characteristic of the 660
extraterritorial Freischwebender. That figure’s social alienation – her exilic 661
character – again seems peculiarly tuned to ‘the notion of some kind of 662
possession or magic, outside the usual parameters’.77 Bridgwater wrote 663
of Erich Fried – the translator of Dylan Thomas who moved to London 664
in 1938, and whom Bridgwater called ‘the chief representative of the 665
second generation of German-speaking poets to have lived in England’ 666
– that ‘the fact of living in exile has clearly influenced Fried’s attitude to 667
his language: not being the language of everyday communication, it has 668
gained in magic and mystery’. (Celan’s poetry, judged Bridgwater, 669
represented a ‘magic that is over-aware of its own seriousness’.)78 670
Commenting on Bomberg’s extraterritorial semi-Vorticist period around 671
1912, Peter Fuller senses that Bomberg shifted into his ‘profoundly un-672
Modern’ abstraction ‘in the hope of intensifying his eschatological, even 673
biblical, motifs’: the exilic sensibility’s pursuit of an absolute again 674
becomes visible.79 675
By 1920, in his essay ‘Schicksalswende der Kunst’ (‘Art’s Turn of 676
Fate’), Kracauer was arguing that Expressionism was effectively defunct. 677
This was the case, he claimed, because it no longer offered a vitalist-678
spiritualist mode of resistance to mundane capitalist life. Before the war, 679
by contrast – Kracauer suggested – Expressionism had struggled 680
towards that ‘which the great social revolutions of the present set as 681
their task in the realms of real life: the destruction of the powers of 682
existence that have hitherto been valid.’ Kracauer defined the pre-war 683
Expressionist project as the expression of ‘the inner needs of the human 684
being transformed into a primal self [Ur-ich]’. Kracauer wrote of this Ur-685
ich as ‘a soul [in] search of a God’, undergoing Stumbling Block-like 686
‘ecstatic convulsions’: in the face of the objective culture of rationalized, 687
mechanized society. ‘Painter and poet endeavour to strip existing reality 688
of its power and to reveal it for what it actually is: a deceptive, 689
shadowlike essence, a chaos without soul, without meaning.’ The artist’s 690
elemental spirituality may be accused of being equally shadowlike, 691
spectral, but for Kracauer the earlier Expressionist could ‘cast the 692
burning torch into the buildings of our existence and inflame the ghosts 693
into revolution.’ With Expressionism we saw the extraterritorial ghosts 694
broach the barricades; while the citizen remains condemned to a ‘God-695
estranged reality’, as if encased in a ‘brazen solid wall’, it had once been 696
Expressionism’s ‘historical merit to have forced a breach in this wall, to 697
have reduced it to ruins.’80 Looking back on Vorticism in Blasting and 698
Bombardiering (1937), Lewis similarly ascribed insurrectionary capacities 699
to the spirituality of an extraterritorial avant-garde. Lewis commented 700
on how, to Asquith, Vorticist ‘pictures looked like plastic cyphers or 701
properties of the magician. And here was its high-priest! […] This 702
learned P.M. was reminded of illuminism, doubtless’ (BB 51). Lewis’s 703
retrospective account projects Vorticism as a threatening leper colony – 704
or an invisible revolutionary community which may be spiritualist or 705
may be political: ‘I might [to Asquith] almost have been the member of 706
a powerful secret society’ (BB 53). There was in fact, Lewis added, a ‘tidy 707
bit of political contraband tucked away in our technical militancy’ (BB 708
253). 709
Kracauer offered what Frisby called a ‘more specific analysis of 710
Expressionism’ in his 1921 article ‘Max Beckmann’.81 Sinclair too turned 711
to Beckmann, when, in ‘The Shamanism of Intent: A Retrospective 712
Manifesto’, he sought to stress the collision of the spiritual and the 713
political, of subjective and objective cultures, within our contemporary 714
art economy. ‘For the great Max Beckmann there were two worlds, the 715
“spiritual life” and “political reality”; worlds that his paintings, 716
paradoxically, insisted upon fusing. The heavenly and the mundane 717
interpenetrate any of the present worlds that we can retain for a 718
moment before our eyes.’ Yet Sinclair here was concerned to develop a 719
critique of a mundane, or fake, performance transcendentalism which 720
undermines an implicit purity of the transcendental. Contemporary art-721
spirituality is seen by Sinclair to be not an absolutism oppositional to 722
capitalism, but instead deeply complicit with it; a new twist in the career. 723
In the contemporary art world ‘apparently occult acts are revealed as 724
survivalist reflexes. Shamanism has developed its own realpolitik. […] 725
This art of secrets, remote or hidden beneath the ground, is also an art 726
of expediency.’82 Interestingly, Beckmann’s own ‘Creative Credo’ 727
(written in 1918 and published in 1920) itself attacked the notion of a 728
pure – or more precisely an abstract – transcendental. ‘Complete 729
withdrawal in order to achieve that famous purity people talk about as 730
well as the loss of self in God, right now all that is too bloodless and 731
also loveless for me.’ An engaged vitalism seemed to be moving 732
Beckmann away from an adolescent, abstract transcendentalism – ‘that 733
false, sentimental, and swooning mysticism’ – and towards a mature 734
‘transcendental objectivity’: ‘I hope we will achieve a transcendental 735
objectivity out of a deep love for nature and mankind.’ I have argued 736
elsewhere that a comparable enriched abstraction is precisely the goal of 737
the Vorticist and neo-Vorticist visionary mode.83 738
It had indeed been their state of disengagement – alienation – 739
which had originally drawn exilic modernists to mysticism. Writing of 740
the German Expressionists around 1910 in her article ‘Jewish 741
Renaissance – Jewish Modernism’, Inka Bertz noted how ‘social 742
isolation and the artist’s alienation from the public now became a 743
dominant theme – for example, in the journal Das neue Pathos. Artists 744
sought to overcome their anomie through mysticism, theosophy, and a 745
religion of art.’84 Simultaneously in Hungary, as Gluck records, 746
Mannheim’s ‘growing interest in the philosophic problems of mysticism 747
coincided with Lukács’ discovery in 1911 of Buber’s work on Chassidic 748
mysticism’.85 Yet Gluck stresses that for the Lukács group ‘antirational 749
phenomena such as mysticism, erotic love, and the world of fairy tales 750
were merely oblique symbols of metaphysical possibilities in some far-751
off future, rather than genuine options and solutions for the present’.86 752
Lajos Fülep’s comment that ‘quite simply, we are the seekers of a higher, 753
spiritual world outlook, and we are not to be confused with any sects’, 754
points forward to Sinclair’s disavowal of ‘movement’ status for the 755
group involved with The Shamanism of Intent.87 756
As spirituals but not spiritualists or sectaries, the continental 757
extraterritorial modernists were of course also affined to Vorticist Lewis 758
– in particular, to Lewis’s critique of Kandinsky’s abstraction. Lewis’s 759
ambivalent view of supernatural interests has been summarized usefully 760
by Richard Humphreys, who notes that ‘although [Lewis] was usually 761
scornful of most varieties of spiritualism he had a persistent attraction to 762
metaphysical and theological interpretations of reality’. Lewis indeed 763
lectured at the occultist Quest Society in 1914, and Humphreys even 764
writes of a ‘central role of occultist thought in his work’ of the Vorticist 765
period. Lewis ‘was not a believer in table-tapping or levitation, but 766
rather saw the artist’s close engagement with the material world as a 767
complex relationship with psychic and metaphysical realities. Without 768
this visionary impulse he believed art would be inert naturalism or mere 769
“significant form”’.88 But Kandinsky’s abstraction too could be attacked; 770
what Giovanni Cianci has termed Kandinsky’s ‘lyrico-mysticism’ led 771
Lewis to view the Expressionist as being, ‘at the best, wandering and 772
slack’ (B2 40).89 Lewis’s objection to spiritualist diffusionism returned in 773
Men Without Art (1934): ‘The massive sculpture of the Pharaohs is 774
preferable to the mist of the automatic or spirit-picture. Then, the 775
dreamy and disordered naturalism of so much European art is akin to 776
the floating, ill-organized, vapours of the plastic of the spiritist’ (MWA 777
99). It should be emphasized that this extremist reaction against the ill-778
organized and unsolid derived from the originary Vorticist, visionary 779
demand for heightened definition. Lewis suspected that the quest for 780
magical definition could be impeded by movements of Expressionist 781
subjectivism. In Head’s words, Lewis ‘had seen Kandinsky as probably 782
the most logical of the artists directing their attention to abstract 783
experiment, but he also found “too much of the vagueness, of the effect 784
of a drunken tracery, that spirit drawings have”. Kandinsky, “docile to 785
the intuitive fluctuations of his soul”, receded into a “cloud-world, out 786
of the material and solid universe”.’90 787
Sinclair, in his essay ‘Nicholas Hawksmoor, his Churches’, from 788
the neo-Vorticist period of Lud Heat, famously describes the affinity of 789
Hawksmoor’s east London churches to Egyptian massive sculpture. 790
‘Certain features are in common: extravagant design, massive, almost 791
slave-built, strength – not democratic.’ Each Hawksmoor building ‘is an 792
enclosure of force’ or spiritual energy-trap precisely because its own 793
architecture has been massively, extravagantly, defined.91 Lewis, 794
developing his Vorticist concern with logical abstraction in The Art of 795
Being Ruled (1926), had held ‘this simplicity, conceptual quality, hard 796
exact outline, grand architectural proportion’ to be prerequisites for ‘the 797
greatest art’ (ABR 338). In the encyclopaedic polemic published the 798
following year, Time and Western Man (1927), Lewis noted his early 799
‘propensity for the exactly-defined and also, fanatically it may be, the 800
physical or the concrete’: this designer’s constructivism was ‘no doubt 801
what made [him], to begin with, a painter’. As a ‘graphic artist’ he 802
required ‘that definition and logical integrity’. Here Lewis recognized 803
that ‘the processes of creative genius, however, are not so dissimilar to 804
those of the spirit-draughtsman’. But though ‘the act of artistic creation 805
is a trance or dream-state’, it is one ‘very different from that experienced 806
by the entranced medium’. ‘A world of the most extreme and logically 807
exacting physical definition is built up out of this susceptible condition 808
in the case of the greatest art, in contrast to the cloudy phantasies of the 809
spiritist’ (all TWM 109). Vernon Watkins, moreover, maintained that 810
‘vagueness is an enemy of holiness; the soul of harmony continually 811
thirsts for definition’.92 812
813
814
Space Discipline 815
816
In his review of White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings, W. L. Webb referred to 817
Sinclair’s ‘sketches as hard and definitive as a Wyndham Lewis 818
portrait’.93 For the Vorticist Lewis, spiritual definition and visionary 819
clarity is achieved through organization: in ‘The Dithyrambic Spectator’, 820
as we have seen, the exemplarily otherworldly ‘art of Egypt’ is held to be 821
‘in touch in an organized way with a supernatural world of whose 822
potentialities we can form no conception’. In Time and Western Man, 823
when asserting the ‘magical quality in artistic expression’, Lewis similarly 824
wrote of the artist ‘tapping the supernatural sources and potentialities of 825
our existence’ (TWM 188). The artist is tapping with intent, questioning; 826
interrogating: manipulating: 827
828
The production of a work of art is, I believe, strictly the work of a 829
visionary. […] Shakespeare, writing his King Lear, was evidently in 830
some sort of a trance; for the production of such a work of art an 831
entranced condition seems as essential as it was for Blake when 832
he conversed with the Man who Built the Pyramids. […] 833
If you say that creative art is a spell, a talisman, an 834
incantation – that it is magic, in short, there, too, I believe you 835
would be correctly describing it. That the artist uses and 836
manipulates a supernatural power seems very likely. (TWM 187) 837
838
Of course the artist too is being organized (and re-organized), by 839
magico-artistic forces – as Lewis suggests in The Diabolical Principle and the 840
Dithyrambic Spectator (1931) when he writes that ‘art at its fullest is a very 841
great force indeed, a magical force, a sort of life, a very great “reality”’ 842
(DPDS 69). But Vorticist art, in particular, seemed to be characterized 843
by the artist’s organization of supernatural forces or impulses, when 844
artistic creation was a type of ordering ritual. Humphreys’s use of the 845
phrase ‘aesthetic “magic” ritual’ to describe Lewis’s production in 1913, 846
is backed up by Thomas Kush’s insight that Enemy of the Stars shared 847
with Expressionist drama a reliance on ‘ritualized action’.94 In his 1934 848
essay ‘Art in a Machine Age’, Lewis stressed that art ‘is in the same class 849
as ritual, as civilized behaviour and all ceremonial observances – such 850
for that matter as those in which it has its roots historically: it is a 851
symbolic discipline’ (WLA 272). 852
In The Verbals, Sinclair spoke of the influence of ‘elements’ of 853
North African ‘ritual magic’ on Catling’s ‘later collections of poems’ – 854
this refers to books such as The Tulpa Index (1983).95 But it is in relation 855
to Catling’s neo-Vorticist Pleiades in Nine, of the mid-1970s, that Sinclair 856
most interestingly identifies Catling’s poetry as an organizing – defining, 857
clarifying – ritual practice. Sinclair in ‘Servant to the Stars’, like Lewis, 858
cannot see spiritual definition or visionary clarity achieved through a 859
diffusing performance spiritism. ‘Pleiades sustains that urge towards a 860
new purifying ritual magic, or transformation. Light. No pose or 861
Yeatsian séance or scribbled automatic writ.’ These sentences appear 862
immediately after the essay’s references to the neo-Vorticist ‘alienated 863
“foreign” quality’, of a ‘sun roaring beneath the formal English surface’: 864
for Sinclair defined extraterritorial passion, clear ‘solar’ disturbance, is 865
precisely the frequency of visionary light to which Catling’s aesthetic 866
practice of purifying ritual magic aspires. Rather as for Lewis artistic 867
magic built up a ‘world of the most extreme and logically exacting 868
physical definition’, or for Watkins ’the soul of harmony continually 869
thirsts for definition’, so for Sinclair the neo-Vorticist visionary stance 870
means that ‘the face is resolutely turned towards that beam of light that 871
is fed with compressed images (and meanings): “beyond the faint glow / 872
of sainted domestic / fury”.’96 The sense is that this cognitive beam is a 873
more violent, more compacted and more intelligent transcendental – 874
passion – than that afforded by psychoanalytically-sanctioned, domestic 875
psychodrama; that it denotes a passionate spiritual knowledge reflective 876
of our present sharp social decay. 877
Lewis described Vorticist art-making in a letter to Charles 878
Handley-Read, on 2 September 1949. ‘The way those things were done 879
– are done, by whoever uses this method of expression – is that a 880
mental-emotive impulse is let loose upon a lot of blocks and lines of 881
various dimensions, and encouraged to push them around and to 882
arrange them as it will’ (L 504). In a footnote Lewis glosses ‘mental-883
emotive’: ‘[b]y this is meant subjective intellection, like magic or religion’ 884
(L 505). Lewis’s identification of disciplined formal design with the 885
operation of a magical ‘impulse’, itself beam-like and intelligently 886
manipulating (within) space, found an analogue twenty years later in 887
‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’, when J. H. Prynne proposed another space-888
ordering impulse – an extension of spiritual attention, or ‘mythic 889
duration of/ spirit’ extending over lines: 890
891
[…] The Hyper- 892
borean paradise was likewise no general 893
term but the mythic duration of 894
spirit into the bone 895
laid out in patterns 896
on the ground.97 897
898
Within Expressionism however – as Kracauer suggested when, in ‘Art’s 899
Turn of Fate’, he wrote of Expressionist art’s ‘texture of lines and 900
bodylike forms, whose structure is almost exclusively determined by the 901
inner needs of the human being transformed into a primal self’ – it was 902
less that a mental-emotive impulse detachedly ordered aesthetic form, 903
than that inner impulses were themselves the aesthetic structure; our inner 904
needs were themselves to constitute and form art’s ‘patterns’.98 But 905
before we too readily separate off a subjectivist Expressionism from an 906
anti-subjectivist Vorticism, we could recall too Head’s argument – and 907
Bridgwater’s evidence, already cited, supporting this argument – that 908
‘the most substantial link between Lewis’s Vorticism and Kandinsky’s 909
Expressionism was a shared belief in the primacy of “inner necessity” in 910
genuine art’.99 Indeed still in Snooty Baronet – the novel published in the 911
same year (1932) as the revised version of Enemy of the Stars – the 912
narrator is driven by an impulsive inner necessity, by his ‘nature 913
consistent with itself, organized upon a single-gauge track so to speak’ 914
(SB 99). This particular mono-track ‘starts’, Lewis stresses, ‘from a 915
nucleus of impulse and of passion’: ‘I pursue the pattern set up by my 916
powerfulest [sic] sensation to its ultimate conclusion’ (SB 99). Snooty 917
runs according to a psycho-predestination – an extremist behaviourism 918
– so that his impulses and passions themselves become the aesthetic 919
form of the narrative. This means that his inner needs can be seen to 920
form inevitably into a fictional ritual; rather as Sinclair, in The Verbals, 921
saw the narrative structure of White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings to be ‘pre-922
ordinated in quite a fixed form, like a series of rituals’. That novel, 923
Sinclair felt, was ‘a much more possessed book [than Downriver]’; one 924
which – just like Enemy of the Stars – ‘enacts itself like theatre’.100 925
Vorticist art-making, then, involves a mental-emotive impulse 926
detachedly ordering inner necessity into ritualistic aesthetic form; but 927
impulses, or inner necessity, are also shaping themselves into form. 928
Head helpfully summarizes: 929
930
Lewis did not disavow this force of ‘inner necessity’ in art, but 931
modified Kandinsky’s subjectivism by insisting that a principle of 932
classicism, something ‘nobly defined and exact’ but not in itself ‘a 933
finished thing’, was needed to reinforce it with an ‘outer necessity’ 934
of a formal order.101 935
936
In Time and Western Man Lewis then held the artist to be, properly 937
speaking, a ‘transformed magician’: one who organizes inner necessity 938
‘personally’ (which is to say impersonally, objectively but experimentally, 939
productively): 940
941
For me art is the civilized substitute for magic; as philosophy is 942
what, on a higher or more complex plane, takes the place of 943
religion. […] [T]hough the artist is certainly not devoid of 944
religious emotion, it is exercised personally, as it were; and he is in 945
temper the opposite of the religionist. The man-of-science is 946
another sort of transformed magician. (TWM 188) 947
948
The idea is that the transformed magician is making a work which is a 949
free ritual, a mobile ritual (Catling’s performance work provides obvious 950
performed examples). We could remember Adorno’s argument to 951
Benjamin, in his letter of 18 March 1936, concerning ‘the magical 952
element that persists in the bourgeois work of art’. Adorno stressed that 953
‘the heart of the autonomous work of art […] compounds within itself 954
the magical element with the sign of freedom’. Paradoxically the very 955
magical, ritualistic urge to dominate inner necessity into something 956
nobly-defined and exact, Adorno suggested, ensures that the resulting 957
art-ritual is a conscious, free, ‘materialist’ mode of production – or 958
offers us a prophetic image of such rational experiment: 959
960
[…] precisely the uttermost consistency in the pursuit of the 961
technical laws of autonomous art actually transforms this art 962
itself, and, instead of turning it into a fetish or taboo, brings it that 963
much closer to a state of freedom, to something that can be 964
consciously produced and made.102 965
966
We get a strong sense of Lewis’s ambition that Vorticist ritualist 967
‘symbolic discipline’, the construction of ‘a world of the most extreme 968
and logically exacting physical definition’, might become such a 969
freedom, when in his 1956 retrospective account ‘The Vorticists’ he 970
writes that the artist in refusal of mimetic naturalism should ‘invent 971
shapes of his own, and assemble them – “compose” them – in full 972
independence, just as the musician does his sounds’ (CHC 378). Hence 973
Lewis’s concept of the pictorial alphabet: Vorticist practice is to be the 974
shuffling and reshuffling of ‘a closely-packed, brightly-coloured alphabet 975
of objects, with a logic of its own’ (CHC 380). But Lewis’s builder’s 976
terminology – the shapes are to be assembled, and closely packed – 977
always continues to hint that Vorticism, precisely when experimentally 978
and consciously produced, is a symbolic discipline aiming at ‘hard exact 979
outline, grand architectural proportion’. For the construction of a world 980
of the most extreme and logically exacting physical definition aimed to 981
enact a revelation of the Vorticist picture’s buried tectonic form. 982
As Head notes, ‘the term “vortex” was never applied with much 983
exactitude to painterly work which more often sought to articulate 984
virtual space in constructivist, tectonic modes than by means of spirals 985
and curvilinear forms’.103 Lewis’s 1934 article ‘Plain Home-Builder: 986
Where is Your Vorticist?’ stressed that Vorticism ‘was, in a sense, a 987
substitute of architecture for painting’ (CHC 278). Lewis had gone on, post-988
war in 1919, to publish The Caliph’s Design: Architects! Where is Your 989
Vortex?, because Vorticism always was ‘aimed essentially at an 990
architectural reform’; ‘the Vorticist was peculiarly preoccupied with the 991
pictorial architectonics at the bottom of picture-making – the logical 992
skeleton of the sensuous pictorial idea’ (CHC 278). For Lewis Vorticist 993
art was to make incarnate, make manifest the logical skeleton, rather as 994
for Sinclair’s Hawksmoor ‘the temple is a map of the idea’.104 In his 995
1934 essay Lewis called Vorticist images ‘pictorial spells, as it were, cast 996
by us, designed to attract the architectural shell that was wanting’ (CHC 997
278). You could say Lewis wanted another London conjured up out of 998
the hidden armature of inner necessity – out of the very structure of our 999
desirous, needy cognition. 1000
The aim to define exactly so as to ‘cast’ potential spatial structures 1001
persists in neo-Vorticism. Simon Perril has wondered what the 1002
‘fascinating diagrammatic line-drawings’ contained in Catling’s The First 1003
Electron Heresy (1972) represent – maybe ‘planned installations’, he 1004
speculates.105 At one point in ‘A New Vortex: The Shamanism of 1005
Intent’, Sinclair remarks that ‘everything’ Catling attempts is ‘concerned 1006
with acts of definition – dowsing, aligning, recording – so that he might 1007
open up a place of potential enchantment’.106 The action of definition 1008
can be seen working towards Catling’s creation of what ‘Servant to the 1009
Stars’ called architectural ‘fixed shape’, or ‘locked-power enclosures’.107 1010
Sinclair, crucially, read Pleiades in Nine as itself such an enclosure: an 1011
impulse-trap. ‘A Tarot of Value, a magical system which is also an 1012
enclosure, or trap, for what the life is. And that is the form of what 1013
these poems are. Their reason for being.’108 Already in Vorticegarden, 1014
Catling had written of ‘Shifting the rock to pin / their energies down’. 1015
Catling described with Celanian exactness and menace how fractions of 1016
life are to be mensurated and pinned down within insect-level spatial 1017
division: 1018
1019
Cockroach intervals divide the calm; 1020
tight as stars, hunting pinprick 1021
life.109 1022
1023
Perril suggests the social background for Catling’s preoccupation with 1024
spatial definition and entrapment in Pleiades in Nine; his poetry 1025
allegorizes how ‘the city has become an enclosure, incarcerating the 1026
terminally “un-productive” in the snares of the poverty trap’.110 It is 1027
bureaucracy which lays down, 1028
1029
a peg board to string out 1030
the city’s pathology 1031
pins and paper 1032
marking the connections.111 1033
1034
These connections recall the ‘shadow-lines’ linking Hawksmoor’s 1035
locked-power enclosures for Sinclair in Lud Heat. ‘Each church is an 1036
enclosure of force, a trap, a sight-block, a raised place with an 1037
unacknowledged influence over events created within the shadow-lines 1038
of their towers.’112 Lewis too had referred to unacknowledged influence, 1039
in his 1914 BLAST essay ‘Fêng Shui and Contemporary Form’, when 1040
outlining Chinese geomancy. ‘Geomancy is the art by which the 1041
favourable influence of the shape of trees, weight of neighbouring water 1042
and it’s [sic] colour, height of surrounding houses, is determined’ (B1 1043
138). Lewis as a Vorticist identified with geomancers: comparing ‘good 1044
Geomancers’ to ‘good artists’, he thought that ‘their functions and 1045
intellectual equipment should be very alike’ (B1 138). The key attribute 1046
was sensitivity to a space’s ‘favourable influence’, ‘to the volume, to the 1047
life and passion of lines’ – and in fact for Lewis, as for Sinclair writing 1048
on the Hawkmoor structures, a spatial ‘genius’ could be ‘good or evil’, 1049
its influence favourable or unfavourable: 1050
1051
Sensitiveness to volume, to the life and passion of lines, meaning 1052
of water, hurried conversation of the sky, or the silence, 1053
impossible propinquity of endless clay nothing will right, a 1054
mountain that is a genius (good or evil) or a bore, makes the 1055
artist. (B1 138) 1056
1057
1058
Spiritual Violences 1059
1060
No plain bore, the stone ‘genius’ that is Hawksmoor’s St George-in-the-1061
East, in Lud Heat, represents for Sinclair an expression of spiritual 1062
violence; a violent geometry.113 ‘St George is Blake’s East in The Marriage 1063
of Heaven and Hell: “spiritual wrath.” The lions of Urizen forge the 1064
geometric shapes that underlie the material universe.’114 To forge 1065
architectural structures thus is to ‘fix them in/ their awful stations’, in 1066
Blake’s words quoted on the succeeding page of ‘Nicholas Hawksmoor, 1067
his Churches’: later Sinclair sees the standing stones prophesying 1068
apocalyptic threat, writing of how ‘future suns of blinding energy do 1069
glint in the mute pallor of the stone’.115 The sense is that awful stations, 1070
static built arrangements, hold in menace – just as the ‘Tarot of Value’, 1071
the magical system which is Catling’s neo-Vorticist poetic, ‘is also an 1072
enclosure, or trap, for what the life is’. Buildings become containers of 1073
wrathful impulses, passionate energies. Writing of how ‘spirals of 1074
magnetism/ mesh & clench’, Catling in Vorticegarden recapitulated the 1075
cone design familiar to readers of Blast, figuring an elliptical motion of 1076
visual passions; moving yet clenched in. 1077
1078
The image frame locked 1079
hissing in the coned 1080
momentum.116 1081
1082
So in a sense a neo-Vorticist spatial structure does become a ‘bore’, a 1083
cone drilling and forging in, like ‘the storm of matter [which] turns at 1084
the central mercury well, hollowed in dream architecture’, in Pleiades in 1085
Nine.117 As it hisses, the dream matter can give the impression of having 1086
broken free, like the horizontal headstones strewn across the churchyard 1087
of St George-in-the-East. Appropriately located alongside the mural 1088
narrating the battle of Cable Street, this must be the most wrecked 1089
hallow site in London, hollowed over by the milky red light of the 1090
nearby river. 1091
Commenting on two major Vorticist works of Lewis’s of 1913-14, 1092
‘Plan of War’ and ‘Slow Attack’, Cianci – just like Sinclair commenting 1093
on St George-in-the-East – locates a violence in geometric shapes. ‘Slow 1094
Attack’ vividly anticipated, Cianci sees, imminent Anglo-German 1095
antagonism: ‘this geometry in conflict, with its severely mechanistic 1096
forms, is war’: 1097
1098
[In ‘Plan of War’] [a] rigid constructional design […] both 1099
expresses all the energy and menacing force of these interlocking 1100
geometries and at the same time prevents their disintegration and 1101
dispersion. […] [In ‘Slow Attack’] the greater density of the 1102
shapes, as well as their more accentuated collision and 1103
interpenetration, together with the more numerous diagonals 1104
structuring the surface, again result in a composition which 1105
succeeds in locking all the turmoil of these convulsed, conflicting 1106
geometrical forms, preventing them from scattering.118 1107
1108
The geometrical shapes are in turmoil themselves, fixed in ‘convulsed’, 1109
awful stations, because they are repositories of turmoil. Sinclair returned 1110
to this Vorticist idea of immanent passion in ‘Servant to the Stars’, when 1111
treating Catling’s way of fixing in awful stations within his sculpture 1112
spaces: Catling’s concern with ‘Place as Set’. ‘This is a sculptural 1113
consciousness: to map the potential actions in a stilled set, to plant all 1114
the possible movements in metal or wood exhibited in an apparently 1115
static condition.’119 The turmoil locked within neo-Vorticist spatial 1116
arrangements hence consists of future-bound movements of impulse or 1117
energy: incipient spiritual actions, intent spiritual violences. The First 1118
Electron Heresy speaks of ‘hungry shells waiting for epileptic vibrations to 1119
be thrown into them.’120 1120
The London neo-Vorticist association of spiritual wrath with 1121
futural ‘possible movements’ recalls the prophetic – apocalyptic but also 1122
potentially utopian – register of early urban Expressionist art, such as 1123
Meidner’s. Meidner was particularly praised in Kurt Hiller’s memorable 1124
review for Die Aktion of the Pathetiker group show at Der Sturm gallery, 1125
in that crucial year, 1912. Hiller’s article took the opportunity to 1126
advocate a contemporary aesthetic ‘spirit’ – ‘Jewish in modality’ rather 1127
than necessarily in terms of tradition or even race – of spiritual violence. 1128
Urban art at odds with the contemporary ‘kingdom of Prussia’, such as 1129
Meidner’s, is identified by Hiller as animated, ‘conflicted’, even 1130
unashamedly hysteric: it fights through psychic pain in pursuit of a new 1131
morality. I personally know of few better descriptions than these 1132
sentences of Hiller’s of the ethical climate of the best neo-Vorticist 1133
writing, such as Sinclair’s in White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings: 1134
1135
The true fully Jewish artist would not be Jewish in subject matter, 1136
but rather Jewish in modality; he would scarcely paint something 1137
biblical, educational, or episodes from the past, but rather he 1138
would paint something contemporary with a Jewish spirit (by 1139
which I mean: with spirit). A glaringly Jewish noble spirit in the 1140
kingdom of Prussia (1912) does not look like a naïve celebrant of 1141
national memories, but rather seems intellectual, future-oriented, 1142
and conflicted.121 1143
1144
In London: City of Disappearances (2006) Sinclair emphasizes how precisely 1145
Meidner’s spiritual agitation, his restless civic morality, makes him the 1146
visionary prophet of ‘the tremble that lies beneath the confident fabric 1147
of long-established cities’. In Berlin he sees the immanent turmoil of the 1148
future, the passionate shift into possible movements; he ‘caught that 1149
instant of fracture, the rip in the temporal membrane, before it was 1150
obvious to less agitated citizens’.122 Exiled in north London, ‘reputation 1151
occulted, he studied Blake and began to write’.123 1152
The future-avid ‘hungry shells’ of The First Electron Heresy of 1153
course also return us to the original Vorticist conception of the vortex 1154
as a focus and processor of spiritual energies. Pound, in 1916, famously 1155
proposed that ‘the Image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it 1156
is […] a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, 1157
ideas are constantly rushing’.124 In ‘The Vorticists’ Lewis recalled that 1158
‘[t]he origin of the term “Vorticism” was the idea of a mass of excited 1159
thinking, engrossed in a whirling centre’ (CHC 378). Here Lewis was 1160
characteristically projecting his persona – ‘I was at once calm and 1161
whirling, […] magnetic and incandescent’ (CHC 378) – over the 1162
aesthetic, but he was also pointing to the metropolitan essence of the 1163
Vorticist movement. In his introduction to the catalogue of the 1974 1164
Vorticism and Its Allies retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, Cork related 1165
the concept of the vortex to Pound’s ‘desire for a whirling force which 1166
drew all the most positive innovatory elements of the time into an 1167
energetic synthesis’: Pound desired pre-war London, with its 1168
‘unprecedented blend of hectic gaiety and experimental vitality’ – such 1169
as the Modern German Art show early in 1914.125 For Catling likewise, in 1170
Written Rooms and Pencilled Crimes (1992), the contemporary artist is to 1171
attend to, and process through visionary hermeneutics, the city’s 1172
centripetal spiritual violences. ‘The hermit’s task is to absorb the 1173
demons of his chosen desert, to funnel their appetites and magnitude 1174
through his open observing soul. The central station of the city is the 1175
wilderness for this urban anchorite.’126 1176
It is likely that Sinclair’s description of the transposition of the 1177
Silbury energy-vortex to the Whitechapel Art Gallery, in Muscat’s Würm 1178
(1972), refers to the Albion Island Vortex exhibition which Sinclair 1179
organized at the Whitechapel that year: 1180
1181
the spiral of Silbury 1182
painted on the floor of the Whitechapel Gallery 1183
1184
as the Ripper walks into it127 1185
1186
This particular central station, here reconvening the Silbury desert, is 1187
perhaps the archetypal Vorticist one. As we have seen already, the 1188
gallery was also the scene of the Twentieth Century Art show in the 1189
summer of 1914, in which Bomberg played a prominent part; the 1190
Whitechapel also hosted a Bomberg retrospective in 1979 – the year of 1191
the publication of Sinclair’s neo-Vorticist Suicide Bridge. Yet we could 1192
also recall Sinclair’s statements in The Verbals remembering how Albion 1193
Island Vortex was only ‘slightly Vorticist in impulse’. Though it was 1194
Catling’s ‘first public show’, the vortex that the exhibition showcased 1195
was only slightly urban. With its focus on ‘sacred sites’ and ‘numinous 1196
sites’ across Albion from Wiltshire to Wales, Albion Island Vortex 1197
understood the vortex as a spatial focus of spiritual energies in terms of 1198
‘the landscape of Britain as a mythological centre’.128 By the time of the 1199
Shamanism of Intent exhibition – or ‘three-dimensional event’, as The 1200
Verbals has it – at the Goldmark Gallery in 1991, the very site of the 1201
neo-Vorticist art vortex had shifted to a defiantly nonmetropolitan 1202
station: Uppingham.129 1203
This provincialization of neo-Vorticism may teach us something 1204
about the inertia of the London creative world. For Catling in Written 1205
Rooms and Pencilled Crimes the urban vortex is a spatial focus of spiritual 1206
energies; but Catling suggests these spiritual violences paradoxically have 1207
more material presence, more ‘magnitude’ and also more desirous 1208
‘appetites’, than the enveloping wilderness, affectless non-space that is 1209
the contemporary material city. In Rude Assignment Lewis sketched 1210
modern urban capitalism as a landscape of spiritual absence. ‘The 1211
machine-age of the mercantile classes is a polar wilderness, or a “dark 1212
continent”, for the authentic “intellectual”’ (RA 111). In the first 1213
BLAST, however, Lewis sees precisely our techno-industrial 1214
soullessness engendering Vorticist spiritual energies in reaction; as 1215
Catling would too, Lewis couples the flattened-out vacuity of the 1216
‘steppes’ with the emergence of art of great magnitude. 1217
1218
As the steppes and the rigours of the Russian winter, when the 1219
peasant has to lie for weeks in his hut, produces that 1220
extraordinary acuity of feeling and intelligence we associate with 1221
the Slav; so England is just now the most favourable country for 1222
the appearance of a great art. (B1 ) 1223
1224
Sinclair would similarly call Norwich ‘the perfect desert’ in which 1225
Catling could achieve his work of the early 1980s.130 Yet Pound’s 1226
September 1914 article ‘Vorticism’ had described Lewis’s 1912 Timon 1227
designs as addressing ‘the fury of intelligence baffled and shut in by 1228
circumjacent stupidity’.131 The First Electron Heresy returns to the 1229
containment of spiritual violences within an environment of contentless 1230
dullness, when Catling writes of ‘the hard knot of cerebral violence in 1231
the impassive blankness’; but again, Catling’s words are revealingly 1232
ambiguous: is the weave of intelligence itself formed – compacted – by 1233
the enveloping inaction, or simply situated within it?132 The overall 1234
Vorticist message seems to be that spiritual violences need not simply be 1235
a product of confinement within surrounding urban soullessness: that 1236
they can pre-exist autonomously. 1237
I would argue that the vitalist primitivism of Vorticism, laid out 1238
first by Lewis in BLAST, leads the aesthetic to refuse the purposeless 1239
progressivism and stop-gap meliorism typically associated with modern 1240
citizenship, yet also to occupy a place within a traceable lineage of 1241
visionary London writing concerned with the citizen’s spiritual passion. 1242
This explains why Vorticism interfaces with the exilic modernist 1243
sensibility developed within central Europe, which similarly fused 1244
romantic anti-capitalism with a magical perspective. The spiritual 1245
demands made at this interface may be absolutist, but they are also free-1246
form, shambolic and anarchic, and so offer us potent ways of resisting 1247
the authoritarian, ‘best practice’ perfectibilism of capitalist secularism: 1248
1249
The artist of the modern movement is a savage (in no sense an 1250
“advanced,” perfected, democratic, Futurist individual of Mr. 1251
Marinetti’s limited imagination): this enormous, jangling, 1252
journalistic, fairy desert of modern life serves him as Nature did 1253
more technically primitive man. (B1 33) 1254
1255
Notes 1256
1 Siegfried Kracauer [completed after the author’s death by Paul Oskar Kristeller], History: The Last Things Before the Last (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 219. 2 Charles Olson, Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 163. 3 Smith quoted from the BBC4 documentary The Fall: The Wonderful and Frightening World of Mark E. Smith (c. 2005). 4 Alan Munton, ‘Fredric Jameson: Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, The Modernist as Fascist’, in Seamus Cooney (ed.), BLAST 3 (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1984): 345-51, 351. 5 Quoted in Philip Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk: Aspects of Wyndham Lewis on Art and Society (Borough Green: Green Knight, 1999), 154. 6 Ibid., 33 and 39. 7 Iain Sinclair, The Kodak Mantra Diaries: October 1966 to June 1971 (London: Albion Village Press, 1971); Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1988), 11. Originally appeared as Spinoza: Philosophie pratique (Presses Universitaires de France, 1970). 8 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 36. 9 Quoted in Mary Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 1900-1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 74. 10 Ibid. 11 Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 161. 12 Deleuze, Spinoza, 4. 13 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays , trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 122. Original German version of ‘Revolt of the Middle Classes’ is 1931; The Mass Ornament was originally published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1963 (as Das Ornament der Masse: Essays). 14 Jay, Permanent Exiles, 152-53. 15 Ibid. 16 Jay, Permanent Exiles, 165 (quoting Kracauer, History, 83). 17 Jay, Permanent Exiles, 172. 18 Charles Spencer, ‘Anglo-Jewish Artists: The Migrant Generations’, in The Immigrant Generations: Jewish Artists in Britain 1900-1945 (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1982): 21-37, 30. 19 Ibid., 33 and 32.
20 Richard Cork, ‘Bomberg’s Odyssey’, in David Bomberg (London: Tate Gallery, 1988): 11-52, 18. 21 Emanuel in Spencer, ‘Anglo-Jewish Artists’, 43 22 Spencer, ‘Anglo-Jewish Artists’, 31. 23 Ibid., 30. 24 Cork, ‘Bomberg’s Odyssey’, 18, 20, 54, and 20. 25 Ibid., 15-16 (quoting Bomberg). 26 Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 194-95. 27 Rosemarie Haag Bletter, ‘The Interpretation of the Glass Dream: Expressionist Architecture and the History of the Crystal Metaphor’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 40. 1 (March 1981): 20-43, 34. 28 Quoted in David Frisby, ‘Social Theory, the Metropolis, and Expressionism’, in Timothy O. Benson (ed.), Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001): 88-111, 108. 29 Iain Sinclair, Lud Heat / Suicide Bridge (London: Vintage, 1995), 204. 30 Timothy O. Benson, ‘Introduction’, in Benson (ed.), Expressionist Utopias: 8-11, 8. 31 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 102 and 101. 32 Carter’s words are printed on the cover of Iain Sinclair, Downriver: (Or, the Vessels of Wrath), a Narrative in Twelve Tales (London: Paladin, 1991). In academic conversation, I have found negative reactions to Sinclair’s passion to range from David Trotter’s attribution of ungenteel ‘backwoodsman’ status to Sinclair’s oeuvre, to Leigh Wilson’s outright rejection of Sinclair’s work on account of its masculine ‘wildness’. 33 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 102 (quoting The Times). 34 Iain Sinclair, ‘Servant to the Stars: Brian Catling’s Pleiades in Nine, the Autolystic Defiances’, in Simon Perril (ed.), Tending the Vortex: The Works of Brian Catling (Cambridge: CCCP, 2001): 46-56, 55. Compare the lines ‘fuses saxon/ & photon/ tunes’ in Brian Catling, Pleiades in Nine (London: Albion Village Press, 1976), 21. 35 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 101. 36 Paul Edwards, ‘”You Must Speak with Two Tongues”: Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist Aesthetics and Literature’, in Paul Edwards (ed.), BLAST: Vorticism 1914-1918 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000): 113-20, 114. 37 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 103 and 104. 38 Neil H. Donahue, Forms of Disruption: Abstraction in Modern German Prose (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 40, 44, and 47.
39 Patrick Bridgwater, ‘Introduction’, in Patrick Bridgwater (ed.),Twentieth-Century German Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963): xli-lxxiii, liv. 40 Quoted in Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 102 41 Ibid., 103. 42 Ibid., 89. 43 Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 143. 44 Edwards, ‘”You Must Speak with Two Tongues”, 114. 45 Richard Humphreys, Wyndham Lewis (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), 31. 46 Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (1957; Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974), 272. 47 Richard Cork, ‘Introduction: Vorticism and Its Allies’, in Vorticism and Its Allies (Hayward Gallery: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1974): 5-28, 6. 48 Bridgwater, x (compare with xlv). 49 Sigrid Bauschinger, ‘The Berlin Moderns: Else Lasker-Schüler and Café Culture’, in Emily D. Bilski (ed.), Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890-1918 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999): 58-83, 72. 50 Bletter, ‘The Interpretation of the Glass Dream’, 34, n. 58. 51 Andrew Causey, ‘The Hero and the Crowd: The Art of Wyndham Lewis in the Twenties’, in Paul Edwards (ed.), Volcanic Heaven: Essays on Wyndham Lewis’s Painting & Writing (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1996): 87-102, 87. 52 Quoted in William C. Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), 6. 53 Reed Way Dasenbrock, ‘Vorticism Among the Isms’, in Cooney (ed.), BLAST 3: 40-46, 45. 54 Robert Bond, ‘“A Dark Insect Swarming”: The Vorticist Visionary Mode of Wyndham Lewis and Iain Sinclair’, in Robert Bond and Jenny Bavidge (eds), City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007): 10-31. 55 Allen Fisher, ‘Diligence and Dilemmas and Aspects of Work by Brian Catling’, in Perril (ed.), Tending the Vortex: 57-65, 63. 56 Brian Kim Stefans, ‘Veronica Forrest-Thomson and High Artifice’, Jacket, 14 (July 2001): http://jacketmagazine.com/14/stefans-vft.html (accessed 21 June 2012). 57 Brieger referred to in Victor H. Miesel, ‘Ludwig Meidner’, in Ludwig Meidner: An Expressionist Master (University of Michigan Museum of Art, 1978): 1-23, 22. 58 The ‘Time and the Raven’ dust jacket is reproduced in Iain Sinclair, The Shamanism of Intent: Some Flights of Redemption (Uppingham: Goldmark, 1991), 22 (see also 51 and 52) 59 Iain Sinclair, ‘A New Vortex: The Shamanism of Intent’, Modern Painters, 4. 2 (Summer 1991): 46-51, 50.
60 Iain Sinclair, ‘The Shamanism of Intent: A Retrospective Manifesto’, in Sinclair, The Shamanism of Intent: 5-19, 7. 61 Sinclair, ‘A New Vortex’, 51. 62 Sinclair, Lud Heat / Suicide Bridge, 68. 63 Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London (London: Granta Books, 1997), 267. 64 Vernon Watkins, The Collected Poems of Vernon Watkins (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 2000), 31. 65 Anna Mendelssohn, Implacable Art (Cambridge: Folio/ Equipage, 2000), 85. 66 Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 6. 67 Iain Sinclair in conversation with Kevin Jackson, The Verbals (Tonbridge: Worple Press, 2003), 126. 68 Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 66. 69 Sinclair, Lud Heat / Suicide Bridge, 70. 70 Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 152 (quoting Lesznai). 71 Ibid., 23 and 24. 72 Sinclair and Jackson, The Verbals, 119. 73 Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 64-65 (quoting Lukács). 74 Ibid., 69 (quoting Balázs). 75 David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin (1985; Cambridge: Polity, 1988), 114. 76 Allen Hibbard (ed.), Conversations with William S. Burroughs (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 167. 77 Frisby, Fragments of Modernity, 114 and 111-12 (quoting Kracauer). 78 Bridgwater, xxx and xxxi. 79 John McDonald (ed.), Peter Fuller’s Modern Painters: Reflections on British Art (London: Methuen, 1993), 118. 80 Quoted in Frisby, ‘Social Theory’, 104-05. 81 Ibid., 110, n. 56. 82 Sinclair, ‘The Shamanism of Intent’, 17 and 19. 83 Max Beckmann, ‘Creative Credo’ (1920), in Victor H. Miesel (ed.), Voices of German Expressionism (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970):107-9, 109. Compare the article of mine referenced at the end of n. 49, above. 84 Inka Bertz, ‘Jewish Renaissance – Jewish Modernism’, in Bilski (ed.), Berlin Metropolis: 164-87, 184. 85 Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 153 (compare 239, n. 72). 86 Ibid., 156. 87 Quoted in ibid., 19.
88 Humphreys, Lewis, 26-27. 89 Giovanni Cianci, ‘A Man at War: Lewis’s Vital Geometries’, in Edwards (ed.), Volcanic Heaven: 11-24, 19. 90 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 126 (quoting Lewis). 91 Sinclair, Lud Heat / Suicide Bridge, 20. 92 Vernon Watkins, New Selected Poems, ed. Richard Ramsbotham (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), 101. 93 Webb’s Guardian review quoted from the back cover of Iain Sinclair, White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings (London: Paladin, 1988). 94 Humphreys, Lewis, 28; Thomas Kush, Wyndham Lewis’s Pictorial Integer (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981), 78. 95 Sinclair and Jackson, The Verbals, 126. 96 Sinclair, ‘Servant to the Stars’, 55. 97 J. H. Prynne, Poems, second edn (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005), 93. 98 Quoted in Frisby, ‘Social Theory’, 104. 99 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 99. 100 Sinclair and Jackson, The Verbals, 122. 101 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 8. 102 Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928-1940, ed. Henri Lonitz (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), 128 and 129. 103 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 105-6. 104 Sinclair, Lud Heat / Suicide Bridge, 32. 105 Simon Perril, ‘“A Ghost is Being Built from the More / Solid Things”: A Catling Overview’, in Perril (ed.), Tending the Vortex: 23-45, 29. 106 Sinclair, ‘A New Vortex’, 50. 107 Sinclair, ‘Servant to the Stars’, 50. 108 Ibid., 55. 109 Brian Catling, Vorticegarden (London: Albion Village Press, 1974), n.p. 110 Perril, ‘“A Ghost is Being Built from the More / Solid Things”’, 32. 111 Catling, Pleiades in Nine, 30. 112 Sinclair, Lud Heat / Suicide Bridge, 20. 113 Ibid., 35. 114 Ibid., 36. 115 Ibid., 38. 116 Catling, Vorticegarden, n.p. 117 Catling, Pleiades in Nine, 41. 118 Cianci, ‘A Man at War’, 20. 119 Sinclair, ‘Servant to the Stars’, 55 and 53. 120 Brian Catling, The First Electron Heresy (London: Albion Village Press, 1972), 8.
121 Quoted in Emily D. Bilski, ‘Images of Identity and Urban Life: Jewish Artists in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin’, in Bilski (ed.), Berlin Metropolis: 102-45, 140. 122 Iain Sinclair (ed.), London: City of Disappearances (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006), 7. 123 Ibid., 8. 124 Quoted in Bridgwater, lii. 125 Cork, ‘Introduction: Vorticism and Its Allies’, 6. 126 Allen Fisher, Bill Griffiths, and Brian Catling, Future Exiles: 3 London Poets, Paladin Re/Active Anthology No. I (London: Paladin, 1992), 351. 127 Iain Sinclair, Muscat’s Würm (London: Albion Village Press, 1972), 22; Cork, ‘Bomberg’s Odyssey’, 52, n. 153. 128 Sinclair and Jackson, The Verbals, 68 dates Albion Island Vortex to 1972, as does the catalogue (which is in box XXVI of the Texas Sinclair Archive). Nevertheless the spectral, unfixed quality of neo-Vorticism is stressed by the show’s floating date in other records. See Sinclair, The Shamanism of Intent, 50, which dates the exhibition to 1973, while Perril, ‘“A Ghost is Being Built from the More / Solid Things”’, 26 dates it to 1974. For the reference to Twentieth Century Art, see n. 20 above and Cork, Vorticism and Its Allies, 6 and 29. 129 Sinclair and Jackson, The Verbals, 68 and 125. 130 Sinclair, ‘A New Vortex’, 50. 131 BLAST, p. 123 n. 32 (compare the similar phrases, from Pound’s ‘Wyndham Lewis’ of June 1914, quoted in Wyndham Lewis, p. 89). 132 Catling, The First Electron Heresy, 12.