Vorticism

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 * Vorticism** might be described as visual energy. It is a term that is difficult to define, just as it is difficult to see energy. It involves creating layers within works, linking time and space, and basically sending the viewer or reader on a journey into a vortex. The best way to describe the "vortex" in Vorticism is by using the analogy of bifurcation points. When one places a pot of water and applies heat, the visible vortex is the point at which hot and cold clash to create change. When one pulls the plug from a bath tub, the point at which the surface tension breaks results in a vortex. It's the moment of change. Just like water in a draining tub, eventually the change runs its course and ends, which Vorticism did. However, despite the short-lived status of the movement, its impact on the artistic world was great enough to be felt for many years to come. whoa anyone can edit this

=**Definition**=

Vorticism was a revolutionary artistic movement created to promote the //avant-garde// style. Some of it's most noteworthy participants include: Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The London-based creators lasted as a group for only six months, but the influence of Vorticism was fairly wide-spread, providing a foundation for modernist art. Its creators saw themselves as teachers, showing people how to read the language of modern times. Vorticism relied on bold statements - both visually and poetically - in order to portray instantaneous energy. Therefore, the use of strong colors and thick lines created a sense of intensity. In addition to the visual element, Vorticist writers created poetry with a multitude of perspective and temporal layers.

**Vorticism Manifesto (1914)**
1. Beyond Action and Reaction we would establish ourselves. 2. We start from opposite statements of a chosen world. Set up violent structure of adolescent clearness between two extremes. 3. We discharge ourselves on both sides. 4. We first first on one side, then on the other, but always for the SAME cause, which is neither side or both sides and ours. 5. Mercenaries were always the best troops. 6. We are primitive Mercenaries in the Modern World. 7. Our Cause is NO-MAN'S. 8. We set Humour at Humour's throat. Stir up Civil War among peaceful apes. 9. We only want Humour if it has fought like Tragedy. 10. We only want Tragedy if it can clench its side-muscles like hands on its belly, and bring to the surface a laugh like a bomb.

=**Historical Context**=

Vorticism owes much to the cultural context that it occurred in. Vorticism formed in England a little after Futurism developed in Italy. Moreover, while Vorticism developed tangentially to the Futurist movement developed by F.T. Marinetti. However, in a number of ways, Vorticism functioned as a critique of Futurist ethics and aesthetics. The largest critique of course being that Futurism - despite its explicit rejection of sentimentality - was in fact aggressively sentimental. Furthermore, Vorticism rejected the movement towards the future and instead located its philosophical and aesthetic groundings within the present - the moment of instantiation for an image. At least for Pound, Vorticism came out of his conception of Imagism; Sort of in response to the economic growth and militaristic pile up that occurred prior to WWI, Vorticism conceived the moment as brimming with energy. Moreover, much of Pound's Vorticist writing happened during WWI while many of his colleagues and friends were sent to the battlefront.

Pound was to move on to other things, as were many of his colleagues within the Vorticist movement. While Vorticism developed during the build up of WWI, the actual conflict destroyed the movement. Many of Vorticists leading writers and artists were sent to the front and several of them never returned. While Vorticism focused on the intensity of a moment, the actual progression of this intensity and these energies - that created in WWI - made it difficult to return to Vorticism.

=**Visual Vorticism**=

The Vorticist movement's ranks were largely populated with visual artists. Following are a few of its most prominent members.

**Wyndham Lewis**
Wyndham Lewis was both writer and artist. His work was largely Vorticist and was the lead of the Vorticist group that formed in England. Lewis also edited BLAST, the Vorticist artistic magazine while producing his own artistic works. Lewis himself started out as a mixture of cubist and futurist with works like //Timon of Athens// (1912) which emphasized a layering of perspective along with an energy characteristic of Futurism. However, Lewis was largely unimpressed with the lack of energy characteristic of most Cubist works and at the same time wanted more structure than Futurism. Therefore, Vorticism functioned as a combination of the two; hence the intense energies mentioned above but only of a moment: there is a distinct core to the work (the eye of the hurricane). Lewis also was the lead editor of the Vorticist magazine BLAST which he printed two volumes and tried to continue a third. Lewis, however, was sent to the warfront and was unable to spur Vorticism any further despite a series of attempts.

[[image:peaceandwarpoetics/vortexgaudier(text).jpg width="300" align="right"]]**Henri Gaudier-Brzeska**
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was a noted Vorticist who worked with sculpture as his medium. He took to the movement with great zeal, becoming a founding member of the London Group. The London Group is a facility for the exhibition of art. It was formed in opposition to the preexisting exhibition center, the Royal Academy, by a group of English Vorticist artists in 1913, and still exists today. The art displayed by the London Group focuses on the working class. Gaudier-Brzeska enlisted with the French Army at the outbreak of World War I and earned notice (and promotions) from higher ranking officers due to his bravery on the battlefield. His experience with war, unlike Futurists such as F. T. Marinetti, did not weaken, rather it strengthened his resolve. As seen in his article "Written from the Trenches," he echoes Marinetti's proclamation that war is "the world's only hygiene" with his affirmation, "THIS WAR IS A GREAT REMEDY." Henri Gaudier-Brzeska died on the field of battle and his works were largely dismissed during his lifetime, but today his sculpture's are seen as pivotal works in the development of the field.

**Jacob Epstein**
Jacob Epstein was a controversial sculptor within the Vorticist movement. He'd often confront the subject of human sexuality with blunt candor, and as a result, his works would often result in strong reactions from the public. In one of his more well-known pieces, //Rock Drill//, he took a human-like figure and positioned (in lieu of a phallus) the rock drill from which the piece derives its name. When asked about the piece, Epstein stated "I made and mounted a machine-like robot, visored, menacing, and carrying within itself its progeny, protectively ensconced. Here is the armed, sinister figure of today and tomorrow." While Epstein's work often faced public outcries due to the uncompromising, sexually explicit content, this piece also ignited explosive disagreement among his friends within the Vorticist movement. Epstein remembered that Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was very enthusiastic about it when he visited his studio in 1913 with Ezra Pound to view it. After Pound started expatiating on the work, Gaudier turned on him and snapped, "Shut up, you understand nothing!"

**Works**
//Timon of Athens 1912// //Composition 1913// //Workshop 1914-1915 (painting at the top of the page)

**Ezra Pound**
Poet and polemic, Ezra Pound developed literary Vorticism as a movement away from Imagism while keeping with some of his Imagist aesthetic. Pound coined the term Vorticism in his essay //Vortex// which was published in the magazie BLAST in 1914. Pound says that "the vortex is the point of maximum energy." Similar to his Imagist poetics, Pound maintained that Vorticism rejects mimesis as a key component of the art form. Rather, "VORTICISM is art before it has spread itself into a state of flacidity, of elaboration, of secondary applications." He states explicitly that the poetry relies on imagery but not in an associative or mimetic way. The image, therefore, remains central to his poetics which relates to the still core and structure that Wyndham Lewis proposed as well as containing the energy characteristic of Vorticism.

Of considerable literary note, Ezra Pound's contributions to translation and his rapid critical and poetic development during the Vorticist years are reflected in Cathay (1915). In a June, 1915 review in Outlook, reprinted in The Critical Heritage, Ford Madox Ford declared it "the best work he has yet done;" the poems, of "a supreme beauty," revealed Pound's "power to express emotion ... intact and exactly." Sinologists criticized Pound for the inaccuracies of the translations; Wi-lim Yip, in his Ezra Pound's Cathay, admitted, "One can easily excommunicate Pound from the Forbidden City of Chinese studies"; yet he believed that Pound conveyed "the central concerns of the original author" and that no other translation "has assumed so interesting and unique a position as Cathay in the history of English translations of Chinese poetry." In The Pound Era, Kenner pointed out that Cathay was an interpretation as much as a translation; the "poems paraphrase an elegiac war poetry.... among the most durable of all poetic responses to World War I." Perhaps the clearest assessment of Pound's achievement was made at the time by T. S. Eliot in his introduction to Pound's Selected Poems; he called Pound "the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time" and predicted that Cathay would be called a "magnificent specimen of twentieth-century poetry" rather than a translation.

**Vorticist Poetry**
Vorticist Poetry, as Ezra Pound developed it, mostly relies on metonymic relations between images. However, these relations are not static but instead inject energy within the particular set of images that Pound devises. This energy usually asserts itself within a layering of different times within one poem or image. For instance, in Ezra Pound's //The Cantos//, Pound often relates various historical figures together merely by linking prototypical images of each character like the fall of Troy to Helen with the romantic betrayals and politics to Eleanor of Aquitaine. So, in effect, Pound traverses temporal landscapes at dramatic speeds creating a vortex between the two figures and their surrounding contexts.

**BLAST**
BLAST was an artistic magazine published by Wyndham Lewis which contained works of Vorticism both visual and literary. Only two issues were published: one in 1914 and another in 1915. BLAST functioned as the staging ground for the Vorticist movement, even containing a so called, "Preliminary Vortex" as well as a series of manifestos expounding Vorticist aesthetics. BLAST contained the works of literary Vorticists like Ezra Pound as well as other modernist writers like T.S. Eliot. The first issue of BLAST functioned as a means of critique and contentment; a large chunk of the early part of BLAST 1 contain a series of BLAST/BLESS/CURSED social and artistic movements including Futurism. However, after the first issue of BLAST, war was declared on Germany. One other issue of BLAST managed to appear but Lewis - the lead editor of the magazine - was sent to the war front. No other issues of BLAST were published despite Lewis' attempts to reinvigorate the Vorticist movement.

**External Links**
[|BLAST Vol. 1] [|BLAST vol. 2] [|Vorticism Online]

**References**
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