Author Archives: Caro

On Exhibit: The Vorticists’ “Mad Modernity”

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Nasher Art Museum at Duke University
Durham, NC
Through January 11

Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Venice, Italy
25 January – 15 May 2011

Tate Britain
London, UK
Tuesday 14 June – Sunday 4 September 2011

“What is Vorticism? Well, like Futurism, and Imagisme, and Cubism, essentially it is nonsense. But it is more important than these other fantastic, artistic, and literary movements because it is their sure conclusion. It is important not because it is the latest, but because it is the last phase of the ridiculous rebellion which has given the world the “Portrait of a Nude Descending the Stairs” and the writings of Gertrude Stein. It is the reduction ad absurdum of mad modernity.”

When The New York Times published this dismissal of “modernity” in August of 1914, only a couple of months had passed since the Vorticists had published their manifesto in the first volume of their magazine Blast. Earlier that year, Dora Marsden had established her journal The Egoist, Vorticist leader Wyndham Lewis had broken with the Bloomsbury artists and established the Rebel Art Center, and the Vorticist poet laureate Ezra Pound had published his anthology “Des Imagistes.” “Mad Modernity” was in full swing (despite that little matter of an assassination).

On the same day that the Times “blasted” Vorticism, they also published a glowing review of a show of American art in Paris featuring work by the figurative painters Ernest Lawson, Bryson Burroughs, and Harry Lachman, as well as the sculptor Cecil Howard. From the vantage point of New York, then conservative and academic, all the European modernisms were madness — the same madness.

Throughout 1914, however, Pound and Lewis were at great pains to emphasize that Vorticism was not the same. In June, they publicly rejected Marinetti’s attempts to co-opt them as a sub-movement of Italian Futurism, despite having previously taken advantage of his high profile for a fundraiser for the Rebel Art Center. Blast 1 is littered with aggressive criticism and rejections of all the modernisms, in an effort to publicly situate Vorticism as a uniquely advanced synthesis. In the introduction to the excellent exhibition catalog for the exhibit reviewed here, Philip Rylands describes it as the “most advanced, the most sharply characterized of the London-based avant-gardes,” including the Bloomsbury movement that fostered Virginia Woolf.

This is even clear from the first time the term “Vorticist” appeared, in a 1914 advertisement for the upcoming Blast 1, printed in the literary magazine The Spectator:

The Manifesto of the Vorticists. The English Parallel Movement to Cubism and Expressionism. Imagism in poetry. Death blow to Impressionism and Futurism, and all the refuse of naïf science.

The Exhibit

The exhibit of Vorticist art currently on display at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, curated by the Nasher in cooperation with the Guggenheim in New York, is the first exhibition of Vorticist art in the United States since Pound mounted his own exhibition at the Penguin Club in New York in 1917. For that reason alone, it is worth attending.

The exhibit is organized in five parts: A display of major works, including Gaudier-Brezska’s Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound (below), Wyndham Lewis’ The Crowd (right), and Jacob Epstein’s Torso in Metal from Rock Drill (below, third), begins the exhibit. That is followed by “re-creations” of the three exhibitions, including Pound’s at the Penguin, held between 1913 and 1917 when Vorticism was a current avant-garde, and a section devoted to the movement’s magazine Blast.

“Re-creation” is a strong word, as many of the originally exhibited artworks are lost – but the curators attempted to gather as many works from the original exhibitions as possible. Of particular note are the paintings by Helen Saunders, which were believed lost but turned up in boxes at Roosevelt University in Chicago, and the vortographs of photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn.

The impact of seeing all these works collected together – as opposed to the usual one-off buried in a room of “minor modernisms” – is significant. In this context, the aesthetic consistency among the movement’s practitioners, their debts to Jacob Epstein and to both Cubism and Futurist painting, and the inspiration they found in the urban landscapes of Northern English cities and English industrialism, all become readily visible.

The section focusing on Blast doesn’t make nearly the same impact. That section and the opening display of “major works” are both haunted by the spectres of literature and philosophy – particularly Pound, who coined the term Vorticism, and Wyndham Lewis, who was as much a novelist and essayist as a painter. Their mutual “friend” T.E. Hulme – in scare quotes because that friendship was characterized by competition and melodrama, which led to Hulme’s exclusion from Blast 1 – was almost singlehandledly responsible for Vorticism’s philosophical orientation, culled from his translation of Bergson and his friendship with the Expressionist philosopher Wilhelm Worringer. Add in Pound’s influential friendships with the feminist anarcho-individualist Marsden and the writer T.S. Eliot (who was also published in Blast), and it’s indisputable that Vorticism was as much a literary, philosophical, political, and social movement as it was a visual aesthetic one. (There was even Vorticist music, eventually.)

The Nasher exhibit emphasizes Blast as a material object, however, displaying original copies of both volumes in long cases, with framed original drawings for the magazine hanging above the cases. Although the physicality of this presentation gives a geeky thrill, Blast was never intended to be enclosed within a display case (to the exhibitors credit, a new facsimile edition of Blast 1 was developed just prior to the exhibit and is available in the gift shop or here).

There is no Vulgarity in Revolt

The manifestos of “mad modernism” depended on mechanical reproduction and fed off the vibrancy of their artistic activism. The avant-garde was here set against both aestheticism and academicism, as Lewis’ stated directly in Blast:

To make the rich of the community shed their education skin, to destroy politeness, standardization and academic, that is civilized, vision, is the task we have set ourselves.

To believe that it is necessary for or conducive to art to “improve” life, for instance, make architecture, dress, ornament, in “better taste,” is absurd.

The Latins are at present, for instance, in their ‘discovery’ of sport, their Futuristic gush over machines, aeroplanes, etc., the most romantic and sentimental ‘moderns’ to be found. It is only the second-rate people in France or Italy who are thorough revolutionaries. In England, on the other hand, there is no vulgarity in revolt. Or rather, there is no revolt, it is the normal state. … the nearest thing in England to a great traditional French artist is a great revolutionary English one.

The spirit in these quotes from the preface and manifesto, not to mention its influence on the experience of the visual art works and literature reproduced in the subsequent pages, is lost when the book is put in a case. Blast-as-exhibit can only suggest it; experiencing the historical materiality of the book can’t even begin to substitute for reading it – even in non-facsimile reproduction.

Likewise, the materiality of the traditional exhibit space doesn’t even evoke, let alone “recreate” the rebellious, radical spirit and context of the wartime exhibitions. The Penguin Club is a case in point: the Club had been founded shortly before the 1917 Vorticist Exhibition by Walter Kuhn, one of the progenitors of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, who put on the influential 1913 Armory Show that introduced Duchamp, and Hopper, and Kandinsky, and the post-Impressionists – among many others – to American audiences. The club was a gathering place for modernist artists rebelling against the constraints of academic art, including Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Joseph Stella. The club held exhibitions, put on costume parties and satirical theatrical productions, offered classes by its members to its members, and encouraged criticism, discussion, and debate. The sedate blue and cream walls of the exhibition don’t begin to capture the frenetic environs from which Vorticism emerged and in which it perpetuated itself. Mad Modernism indeed.

Which is to say – by all means you really must go to the exhibit if you are anywhere near Durham, Venice, or London. Read the wall tags, admire the materiality of the art, and marvel at the lost-but-now-am-found paintings. But be sure to flip through the facsimile edition of Blast and the superb exhibition catalog, too. Otherwise you’ll have seen Vorticist art, but missed what makes it Vorticist.

Blog Versus Professor: Aline Kominsky-Crumb is Authentic, Too

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How useful is Charles Hatfield’s notion of “ironic authentication” for understanding the autobiographies of women cartoonists?

I ask that question provocatively, but sincerely. The concept is worked out in the comics of male cartoonists: Hatfield first offers a compelling account of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, claiming it as the origin point of a comics tradition of realist-naturalist autobiography (which he just calls realist). He then opposes this naturalism to the fantasy mode typically associated with “mainstream” comics, outlining the transformative impact Pekar’s naturalism had on the scope of the “comic book hero.” He next tackles the far more theoretically ambivalent territory of autobiographical subjectivity, beginning by emphasizing the ways in which comics resonate and amplify autobiography’s inability (identified and emphasized by Autobiography Studies in literature) to escape the inherently fictive attributes of narrative subjectivity: “comics pose an immediate and obvious challenge to the idea of non-fiction.” Dan Clowes and the heightened formalist self-awareness in Just Another Day is read first, for insight into how the unavoidable fictitiousness of cartoon selves “distills and mocks Pekar’s ethic of fidelity to mundane truths,” then linked to R. Crumb’s The Many Faces of R. Crumb in order to assert that the seemingly unanchored “fictitiousness” of Clowes’ perspective actually is a “truthful” representation of the plasticity of identity. This elegant and theoretically savvy series of readings culminates in an examination of Gilbert Hernandez’s parodic “My Love Book,” which “teases the reader with a disjointed series of confessional vignettes, between which his visual personae shift so radically that we can confirm their common identity only through the repetition of certain motifs of in dialog and action” and which ends with an ironic suicide that “adverts to the limitations of autobiography” and “muddies its own assertion of truth.”

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Here Be Lovely Monsters: Alexis Frederick-Frost’s Voyage

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A couple of categories dominate mini-comics at SPX: the quick-and-dirty ones with simple drawings and simple or no text, usually photocopied, and the visual-artifacts-with-really-nice-art ones, which are beautifully drawn and decently- to well-printed, but often with “stories” that are rarely more than journal entries or slice-of-the-mundane or just random patter – hat racks for the high-quality art.

Exceptions to the hat rack problem are most often found in wordless mini-comics. The best example in my stash is Alexis Frederick-Frost’s simple but gorgeous “Voyage.” (I originally didn’t think this comic had a prose name: it’s not on the comic and I didn’t immediately locate it on his blog; I’ve been calling it “The Here Be Monsters Mini-Comic.” I was a little disappointed to discover that it did have a title!)

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Frank Kermode: 1919-2010

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I was thinking about Frank Kermode in the days before I learned, belatedly, from the eulogies printed in the London Review of Books, that he had died. I was trying to reconcile his opinion – oft shared by older college English professors during my undergraduate years – that reading was much more important than writing, with something James Sturm said at SPX: that to be psychologically healthy, you have to create as much media as you take in. Both seem intuitively wise, yet at odds, since nobody who read as much as Kermode could possibly write as much too and yet the breadth and seriousness of Kermode’s reading is surely the kernel of his writing and his contribution to literary study.

Kermode, like most male critics of his generation, tended to articulate a conservative response to the “politicization” of the humanities academy in the 1960s-70s and after. His values, he said, were those of the Enlightenment: disinterestedness, orderly thought, the search for wisdom and perspective. And yet his perspective, and his wisdom, were not all that divergent in their details from the insights of the early- to mid-century philosophy that informs so much of capital-T Theory. He wasn’t particularly conservative politically except in terms of academic politics, and his appreciation for Continental philosophy allowed him to read, and critique, the academic practice of Theory seriously when others of his generation could not. His own writing, especially 1990’s Poetry, Narrative, History deals with issues of narrative structure closely related to those of French narratology. 1965’s The Sense of an Ending prefigures social-science’s notion of a “risk society,” which has been treated frequently by Zizek .

But ever invested in the centrality of reading literature for sense, Kermode somewhat blames the academy’s politicization for society’s loss of sanity:

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Too Much is Never Enough: Morris Lapidus’ Postmodern Curves

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HU’s been preoccupied with architecture this week. In yesterday’s post, Suat noted that “the building shorn of its façade has long been favored by cartoonists in search of a structure which best encapsulates the comics reading experience in a physically possible form: the rooms and walls acting like panels and borders…” But it’s worth noting that the gridded interior which resonates most efficiently with the conventional comics form is a historically situated architectural shape: the rectangular multi-story urban dwelling, industrial tenement house or modernist skyscraper.

When architect Morris Lapidus was designing the 50-story Americana hotel in New York City in 1960, he needed to save his client the half-a-million dollars it would take to stabilize the high building against wind pressure. Lapidus’ solution was to bend the building so it would stand by itself, without support. First he illustrated the concept for his client using a calling card:

And then through illustrative drawings:

Basically, Morris Lapidus knew the limitations of a straight line. In the 1930s, living in New York and working as a merchandiser, he was already getting customers’ attention through curvilinear ornamental devices that an editor at Pencilpoint magazine described as “bean poles, cheese holes, and woggles.” [Woggles were amoeba-like shapes.] By the early-50s, during his rise to prominence in Miami Beach as the go-to architect for luxurious exotica, these features had become a signature style.

Lapidus himself defended the curves as natural — ”People don’t move in straight lines like an army — they meander. So, my plans meander” — but his protégé, Deborah Desilets, captures the more subjective experience of eschewing linearity: ”Mr. Lapidus knows how to give emotions physical form,” she said. ”His space swirls you; it prompts you to move; it’s an interactive architecture.”

Around the same time as Lapidus was swirling the glitterati through his Miami hotels, The Chicago Tribune was publishing a single-panel “comic strip” by Arthur Radebaugh called “Closer than We Think”, which traded on the same curvilinear futurist aesthetic.

Although explicitly futuristic, both Lapidus and Radebaugh stand in marked contrast to the stark modernism of the International Style and European futurism of the early to mid-century. Theirs is a decadent, utopian futurism, apolitical, indulgent, ultimately more pop psychology and marketing than technology and science. Contrast with the futurism of Metropolis or Marinetti: these spaces are futuristic environments for an affluent bourgeoisie, professional men and women, with an expectation of technological luxury (an expectation not unrelated to our current economic malaise). This is a characteristically American futurism, indicative of “The American Century” and redolant with the capitalist fantasies that propelled America’s mid-century economy as well as American’s mid-century style.

And that’s where Deborah Desilets has a point: those decadent curves really are more immersive, emotional, and interactive than their more starkly linear cousins. This is the fantasy formation that makes it possible for marketing to mask commodification. Decadent futurism feels so postmodern not just because it foregrounds non-linearity as the avant garde would have it, but because it puts that non-linearity in the service of a fluid, imaginative fantasy — an unanchored, forward-looking fantasy of possibilities rather than the nostalgic one of history and memory that’s more characteristic of modernism. It’s that futuristic fantasy that is characteristically postmodern, in contrast with modernism’s fascinations with history, autobiography, and the contours of the past.

Not that a curvy, luxurious, decadent aesthetic is inherently bad or even inherently capitalist; in pre-modernist art, it was certainly put to far more bohemian ends. And non-linearity certainly isn’t associated with capitalist success in literature — it’s remained avant-garde despite 30 years of experiments with it. But in visual culture, decadence has lost those bohemian connotations and become pretty thoroughly bourgeois. That narrowing of signification needs to be challenged.

By the most fully postmodern standards, comics with a few exceptions tend to be quite linear: narrative storytelling through panels, even at its most flexible, is essentially a medium of vectors and lines. Sometimes in comics conversations and criticism there’s a sense that the form of comics – that sequential narrative storytelling through panels – is somehow transhistorical, that it can be endlessly manipulated internally to speak to and resonate with many and any aesthetic paradigms. But that isn’t true for any other artistic form, so it’s probably not true for comics either. Sequential narrative-through-panels is an architecture, and architecture is as historically situated as anything else.

Doubly Good

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There’s a moment in Lilli Carré’s minicomic “The Thing about Madeline” where you really get that you’re reading a real story and not another installment in the Saga of the Mundane. It’s a little later than the point where that story actually begins: not where Madeline meets her doppelganger/self for the first time – that’s just a plot twist – but when Madeline the First gets “into the habit of watching herself through windows”:

Robert Stanley Martin correctly identified this moment as the place where the story’s main narrative idea slips from metaphor into dramatic irony, as the doppelganger is able to find the happiness in her life that Madeline could not. His review is so spot on I’m just going to link to it rather than trying to cover those aspects of the narrative myself.

But those panels also mark the place where the visuals take over doing that metaphorical work that the narrative leaves behind: the images of double Madeline continue to manifest the theme of alienation from oneself and one’s life while the plot (and facial expressions) hold up the ironic narrative.

What’s particularly beautiful and satisfying about this is not just that the visuals effortlessly carry significations that would become increasingly labored in prose. It’s also that the comic itself is now doubled right along with Madeline: the themes of alienation and happiness continue side-by-side formally in the same way that Alienated Madeline and her Happy Doppelganger populate the narrative. What this allows, then, is two separate story arcs: a literal one about Madeline and the Doppelganger, and a sustained metaphorical one about the relationship between alienation and happiness. Toward the end of the book, when Happy Madeline is visited by her own Alienated Doppelganger, the scenes from the beginning are recast – on a second read or in retrospect, it’s possible to see Happy Doppelganger and Happy Madeline as the same “character.” In that reading, self-alienation is always lurking and, as Robert points out, the easy moralizing criticisms of Alienated Madeline are much harder to make. The powers of circumstance and perspective get attention in a way they could not if the story had stayed more personal, eschewing that metaphorical strand.

Carré’s work always balances very deftly on the line between ironic detachment and literary self-awareness, both traditional dramatic irony as well as the more formalist kind. Her characters often have these very distinctive noses that are a mashup of Mary Poppins and Raggedy Ann, and they alone are sufficient to make her drawing style immediately recognizable. In the case of The Thing about Madeline, this stylistic quirk works as support for the formal edifice: they mark the characters as “drawn,” and the effect of this signature is to anchor those characters to the visual plane of the comic. They restrict the universality of the characters and contribute to our sense of detachment from them.

That signature nose is absent from Carré’s most recent animated film, Head Garden, one of the selections for the 2010 SPX Animation Showcase.

Head Garden from Lilli Carré on Vimeo.

Instead, the face carries the metaphor, more directly. The facial features are less “cartoony” and more influenced by “art” faces like the ones discussed here and in comments. For me, the loss of this creative “signature” lets the animation breathe and allows the critical, slighly neurotic self-awareness of ironic detachment to mutate into the genuine double entendre that marks the best literary characterizations. The physical marker of style is less overt, but there is no loss of metaphorical sophistication (relatively at least; the animation’s metaphors are less ambitious than the mini-comic’s). The characters have become less “self-conscious”, although less well-developed in this less narrative piece, and I think because of this, the seams between the form and its significance are better hidden. I don’t think that’s just an effect of the film as opposed to comics. Identification with these characters is less detached even in still frames, despite the much more distant narrative characterization.

It seems to be a one-off, though; Nine Ways to Disappear maintains the signature style, as do Carré’s previous animations. (The nose is put to exceptional effect in What Hits the Moon; watch the way it sustains the character’s identity as her face ages around it.) But I think the comparison illustrates some of the limitations of too much “handwriting”: after awhile, it begins to feel like deliberate self-citation. Unless the handwriting is used in some meaningful way, it can interfere with other effects. Head Garden is still discernably Lilli Carré, but in the absence of that distinctively marked facial feature, her graceful but slightly awkward lines — like the talented too-tall girl in ballet class — get to take center stage. I hope to see a sustained story from her in the style of Head Garden sometime soon.

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This review is based on the black-and-white mini-comic version of The Thing about Madeline. More information on the SPX Animation Showcase is available here.

Oddbox Bookshelf: Ivan Bilibin’s Russian Folktales

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For all but the most enthusiastic student of historical ballet (and for fans of Alan Moore), a passing mention of the Ballets Russes calls to mind the riotous 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Expecting classical ballet, with its tutus and fairy tale settings, the Parisian audience was caught off guard and put off their dinners by the intensely punctuated rhythm of the score; Vaslav Nijinsky’s aggressive, distorted choreography; and the brightly colored primitivist imagery of the costumes and set design.

I was taught, as a student of that aforementioned historical ballet, to interpret this aesthetic first as an effect of Nijinsky’s own mental illness and second as neonationlist entertainment targeted at the population of expatriate Russian aristocratic patrons. Both are surely true to some extent, but I was also taught to associate that neonationalism with the merchant-class Slavophilism of its original exponent, V.V. Stasov, who in the 1870s zealously opposed Western culture and idealized ancient Russia which he saw as ethnically and aesthetically pure. For Stasov, Russia belonged to the East, and the imagery of the neo-Russian aesthetic was fundamentally Asian.

It is difficult to look at the illustrations of painter Ivan Bilibin and not see Western influences, although his affection for Japanese woodblocks is apparent.

Russian realism and the landscapes of the Peredvizhniki (particularly Levitsky) are certainly predecessors, but the aesthetic of Beardsley and Art Nouveau are palpable.

I was clearly mistaught to see so much of Stasov’s influence on the neo-Russism of the Ballets Russes. Stasov and Diaghilev, it turns out, were fierce antagonists. I think this error is an effect of oversimplification: neo-Russism did start with Stasov and was transformed by later visual artists to incorporate Western aesthetics. But dance history is closer to music history than it is to art history, and Stasov, tied to Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky, is more important to nationalism in Russian music.

The incursion of art nouveau aesthetics likely dates to around 1894, when Princess Maria Tenisheva established an art collective on her estate, Talashkino, as part of a movement to revitalize nationalist art and preserve peasant arts and crafts culture. Aristocratic. pro-Western, and directly influenced by the English Arts and Crafts movement, Tenisheva established workshops to teach and preserve Russian and Slavic peasant techniques for manufacturing furniture, embroidering goods and making other crafts. She also set up an art school, elistist and intellectual but set against the Russian academy (which still favored the merchant-class aesthetic of the Peredvizhniki), that encouraged artists to study and depict Russian history and folklore. The style developed in these schools resembled art nouveau much more closely than any indigenous Russian folk art.

The estate became a meeting ground for a diverse group of artists and intellectuals, all of whom, including Ivan Bilibin, figured into Diaghilev’s theatrical enterprises. Beginning in 1889, Bilibin studied at Talashkino under Ilya Repin, at that time the most famous living Russian Realist, and in 1899, Tenisheva helped underwrite the journal mir iskusstva, co-edited by Diaghilev, which was the first magazine to publish the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley in Russia. In 1908, Bilibin designed the costumes for Diaghilev’s production of Mussorsgy’s Boris Gudonov.

In addition to his stage designs for Diaghilev, Bilibin is best known for illustrating Russian folktales, including famous depictions of Pushkin’s stories. In 1904, Bilibin published an essay in mir iskusstva called “Folk Arts and Crafts in the North of Russia” followed by a monograph on the same subject, based on his personal travels and investigations in the two previous years. During those travels he became interested in architecture, and continued to explore themes of folk art and architecture throughout his career. He died in 1943 during the Siege of Leningrad.

My scans of these drawings come from English translations made in the 1970s of a series of books of folktales commissioned by the Russian Department of State Documents between 1901 and 1903. There’s quite a bit of information about Bilibin online and in books and magazines — he is mentioned at least in passing in all the books I have on Diaghilev and a Google search pulls up many discussions of his art and some biography (see below) — but I haven’t been able to find anything enlightening about my editions: translated and printed in the USSR in 1976-1977, a time of detente, by Moscow-based Progress Publishing. The name of the publisher suggests proto-Glasnost, but for the time being I still have no idea why they were created or to whom they were marketed/distributed. It doesn’t stop me from enjoying them, though!

A excellent essay on Bilibin’s visual technique as well as a biography is available here.

More scans are available here.