BLAST (Magazine) / VORTICISM (England)
a frustration with the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s visit to London in 1910 at London’s Lyceum Club, in which addressed the audience as being “victims of…traditionalism and its medieval trappings.” Although at first galvanized by Marinetti rhetoric, Lewis and others became quickly disturbed by the poet’s arrogance. In an Futurist manifesto of 1914, “Vital English Art,” co-written by Marinetti and British author C. R. W. Nevinson, Lewis found himself as a signatory in which he’d had no involvement.
In a performance by Marinetti on June 12th of that year of the Italian’s poem “The Battle of Adrianople,” with Nevison accompanying him on the drums, Lewis, T. E. Hulme, Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Edward Wadsowth and others broke up the performance with jeering and shouting.
The Manifesto itself includes ten major points, the first of which reveals its self-publicizing aims:
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 fight first on one side, then on the other, but always for th
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. The declaration of the First World War thirty days after the second issue, virtually brought an end to the magazine and the Vorticist movement. Not only Gaudier-Brezeska, but T. E. Hulme was killed in battle. Others lost their faith during the war in Modernist tenants. Moblized in 1916, Lewis fought in France for a while before working as a war artist for the Canadian government. Although Lewis continued to advocate for Vorticism, and planned a third issue of Blast, but as critic Richard Cook noted, “the whole context of pre-war experimentation had been dispersed by the destructive power of mechanized warfare,” which the movement, like Futurism, had inherently advocated.
—Douglas Messerli