In the beginning of the Modernist era there was an unprecedented outpouring of experimentalism in the arts, including architecture, design, painting, music, literature, and the very new art form of film.
Here are some links to materials we will talk about in our first class session. BLAST! was a project of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. You will find the complete first and second issues here, and a little bit goes a long way. We will talk about this over two class sessions, so just start by getting a taste of the two issues. Listen also to the work of Satie, Hindemith and Schoenberg.
In class we will discuss all this, and look at a few clips from the work of film pioneer Georges Méliès.
You weren't kidding, Paul, when you said a little bit of Blast! goes a long way. This may be an ignorant question, but was there any intention on the part of modernists to produce commercially viable material? With the exception of the Satie recordings (the first of which we've heard used in dozens of films), the music and issues of Blast! are rather off-putting, almost as if they're trying too hard to be different. Were the authors we'll be reading considered successful in their day, or is it only through time and scholarly study that they've come to be regarded with reverence?
ReplyDeleteI think "trying too hard to be different" was exactly the point. Modernism was an active rebellion against classicism, against the ideal of beauty itself. Art wasn't supposed to elevate the soul-it was supposed to challenge the mind, and BLAST certainly tried to do that. I think by being overtly, consciously maddening in it's non-stop hammering of rebellious ideas, it was supposed to make the reader (who probably wouldn't pick up an issue of BLAST unless they were somewhat modernist-minded) question whether or not they believed what these nuts were saying. By expressing a dearly held belief in the most ugly light possible, it forces the holder of that belief to analyze how they really feel. It disallows people to have blind faith.
DeleteBlast! definitely has a lot going on all at the same moment. As Michael's post stated, they appear as if they are trying too hard to be different, but I think that is what makes Blast! and the ideas within it unique. Pound and Lewis seem to be striving to get people's attention with their extremist views regarding the equality of the individual within society. They seem to take the stance that the status quo is stifling individual thoughts and opinions, so because of this, they are devoutly against the snobbery and elitism that were making one person feel superior to another. By blasting and cursing the Victorian era and blessing laughter and the ocean, I surmise that they are arguing for happiness and freedom over stuffiness and pretension in England during the era.
ReplyDeleteI find it interesting (as a writer and graphic designer) that Wyndham Lewis sought to distinguish Vorticism from Futurism yet still approached typography and the deconstruction of the printed narrative with a similar sensibility as Filippo Marinetti. Marinetti wrote in The Destruction of Syntax manifesto:
ReplyDelete"I initiate a typographical revolution aimed at the bestial, nauseating idea of the book... on seventeenth Century handmade paper bordered with helmets, Minervas, Apollos, elaborate red initials... My revolution is aimed at the so-called typographical harmony of the page, which is contrary to the flux and reflux, the leaps and bursts of style that run through the page."
Compare a page from BLAST! to Marinetti's Futurism Manifesto or Zang Tumb Tumb, and it is evident that both movements were eager to break free from the entrenched narrative structure in print. Marinetti's sensitivity to letterforms and their deconstruction contrasts with the rigid linear page designs of BLAST! The layout of BLAST! seems to parallel the aesthetics of Vorticist painting: bold dynamic lines and an attention to white space. It is interesting to note that Lewis' typographic experimentation influenced the Russian artist, El Lissitzky and Russian Constructivism.
It seems like the cross-pollination of the avant-garde kept pushing for new and unique perspectives in art.
The first thing that really struck me while looking at the pages of BLAST! was how strikingly similar the prose was to the more contemporary Dr. Bronner's Soap labels! The space is FILLED in different type sizes, kernings, and so on in order to not only grab its viewers attention but to also force its reader to stop and stutter along with its disjointed syntax. Bronner wanted to convince mankind of the virtues of the "All-One-God-Faith," and his "Moral ABC's"--his answers to the Ten Commandments. The text the wraps itself around the soap bottle is extremely difficult to follow. Here, in BLAST! we have a Manifesto experiment that claims to want "nothing to do with the glorification of The People" and everything to do with the "art of the Individual"...even though these pieces seem like propaganda with their siren-cries of BLAST and BLESS and myriad lists of demands. To me it seems that the second issue lacks the same amount of fervency and energy that the first one did...was this because of the war? Any other opinions?
ReplyDeleteIlyssa, I think just using the word "manifesto" automatically sets us to thinking in propagandistic terms, but the tongue-in-cheek nature of much of this manifesto can't be denied. Indeed, how much of this manifesto should we be taking seriously? Humor is blasted, called a "quack English drug for stupidity and sleepiness," then subsequently blessed and dubbed "the great barbarous weapon of the genius among races." So is it with stupidity or genius that such things as "masterly pornography" and "female qualities" are blessed while stylism is blasted even as we view the entirety of this publication as an exercise in diverse style?
ReplyDeleteIn trying to make sense of BLAST! it helped me to view the work of Wyndham Lewis as modernist literature's response to the work of Georges Méliès, the Cubists, etc. The work of Lewis and the rest of the Vorticists conveys a sort of "we can be weird too" attitude that, unfortunately, comes off as overly cloying while Méliès's films are viewed, rightfully, as innovative and ahead of their time. After all, Scorcese isn't making movies about the Vorticists.
DeleteThe typography and design of BLAST! seems to be one of the touchstones of our conversation and I think that's a shame. Lewis and the Vorticists made the writing so inaccessible that all we can do is flip through the pages like an illiterate person and admire the pretty "pictures."
My first reaction to BLAST! was a big giant eye-roll at its over eagerness to display an "out there" quality. However, I think that might only be because the level of energy and chaotic creativity that Pound and Lewis expel here is one that almost every artist since has tried so hard to achieve. It was important for me to try to remember the originality of BLAST! and that it isn't derivative of much else. I also noticed elements of BLAST! that seemed to take a poke at themselves. The self consciousness of it seemed to ground the writing quite a bit and make light of its incoherence.
ReplyDeletePerhaps by being so inaccessible, confusing, and all around kind of nonsensical, Pound and Lewis created a kind of chaos that must be only be enjoyed as something not to fully understand. At least, that's the only way I could enjoy it.
I read some of BLAST! while listening to the three Gymnopedie's. It created quite a disconnect, reading rambling Messianic rants while listening to softly soothing piano music. This is something that's always struck me as odd about Modernism. It rebels against Classicism's obsession with beauty by exploring order, technology and the urban environment, but different art forms seem to take different views on how these themes should be explored. Modernist architecture, for example, sought to use logic and ordered reasoning to calm the mind of the average person and thus create a more harmonious society. Many Modern paintings and sculptures also seem to celebrate order and harmony, and the Gymnopedie suites use slow, repeating melodies to create a calming and almost meditative feeling. On the other hand, BLAST! (as well as most of Three Lives and Tender Buttons) is intentionally chaotic and instead of guiding the consumer to order keeps it intentionally distant. I feel that all Modernism is concerned with order and in some way affecting it on people, but there seem to be two schools of thought: Create art in which order is so overt it cannot possible be escaped, or keep order so obscured that the consumer is forced to find it on their own, and in doing so, perhaps reach a better understanding of it than even the artist could have envisioned.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to try to analyze Paul Hindemith's Suite a bit and put some of my musical background to work so please bear with me. The music of this period is made in a sense almost unintelligible with the complex atonal harmonies created through the twelve-tone method. Much like the poetry of Modernism, the music was a huge leap from what had come before and was not always well received. The premier of Stravinsky's ballet 'The Rite of Spring' in Paris was met with a near riot.
ReplyDeleteWhat strikes me initially about Hindemith's work is that he is using a traditional form: the first movement is a march. Looking at the sheet music accompanying the YouTube video, I notice the figure in the opening three bars would sound normal enough in isolation, but in the two and then four part harmony Hindemith creates whole-step and half-step intervals that give it the off-sounding quality. Where a march might usually begin with a triumphant bugle fanfare, the three bar fanfare to open this piece is quite dissonant and almost macabre. I think this represents the postwar deflation of things like patriotism and sacrifice. What was once noble and elegant is now complex and tortuously nuanced. Later in the piece Hindemith uses these chromatic descending lines that have an almost circus feel to them. The juxtaposition of the march with the circus feel seems to evoke the feeling that the run-up to the Great War was a mad, mechanized inevitability. In this sense, Hindemith's piece is the anthem of the post-war disillusion and despair.