| Within the small and obscure field of those who follow the tale of the tribe, as defined by Robert Anton Wilson will probably already be familiar with this letter by Marshall McLuhan, to Harold Innis.
In the letter McLuhan more or less drafts the trajectory RAW expands upon, with the addition of Giordano Bruno, Alfred Korzybski, Nietzsche, Claude Shannon and Orson Welles, RAW weaves a landscape of, dare i say, cybernetic post modernism? Internet…probably the greatest catalyst, tool, for the evolution of language and human-language interfacing. And so, 12/13 historical characters are selected by RAW to approximate the innovations that took place to bring us here, and the human biographical tales crisscrossing with the design science revolutions and new styles. RAWs tale of the tribe. Here is that letter that helped start it all, in some sense. –steve fly |
| Letter to Harold Adams Innis |
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| Toronto, 14th March 1951
Dear Innis, Mallarmé saw the modern press as a magical institution born of technology. The discontinuous juxtaposition of unrelated items made necessary by the influx of news stories from every quarter of the world, created, he saw, a symbolic landscape of great power and importance. (He used the word “symbol” in the strict Greek sense sym-ballein, to pitch together, physically and musically). He saw at once that the modern press was not a rational form but a magical one so far as communication was concerned. Its very technological form was bound to be efficacious far beyond any informative purpose. Politics were becoming musical, jazzy, magical. The same symbolist perception applied to cinema showed that the montage of images was basically a return via technology to age-old picture language. S. Eisenstein’s Film Forum and Film Technique explore the relations between modern developments in the arts and Chinese ideogram, pointing to the common basis of ideogram in modern art, science and technology. One major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences (basis of myth of Daedalus, basic for the dreams and schemes of Francis Bacon, and, when transferred by Vico to philology and history of culture, it also forms the basis of modern historiography, archaeology, psychology and artistic procedures alike.) Retracing becomes in modern historical scholarship the technique of reconstruction. The technique which Edgar Poe first put to work in his detective stories. In the arts this discovery has had all those astonishing results which have seemed to separate the ordinary public from what it regards as esoteric magic. From the point of view of the artist however the business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication whether in the press, in advertizing, or in the high arts is toward participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts. And this major revolution, intimately linked to technology, is one whose consequences have not begun to be studied although they have begun to be felt. One immediate consequence, it seems to me, has been the decline of literature. The hyper-trophy of letter-press, at once the cause and effect of universal literacy, has produced a spectacular decline of attention to the printed or written word. As you have shown in Empire and Communications, ages of literature have been few and brief in human history. The present literary epoch has been of exceptional duration — 400 years. There are many symptoms that it is at an end. The comic book for example has been seen as a degenerate literary form instead of as a nascent pictorial and dramatic form which has sprung from the new stress on visual-auditory communication in the magazines, the radio and television. The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action. If literature is to survive as a scholastic discipline except for a very few people, it must be by a transfer of its techniques of perception and judgement to these new media. The new media, which are already much more constitutive educationally than those of the class-room, must be inspected and discussed in the class-room if the class-room is to continue at all except as a place of detention. As a teacher of literature it has long seemed to me that the functions of literature cannot be maintained in present circumstances without radical alteration of the procedures of teaching. Failure in this respect relegated Latin and Greek to the specialist; and English literature has already become a category rather than an interest in school and college. As mechanical media have popularized and enforced the presence of the arts on all people it becomes more and more necessary to make studies of the function and effect of communication on society. Present ideas of such effects are almost entirely in terms of mounting or sagging sales curves resulting from special campaigns of commercial education. Neither the agencies nor the consumers know anything about the social or cutural effects of this education. Deutsch’s interesting pamphlet on communication is thoroughly divorced from any sense of the social functions performed by communication. He is typical of a school likewise in his failure to study the matter in the particular. He is the technician interested in power but uncritical and unconcerned with social effect. The diagnosis of his type is best found, so far as I know, in Wyndham Lewis’s The Art of Being Ruled. That pamphlet is probably the most radical political document since Machiavelli’s Prince. But whereas Machiavelli was concerned with the use of society as raw material for the arts of power, Lewis reverses the perspective and tries to discern the human shape once more in a vast technological landscape which has been ordered on Machiavellian lines. The fallacy in the Deutsch-Wiener approach is its failure to understand the techniques and functions of the traditional arts as the essential type of all human communication. It is instead a dialectical approach born of technology and quite unable of itself to see beyond or around technology. The Medieval schoolmen ultimately ended up on the same dialectical reef. As Easterbrook may have told you I have been considering an experiment in communication which is to follow the lines of this letter in suggesting means of linking a variety of specialized fields by what may be called a method of esthetic analysis of their common features. This method has been used by my friend Siegfried Giedion in Space, Time and Architecture and in Mechanization Takes Command. What I have been considering is a single mimeographed sheet to be sent out weekly or fortnightly to a few dozen people in different fields, at first illustrating the underlying unities of form which exist where diversity is all that meets the eye. Then it is hoped there will be a feedback of related perception from various readers which will establish a continuous flow. It seems obvious to me that Bloor St. is the one point in this University where one might establish a focus of the arts and sciences. And the organizing concept would naturally be “Communication Theory and practice.” A simultaneous focus of current and historic forms. Relevance to be given to selection of areas of study by dominant artistic and scientific modes of the particular period. Arts here used as providing criteria, techniques of observation, and bodies of recorded, achieved, experience. Points of departure but also return. For example the actual techniques of common study today seem to me to be of genuine relevance to anybody who wishes to grasp the best in current poetry and music. And vice versa. There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation. Using Frequency Modulation techniques one can slice accurately through such interference, whereas Amplitude Modulation leaves you bouncing on all the currents. |
| from Marshall McLuhan — Complete Correspondence, edited by Matie Molinaro & Corinne McLuhan |
‘A pile-driving vision of the future’: The Rock Drill by Jacob Epstein, 1913-1915. Photograph: Jonathan Hordle/ Rex Features
Rock Drill ought to be his name, not just the title of this long-lost work (this is a reconstruction of the dismantled original). He has terrible force of personality. And he is the most devastating creation in this show by some way, a sculpture from 1913 that seems to summarise all that vorticism stood for with its driving ambition for machine-age dynamism and shattering new forms. The Rock Drill ought to be the ideal host, the perfect symbol for both the movement and the show. Except that Epstein was never a paid-up vorticist.
In the long march through modernism, vorticism is the quickest of steps. It flares up in 1914, peaks briefly in 1915 and sputters out towards the end of the first world war. There are only two shows. There are only two issues of its in-house journal, Blast. There may be only one full-time vorticist. “Vorticism,” declared Wyndham Lewis in the 1950s, “was what I, personally, did, and said, at a certain period.” The assertion may have infuriated the surviving members of the group, but it is not without its merit when you consider the diversity of their gifts, from the painter David Bomberg to the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, compared to Lewis’s single-mindedness as ringleader, recruiting sergeant, megaphone, exemplar and theorist of England’s only homegrown avant-garde movement. Lewis belongs to the first generation of Europe’s non-representational artists. His drawings are incisive, satirical, on the edge of abstraction. His paintings from this phase – angular, syncopated, explosive – are even better, which is some claim, given that scarcely any survive. In the 1912 illustrations for Timon of Athens, he begins to abandon depth for a flat pageant of forms that jostle like the elements of some unsolved puzzle. By 1915, in his enormous painting The Crowd, he shows quasi-cubist figures haplessly scattered in a system of grids that seems to prefigure the pinball machine. Workshop (1914-15) is a marvellous concatenation of geometric planes, in coruscating pinks and hot mustards, that almost resolve into windows, ladders, stacks and shelves, by day and yet also, as it seems, by night. It turns architecture inside out. And seeing it in Tate Britain‘s survey, surrounded by fading issues of Blast, old catalogues and invitations, typed manifestos and handwritten declarations of solidarity or hatred – period pieces of English art history from 100 years ago – it suddenly looks more modern than ever. With its graphic zip and register, Workshop conjures pop art half a century in advance. There are other masterpieces in this show, but not many. Tate Britain has David Bomberg’s terrific painting The Mud Bath, with its interplay of bent, reclining and zigzagging forms packed into a scarlet tank. It has Gaudier-Brzeska’s Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, on loan from the National Gallery in Washington, biting its mucklestone lip. From the front, it is Pound to a stylised T (was ever a poet more portrayed?) from his goatee to his bouffant quiff. From the rear, it resembles a circumcised phallus. “Make it virile,” was Pound’s bombastic command; contemporary critics found it merely pornographic. Nobody visiting this show could fail to spot the influence of abroad in almost every work. The Dancers, Les Demoiselles: Wyndham Lewis’s chorus line wends its way directly out of Picasso. Roger Fry had mounted his celebrated exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, back in 1910, the same year Marinetti delivered his futurist lectures in London. The trick with this show is to try and remain indifferent to the obvious strains of cubism and futurism that appear wherever you look. It is not hard, for instance, to deduce local figurative forms in all this accordion-pleated abstraction – piano keys and nightclubs, people and performers, London alleys and even the back-to-back terraces of northern mining towns. Lewis saw that cubism, for instance, could be more than a highly advanced visual language. It could be made to speak of life itself, with all thronging motion, humanity, incident. One of the strongest works here is his wonderfully acute Architect With Green Tie (1909), which skewers the self-importance of a particular man while sending up the profession’s characteristic fondness for that calculated spot of colour. The work isn’t abstract at all, in fact; it’s one of Lewis’s best caricatures. But it also predates vorticism, exposing an unusual dilemma for the curators of this show, which originated in North Carolina. Vorticism is such a brief movement and so little of the art survives (a huge tranche of it, belonging to the US collector John Quinn, vanished long ago) that it is quite a feat to assemble anything representative. The exhibition attempts to counter the problem by including a good many fellow-travellers, recreating both of the original vorticist shows and displaying the issues of Blast, with its upper-case insults, wonderful woodcuts and wild demagoguery, along with testaments of war, imaginary and real. Here is the row between Lewis and Fry over the Daily Mail‘s Ideal Home Exhibition, of all things, played out in aggressive letters. Here are the missives from the Western Front, including Gaudier-Brzeska’s final postcard before he died in the trenches. He was 23. By the time you get to the end of this vigorous yet melancholy exhibition, vorticism has dwindled into a graphic style. Anyone can imitate it by now and they do. There are still some startling works to come: Edward Wadsworth‘s fantastically concise woodcuts are among the best things here. Look at his Newcastle, as neatly condensed a sonnet to industry, ironwork, bridge span and community as you could find, all stitched together with saw-tooth zips: English printmaking at its sharpest. But even if its members had not lost their lives, the first world war had to kill off this machine-loving movement. Alas, because this show is so strictly vorticist, you do not see how the best of the artists responded, what Lewis made of the trenches in his war paintings, how he mocked his own brutal machismo, his own vicious energy, in the savage self-portrait Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro. But what you do see is what became of Epstein’s The Rock Drill, once again an accidental symbol of the group. Legs gone, drill removed, hands lopped off, Epstein turned the torso into an amputee, vulnerable, disarmed, a victim of wartime violence. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jun/19/vorticists-tate-britain-review
DEEP SCRATCH 