Mick Hartley

The Vorticists exhibition at Tate Britain could hardly have a more dramatic start…

 
 
…with the huge figure of Jacob Epstein's Rock Drill – or at least a 70s reconstruction – looming over you. Alien designer HR Giger must have seen this, surely.

The original survives as Torso in Metal, also in the exhibition. Initially an unironic paean to the glories of the new industrial age, it was drastically mutilated and shorn of its virility by Epstein after the carnage of the First World War.

So, a powerful optimistic image of modernity becomes an image of shame and horror at mankind's hubris, and then, some sixty years later, appears again in popular film, but this time as an image of sheer alien terror. The 20th Century in a nutshell. (Yes, I'm here every day.)

Sadly the exhibition kind of peters out after that – like Vorticism itself, I suppose. Not without some good moments though, especially the sculptures of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and some more (not so dramatic) Epsteins. The Vorticist Manifesto is quite fun, too. Perhaps, unlike those other more famous art manifestos from the Futurists or the Surrealists, the English Vorticists didn't take themselves too seriously:

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 the SAME cause, which is neither side or both sides and ours.
5. Mercenaries were always the best troops…..

Good review here.