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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com owe something to its serrated edge. In music, Mark E Smith of The Fall has made explicit the fact his savage jet-sprays of consciousness owe much to this original renegade. The late Malcolm McLaren was never so honest about the influence of Lewis on his own arch art prankery, but it was there all the same. Indeed the aesthetic of the whole avant-subversive-transgressive Pistols wing of 70s London punk (as opposed to the campaigning-idealist Clash wing) clearly took its cue from the inventively scabrous oppositionalism and fractured imagery of Vorticism, from the swastika- Marx-crucifix emblems on their shirts, to the blackmail lettering of Jamie Reid’s album cover attacking the eyes just as the journal’s cover did all those years before. McLaren and Vivienne Westwood even designed a ‘Which side of the bed’ t-shirt which homaged the “Blasted and Blessed” of the original manifesto, with new heroes (Eddie Cochran, Joe Orton, Ronnie Biggs and free radio stations) replacing the originals (Charlotte Corday, The Pope and James Joyce), and the new villains of (Mick Jagger, Salvador Dalí, Max Bygraves, W.H. Smith and the Stock Exchange) replacing the old (the British Academy, the Post Office, Captain Cook and Sydney Webb.) The best of Blast’s descendants are magnificent. But when your stance is a fetishised oppositionalism, it is absolutely vital this is accompanied with absolute, dynamic ingenuity. Anything less, and the result is childish, boorish, worst of all plain boring. BUY Wyndham Lewis books online from and Its more degraded descendants could arguably include every pitiful spitting punk band, and the piss-poor amoral controversialism of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. But then you shouldn’t blame Graham Greene for Frederick Forsyth, nor Hogarth for ‘Mac’ of the Daily Mail. With Enemy Of The Stars, a two-handed play which sees claustrophobically entwined individuals existentially battling it out against an absurdist landscape, we see an often overlooked influence on Beckett, with the Vladimir and Estragon of Waiting For Godot descendants of Arghol and Hanp in their stylised rhetorical opposition. Lewis’ marred reputation means he very rarely gets the credit he deserves for this inspiration for some of the 20th century’s greatest masterpieces of theatre. Yet of course Lewis’ reputation is eternally marred. The underside to this thrilling pose, from black-hearted nihilism, to the outright Fascism seen in the later career of the man, has been explored at great length elsewhere. The charge-sheet against this personally dislikable individual is neither light nor slight. Of course his barbed vision is open to abuse, abuse itself being its life-blood. Aesthetics translated into politics is very often a bad combination, as certain followers of that other great pugilistic aphorist Friedrich Nietzsche have amply and agonisingly shown. Nietzsche and Wyndham Lewis are like gunpowder, their explosions can both ignite beautiful displays, or lead to incalculable damage. 322 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com W.H. Auden dubbed Lewis “that lonely old Volcano of the Right.” A lonely volcano maybe, but one whose diabolic lava solidified into the shapes which formed the cultural landscape we still live in. Out of print for decades, Blast is now finally available in a new print from Thames and Hudson. It’s worth a read, not least as this is a Blast from which we still live in the echo. � BUY Wyndham Lewis books online from and 323 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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