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Wyndham Lewis would probably have been appalled to learn that, 100 years on, his shortlived avant-garde publication, Blast, would be the subject of two academic conferences. What could be more damning to a movementVorticism - that defined itself against THE SPECIALIST' and the 'PROFESSIONAL', and that celebrated entity the individual, than to be assimilated, via the institution, into a canon to be pored over by dry-as-dust literary critics and art historians?
Perhaps Lewis would have been reassured by the varied schedule of the one-day symposium held at Trinity College Dublin on Wednesday 2nd July. Co-ordinated by Philip Coleman, Katy Milligan, and Nathan O'Donnell, the event matched conventional panels with more unusual proceedings: a roundtable discussion of Blast in the classroom, a first performance (in its original form) of Lewis's proto-Beckettian play 'Enemy of the Stars', and a manifesto-inspired pub performance by local poet Dave Lordan. TCD's Old Library, meanwhile, hosted an exhibition of original copies of both issues of Blast, along with a number of other art prints and journals either published contemporaneously or influenced by Vorticism, many of which were referred to throughout the day.
The papers themselves attested to Blast's ongoing vitality. In the opening keynote, Andrzej G^siorek emphasized four of the magazine's key tenets: its visionary impulse; its hybridity; its human agency; and its humour. If Lewis's description, in 1937, of his Vorticists as "the first men of a future that has not materialized" is one of many statements that refuse to admit the movement's debts to Cubism and Italian Futurism, it is also a premature disavowal of Vorticism's own influence. You can never predict a movement's afterlife, G^siorek explained, before demonstrating the perpetuation of Blast's satirical spirit in such outlets as the 60s New York journal FUCK YOU! A Magazine of the Arts and the more recent Welsh publication BAST. As for Blast's own heritage, G^siorek drew on Stanley Cavell's claim that "only someone outside the enterprise could see [modernism] as a means of exploring old conventions" to introduce the difficulty that, while...