The Measures Taken

Karl Klefisch's artwork for Kraftwerk's 1978 album encapsulates in two images an unexpected affinity . Gunter Frohling's photograph and the El Lissitzky magnification on the reverse suggest a link between Soviet Constructivism and an ambiguous take on masculine sexuality. The approach in both shares a preoccupation with angularity, line, sharpness, geometry- a similar man-machine aesthetic, a combination of dandyism and austerity; a repudiation of sloppiness, curvaceousness, fluids, internal organs. A sexual and political ambiguity is at the heart of these two tendencies. In the party political sense, the earlier groups were diffuse- the Italians pledged their troth to Mussolini, the Russians to Lenin- the Bauhaus were nominally socialist, while the Vorticists subscribed to a petulant 'Tory Anarchism' (in Orwell's phrase). Their sexual politics were equally slippery.

the dreamt of metallisation of the human body

'BLESS the HAIRDRESSER.
He attacks Mother Nature for a small fee.
Hourly he ploughs heads for sixpence,
Scours chins and lips for threepence.
He makes systematic mercenary war on this
WILDNESS.
He trims aimless and retrograde growths
Into CLEAN ARCHED SHAPES and
REGULAR PLOTS'
BLAST 1, 1914

The Italian Futurists were the first artists and propagandists of this man-machine. However, the Futurists have a Dionysian character quite unlike the Apollonians they inspired- Marinetti's 'Founding and Manifesto of Futurism', with its opening scene of Marinetti crashing his car into a ditch, abounds with fluids and vitalist imagery, though the model may be industrial rather than human waste- 'maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black breast of my Sudanese nurse''
But the very category of 'human' is shunned by the Vorticists, with gleeful amorality- 'The New Egos' declares 'THE ACTUAL HUMAN BODY BECOMES OF LESS AND LESS IMPORTANCE EVERY DAY'
Like Marinetti 'erect on the summit of the world', the Vorticist is perpetually aroused but crucially, never comes.

Curiously, for all this phallocratic fervour, some of the most mechanistic, anti-biological Vorticist paintings were by Helen Saunders, one of two female signatories to BLAST's manifesto. Her 'Study for Cannon' depicts a semi-human figure both machinic and insectoid. Amidst angles and arrows depicting thrusts of energy and violently non-naturalistic colour, a figure whose pinkness alludes to human flesh emerges triumphant; seemingly in the act of leaping; a single beady eye trained on the viewer. In much Vorticist painting, the figure is done away with completely- both issues of BLAST are full of tight geometric abstractions of jagged threat and power, with the human no longer deemed a useful referent.