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Tuesday 22 February 2011

BLAST

I have been looking at this in relation to my current collaboration with Alice Smith and The Idler, as well my Beat Generation project.
BLAST was the short-lived literary magazine of the Vorticist movement in Britain. There were two editions published the on 2 July 1914 and the second a year later on 15 July 1915. Written primarily by Wyndham Lewis, with bright pink cover art referred to by Ezra Pound as the "great MAGENTA cover'd opusculus", the magazine is emblematic of the modern art movement in England, and is recognised as a seminal text of 20th-century modernism. I love the typography style, it is so bold brash and can't help but seem opinionated, even before you read the content there appears something confrontational and anarchic about it. The endless resource that is the reserve stock of MMU library brought me to frail papery goodness of this beautiful relic.

2 comments:

  1. Yeah I have a copy of Blast 1 & 2
    there is something quite strange about it, but I love the creative slogans, and the pictures of 1914 England it paints.

    The band The Fall , and their leader Mark E Smith took inspiration from the vorticists
    and they hated futurists & romantics
    "I destroy romantics, actors, kill it , kill it"
    The Fall - The Classical 1982

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  2. Thanks for your insight. Great that you have your own copy!

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