Jacob Epstein: Rock Drill – An Essay

Although Jacob Epstein himself tried to stay independent from the avant-garde groups of his time, besides The London Group – an amalgamation of The Camden Town Group and the English Cubists which formed itself in 1913 – his sculpture Rock Drill inhabits many styles of the modernist movement. These included hints of Futurism’s fascination with machinery, aggressiveness and war; Vorticism’s concept of “the point of maximum energy” and Duchamp’s take on Dada with his readymade objects such as the bicycle wheel which he’d announced as a piece of art recent to the time of Rock Drill’s creation.

The sculpture was comprised of an actual drill, bought second hand, and what is described by Epstein in his autobiography as “a machine-like robot, visored, menacing” in plaster perching on the instrument, the complete piece standing at around 3 meters. This figure, simultaneously man and mechanical with both parts merging into an extension of the other, did still appear to have a few shreds of mimicked organic nature to it in the foetus or “it’s progeny, protectively ensconced” within its ribcage, and the lines in the back and shoulder of the form from behind, almost presenting an anatomical description of the muscles of a human body. Like in many of Epstein’s sculptures presenting pregnancy and the female form, such as Figure in Flenite, the neck of the model cranes forward and the arm that controlled the drill defensively and equally aggressively curves around the form within. The fierceness and mechanisation of this sculpture has strong links to the Vorticist movement with the style of abstraction, modernity, the penetration of the space around it and, though being completely immobile, a sense of movement and dynamism within the work.

While Gaudier-Brzeska and T. E Hulme – who was to write a book on the piece and Epstein’s other work before he was killed by a shell in 1917 – showed enthusiasm for the sculpture, much of the public were disturbed and disgusted by it when it was exhibited in 1915 along with works from other artists in the London Group. The Current Art Topics article in the May 1915 edition of the Fine Arts Journal can be seen as an example of this, openly slandering Epstein and the London Group’s exhibition, which the author describes as “refuse”, stating:

“The piece de resistance – the draw, of the show is Mr. Jacob Epstein’s performance entitled ‘Rock Drill,’ exhibited first, I believe, at Brighton a year or so back, to the scandal of the community. Neither it nor its meaning can be fully described in these pages, but I can quote the ‘Observer’ probably the foremost English Sunday paper whose art critic writes as follows: ‘The whole effect is utterably loathsome,’ * * * ‘Even leaving aside the nasty suggestiveness of the whole thing’ etc., etc.”

By the time of its exhibition in 1916, however, Epstein had dismantled the piece, removing the legs, the drill and cutting the arm that operated it off at the elbow, casting it in gunmetal in a rather bitterly ironic way and renaming the work Torso in Metal from the ‘Rock Drill’. The slaughter

that was witnessed in this time and the death of Gaudier-Brzeska in June 1915 on one of the French battlefields was said to have spurred many associates of the Vorticists into a realisation of the true horror of war and influence Epstein’s radical alterations to his work. It has been widely understood that this fragmentation of the sculpture was a mirror of the very same fragmentation and destruction that fell upon the men and their bodies on the battlefields and trenches of France during the War. Though having been cast in metal, these alterations made the sculpture appear no stronger, but defenceless and sad, unable to protect the progeny within him. Much later, Epstein would write about the previous state of the work: “Here is the armed, sinister figure of to-day and to-morrow. No humanity, only the terrible Frankenstein’s monster we have turned ourselves into.”

Henceforth, Epstein’s Rock Drill, a sculpture that was before violent and optimistic though ‘prophetic’ to the destructiveness of the First World War, became a symbol of the audacity and atrociousness of war and the demise of the avant-garde. Many avant-garde artists and those that had associated themselves and their work with the Vorticists had – or had known those who had – enlisted during the war days, leaving their numbers dwindling in Britain by the end as they died or recoiled from the movement and its implications of human abstraction and mechanistic energy. Epstein himself stated that he couldn’t see that forms of abstraction taken up later than 1913-14 made “any advance on the period, or produced more novel forms,” besides the use of mannequins in surrealism and what he describes as “lunatic collections.” Despite his negativity towards progressing appearances of avant-garde art, his work still had a profound influence on later artists such as Henry Moore.

 

Bibliography

Carroll, Luscombe. Current Art Topics, Fine Arts Journal. Volume 32 (5). 1915.

Comentale, Edward P; Gasoirek, Andrzej. T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism. Ashgate Publishing Limited. 2006.

Cork, Richard. ‘Rock Drill’: Rediscovering a Lost Revolutionary Sculpture. Available: http://www.henry-moore.org/hmi/events/past-events/2013/richard-cork. 2013. Last accessed: 2nd November 2014

Cork, Richard. Jacob Epstein. London: Tate Gallery. 1999.

Epstein, Jacob. An Autobiography. London: Hulton P. 1955.

Malvern, Sue. Modern Art, Britain and the Great War: Witnessing, Testimony and Remembrance. London. 2004

Redfern, David. History of the London Group. Available: http://www.thelondongroup.com/history.php. Last accessed: 30th October 2014

Walsh, Micheal J. K. London, Modernism and 1914. London: Cambridge University Press. 2010

Running About in Wales and Preparing to Exhibit

It feels like last Saturday was decades ago, largely because I tried to fit a weeks worth of tourist attractions into three days, for my lovely friend, Lily. It was good to have a break, to be honest. And I do love rubbing the scenery of Aberystwyth in other people’s faces – especially if they go to mainland Universities. Though – as I learned on Wednesday – Rochester, with its castle and cathedral, is a good rival.

But I’m back to the grindstone now: framing, organising, making lists and slowly succumbing to the madness within. I think everyone’s a little on edge. A lot of my work still needs to be framed at worst and screwed with picture hooks and wire at best, and no one else is much better. There is little chance I’ll have time to finish my ceramics for exhibition – which is not necessarily a bad thing if you consider that they’re currently not in the best state. I’m looking forward to it though, even if it is a bit daunting, at least in hopes that I might get a solid response to my work from the public, if not a bit of cash. God knows I need it this time of year.

One More Week of Sorrow…

There are teen days until my exhibition and I am bricking it, so to speak. Though I’ve finished all my course work within my means at Uni, I’m far from done. Between manning the show for five days, Christmas and New Years, I need to find time to play about with a kiln and do some dodgy decals. And whether or not they’ll be successful is another thing entirely. But I’ve done the plans and made what are effectively simulations of what they’ll look like when done, so I can pray.

Besides my work, I’ve had to deal with the monotonous, droning of my housemate’s Skype calls, words as crisp as a winter’s morning through my wall, continuously from 4 in the afternoon until 2 in the morning (or taking-the-mick o’clock, as I like to call it). It’s the sort of talking that is so loud and equally uninteresting that there’s more of a chance that I’ll die of boredom before I actually fall asleep. Though such is life.

Tomorrow, a friend from home is coming up, so I’ll be very occupied
showing her the sole tourist attraction we have in Aber and trying to find something to entertain her for the remaining three days in the vile Welsh weather. Though there are high chances we may just spend the entirety of the time dressed up as regency dandies, smoking cigars – which isn’t a bad outcome to be honest.

Time is passing way too quickly.

Haunted by The Ghost of a Flea

For the past few weeks, we’ve had fleas – fantastic, I know. And not just the sort of fleas you shower once and flea treat your pets and they’re gone. They’re the sort of fleas that live in the carpet and keep on coming back just when you thought you’d got rid of them. The sort of fleas that are probably laughing with their flea mates over a drink, about how stupid you are, and giving you the middle finger while you aren’t looking.

I bought flea spray and ritualistically sprayed my whole bedroom three times a day, which didn’t seem to work. Then we got a bunch of insect bombs and nuked the house. That evening, a flea landed on my sketchbook. I watched the life drain out of its sad little body, satisfied with our work, and then skewered it with a pencil. The last I saw of them, the grandfather of all flea grandfathers landed on my arm and looked at me as if to say “Geoff you” before I squished it and threw the corpse into the bin.

I haven’t seen one since, or even noticed a bite, but the fleas still haunt me. Even the word makes me itch like mad. I couldn’t help but scratch myself as I wrote three paragraphs on The Ghost of a Flea by William Blake for my most recent essay, the bug between his legs mocking me as I wrote. It didn’t make me feel any better, either, reading in John Varley’s notes on the painting, saying ‘that all fleas were inhabited by the souls of such men, as were by nature bloodthirsty to excess, and were therefore providentially confined to the size and form of insects: otherwise, were [one], for instance, the size of a horse, [it] would depopulate a great portion of the country.’ I must say, I’ve had a few nightmares of that nature since, and woken up itching like I was wearing a shoddily made Christmas jumper.

Of course, the itchiness may be dude to the thousands of tiny slices of lino that have embedded themselves into my carpet and seem too turn up everywhere I go. I would hoover them up but I’ve come to realise that 1) there are considerably more important things I could be doing and 2) our hoover is about as good as a mouse with asthma sucking on a straw.

But the presence of lino shards actually means I’ve been doing my work and believe me I have been working my sorry little butt off. In the past week I have cut and printed three A3 prints, one of which was a reduction print, and an A4 reduction of a face. I’m exhausted, I must say. But it’s all coming along: the Lankin prints have been decorated and are ready to scan and I’ve begun playing around with the design for Twa Sisters on the computer. I’m contemplating putting ink on some of my older prints for Lord Bateman as well, considering how nicely the blue and green theme for Lankin turned out.

Gods willing, I’ll be done with them and the ceramics themselves by the end of the week, giving me enough time to prepare for my exhibition from the 21st to the 27th this month.

Please check out the facebook event for it: Denbies Exhibtion – Light and Colour