"circumjacent stupidity"

"Circumjacent stupidity" This is how one vorticist (Ezra Pound) described the source of their angst and aggression; and it also provides a visual counterpoint to the idea suggested by the magazine's title "BLAST," of their explosive psychic response to the general critical temperament (between the wars and at the beginning of modernism). The violent, harsh geometrical lines of the vorticists (and the futurists) was in effect the shattering of the picture plane, the sound of its release from the frame; the border line between representative art and life was at once banished forever then into sentimentality and advertisement. And soon enough everything witnessed by a recursive eye was seduced into the realm of artifact, performance, absurdity, deconstuction and finally "post-modernism".  Art had become like a golem walking the streets, disassembling everything we thought we had set in stone, realigning everything according to the idea that all is unstabile and only temporarily "real".  This first fearful temperament, this angst could only have been expressed by the severity and dynamic force of diagonal and reverberating line.  And no wonder it is so easy to clutch so fiercely to fascist emblem, and to nationalism through the waving of a flag.