Mixed Media: Bermuda Triangle Test Transmission Engineers (2014)

The Mixed Media Column from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Bermuda Triangle Test Transmission Engineers (BTTTE) are the live performance extension of a trio of sound artists: Melanie Clifford, Howard Jacques and Nick Wilsdon who produce the BTTTE radio programme for the London radio arts station Resonance 104.4 fm. Last October BTTTE presented their Little Red Set: ‘dialectical cabaret in song, sound and exquisite hope’ at the Club Integral at the Grosvenor pub in Stockwell, South London.

BTTTE sang in Magyar Hidegen Fujnak a Szelek (Cold Winds are Blowing), a Hungarian folk song, the music collected by Zoltan Kallos in 1969 in Ördöngösfüzes in Mezoseg, today in Romania. The folk song is a prisoners’ song, a yearning to be free, to break the chains of oppression, reminding us of the Magyar working class attempts at controlling their own lives in the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic or the 1956 Hungarian revolution which was crushed by the Russian Army.

The Song of Investment Capital Overseas written by Chris Cutler and Fred Frith of Avant-rock group Art Bears in 1980 is a satire on capitalist globalisation: ‘I empty villages, I burn their houses down, I set up factories, Lay out plantations, And bring prosperity to the poorer nations.’

BTTTE sang in German Epitaph 1919: Die rote Rosa written by Bertolt Brecht and set to music in 1928 by Kurt Weill as The Berlin Requiem: ‘Red Rosa now has vanished too. Where she lies is hid from view. She told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.’ Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg was murdered by Freikorps troops during the Spartacist working class uprising in Berlin in January 1919.

The Spanish El derecho de vivir en paz (The Right to Live in Peace) was written by Chilean folk singer Victor Jara who was murdered in the coup which overthrew the Allende government in 1973.

They finished with The Internationale written by Eugène Pottier: ‘if these vultures disappeared one of these days, the sun will shine forever, this is the final struggle, let us group together and tomorrow the Internationale will be the human race.’ It was written during the 1871 Paris Commune, of which Edouard Vaillant wrote: ‘If socialism wasn’t born of the Commune, it is from the Commune that dates that portion of international revolution that no longer wants to give battle in a city in order to be surrounded and crushed, but which instead wants, at the head of the proletarians of each and every country, to attack national and international reaction and put an end to the capitalist regime.’

Steve Clayton

Exhibition Review: Wyndham Lewis - Life, Art, War (2017)

Exhibition Review from the November 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Vorticism is sometimes seen as Britain’s only avant-garde art movement. It was founded in 1914 by Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), who is now the subject of a sizeable retrospective at the Imperial War Museum North in Salford Quays, on until the end of the year.

The First World War inevitably limited the spread and impact of Vorticism, and Lewis himself fought in an artillery regiment before becoming an official war artist. After the war he produced a variety of art works, together with a series of books (novels, criticism, polemics), most long out of print. He seems to have been a contrarian with a rather prickly personality, and he disliked privileged cliques such as the Bloomsbury Set. He was vehemently against Bolshevism, and his experiences in WW1 made him very much opposed to war. Unfortunately, these considerations led him to some sympathies for Nazi Germany and to describing Hitler as ‘a man of peace’. He changed his mind on these matters after visiting Germany in 1937, but by that time he had already made himself rather unpopular in many cultural circles.

Many of Lewis’s paintings from WW1, however, contain significant and perceptive comments on the fighting. Drawings from 1918 show violence and death, with soldiers reduced to the status of machines. His 1919 picture ‘A Battery Shelled’ is an impressive work which depicts dehumanised figures running for cover as the shells rain down, while three more realistically-depicted men watch or simply ignore what is going on. This was considered too controversial to be an appropriate memorial painting, and it was passed from the Imperial War Museum to the Tate.

A Battery Shelled (1919)

‘The Surrender of Barcelona’ (1936) refers to the city being captured by Spanish forces in the fifteenth century, but surely relates to the Spanish Civil War as well. ‘Inferno’, dating from 1937, is a pessimistic presentation of corpses and the flames of hell, as Lewis combines his hatred of war with an expectation that another large conflagration is approaching.

The IWM publicity describes Lewis as ‘Britain’s original rebel artist’, and he did set up the short-lived Rebel Art Centre. Despite his  – to say the least – dubious political views, many of his paintings undermine the role of official war artist and reveal both the boredom and the horror of war.           

Paul Bennett