Vorticism and the absence of an English Avant-Garde Edward Wadsworth, Liverpool Shipping (1918), adapted for London Underground in the 20s ‘SOME BLEAK CIRCUS, UNCOVERED, CAREFULLY CHOSEN, VIVID NIGHT. IT IS PACKED WITH POSTERITY, SILENT AND UNEXPECTED POSTERITY IS SILENT, LIKE THE DEAD...

Architectural Drawings of the 1960s Gordon Cullen, for Homes for Today and Tomorrow (Ministry of Housing, 1961) An intriguing by-product of the 1960s' architectural fetish for the ex nihilo was its proliferation of deeply peculiar drawings. A budding Piranesi or Chernikhov would...

Patrick Keiller, The City of the Future In or about December 1910, human character changed. All human relations have shifted - those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change, there is at the same time a change in...

Walter Benjamin and Constructivist Pedagogy A Plasticine Benjamin, from the exhibition Schrift-Bilder-Denken, 2004 In the Diary of his trip to Moscow in 1926 and 1927, Walter Benjamin writes of how the sheet ice and bustling crowds of the city’s streets immediately sweep away the most elementary...

The Glorious First Five Year Plan was not necessarily an example of Sustainable Development, but if you’re going to go from Feudalism to Outer Space in 30 years, those kind of considerations go out of the window. As does any concern for human life, but we’ll leave that for the moment. During the...

The adventures of the Bolsheviks in the land of the West ‘Why did I have to see it, this West. I loved it better without having seen it. Take its technology from it and it remains a rotten pile of manure, hopeless and decrepit’ Alexander Rodchenko, 1925 Reyner Banham once said...

Sexpol and Sexploitation in the cinema of the New Left Part of a Porn Symposium with K-Punk, Infinite Thought, Poetix, Effay, Bad Zero, Bacteriagrl, The Impostume, Beyond the Implode, Carceraglio and Different Maps There is a story of the permeation of pornography into mainstream cinema...

If, as Wim Wenders claims, America has colonised the post-war German consciousness and cultural landscape, it is worth examining the Bundesrepublik’s position in relation to Hollywood, and more precisely the dual role of the state as opponent and main source of funding for the Neues Deutsches...

Modernism- NFT and V&A, London Three- The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic ‘When the body has completely become an object, a beautiful thing, it can foreshadow a new happiness. In suffering the most extreme reification man triumphs over reification’ Herbert...