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A Token of Triumph Cut Down to Size: Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill as Fetish Object

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Sculpture, Sexuality and History

Part of the book series: Genders and Sexualities in History ((GSX))

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Abstract

At the 1915 London Group exhibition, Jacob Epstein exhibited his sculpture Rock Drill for the first and only time. The work consisted of a plaster of paris figure mounted on a real rock drill, the phallic connotations of which were noted both then and in the work’s subsequent reception. The following year, Epstein returned with Torso in Metal from the ‘Rock Drill’, a reduced version of Rock Drill that no longer incorporated the drill and featured only the upper part of the figure. Contesting Epstein’s account of the genesis of the two statues, as well as later interpretations that situate the Torso as a response to the First World War, this essay proposes an alternative reading using Sigmund Freud’s ideas on fetishism.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Mark Antliff, “Contagious Joy: Anarchism, Censorship and the Reception of Jacob Epstein’s Tomb ofOscar Wilde, c. 1913,” The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 4, no. 2 (2013): 195–225. My essay is based on research originally carried out for my Ph.D. thesis at the London Consortium, University of London, in 2005 and subsequently presented at the Desiring Statues conference in 2012. My thanks to my supervisors, Richard Humphreys and Peter Nicholls, for their help and advice on the former and to the conference organisers and participants for the latter.

  2. 2.

    Flenite Relief is now in the collection of Leeds Art Gallery. The two sides are titled Woman Clasping a Phallus and Birth on the Art Fund website, which partially funded the work’s purchase, “Flenite Relief by Sir Jacob Epstein,” Art Fund, accessed July 7, 2017, https://www.artfund.org/supporting-museums/art-weve-helped-buy/artwork/9676/flenite-relief-sir-jacob-epstein.

  3. 3.

    Photographs of the work include the unfinished Rock Drill in Epstein’s studio, see Chris Stephens, “The Story of Jacob Epstein’s ‘Rock Drill’,” Tate, July 27, 2011, http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/story-jacob-epsteins-rock-drill. For a photograph of the reconstruction see “The Vorticists at Tate Britain—now open! Tell us what you think,” Tate, June 15, 2011, http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/vorticists-tate-britain-now-open-tell-us-what-you-think

  4. 4.

    Jacob Epstein, Six Studies for ‘Rock Drill’, ‘Venus’ and ‘Doves’, in Richard Cork, Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill (London: Royal Academy, 2009), 162–3 (catalogue number 87).

  5. 5.

    See the example in the Tate Collection, T00340, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/epstein-torso-in-metal-from-the-rock-drill-t00340, accessed May 13, 2018. The first cast is in the National Gallery of Canada, 6498, https://www.gallery.ca/collection/artwork/rock-drill, accessed May 13, 2018. A further example is held by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 155.1962, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81041, accessed May 13, 2018.

  6. 6.

    Wilhelm Worringer, AbstractionandEmpathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997), 54.

  7. 7.

    Sigmund Freud, “Totem and Taboo”, in The Origins of Religion. Penguin Freud Library, ed. Albert Dickson, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 13: 49–224 (53).

  8. 8.

    P. G. Konody, “Art and Artists: The London Group,” The Observer, March 14, 1915, 5.

  9. 9.

    Cork, Wild Thing, 165.

  10. 10.

    Chris Stephens, “The Story of Jacob Epstein’s ‘Rock Drill’,” Tate, July 27, 2011, http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/story-jacob-epsteins-rock-drill.

  11. 11.

    Sue Malvern, Modern Art,Britainand the GreatWar (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 1.

  12. 12.

    Raquel Gilboa, … And there was Sculpture:Jacob Epstein’s Formative Years, 1880–1930 (London: Paul Holberton, 2009), 125.

  13. 13.

    The work is Study for Rock Drill (1913) held at the New Art Gallery Walsall, “Epstein, Sir Jacob—Study for Rock Drill,” The New Art Gallery Walsall, accessed January 7, 2018, http://thenewartgallerywalsall.org.uk/item/study-for-rock-drill/.

  14. 14.

    Peter Brooker, Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 99.

  15. 15.

    Ibid.

  16. 16.

    Jacob Epstein, Epstein: An Autobiography, 2nd ed. (London: Studio Vista, 1963), 56.

  17. 17.

    Stephen Gardiner, Epstein: Artist Against the Establishment (London: Michael Joseph, 1992), 128.

  18. 18.

    Epstein, Epstein, 56.

  19. 19.

    F.T. Marinetti, Mafarka the Futurist: An African Novel, trans. Carol Diethe and Steve Cox (London: Middlesex University Press, 1998). Marinetti wrote the book in French.

  20. 20.

    Aru H. Merjian, “Manifestations of the Novel: Genealogy and the Sculptural Imperative in F.T. Marinetti’s Mafarka le futuriste,” Modernism/modernity, 23, no. 2 (2016): 365–401 (367).

  21. 21.

    Mafarka rejects the advances of Coloubbi and her claims on Gazourmah: “I won’t allow you to see my son! He is mine alone! It is I who made his body. It is I who engender him through sheer exertion of my will! … And I didn’t call on you to help me! … I did not lay you on your back and pump the divine seed into your ovaries, with heaves of pleasure!” Marinetti, Mafarka, 183.

  22. 22.

    Sigmund Freud, “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex,” in On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Work. Penguin Freud Library, ed. Angela Richards, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 7: 315–22 (318).

  23. 23.

    Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in On Sexuality, 7: 351–7 (353).

  24. 24.

    Alan G. Wilkinson, “Paris and London: Modigliani, Lipchitz, Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska,” “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, ed. William Rubin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 1: 417–50 (440).

  25. 25.

    Epstein, Epstein, 188.

  26. 26.

    Ibid., 46–7.

  27. 27.

    Patricia Leighten, “The White Peril and L’Art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism and Anti-Colonialism,” Art Bulletin, 72, no. 4 (December 1990): 609–30 (610).

  28. 28.

    Sigmund Freud, “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,” in Civilization, Society and Religion. Penguin Freud Library, ed. Albert Dickson, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 12: 33–55 (37).

  29. 29.

    Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” in Civilization, Society and Religion, 12: 251–340 (292).

  30. 30.

    Ibid., 12: 294.

  31. 31.

    See Jill Lloyd, “Kirchner’s Metaphysical Studio Paintings,” Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: The Dresden and Berlin Years, eds. Jill Lloyd and Magdalena M. Moeller (London: Royal Academy, 2003), 15–21 (17).

  32. 32.

    Richard Cork, Jacob Epstein (London: Tate Gallery, 1999), 19.

  33. 33.

    Gill, quoted in ibid., 19.

  34. 34.

    Wyndham Lewis, “The Cubist Room,” The Egoist, January 1, 1914, 8–9 (9).

  35. 35.

    Epstein, Epstein, 59.

  36. 36.

    See Gardiner, Epstein, 129.

  37. 37.

    Epstein, Epstein, 56.

  38. 38.

    Epstein in Jacob Epstein and Arnold Haskell, The Sculptor Speaks: A Series of Conversations on Art (London: Heinemann, 1931), 90.

  39. 39.

    Ibid., 94.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., 88.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., 92–3.

  42. 42.

    Epstein, Epstein, 190.

  43. 43.

    Ibid.

  44. 44.

    Hal Foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art,” October 34 (Autumn 1985): 45–70 (46). ‘Socius’ literally translates as ‘fellow’ or ‘companion’ and its use here covers the bonds that are made in order to form patriarchal society.

  45. 45.

    Worringer, AbstractionandEmpathy, 15.

  46. 46.

    Ibid.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., 16.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., 17.

  49. 49.

    T.E. Hulme, “Modern Art and its Philosophy,” Selected Writings, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet, 1998), 94–113 (98).

  50. 50.

    Lewis, quoted in Richard Cork, Vorticismand Abstract Art in the First Machine Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 1: 161.

  51. 51.

    See “Appendix One: An Article by the Late T.E. Hulme” in Epstein and Haskell, The Sculptor Speaks, 152–64; Epstein, Epstein, 63–8. Epstein is a revised and expanded edition of Epstein’s first autobiography, Let There Be Sculpture (1940).

  52. 52.

    T.E. Hulme, “Modern Art—III. The London Group,” New Age, March 26, 1914, 661–2 (662).

  53. 53.

    Hulme, “Modern Art and its Philosophy,” 98.

  54. 54.

    Ibid., 106.

  55. 55.

    Ibid., 110.

  56. 56.

    Ibid.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., 99.

  58. 58.

    David Trotter, “Techno-Primitivism: À Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Modernism/modernity, 18, no. 1 (2011): 149–66.

  59. 59.

    Evelyn Silber, The Sculpture of Epstein: With a Complete Catalogue (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986), 134.

  60. 60.

    Epstein, Epstein, 56.

  61. 61.

    In 2012, Jonathan Jones, art critic of the Guardian newspaper, reproduced Torso under the headline “Menacing Machine”, writing: “A science-fiction monster turns its long metal snout sideways as it scans the wreckage of some endless robot war.” Jonathan Jones. “Menacing Machine,” Guardian, October 1, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/picture/2012/oct/01/jacob-epstein-torso-metal-rock-drill.

  62. 62.

    Cork, Epstein, 40.

  63. 63.

    Cork, Epstein, believes that Torso marks the point at which Epstein “began to recoil from avant-garde art”and “returned to a more figurative way of working”, 40, 41. For Charles Harrison, writing more generally, “the radical modernists were forced by the actual experience of war to adopt more naturalistic styles”, Charles Harrison, English Art and Modernism, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 131.

  64. 64.

    Gardiner, Epstein, 131.

  65. 65.

    Silber, The Sculpture of Epstein, 33.

  66. 66.

    Harrison, English Art and Modernism, 100.

  67. 67.

    Cork, Epstein, 40.

  68. 68.

    Lisa Tickner, “Men’s Work? Masculinity and Modernism,” in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, eds. Michael Ann Holly, Keith Moxey, and Norman Bryson (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 42–82 (46). This is, however, Tickner’s last word on Epstein’s sculpture.

  69. 69.

    Cork, Wild Thing, 165 (my italics). He calls this study the “germinating motif” of Rock Drill in Richard Cork, Vorticismand Abstract Art in the First Machine Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 464.

  70. 70.

    The figure is catalogued and reproduced on the British Museum’s website, “Af1962,20.2”, British Museum, accessed January 10, 2018, www.britishmuseum.org/collection. For emasculation of African figures, see Jeremy MacClancy, “Cutting and Covering Up Ethnographica: The Culture of Curatorship,” Journal of the Association of Social Anthropologists, ASA Online, no. 01/08 (August 2013), https://www.theasa.org/downloads/asaonline/PDF/asaonline0108.pdf.

  71. 71.

    Freud, “Fetishism,” 353.

  72. 72.

    Sigmund Freud, “On the Sexual Theories of Children,” in On Sexuality, 7: 183–204 (195). This study was published in 1908.

  73. 73.

    Jacques Lacan and Werner Granoff, “Fetishism: The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real,” in Perversions: Psychodynamics and Therapy, eds. Sandor Lorand and Michael Balint (London: Ortolan, 1965), 265–76 (273).

  74. 74.

    Parveen Adams, The Emptiness of the Image:Psychoanalysisand Sexual Differences (London: Routledge, 1996), 43. Here Adams is discussing Octave Mannoni’s use of Casanova as an example of fetishism in his “‘Je sais bien … mais quand même’: la croyance” essay for Les Temps Modernes, 212 (1964), 1262–86.

  75. 75.

    Sigmund Freud, “An Outline of Psychoanalysis,” in Historical and Expository Works onPsychoanalysis, Penguin Freud Library, ed. Albert Dickson, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 15: 375–443 (439–40).

  76. 76.

    Worringer, AbstractionandEmpathy, 37.

  77. 77.

    Freud, “Fetishism,” 356–7.

  78. 78.

    Ibid.

  79. 79.

    Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 104.

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  1. Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London, UK

    Bernard Vere

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  1. University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Jana Funke

  2. University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Jen Grove

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Vere, B. (2019). A Token of Triumph Cut Down to Size: Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill as Fetish Object. In: Funke, J., Grove, J. (eds) Sculpture, Sexuality and History. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95840-8_6

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