Actual notes from the exhibition in Inverness Museum and Art Gallery 16 May – 13 June 1998. A Highland Tour followed. Text from the catalogue, written by Trevor Avery, was enlarged and mounted in Thomas Hirschhorn’s U-Topia Room as part of the Common Wealth exhibition in Tate Modern in late 2004.

The Rock Drill and Beyond curated by Another Space Limited (Directors Trevor Avery and Nigel Mullen) in collaboration with Inverness Museum and Art Gallery (with very special thanks to Stephen Moran), The Highland Festival, Highland Council Cultural and Leisure Services.

This exhibition is a unique opportunity to consider a major piece of twentieth century sculpture, the Rock Drill, 1913 by Jacob Epstein (courtesy of Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery) and to look at the historical context and circumstances under which it was made and subsequently dismantled.

This version of the Rock Drill should not be confused with the truncated bronze version on display in the Tate Gallery in London.

Memorabilia, images and artefacts dating from the 1914-1918 Great War for Civilisation have been gathered from museum collections and loaned by members of the public. These objects have been used to create a powerful installation linking a major work of modernist art with the time of its making.

Six contemporary artists from Scotland were commissioned to produce works influenced by the Rock Drill. Their pieces have also been placed throughout the exhibition bringing some of the concerns and issues raised by this controversial sculpture into the present day.

The artists in the exhibition are Robert Callender, Gavin Lockhart, Alex Main, Tim Pomeroy, Frank Pottinger, Mary Rosengren

Rock Drill, 1913 by Jacob Epstein.

Reconstructed in 1974 from original Epstein drawings and plans. The reconstruction is in the collection of Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery and is shown here courtesy of Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.

Jacob Epstein himself had a nervous breakdown, whilst in military service, in 1917 and dismantled his sculpture. Such was the impact of the war on Epstein that he turned his back on machine imagery and Rock Drill was never exhibited again in its full form until the reconstruction was made in 1974. Epstein died in 1959, the original conception of Rock Drill never having been shown again in his lifetime.

The Rock Drill and World War One

The original “Rock Drill”, 1913, is an awesome large scale sculpture created by the artist Jacob Epstein and shown only once in his lifetime. During the early summer of 1915 this monumental vision of horror was displayed to a shocked press and public who attacked both the sculpture and the sculptor with a savagery seldom seen in art circles. Epstein himself had to endure ferocious anti semitic comments which abated only very much later in his life as he became knighted and “respectable’.

It is difficult for us now to appreciate the anger directed towards the “Rock Drill” but it is curious that largely as a result of the scale of this reaction the ten feet tall “terrible Frankenstein monster” accumulated a mystique which its disappearance, at the artists own hands in 1915, only intensified.

After you have looked at the small scale model of “Rock Drill” please take a look at the installation which shows projected photographs of soldiers of the First World War. If it shocks you to see this “modern” sculpture amongst these haunting images of young soldiers please remember it was made by a young man who suffered a nervous breakdown in 1917, less than two years after he made “Rock Drill”. The circumstances surrounding the breakdown are debated even now but what is undeniable is that Epstein dismantled his original conception of “Rock Drill” because his faith in a technologically enhanced humanity was shattered on the battlefields of Northern France.

This exhibition looks at the way works of art are created under specific historical conditions and how an understanding of the events which occur during an artists lifetime can have a dramatic effect on the art produced. To try to understand the “Rock Drill” we need to try to understand the First World War and its legacy.

Europe in 1913.

In 1913, the year Rock Drill was made, the major powers of Europe were preparing themselves for a conflict that many, if they considered the possibility of war at all, saw as avoidable. The following year of 1914 saw the beginning of the Great War for Civilization, a conflict which was to last until 1918 and which would cost an estimated twelve million lives across Europe. The British Empire, the most powerful nation on earth at that time, lost about 1.2 million men largely on the Western Front in
northern France. The other major participants in the conflict, Germany, France and Russia, lost even greater numbers. The short-term impact was obvious and as the war ended in 1918 it was realised that Britain alone had lost one in ten of its young men under the age of twenty-four.

The longer term effects are more difficult to analyse but as an example the system of government set up in the aftermath to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, the immediate cause of which was the war on the Eastern Front, lasted until 1989, a year in itself which the world has yet to come to terms with. This is one example of how far reaching the events of 1914-18 have proved to be.

The Machine in Art

Before 1914 there were several artistic movements across Europe that believed in a future based on the developing relationship between humankind and technology. Different countries had different names for this particular form of fascination with the machine age. In Italy it was Futurism, in Britain it was Vorticism . The major feature of these movements was a fascination with speed, power and machine energy. These ingredients lent themselves both at that time and later to extreme political movements that spoke of technologically enhanced Supermen. Less sinister ideas of the time saw the machine as a potential means of liberation from toil and work that gave technological advance an almost mythical aspect. The events of 1914-18 severely undermined these ideas with many followers of these movements being killed in the war.

Epstein the Vorticist: A Critical Reception

Jacob Epstein never claimed to be a Vorticist. This American born British artist had made his reputation, not without controversy, on subjects such as his commission for The Tomb of Oscar Wilde. Single minded as ever, Epstein decided in 1913 to make the Rock Drill as a means of exploring what aspects of sculpture and imagery were available to an artist at that crucial time in history. Many years later he was to describe the ambition to create a “Frankenstein monster” as his primary motivation for the piece but at the time of its making Epstein was, if not optimistic, then much more ambivalent about his creation and its implications.

Such was the ferocity of the critical reception to Rock Drill at its one and only public showing in 1915 that Epstein dismantled his sculpture implying he was the victim of a vendetta. Supporters of the piece such as Wyndham Lewis, editor of “Blast” the Vorticist publication, applauded its audacity and vision, other critics meanwhile complained of many aspects of it not least the fact that Epstein had used a real drill (“an American drill”) in its construction and therefore the artist’s ability fell short of an acceptable level of skill. This was possibly the first occasion on which a “readymade” component was displayed as an artwork in a British gallery, a gesture that proved too provocative for many critics at that time.

The Disappearance of Rock Drill .

Epstein had a nervous breakdown in 1917. The circumstances surrounding these events are unclear but having failed in his attempt to be an Official War Artist he joined a Jewish Battalion in the British Army. The day before embarkation to serve in Palestine he was found wandering alone on Dartmoor. He then spent the next few months recuperating in hospital with other victims of the war spending some time drawing life studies of a few of his fellow patients. What significance this period had on his decision to cast only a shortened, dismembered version of Rock Drill in bronze is hard to say. Certainly he was deeply affected by the war in France and it could be argued this had a lasting effect in his decision to turn his back on the original Rock Drill with its close association with the glorification of the machine, though much of this interpretation may not have been of his own making.

The rarely seen full reconstruction of Rock Drill on display here is shown by courtesy of Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. It speaks much for the stature of the original
sculpture that even though it had not been seen in its complete form for over sixty years, rare photographs and descriptions from 1913-15 instigated a move in 1974 to have the piece resurrected. After consultation with the Epstein family two artists, Cook and Christopher, were commissioned to produce this reconstruction based on studies of the artist’s original material.

“It’s War!”

The populations of Europe greeted the outbreak of war in 1914 with a form of mass approval. We shall never understand the circumstances that came together to provoke such a reaction to the declaration of war but we can say that it was a unique coming together of many factors whose roots lay in the mid-nineteenth century. Enormous cultural, political, economic and technological changes conspired to produce an event which was rapidly to prove devastating in human and economic costs. It was a war that began on horseback, with soft headgear, bolt action rifles and outdated military strategies. It was to end four years later after enormous artillery bombardments, aerial conflict, steel helmets, armoured tanks, gas and the widespread use of the machine gun.

Behind the statistics lies the human experience of the Great War both at home and in the front line. The hope and optimism of 1914 turned to resignation and nihilism as the stalemate took hold. For the French army it was the charnel house of Verdun, for the British it was the disaster of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 when Kitchener’s volunteer army was decimated in what had been promised to be “The Big Push”. Battles such as these reaffirmed the growing feeling of helplessness the troops at the front line felt in the face of an ordeal as yet literally inexplicable. Every combatant in the trenches had a personal story to tell but the overriding loyalty to your “pals” rather than to “the cause” came to dominate life in the trenches.

“Keep the home fires burning”

On the home front in Britain a culture of fear developed, a dread of the telegram arriving reporting the death of a member of the family in France. The geographical closeness of the conflict just over the channel, enhanced by the widespread use of the European railway networks for troop movements, seemed on the one hand to heighten the emotional grip the conflict held on the home population whilst, on the other hand, increasing the gap in understanding between those experiencing the war in the front line and those remaining at home. This was Total War.

Old Soldiers Never Die...

How is the First World War felt today, some eighty years later? Much has been written of the conflict and many memoirs recorded of those who served in the trenches and those who lived at home. Only now can we begin to imagine their actual experiences but we can catch glimpses of that time through the fragments of film, documentary records, family memorabilia and museum artefacts that remain. Poetry and verse offer a look into the war experience as felt by those who lived, and often died, in the trenches. The visual art of the time could be argued to be more problematic to interpret but none-the-less invaluable.

The increasingly neglected memorials to “the fallen” of the Great War scattered across Britain stand as testimonials to a conflict that is being absorbed by more wars and more history. These monuments were erected as memorials to a conflict felt by many both during but particularly in the aftermath to have been of enormous waste. This feeling of waste, however, quickly turned into a determination to remember, if not the cause, then the dead. This is perhaps why the First World War, in its unique way, is increasingly interpreted as a war of memory. Memories, however, have a basis in real experience.

The Great War and the Highland Legacy.

The aftermath to the Great War can still be clearly seen and felt in the Highlands of Scotland. From the loss of its young men directly in the conflict, through to the economic collapse on the estates and in the agricultural industries in its wake, the Highlands suffered its most dramatic population decline of all in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Men who returned in peacetime from 1918 onwards did not find “a land fit for heroes” as had been promised. The same economic forces that provoked industrial unrest throughout the rest of Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland found spasmodic unrest in the Highlands. Land reform and land ownership were high on the agenda, in some instances breaking out in civil unrest, as Highlanders struggled for security of tenancy and to protect a way of life threatened by critical economic pressures.

Some succeeded in a modicum of security, many others migrated to urban areas or overseas. To understand the Highlands now there is a need to understand, at least in part, the events leading up to, including and the aftermath to the events of 1914-1918.

The Drill

The drill which Epstein used in his sculpture was one which was in use in the quarries and rock cutting works around the Highlands. It was used to drill the hole in the rock face where the explosive charges would be placed to blow the rock away. The most obvious example of its use was in 1930’s in the blasting through of the A82 road along the northern side of Loch Ness.

Drilling still has an enormous resonance for the Highlands of Scotland in the presence of the off shore oil industry, an industry which is still of enormous significance in the north of Scotland.

Pataphysics and the Readymade

Marcel Duchamp, 1887 - 1968, was one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Although he was associated with Surrealism and Dadaism he resolutely refused to be categorised in any art groupings. Duchamp’s importance to the development of art practice was to question the role and function of mainstream art. His most provocative gestures included the act of taking mass produced, everyday objects and exhibiting them in an art gallery context as a “readymade” work of art. His first acknowledged “readymade” Bicycle Wheel was made in 1913 (the same year as Epstein included a “readymade” drill in the Rock Drill) and took the form of a “happy idea” to mount a free spinning bicycle wheel on a high stool.

Among the many concerns and issues Duchamp dealt with was his use of machine activity as a metaphor for human experience and behaviour. His most important work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even , 1915-1923, was painted on glass and can be interpreted as a portrayal of the impoverishment of human relationships in the modern era. He developed a series of rules and scientific theories called “pataphysics” which had their own internal logic based on chance and irony. Duchamp applied these ideas when constructing his body of work suggesting that if “real” scientific development and thinking led to the technology of the First World War battlefield then who was to say “pataphysics” as opposed to “real” physics was nonsense?

The Cromarty Firth

The Cromarty Firth and Scapa Flow at the Orkney Islands played crucial roles in both the First and Second World Wars. Mastery over the North Atlantic was strategically crucial for the naval movements of both the British and German naval fleets. It was at Invergordon on the Cromarty Firth, and at Scapa Flow where the British fleet was serviced before embarking on, among other things, convoy protection duties as the German U-Boat threat intensified during both world wars.

The impact of the First World war military presence is best illustrated by the fact that the population of Invergordon alone grew from 1,100 to 21,000 in 1914 as a result of the impact of naval and coastal defence personnel.

The airfields and defences still to be seen on the coastline today stand as reminders to the enormous military importance of the area and indicate the scale of the operation in this part of Northern Scotland.

“Passion Dale”

Passchendaele, its pronunciation “Passion Dale” coming to be loaded with a bitter irony, was the name of a village in Belgium which was a military objective for the British army in 1917 during the battle which came to be known as Third Ypres. It was here that the horror of the First World War came to be fixed in its association with mud. During the early stages of the war the British had instigated the flooding of the Belgian and French lowlands, by the destruction of the drainage and dyke system, in order to hamper the advance of the German forces in 1914.

In 1917 the British forces in the area were ordered to advance and take a slight rise less than two miles from their front line known as Passchendaele Ridge. The whole geography of the area was a sea of liquid mud constantly churned over by heavy artillery and heavy rain. Men were as likely to drown here as they were to be killed by military means.

During the three month battle for Passchendael Ridge over 200,000 soldiers lost their lives in one way or another. The largest Great War British and German military cemeteries
are at Passchendaele and at nearby Langemark. These images in this exhibition give an indication of the different forms of military cemetery in Flanders. Whereas the German cemetery is shrouded from sunlight by oak trees, the British one is more open. Interestingly, veterans later described the trees in the British cemeteries as resembling “frozen” shell explosions much like those of 1917.

“According to all appearance, the artist acts after the fashion of a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks a way towards a clearing”

“The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp” translated by Michel Sanoiullet.

“What an age is this anyway where/ a conversation about trees is almost a crime/ because it entails being silent about so many misdeeds”

“An die Nachgeborenen”, Collected Works of Bertolt Brecht, Frankfurt 1967.