The work of 12 international artists is currently being shown at the Arnolfini in Bristol in a group exhibition called Pale Carnage, which explores ideas of cruelty, desire, beauty, decadence, voyeurism and violence.
Taking as their inspiration the turbulent but creative periods of the late 19th and early 20th centuries the artists have each produced works that investigate the relationship between Classicism and Modernism and its unsettling association with fascism.
A touchstone for the exhibition is Ezra Pound’s poem April, a line from which gives the show its name, and many of the themes are mirrored in the controversial poet’s life, work and skewed aesthetic.
Having carved out a reputation in the midst of the literary innovations of the early twentieth century Pound moved to Italy after the First World War. Here he developed his modernist literary ideas whilst becoming increasingly enamoured with the fascism of Mussolini for whom he made anti-Allied speeches during World War Two.
He was charged after the war with treason and, on pleading insanity, incarcerated in a St Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington DC. For some he is still regarded as the father of Modernism, for others he remains the flawed and discredited poet who succumbed to the evils of the time.
However the exhibition is not solely about Pound but rather takes note of the period - a formative time for politics, music, literature, theatre and art and some of the artists in the show have re-visited the aesthetic sensibilities of the time. There are references to occultism and its relationship to the birth of Modernism as well as the thinking of a variety of 20th century figures ranging from Yeats to Hitler.
