I’ve had to pause my working on this essay.

Partly because I have needed to spend time in the studio and partly because I have come across a very rich dialogue between two artists – Simon Lewty and Susan Michie – in The Self as a Stranger, a book on Lewty’s work. In it they talk about the relationship between art and magic and I need carefully to digest what they say before I continue.

‘Seeing Through’ Capitalist Sorcery?

One of the oldest purposes of magic is protection from harm or ill-fortune, whether as the result of supernatural agencies, disease, accident or from human malevolence. Consequently a major function of the magical practitioner – wise woman, shaman, magician, sorcerer, whoever – was to identify and understand the source of such harm in order to protect others or themselves against it. This same desire animates Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell (2011) by Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers which, along with Emma Wilby’s research, is pivotal to my thinking here.

Pignarre is a writer, publisher and activist with experience of working in the pharmaceutical industry, while Stengers, whose writing on animism I referenced earlier, is a philosopher and historian of science, also a writer and activist. Their book is based on the passionate belief of activists that ‘another world is possible’. They take this belief very seriously. As their English translator Andrew Goffey points out in the book’s introduction: On the Witch’s Broomstick, this belief requires accepting that we don’t already know how to respond to the questions it throws up. In the present context this “not knowing’ means asking what understanding of the relationship between art and magic might help us believe that ‘another world is possible’. One hopefully not dominated by a pernicious, extractive economics, a psychosocial culture based on possessive individualism that denies the interconnectedness of all human and more than human life, or the pervasive misogyny fed by it.

In approaching this question about the possible relationship between art and magic I am guided by Pignarre and Stengers as ‘sounders of the depths’. (p. 14) This means taking magic and its practitioners seriously, which is not the same as taking them literally. That’s to say I will “think with them” as a way of ‘stepping out of the comfort zone of modern critical judgement’, that binary process in which we ‘sort between the good (reasonable, objective, progressive) and the bad (irrational, subjective, backwards-looking) without having to think about it too much’. Also because ‘the abstract conception that we have of modern rationality – with all its destructive effects – only holds sway by the way in which it manages not to deal with things it doesn’t understand and to close off the possibilities they open up’ (p. xviii). One of those possibilities is magic, for example the specific therapeutic practices used in non-modern cultures by particular traditional specialists – wise women, shamans, witches, etc. – seen as ‘technicians of the cure’ (p. xix).

One such European tradition, that of the healing whisperers of Belarus, researched by the photographer Siarhiej Leskiec and documented in an article by Anika Burgess published in 2017 online by Atlas Obscura. This tradition is only maintained by a few elderly women known as Babkas (Belarusian for “grandmothers”). Their activity is focused around a heavily ritualized form of healing in which a small, often rhymed, text specific to the illness is spoken in a barely audible whisper. The healers primarily treat disease and infection, but may also address spiritual concerns such as casting out evil spirits. In short, the Babkas have continued forms of magical practice familiar to any reader of Emma Wilby’s detailed study of British witch trails into the twenty-first century.  

Pignarre and Stengers’ concern, however, is not with this type of traditional magical practice but with the use, by modern witches such as Starhawk (also a peace activist, ecofeminist, author and educator), of the ‘artifices of witchcraft’ so as to ‘cultivate a power to “activate” thinking’ (p.xx) that is not already subject to the dominant mentalité. It is in this light that I see a possible convergence between the ‘artifices’ of magic and the practices of certain artists. In both cases, it seems to me, specific activities enable individuals or groups to help themselves resist, avoid or break with a spellbinding and toxic mentalité. One that is able, to a greater or lesser degree, to use a powerful and malign “sorcery” to create a ‘stunned impotence’ in its subjects. (p. 4) A sorcery by which capitalism ‘never stops inventing the means to submit what it deals with to its own requirements – and the consequences don’t concern it at all: it externalises them (others can pay), or defines them as the potential matter for new operations’ (p. 17).

Pignarre and Stengers address the question of sorcery in ways that relate directly to my speculations about the possible relationship between art and magic. They write: ‘Sorcery? It is a metaphor, of course? You don’t mean that you believe in sorcerers, in ‘real’ sorcerers who cast spells, transform charming princes into frogs or make the poor women who have the bad luck to cross their path infertile?’ They then point out that: ‘this sort of accumulation of characteristics translates what happens whenever one speaks of the “beliefs” of others. There is a tendency to put everything into the same bag and to tie it up and label it “supernatural”. What then gets understood as “supernatural” is whatever escapes the explanations we judge ‘natural’, those making an appeal to processes and mechanisms that are supposed to arise from ‘nature’ or ‘society’. They add that, of course, it’s always possible to claim that: ‘sorcery exists because it is a part of ‘cultural systems’ but that anyone who takes such claims literally within ‘our modern culture’ is failing to properly acknowledge that it ‘only exists in a marginal fashion, a belief that is no longer culti­vated, a residual survival’. (p. 39)

Forms of art as alternative thinking?

The poet Frank O’Hara names, in Robert Motherwell: with selections from the artist’s writings (1965), the ‘marvellously demonic, sullen or mysterious’ qualities of the artist’s work. Motherwell himself, whose practice was heavily informed by French Symbolist poetry and Surrealism, writes in the same catalogue of himself and his contemporaries as setting out ‘to recover the …. magical… force of their mediums’, insisting that ‘abstract art is a form of mysticism’. These statements suggest that, through his practice, Motherwell was seeking a sense of the numinous, of what lies outside rational explanation. He also writes that: ‘Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come into existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need’ (p. 45).

A need that, given Motherwell’s stated political and cultural concerns, I feel able to link to Pignarre and Stengers’ sense of ‘yearning’ as the ‘cultivation of sensitivity to what makes us vulnerable to the operations of capitalism. (p.48-49) A psychosocial yearning, both personal and political, predicated on the belief both that ‘another world is possible’ and that the yearning for that world is inseparable from seeking an altered sense of consciousness or being. One that I believe is also implicit in the practice of an artist who would appear, in many respects, that is the antithesis of Motherwell’s. Hannelore Baron also expressed her absolute need for another dimension in daily existence, which I take as another way of articulating a yearning for the possibility of another world.

It can be difficult to grasp that Motherwell understood his work as a form of mysticism due to the ways in which abstract expressionism was presented by formalist critics such as Clement Greenberg. An approach that can appear devoted to disassociating what the artists themselves said they believed from the formalist account given of their work. Nor has that tendency been entirely abandoned. In 2023 the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, organised a major touring exhibition entitled Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting. The very title of both exhibition and catalogue seems to me to sit uncomfortably with Motherwell’s dismissal of the notion, proposed by some abstract artists, that there is any such thing as a ’”pure” red’ and, by implication, a “pure painting”. Against such a view he reminds us that our experience of colour is always ‘rooted’ in ‘concrete phenomena’. There is a similar tension between Motherwell’s insistence that his practice involved ‘the correction of mistakes by feeling’, which Susan Davidson quotes in her essay Flashes of Clarity: Robert Motherwell’s Pure Painting in the Fort Worth catalogue, and her own emphasis on what she refers to as mental processes such as Motherwell’s analytical re-evaluation of work. Despite acknowledging Motherwell’s concern ‘to depict the unseen’, her overall approach tends to the ideology of “pure” painting central to Modernist American art history and the markets it serves.

Unlike Simon Kelly writing in the same catalogue, Davidson neither takes Motherwell at his word nor sees him in relation to current contexts. Kelly, while acknowledging Motherwell’s place in, and contribution to articulating: ‘a male-dominated, Euro-North American, and generally white aesthetic canon’, sees much of continuing value in his vision, not least ‘his belief in the “metaphysical” quality of his art and its role in communicating the “ultimate concerns of life, its essence’.  An inclusive position that does not ignore that Motherwell could make pejorative statements such as: ‘Little pictures are for midgets or for tourists – souvenirs’; a comment that highlights a difference between his work and that of Hannelore Baron. Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 100 measures84 by 240 inches, while a large Baron collage is unlikely to exceed 15 by 11 inches.

While Motherwell grew up in relative affluence in California, where his father served as president of the Wells Fargo bank, Baron was taken from Nazi Germany as a child after the beating and arrest of her father on Kristallnacht. (One of her most vivid memories was that of briefly returning to her family’s wrecked apartment, where the bloody handprints of her father were still visible on the walls). However Motherwell, who as an artist would be deeply preoccupied with themes related to mortality, also had a difficult childhood, in his case due to his frail health. Baron’s art, made largely from found and used everyday materials, has been described as one of concealment and protection and as the means to transform her life’s painful experiences into images of the darkness and mystery of being, an aim that chimes with the tenor of Motherwell’s Elegy series. While Motherwell produced vast paintings and numerous prints in large, well-appointed studios, the critic Ariella Budick, writing in the Financial Times (21.02.2024), reminds us us Baron, a women in her forties and mother to two children who never had a studio: ‘sitting at a kitchen table in the Bronx, obsessively exorcising her terrors by piecing together scraps of fabric, torn paper and string into elegant collages for nobody to see’. A women ‘so overcome by anxiety and mental anguish that she rarely left the house, shut out 20th-century America where protests raged, cultures clashed and bloodshed dragged on in Vietnam’. This somewhat inaccurate pronouncement needs to be seen in the context of Baron’s own, rather more nuanced, understanding of her own work.

It’s certainly the case that Baron’s early experiences of terror and persecution continued to torment her throughout her adult life, most obviously in giving rise to her tendency to serious depression and claustrophobia but also perhaps in the context of her having had to battle several types of cancer in her lifetime. However, as she herself was well aware, these difficulties also informed her concern for the disempowered, her mistrust of nationalism, and her fierce criticisms of war and environmental destruction. It’s significant here that Baron understood her collages both as a form of political expression and as one of therapeutic release.

Budick also assumes that, despite the isolation, claustrophobia, and depression that would lead to a series of nervous breakdowns throughout her life, Baron ‘somehow osmosed cutting-edge aesthetics and an ample aggregate of  influences’. The possibility that her work might have largely emerged without the influence of such cutting-edge influences is simply not considered. However, her work can be said to have many of the characteristics that Daniel Wojcik, in Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma (2016), identifies as those of a visionary artist responding to trauma.

However, even to tentatively identify her work in that way is to raise thorny questions about categorisation and gender in relation to art practices. For example, it begs the question of why Frank O’Hara feels confident to present Motherwell’s work as ‘marvellously demonic, sullen or mysterious’, while critical discussion of Baron’s work tends to be in terms of her having been influenced by cutting-edge aesthetics or as a response to trauma. Motherwell after all is on record as saying that throughout his life he was obsessed with death. No curator or critic, however, presents his work as a response to that obsession. I see no reason why we cannot understand Baron’s practice, as Motherwell’s near-contemporary, as setting out to recover the “magical” force of her medium through an art that might equally be seen is a form of “mysticism”; namely as an attempt to envisage what lies outside rational explanation and the ‘consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need’ or ‘yearning’?

Motherwell, Baron, Koczÿ?

Rosemarie Heber Koczÿ made paintings, wooden sculptures, and many hundreds of drawings in response to the Holocaust. Professor Daniel Wojcik, an authority on visionary art, art brut; trauma, grief, and creativity, locates Koczÿ’s art as that of a visionary artist responding to trauma. However, after her death the historian Georg Möller and others demonstrated that Koczÿ’s account of her war-time experiences, the subject both of her work and her book I Weave You a Shroud (2009) were fabricated. They found documentary evidence that she came from a Catholic, not a Jewish, family and that she was not interned in the concentration camp in which she claimed to be incarcerated, which was used entirely for men. He acknowledged, however, that she had a difficult childhood in a dysfunctional family and spent periods of time in a children’s home. Museum directors have defended her reputation on the grounds that she left behind a serious body of work. Nobody knows what drove her to portray herself as a Holocaust victim.

Wojcik presents a similar view, maintaining that Koczÿ’s drawings bear witness to overwhelming personal and collective trauma through creating ‘a burial ritual, a rite of purification, and prayer for the dead, painfully and meticulously expressed’ (p. 85). As already indicated, this view is shared by the numerous individuals and museums – including Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance centre in Jerusalem – that have examples of her work in their collections. Given this situation, it would be plausible to claim that the differentiations made between the types of work made by Motherwell,  Baron and Koczÿ by curators and critics are predicated on wilfully ignoring, or at best reinterpreting or placing another emphasis on what the artists themselves say about their work. That is they their approaches are oriented by the particular priorities and realpolitik of the different sectors of an institutionalised art world with which they are affiliated, a world that is ultimately the cultural arm of the dominant mentalité. To make such a bald claim would, however, be to side-step a fundamental issue; namely, how are we to understand notions of the “visionary” or “mystical” in relation the these artist’s work?

In what sense then might we legitimately understand the very different types of work produced by Robert Motherwell, Hannelore Baron and Rosemarie Koczÿ as having been animated by “mystical” or “visionary” concerns? And, if it’s legitimate to do so, how is that relevant to understanding any possible relationship between art and magic? One approach to these questions is suggested by Wojcik when he quotes the historian and ethnographer William A. Christian Jr. as identifying visionary experiences as a far more pervasive phenomenon that is usually acknowledged. Furthermore, he adds that if those experiences are understood as meaningful, they are also potentially ‘life and world changing events’. Might it be relevant to these artists’ work, as it is to Wilby’s whole thesis around the shamanic-style visionary encounters of cunning folk with their familiar spirits, that Christian also reminds us that, in relation to the phenomenon of visionary experience: ‘many people talk to with their dead, believers converse with holy figures about personal problems, children play with imaginative companions, and everyone dreams’? (quoted ibid. p. 920) More particularly, where do we set the boundary between the “visionary” as applied to exceptional and transcendent experiences and the activities Christian lists? Furthermore, if there was a “visionary” element of some kind to Baron and Koczÿ’s practices, does this also apply to that of Motherwell and, if so, are there characteristics that distinguish between their approaches?

I want to suggest hat a major difficulty regarding contemporary discussion of “visionary” or “mystical” experience lies in how those terms are understood. By and large they are taken either as referring to an exalted spiritual, or else anachronistic supernatural, beliefs and encounters. However, if I take up and extend Christian’s claim, I arrive at Rebecca Solnit’s view that we are not ourselves, but are ‘crowds of others … are as leaky a vessel as was ever made’, and have spent much of our lives ‘as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers’ we have never met. This is to say that the usual identity we are given: ‘has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel specializes in and none of the porousness of our every waking moment, the loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgettings and misrememberings, the portions of a life lived through others’ stories, the incoherence and inconsistency, the pantheon of dei ex machina and the companionability of ghosts’ (The Faraway Nearby, 2013, p. 248). If we accept Solnit’s argument, as I do, then the terms “visionary” and “mystical” can be seen as referring at root to common experiences we all, whether artists or not, share but which our culture suppresses as unreal and of no value. Nor is  without intellectual support. As Solnit points out, referencing neither elevated spiritual experience or anachronistic superstition, there is a porosity to our experience that, if we are aware of it, allows us to “see through” the restricted conception of reality taken as given by the dominant mentalité. This understanding is supported by the philosopher Peter Singer, who points out that we have: “’two distinct processes for grasping reality and deciding what to do: the affective system and the deliberative system’” … “the former deals in images and stories, and generates emotional responses; the later works with facts and figures and speaks to the rational, reasoning mind” (ibid. p. 243), as it is by the writings of the archetypal psychologist James Hillman.

While this argument for what I’ll refer to as the “everyday visionary” may suggest elements that the practices of Robert Motherwell, Hannelore Baron and Rosemarie Koczÿ may have had in common, it fails to throw light on a critical issue. Quite simply, what distinguishes those three artists’ practices one from another and does any such distinction take me nearer to answering my original question about possible relationships between certain forms of art and magic? These questions are the focus of the next section.

‘“Magicians believe that by words, spells, they can alter the world”, (Evans-Pritichard 1965, p. 41, speaking as Freud). Such a definition would have to cover not only “poets …criminals …madmen” (ibid.) but legislators, scientists, news editors, and the rest of us.’ Bill Griffiths Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Magic (1996) p. 90.

In this essay I set out to explore the question of possible relationships between art and magic, broadly understood. A question revived by Surrealism in the first half of the last century but clearly implicit from much earlier times. Inevitably, given the slipperiness of the task I’ve set myself, my thinking will meander back and forth across the line between the two which, as I understand it, is in any case constantly shifting. My reasons for addressing this question are the result of a confluence of many different concerns, hunches, contacts, and questions, some of which I’ll set out by way of background.

Background to the question.

The first and immediate circumstance that prompted this essay was seeing an advertisement for, and then buying, a small book published in Ireland – Looking for a Sign: Contemporary Art, Magic, and Language (2024). Its arrive coincided with my reading Nick Richardson’s review of David Rankine’s The Grimoire Encyclopedia Vols. 1 and 2 and Owen Davies’ Art of the Grimoire inThe London Review of Books (7^th Nov., 2024). (Grimoires are found in various different forms in many cultures and are collections of magic spells, along with the instructions as to how these should be performed). However, my question has its roots in work I did some twenty years.

My deep mapping projects on the English/Scottish border resulted in two works: the artist’s book Between Carterhaugh and Tamshiel Rig: a borderline episode (2004) and the CD, booklet and images of Eight Lost Songs (2004). Both drew directly on old “supernatural” Borders ballads involving relationships between humans and “the good neighbours”. The Elfin Knight, Tam Lin, Lady Isabel and the Elfin Knight and, above all, Thomas the Rhymer, reflect a world view at odds with Christian orthodoxy, particularly in its Puritan form, and investigating it led me to the work of historian Emma Wilby. Her Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (2009) and later study The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (2011) are astonishing pieces of social history produced by a forensic analysis of accounts of witchcraft trials.

What’s significant in terms of my concerns here is that Wilby argues, I think convincingly, that: ‘the encounter-narratives given by cunning folk and witches where not just accumulations of folk beliefs and stories’, rather they ‘were, like comparative narratives given by shamans, descriptions of visionary experiences – actual psychic events  which occurred in historical time and geographical space’ (2009, p. 7). I might have seen this link between psychic events and magic as simply of historical interest had it not been for the Preface to her first book. There she gives an account of the 1576 trial in Edinburgh of Bessie Dunlop, a wife and mother who: ‘delivered babies, healed the sick, consoled the bereaved, identified criminals, and recovered lost and stolen goods’, all with the assistance of ‘a familiar spirit who she called Tom Reid’ (p. 3). Welby identifies Reid as an ‘autonomous envisioned entity’ of the kind that now plays ‘a key role in a number of modern psychological therapies – such as analytical and archetypal psychology’ (p. 4) but also, as I know, in the imaginative lives of certain poets. What most moved me and has stayed with me since is the simple fact that women like Bessie Dunlop held to their beliefs and refused to deny the reality of their familiars, from whom they had received both their abilities and a degree of personal comfort. A refusal which they must have known would cost them their lives.        

All of which begs a host of questions, not the least of which is how to understand “visionary experience” and “magic”, given this historical context. It might reasonably be argued, for example, that the work of a number of modern artists referred to as “visionary” – for example Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, Agnes Pelton, Pavel Tchelitchew, Remedios Varo, Cecil Collins, Mark Tobey, Emma Kunz, Morris Graves and Anna Zemánková – enacts or records a numinous or visionary reality that, regardless of whether autonomous envisioned entities were involved, was as real to them as Tom Reid was to Bessie Dunlop.

Whatever the origin of their visions, their existence raises an issue identified by Celia Rabinovitch in Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros, and the Occult in Modern Art (2004), namely that our understanding of such visionary art is conditioned by exclusions predicated on the ‘Christian conception of daemonic power’. Conceptions that have transformed the unpredictable, dark aspect ‘of the sacred into the negative, simplistic notion of the demonic or evil’ (p.203). Consequently art histories, even when they include such visionary works, fail to engage with the questions explored by the poet Edward Hirsch in The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (2002). (A book which includes discussion of the work of a number of visual artists, notably Joseph Cornell, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell). Without some understanding of the issues Hirsch explores, the relationship between art and magic remains distorted and obscure.

Hirsch identifies the creative tension within poetic imagination in terms of that between Waldo Emerson’s ‘white fire’ and Federico Garcia Lorca’s insistence on the importance of ‘black sounds’ or ‘duende’, on the Dionysian and chthonic. This may seem too academic a distinction for those not interested in poetry, but It’s possible to hear this same tension by listening to the singer Martha Scanlan. Scanlan has recorded two versions of her song ‘Higher Rock’, the first with the Reeltime Travellers. This recording conforms to the feel of traditional notion of “old time”, Biblically-based spiritual uplift in American folk music. However a second version, recorded in 2018 for The River and the Light, has a fundamentally different feel. The musical arrangement counterbalances the dominant sense of uplift in the first version by introducing a powerful sense of duende that, by hightening its emotional ambiguity, deepens and, for me, transforms it.

Deep-seated binary assumptions about the numinous inherited from Christianity means that it’s much harder for people working in the arts to acknowledge and articulate their relationship with the “dark” aspect of inspiration, visionary or otherwise. Someone who openly acknowledges this difficulty is the Irish poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. She sees some of her best work has having ’been written out of a response to the unspeakable, because you’re not supposed to talk about this. Women aren’t supposed to have this quality in them, these negative, destroying teeth’. She goes on: ‘Ultimately, in me, the deepest image would be one of the Mothers. But … when you set out on the journey towards your Mother’s, you think you’re going to meet the great Mother, the Good Mother, the Ecstatic Mother, but what do you do when you meet the Teeth Mother’? (In Rebecca E. Wilson Sleeping with Monsters: Conversations with Scottish and Irish Women Poets 1990, p. 153). This understanding of the role of the conventionally unspeakable in a poet’s imaginative life lived in the context of what is still a largely Catholic culture is made manifestly clear in poems like her The Ebony Adonis .

In trying to think about the relationship between art and magic it seems to me critical to acknowledge the profound ambiguity of the numinous, sacred, and of archetypal and uncanny images, and consequently of their potential role in our imagination. Once that’s accepted certain categorical distinctions start to dissolve. For example, while the Old Testament regularly condemns witchcraft and magic, it’s difficult to think of another term to describe a miraculous event such as Moses’ parting of the Red Sea.

But what of magic today?

Magic?

Magic is conventionally understood as the practical employment of, and/or belief in, rituals or actions capable of in some way manipulating or influencing natural or supernatural beings and forces. Magic as an activity seems to me to include, or is difficult to distinguish from, what in religious orthodoxy is seem as prayer and ritual. Both prayer and magical evocation seem equally difficult to distinguish from the way many artists classically asked the Muses for inspiration which, since it them came from an “elsewhere” we might now call the unconscious, located the artist as a the skilled practitioner of an arguably ritual activity through which the work appeared.

In this context Hirsch writes, in Help Me, O Heavenly Muse. Where does a poem come from? The sources of inspiration are many, from reason to a touch of madness, that: ‘No-one entirely understands the relationship in poetry between trance and craft, between conscious and unconscious elements, and, indeed, poets have been obsessed by the problem of what can and cannot be controlled in the making of art. This is especially instructive to readers who bring their own conscious purposes to poetry, their own unconscious mechanisms of displacement and identification, of sublimation, projection, condensation . . . .’. It may also be that magic, or perhaps more accurately magical thinking, is almost impossible to separate from many of our beliefs and attitudes in everyday life, as the quotation from Bill Griffiths that heads this suggests.

An art historical context

We now know that, throughout much of the twentieth century, the critical and historical orthodoxy not only ignored painters like Hilma af Klint, but also constructed a highly reductive account of major artists like Kandinsky. As Peg Weiss has now shown, Kandinsky owed a fundamental debt to his encounter, as a trained ethnographer, with shamanic culture and artefacts. Like a number of his fellow faculty members at the Bauhaus, notably Johannes Itten, Kandinsky believed that if the genuinely new was to find artistic form, then all our corporeal, sensual, spiritual, and intellectual powers and abilities must be engaged together. This is an important point and one that has, ironically, been largely obscured by attempts to broaden our understanding of twentieth century art such as Maurice Tuchman’s The Spiritual in Modern Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985. Important because it runs counter to the assumption that the spiritual in art will, given the cultural framing inherited from Christianity, rise above corporeal and sensual concerns.

The ethnocentric focus of Tuchman’s exhibition, with its emphasis on the impact of Theosophy and mysticism on modern American and European painting priviliged a particular “Western” or monotheistic conception of spirituality at the exclusion of other, more inclusive, understandings. It passed over, for example, the polytheistic and heterodox nature of many popular belief systems the world over. Something of this marginalisation of heterodox approaches was addressed, at least in part, by Jean-Hubert Martin’s the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition of 1989. Significantly, and as many people noted at the time, while the ritual, the magical and the spiritually heterodox animated much of the “non-Western” work, that of the “West” was largely motivated by belief in art as an end in itself. 

Magiciens de la Terre can serve to remind us that in traditionally heterodox popular belief the link between the arts and magic was, and remains, active. The earliest works made by the Iranian-born American sculptor Siah Armajani belong to that heterodox tradition. These were collages of fabric and paper he made as a student and political activist in Tehran in the 1950s. Reflecting the culture of southern Tehran’s bazaar, they belong to a heterodox popular culture within a broadly Islamic culture. There spells, prayers and talismans purchased from post-office scribes, lines of poetry, political protest and folk songs, figures copied from Persian miniatures, information from family birth certificates and the wax seals of signet rings could be brought together within a single work. While clearly works of art, they openly acknowledge the reality of a popular belief in magic. A similar acknowledgement of a popular heterodox background informed the work of K.C.S. Paniker, who counterbalanced the influence of Western painting on Indian art by initiating what came to be known as Neo Tantrism.

The relationship between art and ritual and magic becomes less clear-cut when Western artists become familiar with, and draw directly on, ritual folk practices. This is the context in which a particular collaboration between the Warli artist Jivya Soma Meshe and Richard Long at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanae in Milan in 2004, took place. Long had previously visited and made ephemeral work in Warli territory and the two artists established a dialogue based on a mutual interest in the natural world. As the art critic, curator and collector, Hervé Perdriolle makes very clear, in the Milan exhibition Long’s work referred directly to his relationship with Warli culture and territory. (See Perdriolle’s Indian Contemporary Art : Contemporary, One World, Several Worlds, 2012, pp. 130-135). Long and Meshe also employed a ritual used by the Warli as the basis for a collaborative work by replicating a puja created to ensure a good rice harvest. The puja, normally undertaken when the rice plant is pulled from the ground, is made by using the base of a closed fist to make a series of prints with diluted ground rice.

This collaboration might be read in one of two ways. Negatively, as an uneasy appropriation and transfer of a meaningful rite from its “proper” context into the world of high art; a transfer that reduces it to a merely aesthetic phenomenon. More positively, it might be read as the transformation of a particular rite through locating it in a novel context. One where it serves to mark and confirm a productive exchange between two individual members from very different cultures who, through working together, have come to a new relationship with meanings grounded in each others worlds.

By accepting the possibility of this second reading, and keeping Bill Griffiths’ observation in mind, I hope to introduce the possibility of a particular understanding of the function of art in relation to magic. This possibility is in part predicated on the curator Monica Szewczyk‘s claim that ‘… if, as an art, conversation is the creation of worlds, we could say that to choose to have a conversation with someone is to admit them into the field where worlds are constructed. And this ultimately runs the risk of redefining not only the ‘other’ but us as well’ (‘Art of Conversation, Part 1’ e-flux journal no 3 – February 2009). I will return to this thought in due course.      

Setting Szewczyk‘s claim to one side for the moment, the question of the nature of the relationship between art and magic, as currently understood in “the West”, remains.

In 2022 the critic and editor at ArtReview J. J. Charlesworth made clear, in The Return of Magic in Art (30^th May 2022), that magic, animism, mysticism, spirituality, the figures of the witch, the medium and the shaman, had reappeared over the previous decade in the work of contemporary artists. Charlesworth suggests that this is in part a critique of the experience of the present that draws on pre-modern worldviews, in part a respectful acknowledgement of cultures that today still resist the hegemony of the social modernity of global capitalism, and in part resonant with anti-capitalist, postcolonial, and ecologically-responsible politics. However, in concluding his article he made a particular and telling choice. One that relates to the argument put forward by Franklin Rosemond – poet, artist, historian, street speaker, and co-founder of the Chicago Surrealist Group. Namely, that the cultural orthodoxy that underwrites most critical writing is dominated by the ‘pragmatic/positivist presuppositions and prejudices’ (Foreword to M. E. Warlick Max Ernst and Alchemy 2001, p. xvi), that underpin the realpolitik of cultural and academic institutions. Institutions to which J. J. Charlesworth owes his authority and, in consequence, must demonstrate his loyalty by maintaining the “detached” neutrality of the participant observer. His views must, that is, conform to the requirements of the very institutions central to the dis-enchantment of the world that the artists about which he writes seek to contest.

By contrast, in July 2012 the eminent philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers published a highly significant article, Reclaiming Animism. There she sets out the philosophical and ecological argument for adopting a new understanding of animism, concluding that: ’Against the insistent poisoned passion of dismembering and demystifying’ that flows from an intellectual orthodoxy predicated on pragmatic/positivist presuppositions and prejudices, a new animism is needed that will affirm that which is required to ensure that that mindset does not ‘enslave us’, namely by showing us ‘that we are not alone in the world’.

J. J. Charlesworth, however, chooses to conclude his article by referencing Theodor Adorno’s Theses Against Occultism. Put simply, he dodges what for me is the core issue at stake in all this. Having demonstrated his knowledge of the return of an interest in magic in contemporary art, he concludes by suggesting that such art’s relationship to “magical thinking”, while understandable, is ultimately a regressive tendency and so culturally marginal. This despite the fact that, as Stengers argues, the whole notion of regression in relation to alternative modes of contemporary thinking needs to be put in question.

Part of my concern here, then, is to question the views of those who, like J. J. Charlesworth, are happy to exhibition their intellectual capital in terms of knowledge of “magically-oriented” contemporary art but, at the same time, wish to do so as detached observers for whom such art has no imaginative purchase or practical value in relation to the world at large.

(To be continued).