‘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.