‘“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 (7th 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 (30th 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).