I need to go back to consider where, for me, the questions I’m struggling with here might be said to have been initiated. On the 22nd of August 2017, the philosopher of science and political activist Isobel Stengers and the writer and ecofeminist neo-pagan Starhawk met at the zad’s library, le Taslu, [https://zadforever.blog/2017/08/07/starhawk-and-isabelle-stengers-on-the-zad/]. Their purpose was to discuss shared concerns that Stengers had set out in Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell (written with Phillippe Pignarre and published in an English translation by Andrew Goffey in 2011). That the Introduction to the catalogue Looking for a Sign makes no reference to the position shared by Stengers and Starhawk suggests to me that its author is over-reliant on a single line of thinking, but on too particular a theoretical focus more generally. This worries me. Stengers has been engaged in a conversational exchange with artists, curators and so with various types of art practice at least since her contribution to Reclaiming Animism in 2012. However, rather than get bogged down in the niceties of allegiances to theorists and social positions, I want to return to a fundamental question.
What is visual art “for”?
It’s a seemingly simple enough question but one that has been answered in any number of ways. If pressed, I would suggest that it provides us with telling images that invite, are occasions for, genuine exchange. For many forms of open conversation – whether with the image itself, with another person, with what I can only call the life of materials, with the dead or, critically, with an aspect of ourselves that requires attention – with what makes us curious, holds our interest, worries us, about what we fear, value, need, and so on. Where this touches on my meandering attempts to think about the possibilities of taking a view of art and/as magic will I hope by now be obvious to anyone reading this essay through from the start. The “magical” aspect of visual art lies, for me, in its ability to animate the kinds of speculative conversations that, as Monica Szewczyk puts it, enable ‘… the creation of [alterative senses of] worlds’, that allow us to: ‘say that to choose to have a conversation with someone [including one of our many neglected selves] 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’. Which returns me to the notion that what art and magic have in common is some form of transformation, perhaps literal but more likely a subtle change of attitude, feeling, orientation. At this point I need to turn to my own recent experience.
Covines.
The now archaic word ‘covine’ is related to coven. The Scottish National Dictionary tells us that covine, covin, coven and covyne all derive from the notion of a compact, an agreement, a gathering or assembly, all derived from the Latin convenire: ‘to come together, to assemble’. In short, covine carries with it a sense of collective gathering in which matters are addressed in such a way that some form of common purpose is affirmed. It’s in this sense that I want to link covine to occasions when “magical” transformative conversations or exchanges take place without, however, linking these to any specific art form or practice. In traditional Scottish social lore the ‘Covin Tree’ marked the heart of a social convention, being a large tree standing in front of a Scottish mansion at which a laird would meet his visitors on their arrival, and to which he would escort them back when they departed. A tree, then, that placed the start and conclusion of a covine, not in a human dwelling but in the natural world. I add this because it may, at least for some readers, be suggestive of something I can find no other way of indicating.
I have a particular sense of what the contemporary covine in the sense I’m trying to open up here. This grows out of my involvement with two groups that, while animated by their involvement in the arts, seem to me to be at heart to be concerned with the transformational “magic’ I’ve identified with art’s ability to invite transformation. These are the collaborative Utopias Bach, based in north Wales, and the loose group of individuals responsible for animating the community engagement with Gleann a’ Phûca, or the Glen River Park, located just outside Cork in the Republic of Ireland. Both have employed creative imagination mediated through art and neither is concerned with magic in any of its usual, literal, senses. At this point I will let you the reader go and invite you to turn to the two links given above.