Looking for a Sign: Contemporary Art, Magic, and Language, (2024), published in Ireland by Durty Bookspresents a small international group of individuals concerned with, in their words: ‘the intersectional practices of art and magic, exploring their capacity to invoke a profound dimension of reality that transcends the limitations of language’. My reservations about this book have less to do with its immediate content – that is to say the essays and work represented by the photographs, diagrams and spells included – than with the underlying context presented by the seven artists’ whose texts it includes. Unlike the authors in Spellbound, however, Kerry Guinan, Annie Kwan, Aaron Gach, Zarina Muhammad, Anri Sala, Linda Stupart and The Order of Cooperative Consciousness (Guinan & Frank Sweeney), have a considerably more open and agile sense of the problematics and possibilities of the contemporary convergence of magical with artistic practices. (Jesse Jones’ Tremble, Tremble is referenced but not illustrated in the book and she is included in its list of contributors). My reservation has to do with a personal discomfort with certain assumptions implicit within these texts. Because these are just that, personal reservations, I’ll keep them to myself for the moment and turn back to considering aspects of Nick Richard’s LRB piece.

The poet’s art as a bridge?

In that piece Richardson recounts his experience of a number of synchronicities that occurred while he was working on his review. The synchronicities he experienced were so striking that he felt, ‘at times, as though something supernatural was trying to communicate with me’…. ‘was playing with me, or wanted me to play with it’. Finally, out of curiosity, Richardson carefully performed a spell from a grimoire, seemingly as a way of engaging with that “something”. Predictably, nothing happened. Predictably because it would seem to be the case that magic, when taken literally, suffers from the same limitation as poetry, as expressed in W H Auden’s notorious phrase. That is to say, it ‘makes nothing happen’.

However as Paula Meehan suggests in her Imaginary Bonnets With Real Bees In Them (2016), Auden’s ‘nothing’ can also be understood positively. She writes that if: ‘poetry makes nothing happen, maybe it stops something happening, stops time, takes our breath away… Maybe it’s like the negative space in a painting by which what is there is revealed, to be apprehended by human consciousness’. She adds that she sees individual words as having ‘autonomous force, I would say magic power’, in terms of their effect on the physical body. Words in a poem that, as in songs, spells, and incantations, are organised ‘into rhetorical patterns, periodic phrases, anaphoric utterance’ that carries us up and out of ‘the earthbound stricture of the poem, the craft free of gravity, true agent of flight’ (pp. 19-20). Meehan’s insight, which can be seamlessly translated into the interplay of the referential and formal aspects of both visual art and conversation as Monica Szewczyk understands it, is critical to my attempt to think art and/as magic together in the context of Szewczyk‘s claim concerning the art of conversation as the creation of worlds.

Earlier in his review Richardson takes up the suggestion that a magician who uses a grimoire (as they continue to do so today) is ‘trying to drive him or herself mad in a controlled setting, within controlled laws’. (Here I take “madness” to be, put very simply, a measured refusal to accept the values of the status quo). This position, like his various statements about synchronicities, are resonant with Surrealism as represented by writers such as Celia Rabinovitch. My own experience tells me that synchronicities in the day world usually appear unbidden, often when creative imagination is unfocused but linked to a deep attention. This is something certain poets understand in ways that I suspect many contemporary visual artists, all-too-often subject to the excessive, and so baneful, influences of conceptualism, new technologies, and academic theorising, have either forgotten or dismissed. A useful way into a poetic understanding of what Richardson refers to as “controlled madness” is via Paula Meehan’s discussion of Gary Snyder’s teaching in her book already referenced. There she refers to his What You Should Know to Be a Poet from Regarding Wave (1970), which I read as the poetic equivalent to a grimoire. Again, readers can, if they choose explore this further via the link above.

At root, what is central here are questions about power, about who is permitted to speak authoritatively on a subject and who is not, and about the diversity of human experience, are of equal relevance to how both art and magic are valued and understood. For example, the contemporary notion of “magical thinking” is implicit in the claim that the experience of music can momentarily transport us “elsewhere” or “out of ourselves”. The authoritative view is that any such description is “just a figure of speech”, a view that refuses to register the implications of Rebecca Solnit’s insistence on ‘the porousness of our every waking moment’. That being the case, it’s useful to offer a brief narrative as a way of putting that authoritative view in question.

The surrealist painter, author, curator and activist Penelope Rosemont writes of how a performance by the blues gospel singer Carrie Robinson and her band that took place on a Chicago street resulted in a man in the audience going into an involuntary trance. In that trance he danced with Robinson for some time before “coming to”, ‘embarrassed’, ‘stunned and confused’ at what had happened to him (Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields 2019, pp. 75-76). That such an experience can be precipitated in some people by music may lie behind the fact that the Old English word for a “spell”, leod, as used in the early Middle Ages, also means “a song, lay, or poem’, a linguistically-expressed understanding that in all probability has its roots in the drumming that shaman’s use to enter into a willed trance. My point, however, is simply that what the dominant mentalité takes as given, namely what is “normal” and what is “real” are, in the last analysis, the effects of capitalist sorcery.  

In discussing why they ‘identify the mode existence of capitalism with a system of sorcery’, Pignarre and Stengers use the distinction between ‘majoritarian’ and ‘minoritarian’ groups, seeing the former as consisting of those who regard their thinking as constituting itself as ‘normal’ and every divergence from its position as a ‘divergence’, and the latter as those ‘to whom it would never occur to think or wish that everyone would follow their example’. They add that this is not because the second group wants to cultivate a sense of particularity, but because those who belong to this group ‘know about the link between being and becoming’. (p. 108) It’s in this context that I’ve written the above.   

I am well aware that there is a vast amount of academic scholarship that is predicated on an absolute differentiation between art and magic, yet I find much of that scholarship both confused and questionable,. For example when I read Colin Rhodes’ account, in Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives (2000), of the ways in which the art of those individuals he calls ‘self-taught visionaries’ are “dictated” by a spirit guide or other entity, I’m at once struck by the similarity to Emma Wilby’s accounts of the relationships between cunning folk and their familiar spirits. Academic disciplinary protocols will ensure, however, that the two situations are not compared. So it’s important to keep in mind that there are many, sometimes conflicted, understandings of art, magic, witchcraft, and so on. Some we take literally and accept as relatively self-evident, others are understood as metaphorical, others still we cannot understand but can only acknowledged as ultimately a mystery. It’s also evident that these understandings have changed and continue to change and are linked, directly or indirectly, to fundamental issues of power and authority. Writing in 2000 Rhodes takes as a given the term “Outsider”. Less than two decades later an alternative, “Outlier”, is introduced by Lynne Cooke and her fellow authors in the catalogue of the Outliers and American Vanguard Art exhibition of 2018. Two observations by Darby English in his essay Modernism’s War on Terror in that catalogue serve to illustrate the way in which advocates of Modernist “high” culture generated a particular, highly restricted, conception of art that continues to influence our understanding to this day.

The first is: “The often brutal character of modernist criticism is shown in its insistence on the primacy of external judges, which is another way to describe its tendency not to think of the makers as the primary seers and knowers of their work. No matter how sympathetic to artists, properly vanguard criticism displaces maker’s vision and knowledge in favour of its own rigorously cultivated awareness of how Art (i.e., the feverish machinations of autonomous aesthetic forces) operates in the work at hand’ (p. 31). The second is: ‘Nowhere is the policy of limited tolerance held by the vanguard and its institutional monoculture more clearly on view than in its intercourse with outsiders’ (p. 32). What he refers to as an ‘institutional monoculture’ was and is a characteristic, not only of the specific institutions that police the economy of the art world, but of all cultural institutions predicated on upholding “progressive” notions of a productive vanguard culture and, implicitly, the assumptions of a global capitalism wedded to a belief in continual economic growth predicated on the assumptions of possessive individualism.