Contemporary understandings of magic
Lewty’s sense of what is most inward in the artist being shared and recognised is, however, about as remote as can be imagined from most common notions of magical practices today. These are popularly conceived as the activities of conjurers at children’s parties, associated with the Harry Potter books and films, or else related to the Halloween image of an old women in black with a pointed hat, black cat, broomstick and bubbling cauldron. Behind these popular stereotypes there is, however, a rather different set of understandings.
Setting aside for the moment the practices of contemporary witches such as the peace activist, ecofeminist and author Starhawk, the research conducted by Siarhiej Leskiec into the Babkas of Belarus offers an image of the practice of contemporary “magic” that tallies in many respects with those identified by Emma Welby and Éva Pócs. Additionally, and with Hannelore Baron’s work in mind, there’s perhaps a quiet magic identified by the philosopher Gillian Rose in relation to her 96-year-old friend Edna. A ‘magic’ of ‘quiet and undramatic transmutation that can come out of plainness, ordinary hurt, mundane maladies and disappointments’ (Love’s Work, 2024, p. 8). This may or may not relate to Simon Lewty’s sense of shared inwardness. If this is the case, it would suggest that perhaps the only thing that different understandings of magic have in common is a yearning for some form of transmutation or transformation, whether extreme or subtle, transient or permanent, whether through a performing of self or through art’s alchemy of material manipulation and its shared resonances.
This yearning, and its link to the belief that ‘another world is possible’ as Pignarre and Stengers understand it, is the point of convergence between the broadly Dadaist/Surrealist tradition with which I would loosely identify the practices of Motherwell and Baron – the one more weighted to memorialisation through aspirations of cultural heroism, the other to a memorialisation predicated on inwardness – and the understanding of magic I’m trying to tease out here.
I’ll try to further differentiate between those two practices by reflecting on contemporary understandings of magic. In The London Review of Books (7th Nov. 2024) Nick Richardson discusses David Rankine’s The Grimoire Encyclopedia Vols. 1 and 2 and Owen Davies’ Art of the Grimoire. (A review that also alerted me to Owen Davies’ contribution to Spellbound: Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, the catalogue for an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museumin Oxford held between August 2018 and January 2019).
The catalogue for Spellbound raises what I see as a major issue around “authoritative” discussions of art and/as magic. Its essays display a firm adherence to the analytical detachment that is the “natural” precondition of the successful academic. Individuals who actually engage in magical practices today, such as the authors Jake Stratton-Kent and David Rankine, both referenced by Richardson, are not represented here. This matters. To understand why we only have to imagine a book on the history, drives and techniques of mountain-climbing written by a series of “experts” who have never climbed a mountain. In his LRB review Richardson rightly asks why people used, and continue to use, grimoires? To which he offers the tentative answer that maybe, through using them, they find ‘a powerful source of religious experience’ or, perhaps more accurately, a source of numinous experience – inward or otherwise – in all its power and ambiguity. The essays in Spellbound do not address this central issue.
My second reservation about Spellbound is its undue, but perhaps inevitable, emphasis on certain types of artefact; on elaborate illustrated books, old prints and engravings, and equally elaborate and beautiful and/or bizarre ritual objects. As Richardson points out, the majority of those who owned, used and viewed such artefacts would have been ‘male and literate’ and, as such, were not for the most part the same people who, historically, were tried as witches, who were principally ‘female and illiterate’. Put bluntly, Spellbound privileges the historical world of “elite” magic and effectively marginalises the “popular” tradition examined by Emma Wilby. Broadly speaking, there are two distinguishable traditions within magic historically understood that can perhaps usefully be related to distinctions between the practices of Motherwell and Baron.
Before going into that it must be said that Owen Davies and Ceri Houlbrook’s chapter Concealed and Revealed: Magic and Mystery in the Home in Spellbound would seem to invalidate my suggestion of a bias to “elite” magic. This is because it focuses on largely mundane magical objects associated with practices related to everyday homely concerns. However, Emma Wilby’s workhasmade it abundantly clear that “popular” magic was primarily an oral tradition sustained by a culture carried by song, folklore, story-telling, word-of-mouth lore (and primarily shared by women). As such it cannot compete in a museum context with the illustrated texts, prints, and physical artefacts of the “elite” tradition. (Wilby’s texts, while controversial, still remain the most detailed study of the mentality of the “popular” magical world in Scotland, before, during and after the 16th and 17th century witch-trials). Again, this matters for reasons relating to gender that should be obvious to the reader.
The final chapter of Spellbound is by Marina Wallace, Professor of Curating and Director of Artakt (an organisation concerned with dialogues in the field of art and science) at Central Saint Martins College of Arts & Design, University of the Arts, London. In it she addresses the work of the contemporary artists with an interest in magic invited to contribute to the exhibition: Ackroyd & Harvey, Katharine Dowson, and Annie Catterall. Frustratingly, however, this chapter is again framed by the assumption that an academic should speak “on behalf of” the artists involved, rather than allowing them to speak for themselves. It’s also coloured by its author’s own art/science preoccupations, which may explain why it fails to mention less orthodox ways in which contemporary art has engaged with magic. What’s excluded as a result is indicated by Hettie Judah’s review of Spellbound for Frieze.
As Judah points out in relation to Wallace’s curatorial approach, that ‘out in the wild, art and magic do not maintain such critical distance’ and concludes her essay by referencing Jesse Jones’s Tremble, Tremble (2017), first shown that year at the Venice Biennale. Tremble, Tremble is a rich and complex work that recreates the figure of the witch through the lens of feminism and the archetypal imagination so as to project something of why that figure has so frightened the patriarchy. Judah concludes by pointing out that the passionate ‘call to arms and historical critique’ presented by this work ‘felt absent at the Ashmolean’, and sees Tremble, Tremble as an example of an artists’ imaginal thinking ‘making leaps where documentary investigation cannot’.