At the conclusion of the second part of this essay I suggested that, while the notion of the “everyday visionary” might suggest a possible area of common ground between the practices of Robert Motherwell, Hannelore Baron and Rosemarie Koczÿ, it remains to distinguish between those practices in ways that might bring me nearer to answering my original question about possible relationships between certain forms of art and magic. My intention to distinguishing between them has, however, been both complicated and to a degree less urgent by coming across an exchange between Susan Michie and Simon Lewty called ‘Reveries & Transformations’ in Simon Lewty: The Self as a Stranger (Black Dog Publishing, 2010). In this they discuss various understandings of the relationship between art and magic that have a direct relevance to this essay. 

A trajectory within the art of modernity?

As I’ve suggested earlier, referencing Edward Hirsch, understandings within Western art history have frequently intersected with broader questions about artistic inspiration and, in the modern period, with exploration of ways of tapping into unconscious, numinous or mystical states. These states were explored in various ways and to various degrees by the Romantics, Symbolists, Surrealists, Abstract Expressionists, Beats and others, forming a loose trajectory in which the concerns of visual artists and poets often overlap. Put at its simplest, I see Motherwell’s practice as located squarely in that loose trajectory, a position focused by his contact with Surrealism. Koczÿ’s work seems to be that of an Outlier animated by an inner drive linked to trauma. Baron’s practice is clearly located somewhere between the two although, in my view, she is closer to the former trajectory.

The historian, sociologist and essayist Perry Anderson views abstract expressionism as the last genuine avant-garde of the West. For Anderson, what distinguished artists engaged with modernity in that period was: ‘their firm ability to grasp both sides of the contradictions of capitalist development – at once celebrating and denouncing its unprecedented transformations of the material and spiritual wold, without ever converting these attitudes into static or immutable antitheses’. (New Left Review no. 144,1984, p. 98). In his view that ability gradually withered away as art increasing became: ‘a function of a gallery-system necessitating regular output of new styles as material for seasonal commercial display, along the lines of haute-couture’. (ibid. p. 108) While a study like Sarah Thornton’s 33 Artists in 3 Acts (2014) might seem to confirm Anderson’s analysis, the fact that she includes Andrea Fraser’s views should prevent any such final conclusion. What Fraser’s concerns take up, and what Anderson overlooked in 1984, is the way in which artists like Carolee Schneeman, originally a painter in the Abstract Expressionist tradition, rejected its emphasis on a masculine heroism by turning to performance-based work informed by feminist concerns that continued Dada and Surrealism’s willingness to encounter what the dominant cultural mentalité would see as unacceptable, even “demonic”. If abstract expressionism is the last genuine avant-garde of the West, it’s equally the last expression of the concept of the avant-garde as a projection of heroic masculinity, a position implicit in Motherwell’s comments about ‘little pictures’. The resulting situation exposes an all-too-often openly misogynistic form of cultural “heroism”, one that’s the antithesis of Baron’s work. It’s in relation to this problematising of cultural heroism and its implications for questions of art and/or magic that I find the exchange between Susan Michie and Simon Lewty helpful.

Their conversation touches on a range of issues relevant here but it’s what they say about Picasso and Beuys that I think connects with the problematic notion of cultural “heroism”. Following up on a comment by John Burger, Lewty suggests that certain artists – he identifies Picasso, Beuys and Damien Hurst by name – have grasped that people have a need for a sense of the magical and, in response, have become artists as ‘essentially prophet/showmen’ able to satisfy that need for a sense of the magical (p. 162). However, Lewty goes on to make an important distinction, saying that, in his own case: ‘It was the magic in art, and making that magic that fascinated me, not the thought of being a magician’. A distinction that the two artists then extend by suggesting that the role of the artist as magician or cultural hero requires an extrovert willing and able to perform the role of the artist as a “special” kind of person, while introvert artists ‘sit quietly in their studios’ and create art by attending to their own ‘inwardness’ (p. 163). Although the two artists have a different understanding of the relationship between art and magic, they seem to agree that: ‘Magic is a slippery subject, as difficult as trying to explain the reasons for making art and that’s the thing, the outcome of magic can’t be explained any more than how a work of art comes about but both have an end product’ (p. 165). In Lewty’s case that ‘end product’ is the exchange implicit in this observation. ‘Sometimes I sense that whatever it is that is most inward to me as an artist has spoken to something equally inward in another person, and has been recognised, and this is the most valuable of all responses’ (p. 169).