Rebecca Solnit has drawn attention to J. D. Vance saying that: “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.” 

Setting aside all that’s ridiculous in that statement in terms of the inference that Thunberg threatened US democracy, not to mention the imbalance between the two figures, I think it suggests an interesting truth. Vince’s strange comparison seems to me to imply a wholly disproportionate fear of a young woman – Thunberg is still only 22 – whose concern for the global environment on which her and all our futures depend, he characterises as “scolding”. Scolding is, of course, a word most frequently used to refer to a female authority figure, most usually a mother, in relation to a child that has repeatedly done something stupid, inappropriate or wrong. Doesn’t his statement suggest a very real fear of, and resentment about, a woman telling truth to power and, behind that, a childish fear of, and resentment about, anyone who draws attention to his appallingly “bad behaviour”?

I find it very hard to write anything for this blog that feels worthwhile at present. This is in some small part due to the complexities of our current family circumstances but, much more centrally, as a result of what is happening in the wider world. I’m probably not alone in feeling that recent events in Gaza, Ukraine and the results of the election in the USA signify a slide back towards a world dominated by gross egoism, greed, bigotry, religiously-justified hatred, and much else that it might be hoped we, as a species, were slowly moving away from. And of course the increasingly rapid destruction of a habitable world, not only for the human population but, in all probability, for all living things.

I am in consequence very grateful to those who, like Rebecca Solnit, are continuing to do what I don’t feel able to do; to think and feel clearly and to act accordingly See, then, Solnit’s Meditations in an Emergence.

Not a lot of good news comes out of the USA just now, so today’s report in The Guardian on Pamela Hemphill’s choosing to reject Donald Trump’s pardon is particularly welcome. Formally caught up in the attempts by MAGA supporters to overturn the democratic result of the previous election – an activity that made a mockery of democracy and resulted in wholly unnecessary deaths – Hemphill has come to accept responsibility for her (minimal) participation in the attack on Capital Hill. She recognises, as any honest person must, that Trump’s pardoning of his supporters who took place in that attack makes a mockery both of the American justice system and its democratic process.

I respect, and want to celebrate, anyone prepared to speak out against the Presidentially-led culture of lies and intimidation now in place in the USA. The call to “make America great again” is simply an attempt to mask an often deeply problematic, indeed murderous, historical reality. What I suggest is badly needed instead is a MASA (“make America sane again”) movement.

Recently I heard from a friend, the South African earth artist Hanien Conradie, whose environmental work I first came across when she spoke at Dartington in 2018 about her film Dart, made in collaboration with Margaret Le Jeune (USA) at the UK leg of the Global Nomadic Art Project.

I was very pleased to hear that her Flood Series (The Malawi Paintings), in which she explores the theme of flooding, will be shown at the end of next year in Cape Town. Also, that she’s received a commission from the Spier Arts Trust to make a painting of the latest flood in the Breede River Valley, where her grandmother farmed and where the clay she paints with comes from. But for me her most interesting news was that, through her work with the cosmology of animism, she now feels that she’s finding an alternative way to address the ethical and environmental complexities that arise from making a living as a painter in the art world. 

Central to this is what struck me as so significant when I first hear her speak – namely that her work is inseparable form the stories that bind it (and her) to specific ecologies. As she writes: 

‘It seems that the paintings are representing a process and a story that people can relate to. Once they make that connection, they seem to gain a better understanding of what the paintings are. That they are made with matter that I have fostered long and deep relationships with; I mean the clay and ochre I use from very specific places’. 

This insight into the connection between the work and stories about the relationship between people and land has allowed her to try: ‘to move people away from the idea that my paintings are objects to purchase for ownership’. Instead, she is putting forward the idea that individuals who buy her work become custodians of a process that belongs to many beings – including other-than-human beings – but that someone needs to be responsible for looking after it, to live with and have a relationship with it. By promoting this shift from passive ownership to an active notion of the custodianship of an object that is also a process and a story, she is reconnecting those who buy her work with a very old and pervasive respect for the custodianship of shared stories and their role in “making” the world. While she acknowledges that this is ‘quite a leap in consciousness’ for most of her buyers, she rightly sees it as a subtle invitation to a fundamental change of heart. 

Hanien will be coming to England in July 2025 to teach a course about Art and Animism, called The Rainmaker, at Loweswater in England’s Lake District. When I’ve more information about this course I’ll post it on this website. 

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 22^nd 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.  

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.

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 (7^th 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 16^th and 17^th 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’.    

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).            

I’ve had to pause my working on this essay.

Partly because I have needed to spend time in the studio and partly because I have come across a very rich dialogue between two artists – Simon Lewty and Susan Michie – in The Self as a Stranger, a book on Lewty’s work. In it they talk about the relationship between art and magic and I need carefully to digest what they say before I continue.

‘Seeing Through’ Capitalist Sorcery?

One of the oldest purposes of magic is protection from harm or ill-fortune, whether as the result of supernatural agencies, disease, accident or from human malevolence. Consequently a major function of the magical practitioner – wise woman, shaman, magician, sorcerer, whoever – was to identify and understand the source of such harm in order to protect others or themselves against it. This same desire animates Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell (2011) by Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers which, along with Emma Wilby’s research, is pivotal to my thinking here.

Pignarre is a writer, publisher and activist with experience of working in the pharmaceutical industry, while Stengers, whose writing on animism I referenced earlier, is a philosopher and historian of science, also a writer and activist. Their book is based on the passionate belief of activists that ‘another world is possible’. They take this belief very seriously. As their English translator Andrew Goffey points out in the book’s introduction: On the Witch’s Broomstick, this belief requires accepting that we don’t already know how to respond to the questions it throws up. In the present context this “not knowing’ means asking what understanding of the relationship between art and magic might help us believe that ‘another world is possible’. One hopefully not dominated by a pernicious, extractive economics, a psychosocial culture based on possessive individualism that denies the interconnectedness of all human and more than human life, or the pervasive misogyny fed by it.

In approaching this question about the possible relationship between art and magic I am guided by Pignarre and Stengers as ‘sounders of the depths’. (p. 14) This means taking magic and its practitioners seriously, which is not the same as taking them literally. That’s to say I will “think with them” as a way of ‘stepping out of the comfort zone of modern critical judgement’, that binary process in which we ‘sort between the good (reasonable, objective, progressive) and the bad (irrational, subjective, backwards-looking) without having to think about it too much’. Also because ‘the abstract conception that we have of modern rationality – with all its destructive effects – only holds sway by the way in which it manages not to deal with things it doesn’t understand and to close off the possibilities they open up’ (p. xviii). One of those possibilities is magic, for example the specific therapeutic practices used in non-modern cultures by particular traditional specialists – wise women, shamans, witches, etc. – seen as ‘technicians of the cure’ (p. xix).

One such European tradition, that of the healing whisperers of Belarus, researched by the photographer Siarhiej Leskiec and documented in an article by Anika Burgess published in 2017 online by Atlas Obscura. This tradition is only maintained by a few elderly women known as Babkas (Belarusian for “grandmothers”). Their activity is focused around a heavily ritualized form of healing in which a small, often rhymed, text specific to the illness is spoken in a barely audible whisper. The healers primarily treat disease and infection, but may also address spiritual concerns such as casting out evil spirits. In short, the Babkas have continued forms of magical practice familiar to any reader of Emma Wilby’s detailed study of British witch trails into the twenty-first century.  

Pignarre and Stengers’ concern, however, is not with this type of traditional magical practice but with the use, by modern witches such as Starhawk (also a peace activist, ecofeminist, author and educator), of the ‘artifices of witchcraft’ so as to ‘cultivate a power to “activate” thinking’ (p.xx) that is not already subject to the dominant mentalité. It is in this light that I see a possible convergence between the ‘artifices’ of magic and the practices of certain artists. In both cases, it seems to me, specific activities enable individuals or groups to help themselves resist, avoid or break with a spellbinding and toxic mentalité. One that is able, to a greater or lesser degree, to use a powerful and malign “sorcery” to create a ‘stunned impotence’ in its subjects. (p. 4) A sorcery by which capitalism ‘never stops inventing the means to submit what it deals with to its own requirements – and the consequences don’t concern it at all: it externalises them (others can pay), or defines them as the potential matter for new operations’ (p. 17).

Pignarre and Stengers address the question of sorcery in ways that relate directly to my speculations about the possible relationship between art and magic. They write: ‘Sorcery? It is a metaphor, of course? You don’t mean that you believe in sorcerers, in ‘real’ sorcerers who cast spells, transform charming princes into frogs or make the poor women who have the bad luck to cross their path infertile?’ They then point out that: ‘this sort of accumulation of characteristics translates what happens whenever one speaks of the “beliefs” of others. There is a tendency to put everything into the same bag and to tie it up and label it “supernatural”. What then gets understood as “supernatural” is whatever escapes the explanations we judge ‘natural’, those making an appeal to processes and mechanisms that are supposed to arise from ‘nature’ or ‘society’. They add that, of course, it’s always possible to claim that: ‘sorcery exists because it is a part of ‘cultural systems’ but that anyone who takes such claims literally within ‘our modern culture’ is failing to properly acknowledge that it ‘only exists in a marginal fashion, a belief that is no longer culti­vated, a residual survival’. (p. 39)

Forms of art as alternative thinking?

The poet Frank O’Hara names, in Robert Motherwell: with selections from the artist’s writings (1965), the ‘marvellously demonic, sullen or mysterious’ qualities of the artist’s work. Motherwell himself, whose practice was heavily informed by French Symbolist poetry and Surrealism, writes in the same catalogue of himself and his contemporaries as setting out ‘to recover the …. magical… force of their mediums’, insisting that ‘abstract art is a form of mysticism’. These statements suggest that, through his practice, Motherwell was seeking a sense of the numinous, of what lies outside rational explanation. He also writes that: ‘Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come into existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need’ (p. 45).

A need that, given Motherwell’s stated political and cultural concerns, I feel able to link to Pignarre and Stengers’ sense of ‘yearning’ as the ‘cultivation of sensitivity to what makes us vulnerable to the operations of capitalism. (p.48-49) A psychosocial yearning, both personal and political, predicated on the belief both that ‘another world is possible’ and that the yearning for that world is inseparable from seeking an altered sense of consciousness or being. One that I believe is also implicit in the practice of an artist who would appear, in many respects, that is the antithesis of Motherwell’s. Hannelore Baron also expressed her absolute need for another dimension in daily existence, which I take as another way of articulating a yearning for the possibility of another world.

It can be difficult to grasp that Motherwell understood his work as a form of mysticism due to the ways in which abstract expressionism was presented by formalist critics such as Clement Greenberg. An approach that can appear devoted to disassociating what the artists themselves said they believed from the formalist account given of their work. Nor has that tendency been entirely abandoned. In 2023 the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, organised a major touring exhibition entitled Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting. The very title of both exhibition and catalogue seems to me to sit uncomfortably with Motherwell’s dismissal of the notion, proposed by some abstract artists, that there is any such thing as a ’”pure” red’ and, by implication, a “pure painting”. Against such a view he reminds us that our experience of colour is always ‘rooted’ in ‘concrete phenomena’. There is a similar tension between Motherwell’s insistence that his practice involved ‘the correction of mistakes by feeling’, which Susan Davidson quotes in her essay Flashes of Clarity: Robert Motherwell’s Pure Painting in the Fort Worth catalogue, and her own emphasis on what she refers to as mental processes such as Motherwell’s analytical re-evaluation of work. Despite acknowledging Motherwell’s concern ‘to depict the unseen’, her overall approach tends to the ideology of “pure” painting central to Modernist American art history and the markets it serves.

Unlike Simon Kelly writing in the same catalogue, Davidson neither takes Motherwell at his word nor sees him in relation to current contexts. Kelly, while acknowledging Motherwell’s place in, and contribution to articulating: ‘a male-dominated, Euro-North American, and generally white aesthetic canon’, sees much of continuing value in his vision, not least ‘his belief in the “metaphysical” quality of his art and its role in communicating the “ultimate concerns of life, its essence’.  An inclusive position that does not ignore that Motherwell could make pejorative statements such as: ‘Little pictures are for midgets or for tourists – souvenirs’; a comment that highlights a difference between his work and that of Hannelore Baron. Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 100 measures84 by 240 inches, while a large Baron collage is unlikely to exceed 15 by 11 inches.

While Motherwell grew up in relative affluence in California, where his father served as president of the Wells Fargo bank, Baron was taken from Nazi Germany as a child after the beating and arrest of her father on Kristallnacht. (One of her most vivid memories was that of briefly returning to her family’s wrecked apartment, where the bloody handprints of her father were still visible on the walls). However Motherwell, who as an artist would be deeply preoccupied with themes related to mortality, also had a difficult childhood, in his case due to his frail health. Baron’s art, made largely from found and used everyday materials, has been described as one of concealment and protection and as the means to transform her life’s painful experiences into images of the darkness and mystery of being, an aim that chimes with the tenor of Motherwell’s Elegy series. While Motherwell produced vast paintings and numerous prints in large, well-appointed studios, the critic Ariella Budick, writing in the Financial Times (21.02.2024), reminds us us Baron, a women in her forties and mother to two children who never had a studio: ‘sitting at a kitchen table in the Bronx, obsessively exorcising her terrors by piecing together scraps of fabric, torn paper and string into elegant collages for nobody to see’. A women ‘so overcome by anxiety and mental anguish that she rarely left the house, shut out 20th-century America where protests raged, cultures clashed and bloodshed dragged on in Vietnam’. This somewhat inaccurate pronouncement needs to be seen in the context of Baron’s own, rather more nuanced, understanding of her own work.

It’s certainly the case that Baron’s early experiences of terror and persecution continued to torment her throughout her adult life, most obviously in giving rise to her tendency to serious depression and claustrophobia but also perhaps in the context of her having had to battle several types of cancer in her lifetime. However, as she herself was well aware, these difficulties also informed her concern for the disempowered, her mistrust of nationalism, and her fierce criticisms of war and environmental destruction. It’s significant here that Baron understood her collages both as a form of political expression and as one of therapeutic release.

Budick also assumes that, despite the isolation, claustrophobia, and depression that would lead to a series of nervous breakdowns throughout her life, Baron ‘somehow osmosed cutting-edge aesthetics and an ample aggregate of  influences’. The possibility that her work might have largely emerged without the influence of such cutting-edge influences is simply not considered. However, her work can be said to have many of the characteristics that Daniel Wojcik, in Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma (2016), identifies as those of a visionary artist responding to trauma.

However, even to tentatively identify her work in that way is to raise thorny questions about categorisation and gender in relation to art practices. For example, it begs the question of why Frank O’Hara feels confident to present Motherwell’s work as ‘marvellously demonic, sullen or mysterious’, while critical discussion of Baron’s work tends to be in terms of her having been influenced by cutting-edge aesthetics or as a response to trauma. Motherwell after all is on record as saying that throughout his life he was obsessed with death. No curator or critic, however, presents his work as a response to that obsession. I see no reason why we cannot understand Baron’s practice, as Motherwell’s near-contemporary, as setting out to recover the “magical” force of her medium through an art that might equally be seen is a form of “mysticism”; namely as an attempt to envisage what lies outside rational explanation and the ‘consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need’ or ‘yearning’?

Motherwell, Baron, Koczÿ?

Rosemarie Heber Koczÿ made paintings, wooden sculptures, and many hundreds of drawings in response to the Holocaust. Professor Daniel Wojcik, an authority on visionary art, art brut; trauma, grief, and creativity, locates Koczÿ’s art as that of a visionary artist responding to trauma. However, after her death the historian Georg Möller and others demonstrated that Koczÿ’s account of her war-time experiences, the subject both of her work and her book I Weave You a Shroud (2009) were fabricated. They found documentary evidence that she came from a Catholic, not a Jewish, family and that she was not interned in the concentration camp in which she claimed to be incarcerated, which was used entirely for men. He acknowledged, however, that she had a difficult childhood in a dysfunctional family and spent periods of time in a children’s home. Museum directors have defended her reputation on the grounds that she left behind a serious body of work. Nobody knows what drove her to portray herself as a Holocaust victim.

Wojcik presents a similar view, maintaining that Koczÿ’s drawings bear witness to overwhelming personal and collective trauma through creating ‘a burial ritual, a rite of purification, and prayer for the dead, painfully and meticulously expressed’ (p. 85). As already indicated, this view is shared by the numerous individuals and museums – including Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance centre in Jerusalem – that have examples of her work in their collections. Given this situation, it would be plausible to claim that the differentiations made between the types of work made by Motherwell,  Baron and Koczÿ by curators and critics are predicated on wilfully ignoring, or at best reinterpreting or placing another emphasis on what the artists themselves say about their work. That is they their approaches are oriented by the particular priorities and realpolitik of the different sectors of an institutionalised art world with which they are affiliated, a world that is ultimately the cultural arm of the dominant mentalité. To make such a bald claim would, however, be to side-step a fundamental issue; namely, how are we to understand notions of the “visionary” or “mystical” in relation the these artist’s work?

In what sense then might we legitimately understand the very different types of work produced by Robert Motherwell, Hannelore Baron and Rosemarie Koczÿ as having been animated by “mystical” or “visionary” concerns? And, if it’s legitimate to do so, how is that relevant to understanding any possible relationship between art and magic? One approach to these questions is suggested by Wojcik when he quotes the historian and ethnographer William A. Christian Jr. as identifying visionary experiences as a far more pervasive phenomenon that is usually acknowledged. Furthermore, he adds that if those experiences are understood as meaningful, they are also potentially ‘life and world changing events’. Might it be relevant to these artists’ work, as it is to Wilby’s whole thesis around the shamanic-style visionary encounters of cunning folk with their familiar spirits, that Christian also reminds us that, in relation to the phenomenon of visionary experience: ‘many people talk to with their dead, believers converse with holy figures about personal problems, children play with imaginative companions, and everyone dreams’? (quoted ibid. p. 920) More particularly, where do we set the boundary between the “visionary” as applied to exceptional and transcendent experiences and the activities Christian lists? Furthermore, if there was a “visionary” element of some kind to Baron and Koczÿ’s practices, does this also apply to that of Motherwell and, if so, are there characteristics that distinguish between their approaches?

I want to suggest hat a major difficulty regarding contemporary discussion of “visionary” or “mystical” experience lies in how those terms are understood. By and large they are taken either as referring to an exalted spiritual, or else anachronistic supernatural, beliefs and encounters. However, if I take up and extend Christian’s claim, I arrive at Rebecca Solnit’s view that we are not ourselves, but are ‘crowds of others … are as leaky a vessel as was ever made’, and have spent much of our lives ‘as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers’ we have never met. This is to say that the usual identity we are given: ‘has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel specializes in and none of the porousness of our every waking moment, the loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgettings and misrememberings, the portions of a life lived through others’ stories, the incoherence and inconsistency, the pantheon of dei ex machina and the companionability of ghosts’ (The Faraway Nearby, 2013, p. 248). If we accept Solnit’s argument, as I do, then the terms “visionary” and “mystical” can be seen as referring at root to common experiences we all, whether artists or not, share but which our culture suppresses as unreal and of no value. Nor is  without intellectual support. As Solnit points out, referencing neither elevated spiritual experience or anachronistic superstition, there is a porosity to our experience that, if we are aware of it, allows us to “see through” the restricted conception of reality taken as given by the dominant mentalité. This understanding is supported by the philosopher Peter Singer, who points out that we have: “’two distinct processes for grasping reality and deciding what to do: the affective system and the deliberative system’” … “the former deals in images and stories, and generates emotional responses; the later works with facts and figures and speaks to the rational, reasoning mind” (ibid. p. 243), as it is by the writings of the archetypal psychologist James Hillman.

While this argument for what I’ll refer to as the “everyday visionary” may suggest elements that the practices of Robert Motherwell, Hannelore Baron and Rosemarie Koczÿ may have had in common, it fails to throw light on a critical issue. Quite simply, what distinguishes those three artists’ practices one from another and does any such distinction take me nearer to answering my original question about possible relationships between certain forms of art and magic? These questions are the focus of the next section.