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).