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.

‘“Magicians believe that by words, spells, they can alter the world”, (Evans-Pritichard 1965, p. 41, speaking as Freud). Such a definition would have to cover not only “poets …criminals …madmen” (ibid.) but legislators, scientists, news editors, and the rest of us.’ Bill Griffiths Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Magic (1996) p. 90.

In this essay I set out to explore the question of possible relationships between art and magic, broadly understood. A question revived by Surrealism in the first half of the last century but clearly implicit from much earlier times. Inevitably, given the slipperiness of the task I’ve set myself, my thinking will meander back and forth across the line between the two which, as I understand it, is in any case constantly shifting. My reasons for addressing this question are the result of a confluence of many different concerns, hunches, contacts, and questions, some of which I’ll set out by way of background.

Background to the question.

The first and immediate circumstance that prompted this essay was seeing an advertisement for, and then buying, a small book published in Ireland – Looking for a Sign: Contemporary Art, Magic, and Language (2024). Its arrive coincided with my reading Nick Richardson’s review of David Rankine’s The Grimoire Encyclopedia Vols. 1 and 2 and Owen Davies’ Art of the Grimoire inThe London Review of Books (7^th Nov., 2024). (Grimoires are found in various different forms in many cultures and are collections of magic spells, along with the instructions as to how these should be performed). However, my question has its roots in work I did some twenty years.

My deep mapping projects on the English/Scottish border resulted in two works: the artist’s book Between Carterhaugh and Tamshiel Rig: a borderline episode (2004) and the CD, booklet and images of Eight Lost Songs (2004). Both drew directly on old “supernatural” Borders ballads involving relationships between humans and “the good neighbours”. The Elfin Knight, Tam Lin, Lady Isabel and the Elfin Knight and, above all, Thomas the Rhymer, reflect a world view at odds with Christian orthodoxy, particularly in its Puritan form, and investigating it led me to the work of historian Emma Wilby. Her Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (2009) and later study The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (2011) are astonishing pieces of social history produced by a forensic analysis of accounts of witchcraft trials.

What’s significant in terms of my concerns here is that Wilby argues, I think convincingly, that: ‘the encounter-narratives given by cunning folk and witches where not just accumulations of folk beliefs and stories’, rather they ‘were, like comparative narratives given by shamans, descriptions of visionary experiences – actual psychic events  which occurred in historical time and geographical space’ (2009, p. 7). I might have seen this link between psychic events and magic as simply of historical interest had it not been for the Preface to her first book. There she gives an account of the 1576 trial in Edinburgh of Bessie Dunlop, a wife and mother who: ‘delivered babies, healed the sick, consoled the bereaved, identified criminals, and recovered lost and stolen goods’, all with the assistance of ‘a familiar spirit who she called Tom Reid’ (p. 3). Welby identifies Reid as an ‘autonomous envisioned entity’ of the kind that now plays ‘a key role in a number of modern psychological therapies – such as analytical and archetypal psychology’ (p. 4) but also, as I know, in the imaginative lives of certain poets. What most moved me and has stayed with me since is the simple fact that women like Bessie Dunlop held to their beliefs and refused to deny the reality of their familiars, from whom they had received both their abilities and a degree of personal comfort. A refusal which they must have known would cost them their lives.        

All of which begs a host of questions, not the least of which is how to understand “visionary experience” and “magic”, given this historical context. It might reasonably be argued, for example, that the work of a number of modern artists referred to as “visionary” – for example Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, Agnes Pelton, Pavel Tchelitchew, Remedios Varo, Cecil Collins, Mark Tobey, Emma Kunz, Morris Graves and Anna Zemánková – enacts or records a numinous or visionary reality that, regardless of whether autonomous envisioned entities were involved, was as real to them as Tom Reid was to Bessie Dunlop.

Whatever the origin of their visions, their existence raises an issue identified by Celia Rabinovitch in Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros, and the Occult in Modern Art (2004), namely that our understanding of such visionary art is conditioned by exclusions predicated on the ‘Christian conception of daemonic power’. Conceptions that have transformed the unpredictable, dark aspect ‘of the sacred into the negative, simplistic notion of the demonic or evil’ (p.203). Consequently art histories, even when they include such visionary works, fail to engage with the questions explored by the poet Edward Hirsch in The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (2002). (A book which includes discussion of the work of a number of visual artists, notably Joseph Cornell, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell). Without some understanding of the issues Hirsch explores, the relationship between art and magic remains distorted and obscure.

Hirsch identifies the creative tension within poetic imagination in terms of that between Waldo Emerson’s ‘white fire’ and Federico Garcia Lorca’s insistence on the importance of ‘black sounds’ or ‘duende’, on the Dionysian and chthonic. This may seem too academic a distinction for those not interested in poetry, but It’s possible to hear this same tension by listening to the singer Martha Scanlan. Scanlan has recorded two versions of her song ‘Higher Rock’, the first with the Reeltime Travellers. This recording conforms to the feel of traditional notion of “old time”, Biblically-based spiritual uplift in American folk music. However a second version, recorded in 2018 for The River and the Light, has a fundamentally different feel. The musical arrangement counterbalances the dominant sense of uplift in the first version by introducing a powerful sense of duende that, by hightening its emotional ambiguity, deepens and, for me, transforms it.

Deep-seated binary assumptions about the numinous inherited from Christianity means that it’s much harder for people working in the arts to acknowledge and articulate their relationship with the “dark” aspect of inspiration, visionary or otherwise. Someone who openly acknowledges this difficulty is the Irish poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. She sees some of her best work has having ’been written out of a response to the unspeakable, because you’re not supposed to talk about this. Women aren’t supposed to have this quality in them, these negative, destroying teeth’. She goes on: ‘Ultimately, in me, the deepest image would be one of the Mothers. But … when you set out on the journey towards your Mother’s, you think you’re going to meet the great Mother, the Good Mother, the Ecstatic Mother, but what do you do when you meet the Teeth Mother’? (In Rebecca E. Wilson Sleeping with Monsters: Conversations with Scottish and Irish Women Poets 1990, p. 153). This understanding of the role of the conventionally unspeakable in a poet’s imaginative life lived in the context of what is still a largely Catholic culture is made manifestly clear in poems like her The Ebony Adonis .

In trying to think about the relationship between art and magic it seems to me critical to acknowledge the profound ambiguity of the numinous, sacred, and of archetypal and uncanny images, and consequently of their potential role in our imagination. Once that’s accepted certain categorical distinctions start to dissolve. For example, while the Old Testament regularly condemns witchcraft and magic, it’s difficult to think of another term to describe a miraculous event such as Moses’ parting of the Red Sea.

But what of magic today?

Magic?

Magic is conventionally understood as the practical employment of, and/or belief in, rituals or actions capable of in some way manipulating or influencing natural or supernatural beings and forces. Magic as an activity seems to me to include, or is difficult to distinguish from, what in religious orthodoxy is seem as prayer and ritual. Both prayer and magical evocation seem equally difficult to distinguish from the way many artists classically asked the Muses for inspiration which, since it them came from an “elsewhere” we might now call the unconscious, located the artist as a the skilled practitioner of an arguably ritual activity through which the work appeared.

In this context Hirsch writes, in Help Me, O Heavenly Muse. Where does a poem come from? The sources of inspiration are many, from reason to a touch of madness, that: ‘No-one entirely understands the relationship in poetry between trance and craft, between conscious and unconscious elements, and, indeed, poets have been obsessed by the problem of what can and cannot be controlled in the making of art. This is especially instructive to readers who bring their own conscious purposes to poetry, their own unconscious mechanisms of displacement and identification, of sublimation, projection, condensation . . . .’. It may also be that magic, or perhaps more accurately magical thinking, is almost impossible to separate from many of our beliefs and attitudes in everyday life, as the quotation from Bill Griffiths that heads this suggests.

An art historical context

We now know that, throughout much of the twentieth century, the critical and historical orthodoxy not only ignored painters like Hilma af Klint, but also constructed a highly reductive account of major artists like Kandinsky. As Peg Weiss has now shown, Kandinsky owed a fundamental debt to his encounter, as a trained ethnographer, with shamanic culture and artefacts. Like a number of his fellow faculty members at the Bauhaus, notably Johannes Itten, Kandinsky believed that if the genuinely new was to find artistic form, then all our corporeal, sensual, spiritual, and intellectual powers and abilities must be engaged together. This is an important point and one that has, ironically, been largely obscured by attempts to broaden our understanding of twentieth century art such as Maurice Tuchman’s The Spiritual in Modern Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985. Important because it runs counter to the assumption that the spiritual in art will, given the cultural framing inherited from Christianity, rise above corporeal and sensual concerns.

The ethnocentric focus of Tuchman’s exhibition, with its emphasis on the impact of Theosophy and mysticism on modern American and European painting priviliged a particular “Western” or monotheistic conception of spirituality at the exclusion of other, more inclusive, understandings. It passed over, for example, the polytheistic and heterodox nature of many popular belief systems the world over. Something of this marginalisation of heterodox approaches was addressed, at least in part, by Jean-Hubert Martin’s the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition of 1989. Significantly, and as many people noted at the time, while the ritual, the magical and the spiritually heterodox animated much of the “non-Western” work, that of the “West” was largely motivated by belief in art as an end in itself. 

Magiciens de la Terre can serve to remind us that in traditionally heterodox popular belief the link between the arts and magic was, and remains, active. The earliest works made by the Iranian-born American sculptor Siah Armajani belong to that heterodox tradition. These were collages of fabric and paper he made as a student and political activist in Tehran in the 1950s. Reflecting the culture of southern Tehran’s bazaar, they belong to a heterodox popular culture within a broadly Islamic culture. There spells, prayers and talismans purchased from post-office scribes, lines of poetry, political protest and folk songs, figures copied from Persian miniatures, information from family birth certificates and the wax seals of signet rings could be brought together within a single work. While clearly works of art, they openly acknowledge the reality of a popular belief in magic. A similar acknowledgement of a popular heterodox background informed the work of K.C.S. Paniker, who counterbalanced the influence of Western painting on Indian art by initiating what came to be known as Neo Tantrism.

The relationship between art and ritual and magic becomes less clear-cut when Western artists become familiar with, and draw directly on, ritual folk practices. This is the context in which a particular collaboration between the Warli artist Jivya Soma Meshe and Richard Long at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanae in Milan in 2004, took place. Long had previously visited and made ephemeral work in Warli territory and the two artists established a dialogue based on a mutual interest in the natural world. As the art critic, curator and collector, Hervé Perdriolle makes very clear, in the Milan exhibition Long’s work referred directly to his relationship with Warli culture and territory. (See Perdriolle’s Indian Contemporary Art : Contemporary, One World, Several Worlds, 2012, pp. 130-135). Long and Meshe also employed a ritual used by the Warli as the basis for a collaborative work by replicating a puja created to ensure a good rice harvest. The puja, normally undertaken when the rice plant is pulled from the ground, is made by using the base of a closed fist to make a series of prints with diluted ground rice.

This collaboration might be read in one of two ways. Negatively, as an uneasy appropriation and transfer of a meaningful rite from its “proper” context into the world of high art; a transfer that reduces it to a merely aesthetic phenomenon. More positively, it might be read as the transformation of a particular rite through locating it in a novel context. One where it serves to mark and confirm a productive exchange between two individual members from very different cultures who, through working together, have come to a new relationship with meanings grounded in each others worlds.

By accepting the possibility of this second reading, and keeping Bill Griffiths’ observation in mind, I hope to introduce the possibility of a particular understanding of the function of art in relation to magic. This possibility is in part predicated on the curator Monica Szewczyk‘s claim that ‘… if, as an art, conversation is the creation of worlds, we could say that to choose to have a conversation with someone 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’ (‘Art of Conversation, Part 1’ e-flux journal no 3 – February 2009). I will return to this thought in due course.      

Setting Szewczyk‘s claim to one side for the moment, the question of the nature of the relationship between art and magic, as currently understood in “the West”, remains.

In 2022 the critic and editor at ArtReview J. J. Charlesworth made clear, in The Return of Magic in Art (30^th May 2022), that magic, animism, mysticism, spirituality, the figures of the witch, the medium and the shaman, had reappeared over the previous decade in the work of contemporary artists. Charlesworth suggests that this is in part a critique of the experience of the present that draws on pre-modern worldviews, in part a respectful acknowledgement of cultures that today still resist the hegemony of the social modernity of global capitalism, and in part resonant with anti-capitalist, postcolonial, and ecologically-responsible politics. However, in concluding his article he made a particular and telling choice. One that relates to the argument put forward by Franklin Rosemond – poet, artist, historian, street speaker, and co-founder of the Chicago Surrealist Group. Namely, that the cultural orthodoxy that underwrites most critical writing is dominated by the ‘pragmatic/positivist presuppositions and prejudices’ (Foreword to M. E. Warlick Max Ernst and Alchemy 2001, p. xvi), that underpin the realpolitik of cultural and academic institutions. Institutions to which J. J. Charlesworth owes his authority and, in consequence, must demonstrate his loyalty by maintaining the “detached” neutrality of the participant observer. His views must, that is, conform to the requirements of the very institutions central to the dis-enchantment of the world that the artists about which he writes seek to contest.

By contrast, in July 2012 the eminent philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers published a highly significant article, Reclaiming Animism. There she sets out the philosophical and ecological argument for adopting a new understanding of animism, concluding that: ’Against the insistent poisoned passion of dismembering and demystifying’ that flows from an intellectual orthodoxy predicated on pragmatic/positivist presuppositions and prejudices, a new animism is needed that will affirm that which is required to ensure that that mindset does not ‘enslave us’, namely by showing us ‘that we are not alone in the world’.

J. J. Charlesworth, however, chooses to conclude his article by referencing Theodor Adorno’s Theses Against Occultism. Put simply, he dodges what for me is the core issue at stake in all this. Having demonstrated his knowledge of the return of an interest in magic in contemporary art, he concludes by suggesting that such art’s relationship to “magical thinking”, while understandable, is ultimately a regressive tendency and so culturally marginal. This despite the fact that, as Stengers argues, the whole notion of regression in relation to alternative modes of contemporary thinking needs to be put in question.

Part of my concern here, then, is to question the views of those who, like J. J. Charlesworth, are happy to exhibition their intellectual capital in terms of knowledge of “magically-oriented” contemporary art but, at the same time, wish to do so as detached observers for whom such art has no imaginative purchase or practical value in relation to the world at large.

(To be continued).

Jenny Scheinman – Will Jesus Wash the Bloodstains from Your Hands

Bob Dylan – Desolation Row

Mary C Carpenter – John Doe no. 24

Shearwater – Rooks

Robin Holcomb – I Tried to Believe

Natalie Merchant – Sister Tilly

Otis Taylor – Ten Million Slaves

Vic Chesnutt – We Are Mean

Patty Griffin – 250,000 Miles

Josh Ritter – The Torch Committee

Anais Mitchell – Young Man in America

Leonard Cohen – The Land of Plenty

Laura Veirs – America

Brown Bird – Wayward Daughter

Buffy Sainte-Marie – Cod’ine

David Crosby – What Are Their Names

Susan Tedeschi – 700 Houses

Grateful Dead – Ship of Fools

Lucinda Williams – Man Without a Soul

Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit – White Man’s World

I have recently started working as an external reviewer with the bilingual Welsh group Carreg Creative. They are currently planning Wrth Wraidd – At Root for the sixth Wales Real Food and Farming Conference, which is to be held on the 20th-22nd of November at the University of Wales Trinity St David, in Lampeter.

Carreg Creative’s aim is to provide a bilingual space for questions, considerations, mapping and dreaming in the Foyer of the Arts Building. As a starting-point, they are inviting conference attendees to join them at any time, bringing along a small amount of soil or roots from home and/or unanswered/unasked questions from their conference experience. They will also be hosting a reflection session in the Foyer of the Arts Building at the end of each day.

The Carreg Creative bilingual team is somewhat unusual in that it consists of experienced artists, performers and poets with backgrounds in food, farming and the environment. Between them, they work as artists in performance, creative writing, poetry, film, photography, drawing, painting, print-making, and sculpture. However, what particularly interests me about their planned approach is their emphasis on the value of conversation and, in particular, on the importance of prioritising listening as a basis for whatever work they do over the delivery of a pre-determined programme or agenda. I hope to be writing more about their work at the conference in a future post about particular ways in which certain artists are now engaging with issues of land, environment, ecology and farming.

In an email exchange responding to my review of her and Chris’ book, Anne Douglas contacted me about the point I’d made about artists today and the “material question”. She writes that:

“this very point was raised by a PhD student from Berlin/Bauhaus Weimar. Her work is excellent on sea level rise and she was very clear that there would be no way she could function in the way the Harrisons had and asked whether that undermined her potential as an artist working on ecological issues. My response at the time was that she was an artist and needed to focus on working within whatever constraints life posed as excellence frequently emerges out of very severe constraints”.

She also notes that when Newton Harrison “addressed Masters students at ECA in Edinburgh, he began by saying that their challenges to be artists in the current world would be much, much greater than his own…” adding that: “then there is Hannah Arendt, ‘We are born unasked into the world” and have no control over the circumstances of our birth. Thereafter we have some and therefore need to invest in thinking for ourselves”. 

She goes on to say taht while her points don’t directly address my thoughts about the economics of the art world and how eco-art practices “can/will be supported when so much of institutional life, not least education in art schools, is fractured. It would make an important book around the kind of judgements artists need to make in how to become recognised…”.

I very much hope someone out there is busy preparing to research and write just such a book, not from the usual “critical Left” position within the art world, but with a clear understanding of the radical shift of mentality needed. One that moves us beyond the myopia imposted by a disciplinary-based education system to a view of life in which creativity is seen as intrinsic to all worthwhile human activity – Joseph Beuys’ notion that “everyone is an artist”. One in which everyone’s practices are understood as located within an ensemble of skills and orientations rather than in specialisms all-too-often linked to exclusive notions of authority and power.

Introduction

Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, authors of this highly significant book and themselves artist researchers, worked closely with Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (1932-2023) – collectively known as the Harrisons or The Harrison Studio – both on particular projects and more generally. Douglas co-produced On the Deep Wealth of this Nation: Scotland and Fremantle produced Greenhouse Britain, Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom. (He is also one of the editors of Eco-art in Action: Activities, Case Studies, and Provocations for Classrooms and Communities, 2022, a field guide that offers practical solutions to critical environmental challenges that includes Newton Harrison). Which is to say they write both as observant participants working from direct first-hand involvement in the Harrisons’ processes, and from a researcher’s concern with rigorous creative ‘thinking with’. Thinking that in the course of their study ranges across the arts, particularly in relation to engagement with environmental concerns, but also across the work of a variety of important scientists, philosophers, and other thinkers.

The result is less an ‘art book’ in the usual sense and more an unusual and highly important text that uses the work of the Harrisons as its focus. A text that for the most part avoids the usual biographical / aesthetic approach to analyse a particular artistic oeuvre by focusing on how the Harrisons’ unfolding process addresses a series of fundamental and pressing ecological questions. That is, it asks, in the face of a deepening and global eco-social crisis, how can:

“…arts practices be reimagined in the face of the escalating number of manifestations of the crisis? How might they help us re-imagine ourselves in the world outside of human exceptionalism and progress, cultural narratives that have dominated the Western world for more than 500 years since the Renaissance? Can the arts offer alternative ways of knowing that counter the authority of ‘techoscience’ to shape Earth as an object for our human convenience”? (p. 11)

These questions are at heart then of a book that takes the intertwining of art with other approaches to the world central to our need for continuing self-education very seriously indeed. A book that can also be read, however, as a substantive refutation of the performance artist Andrea Fraser’s observation about the relationship between art, wealth and politics. That’s to say it proposes how we counter her claim that: “Artists are not part of the solution…We are part of the problem”. (In Sarah Thornton 33 Artists in 3 Acts, p. 376)

In this context it is entirely in keeping with both the Harrisons’ and the authors’ approach that this book: “will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to Path to Open“.

What colours this review.

Any review is inevitably coloured by the reviewer’s own concerns. I have read this book as someone with a European, and primarily British, cultural background, while keeping in mind that it concerns practices developed by the Harrisons against the background of American culture and economics.  My response to it is also coloured by two related preoccupations. Firstly, by long engagement with the complexities and responsibilities of our senses of place, particularly as these are explored through deep mapping, an approach with some similarities to that of the Harrisons’. Secondly, with a preoccupation shared with the Harrisons, one encapsulated in their understanding that they would: “focus their work on the web of life and the journey that took them on”, one that had “the potential to form a powerful pedagogy”. (p. 208) That is to say, I share their preoccupation with life-long self-education. (Significantly, Helen Mayer Harrison initially worked as a scholar and educationalist).

These two preoccupations are entangled in many working friendships. With, for example, the Irish eco-artist Cathy Fitzgerald, who learned directly from the Harrisons and has now set up the Haumea Ecoversity; with the members of the Welsh collaborative Utopias Bach; and with a 50-year-long friendship with a versatile and intensely practical artist, Simon Read. Simon has pursued a line of work independently of the Harrisons’ influence but, like them, has immersed himself in environmental debates and developed a complex ‘ensemble’ practice informed by interdisciplinary collaboration. One that allows him to make informed interventions in matters primarily relating to estuary landscapes, in particular estuarine salt-marsh. I see these working friendships as active ‘in the spirit of’ the questions this book addresses, as establishing integrated, experimental, creative research networks that connect people so as to engage with and share the concept of change and to support decisions made in relation to the landscapes in which they live. I stress all this because, although in one respect this is very obviously a book about the Harrisons’ work, in another it can be read as celebrating an emerging mentalité of which they are highly significant examples.

“Thinking with ….”

The book presents the Harrisons’ work as “particularly prescient” in anticipating the orientation of thinkers grounded in scientific and philosophical disciplines who are facilitating convergences of scientific and aesthetic insight. (Examples include Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing). In particular, they draw on Stengers’ account of learning to ‘think with’ the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead. An engagement that helped Stengers to imagine and resist “ready-made” models and to avoid falling into despair at the socio-environmental situation we face. Something the authors clear hope this book will help their readers in doing. Consequently the second chapter of the book, Thinking With’ Whitehead, Stengers and the Harrisons, sets out the authors’ use of key concepts from Whitehead’s writing on process philosophy, seen in turn as prefiguring “ecological thinking in the sense of understanding nature as emergent through a process of deep entanglement”. This provides them with “a point of entry into learning what our responsibility towards the work of the Harrisons might be” since Whitehead, as a scientist and mathematician, worked with “a unified concept that takes into account sensory experience, feelings, and emotions”. (p. 29) The chapter then uses Whitehead’s thinking to discuss the Harrisons’ work between 1971 and 1974 and the process of critically identifying “the collisions and contradictions” that led the artists to conclude that the forms of the work made during this period were “fundamentally flawed”, (p. 35) although essential to the development of The Lagoon Cycle, the focal topic of Chapter 3.

In Chapter 3 we are introduced to the development of a poetics of dialogue and the visual storytelling that then appeared in the Harrisons’ work. A shift  that enabled them to frankly acknowledge that: “the universe is a multileveled discourse, a conversation in many languages – biological, chemical, physical – most of which we cannot even perceive, much less understand. Within this discourse, every place is bespeaking the story of its own becoming. Everyone is in this conversation, as is everything”. (p. 80)

Chapter 3 is pivotal in setting up the basis for discussion of “the relationship between ‘system’ and ‘improvisation’ and between ‘discourse’ and ‘the political’” as they appear in The Lagoon Cycle and other early works, in identifying central qualities in the Harrisons’ “approach as artists” that are “also potentially powerful” factors “in the development of the arts’ relationship to ecology”. (p. 88) What then follows are three chapters that address the particular and complex nature of the central aspects of the Harrisons’ overall approach. Chapter Four explores their approach to improvisation, Chapter Five to the poetics and aesthetics of systems, and Chapter Six to the political.

Rich in examples drawn from both the Harrisons’ work and that of relevant artists and thinkers as various as the novelist and critic Amitav Ghosh, the free jazz improvisor and philosopher Gary Peters, the musician and writer on the raga tradition of northern India Amit Chaudhuri, visual artists Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, art critic Jack Burnham, and scholars and thinkers Hannah Arendt, Frijof Capra, Julia Kristeva, Brian Massumi, and Morse Peckham, these chapters offer an extraordinary wealth of insight to the reader. As such they invite close and reflective study and I simply cannot summarise these in a review since each would require an essay in itself. It must be sufficient to say that they offer considerable insight, for example, into the intellectual and emotional context in which the development of different aspects of the Harrisons’ eco-social working process is best understood, a valuable analysis of, and warning about, the dangers of eco-fascism, and a clear sense of the “aesthetic tactics” employed by the Harrisons “to woe us as audiences”. (p. 156) A capability predicated on “the refined skill that artworks embody of vivid communication and innovation, making present those experiences for which many of us would otherwise have no words”. (p. 161).       

Chapter Seven pivots on the relationship between Newton Harrison’s interest in the “seemingly obvious questions’ asked by particular artists’ work “that, once asked, become transformative” when viewed in the context of Stengers’ very similar concern to “search for and make meaning, rather than presume that meaning is given”. (p. 177) In addition to a discussion of the importance in this respect to the Harrisons of work of particular artists – for example, Giotto, Rembrandt, Cezanne and Joseph Albers, but also Chaucer and Charles Dickens – this leads to an account of the ways in which the Harrisons engaged in dialogue with other contemporary artists. These include the artist, biologist, and environmental educator Brandon Ballengée, the multifaceted environmental artist Lauren Bon, Tim Collins and Reiko Goto-Collins’ collaborative work investigating the intersection of art, ecology, and the public realm, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens’ radical feminist art, and Ruth Wallen’s work as an interdisciplinary artist and writer dedicated to ecological and social justice. The discussion leads, perhaps inevitably, to a highly significant section entitled Pedagogy: Curriculum Proposals. Highly significant because it addresses a fundamental educational issue identified by Tim Collins in 2023, one largely obscured by the presuppositions of possessive individualism that continue to dominate Western thinking about art. Namely that:

“Artists are unprepared to take a productive role in civic discourse. Students graduate without the tools and bridging experience to allow them to learn the languages and process in the areas of ecology, politics, and sociology, and are therefore unable to enter into effective creative communication … There isn’t a single department in the country with a programme area which addresses the changing meaning of nature, restoration ecology, and bio-technology”. (p.185)

This section is followed by one that focuses on exchanges between the Harrisons  and Ballengée, Lauren Bon, Reiko Goto-Collins and Tim Collins, Sprinkle and Stephens, and Ruth Wallen, and on the ways these artists’ practices have drawn on the Harrisons’ work but also on how they differ. It also references the 2022 Listening to the Web of Life Interdisciplinary Workshop, an event that prompts the authors to set out the mesh of influences that inform the participants’ work and at which an artist like Cathy Fitzgerald felt encouraged to take on something of the mantle of Harrisons’ work. As the authors set out in the final section of the chapter, perhaps the primary stress in any summary of the Harrison’s work must be on: “the fundamental importance of learning, experimentation, and pedagogy in the relationship of art to the environment”. (p. 211). Read in this light the book seems to me to constitute the basis for an in-depth and radical curriculum for contemporary eco-social art education; indeed for art education as a whole.

Significantly, the final chapter of the book, entitled Conclusions, offers the reader no such thing. Instead it consists of a series of questions about the impact and value of the Harrisons’ work. This is entirely in keeping with the authors’ understanding of the Lagoon Cycle as marking the point in the Harrisons’ work where the concern: “shifts from solving a problem” – more specifically one of food production – “to participating in a dialogue with the universe, while coming to terms with the processes of climate change that we have set in motion”. (p. 216)     

The form of the final chapter also begs the question of how to conclude this review. Perhaps simply by saying that I find it profoundly useful and know I will read and reference it again and again. Also that, while it has little relevance to the particular ‘art-making’ aspect of my own ‘ensemble practice’, it is profoundly relevant to pretty much every other aspect of that practice; to work done as a conversationalist committed to critical solicitude, as a writer and mentor, and as somebody participating in a diverse range of eco-social and educational projects and experiments.

Finally, I need to ask whether I have any substantive criticisms, reservations, or concerns about this book? The answer is ‘no’. I do, however, have one very small concern.

The principle market for a book like this is likely to be seen as the USA by its publishers. The Harrisons established themselves as artists in the USA in the 1970s and 1980s. That is to say at a time when its economy, education system, and the taxation breaks given to foundations, provided very substantive financial possibilities in terms of sponsorship for the arts. A context that, in so far as we were aware of it in the UK, suggested something of a ‘golden age’ to those of us setting out on our careers. The Harrisons benefitted in their formative years from both that situation and financial input from Newton’s parents.

On graduating from Yale in 1965, Newton at once obtained an assistant professorship and took up a similar post when the couple moved to California in 1967. In California Helen gained a director’s position in a university extension education program which she later resigned to collaborate more fully with Newton. By 1980 both Harrisons had become tenured professors in the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego. While none of this in any way detracts from their very considerable achievements, this background is relevant, or so it seems to me, to our understanding of the socio-cultural context in which the Harrisons’ achievements as eco-artists who were also educators developed.

As a book with a strong educational orientation, I would have liked the authors to have acknowledged the economic context that framed the Harrisons’ work given that they are in effect offering a model of practical orientation to younger artists. Younger artists today, at least in the European countries I am familiar with, will almost certainly be unable to achieve anything like the level of material security, intellectual support, or net-working opportunities that the Harrisons’ institutional status gave them. It would have been helpful, at least for readers in a European context, if this disparity had been acknowledged, if only tacitly.

As Sarah Thornton’s account of “the world’s most important artists” quoted earlier makes clear, the core criteria of the international art world today are predicated on the mentality of a culture industry that has the primacy of economically-driven entrepreneurship at its heart. A mentality with no interest in the development of the ethics central to any genuine eco-social arts practice. Even those few younger artists fortunate enough to gain the economic security of an academic post today will have nothing like the time and creative freedom available to the Harrisons after 1980. Not only will they be subject to much greater teaching and administrative work loads, but to a State-controlled regime of research audit enforced by economic sanction. As I have already said, none of this in any way detracts from the value of the Harrisons’ achievement or the value of this book but, if it is to become the valuable basis for education it deserves to be, this is an issue that will need to be taken into account when reflecting on eco-social artists’ engagement with the web of life. However, I accept that the authors may have felt that this issue lay outside the brief they set themselves.      

All this said, I believe this is an immensely valuable book that needs to be studied and digested in the widest possible educational context, not simply by those involved in teaching the arts and by students on degree and masters level art and design courses. Whether or not that will happen is obviously an open question. However, if by ill-chance this book does not find its rightful place on college and university reading lists, which are still all-too-often compiled by academics sheltering behind the narrow protectionism inherent in disciplinary specialism, I can only fervently hope that it becomes an ‘underground classic’. One of those books that lively and imaginative individuals and groups will delight in sharing, discussing and acting upon.          

A while ago I came across an advertisement for a book called Looking for a Sign: Contemporary Art, Magic and Language (2024), published in Ireland by Durty Books. In a fit of curiosity, and because I’ve a long-time interest in old songs and recent theories that relate to what, broadly speaking, might be called ‘magical understandings’, I bought a copy. Perhaps, before I go on, I need to say a little more about why I would do that. In 2018 I presented an illustrated talk to art students at the University of Dundee called Un-disciplining practices: some paradoxes and possibilities. Part of the introduction goes as follows.

“Increasingly, the assumptions that underwrite disciplinarity are being questioned. Isabelle Stengers is a Belgian professor of philosophy. She trained as a chemist and has won international acclaim for her work in the philosophy of science. Starhawk is an American writer, teacher, activist and leading exponent of feminist neopaganism and ecofeminism – or, as she might say, a witch. From the perspective of academic disciplinarity, these two women are separated by an unbridgeable divide. Yet in Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell, Stengers and her co-author Philippe Pignarre present Starhawk as somebody reclaiming an art of participation that deals directly with pragmatic concerns about effects and consequences”.

Put bluntly, Stengers and Pignarre’s book insists that we take witches seriously. I suppose I had hoped that Looking for a Sign might take up and extend the thinking that underpins that argument. And, if one understands that the point that Pignarre and Stengers want to make by references people like Starhawk and the practices they have developed is that they are ways of communicating with what Stengers describes as the ‘unknowns’ of modernity – with all that it fails to adequately address – then perhaps to a very small extent it does.

Andrew Gojfey is the translator of Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. What follows is in part a free paraphrase of points made in his introduction to that book: On the Witch’s Broomstick. To help explain its orientation he asks whether it’s possible to take seriously somebody who claims to have been attacked by a sorcerer? The answer, he insists with the book’s authors, should be “yes”. But  on the condition that we understand that the modern approach that frames such questions, namely that of psychoanalysis, is predicated on an unjustifiable pretension. Namely, that as a discipline it has scientific authority to make universally valid pronouncements about ‘the unconscious’. Stengers points out, however, that psychoanalysis fails to acknowledge what it does when it claims to explain its curative effects through quasi-scientific notions like ‘transference’. Stengers argument is that therapeutic practitioners in non-modern cultures are ‘technicians of the cure’ who adopt culturally specific approaches that are effective in their own context and, significantly, don’t make “scientific” claims regarding universal authority as does psychoanalysis.

Gojfey goes on to point out that one consequence of Stengers’ argument regarding the therapeutic practices of  non-modern therapeutic ‘technicians of the cure’ is that it requires us to set aside any notion of their hierarchical subordination to science. A point that returns him to witches again, persons whose technique cannot be explained by science and so is, from a modern point of view, simply another artefact. However, if we refuse to ‘privilege episteme over techne, not only is artefactuality not necessarily a criticism, but the idea that there is something to be learned from the neo-pagans becomes a more credible claim – because a central element of what would otherwise allow what they do to be explained (away) is removed’ (p. xix).

Pignarre and Stengers, drawing on Guattari, consider  the techniques of non-violent protest and ritual used by contemporary witches as an effective form of ‘existential catalysis’. Stengers notes that: ‘to take the efficacy of a technique seriously imposes the need to understand it as being addressed to something more powerful than the technician’ and that for witches such as Starhawk this is the immanent Goddess who, in turn, becomes the ground for  cultivating ‘a sensibility and disposition to think and act’ otherwise (p.xx). For Pignarre and Stengers, then,  the artifices of witchcraft are a means to cultivate an active thinking that is not framed by the presuppositions of modernity and, as such, returns us to  the need to insist that alternatives to it are possible. Or, as Starhawk puts it: “Systems don’t change easily. Systems try to maintain themselves, and seek equilibrium. To change a system, you need to shake it up, disrupt the equilibrium. That often requires conflict. …To me, conflict is a deeply spiritual place. It’s the high-energy place where power meets power, where change and transformation can occur.”

It may be that the artists whose thinking and work make up Looking for a Sign: Contemporary Art, Magic and Language would be in agreement with this, although there s no evidence that any of them are aware of the arguments in Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. All I can say is that I am more taken by the work of Crone Cast, a feminist art collective that explores the conditions of the pandemic, climate change, and societal and ecosystem collapse, and that reimagines the crone as noticed, seen, and heard so as to engage with ageing, power, identity, eccentricity and merging with the more-than-human as a process of becoming, in symbiosis with the precariousness of our times.

Images provided by Wanda Zyborska