Magic

Title slide of the Magic in Art lecture

I am not teaching any more, but when I was, one of the lectures I gave was on magic and art. I proposed that magic was at the core of the process we now call art and that the boundary between the real and the unreal is what is played with in both the performance of magic and art. As key examples I used images from ancient Egypt, Rome, India and Greece, and suggested that often there was no distinction between art and magic. 

What I wanted to do was to question the passivity of objects and to highlight how objects affect our experience of perception and effect change in our minds and bodies. Hopefully this way of thinking would lead to the construction of a different, more animist relationship with objects. 

A few slides from the presentation

When discussing theatrical props in relation to stage magic, Robinson argues that there is a process of transformation occurring as the trick is enacted; the ‘illusory enactment’ (Robinson, 2014, p. 136). I see this as being very similar to the need for rituals in the energising of the inanimate, and the making of magical reality. When I make votives for people, I also need to develop a private ritual for when the votive is 'put into operation' or made 'live'. This might seem to be illusionary but it is as 'real' an experience as any other. This is the driving force behind ritual objects. But they must all have a point of contact with something that gives them traction or meaning. This is often called the 'Law of Similarity' or 'Sympathetic Magic'. In my own work this might be rather obtuse or hard to see, but I can track the connection, and this gives it, if only to myself, the object's spiritual energy.

For instance recent images that are like crabs, scorpions or insects, began with someone talking to me about a somatic experience of pain that felt like they were being stung on their insides. In my mind I saw the shape of this 'stinger', which was initially like a scorpion and drew an image for the person involved of a man riding a scorpion, like a horse; in effect getting on top of the pain, being in control of it. This became a print and as I thought about this 'creature' from the insides, it began to have offspring, other pain inflicting creatures, such as crabs that could pinch and snip you, or insects that could sting. We tend to believe that these sorts of creatures have no sentience, so in our minds they do not themselves feel pain, but this is probably myth too and they probably do feel pain. 

Getting on top of the pain

Visualising a somatic experience of pain that felt like being stung on the inside

By bringing humans and invertebrates together in a visual narrative, it gives honorific value to both and some sort of equality as agents, even if the scorpion was initially only an analogy in someone's mind. 

Eventually the drawings engendered solid ritualistic objects, as these seem to have more potency. Objects offer possibilities of actual 'exchange', they externalise ideas, and as they do they make them 'real'. In his paper, 'Becoming Real: The Fluidity of Objects in Magic', Fan-chen Huang explains how boundaries between the real and the imaginary become unpicked during the enactment of magic acts. He states, 'Since time immemorial, magic has been an art that, by manipulating human perception and simulating the real, alternates the passivity of objects and disturbs the stable relationship between man and things. As magic creates a real that surpasses the realm of common knowledge and becomes more real than the real, our recognition of objects undergoes a distortion.'  He goes on to state that '...objects seem to be able to deviate from their normal course of thing-for-us in magical illusions, shattering our affirmation of perception and the scientific absolute.' 

This unpicking of the 'scientific absolute' is a useful thought as far as I am concerned, as I'm always trying to find a place for my practice as an artist, and I sometimes need to work in those gaps between a logical, supposedly 'objective' view of the world and a scientific understanding of things. There still seems to myself something missing, whether this is 'spirit', the vital spark of life, Bergson's élan vital, invisible energy forces, that something or whatever it is that I can never quite touch or put my finger on, but which I intuitively feel is there. 

I was in the Ashmolean museum recently making drawings of objects that made sense to me in relation to where I am in my own work, and one vitrine related to work from an ancient Egyptian civilisation going back to the Palaeolithic period, was full of significant objects. It was as if they could still talk to me, especially as I was already making images of scorpions and the ones in the vitrine were used in magical rituals.

From sketchbook pages drawn in the Ashmolian Museum

On returning to Leeds I went back into image making and began looking for that form that was both magical and real. 

Drawing for ceramics

Of course I then had to do some research into ancient Egyptian culture and realised once again how powerfully these themes had already been dealt with, but instead of being put off, I am even more fascinated by the possibilities this approach to image making offers. 

Serket

Serket, “She Who Causes the Throat to Breathe”

In ancient Egypt images, like the one above that was used as part of a spell to protect you from stepping on a scorpion, were used to put into effect sympathetic magic. Scorpions were also often pictured without stings or claws or they had knives stuck in them, to magically render then harmless. The protective scorpion goddess Selket used to guard coffins of the dead, and in order to effect this, statuettes of scorpions were often pierced, so that they could be be mounted on poles that had been pushed into the ground. As I read about this I was reminded of the work I made for the Patching Sculpture trail in Nottingham, where I had done something similar, this time using flower forms as a memorial to those drowned in the Mediterranean sea as they tried to get to safety in Europe.

From the YSG Patching exhibition: Breaking Ground

The objects I'm thinking about are only just emerging, several are waiting to be fired, others waiting to be glazed and I've as yet to come up with the right way to position them on poles and how to do this both indoors and outdoors, but I shall get there.

In the meantime I have a couple already made.

Crab/scorpions

Magic fetishes emerging

References:

Robinson, A. (2014). All Transparent: Pepper’s Ghost, Plate Glass, and Theatrical Transformation. In M. Schweitzer & J. Zerdy (Eds.), Performing Objects and Theatrical Things (pp. 135–148). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Lynne U. Sneddon (2015) Pain in aquatic animals Journal of Experimental Biology Volume 218 Issue 7 April p. 967–976.

See also:

The evolution of an idea A post that shows in more detail how I evolve a sculptural idea 

The iconography of the invisible 

Drawing feet

Why I'm making animist images

Magic Slideshow