What's going on?

Ali Cherri, Totems (2022), at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams, Venice (23 April–27 November 2022). Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Roberto Marossi.

I remember several years ago being drawn to Ali Cherri's work 'The Gatekeepers' which drew on the tradition of erecting totem poles at the gates of certain communities, as a welcoming or a warning. Cherri was making hybrid forms that at first sight I was was confused as to whether this was a contemporary art practice or that of someone from an indigenous part of some country I had yet to encounter. He was tapping into a feeling that I thought I could sense, one that suggested that artists were trying to tap back into ways of working that built direct relationships between us and the world we inhabit. Artwork as portals into the world of the spirit. 

Ali Cherri: The Gatekeepers

Invoking figures inspired by the animal kingdom, The Gatekeepers, presented at the Musée des Beaux- Arts de Marseille, paid homage to the souls of all the naturalised animals housed in Marseille's Museum of Natural History, located just a few steps away. Ali Cherri collected curiosities, bought at auction or from antique dealers, from Marseille and elsewhere. Then he sought to restore to them a presence, by working with these found objects to make them 'strange' again, to give them back a magical presence. I'd a couple of years later seen his work at the Venice Biennale in 2022. I was interested in what he was doing, as at the time I decided it would be wonderful if every house had a warning object made for it by an artist, a sort of protecting spirit that would ward off intruders and protect those inside and I had made some trial pieces to fit on poles that could stand in someone's garden. But perhaps people also needed a welcoming form, one I then realised was already in place, something we call a Christmas wreath.

Christmas wreath.

I was also thinking at the time about Halloween and it is coming round again, so I must have a good look around at what people are doing. Someone down the road has had a large spider put up over their doorway. Every year when the girls were small, it was my job to cut out the face of the pumpkin lantern.

Halloween decorations

It's as if we have a need to at least once a year to just go and celebrate the uncanny, and recognise the fact that there might be other forces at work. Perhaps we all need a touch of magic. 

Back in 2022 during the time the Venice Biennale entitled 'The Milk of Dreams' was held, J. J. Charlesworth, one of the editors of ArtReview, wrote an article entitled 'The Return of Magic in Art'.

In the article he stated; 

 'If ideas of reason, rational action, science and progress are in decline, and if the human culture and consciousness formed by those ideas is dangerous and destructive, then the only alternative can be a return to the premodern: or rather not a return, but a dissolution of modernity and modern ways of thinking in the present. This is the cultural driver for the revival of the sacred and the mystical in art. Magic replaces science, belief replaces knowledge, ritual replaces rational action. Circular time replaces history. And as a corollary, the idea of the distinctly human subject, a being different in thought and action to the rest of nature, is dismissed as the hubris of the colonist and oppressor. While much ecological thinking grounds itself in science, it leads back to what is really the premodern mystical view of humans as participants intertwined with nonhuman entities as part of a greater, harmonious ecosphere. Much of the new mysticism in art regularly invokes the old countercultural tropes of psychedelic transcendence and the loss of the individual self to the collective and a greater planetary entity' He then ended the article with... 'but this time it’s in VR.'

I thought it a prescient article and I agreed with quite a lot of what he was saying except for the ending, whereby he decided that it was now VR that was going to carry the can, so to speak. Perhaps it's my age but I find VR very problematic, not least its ability to eat up resources as more and more data farms are built to serve the ever expanding needs of new technology. We have been here before, in the time of the First World War, the rise of Dada was a response to where science and so called modern civilisation had led us. The deaths of millions in the trenches was a lesson in hubris and artists were not slow to pick up on the fact that science had helped human beings develop more and more deadly weapons, whilst human nature was still in effect 'tribal' and using an operating system developed during a time when the most damage someone could inflict on other humans was by using a thrown rock. 

Leonora Carrington 

The title of the biennale,'The Milk of Dreams' was taken from one of Leonora Carrington's children's books. There had been an effort to readdress the gender balance in terms of historical representations at biennales and she was used as a sort of touchstone, in terms of sensibility. She viewed the artistic process itself as an alchemical act of transmutation, turning everyday materials and subconscious visions into sacred visual realities. She populated her works with magical beasts, giant goddesses, and human-animal hybrids and she was deeply versed in the Kabbalah, Mayan cosmology, and the Tarot. In particular, she reclaimed domestic spaces—like kitchens and cauldrons—as sites of ancient feminine power, healing, and sorcery rather than confinement, there was something about her that reminded me of my grandmother.

One of my blog posts on the 2022 Biennale was the first report on a Venice Biennale whereby I had felt confident enough to put a couple of images in of my own work, simply because I could see that the underlying theme was a pretty good fit of where I was at that time and in many ways still am. The difference is that over the last few years I have become more convinced that the world is again in danger of letting loose science led technologies that we have no idea of how harmful they may be. Because we are still in effect creatures of the Palaeolithic world, I believe we need to in some way return to ways of meaning making that link us all back into the world out of which we emerged. I don't mean by this we need to turn to formalised religions, but that some sort of spiritual need needs to be fed, if not we become mentally disturbed. Some people are already returning to 'nationalism', finding it feeds spiritual needs by providing individuals with a sense of meaning, filling the emotional and existential voids that we need to experience. It gives individuals a higher cause to live and potentially die for, transcending the mundane routines of daily life and it establishes a clear framework of right and wrong based on the loyalty to and preservation of the nation. The problem with this is it also leads very easily to posturing and aggression, which in turn lead to war and war is what brought out all the new weapons of destruction that we saw emerge during World War One. AI led drone technology is only the tip of an iceberg that would be brought into view if a new world war was ever started.

So why magic? Ramsey Dukes in his essay on magic states that both truth and falsehood, as well as illusion may be used to effect change, you just have to see what works. He suggests that it's not so much how one arrives at a solution, but that actions produce tangible results, even though they might not be considered logical. Which is somewhat of a relief and when looking at the diagram (above) he produced to show how the four different modes of thinking were related, it is easy to see how art is firmly set within the quarter bounded by intuition and feeling, a place where I would expect imagination to be comfortably housed. Imagination is one of art's most powerful tools, it's use adds meaning to our lives by taking us out of ourselves and giving us new possibilities. Similar to art, magic uses imagination to create meaning and it is inseparable in its methodology from play. Dukes essentially strips magic of its mumbo jumbo and arcane symbology and gives it a sense of post-modern purpose, some of which I believe the arts can appropriate too.  

But how? There is an ancient Sumerian epic poem dating back to around 2100 BCE called the Epic of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. The poem contains a passage known to historians as "The Nam-shub of Enki." In this text, it is described that long ago, all of humanity spoke the exact same language and praised the god Enlil in unison. The god Enki, lord of wisdom, who was incidentally the deity related to crafts, but also subterranean waters, magic, and incantations, in his trickster mode, decided to change the speech in their mouths and "put contention into it," effectively fracturing humanity's single tongue into diverse languages. (An early Babel myth). In the text of the myth, the word nam-shub (nam-šub) translates to "incantation," "sung spell," or "magical speech. This nam-shub is a powerful idea, and was quoted within a novel by the writer Neal Stephenson, who uses text from the Sumerian epic and quotes it directly in his novel Snow Crash. Stephenson interprets this "incantation that fractures language" as the ultimate neurological anti-virus; a piece of code designed in the novel to shatter a universal mental interface, that had been developed by fascist powers, to enslave everyone's minds and bodies. In this case the nam-shub is used to ensure that humans would still have free will. I. e. Stephenson uses the old idea of magical speech, cloaked in the technological language of a modern world computer virus. In my case 'magical speech' is something I associate with the making of fetishes. It being the associated narrative that empowers the fetish. For instance, my reading of the function of the Mali Boli fetish is to accumulate and control the naturally occurring life force called nyama for the spiritual benefit of the community. 

Mali Boli fetish

These fetishes are complex creations created from esoteric recipes, or 'daliluw'. Animal bones, vegetable matter, honey, and metal are packed around an interior armature of bamboo wrapped in white cotton cloth, which are then covered with layers of mud and clay. Over time their surfaces accumulate related sacrificial materials, including chicken and goat blood, chewed kola nuts, alcohol, and millet porridge. Each added layer of material adds to the power narrative and as it does it lends the structure greater spiritual power. The disparate elements of which boliw (the plural of boli) are composed symbolise the various parts of the universe, so that the whole object can be read as a model of local cosmological belief. It has also been noted that a boli's sacrificial coatings are strikingly similar to the undigested contents of human stomachs, while its interior is made of materials generally associated with the body's exterior surrounding world. For this reason, they have sometimes been interpreted as portrayals of animals and people turned inside out, a sort of 4D transformation, as in H G Wells's 'The Plattner Story', whereby a schoolmaster disappears after a chemical explosion and returns nine days later with his body entirely inverted; literally turned inside out, as in a mirror image. In this case my own visualisation being a more gory one, my anatomic inversion would put the body's organs on the outside. Wells was illustrating a spatial fourth-dimensional rotation, a concept heavily inspired by the mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius, his Möbius strip being the 2 dimensional cousin of the Klein Bottle, a form that I have thought of as one the human body could easily be seen as being. All of which is my roundabout way of fusing scientific ideas with magical thinking. Contemporary superposition theory within quantum mechanics being my particular go to when trying to tap into possible science/magic conjunctions. As Ramsey Dukes suggests, it's not so much how one arrives at a solution, but that you just have to explore where and when actions may produce tangible results. In this case I'm tempted to see 'belief' as being a prime mover, especially as I have seen the placebo effect at work, alongside a continuing use of charm bracelets and contemporary votive practices. But perhaps even more than these, is the fact that contemporary politics seems to be locked into what I can only think of as the use of 'nam-shub' incantations, such as 'stop the boats' or 'fake news', short phrases that seem to magically shape reality. 

The Promise of arrival: 2016

'The Promise of Arrival', a work of mine from 2016, is a woven textile, an artefact that you can wrap around you to keep yourself warm, it is also when hung from a wall an image of a boat, one 

filled with migrants, attempting to cross a sea. The depiction of the sea echoing the shapes made by the textile when it begins to fold in use, the sea swell, another 'folding' by analogy, another gambit in a set of artworks that seek to unravel a plot to eliminate refugees and rename them terrorists. This is another 'nam-shub', one used to ensure that humans still have free will, this time as an antidote to the 'stop the boats' incantation, the spell that has been developed by fascist powers, to enslave everyone's minds and therefore bodies too. 

See also: 

Magic

Hybridity and permeability 

Chaos Magic

Why I'm making animist images