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

Chaos magic

For many years I have made fetishes. physical objects made to be inhabited or empowered by a spiritual force capable of offering protection or healing. These objects sit in my practice alongside votives and I view them both as objects of magical power. They operate using what I think of as sympathetic magic; a type of magical thinking based on the belief that an object or action can affect a person or thing through resemblance or a symbolic connection given to something via an associated narrative. 

For instance sometimes I make fetishes in the form of body parts.However they are also like animals, in this way a body part can have more agency and it feels as if it can take independent action.

Ceramic body part fetishes

At other times fetishes take the form of an animal. They are given an energy associated with the way the receiver of the fetish thinks about the animal depicted. A dog may be hard working, fierce, loyal or just dogged. A monkey might be mischievous, thoughtless or just swinging in the trees, the important issue being that the nature of the fetish will depend on what belief the participant has about the animal.  

Ceramic animal fetishes

I am fascinated by objects being able to affect invisible action at a distance. But just as interesting to me as sympathetic magic, is the contagious effect; contagious magic being the anthropological belief that things once in contact continue to act on each other, meaning a person or object can pass qualities, power, or harm to another through a physical association. My fetishes and votives working in this case as objects of touch. My handling of clay for instance is frozen as finger imprints into each object, which is why they are not smoothed out. I can put all of my feelings into my making and hope that those feelings can be passed on to others. 

Loneliness votive

I have made several loneliness votives. We all need a hug a one time or another and that is essentially what they consist of, a form hugging itself. They are small, designed to be kept in a pocket or held in the hand in times of stress. Their surfaces are of polished wax over rough fired clay, so that more handling enhances the effect. I put a lot of care into the final finish, so that whoever is given one, or asks for one, can intuitively feel that I'm passing on something that has had care put into it. The hug becomes a hug for them. It is passed on, both by its symbolic representation and by the 'care in the hand'. 

Occasionally as I'm working I get hints that what I'm sort of doing is reinventing a type of 'chaos magic' or 'magick' as it is often spelt within the realms of those who operate in this area. It was Grant Morrison whose graphic novels 'The Invisibles' I used to read avidly, that introduced me to chaos magick. This is a more modern approach to magic, one that acknowledges the old traditions, but which takes a more 'postmodern' approach to how to apply magical effects. It is more an attitude to practice than a set of rules or a belief system. Chaos magic explores the techniques of magical action, rather than setting up a particular sets of symbols to believe in, however many of the techniques used involve participants in engaging with belief systems. There being no absolute truth, therefore a magic practitioner can theoretically do anything in order to achieve a result. However at its core is a belief in belief, a similar reasoning also underlying why my votive objects can affect both physical and mental change. 

One definition of chaos is, 'The formless and disordered state of matter before the creation of the cosmos.' The apparent order of things, a chaos magician might argue, is merely an arbitrary structure that we perceive. This formless state of matter, being a primal force from which is built magical energies. A chaos magician has the ability to change beliefs and thinking paradigms whenever a different approach is needed. I. e. they are accustomed to be able to look at and see their reality from different points of view. To the chaos magician, beliefs are choices, but belief is the tool that empowers the magic. I suppose it was this issue that drew me to exploring chaos magic as a system of thinking, as it allowed me to embrace a number of varying systems at the same time and to embed them all into my thought process. Hence my interest in outdated beliefs and para-scientific ideas such as Rayonism, Geometrical Psychology, etheric doubles, subtle bodies and similar ideas. 

At the centre of these belief systems is a concept of materialising thought, whether these thoughts are constructed as flat images or objects, what is interesting is that ideas that were in someone's head are now manifest as tangible things. Ceramic objects, because they are invested with clear memories of my hands at work, are often used by myself as fetishes and I have attempted many times to conjure up the associated energies that need to be embedded within fetish type objects. As you make them, you need to believe that you are investing them with some sort of energy or psychic force, something that is transmitted through the hand/eye/brain relationship and as you bring them into a public arena, you need to be able to communicate that concept to others. Which is why stories and narratives are often needed to bolster the visual affect of these objects. 

My fetish store

Ramsey Dukes in his essay on magic produced a diagram to explain how magic sat alongside art, science and religion as a way of explaining or controlling human behaviour. 

I shall in a future post use Ramsey Duke's as a guide as to how magic can be thought of as a way to explain how an art practice can be also in some ways magic too and I have a bit more to say about how an artwork as fetish might operate. 

See also:

Magic

Parascientific visions and Rayonism

Magic in art Slideshow

Benjamin Betts and Geometrical Psychology

Eye Music Includes link to 'Thought Forms' by Besant and Leadbeater

Freud and drawing invisible forces

The iconography of the invisible

The active cycle of breathing techniques A paper whereby I try to visualise the invisible sensations that pain and emotional trauma instil within us. A first step towards the construction of a form of ‘illusory enactment’.

Why I'm making Animist images

Joseph Campbell

In the previous post I suggested that it was perhaps time to devote a post to Joseph Campbell and his work. I first read Joseph Campbell's four volumes of The Masks of God when I was teaching on the foundation course at Leeds. The first of these, Primitive Mythology examined the roots of myth in hunter-gatherer and tribal societies, looking at psychoanalysis and early human history. Oriental Mythology explored the mythic traditions and philosophies of Asia, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, and Shinto. Occidental Mythology focused on Western mythology from the Near East and ancient Europe through the classical era and the Middle Ages and finally I read Creative Mythology which focused on the modern era, tracking the evolution of the individual myth-maker from the twelfth-century troubadours to modern literature and art. These books had a profound influence on me at the time and their relevance it seems to me becomes more and more important as I get older. In particular in a time when people of different religions set themselves against each other, without looking for that commonality that lies beneath their beliefs and which forms links between us all.

Campbell set out to explore what lay behind the various myths of as many cultures as he could. He went back as far as archeology let him and gradually made his way towards where we are now, pointing out that each myth had a 'local' construction, i.e. aspects of each myth were specifically to do with the time and place the myth was constructed within. These 'local' aspects were often to do with how the people organised themselves as a unit and often set out rules of behaviour. However, each myth also had universal significance, whereby it reflected the common reality of the human condition, which allowed people to come to terms with birth, growth, maturity and death, these things being aspects of everyone's lives no matter where they came from and when. By breaking myth down into these two different categories it became much easier to see how conflicts arose. Basically it was the local differences that caused difficulties. A religion developed in a specific area of the world, during a specific time, would have local issues related to what the conditions of life were at that time and place. If people continued to believe the same set of rules for hundreds of years, those rules would begin to appear arbitrary. For instance a belief that the world was created let's say 6,000 years ago, might have been feasible to people that lived 2,000 years ago, but the solid evidence of the more recent science of geology disputes this and tells us that the world was created four and a half billion years ago. A book that was written when knowledge of the history of the planet was very sketchy, should not be used as a sort of equal truth in relation to constantly updated real evidence about reality. But Biblical creationists still believe that the universe and all life were directly created by God in the exact manner described in the Book of Genesis.
In Primitive Mythology, Campbell tells a story of the commonality of our underlying nature, it develops a narrative centred on how we make sense of what it is to be human. He uses anthropology, archaeology, and psychology to show that all humans share a fundamental core of spiritual history. Not only does he do this but he proposes that the mythological stories that give meaning to our human lives, are composed much like a great symphony. His book looks at how early humans expressed religious awe, as well as how the continuing rituals of certain still existing tribes, help us to understand how and why religious awe is significant in the establishment of meaningful social codes of behaviour. He also explains how humanity's oldest spiritual worldview emerged; the practice of animism, a belief that all things possess living spirits, be they animal, plant or substance, such as a landscape, a star or a force like the wind. This is something that I have come to believe myself, which helps me to find a very personal connection with those early modern humans. Early peoples must have had a hard time surviving, but perhaps some times were harder than others. Those who strove to find forms that could express and communicate their religious reverence of and interconnection with the surrounding world, must have believed very strongly in a reason to do so, as to make a carving such as the Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, would have taken up a lot of energy, which otherwise could have been devoted to hunting or fishing. Perhaps a figure like this might have been made during a time of excess, such as when fruit was in plentiful supply, but the fact that the figure is carved from the tusk of a mammoth suggests that it was made during a time of long winters, when elephants needed thick hairy coats to survive the cold.

Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel

I have pointed out in an earlier post that archaeologists think that early humans viewed cave walls as thin, permeable membranes that separated their physical world from the spirit realm. Painting on the surfaces of these cave walls being a way to interact directly with the animal spirits believed to dwell within.

Lascaux Cave

This concern with ideas whereby spirits could move between things, is highlighted by that hybrid figure of the "Lion-Man"; a 40,000-year-old ivory sculpture that is half-human, half-animal. The sculpture is a physical manifestation of the act of a human transforming into an animal or channeling the raw power of a cave lion.
This sculpture is a model I often think about when drawing. The form was found within the shape of the mammoth tusk, the curve of the lion man's body echoing the curve of the tusk. Just as when you are making a drawing, the image often emerges out of the way drawing materials suggest form. Of course this is also the case when I'm making ceramic objects, the clay itself will feel as if it needs to go in one direction more than another and as it does the implication of a new form begins to reveal itself.
I have a drawing led practice, i. e. that it is in drawing that I find manifestations of imagery that guide my practice. I have used a wide range of media, including screen based approaches and whether I am using pencil on paper, a finger pushing through charcoal dust on a floor, chalk on a blackboard, tape on a wall, a stick on a beach or a mouse and computer screen or a drawing tablet and computer monitor, each media will suggest new and different forms. There is some sort of exchange principle that moves back and forth between myself as an organic entity and the substances I engage with to create meanings. This process I find very similar to animism, the spirit of an idea being passed between myself and the media I use to materialise my thoughts.

A drawing made using computer software: 1990s

In the image above made many years ago, I can still see the influence of Campbell's books. At the time I was excited to see how using a computer as a drawing tool would help shape ideas; the then heavy pixilation of screens meant that diagonal lines and curves looked like jagged staircases. This fact coupled with a need to 'paint' colour blocks using a 'fill' tool, meant that there was no blending or smoothness of surface available. I also found I could use a 'wax layer' printer as an output device. This meant putting through a printer wax impregnated papers, one after another; the printer then heated the areas where it was lifted off onto the print paper. The wax papers were cyan, magenta, yellow and black and at the time I really thought the limitations were leading me to discover fascinating image potential. Looking back on those images I see that the hybrid human/animal form was part of my image bank then and it still is. Joseph Campbell had viewed hybrid human-animal figures, 'therianthropes', as profound psychological and spiritual symbols, that reflected the earliest stages of the human mythic imagination. He explained that rather than separating humans from nature, ancient mythologies used hybrid figures to bridge the gap between our inner consciousness and the external 'natural' world. Which is something I find I'm still thinking about as I strive to find forms for interoceptual experiences.
Early humans developed a visionary framework centred around shamanism, whereby individuals with spiritual knowledge could enter ecstatic trance states. These altered states could be achieved through rhythmic chanting, dancing or sensory deprivation, states that allowed them to believe that they were traveling to otherworldly dimensions to commune with animist entities. The first indications that we have in archeological evidence of such early spiritual thought is that people began to purposefully bury their dead. Bodies were often arranged in deliberate positions (such as facing the rising sun) and buried with flowers, animal bones, or precious tools. This clear conceptualisation of an afterlife, must have also included a surrounding set of rituals, such as the widespread use of red ochre to colour the bones of the deceased. This use implies a very early symbolic connection to blood, the representation of a life force through the use of a painted colour and in the painting of these bones there must have been sought some sort of spiritual transition.
In addition to rituals surrounding death, early hunter-gatherers felt a profound and direct kinship with their environment. They worshiped the immediate forces of the landscape that surrounded them. Unusual landscape features like waterfalls, ancient groves of trees, thermal springs, and high mountain peaks were treated as being sacred. They were in awe of the creatures they hunted, developing concepts of animal guardians and related deities who could protect the souls of both humans and other animals. Out of these beliefs myths arose, narratives that could act as guides and give clues to human spiritual potential, helping individuals and the tribe to connect with the deep experience of being alive.
Primitive Mythology was not I soon realised 'primitive' and it had a profound effect. I remember reading it in sections on my way to work. In those days I caught a bus in the morning and it took the best part of an hour to get where I needed to be, so Campbell and many other authors were consumed during a time I felt would be otherwise wasted. This meant that I was primed to enthuse my teaching with what I was reading and of course it was also influencing what I was trying to make as an artist. Campbell's ideas of 'enthusiasms' were a guiding light for both. When asked by an interviewer how do we find the God within us, Campbell replied, "Look to see what makes you enthusiastic? Then follow it." He then pointed out that the word 'enthusiastic' comes from the Ancient Greek word enthousiastikos, which literally means "possessed or inspired by a god".

Joseph Campbell in conversation

I also read Campbell's other books but non of them had the impact of Primitive Mythology; Creative Mythology though did give me a clue as to what I should be doing as a practitioner, his thoughts on James Joyce's Ulysses I often passed on when talking to students. In particular the idea that one day in someone's life could become as mythic a journey as Homer's epic poem, The Voyage of Ulysses; which was a great reminder that everything we experience in our daily 'normal' lives has the potential to be mythic. 

I was during this time a young father and the activities undertaken by my daughter and son were huge influences. They seemed to be able to tap into the deep mysteries of a mythological condition by just doing what they did, they did not need to learn about this, they knew it. This made me very aware that in our society education in many ways was designed to iron out the creases of ancient myths that we all inherited. We had to learn to put on new clothes and discard old ones, even if the old ones were still serviceable. 

My daughter as a bird: An image worked on over 3 sheets of A1 paper: 1987

The drawing above is from the time when my daughter was a girl, back in the 1980s. We lived in a back to back terraced house and the children at that time could play in the street. She used to dress up as a bird; my wife had made her a costume which included a bird head/hat and she would 'fly' in and out of the house and up and down the street, totally inhabiting her bird persona. It was for myself a realisation of how deeply embedded into our nature Campbell's ideas about animism were, that we needed to find ways for our spirit to travel into other forms if we were to release ourselves from the prison of our current existence. Both my son and my daughter developed aspects of their young lives that demonstrated how this could still be done. As an artist I tried to record this, the warping of the street being an attempt to draw what it must have looked like to a humanbirdgirl flying through it. Much of the work from that time has been lost, but the struggle to find imagery that might help us to come to terms with or be a portal through which we might find at least one of the masks of God, continues. 

Another more recent hybrid

See also:

Drawing and spirituality

The tattoo: Drawing on the body

For Patrick: Potting the 8 ball  A reminder of how when teaching we used to embed everyday experiences into mythic consequences

Bringing the inanimate to life

The art of memory

Why I'm making animist images

Reciprocity in art

Trikka Georgia :Feeling the roots under my feet grow

I finished my last post thinking about the importance of reciprocity and I referenced Lewis Hyde's book, 'The Gift'. Subtitled 'Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World', it is a very useful read if you are ever worried about the role of the artist in a world dominated by capitalism. I mentioned in my previous post that the press rarely write about visual art outside of the very exclusive 'art' sections and when they do it is nearly always about money and how high prices now are at auction. I also mentioned that as early as the 1920s Kandinsky was criticising the art market system as being unable to cater for what art was really about. In the art market the divorce of money from any spiritual or empathetic humanistic meaning is exemplified by the image of a 1955 De Kooning painting below. As an abstraction of the human figure it is interesting and it asks questions as to the embodied interrelationship between figure and ground, but at $300 million back in 2015, you could have given humanitarian aid to an entire community. In comparison a small, 50-bed modular hospital might cost £25-£40 million, at 2026 prices.

Interchange: De Kooning 1955. Sold for $300 million in 2015

During the late 1930s and early 1940s Hans Hofmann used to host a life drawing class that raised all sorts of questions as to how the human figure could be represented. During this time Lee Krasner attended and her drawings made as a student in his class were on offer recently at the Kasmin gallery’s booth at Art Basel, for prices ranging from $100,000 to $200,000.

Lee Krasner, Untitled (1939).

If you look at the Lee Krasner drawing you will see that she has been looking at almost exactly the same issues that De Kooning was exploring in 1955. So if the money spent on the De Kooning had anything to do with originality someone missed out on a bit of art history, as Hofmann was dealing with these issues in his classes almost twenty years before De Kooning got to grips with them in 'Interchange'. I don't think the price has anything to do with originality or 'greatness' as an idea or visual expression. it is simply to do with investment in a name and a time. In fact you could have bought a Lee Krasner drawing made when she was a student for a few dollars not that long ago, but her investment star is also rising and this is a good time for her in terms of her work's worth on the art market. Not that she would know that, as she died in 1984. But the gift of her work still keeps giving.

Amongst the indigenous peoples of North America the Kwakw_ak_a’wakw have a word meaning “a gift from the supernatural, a gift from the creator”. We all have these supernatural gifts, but in the western world we would call them our talents or special skills, we might be very aware of animal habits and become great hunters, have sensitive taste buds and love cooking but we might also be artists. These gifts are what individuals offer to others in the community and feasts are often held in order to celebrate achievements, a celebration that is associated with what is often called potlatching. This involved the giving away of or even destroying wealth to demonstrate status, reaffirm lineage, remember special achievements and mark life events like births, deaths, or marriages. "Potlatch" means "to give," and the practice, once banned by white governments, centres on generosity, community, storytelling and the redistribution of resources. It is a cornerstone of social, political and spiritual life. The reason that when white people showed up, they tried to stop tribes from potlatching, was that it was outside of any understanding of commodity exchange within capitalism; it was, like the idea of Communism, a threat to a particular way of thinking, in this case it seemed paradoxically that people were giving away everything that they had, in order to become wealthy.

When you have children you instinctively gift to them your time and energy, as you know that the family community will benefit from this. If you have any special gifts, such as an ability to play a musical instrument, you will gift this skill to your children by teaching it to them, thus passing on cultural capital and building the family's riches. You freely give away your time and energy, if you feel others will benefit. The Kwakw_ak_a’wakw tribe operates like a family and hosts celebrations to mark the various times that these gifts have been given. Lewis Hyde asks us to think about this type of exchange as being an alternative to the one we see operating when art is regarded as an investment, it is a gift that builds social capital.

I have occasionally received money for my work, but at the most just a few hundred pounds and there has always been a sense of exchange beyond the monetary value, people wanting to have an object in their house that represented a certain sort of idea, in a similar way to why you might buy a book. The money being more to do with a recognition that without some sort of exchange, it might be too hard for the maker to continue making. I have like so many artists kept the wolf away from the door by doing other things as well, such as teaching. I still make things and think about what it means to make things, this blog being one of the main channels through which I do my thinking. I do occasionally check to see if anyone picks up on what I do, as much as anything to see if what I do is of any use. It's good to hear from people too and open out conversations but sometimes a little research is useful. This is why I was looking recently at why other writers might have referenced my writing and came across a very interesting text on hair hanging as a circus discipline. It was illustrated by the writer's drawings, such as 'Feeling the roots under my feet grow', the image that opens this post. I found the text very interesting as it represents an attempt to fuse what a complex situation might look like together with how it might feel, an issue that I have had to work with during my own work on visualising interoceptual experiences. Trikka Georgia's text, 'The Journey of a hair hanger's release' had at one point referred to my blog post on horizontality, as this had helped her think through the issues she was dealing with. Hopefully what I had written had supported her thinking, just as in the same way what she had written helped me. This is what I mean by the gift; it is given freely and as it is received by others it allows them to do more and what they do then enriches us all and so by giving away our time and energy to create things, we eventually all profit. 

I first looked at the politics of a non-monetary economy, when a group of us were developing a model for the Leeds Creative Time Bank.  We developed a set of ethics, which were put into a poster form, which was itself at one point shown at the Tate Modern Gallery in relation to the ‘No Soul For Sale’ project. LCTB operated under a belief that we could use ‘social design’ to change social realities such as poverty or social isolation, which we saw at the time, as factors that were already impacting not only upon the creative sector in Leeds, but on all the city’s communities. Hyde's text was one of the gifts that we took from others to help us engineer the Timebank's structure. 

The poster developed for the timebank

However the politics surrounding non-monetary economies can be rather murky. The idea of the potlatch is a powerful one, but one that has come into being as much by desire as by reality. Variously described as an exchange of gifts, a system of banking and a means by which prestige is maintained, the potlatch is a central anthropological concept. Christopher Bracken in 'The Potlatch Papers' shows how the potlatch was in fact invented by the nineteenth-century Canadian law that sought to destroy it. In the act of constructing fictions about certain First Nations and then deploying those fictions against them, the government had invented something that people actually wanted. As Bracken put it, what had been invented was a mirror in which to observe not “the Indian,” but “the European.” 

The idea of the gift still has traction, because unlike money and traded goods, things like love, hope for the future, faith, beauty, the sentiment of a poem, the feeling tone of an image and the construction of an idea; you don’t have less when you give them away. Indeed, they are made to be given away and you feel better when you pass them on. As your gifts are passed on, somehow the world looks a little more like the one you would like it to be and you feel better about yourself. This reflection on the role of the artist in a world dominated by capitalism, doesn't perhaps help a starving artist put bread on the table, but it might explain why as artists we sometimes need to become involved with ventures outside of art making and how we might think about the role of the artist community and the objects that we make. I can remember a conversation from some years ago when I was part of a group exhibition and prices for our various works were being discussed. One artist put forward an idea that they thought their work was worth as much as a fridge. As they did others began to pitch in what sort of commodity their work might be seen as being as useful as and therefore as valuable as. Was a painting as useful as a carpet? Both have aesthetic qualities but one also keeps the room warm and softens the floor's impact on the feet. Therefore argued another, tapestries ought to cost more than paintings, as they could also be used to help keep a room warm. But argued someone else, an artwork is an idea and what people are buying is intellectual property and this is surely worth more than any single commodity. This was countered with, "Yes but counting backwards is also an idea, but its not worth anything." 

I don't have an answer to this, except to say that if at some point someone came along and said this blog is interesting enough to be published as a series of books and asked me if the content could be therefore sold in printed form, I would probably have a real dilemma to face. On the one hand the ideas contained in these posts might be disseminated even more widely and that would be a good thing. But by turning these online posts into hard copies that would have to be marketed and sold, they would join the rest of the commodifiable entities that the capitalist economy embeds within itself. As is often the case I'm lost and puzzled as to any answers to the conundrums I give myself, which is probably why I make art rather than write philosophy or engage directly in politics.

An anti-slug votive at work

I will be showing a few anti-slug votives in a small exhibition at the Trapezium Gallery in Bradford. At the end of the exhibition, I will gift the votives to anyone who feels they need a little other worldly support in their efforts to maintain a garden.

"That art that matters to us—which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience—that work is received by us as a gift is received. Even if we have paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us which has nothing to do with the price." Lewis Hyde: The Gift

References

Trikka Georgia: 'The Journey of a hair hanger's release

An interview with myself about the Leeds Creative Timebank

Barker, G. (2018) Leeds Creative Timebank: reciprocity for sustainable social design, Expanding Communities of Sustainable Practice Conference, Leeds Arts University, 16 November 2018 available at https://www.academia.edu/87392269/Expanding_communities_of_sustainable_practice_symposium_proceedings_2018 

Hyde, L., (1983) The gift: Creativity and the artist in the modern world. London: Vintage.

See also:

In praise of verbs 

Drawing and the principles of permaculture

Horizontality

Katja Heitmann and embodied memory

Defining art

Artists' signatures 

Shamanism and art

Ceramic fish

I ended my last post thinking about the artist as shaman. This association has been made many times. For instance, Kandinsky believed that contemporary art and ethnic artefacts were both suffused with creativity and that the shaman as a craftsman, should be given the same level of aesthetic and anthropological appreciation as an artist. Kandinsky believed that it was not just an aesthetic affinity that cultural objects have, but that the spiritual and ethical congruity of hand made objects came into being because of an inner necessity and openness to the underlying resonances of a deeply spiritual world.
He was an early critic of the art market system and pointed out that the separation of art from popular culture, children’s art or the objects that were normally associated with ethnography or primitive art was wrong, indeed he stated that in his eyes they were often identical. As far back as1889, Kandinsky had made a visit to the Vologda governorship, coming across the Zyrjane, a Finno-Ugric population, where he met shamans and was astonished by the beauty and colours of the furnishings and artefacts that decorated their homes.

Joseph Beuys saw himself as an artist-shaman, a spiritual guide who used art to heal and transform society by connecting people to deeper, often forgotten, human and natural truths. He believed that art could be a force for social healing and when in the early 1980s I met him, he made a deep impression and helped me to find a needed belief in the power and importance of the discipline I was involved with.

However I've never been as forceful in my beliefs as Beuys, I tend to work by feeling my way towards something, rather than having a plan and executing it. For instance when I make one of my ceramic ideas, something comes into being that wasn't there before, arriving out of a muddle of thoughts and possibilities, partly as result of the material having a voice and partly out of my own desires to bring a thought into existence. Once made ceramics belong to the world of objects and many of the human made objects we engage with can also be used as commodities and even the ones initially not made as commodities, are often judged or regarded as objects that in one way or another have a relationship to commodities. Such is the power of money and exchange value. The idea that monetary value is the only way to measure worth is central to the art market and it is no surprise that the media rarely discuss art, except when it is sold at auction and fetches astronomical prices. Under Capitalism, worth has a very narrow definition and the strive towards economic success, seems to have eroded away many of our more spiritual or communal bonds and in particular in relation to the making of art or other culturally significant objects, we are loosing sight of the transformative power of objects as extended minds. However the shamanic idea that objects have fetishistic power lies not far beneath the surface of our everyday economic reality.

Marx wrote, "A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties". He saw that a belief in invisible lifelike powers existing within inanimate objects was essential to our complex meaning system that embeds the believer into the wider world of objects with meaning. Coining the term 'commodity fetishism', things were Marx believed 'magical', in that they promised 'magical' effects, that were, he would further argue 'fictional' or of no clear practical use value, but which nevertheless appeared to be the drivers for possible life changing psychological transformations. Marx never did quite get his head around the psychological power of capitalism. He took several of his ideas from contemporary writings about tribal uses of fetishes and other animist practices and it is this fact, that makes me think again about the role of the consumed object within late capitalism. I see the animist idea that underpinned Marx's original observations still in place. In recognising this, perhaps this gives us a way forward when looking for alternatives to a Capitalist model. Any alternative possibility to values based in capital, should emerge from a recognition that whatever new system comes into existence, that it would have to exercise a similar underlying psychological lever, but one that drove people into making more communally supportive decisions, rather than rewarded the economic achievements of the individual.

When I make a drawing or a ceramic object, I am not making one to sell, whereby I exchange it for cash. What I am doing is though trying to make another type of transaction, one whereby the person coming across the object is asked to think about why such a thing might exist. The art object becomes in effect a type of externalised mind, a form that allows thought to be grown around itself. The exchange value in this case depends on the receptiveness of the person encountering the object and how entangled they want to be into the possibilities the object opens for them.

For instance, in relation to a work I made a while ago now, my initial prompt to making over 300 ceramic fish was a description I came across of thousands of dead fish, washed up on a riverside beach due to an outflowing of pollution into the waters that they had previously inhabited. I wanted to ensure a moment of news was not forgotten and to make it concrete and unavoidable. I also wanted to highlight the bigger issue, which was the fact that we are constantly degrading and destroying the world in which we and all other creatures live. But as I made the fish, each one emerged out of the making as having a different 'life force', some felt as if they had more élan vital than others. Where this came from I wasn't sure, but it had something to do with my relationship with the clay out of which their various forms emerged. Somehow something of my own life force had been transferred into what had been made. Something of my personal spirit had travelled out of my body and had been transported into an inanimate material which now had some sort of animate form. I had in effect performed an ancient shamanic rite and in doing so had also made 'fetishes'. Fetishes that in this case were meant to be found by people who were exploring this small stream in Barnsley.

Fish installation and three individual fish

There are different types of shaman, I don't for instance operate as a spirit walker, the type of shaman that can leave their body behind and travel in spirit form, but as a maker I do feel I have access to a shamanic tool kit. These tools are though not just physical objects but are things possessing spiritual significance that can be used to help make objects come into being, that are designed to connect people with concepts that have the potential to bring about change in their inner thoughts, energies or beliefs. 

This interest in art as a shamanic practice goes back to when I was a student at Newport College of Art. It was there that I first read the work of Mircea Eliade and Carlos Casteneda. After this experience, I had an intuitive feeling that a shamanic aspect of art practice was still viable, but didn't know how to harness this feeling. Casteneda's 'The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge' was widely read by artists in the early 1970s and although now more regarded as fiction, the ideas were very powerful and they developed an intuition that shamanic practices were still possible. 

It was only after working more as a community based artist and eventually as a votive maker, who then found himself more recently working in a hospital setting, that I have perhaps finally begun to see what my previous experiences were hinting at.

Another influential writer who also wrote about the continuing importance of shamanism and who has helped me in the past to make sense of what I do is Lewis Hyde. In particular the idea of art making as a gift. According to Hyde (1983): 'The spirit of an artist’s gifts can wake our own. The work appeals, as Joseph Conrad says, to a part of our being which is itself a gift and not an acquisition…. A gift revives the soul.' This is an incredibly romantic idea and to offer up what you do as a gift is a rare thing, mainly because we are brought up to believe that we need a monetary reward for our labour, if not we cant put any food on the table and we die. However I now have a pension, having worked for over 50 years at what is now Leeds Arts University, so I am in a position to offer some of my time as a gift. 

The importance of reciprocity needs a little fleshing out, something however for another post. 

References

Casteneda, C. (1990) The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge London: Penguin

Poggianella, S. “The Object as an Act of Freedom. Kandinsky and Shaman Art, in Evgenia Petrova, (ed), Wassily Kandinsky. Tudo comença num Ponto. Everything starts from a dot , State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, 11/11/2014 - 28/09/2015, pp. 29-39 Available at: https://www.academia.edu/41629506/The_Object_as_an_Act_of_Freedom_Kandinsky_and_Shaman_Art?email_work_card=abstract-read-more

Eliade, M. (2020) Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy New York: Princeton University Press

Hyde, L., (1983) The gift: Creativity and the artist in the modern world. London: Vintage.

Marx, K. (1990). Capital. London: Penguin Classics. p. 165.

See also:

Audience as Shamanic community

Drawings of nervous systems

Why I'm making animist images

In praise of verbs

Exhibition: Piscean Promises

Reciprocity in art