Walter Russell was an impressionist style painter, but his most important contribution to visual imagery and its ability to carry ideas was in the development of a range of diagrammatic descriptions of mystic energy forces. These diagrams have recently come back into fashion, probably because of a rise in interest of artists such as Hilma of Klint.
Hilma of Klint
Both Walter Russell and Hilma of Klint were in their own ways influenced by Theosophy and they were drawn to an exploration of alternative ways of envisioning the world that were attempts to uncover the underlying spiritual and metaphysical aspects of reality. At the time they were regarded initially as 'interesting' but very quickly dismissed as odd balls but we must not forget that many artists at the time were involved in theosophy including Kandinsky and Mondrian. Perhaps artists like Walter Russell and Hilma of Klint asked too many difficult questions of the art dealers and art audience of the time, because they were not just making images, they were producing diagrams for action, their art was part of a much larger ideal, one that would have involved participants in massive social change. In times of upheaval like the one we are in now we often need to look for an alternative understanding of reality. The one we have seems to be failing, in particular truth seems to be something for people to make up as they go along and this has caused many of us to distrust 'the powers that be' and we therefore perhaps need to forge another vision that seems more spiritually up-lifting. However to do this artists need to think of their practice as being not an isolated reflection on our times, but as a way of working that is integral to the forging of new ways to think. Our current undermined social systems and belief structures, need new foundations if we are to move onwards and become able to deal with huge issues such as global warming and the failure of our democratic processes. At the end of the 19th century theosophy seemed to offer an answer to a series of failing belief systems, and several artists at the time saw in its belief system an opportunity to rethink their practices, both as artists and as social thinkers. However it was to be Dada and Surrealism that carried the anti-rationalist flag into the centre of twentieth century art practices, and as Rosalind Krauss stated, it soon became “embarrassing to mention art and spirit in the same sentence". However Massimiliano Gioni’s 2013 Venice Biennale, entitled 'The Encyclopedic Palace' was a turning point in critical reception amongst the art community. As you entered the first pavilion in the Arsenale you were confronted with Marino Auriti's museum of imaginary knowledge, a three dimensional diagram that echoed the structure of memory theatres. We were being informed that it was ok to once again be in touch with that other side of creativity, the one we never talk about, but which we often draw upon when feeling spiritually exhausted. Since that time several artists have emerged from obscurity who put spirituality at the centre of their practices, such as Marjorie Cameron a follower of Thelema, a spiritual practice developed by Aleister Crowley, Agnes Pelton, Georgiana Houghton, who's 'spirit drawings' were shown at the Courtauld and Emma Kunz who's work was shown at the Serpentine Gallery recently. The exhibition 'Language of the birds' at New York University’s 80WSE Gallery, was an exploration of art inspired by Kabbalah, alchemy, hermeticism, and Tarot and Grisha Bruskin's work (someone I have been looking at and been influenced by for some time) is now becoming much more well known.
Grisha Bruskin
In Bruskin's work we find a conjunction between the structures of soviet Russian society and the imagery of Jewish mysticism and he has in the past set out his ideas in diagrammatic form.
However it is probably in the diagrams of Rudolf Steiner that we see the most powerful influence of the spiritualist/socialist mind on contemporary art.
Rudolf Steiner diagrams
Steiner developed a system of thinking that he called anthroposophy and he aimed to regain traction in the the spiritual world by mirroring the information obtained by science when investigating the physical world. This split between the world of the social (spiritual) and that of science, would be raised yet again in the work of both Joseph Beuys and Bruno Latour.
Beuys was deeply influenced by Steiner's diagrams, in particular those produced during his blackboard lectures. In fact a Beuys diagram at first sight looks very like one of Steiner's.
Joseph Beuys diagrams
Bruno Latour has developed a system of thinking that is an "anthropology of science". It explores the dualistic distinction that modernity has made between nature and society. Pre-modern peoples argues Latour, made no such division and a tidy nature/culture dualism was in fact never possible. He cites a particular moment in time as the beginning of this separation, the argument between Hobbes and Boyle as to what constitutes evidence. Hobbes is someone that saw evidence as something that comes from the masses of people that experience the world, evidence being something that emerges from social discourse, while Boyle points to another type of evidence, that which was embedded within a scientific experiment, such as in his case the proof of the existence of a vacuum by experiment. The tacit practice of the air pump and the dexterity it required is witnessed not by texts or languages but by silent things such as air pumps and Hobbes could not accept that this type of evidence could outweigh the voices of many people.
It was Beuys as an artist that made us aware that being an artist was more akin to being a shaman type figure, one that operated as a catalyst between people and the various ways that they came to understand the world. He was very interested in systems and saw his work as interventions that might change what were becoming ossified systems that pervaded Western society. As well as looking back to Steiner he looked as Eastern philosophies and religions as signs of alternative approaches to living and he began to integrate various aspects of his life into a larger diagram that was continually evolving. For instance he might focus on money and how it could be both used to lever change and at the same time be subject to a rethinking, whereby as a capitalist form of support for commercial exchange it was becoming redundant. This particular tendency within the various strands of contemporary practice has been brought together in the net exhibition, Diagrams of Power which showcases a range of artists working in this territory at the moment. However what seems to be missing is the touch of the esoteric, we need to remember that Thomas Edison was fascinated with the occult and that he initially invented the telephone to talk to the dead. The existence of an invisible, non-material realm is still with us but we now call it 'dark matter', these unknown territories will hopefully always be with us, they are the gaps in our knowledge that allow us as artists to do the things we do, without having to always justify ourselves in the court of rationality.
Emma Kunz Visionary Drawings: Serpentine Galleries
Coda:
I have looked at this area of work myself at times, in particular now that I'm part of the group, 'Life hacks for a limited future', I have developed a diagram for the group to help envisage the various stages of ageing.
The stages of ageing
The idea was to create a diagram with an image embedded within it, in this case a scarab beetle was the rough guide to the overall shape. In Egyptian times it was a symbol of immortality, resurrection, transformation and protection, so seemed a good model on which to base a diagram that was designed to get older people to think about facing up to death. Because this is an age of the mobile phone I then had to redesign my diagram to fit a phone screen, a note to self about the fact that technology moves on.
Louise Despont is perhaps the artist who is working most powerfully in this area at the moment. She uses stencils to create large scale 'spiritual diagrams' often using old ledger paper as a surface to work on.
Louise Despont
Another addition:
My old friend Terry Hammill on seeing this post sent me a story about when in 1971 he was in the USA and came across the work of Soleri, who had published a wonderful book called ‘Arcology: the city in the image of man’. Paolo Soleri had published his ‘Arcology' book just two years before in 1969 and his spiritual ideas are very similar to the ones introduced above, the difference being that Soleri was an architect and was determined to erect real buildings that would reflect his cosmological ideas.
Paolo Soleri: Diagrams from Arcology: the city in the image of man
I first read Ruskin when I was at school. I went through his
‘Elements of Drawing’ and tried to follow the steps that he laid out for those
beginning to draw. I still remember his advice on how to draw individual
elements and then to move on to masses, such as the shape of one leaf and then
the form of a cluster of leaves as they hung from a branch.
Ruskin: drawing of a leaf
His drawing of a leaf above, helps me to think about our close relationship with other living organisms, I am reminded of our own bi-lateral symmetry and how we ourselves have a system of veins that fan out from our centre to our edges. Ruskin likes moving from the particular to the general. The process was one that he believed could be extended into a design principle. A particular observation, such as the shape of a leaf could be generalised to stand for nature itself. When I was doing my Pre-Diploma course at Wolverhampton in the late 1960s, my personal tutor was a textile designer and she used to show me her flower drawings and explain how she was interested in exploring nature and applying what she saw to her designs. At the time I was into Pop Art and tended to dismiss her ideas as either too design orientated or simply old fashioned, but I now think of her as representing an old approach that is becoming more relevant again, and one that has an importance that goes beyond the fine art / design divide.
Ruskin: drawing of a strawberry leaf
Close observation can reveal how
mathematical order underlies everything. A drawing of something as basic as a leaf on a branch stem could therefore be linked to a vision of nature’s underlying structures. Formal principles arising
from this understanding could be then applied to art, architecture and design and they could be used to critique forms used in art and design.
The way leaves are ordered around a stem
Curve 'a' is a segment of a circle, curve 'b' is based on the stem above
Ruskin would argue that curve 'b' is aesthetically more powerful because it is varied and its form links back to an observation from nature. We have looked at issues like this before. In particular why the Bezier Curve is so important in both car design and graphic design and Hogarth's 'Line of Beauty'. A curve that moves between one type and another will always be visually active and is more organic, i.e. it has 'life'. But for Ruskin the importance of the more organic curve is that it holds within it a 'memory' of nature, a memory that should be built into the things we make; and when we do so, we demonstrate our love of nature and the importance of our relationship with it.
Later I would read ‘the Stones of Venice’ and began to see that his
ideas about visual interconnectedness could be applied to society. In particular
he lamented the class divide and the separation between labour and management. In his chapter on 'the Nature of Gothic' he had this to say, “We want one man to be always thinking, and
another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an
operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker
often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. As it is,
we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising, his brother; and
the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers and miserable workers. Now it
is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour
can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.” (Ruskin,
1890) Just as a separation from nature impoverishes both us and nature, a division of human beings into one class and another also impoverishes both classes.
Over time Ruskin’s
political relevance became more important to me and because his name was mentioned
several times in Bristol at the recent symposium on teaching drawing, I thought it timely to post my own reflections on his influence, especially during a period of intense political debate about the future direction of the country.
If you begin your
philosophy by stressing the importance of looking at a leaf and drawing it,
that philosophy will no doubt argue for a close relationship between humans and
nature. Look closely at a leaf and you will see things that entangle you as the observer back into the nature from which the
observation began. Knots of mathematical, analogical, material and ecological entanglements
are created as observations are made; for instance both trees and people at one
point or another were on parallel evolutionary paths, in particular the need to
move fluids around from one place to another was essential to both, the tree’s
dendritic system of branching pathways extending right down into every leaf,
being very similar to a human cardio vascular system, which is itself described
as ‘dendritic’ or tree like in its branching structures. As we see similarities
between ourselves and a leaf, we hopefully establish grounds for empathy
between plant and human lives. It is the beautiful chemistry of
photo-synthesis that captures energy from the sun in a plant’s leaves and this
is taken up and distributed in a not too dissimilar way to how the human digestive
system works, which then releases the sun’s energy into our own cells and gives us
life. We are totally interconnected and that is Ruskin’s point. He believed
that making, owning and sharing were not separate things, they had only become
so under capitalist structures, but in earlier forms of society, ownership and
production of art and craft were integrated and not separated out into a buying
class, a class that gives critical value, a making class and an intellectual
class. This separation of culture into different roles within different classes
in society, Ruskin believed, resulted in a fracturing of art into high and low forms. For
an upper ownership class, it became more about art for art's sake, validated by a class of specialist critics and specialist intellectual artists who did not want to think about their productions as craft, because craft was what the labouring classes occupied themselves with. The lower classes, often craftspeople who made things with their hands, had different values, their handicrafts and their culture came to be seen as of 'low' value or kitsch by the upper classes. Out of this milieu arose an idea of the artist as an
outsider and the concept of the avant-garde or advance guard whereby the artist’s
sensibility was out in front of ‘ordinary people’, sensing out the new and the
different. This became part of the logic of capitalism, because new things are always needed if you are to get people to consume and therefore 'innovation' became more important as a commercial value. Ruskin saw that this sort of approach to art would eventually lead to a total separation between those that understood the site of production because they worked hard to make things and those that only valued the site of exchange or the transaction that saw value only in monetary profit. As he put it, neither will be content with their lot, "the one envying, the other despising". Ruskin is a wonderful example of how something as basic as giving importance to looking at a leaf, could eventually if you follow it's implications, lead to an idea about how society should be constructed.
The artist is seen as someone who can make observations that might help others grasp the wonders of nature. Drawing is seen as a very democratic tool that all people can use and although some might be better at using it than others, its practice will help everyone reach a better understanding of what is there to be seen. Gradually drawn observations will lead to a recognition of a 'bigger picture' whereby the principles seen in particular observations could be understood as belonging to certain patterns, patterns that relate to deep underlying principles such as mathematical order. Ruskin believed that a separation between humans and nature will occur if we don't spend time reflecting on the fact that we are both part of nature and able to observe it; he also pointed out at the time that manufacturing was already despoiling the natural world and that we were avoiding our responsibility for the world around us. As the potter needs to understand the clay, so the weaver needs to understand the properties of cloth and the metal worker understand how iron can be worked. Making and conserving are close neighbours; someone that understands the hard won nature of individual production, will waste less and consume less. Someone removed from the site of production has no empathy with both the people and the various materials of production and will therefore find it easy to make decisions that lead to pollution and the ravaging of natural resources. Ruskin's observations still ring true and his ideas still effect the way artists think about the world.
Images taken from the elements of drawing
Without Ruskin in many ways we would never have had the moral conviction that lies behind Michael Landy's 'Breakdown'. Ruskin would have hated consumerism and would have seen it for what it is, a phycological endgame designed to trap people in a loop of want which they feel is really 'need'. We bloat ourselves on things and come to believe that we need them. Landy decided to make a piece of work whereby he got rid of all his possessions, a task that was far more difficult than you might imagine. He in effect had to develop a factory large enough to cope with the task. Finally after getting rid of all his belongings, Landy was left with a need to start again and the first work he did was to create a series of etched drawings of weeds. It was as if he had to start at the bottom again and to look for a subject matter that reminded him and us of what art was always about, noticing things and looking at them for what they are. By making drawings of "wild plants growing where they are not wanted and often in competition with cultivated plants", Landy reminds us of the need to include 'all' animal, vegetable and mineral forms in our interconnected and entangled eco systems and not just the cultivated ones that we humans think of as being important to us. In doing so he reminds us yet again of the continuing importance of Ruskin's thinking and of a vital lesson when it comes to making art, often the most simple direct approach is the most powerful and this approach when supported by a strong ethical framework can be of great service to us all.
Michael Landy: Breakdown
Michael Landy: Creeping Buttercup
To read:
Ruskin, J. (1890). The stones of Venice.. (Vol. 2) London: J. Wiley and sons
