Wicked ways and means
Already undergoing a revival on screen, the occult has now conjured up its own major art exhibition.
Already undergoing a revival on screen, the occult has now conjured up its own major art exhibition.
It is the season of the witch; of the mystic, the magician and the medium. Agent Dale Cooper, now Dark Coop, is back, stalking Twin Peaks with his coal-black gaze. Dragons and prophecies have torn through the latest series of Game of Thrones. A movie of Margaret Mahy’s witch story The Changeover is soon to bring the evil Carmody Braque to the big screen. One of last year’s biggest independent American hits was The Witch, set in Puritan New England. In the fashion world, Japanese label Comme des Garçons launched its 2016 summer season with a darkly adorned occultist collection. Around the world, galleries are turning over their orderly white walls to the arcane realms of magic and metaphysics. As a recent Guardian article declared, “The occult returns to the art world.”
“But,” says US “witch”, curator and teacher of magical history Pam Grossman, “the occult has never entirely gone away from the art world.
“Public interest waxes and wanes, but the occult has been influencing artists for as long as art has been made. The Symbolist movement, the abstract art movement – all those artists were trying to render the invisible visible, to take experiences that are metaphysical or sublime or ineffable and pull them into the visual space.”
Grossman is participating, through an appropriately disembodied Skype talk, in one of a series of events marking Occulture, City Gallery Wellington’s new exhibition of esoteric art.
The exhibition demonstrates the persistence of magical thinking in publishing, painting, videos, photography, sculpture and installation from the late 1700s to the present day.
Although largely ignored by the arthistory establishment, the entanglement between art and occult practices has always been at play, says City Gallery curator Aaron Lister.
“If you think of the meaning of the word ‘occult’ as hidden or secret knowledge, art is also a form that tries to open up those alternative ways of thinking about our place in the world. At particular times in history, that connection between art and the occult becomes really direct, maybe through the breaking down of established power structures and the search for other ways of being.”
At the centre of the exhibition are three rarely seen works by notorious English occultist and self-taught artist Aleister Crowley. Once declared “the wickedest man in the world”, he made these works while establishing his Abbey of Thelema in Sicily (Mussolini threw him out of Italy in 1923 for sexual depravity). One is an image of the Hierophant, the masculine counterpart to the High Priestess in the tarot pack; another is Crowley’s scarlet-haired lover; another is a self-portrait as the Sun God – all flaming halo and blackened eyes.
“For Crowley, magic was the science of understanding one’s self,” says Australian artist, curator and Crowley collector Robert