Last night the Drawing Center hosted a panel to accompany the exhibition '3 x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing' by Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Martin. The panel consisted of Griselda Pollock, Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art at Leeds University, Bracha L. Ettinger, a Israeli-French artist, psychoanalyst and feminist theorist, Guido Magnaguagno (who is on the board of trustees of the Emma Kunz Foundation) and Birgit Pelzer, the Brussels based writer and critic. The topic of conversation was to examine the role of the artist as spiritual healer and educator in providing an antidote to a society focused on material consumption. Guido shared his experience in arriving at the exhibition, traveling through the materialism of Canal street, contrasted with finding himself alone with the paintings, experiencing the happiness and freedom that the images offered up to the viewer.
Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz and Agnes Martin were three artists who all used geometric abstraction as a means of organizing and expressing their ideas about life as a means of connecting the invisible with the visible. Using the repetition of shapes such as circles, squares and triangles all three artists practiced art as a rigorous spiritual practice, as a path to perfection and beauty.
"When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye, it is in the mind."
Agnes Martin.
Agnes Martin, Grey Stone II, 1961
They lived in seclusion, deeply motivated by their relationship to nature, completely dedicated to seeking of truth through their art, indifferent to worldly fame and the compromise that accompanies such desires. I am reminded of the path trod centuries earlier by spiritual and powerful women, St Brigid of Kildare and Hildegard of Bingen. Perhaps in the vast untamed wildness of nature, such as the southwest desert, such strong and unique women could find a place to find themselves, be themselves, free from the normalizing, confining expectations of society.
Griselda described the panel as an "event" - something is brought into culture when art is made. We reconsider the works on display, in the light of the present. As Larry Poons has said, Art is a calling. According to Joseph Campbell a calling is a journey into the unknown to bring back a treasure, a gift that will help society. The interesting thing about such journeys, is that they are made alone, and with great courage. The artist cannot take the rest of the tribe with her. Many times, the great artists are ahead of their times and are neither understood nor seen by their peers. Vincent Van Gogh's life was an example of this. He was totally dedicated to exploring his relationship with the sacred, through the hard work and discipline of his art. But no-one "saw" his art.
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
Wittengenstein.
Emma Kunz understood this. She gave strict instructions that her art was not to be shown to the public until twenty years after her death. 42 years later in Soho, NYC, the audience was excited by the ideas her work presented as a vehicle for mysterious and healing forces. But in her own day her work was invisible amongst her artistic peers. She stood outside the prevailing thought forms of her day. She lived alone and took no money for her healing sessions. She trusted enough in life to live on the goodwill of her patients. Today, we are only at the threshold of seeing how she worked. Her geometric based grids are incredible to experience. They move in-between two dimensional and three dimensional space, moving toward and away from you, triggering changes in consciousness.
The drawings served the purpose of correcting imbalances in the patient's energy field by restructuring the blocked energy into an organized pattern of health. Her drawings are like musical or auditory images. She was influenced by harmonic symbolism, that is, the symbolism of the acoustic phenomena of music and the use of numeric rations in so called intervallic proportions. I have not seen drawings before that looked so "musical." There's a great essay in the catalogue entitled the "The Melody of Structures." As Emma herself said, "Try to weave the brightest note into the musical image." The light as a motivating force has often been explored in art but the relationship between the structure of art and the structure of music has had far less attention.
Emma Kunz, Work No. 194
One question that was raised during the panel but not discussed was the role of the feminine in modern art. I feel that the divine feminine has been all but lost from modern art. Perhaps this exhibition contains clues as to the role of the feminine in art. Three strong spiritual woman pursuing their own unique paths to the realization of the spiritual in art. Hilma af Klint interested me in this respect. In the catalog it mentions that her approach was different from that of the traditional Modernist because her practice "was not the deliberate attempt to progress from realism". Her abstraction was not the result of rigorous intellectual pursuit but an intuitive and spontaneous surrendering to universal forces. Apparently she never sought out this responsibility and she, herself, wondered if she might be "sick."
This reminds me of some of Caroline Myss's work on the path of the modern mystic where our life's calling might be something we feel ill-suited to do, and involve a period of "spiritual madness" or painful relinquishment of notions of the "Self." Perhaps this might be an example of the feminine force working through art, in surrendering the ego, turning inward to the unseen world for inspiration, rather than looking towards the rewards and accolades of the external world for direction.
Hilma af Klint, Series No VII, No 3f, February-March, 1920
Bracha Ettinger had a quote from Agnes Martin in the catalog that I think is extremely useful:
"Not thinking, planning, scheming is a discipline. Not caring or striving is a discipline ... Defeated you will stand at the door of your house and welcome the unknown, putting behind you all that is known. Defeated, having no place go you will perhaps wait and be overtaken. As in the night. To penetrate the night is one thing. But to be penetrated by the night that is to be overtaken."
The "spiritual in art" is currently not in vogue. In popular culture, it is connected with fluffy angels, esoteric yoga postures or questionable New Age practices. Yet Kandinsky wrote a whole book on "Concerning the Spiritual in Art". The book had a profound influence on Georgia O'Keeffe. He didn't stand alone in believing that the role of the artist was a scientific exploration into the realms of the invisible. Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian were influenced by theosophy. The theosophists believed that "To unite one's soul to the Universal Soul requires but a perfectly pure mind. Through self-contemplation, perfect chastity, and purity of body, we may approach nearer to It, and receive, in that state, true knowledge and wonderful insight." In the light of this art can become a system of mapping pictorially the unseen, invisible forces of the spiritual world.
I don't think that art can be separated from the consciousness and intention of the artist creating it. As one person in the audience asked "Why is it necessary to classify art in terms of abstract theory and history when the artists themselves didn't see their work in that context?" For me, painting is a journey into the unknown. The very act of painting opens up a gap between who I think of myself as being (my ego) and a mysterious other which cannot be described, thought of, labeled, executed. The act of painting itself informs the journey. The act of surrender to the process and the energy it brings up illuminates the sign posts. Some people have described this place as an ocean. This can be particularly seen in Agnes Martin's grid paintings where form dissolves into formless and names, labels, are lost in the actual experience of entering the world that her paintings calls into being. As Agnes had said, it is this "remembered" place of perfection that calls forth to us to capture it's truth in creativity.
Art created from such a place of deep uncertainty and the edges of our truth, becomes an opportunity, a doorway into a new world of experience for the viewer. This is why art cannot be separated from the consciousness of the artist. Just as a person who has experienced cosmic consciousness, can lift others up to visit, albeit for a moment, the world they inhabit (for example, Walt Whitman) when a painting is successful we, as the viewer recognize it. We are grabbed from the gut, transported, transfixed, moved, touched, woken up. No amount of formalism or abstract art theory can give us this feeling if it wasn't there in the first place. Even though we may each attempt to use language in unique and different ways to express that which originates from beyond language, grounded in the purely pictorial, whether informed by rigorous art history analysis or popular culture ideas, great art moves us, opens us up to new worlds and opens us to new levels of opening to the work itself. That is why, last night, the room was on fire and people had to be dragged away long after closing.
In the words of Paul Klee:
"What remains of life is the spiritual. The spiritual in art, or we might simply call it the artistic ...abstraction in a picture is absolute, and perhaps can be recognized as such by psychic feeling. Creation lives as genesis under the visible surface of the work. All those touched by the spirit see this in retrospect, but only the creative see it looking forward (into the future)."
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