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How do we define contemporary art? In the most basic sense, contemporary art is art made since the 1960s and of the present day usually by living artists. Challenging and provocative, contemporary artists combine multiple mediums and blur the boundaries of what is considered art. These works often challenge our ideas about what art should look like or how it should behave. An open mind, and a willingness to engage in conversation and debate are essential when interacting with a contemporary artwork. Oftentimes, we as the observer may find similarities in our own experiences when interacting with these pieces.
True to this definition, would be the large selection of contemporary art we, at Stephan Welz & Co, have on our upcoming March auction in Johannesburg. Works worth highlighting would be Senzo Shabangu’s Sins of our leaders, Diane Victor’s Trojan III, Bambo Sibiya’s The Portrait of a Man, and William Kentridge’s Black Monkey Thorn, amongst others.
Above: Regi Bardavid, Present Time, oil paint and bees wax on canvas, 88 by 88 by 4,5cm, R3 000 – R5 000. Right: Senzo Shabangu, Sins of our Leaders, colour plate linocut, sheet size: 60 by 120cm, R8 000 – R9 000
Norman Clive Catherine, Roadshow, lithograph, sheet size: 50 by 65,5cm, R13 000 – R15 000
These works embody the versatile experimentation and avant-garde approach synonymous with contemporary art. Through their work, each artist investigates personal or cultural identity, questions social and institutional structures, as well as complex issues that influence our continually changing society. This art form gives a voice to issues that society normally denies or ignores entirely. A gripping example would be the Child Soldier by Willie Bester. The piece is confrontational and demands the full attention of the viewer. Bester has said of his work “I am sometimes tempted to go to the seaside and to paint beautiful things from nature. But I do not do it because my art has to be taken as a nasty tasting medicine for awakening consciences.”
Senzo Shabangu explores themes of space, alienation, and identity. City landscapes often emerge from below or are suspended above the figures he depicts, creating a suffocating and overwhelming sense of being surrounded and consumed by the city. Alongside these themes, Shabangu also explores notions of how people live and the politics surrounding forced removals. Shabangu has expressed that it is his duty as an artist to reflect the uncertain and difficult times of terror, inequality, and alienation amongst other issues, that we live in as these issues affect how we relate to one another.
We are looking forward to our March auction to showcase these thought-provoking artworks and invite the public to start challenging their ideas about art. Contact our specialists for more information or to view these works up close. Visit www.swelco.co.za for further updates or email support@swelco.co.za and our specialists will gladly assist.
Nelson Makamo, Portrait with Glasses, mixed media on paper, 99 by 71cm, R100 000 – R120 000 Bambo Sibiya, Portrait of a Man, mixed media on canvas, 113 by 79,5cm, R30 000 – R50 000
HOW BOSCH EXPERIENCED HIS OWN KIND OF HELL
hyperallergic.com By by Ed Simon
Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (circa 1480–1490) oil on panel, 153.2 x 86.6 inches, located in Madrid, Museo del Prado (image courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
Around the turn of the 14th century, for reasons still not completely clear, the average annual temperature underwent a precipitous drop for the next half millennia during what scientists have termed a “Little Ice Age.” Planting seasons were reduced throughout France and the Holy Roman Empire; lush vineyards in the Low Countries and England were blighted; the River Thames regularly froze over (until well into the Industrial Revolution). For two years starting in 1315 massive crop failures throughout Europe led to thousands of deaths. A generation later, and a population already sickly from famine was far more at risk from the bubonic plague, which in the infamous pandemic of 1347 (the Black Death) may have killed a third of Europeans.
These years of pandemic and climate change were well attested to in later artwork, especially in Germany and the Netherlands. The frozen lake and low winter light in Pieter Brueghel the Elders’ 1565 “The Hunters in the Snow,” the pustulecovered Christ in Mathias Grünewald’s 1523 “Crucifixion,” those grinning and corpuscular demonic skeletons from Hans Holbein’s 1526 “Danse Macabre,” and the eschatological mania of Albrecht Dürer’s 1496 woodcut “The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse.”
Before all of them, however, was the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, born sometime around 1450, who was at the height of his artistic skill during the decades on either side of 1500, and died in 1516, only a year before all that northern European gothic mania would culminate in Martin Luther’s “95 Theses.” Alice K. Turner described Bosch in The History of Hell as “one of the handful of truly original creators of hell.”
I would argue that more than even that, Bosch was both the inventor of the modern Western imagining of the demonic while transcending that very same tradition — all because of bad weather and moldy bread.
Since he was a psychedelic visionary, it’s been hypothesized that the deranged piety of the painter was inspired by ergot poisoning. Claviceps purpurea, the most common variety of the fungus ergot, produces an alkaloid known as ergotamine, which in chemical composition is closely related to lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. Because of the damp growing seasons, ergot rot was endemic throughout northern Europe, and infected rye often found its way into bread. John Waller explains in The Dancing Plague: The Strange, True Story of an Extraordinary Illness that the mold could “induce delusions, twitching, and violent jerking,” mentioning how Alsatian millers had fitted their wooden pipes which transported flour with intricate carvings of distinctly Boschian faces as a reminder of hallucinatory risks.
Art historians have long looked for some explanation of Bosch’s imagery: a shrieking insectoid demon with globular, coal-black eyes wearing a Flemish matron’s chaperon; an avian devil with a chamber pot as a crown stuffing a nude man into its gaping beak; a pig in a nun’s habit forcefully embracing a screaming man. Those are just details from the dense tableaux of his most celebrated work – “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” painted between 1495 and 1505. Jeffrey Burton Russell argues in Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World that part of Bosch’s impact isn’t only because he “introduced a complex and varied symbolism open to interpretation,” but also because he “shifted the focus of evil from the demonic to the human.” Part of what strikes viewers of Bosch’s work is that regardless of how grotesque his demons are, they are also individuals.
Laurinda S. Dixon makes the most connoisseurial case for Bosch’s ergotism in an essay from Art Journal, but ultimately any diagnosis must only be conjecture. We feel the need to explain Bosch’s macabre obsessions in some way, the singular, fantastical, unprecedented nature of his paintings.
Bosch can be partially explained by the context of the High Middle Ages: The distinctly Teutonic religious malaise and mania which he shares with Brueghel and Dürer and which reached its apotheosis with the coming Reformation, and the melancholy which marked a region that had gotten colder, sicker, and hungrier. While the Italian Renaissance has its share of demonic imagery, nothing was produced that quite matched Bosch for horrific import. For that matter, nothing else was produced anywhere that quite equaled his hellish vision. Both allusive and illusive, because a central attraction to Bosch has been the sense that he possesses some ability to divine cursed verisimilitude, that if his images seem too remarkable that it’s because he actually knew what hell looked like. I venture such a claim only to emphasize just how otherworldly and sui generis Bosch happens to be, a necromancer who was able to pull hell upward to earth and to preserve it in oil and wood. As Turner argues, Bosch’s “demons and tortures are more varied and imaginative than anything we have seen yet.” No other artist in Western painting has ever captured such an enduring demonic imaginary like Bosch has. He single-handedly perfected the visual idiom of perdition, and the result has been five centuries of nightmares, the progeny of the Netherlandish painter visible in contemporary Satanic imagery from horror movies to heavy metal music.
There is an eternal quality about Bosch, not just that he influences modern culture, but that his multitude of horrors somehow exists outside of any simple framework of past, present, and future. He’s endlessly interpretable, and what exactly any occult revelation he presents might evoke or connotate must by necessity shift. In our own years of pandemic and climate change, in my book Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology, I return to another segment of “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” describing what looks like, if anything, a “fiery cityscape, collapsed and burning skyscrapers, twisted steel I-beams and crumbling concrete, the haze of nuclear fallout across the skyline of a once-mighty and modern metropolis.” Whether Bosch is in hell or we are remains as unanswered as the origins of his strange and terrible visions.
Detail view of Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (circa 1480–1490) oil on panel, 153.2 x 86.6 inches, located in Madrid, Museo del Prado (image courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
ACROSS THE U.S., MUSEUMS ARE EXPLORING SPIRITUALISM AND THE OCCULT AS POWERFUL, UNSUNG FORCES IN ART HISTORY
“Another World” and “Supernatural America” offer a chance to reconsider the politics of long-derided cultural movements.
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Columbia Industries. Mystic Answer Board (ca. 1940s). Collection of Brandon Hodge. Photo: Brandon Hodge / MysteriousPlanchette.com.
In art circles, spirituality is coming out of closet as curators and critics reconsider the influence of religion on artists from Robert Smithson to Andy Warhol. But spirituality’s cousins, spiritualism and the occult, remain cloaked with suspicion. There is now, as there long has been, an aura of disrepute around these practices: they reek of charlatanism, crackpot science, and New Age gullibility. A few years ago, when I was writing an article on art and spirituality, I was warned by a prominent writer on the subject to avoid the word spiritualism. And indeed, when major art museums touch on the subject of spiritualism or the occult, it is generally to debunk or satirize. The 2018 Hilma af Klint exhibition at the Guggenheim was the rare exception, but even there the curators seemed discomfited by the artist’s insistence that her works should be seen as messages from her spirit guides.
Two exhibitions currently on view take spiritualism and the occult seriously, examining not only works made by artists in touch with other realities, but also the way that such explorations are woven into the fabric of American art and culture. Both exhibitions have extensive, well-researched catalogues that make their cases even to those of us unable or unwilling to travel in the time of Covid, and are well worth engaging with.
First some definitions: While spirituality has evolved into an all-purpose term encompassing myriad antimaterialistic approaches to art, spiritualism has a specific meaning. It flowered in the 19th century as a religious movement aimed at proving the immortality of the soul by establishing communication with spirits of the dead. The occult encompasses a wider group of practices, spiritualism among them, based on the belief that secret or hidden knowledge can give access to otherworldly or magical energies.
Agnes Pelton, Nurture (1940). Collection of the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, gift of the Marie Eccles Caine Foundation.
Transcendental Painting
“Another World,” which opened in October at the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, resuscitates the Transcendental Painting Group, a Southwest-based collective that emerged in 1930s New Mexico. As one of its adherents explained, its members were seeking “a richer and deeper land—the world of peace—love and human relations projected through pure form.”
These artists drew heavily on the occult philosophy of Theosophy and explored such phenomena as synesthesia, vibration, sacred geometry, and cosmic images in their quest to reach a transcendent state of consciousness. As curator Michael Duncan explains, they adopted the name Transcendental, not from Emerson’s fusion of nature and the divine, but from the quest to discover the inner spiritual depths within each artist. Today the best-known member of TPG is Agnes Pelton, the subject of a dazzling 2020 exhibition at the Whitney Museum. The others are virtually unknown outside New Mexico, where all but the Southern California-based Pelton lived. TPG existed as a group for only three years before being disrupted by the advent of the Second World War. But the artists continued to work individually for decades after.
Stylistically, they present diverse approaches to transcendence, ranging from the crisp, precisionist geometry of Raymond Jonson and the almost-landscapes of Lawren Harris to the Zen-inspired improvisations of William Lumpkins and the gentle biomorphism of Florence Miller Pierce.
Duncan argues that TPG’s invisibility is a result of “the double disadvantage of being an openly
Raymond Jonson, Casein Tempera No. 1 (1939). Albuquerque Museum, gift of Rose Silva and Evelyn Gutierrez.
spiritual movement from the wrong side of the Mississippi.” Until recently, art historians have shown great reluctance to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence of the influence of occult ideas on the development of modernism. As the canon splinters, the paintings in “Another World” open up new avenues for understanding the evolution of American abstraction, especially as it took place outside the major centers of the mid-century American art world.
Paranormal Art History
While TPG’s rhetoric of inner Godhood and the archaic Unconscious may still raise eyebrows, the works fit comfortably in the art historical space currently being opened up by the huge public response to the Hilma af Klint show. “Supernatural America: the Paranormal in American Art” presents a thornier challenge.
This exhibition—opening at the Minneapolis Institute of Art after travels to Toledo and Louisville—has been curated by the MIA’s Robert Cozzolino, who reports that he personally has had other-worldly experiences. Rather than the easier-to-digest influence of occultism on abstraction, Cozzolino has chosen to emphasize its manifestations as they occur in figurative art. He follows these through the whole swath of American history employing a definition of the paranormal that encompasses everything from séances and spirit photography to mesmerism and UFOs.
As set out in the catalogue, the historical record includes some fascinating case studies. For instance, there’s the story of Gertrude Abercrombie, painter and self-described witch whose works represent herself as an elongated figure who levitates, drifts through sparse landscapes, or consorts with her animal “familiars” in spooky domestic interiors.
Above: Gertrude Abercrombie, Search for Rest (1951). Collection of Sandra and Bram Dijkstra. Photo: Sandy and Bram Dijkstra. Opposite Page: Lawren Harris, Painting No. 4 (ca. 1939). Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
An essentially unschooled artist who was an aficionado of the prewar Chicago jazz scene, Abercrombie created eerie works that seem born of a rebellion against the strictures of conventional marriage and motherhood.
Representing another form of rebellion, we meet the elegant Lady Campbell, a British aristocrat, cross-dresser, actress, and spiritualist. She served as inspiration for one of Whistler’s most ethereal paintings, a representation of a woman’s face and hands emerging mysteriously from an enveloping darkness, which was lauded as a spiritualist icon. The MIA show also introduces Wilson Bentley whose obsessive photographs of vanishing snowflakes are seen here as part of a post-Civil War hangover, with the ephemeral crystals providing a metaphor for the flickering essence of the souls of fallen soldiers.
Contemporary Encounters
When it comes to contemporary art, the exhibition casts a wide net. Several artists take inspiration from historical manifestations of the occult. The late Jeremy Blake’s 2002 video Winchester is an impressionistic tour of the ghost haunted Winchester mansion in San Jose California that was home to the eccentric widow of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Rachel Rose’s Wil-o-Wisp evokes the life of 17th century mystic Elspeth Blake who was persecuted for her practice of magic and healing.
But especially fascinating are works by artists who themselves have had occult experiences. Cozzolino’s introductory essay opens with a discussion of a set of early works by painter Jack Whitten. These comprised spectral images that the artist felt had emerged unbidden from early memories of ghost stories surrounding a lynching in his father’s Mississippi hometown. The works are not reproduced in the catalogue, Cozzolino notes, because Whitten’s gallery doesn’t want his work associated with spiritualism. But as described, they would seem to bear a striking resemblance to late 19thcentury practice of thought photography which purported to provide records of their subject’s thought as transmitted by energy waves directly from the brain.
Cozzolino quotes a statement by Whitten: “I LIKE THE NOTION OF PAINTING AS OBJECT USED TO SEDUCE SPIRIT.” And, indeed, the exhibition as a whole suggests a connection between African American folk knowledge, African religious practices, and the profound sympathy for the supernatural found in the work of many African American artists.
Some cases in point: Howardina Pindell evokes the spirit-haunted Middle Passage where so many captives perished on their way to slavery, while Ellen Gallagher imagines the mythical land of Drexciya said to be populated by aquatic beings born from the pregnant women thrown overboard from slave ships. Whitfield Lovell’s Visitation: The Richmond Project conjures the ghosts of the residents of post-Civil War America’s first successful Black entrepreneurial neighborhood. Works by Betye and Allison Saar explore the tradition of “conjur women,” those herbalists and healers in rural southern communities who are said to traffic in both black and white magic. The catalogue of “Supernatural America” also gives substantial space to Renee Stout’s The Rootworker’s Worktable, an installation that presents the artist’s version of one such herbalist’s tools for gaining access to the spiritual world.
Contemporary African American artists are not alone in their openness to the occult. “Supernatural America” makes a point of presenting works from groups often marginalized by mainstream American culture, among them Native Americans, self taught and outsider artists, UFO abductees, psychics, and witches. In this vein, it also provides a mystical context for works by feminist artists like Carolee Schneemann, Mary Beth Edelson, and Ana Mendieta. An essay on their practices suggests that feminist art history shares the culture’s general squeamishness about spiritual matters, leading it to downplay the tremendous interest shown by ‘70s feminists in ritual, Great Goddess archetypes, and the sacred feminine.
The Politics of the Occult
The selections in “Supernatural America” emphasize progressive aspects of the occult impulse. This is in keeping with the historical record. In the 19th century, spiritualism, in particular, belonged to a constellation of interests that included abolition, women’s rights, socialism, temperance, and other social reforms.
William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of The Liberator, the foremost abolitionist newspaper, was an avid Spiritualist. Mary Todd Lincoln conducted séances in the White House. In their monumental History of Woman Suffrage, pioneering feminists
Betye Saar, The View from the Sorcerer’s Window (1966). Collection of halley k harrisburg and Michael D. Rosenfeld. Photo: Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. Courtesy the Artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, CA. © Betye Saar.
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton declared, “The only religious sect in the world… that has recognized the equality of women is the Spiritualists.” Historian Ann Braude argues that spiritualists and social reformers shared a radical individualism based on resistance to hierarchies and enforced orthodoxies. She maintains, “The religious anarchism of spiritualism provided a positive religious expression that harmonized with the extreme individualism of radical reform.”
However, Braude notes that contemporary narratives of the struggle for women’s rights have largely erased the spiritualists’ contribution. The same is true for accounts of abolition. The suppression of these histories have contributed to the occult’s bad odor—especially at a time when skepticism and individualism have taken a reactionary turn, manifesting themselves in the anti-vax movement and the proliferation of conspiracy theories around the belief that Bill Gates plans to insert micro chips into our brains.
Indeed, you could say that the decoupling of spiritualism and the occult from the history of progressive ideas mirrors their decoupling from the history of art. But as the utopian dreams of groups like TPG and the individualistic quests of the outsiders in “Supernatural America” demonstrate, the occult is deeply entwined with American art and identity.
It is often said that belief in mysticism, occult energies, and immaterial realities grows stronger in times of trauma. It is easy today to scoff at the obvious fraudulence of some 19th century spirit manifestations. But during that time of social, political, and philosophical upheaval, there was a widespread tendency to spiritualize such emerging technologies as the photograph, the telegraph, and electromagnetism. Today, many of our own emerging sciences, from Artificial Intelligence to the study of dark matter to the renewed attention to the therapeutic properties of psilocybin, again demonstrate that the line between science and “pseudo science” can be difficult to draw.
In times of multiple crises, settled certainties become undone. “Another World” and “Supernatural America” suggest how artists can help us look beyond the world we only think we know.
Renée Stout, <em?The Rootworker’s Worktable (2011). Karen and Robert Duncan Collection, Lincoln NE. Photo: Renée Stout.
