Inever used to begin my weekly round of gallery visits with the words of Toyah Willcox, the actress and pop star, ringing in my ears, but recently I have found it useful. The art world has developed a passion for witchery, the occult, tarot, all forms of hocus-pocus. So it often helps to remember Willcox’s otherworldly observation: “Some people believe tarot cards are a form of black magic or senseless new age mysticism, but for me, they are a practical way of talking directly to the universe.” Who among us would not want to talk directly to the universe?
Up and down today’s art world, on all its levels, we are watching a retreat from reason and a stampede towards unreason. The Tate’s Cornish outlet, Tate St Ives, has just opened a retrospective devoted to the local occultist Ithell Colquhoun (1906-88), whose work has become so fiercely trendy it’s rare to find a contemporary theme show that excludes it.
Colquhoun’s occult hopes, as explained in her magic text The Water-stone of the Wise, were to replace a world of masculine bondage with a universe guided cosmically by the Twins, “a boy and a girl, perpetually joined by an ectoplasmic substance which is warmed by the solar and lunar currents of their bodies”. If we follow the hermaphrodite twins, and overturn the masculine world of “lordship and bondage” we will find “a clear, joyous free day”, she enticed.
While Colquhoun is omnipresent in the British art world, the global phenomenon to notice is the adoration being lavished on the wild imaginings of the Swedish mystic Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). Klint did not believe that her art issued from her. She insisted, instead, that she was merely the conduit for the creations of her occult overlords, the High Masters, with whom she communicated at seances.
The spooky abstract art that poured out of her has just been on show at the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Another exhibition opens at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in May. In recent years it has been fêted at Tate Modern, the Venice Biennale — everywhere.
So what’s going on? Why the artistic stampede towards distant corners of occult fantasy? A big cause, probably the biggest, is that occult fantasies can be reshaped easily into attacks on the true enemy here — the patriarchy.
In nine out of ten instances — we’ll come to the rare exception later — the support for witchery and hermeticism is coming from women artists and female curators who have discovered an alternative value system that allows them to challenge the masculine thinking that has shaped the artistic canon. In particular, it allows them to ignore the macho art instructions of modernism, an aesthetic imprisonment that enchained the entire 20th century.
The chief reason why af Klint is so popular today is because she was producing abstract art several years before the official “invention” of abstraction by Kandinsky and the modernists. A woman got there first. When Colquhoun calls for an overthrow of masculine bondage, she is calling for diverse artistic tastes and wider emotional freedom.
So art’s stampede towards unreason is being driven by sociopolitical hope: the rise of the art woman. But that cannot be the only reason why the Warburg Institute, in London, beacon of enlightenment and home to immense university holdings of aesthetic knowledge, has put on a celebration of tarot that would have Willcox waggling her toes with delight.
The show gallops through the gripping history of the fortune cards and gives serious attention to a coven of characters who until recently would never have been treated to a gallery examination by adults. Even Aleister Crowley, the mad satanist, “the wickedest man in the world” — the aforementioned masculine exception — gets a niche that he shares with his occult disciple, the painter Lady Frieda Harris.
Together they created the Thoth Tarot, the most radical new tarot pack to be produced in Europe since Renaissance times. It’s an unsettling thing, full of horned demons and rays of radiating hyper-light. If Crowley had put Harris’s designs on clothing instead of in books, he would have invented the heavy metal T-shirt 30 years early.
The display makes clear that tarot, in its many forms, has played a persistent role in European thinking. Unreason, the argument goes, is the human norm, and reason the aberration. And with the world growing ever crazier, all systems based on the supremacy of reason have reached their sell-by date. On our nutty earth, the nuttiest nut is king.
This fascination with the occult displayed by our public galleries has flowed out into the private sector too. Magic, witchery, gender fantasy, have become unstoppable topics. Delaine Le Bas, an artist of Romany heritage with occult tastes who was shortlisted for the Turner prize last year, has just opened a show throbbing with hermeneutics at the Quench Gallery in Margate. At Pilar Corrias’s London space, the exciting Sophie von Hellermann gives us Moonage, an ambitious assembly of artistic modes — furniture, textiles, paintings — devoted to the impact of the moon on love.
Downstairs at Pilar Corrias, Georg Wilson, a female artist with a manly name, confronts us with The Last Oozings, a bewitching display influenced heavily by Victorian fairy painters. The results are fabulous: a wacky journey through spectral landscapes and tangled botany that would never have been allowed in modernist times.
If this is what the focus on hocus-pocus brings, I’m all for it. Tarot reading should be made compulsory in art schools.
Ithell Colquhoun, at Tate St Ives, to May 5; Tarot, at the Warburg Institute, London, to Apr 30; Sophie von Hellermann and Georg Wilson, at Pilar Corrias, London, to Mar 22