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Magical Thinking.

My artistic practice may well be the unconscious expression of a form of magical thinking rooted in my early interest in the occult and alchemy. Such interests permeated Renaissance humanism and probably arose due to a revived interest in Neoplatonism. According to Philip Ball,

‘… the Neoplatonic universe is organised according to principles of correspondence, for example so that certain plants and metals are associated with particular planets that govern their behaviour in an invisible conspiracy of sympathies.’

Philip Ball, Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen (London: The Bodley Head, 2014), 20.

He also writes that,

‘These relationships were often revealed in the outward forms of nature: they could be read literally from the surface of things.’

Philip Ball, Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen (London: The Bodley Head, 2014), 20.

 

Such correspondences form the basis for sympathetic or natural magic. I was fascinated by the systems of correspondences in which different substances, plants and minerals were aligned to certain planetary influences based on a form of sympathy or similarity. Later I became interested in alchemy and early herbal medicine in which the same systems of correspondences were also at work.

After reading Carl Gustav Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy, which I came across in a second-hand book shop, I felt as though I had been given the keys to a silent language of alchemical images. A language also rooted in a system of correspondence. Slowly I began to immerse myself in philosophy and mysticism and developed an interest in Frankfurt School theory which has a marked antipathy to the work of Jung. I forgot my earlier interest in sympathetic magic and alchemy, although I have always thought of art as a form of alchemy due to its ability to effect material transformations.

I then came across the writings of Walter Benjamin and was completely entranced. I now realise that this is due to his ability to perceive correspondences, in Peter Demetz words,

‘… in an age without magic...’

Peter Demetz, “Introduction,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (Boston and New York: Mariner Books, 2019), XXII.

 

Peter Demetz suggests that for Walter Benjamin,

‘It is man’s mimetic faculty in the widest sense that brings together what seems split and divided; the wholeness of the universe is sustained… by “natural correspondences” that in turn stimulate and challenge man to respond by creating analogies, similarities, something that is akin.’

Peter Demetz, “Introduction,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (Boston and New York: Mariner Books, 2019), XXII.

The magical bond within my own artistic practice appears to be a resemblance or similarity, that evokes the original image first translated into an artwork many years ago.

‘The hypothesis of substitutability… is a mode of magical reasoning because it asserts the identity of like to like, behind the deceptive screen of experience. Art, too, is a manipulation of the similarities and identities proposed by the substitutional model of production. Art, therefore, cannot be understood as an enlightened successor to magic.’

Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 11.

Below are three more pages from the copy book I am working on.









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