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The Lure of the Occult: Three Exhibitions at KUMU

If one dropped into KUMU in late March without prior knowledge of what was on show aside from the permanent display, like I did, one would find three temporary exhibitions (plus an extensive historical overview of Estonian printmaking not covered here) that, albeit seemingly being worlds and epochs apart, surprisingly resonated with each other in one aspect. They all shared, to a different extent, a relation to the mystical, the otherworldly, and the occult. When considered all together in parallel, even as a kind of chronological progression, these three exhibitions – Hilma af Klint. A Pioneer of Abstraction [1]; Metamorphoses of the Black Square. Interpretations of Malevich’s Work in Estonian Art [2]; and Death and Beauty. The Contemporary Gothic in Art and Visual Culture [3] – say something about the way our relationship with the less readily explainable, twilit corners of our own mind and the universe has changed. Above all, this progression shows how our understanding of the mystical and the macabre has possibly become overwhelmingly banal and dull.

While it presents works produced in the early decades of the 20th century, Hilma af Klint’s exhibition (curated Iris Müller-Westermann, Moderna Museet, Stockholm) is surprisingly the freshest one. Indeed, some of the works must have seemed radically abstract at the time of production (hence the author’s wish to keep them from being shown publicly for not less than twenty years after her own death, stated in her will), and even today the years specified under some of the more elaborate and “untimely” paintings look puzzling, as if the works violated some established temporal logic. On the other hand, what other form of expression could be more appropriate at a time when most of the Western world was deeply immersed in various strands of spiritualism, theosophy, and other occult and esoteric teachings, and looking for means to express the ties between the inner world of the mind and the outer universe was the general impulse? Still, some of af Klint’s pieces are so reminiscent of later 20th century esoteric imagery, say, 1960s psychedelic art or Kenneth Anger’s late 60s and early 70s “occult” short films like Invocation of My Demon Brother or Lucifer Rising that they truly look out of time and place. This is to say that something not as entrenched in pop culture as the work of some of af Klint’s contemporaries, e. g. Malevich, even somewhat obscure perhaps, especially considering the fact that the Stockholm Moderna Museet initially rejected the donation of a vast collection of her works in 1970, can really look like an anomaly when one encounters it in a historical context.

Film still from Invocation of My Demon Brother, Kenneth Anger, 1969

The nature of Hilma af Klint’s “occultism” is quite optimistic and idyllic, as one would expect an endeavour to convey the unity of the human realm and the cosmos to be. Yet what makes it all the more poignant and even oddly fragile is that it shares the historical timeline with more sinister occult doctrines like ariosophy, in their turn influenced to some extent by theosophy and anthroposophy, which reportedly provided some of the initial inspiration for the early occult currents of German Nazism. In a way, af Klint’s body of abstract spiritualist work represents occultism at a moment before ideas of spiritual purification and attainment of godlike transcendence took a troubled turn across Europe and produced one of the greatest traumas in its history (which can be sensed retroactively in Anger’s films, and which seems to have no foreshadowing whatsoever in the bright and elevated mystical world of af Klint).

Switching to the next exhibition and invoking the name of Malevich again, it can definitely be argued that his seminal Black Square stands for a comparable trauma in the world of Western art, which it has been haunting ever since it was produced. Aside from being a material manifesto of Suprematism and its radical pursuit of a new expressive language, Malevich’s Black Square is also a MacGuffin object of sorts, a latent driving force behind the development of Western modern and, to some extent, contemporary art during the 20th and into the 21st century. It is something that artists after Malevich have seemed to simultaneously desire and wish to uproot, something they have been trying to exorcise in a way, something that is both mute and commanding, a presence that one cannot but take into account. The Black Square is a persistent apparition that artists seem to be striving to overcome in themselves, to catapult it out of their range of vision, but it is impossible to do so precisely because it is the alpha and omega of art, both the beginning and the end, so there is really nothing in it to be overcome or exorcised, no real “substance”. So most of the attempts to tamper with it come to resemble rolling it up a hill in the manner of Sisyphus.

At least that is the impression one gets from Metamorphoses of the Black Square, curated by Elnara Taidre and dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the eponymous painting. The featured artists from various generations are making efforts to neutralize the imperative square by the predictable means of ironic transformation, physical extermination, trying the role of the square on themselves, yet after all these manipulations the square seems to remain self-sufficient and indivisible. So much for artistic exorcism – but what else can one do in the domineering presence of the unavoidable square with all of its connotations of the void, death, inhuman beauty and nihil?

It seems that the only way out is to reduce the void and nothingness to the abject, thereby oddly humanizing it and making it more tangible, but also increasingly less terrifying and even tautological. In Death and Beauty (curated by Eha Komissarov and Kati Ilves), heavily centered around the 90s and its fixation on the abject, the “occult” element evidently lies almost exclusively in the human body – dead, deformed, dismembered, abused. It is a kind of demystified mundane demonic possession which involves no other demon than the demon of pop culture with its perverted emphasis on the body – to the extent that even deformity and “abject” appearance of certain kinds is deemed glamorous, as in the case of Marilyn Manson, perhaps the most “pop” representative of the alternative music scene, who meets the viewer early on in the display.

One can also speak of a specific kind of “gentrification” that can be observed at the intersection of the contemporary art world and the subcultural underground recently. When artists and, particularly, curators take to exploring hitherto little-charted territories like “psychedelia”, “the gothic”, or “the underground” itself, one cannot but get an impression that their original oft-ambiguous and subversive dynamic gets lost in the process of the contemporary art scene and the “bohemian” milieu in general ironically capitalizing on their peculiar “sex appeal”. The newly emerged “lure of the occult” can already be seen for quite a while in various post-subcultural musical trends like witch house or grave wave and the excessive and self-exhausting use of “occult” imagery (triangles, crosses and the like) as well as stylized abject scenes as purely empty signifiers in the associated visual culture, a part of which is finding its way from clubs to exhibition spaces. The process of fetishization of the various outward “transgressive” attributes that used to belong to particular nonconformist subcultures (BDSM-like latex outfits or leather harnesses, heavy tattoing, the cult of images of death, deformity and self-harm etc.) is also inevitably a process of banalization and desensitization. Perhaps for this reason many of the works in Death and Beauty look kitschy, forced and frigid, just not deathlike or beautiful enough. Yet that might well be the exact nature of “the gothic” or “the macabre” as it is understood today.