Women artists have often, are often erased from the attention of art curators, critics, and historians but this phenomenon has been doubly so if the artist in question has appeared to be concerned with, or heaven forbid, guided by spiritual concerns, especially those seen as anomalous to the mainstream culture.
At the time of Christian sovereignty in the West, this might have been a perceived entanglement with the pagan, the natural world, and the magical. Christian dominance being supplanted in the nineteenth century by a growing scientific materialism, here the impermissible shifts to a perceived engagement with the magical, the paranormal, and any phenomena deemed impossible by the guardians of this 'scientism', not excluding those nestling in the art world temples of the rationalizing modern!
Jennifer Higgie shows in her engaging, 'The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art, and the Spirit World' that this does a disservice not only to the women themselves but to the actualities of art history (and ultimately to the possibilities of art itself).
Within these pages, we find alert, swift vignettes of what an ''alternative" art history might have looked like (and could look like) if women and the spaces of the spiritual were given deeper, more sustained attention.
Needless to say, Hilma af Klint, the current 'superstar' of this re-emergence of the repressed is featured prominently - her Guggenheim show in 2019 was their best-ever attended exhibit, and Higgie reminds us, in a way that the curators of that show did not, of the symmetry of one esoteric artist - informed by spiritualism and Anthroposophy - who wanted her work exhibited as a whole in a specially designed tower being shown in the spiraling, tower-like structure of the Guggenheim designed by a Gurdjieff influenced architect in Frank Lloyd Wright!
Here too is the extraordinary, mercurial Madame Blavatsky and her successor, Annie Besant, whose 'Thought-Forms' (with C.W. Leadbeater) published in 1905 relate, with illustrations, the relationships that exist between thought, rhythm, the flow of energy, and color - a book whose subtle influences of subsequent art history, especially the development of abstraction, has barely been plummed. Both Kandinsky and Mondrian, the latter presently paired with af Klint at Tate Modern, knew it well, as did af Klint herself. It feels no longer possible to simply note that all three artists were influenced by x or y stream of late C19th occultism and then pass over to discuss their formal techniques, their surfaces, without wrestling intelligently with their depths - what is it that they meant to express, how does the art meaningfully lead you into its embodied mysteries, mysteries that in some cases are possibly very precise, others more invitingly open-ended.
However, the book's own strengths lie not in any systematic exploration of these issues, the book is too anecdotal for that, but as a series of invitations to meet disparate and beguiling women who have swum in these oceans of possibility and have sought to allow, and create, works that seek to evoke them - and to range freely over the last century until now, introducing them and inviting further entanglement. Noting on the way how often these women have been influencing better-known male artists - stories only now re-emerging from their past erasure.
We meet painters of Tarot cards, weavers of wonderful fabric sculptures, occult surrealists, painters of fairy, and a host of others, exploring multiple media from a wide range of perspectives.
Common threads include the importance of indigenous art cultures - the Aborigines of Higgie's native Australia, for example, for being inhabitants of a living cosmos, full of persons, some of which are human. The influences of Theosophy, Spiritualism, and Anthroposophy - with their blending of the mystical with the experimental. The touch of Surrealism permitting the importance of dreams and the irruption of the irrational or a-rational. The sense that art could/should be a process of healing and that it carries embodied meanings waiting to be received, inscribed in our own embodiment. That the world is a place of incipient magic, synchronicity, and happenings that take us beyond the ordinary, deepening the felt meaning of our lives.
Higgie lays many of these intersecting pathways before us, embodies them in the actual lives and practices of given artists and their works, and invites us to wander off in their company in whichever way speaks to our particular desires and conditions.
It is one of those books that gives you a very satisfying sense, as you take notes, of multiple, challenging, and refreshing discoveries ahead.
'Fire Sounds' 1930 by Agnes Pelton
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