Chris Burden (1946-2015), title of painting not created yet
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Chris Burden (1946-2015), title of painting not created yet |
THE BEGINNING OF DUCHAMP’S OCCULT ART
Glyn Thompson; Metaphysics: Occult Munich (Part 1)Metaphysics: In A Science for the Soul, Corinna Treitel[130] examines the culture of the occult in the Germany which Duchamp toured in 1912. Here the everyday, very much exoteric, occult was respectable, and at the time, the subject which had been the focus of philosophical debate at the boundary between science and spiritualism for the previous half century, the incursions of the unconscious as a factor of human psychology, still retained an indeterminate status. Thus the nub of the issue which Treitel identifies was epistemology. The unconscious was sited now in the middle of a new zone to which philosophers, psychologists, physiologists, physicists, doctors, clerics and educated and lay people could all lay legitimate claim. But under whose control this novel approach to the experimental study of the human psyche would fall, since it was a multidisciplinary effort to establish the" criteria for objective knowledge, while at the same time leaving room for intellectual freedom and moral values", remained unresolved. The human psyche and fourth dimension belonged to no one, never functioning as private property. Mathematicians wanted ownership of the latter, and psychologists, power over the former, but X-rays, in the 1890's, and quantum theory, in the 1920's, never became the private property of any group. Astro-physicist Zöllner appropriated the fourth dimension from Helmholz, who appropriated it from the mathematicians; German occultists appropriated concepts from German science: and as Zöllner passed the fourth dimension into general culture, so mediums and magicians evoked scientific research. Experiments were commonly carried on at home, with a mixture of domestic props such as coffee tables, bowls of flour, writing slates and scientific instruments; it was compasses and prisms which unlocked the fourth dimension, as Duchamp himself would later demonstrate, with his optical and geometric devices. It was neither fully laboratory based, nor entirely domesticated, neither physics nor philosophy, elite science or popular practice. The origins, in the sixteenth century, of this epistemological antinomy are examined by Russell Hvolbek.[131] In the late 15th and 16th centuries theories of knowledge and their mode of investigation remained the same but the subjects of their studies changed, evidenced in the shift from Caspar Schwenckfeld's concerns about how to attain salvation in a comprehensible cosmos to Jacob Böhme's attempt to understand God's universe, and man's place in it, now made incomprehensible by the new science. Hvolbek notes the rise during the last quarter of the sixteenth century of discussion of questions about cosmology, natural philosophy and Christology amongst German noblemen and commoners alike. Despite the solidification of the orthodox position, many Lutherans continued to proclaim the importance of "inward spirituality." Johann Andrea, Lutheran minister, son of a Lutheran minister, and the person most frequently associated with the Rosicrucians, elaborated similar epistemological and anthropological ideas in his Chemical Wedding (1616). Hvolbek notes that the publication of the Rosicrucian tracts (1614-16), both ridiculed and taken seriously, aroused a heated battle of pamphlets, essays and even books questioning the validity of the secret knowledge; this was an enthusiasts period, when questions about inner knowledge, and the path to it, were significant concerns. Böhme extended enthusiast ideas the farthest. The only authors he begrudgingly professed learning anything from were Schwenckfeld, Weigel and Paracelsus; he could not claim otherwise if all his knowledge was intuitively derived: thus he claimed all his books were the consequence of divine revelation. (This is identical to the Masonic revelation described by Wilmshurst[132] since he cites Böhme as a model, on page 139.) Hvolbek stresses the importance of science here; Böhme's contemporaries were Galileo, Harvey, Kepler and Bacon. He was aware that the Copernican thesis had thrown the universe out of joint, and Paracelsian nature philosophy was turning more heads than Lutheran doctrinal issues. Böhme's interests, but not his epistemology and anthropology, changed. No longer focusing on the Bible and salvation, Böhme's interests lay in the individual's relation to nature and the cosmos. Whilst seeing himself as part of the growth of the new sciences, accurately perceiving their mathematical and observational aspects, he claimed that they could only observe the external and visible, and investigate the letter of nature through the five senses. But empiricism only offered one part of the picture. His concerns were more with a universal truth which transcended time; his anthropological stand was" designed to work through issues which take place in time so that a knowledge could be received that was beyond time. This is precisely the sentiment that Duchamp tells Walter Pach he will attempt to recommend to John Quinn.[133] But now in the twentieth century, as Treitel examines, what the orthodoxy, the new psychologists, deplored, Kandinsky applauded, i.e., that human psyche was a world unto itself, of mysterious, hidden depths and occult powers, and that each person carried within their psyche a world which linked the individual to the cosmos. And what could now ameliorate the 'soul sickness' of the age was amenable to modern techniques of experimental investigation. Kandinsky is also known to have read du Prel's Studien aus den Gebeite der Geheinswissenschaftler, Aksakow's Animismus et Spiritismus, and articles in The Sphynx also privileging not the objective world of the senses, but the mental world of subjective experience. Trietel's argument underlines the fact that the appeal of the occult was pragmatic, since it solved specific problems; for example, Kandinsky proposed a blue-print for a spiritual art the modern age demanded. And the truth of the phenomenalay with the practical consequences of the belief in the phenomena. For the thousands of Germans who believed, Zöllner's knot experiments, and telepathic communication, dream dancers, automatic writing and materialized spirits were all manifestations of the soul in action. Jung's 1902 Ph D thesis on the occult, which references Zöllner, then testifies to an explicit linkage of the German occult sciences with a key modernist movement within fin-de-siecle European culture. Examining the evidence, Treitel draws on periodicals, investigative reports, memoirs, monographs, personal papers, and cultural holdings such as the papers of Hübbe-Schlieden at the University of Göttingen, and the collection at the Stadtslichbibliotheck at Munich, whose former director, Ludwig Held, observed the occult movement as it happened. This widespread enthusiasm for plumbing the depths of human psychological experience, so as to bring consciousness to an understanding of itself, was based on decades of attempts to reconcile the previously transcendent realm of the human psyche with the methods and claims of modern science, in which the occult was the link, since occult phenomena opened the door to the transcendent which scientific materialism attempted to dismiss as metaphysical speculation. That the occult was entirely respectable is born out by the fact that by the time Duchamp visited Germany in 1912, the Munich based Psychologische Gesellschaft was in the twenty-sixth year of its attempt to make science, in its broadest sense, relevant to the study of the human psychological experience. Founded by du Prel, Schrenk-Notzing, Hübbe-Schlieden, the engineer Denhardt, and the curator of Alte Pinakotek (which Duchamp visited every day), Adolf Bayersdorfer, and the painters Trübner, von Max and von Keller, its manifesto had been published in an occult magazine, the Sphynx, in 1867. Full international respectability for psychical research was achieved by the holding of the First International Congress of Physiological Psychology in 1889, in Paris. The roster of the four hundred highly respected delegates reads, as Treitel puts it, "as a virtual who's who of the new experimental psychology." In contrast to the du Prel generation, fin-de-siecle occultists sought a private wisdom, not by experiment, but through self-focused empiricism; not a scholarly, but a populist, elaboration of self-transcendence, as the change in editorial emphasis of occultist magazines, such as Sphynx, illustrates - from its early period under the guidance of de Pre I and Hübbe-Schlieden to that of its successor, the Neue Metaphysische Rundshau, which cultivated the occult as a cult of self-development. For Treitel, then, the occult must be understood as an essential component of an alternative modernity, not least because from circa 1900, occultism had been deeply implicated in the contemporary innovative elaboration of subjectivity. The Occult Public which Treitel identifies lived in a modern society with a well-developed public realm. Heated debates were routinely held in national dailies, occultists traveled by train to occult conferences, communicated by phone about their experiences, bought and sold horoscopes on city streets, bought texts, by Kandinsky, from specialized bookshops, (according to which reasoning, Duchamp was an occultist) borrowed material from public libraries set up by occultists, mounted public exhibitions, such as Kandinsky's Blaue Reiter, established journals anyone could buy, and printed inexpensive editions of occult texts, the equivalent of French divulgations. The essentially exoteric German Occult was, in short, a very public enterprise whose size, geographical distribution, and social and political composition were key mechanisms in its diffusion. The eclectic core of a mass-movement, the occult was efficacious and quickly adapted itself to the exigencies of modern consumer culture. The protestant minister Theodore Traub recorded that by 1900, Berlin alone boasted more than 60 working mediums. The trial for fraud of the medium Anna Roth, in 1902, was reported in local Berlin newspapers and engaged the attention of the nation. Tens of thousands belonged to the clubs, and read the publications of the presses, which Treitel lists in her appendices, (A) and (B); Berlin, for example, enjoyed 10,000 spiritualists, 400 mediums and 15-20 spiritualist clubs. Munich was also a hotbed of occultism; police records testify that in 1923 10,000 families held séances, a habit repeated in many smaller cities. A modern industrial infrastructure eased access of an educated and bohemian urban population to occult events. In Munich, lectures were regularly held in public drinking establishments, stations and hotels. For example, the Uranus Gesellschaft für Astrologische staged astrological lectures in the big hall of the Kreuzbrau, and the Gesellschaft für Physiche Forschung und Astrologische Gesellschaft conducted meetings in the restaurant at the Holzkircher train station. The phenomenon was not just metropolitan, as the centre at Monte Verita, connected to boheminain Schwabing, attests; and we know that Duchamp visited Bergmann's plein-air painting school at Haimhausen, whilst renting a room, in Schwabing, from a young machine operator, called Gress. The occult attracted Gennans of different backgrounds, from the lowest to the highest echelons. Treitel cites the proletarian Joseph Weissenberg, a labourer who attained great wealth as a magnetist in a working class district; Karl Zuckmayer, a miner: and of course, in Paris, Franc Kupka, a spiritualist taught by a saddler, who attended science lectures at the Sorbonne, and was a close friend of the Duchamp brothers, in Montmartre and Neuilly. A favorite medium of Schrenck-Notzing was Rudi Sneider, the son of a lowly typesetter from a small town in Austria. There was Adelbert Hanigg, a postal worker turned scholar around World War I, who established the Verien Freibund, which met in beer halls and hotels, at which he would give demonstrations of 'the will'. There was Clair Reichardt, a salesgirl daughter of a tailor; a Munich dancer, she set herself up as clairvoyant: (the men were often tailors and shoemakers.) The 300 fortune-tellers noted in 1924, in Munich, comprised not only waitresses, like Duchamp's friend in Schwabing, Mucki Bergé, but also widows, and wives of civil servants. It was the propertied and middle-classes who dominated psychical research and Theosophy, but whilst professionals from the law, medicine, business and journalism were well represented, academics tended to be lacking, with some exceptions, such as Lipp, in Munich. So the petit bourgeois Duchamp, who was not an academic, would have felt at home here. Since a bourgeois profession was a marker of status in the German occult, many practitioners assumed spurious titles; there was a performative aspect to occultism: 'expertise' and 'professional training' were badges of legitimacy. This applied particularly in astrology and characterology, in which special certificates, schools and titles distinguished the 'scientist' from the mere amateur. Middle class women were present in large numbers, often leading and speaking at sessions, their presentations tailored to their interest and expertise, such as child-rearing, getting married, practicing law or medicine, getting a profession; Treitel notes Schwabing bohemians looking like innocent members of a knitting bee. Women outnumbered men as mediums. The German occult was then a mass movement, its cultural tenor syncretic, politically polyvalent and diverse. Theosophy, arriving in Germany in 1884, brought an eastern flavor to indigenous Christian elements, which eventually lead to Rudolf Steiner's split, and his founding of Anthroposophy. Many of Germany's theosophical groups had strong links with USA, and many mediums working the German circuit were Americans, the market towards which Duchamp turned after the outbreak of war. Occult beliefs and practices were widely disseminated through texts, a form which features heavily in conversion stories of occultists, such as the modern writer Gustav Meyrinck, who was saved from suicide by a chance encounter with a Theosophical text. Treitel also cites van Lansdorf and Gottfried Krall reporting how cheap editions, pamphlets shoved under doors, changed their lives. Occult texts functioned as information billboards, typically bundled with several pages of advertisements for related books and services, instructions on how to dowse, and analyze handwriting, how to stage an occult event, step-by-step ways to cast a horoscope, conduct family séances and transmute gold. There were therapeutic cookbooks, self-help medical texts, tracts on sexuality and how to succeed at everything. They carried adverts for occult clubs, bookshops and special products. They created specialist niches; the dozen or so specialized periodicals existed by 1914. Thus, the occult text, increasingly printed by new small presses, was instrumental in precipitating conversions, advertising services and goods and educating novices and adepts, because behind them was an extensive publishing system producing cheap and readily available titles. This specially helped to connect the German Occult to the larger context of modernism, and link it, for example, to psychoanalysis. Publishing houses, acting both as cultural patrons and entrepreneurs, were then crucibles for the fusing of new cultural forms. The Nirvana Verlag, in Berlin, was, for example, before World War 1, the biggest specialist business plugging the Occult. On the posh Wilhelmstrasse, at the heart of metropolitan Berlin, it offered ease of access to hundreds of texts and items in a regularly updated catalogue - in 1922, of 937 texts, mostly fully annotated, on a full range of topics. Its prompt and helpful service confirmed the customer was buying from experts. Its new lending library, sponsored lectures and demonstrations and brochures about schools and services made it an active agent in the reform of life, promoting a modern lifestyle, in which fictional experiences had solid basis in fact. It was the same in Munich, where occult groups sponsored psychical research via lecture courses and well-constructed laboratories for mediumistic research. Not limited to occult institutions, for a select clientele there was a range of services. New, male professional astrologers augmented the older network of individual astrologers who gave lessons at booths in local fairs, on the street, made house calls, held office hours and offered other services such as hypnosis, telepathy, character analysis and techniques of healing. Typical of bourgeois Munich was the actress Josephine Ziever who, with her housekeeper, was adept a using mail to find customers. The German Occult therefore belonged to the larger culture of consumption and the consumerist ethos, and was very adaptable to the modern mass market place and the department store, to a vibrant marketplace satisfying the needs of this world as much as the next. This novel emphasis on individual experience was a reflection of the elevation of occult powers furthering an apolitical cult of the self. A matter of personal will and conscious expression, now the path to enlightenment was the individual. The Theosophically inspired emphasis on self-focused occultism was reflected in the lecture programme of the second of June, 1912, meeting of the Internationale Theosophische Verbrüderun, noted by Hübbe-Schleiden as featuring personal development, Barriers to Self-Knowledge, and The Meaning of Art for the Life of the Spirit. The Hübbe-Schleiden apartment Rudolf Steiner visited in 1900 was full of wire contraptions representing chains of molecules, physical and transcendent configurations serving as graphic three-dimensional illustrations of scientific proofs with which to persuade Germans of the Theosophical message of transcendent reality and universal brotherhood. These gimcrack contraptions appear to have inspired the 'spirit science' stage props that Steiner designed for his play, which we discuss below. The degree to which the Occult can be seen to permeate the aesthetic culture of modernism is revealed in how, to some, the turning inwards onto the self amounted to a new experience of the existence of a universal creative urge binding the art of the avant-garde to the schizophrenic, itself the result of a general craving for direct intuitive experience combined with a mystical self-deification, and a concern with metaphysics, from the general philosophical to the Theosophical. Thus affinities could be established between the art of the avant-garde and that of the mentally ill, since both renounced the outside world and denigrated surface appearances. Therefore, contemporary art, whether high modern, avant-garde or schizophrenic, is an outgrowth of the zeitgeist in which psychological experience and metaphysics so common in the Occult was carried well beyond the boundaries of canonical modernism. For Treitel, the modernist aesthetic and the occult are then but two facets of a single phenomenon, the emergence of a modern sensibility defined by the privacy of intuitive experience. Wilke's satirical cartoon of 1898 which Gombrich illustrates then raises the issue discussed by Ringbom of how painters, dedicated to a depiction of an invisible spiritual reality, were to convince viewers that their artworks were not the product of a fantastic private vision, since the immaterial objects that no-one but the artist could see must be rendered into visual form. The cartoon,[134] published in the German weekly Jugend, in which a dumfounded critic is obliged to patronize a caricature by an occult artist with his assessment of a squiggle, apparently representing" the metaphysical line" of the artists" personality", with the judgment that it is a very good likeness, is not only interesting in its characterization, but in the fact that it was datelined from Paris, in 1898! Kandinsky's answer, in Munich, in 1912, was that the universe resonated with vibrations of immaterial entities. To paint this "sounding cosmos" artists only had to tune their souls to the cosmic waves and let those ringing souls express themselves on canvas. They would then play on the viewer the way the cosmos played on the artist; "Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano, with many strings. The artist is the hand that purposefully sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key. Thus it is clear that the harmony of the colors can only be based upon the principle of purposefully touching the human soul." For Kandinsky, artist, viewer, artwork and immaterial objects were bound together in a cosmic circle of resonance - Klang. This was no answer for Duchamp, who merely symbolically references it, in 1918, with the spurious signature appended to Tu m', allegedly the name of subcontracted sign-painter; Duchamp's Bavarian response was to give up painting altogether. His Munich experience must account for why, or perhaps, how. In this context, 'Munich Moderne', and its avant-garde, including figurative painters, offers a unique insight into the circumstance in which Duchamp enjoyed his "total liberation" triggered by Roussel. We might bear in mind here that whilst Duchamp characterizes as old friends the modern French art he sees during his trip, Fauvism and Cubism, the two artists in whom he finds inspiration, according to the Ephemerides, were Böcklin and Cranach, both religious painters. A founder member of the Psychologische Gesellschaft was the painter, Gabriel von Max, a Buddhist and leading member of Germany's first theosophical group, who enjoyed a reputation among avant-garde critics as an aesthetic pioneer equivalent to Böcklin and von Keller. In the mid 1880's von Max painted a series of works based on the ecstatic visions of the German nun Anne Catherine Emmerich, which are now in the Neue Pinakotek in Munich; ecstatic visions were a favorite topic of conversation in 80's and 90's in German Occult journals. A supporter of reformist causes, like pacifism, a friend of Haeckel and an enthusiast for Darwin, anti-Christian and pro-Science, von Max's art shows a fascination with the transcendent; his subject, the foundation of the beyond, and the secrets of religious fanaticism displayed by female seers, the possessed, and martyrs. Producing work depending from the psychology of extreme female spiritual experience, in 1875 he painted the subject of a dead female revived by Jesus. In 1879, it was a young woman being touched on the shoulder by a spirit from the beyond. The 1880's saw Ann Emmerich. By the time he died, von Max had painted Katie King, the control spirit of the English medium Florence Cook. Not only for von Max were mediums ideal models for the liminal experiences that so intrigued him. Keller was also interested in 'psychic realism'. He hosted fifty séances at home, using four mediums, and between 1885 and 1907 produced twelve paintings invoking scenes from psychic work. Keller used paintings as suggestive objects which would induce the medium Lina Matzinger to make facial expressions and bodily gestures of a woman returning from the dead. The resulting photos became the raw material for paintings, such as Die Somnabule, of 1886. 1888 saw Hexanverbrenning, or Witch burning, the victim beaming the smile of the hypnotized medium, taken from a photograph of Matzingen; it is the image of a woman between life and death, in the liminal state of hypnagogia. This interest in psychological liminality was common all over Europe, Klimt's females returning from the outer reaches of sexual ecstasy, a subject to which he came a little late, in the 1890's, being perhaps the best known of the genre. Treitel proposes that all were tapping the emergent modernist sensibility dedicated to exploring how the irruptions of the unconscious drives, desires and emotions played out on the surface of the face and body. Duchamp's Passage from a Virgin to a Bride, "not a physiological passage", sits happily in this company. At the same time, female mediums themselves were being appropriated for their aesthetic potential of liminality, mediums such as Madelen G, who performed her dream dances, in Munich in 1904. Schrenck-Notzing invited this wife of a French businessman, who was being treated by Magin, in Paris, for a cure for headache. Effecting this by hypnosis, he discovered her mediumistic powers of dance. For Schrenck-Notzing, hypnosis then might facilitate creativity. ough a series of public experiments, she became a public sensation, offering glimpses of the mysterious sources of artistic creation - a defining moment, for some, such as von Keller. Schrenck-Notzing's universalizing of the creative process equated Madalen G with Isadora Duncan in the potential of the creative unconscious to make modern art. Whilst for von Max in 1882, "Painters are unconscious agents of spiritualism. Before the two-dimensional surface on which they communicate their opinion of the third dimension, they are medium and spirit", now not only could artists act like mediums, but mediums could be artists. Without training, no longer merely artist's models, mediums could be artists in their own right, albeit unconscious ones. [Glyn Thompson; Metaphysics: Occult Munich. (Unwinding Duchamp: Mots et Paroles à Tous les Étages. Volume 1. Text., pp. 110-119.) Dissertation. The University of Leeds School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies. September 2008.] Glyn Thompson; Metaphysics: Occult Munich (Part 2) References and Sources: [130] Corinna Treitel; A Science for the Soul. The John Hopkins University Press. Baltimore and London, 2004. - John Francis Moffitt; Alchemist of the Avant - Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp. S.U.N.Y., Albany, 2003. |