The state of the visionary arts

Notes on two exhibitions

Judy Chicago: Revelations. Serpentine North Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London. Until 1 September 2024.

‘Entheoen: A Sanctuary of Visionary Art’ By Alex Grey & Allyson Grey. Illusionaries, Canary Wharf, London.

In a recent instalment of his indispensable Weekly Readings, John Pistelli included a discussion on “visionary fiction”, by which he meant “fiction that neither rests in a mimesis of what’s merely given in our world nor flies off to some other world, some mere fantasy creation”. John’s own Major Arcana is of course a good recent example, as is Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. I was prompted to reflect on the role of visionary art more broadly by two visual art exhibitions I attended on the weekend.

Allow me to propose an aspirational definition: visionary art develops consciousness.

Naturally, only the greatest works of art can be said to achieve this aim: most visionary art, like most art, is bad art (in the sense that Gribbin via Pound uses the term to refer to “art that makes false reports”). Under the unfortunate influence of Rousseau and/or Marx, many would-be visionary artists misinterpreted the aim as being the raising of consciousness: educating the masses and thereby leading them out of the cave of false consciousness and into the light of Truth. Somewhere along the way, the belief in Truth got lost (and the belief in my truth got strengthened) so the objective was softened to raising awareness, a.k.a. creating hype, a.k.a. propaganda, which allowed artists in the Anglosphere to achieve pyrrhic cultural victories on behalf of the so-called working class, women, racial and sexual minorities, and the environment. In my view, this has for the most part made for bad politics as well as bad art.

Can art transcend politics and economics? Or are all visions of transcendence ultimately illusionary? Let’s explore!

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According to the Serpentine’s patronising wall text, the artist born Judith Sylvia Cohen in 1939 decided after the death of her husband Jerry Gerowitz to de-Judaise universalise her surname as a blow to the patriarchy and as a tribute to the city of her birth. Personally, I would have been tempted to call the exhibition Judy California since the artistic regression so clearly on display here is a prime example of the mystic-to-dumb-liberal pipeline which is alarmingly common wherever the Californian Ideology has taken root.

Judy’s early work is a late 60s summer camp version of Hilma af Klint: flower power meets Looney Tunes meets the female as void:

The ecstatic vision soon turns into agony as Judy reflects on experiences that left her feeling “rejected and diminished as a woman”. She groks that the personal is political: if he isn’t interested in my special flower, I will show my special flower to the world!¹

But it was not just her own flower that she felt was being unfairly overlooked. Her best-known work, The Dinner Party, honouring the unacknowledged achievements of women throughout herstory, would not have looked out of place in Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, which is enough in my book to qualify as “visionary art”.

Judy next challenges the standard Sky Daddy creation myth by depicting life bursting through the cunt of Mother Earth. I found it quite moving, but the naked celebration of the reproductive potential of the female body might strike younger, more intersectional audiences as a tad TERFy.

In the 21st century, Judy veers away from the corporeal and the mythopoetic. Coincidentally, her work becomes indistinguishable from that of a precocious twelve-year old:

Her 2019 project What if Women Ruled the World invited participants to imagine this pink utopia by reflecting on eleven questions embroidered² on giant banners, including:

Would God be a Woman?³

Would Men and Women be Gentle?

Would Buildings Resemble Wombs?

Women from across the world were asked these thought-provoking questions and their responses were combined into a “digital quilt” (i.e. an unpaid intern copied and pasted them into InDesign):

This is the artist-as-management-consultant: from visionary art to vision statements.

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More promising perhaps is the “visionary art” of Alex and Allyson Grey (who have since the 90s described their drug-fuelled creations in this manner), which has been turned into a slick, immersive multi-media experience housed among the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf: an oasis of madness in the heart of the crumbling British financial services empire.

I’m generally rather sceptical of so-called immersive art experiences (if I wanted to be immersed in a field of sunflowers, I would drive to the countryside and immersive myself in a field of real live sunflowers, thank you very much), but since the art in question is supposed to simulate tripping balls, I thought the immersive element might be additive. Needless to say, it also helps to be on drugs throughout the experience.⁴

The experience was described as follows:

When entering the Entheon room, I got rather corny 90s CGI vibes. But the visualisations improved and sitting back and just letting it all wash over me, I was able to allow myself to briefly be mesmerised.

We next visited “Steeplehead”, a technically accomplished installation which reminded me of the colourful fantasies that I have a tendency to project onto the men in my life:

“The Progress of the Soul” was definitely my favourite: Alex Grey’s famous anatomically precise literally-stripped-to-the bone beings radiating with light truly came to life in the mirrored room. Like Judy Chicago’s earlier work, it was giving super retro in being so unabashedly life-affirming (the depiction of the miraculous development of a foetus naturally elicited an abortion joke from my gen z boyfriend)⁵

The mirrored walls, floor and ceiling don’t just enhance the trippiness of the visuals, they serve as a metaphor for the self-reflection that psychedelic (literally ‘mind-revealing’⁶) substances can facilitate. Watts described them as tools for investigating those parts of the self that are unavailable to everyday consciousness, similar to how we use microscopes and telescopes to examine objects that are not visible to the unaided eye.⁷

“Sanctuary” turned out to be a rather apt description, unfortunately so. It did feel a bit like visiting a temple, albeit one without any rituals. With nothing to be performed and everything on automatic loop, there was no risk that anything could go wrong.⁸ Although the visuals were at times rather delightful and the music well-paired, it never quite reached the level of the cinematic. Everything seemed too safe, with too little at stake to be truly visionary: nothing was genuinely creepy or terrifying (like in a good bad trip) or even particularly whimsical.⁹

One could say that this type of visionary art is to the psychedelic experience what pornography is to sex.

MY👏PSYCHEDELIC👏 CULTURE 👏WILL👏 BE👏 PARTICIPATORY👏 OR👏 IT 👏WILL 👏BE 👏BULLSHIT👏

Otoh, if the pair of old witches were merely intending to entice young Hansels and Gretels into trying some cosmogenic candy, they will surely succeed.¹⁰

And why shouldn’t they? What better visions are there on offer?

1. As Blake Smith might say: before you blame the patriarchy (or modernity), perhaps consider the possibility that he/she/they just isn’t/aren’t that into you.

2. Because embroidery is a female art, get it?

3. The statement that God is a woman, although not wholly inaccurate, is a bit second wave, wouldn’t you say? Would it not be more just to say that God is a trans woman? Since God is in all things and also beyond all things (if we accept the premise of panentheism, and why would we not, since it covers all the bases and is therefore the most inclusive of all metaphysical positions), it follows that God isn’t any more or less an old man with a beard than He is a little girl or She is an octopus.

4. I attended on the back of a mushroom trip, mildly under the influence of some THC oil.

BTW, if there are any drug-addled billionaires who would like to sponsor me to take drugs and write about bad art inspired by taking drugs, please hit me up.

5. To continue riffing on Christ/Nietzsche, what we need is a virtuous vitalism: a pro-life movement in the broadest possible sense, recognising that life in all its forms is both precious and contingent, constantly involved in a struggle with other instances of life. We need to recognise that death is inextricably linked to life and yet continue to rage against it. We should aim to live virtuously, out of respect for our own lives and for the lives of others. We must fix our philosophical plumbing so that we can adjudicate justly between life’s competing claims, including between the vitae activa et contemplativa. We should shun that which poisons life: resentment, bitterness, despair… We can live joyfully in the knowledge that without us, life will go on.

We should hope not for the re-enchantment of the world, but for its re-ensoulment.

(I’ve been enjoying Sam Kahn’s series on world religions. I believe that every living tradition has something to teach us.)

6. Fun fact, the term ‘psychedelic’ was coined by a British psychiatrist named Humphry Osmond in correspondence with Aldous Huxley, who (never the greatest wordsmith bless him) had proposed phanerothyme in a little rhyme:

To make this trivial world sublime,

Take half a Gramme of phanerothyme.

Osmond responded:

To fathom hell or soar angelic

Just take a pinch of psychedelic

(From Acid Dreams: The complete docial history of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond by Martin A. Lee & Brice Slain)

7. Such tools can indeed be helpful, but since the limits of self-awareness is a running theme of this blog, I’ll note that a hall of mirrors only creates the illusion of depth and that the line from Blake that Huxley has made synonymous with the psychedelic experience refers not to mirrors, but to doors.

8. I was reminded of Paul Franz’s brilliant essay on seeing plays vs watching movies.

9. Talking about whimsy, I have come around to agreeing with Sam J that Charli XCX is the Best Pop Star We Have and I think its fair to call Brat one of the most significant pieces of visionary art of our time for its sonic innovation, joyful irreverence and instant cultural impact. I had high hopes for Dua Lipa’s third album, but unfortunately Radical Optimism turned out to be the aural equivalent of CBD.

10. A question for our parapolitical friends: what if MK-ULTRA wasn’t a failure, but the deep state realised that they couldn’t at the time risk the emergence of a true collective consciousness among the populace and had to wait for the processes of deracination and atomisation guided by the neoliberal world order to be sufficiently advanced to ensure that the reintroduction of neurotoxins into the bloodstream of the body politic by the likes of Michael Pollan and Gwyneth Paltrow would reliably result in people getting lost in the labyrinths of their alienated minds?

(Veteran stoners learn to treat paranoia as yet another one of Rumi’s fabled house guests.)