Making spells to break the spell
1 December 2022 at 11:30:00 pm
Convert to local time with www.timeanddate.com
Session Convenors
Dr Tessa Laird, The University of Melbourne
Session Speakers
Dr Anastasia Murney, UNSW
Kellie Wells, University of Melbourne
Dr Gwynneth Porter
Jen Alexandra
Tina Stefanou, University of Melbourne
In Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell (2011), Phillipe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers define capitalism as a “system of sorcery without sorcerers”, and posit the reclamation of women’s ritual practices as compelling techniques for wresting authority from “invisible powers”. Likewise, Michael Taussig advocates for “apotropaic” artistic practices, in order to “break the catastrophic spell of things” not least the “magic of the state”. Increasingly, artists and activists are drawn to magical thinking, incantations and rituals, such as Linda Stupart’s “Spell to bind all-male conference panels” (2017), or Jeremy Deller’s Father and Son (2021), a case of sympathetic magic in which large scale wax figures of the Murdoch Empire were publicly melted, to provoke the waning of their power.
Pignarre and Stengers ask would-be witches to “share recipes” on how to protect ourselves from common enemies in the poisoned milieu we all inhabit. Similarly, this panel welcomes papers from artists, writers and researchers whose practices are engaged in the reclamation of magic arts; reviving and protecting sleeping knowledges; and fabulating tactics for earthly flourishing.
Teaching with Tarot in the Uneven Anthropocene
Dr Anastasia Murney, UNSW
Magic is a slippery term, encompassing a vast range of disparate and conflicting knowledges and practices. This paper will engage with the cultural politics of magic and the recent ‘resurgence’ of magic in the arts. I will then reflect on my own practice of Tarot reading in the neoliberal university. Jamie Sutcliffe broaches the so-called rediscovering of the relationship between art and magic, noting with frustration contemporary art’s “amnesiac relationship with the occult” (2021). He argues that a superficial narrative of ‘re-enchantment’ neglects adequate recognition of the cultures that sustain the occult and have done so for a long time. I am mindful of these tensions when I use Tarot in the classroom. Unlike the traditional one-on-one format, I facilitate group readings, distilling common feelings and anxieties into a question to ask the cards. I am particularly invested in using Tarot to address the affective and cognitive messiness of anthropogenic climate change, which is overwhelming, inescapable and often paralysing. In a pedagogical context, Tarot can be productively unsettling. It is a practice of asking questions differently, embracing the interpretative work of making connections across multiple scales, and carving out a space to act.
The Alchemy of Auto//Mysticism and the self-as-subject Inquiry in artistic practice
Kellie Wells, University of Melbourne
The Auto//Mysticism framework positions the Auto- (self) as simultaneously the subject, material, method, and location through which the artist is situated and moves through. A short discussion of key performance video Anchorite, 2020-2022 offers insight into modes of making and thinking which seek to understand and ultimately reframe some of the more mysterious partial perspectives of subjectivity i.e., hearing voices or having visions. The artist/subject at the centre of this inquiry, focusses on creating a collection of methods of practice which aim - to gather < > to learn - through artistic experimentation and magical reimagining of lived experiences across timelines and geographies.
Daily Altar
Jen Alexandra and Gwynneth Porter
Daily Altar is an alliance between artist Jen Bowmast and writer Gwynneth Porter that arose from mutual interest and practice of invocation. Via rituals to harness powers for individuals on the disadvantaged end of patriarchal capitalist machinery. Witches live on the edge of town. Intermediaries between the natural and human worlds, between animals and plants and people, and the material and spiritual realms. From writing and art practices come the magical facilities of attention, observation, inscription, and material improvisation and utterance. This is how we rewrite the present with divinatory acts. Real life magical ritual involves objects and pharmakon, but spell-casting is the act of developing the ability to tune in and focus energies. Bringing the scattered parts of the self together into a glowing ball that attracts more light to it. Casting a circle, holding a space open, and being active in it. Bowmast and Porter will host a ritual for protection against an atmosphere of a-significance, harm, destitution, violence, narcissism, invasion, energetic erosion. Or as Stengers and Pignarre put it in Capitalist Sorcery, “vulnerability to capture”: “Another world is possible!”
The World is Possessed: Voice as Talisman
Tina Stefanou, University of Melbourne
This presentation is both a performance and a story that sings to the many encounters that have shaped and constructed my research into Voice in the Expanded Field. Through sing-speak: a wayward tongue that lives in the world of the human, abiotic, machine, animal and the world of spirits. The presentation explores alter-sensibilities that occur when the voice is actioned in relational coming-togethers across species and spaces. Using field notes, I will trace a line through performative video/sound works made with teenage girls sounding hymen mythologies with horses; communities that hum across air waves on election day; a mime who attempts to resurrect a lost working-class town, a migrant family who retrospectively soothsays a peasant surrealism; a robotic dairy farm lament for the mother commons and the grain of the voice as felt through the movement of wheat production. These works explore the intersection of agriculture, poetics, and ethics - Agripoet(h)ics. To speak-sing to the invisible facets of capital and labour in energy creation. This is not the finger-painting cliché of community art practice or the subtractive social practice of elite artists and institutions. This is something else.
Biographies
Dr Tessa Laird, The University of Melbourne
Tessa Laird is an artist, writer and lecturer in Critical and Theoretical Studies at VCA Art, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne. Originally from Aotearoa New Zealand, Tessa was an art critic and editor for over twenty years, as well as a Lecturer at the University of Auckland, before relocating to Melbourne in 2015. Her monographs include a speculative inquiry into colour, A Rainbow Reader (Clouds: Auckland, 2013); a cultural history of bats, Bat (Reaktion: London, 2018); and she is currently working on a book on animal aesthetics in experimental film for the University of Minnesota Press. In 2021 she edited a special issue of Art + Australia with the theme “Multinaturalism”, and in 2022 she curated the Gertrude Contemporary annual Octopus exhibition, titled Baroquetopus: humanimal entanglements and tentacular spectaculars. Tessa is interested in the intersections between animal studies, ecology, activism and creative practice.
Dr Anastasia Murney, UNSW
Anastasia Murney is a sessional academic at the University of New South Wales on the unceded lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal people. She currently teaches across contemporary art, activism, and environmental humanities. She has published her research in Third Text and the Routledge anthology Feminist Visual Activism and the Body (2021). She has presented her research at the annual conferences of the Art Association of Australia & New Zealand and the College Art Association. Her doctoral thesis on feminist speculative fiction is currently being translated into a book manuscript, titled Messy Aesthetics: Anarcha-feminist Worldmaking.
Kellie Wells, University of Melbourne
Kellie Wells (born lutruwita/Tasmania) uses performance video, sculpture, painting, and photography to explore the multidimensional nature of subjectivity(s) in both its material and immaterial expressions. Her ongoing artistic research weaves together the many threads of the self-as-subject inquiry through fluid entanglements of memory, visions, voices, and the matter and mattering of our lived experience. Wells’ current PhD through VCA/MCM University of Melbourne - ‘The Alchemy of Auto//Mysticism: Subjectivity(s) From the In-Between’ - proposes a practice-led research framework composed to learn from the mysteries and mythologies of anomalous and unexplainable felt patterns of embodiment.
Dr Gwynneth Porter
Gwynneth Porter (b.1970, Aberystwyth, Wales) is a writer and editor from Ōtautahi Christchurch in Aotearoa New Zealand. Writing essays since the mid-1990s, her practice has involved persistent experimentation with forms, methodologies and subject positions – auto-theory, ficto-criticism and dialogue – for art writing and book development with artists. She has recently completed a PhD through Monash University in Melbourne’s Department of Art History and Theory with a thesis titled ‘Delinquent palaces: Adolescent museum visitation in literature.’
Jen Alexandra
Jen Alexandra’s practice combines sculpture, installation and performance to explore the position of the artist as querent, and real and imagined relationships between people, objects, materials and space. It proposes that art can be a way to connect with other realms of experience, interpret a vision – or the idea of a vision – or be a mode of knowledge in itself. Objects, ontologically floating as artefacts and channels for intention, are offered as transitional objects between one place and another. Alexandra lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch where she completed an MFA at the University of Canterbury in 2018.
Tina Stefanou, University of Melbourne
Tina Stefanou is in her 36th year of life - continually diminishing and re-emerging in live actions, sound works and moving images. Through an undisciplined but rigorous practice, she playfully and carefully makes meaning with others - whether familial or strangers, bipedal or multipedal, living or otherwise. Stefanou has exhibited and presented work both nationally and internationally and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, Victorian College of the Arts.