Art review: Off the Wall

Curator Enrique Juncosa believes that the work of artists whose production derives from their association with alchemy, secret societies, theosophy and anthroposophy, is habitually overlooked. “Despite their importance for the development of 20th-century art, they tend to be ignored or disparaged…due to the dominance of rationalistic thinking and the difficulty of talking about these subjects in clear, direct language.” The title comes from Sufism, an Islamic cult that regards reality as light in differing degrees of intensity. This show sets out to give these individuals their due; the tag line is, “Discover the occult side of contemporary art.” A state of supra-consciousness is announced symbolically by this black light.  

The difficulty in mounting such an exhibition in any cohesive way is that the very individuality of the creative minds whose production is on display generally defies categorization. It is thus difficult to group any kind of visual or philosophical trends together into a meaningful presentation for the visitor. The exhibition covers a lot of territory as it incorporates the work of artists as divergent as filmmakers Kenneth Anger and Derek Jarman, visual artists Antoní Tapiés and Francesco Clemente, performers Joan Jonas and Sun Ra, and several all-purpose creative/philosophical types like Joseph Beuys and Bruce Conner, to name but a few.

Most of the artists are not exactly household names, like the Americans who revolved around their better-known gurus William S. Burroughs and Timothy Leary. The opening galleries, full of the work of Jordan Belson and Harry Smith, for instance, seem to be paving the way for the visuals of Monty Python (a black-and-white animated video called The Heaven and Earth Magic Feature from 1957-1962 is a prime example). But it gets more intense from there, and heavy-hitters like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman enter the picture. “There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing,” wrote Rothko to a colleague. “We assert that the subject is crucial.” (Whether or not Rothko could be considered primarily a spiritual artist might be open to debate.)

It is refreshing to see lesser-known, but equally worthy, artists like San Francisco’s Jess (Collins) included in this group of forward-thinkers, as he was a trailblazer in queer art in the Fifties, and his homoerotic collages and tribute to his lover, the poet Robert Duncan, settle in comfortably here. A group more blatantly influenced by mind-altering drugs is represented by the Simplest Brothers, who in Twenties and Thirties France inhaled carbon tetrachloride, a synthetic refrigerant, for their inspiration. Aleister Crowley gets a gallery of his own; the prolific English writer and occultist transcribed his Book of Law from a supernatural being who dictated the text to Crowley on his honeymoon. He died in 1947, but he lives on as inspiration for the cover art of Pink Floyd’s vinyl and for appearing on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in the Sixties.

Many of these original thinkers made art, like the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner (who founded the Waldorf education system), but the objects that they left behind were not necessarily meant for public consumption. Steiner, for instance, whose work combined science and spirituality, drew constantly as an exercise in personal growth, but he never looked at the truckloads of images that he created.

‘Black Light’ succeeds more as a cultural exhibition rather than art, which is, after all, the genre that the CCCB tackles most successfully. Maybe the darkened galleries of the museum are not the best environment in which to try to enter into the heads of dozens of such original thinkers. There are a few brief—and dare I say welcome—moments of visual beauty amid the cacophony. Two lyrical Agnes Martin paintings (on loan from the collection of La Caixa) comprising horizontal bands of subtle high-key colors make you feel as if you are floating over a desert landscape of New Mexico. And the exhibition ends beautifully with a 10-minute video by Bruce Conner, the San Francisco ‘beat’ artist who is often credited with inventing the music video. His ‘Easter Morning’ strikes a musical and visual tone of great beauty as a wrap-up to an exhibition where one’s senses have been violently altered.       

CCCB. Carrer de Montalegre 5 .