SPIRITUS
15 FEBRUARY–13 APRIL 2003

Doug Aitken, Ceal Floyer, Dan Graham, Marine Hugonnier, Carsten Höller, Ann Veronica Janssens, Sigalit Landau, Paul McCarthy, Pipilotti Rist

From the press release, 2003: Works by nine contemporary artists is presented alongside unique historical photographs of séances. The central theme of the exhibition is the attempt to reach realities beyond the one with which we are familiar. The artists address themes such as ecstasy, rituals and parallel worlds. In diverse ways the art represents or evokes altered states of consciousness. The displayed work aims to relate to the exhibition's thematic on an associative rather than illustrative level and are both representational and experience-based.
SPIRITUS is produced in collaboration Riksutställningar and will travel to several other institutions in the Nordic countries, including Kulturmagasinet in Sundsvall, Sweden, and Bomuldsfabriken in Arendal, Norway.

Spiritus, 2003

Doug Aitken, Ceal Floyer, Dan Graham, Marine Hugonnier, Carsten Höller, Ann Veronica Janssens, Sigalit Landau, Paul McCarthy, Pipilotti Rist
Curated by Richard Julin from Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall and Magnus af Petersens of Rikutställningar.

The central theme of the exhibition Spiritus is the attempt to reach realities beyond the one with which we are familiar. The artists address themes such as ecstasy, rituals and parallel worlds. In diverse ways the art represents or evokes altered states of consciousness. The displayed work aims to relate to the exhibition's thematic on an associative rather than illustrative level and are both representational and experience-based.

Around the turn of the last century, there was a great interest in séances where mediums produced ectoplasm as a result of the contact with other worlds. Ectoplasm is the visible presence - or a trace of the presence - of the spiritual world. For the exhibition photographs that document those occasions are shown. In Spiritus the works by nine contemporary artists will be presented alongside the historical photographs that works as as a point of departure.

DOUG AITKEN hysteria is a video and audio installation that takes mass hysteria at rock concerts as its point of departure. Aitken uses images ranging from the early days of rock to today. The viewer can see the differences in how various crowds react within the specific forum of a "concert", though we also witness specific individuals' ecstatic behavior. In "Spiritus," Aitken exhibits hysteria (breaths), a second piece that is based on the first but instead focuses on the sound of the rock concert phenomenon explored above. The viewer is here offered a physical experience and a chance to reflect as the sound of another person's strong breathing creates vibrations in the body of the viewer who lies down on the piece.

CEAL FLOYER In Door, Floyer uses the room to the utmost. In the spirit of the exhibition's theme, we can say that her piece points toward an abstract space outside the exhibition space. The viewer is invited to focus on a strong band of light coming from under an existing door. We are quick to think of a place that is bathing in warm, benevolent light, a place that in this case is a pure illusion as we find out soon enough. The viewer realizes that something much more banal is behind the door than what the illusion might have led us to believe initially, though our thoughts might still err in that direction.

DAN GRAHAM In his film Rock My Religion, Graham presents a kind of historical account where ecstasy forms a link between the Puritanical religious movements that arrived in the US in the mid-18th century and the rise of rock music and the youth movement from the 1950s on. The film portrays religious sects rhythmically reciting the Bible, speaking in tongues, taking off their clothes, and shaking and rolling on the floor in a collective effort to drive out Satan. Texts and images depicting these rites are interlaced with footage of rock concerts where ecstasy is attained in a similar way. By dancing in circles, members of the Shaker movement enter a trance. "Shake, rattle, and roll," howls Jerry Lee Lewis. The gap between the strict, Puritanical religious sects and youth can seem enormous. What they share, however, is the desire to be cleansed collectively through ecstatic dance and recitation.

MARINE HUGONNIER Hugonnier's Candle consists of a burning candle. The motif is a recurring one in art history and is associated with a number of themes, such as life, frailty, warmth, and time. Hugonnier's candle has the scent of a newly extinguished candle. In this way, the viewer is offered, in parallel to the experience of a simple burning candle, a sensory perception of a future moment in time. The senses of vision and smell clash.

CARSTEN HÖLLER The film The Forest takes the viewer on a walk through the woods at night. The viewer is immersed experientially in the journey because he watches the film on a pair of video glasses. The film is initially three-dimensional, with both eyes seeing the same footage shot with two cameras at a slight distance from each other. When the walk in the woods leads us to one specific tree, the two projections part ways. The eyes suddenly follow two different paths that every so often merge into one, and we end up in a place beyond the reality to which we are accustomed, where our sense of space is put to the test.

ANN VERONICA JANSSENS Blue, Red and Yellow - Scalemodel 1 is a minimalist cube from the outside, a sculpture made of plastic. Three of the sculpture's sides are covered by a transparent, colored film. But the viewer can also step into the work and encounter a wholly different space than what one would have imagined from just seeing the outside of the piece. A smoke machine fills the little space with smoke. The space is bathed in light but at the same time the viewer experiences a kind of blindness because there are no resting points for the eye in the room. The blindness causes the viewer to strain his other senses in order to orient himself; the sense of hearing is affected, as is the perception of time. Those who remain outside the cube can just make out those who are inside through the semi-transparent plastic, like phantoms.

SIGALIT LANDAU In the piece Barbed Hula, we see footage of the artist on a beach, twirling a hula hoop made of barbed wire. It is a short sequence filmed in slow motion, with the camera moving toward her body as it is lacerated by the barbed wire. The hula-hoop act itself becomes unbearable and we can imagine the pain increasing. For the artist, the loop is a metaphor for a trap outside time and space. Like a fakir, Landau repeats an act that causes pain in order to go beyond the corporeal and away from the pain. The rhythmic movement protects her, but the viewer experiences the opposite.

PAUL McCARTHY McCarthy's works are often repulsive and difficult to watch. Family Tyranny and Cultural Soup are performance-based works that were staged and directed for video. McCarthy acts in the films' twisted, grotesque scenes. The artist is in the guise of a deranged television chef instructing the public on how to force-feed one's child. "My Daddy did this to me. You can do this to your son too," he mumbles. Despite it being such an obviously exaggerated, theatrical, and staged situation, it is easy to feel ill at the brutality and the connotations of sexual abuse. The trauma that is handed down from father to son constitutes a circle of evil. The way in which McCarthy intones certain phrases and repeats them like a mantra emphasizes the power of repetition: "The father begat the son, the son begat the father." Mike Kelley, who plays the son, tries in vain to flee but is obstructed by McCarthy, the cruel, patriarchal father. When the son finally gets to leave the house, he does so with a chipper, little announcement: "Time to go to school, Dad!" School therefore becomes the next link in the authoritarian formation of the subject.

PIPILOTTI RIST Mutaflor für Wien is a short video projected on the floor. The camera almost literally performs an inner and outer journey. Rist is sitting naked on the floor and looking into the camera that is moving down toward her. Suddenly, she opens her mouth and the camera disappears in the opening, into her body, to finally emerge out of her anus. The film zooms out, goes round, and starts again. It is a short loop that circles around, in, and out of the artist, who ravenously eats the viewer

CONTENTS:

Foreword by David Neuman, director Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall and Mats Widbom, director of exhibition, Riksutställningar. Spiritus by Richard Julin, curator Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall and Magnus af Petersens, curator, Riksutställningar (2002). The Phenomena in a Clear Red Light - Mrs Henderson and her Ectoplasmic Manifestations by Frank Hawken, Marylebone Spiritualist Association (2002). Ethereal Body: The Quest for Ectoplasm by Marina Warner, critic and novelist (2002) Exhibition catalogue no 27. ISBN 91-974236-1-0. 88 pages, color, illustrated. Texts in Swedish/English. Published 2003 by Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall and Riksutställningar.
Price: 240 SEK (approx. 25 EUR)

Ethereal Body: The Quest for Ectoplasm by Marina Warner

"Your belief will help create the fact."
William James

Under "Duncan, Helen, Mrs." in the catalogue of the archives of the Society for Psychical Research, now kept in the University Library, Cambridge, this entry appears:

'Sample of Ectoplasm. Material alleged to have been captured from Mrs Helen Duncan, materialising medium...'

I asked to see "the sample of ectoplasm". The librarian looked at me strangely; he said, 'Are you sure? It's very nasty.' My response was, 'Would you prefer me to look at it somewhere else?' I thought there might be a desk of shame, where I could be supervised and other readers would not be disturbed. He said, 'No, but be discreet.'

There was nothing corporeal about the "sample of ectoplasm' when it arrived, in the strict sense of human or animal tissue. Inside there was a folded heap of dressmakers' lining material, a cheap man-made fibre, now yellowing white in colour. About four yards had been cut straight from the bolt, with no hems, and the selvedge left plain. It had been washed and ironed, but the creases where it had been crumpled were still marked; the pattern of these showed it had been tightly wadded. There were traces of old blood that the laundry had not erased.

This bulky fabric was the spirit stuff that Helen Duncan had extruded from her body as ectoplasm, which had been 'captured' - the metaphor habitually used by spirit investigators - from Mrs Duncan during a séance in l939.

Helen Duncan was a Scottish medium, who was born in l898 and died in l956; her dates reveal how the quest for ectoplasm, the stuff of the other side, the substance of the ethereal body, continued well into the twentieth century. Its existence still receives detailed discussion on the web, with the portraits and the stories of its heroic protagonists. Mrs Duncan was celebrated in her lifetime for the clouds of shining, billowing spirit stuff that emanated from her as she sat in the spirit cabinet, groaning and shuddering as the trance state took hold. A medium's body became a porous vehicle as the phenomena exuded from mouth, nose, breast and, even, vagina: she acted as a transmitter, in an analogous fashion to the wireless receiver, catching cosmic rays whose vibrations produced phantoms and presences.

Materialisation was the word used in the circles of psychical researchers to describe a phenomenon that first became common in seances in the l870s : the summoning of spirit presences in the form of objects and of bodies, or of traces of objects and bodies - touches to the cheek or hands of the sitters, slaps or caresses or breezes as of something passing, sometimes fingerprints or other marks, the sounds of bells ringing or ethereal music, apported flowers and other gifts from the spirits, and, above all, ectoplasmic manifestations. These took two predominant forms: luminous, veiled, phantom-like beings, or revenants, such as Helen Duncan's favourite 'spirit control', known as 'Peggy'. Peggy was the manifestation of a dead child, who had been recognized by her mother during one of Mrs. Duncan's séances and continued to appear regularly thereafter, doing winsome routines, singing and dancing like a child film star of the period. But from its beginnings, ectoplasm was pursued by scientifically minded researchers, who did not believe in spirits as ghosts of the dead, and did not declare themselves to be spiritualists. They were questing to know the structure of the universe, and the concept of ectoplasm grew out of Victorian physics and cognitive sciences, not faith. Ectoplasmic phenomena are generic stuff of the spirit, not unique ghosts of dead souls. (...)

(Excerpt from the catalogue text "Ethereal Body: The Quest for Ectoplasm" by Marina Warner. Her most recent book is "Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds" (Oxford University Press) and she is currently working on a study of the invisible, "Spirit Visions" (2003).

SPIRITUS 15 FEBRUARY–13 APRIL 2003

SPIRITUS
15 FEBRUARY–13 APRIL 2003