LUCA School of Arts

Master of Fine Arts

Master dissertation

An Epistemology of the Flesh.

The Body and Alchemy in (Visual) Art

Stefan Nestoroski

Promotor: Prof. Johanna Kint

May 2015

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

1. Au-deçà 2

Incipit 2

Philosophy 3

Text 4

Song 6

Image 7

2. Au-delà 9

An Alchemist 9

The Alchemist 11

The Alchemists 12

Epilogue 20

Bibliography 21

1

Prologue

Before I set out the exposition of what follows in this paper, I would like to spare one

initial remark.

This essay was written for the requirements of an MA course in Fine Art and as such it

does not aspire to the standard for an academic paper. In it, in fact, rather than making up a

systematic survey of the notions covered in the title, I adhere closer to some approaches and

distance myself from others according to the relevance that the treated instances have for my

own practice and sensibility. This is not to say that the core of this written piece is somehow

arbitrary. Instead I mean to say that it is structured as a reflection, meditation, process rather than

a disciplined discussion leading to a final conclusion of any sort.

* * *

In this first chapter, I would like to discuss notions of the human body as an

epistemological site and attempt to reaffirm it as a primordial center of experience. The interest

in and necessity of addressing this particular discourse follows from a core of personal

encounters with instances in the visual arts, literature, music and film which have engaged with

my body on a plane more profound and more authentic than that of mere reference.

Some weak points are already implicit in the said. In sharp contrast to the experiences in

themselves, my written account of these experiences and the critical texts that I will relate to,

cannot be but referential. Furthermore my focus, the one that I would like to envision as a

possibility for my own practice, falls within what we commonly term Visual Art – although the

emphasis on ‘visual’ is somewhat at odds with the way I will access this perspective.

Nevertheless, through adopting a broad plane of practices and cutting across various contexts in

search of the relevant approaches, I hope to give this proposal a more substantial contour and as

clear a definition as possible.

The second chapter, running close to the attitudes present in my work, will integrate

reflections on alchemy in the domain of the visual arts.

Although the linking of these two components in a single paper makes for an idiosyncratic effort,

a common attitude - a continuity can be felt and lines drawn from my discourse on the body to

that on alchemy and vice versa. On a second, extra-artistic level, this blending together of the

body and alchemy in the text metonymically refers to the dialectics of immanence/

transcendence, touching thus on another important part of my thinking, artistic and otherwise.

Hence, Au-deçà and Au-delà, here and beyond, the body and alchemy.

2

1. Au-deçà

Incipit

“Enjoying their sweetness, I chew them over and over, my internal organs are replenished, my

insides are fattened up, and all my bones break out in praise”1

This short but decidedly hedonistic confession comes to us not from an epicurean, but from a

medieval catholic saint, moreover one of the doctors of the church. St. Bernard of Clairvaux

(1090-1153), by “their” refers here to words, and the words he means are those of the Canticle of

Canticles, a book of the Old Testament on which he wrote forty-three sermons. This surprisingly

sensual reaction to mere text can be shocking to a modern reader: first, because of the

commonplace belief that Christian theology always made clear distinctions between an

immaterial soul and bodily senses. But in a minor sense, it is perhaps unsettling that words can

activate proprioception to such a visceral depth. To my mind, St. Bernard is not being rhetorical

here, viscera mea is not a metaphor – but a real synesthetic experience: that of consuming parts

of the world through his body.

This instance is hardly an exception for the Middle Ages: a spiritual theory on the senses runs at

least from Origen all the way to St. Ignatius of Loyola. Ivan Illich points out that the vocabulary

for the olfactory and gustatory faculties was significantly larger than that in use today and much

of it was used to describe exclusively the “taste” of the Holy Scriptures. “Sweet”, for example,

throughout the first millennium was used to designate precisely that, assuming the more

mundane acceptation of the term sometime later. 2

Should we not ascribe this carnal delight of the text to mysticism? I think not, or at least not just

to mysticism.

Up until the late twelfth century, Western monasteries were communities of men for whom

reading the Bible was a strong bodily experience rather than only a means for the attainment of

knowledge.

First, individual reading of the Book, sibi legere3, was almost inseparable from the simultaneous

utterance of the read, or better, mumbling along. Secondly, memorization of the Scriptures, -

which was one of the purposes of reading- was not so much a mental activity, as much as a

corporeal one: pupils of faith (in a fashion similar to that seen in Jewish or Koranic schools)

recited the Bible “sway(ing) their bodies from the hips up or their trunks back and forth”. Even

“the Latin term itself, legere, comes from a physical activity. Legere connotes picking, bundling,

harvesting or collecting.4. All of this is indicative of a relationship with the text which stands in

1 Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text. p. 57. The translation is Ivan Illich’s. Originally found in Sermon XVI on

the Canticle of Canticles. 2 Ibid., p.55 (footnote)

3 Reading to oneself, as opposed to the Clara Lectio, which was a collective reading for the congregation of monks.

4 From St. Augustine quoted in Ibid, p. 58

3

stark contrast to our detached approach to it with today. The evidence I reported, albeit very

sketchy and stenographic, points to an intense bodily engagement with the text. What’s more, the

same text was subjected to repeated readings that only ended with the end of a monk’s life.

Considering these points, it becomes easier to see how the text (the Bible in this case), became

“sweater than all honey”.

But what is the use of all this, beyond the curiosity of the fact?

I am pleading to the possibility of imagining a practice in the visual arts that can be tasted,

swallowed, absorbed in our internal cavities and felt over our skin. Something abstract and

undifferentiated that talks to the body. My attempt is less a manifesto or a recipe for the type of

engagement that contemporary art should turn to, as much as a possibility for “reading” with

one’s entire body.

Philosophy

To start with, I would like to consider some of the philosophical underpinnings of

Western thought in connection to the body in the sense that I have hinted at. It is important

because, perhaps a little bit like pleasure, it has been often left out of discourse. This, the

sensuous body, something quite different from the one diagrammed and anatomized in

physiology textbooks.

The very possibility to think of the body as something different from its sheer material

presence comes at the end of a long philosophical tradition in the West. First Plato, then Aristotle

and later Descartes established the dualism of a material body and an immaterial soul. Although

various monistic theories became soon current, the terms of philosophical speculation on the

human subject remained within the cold dialectics of idealism versus materialism until the end of

the XIX century. The most significant attempt at overcoming these traditional limits towards a

deeper understanding of bodily consciousness was first done by Edmund Husserl and later

developed by French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Profoundly influenced by Husserl’s late writings5, Merleau-Ponty prepares his own

thinking from the philosophical premise of crisis in the human relation to the world. Husserl had

already expressed sharp criticism of the natural sciences, which have for centuries tried to

mathematise everything in nature that can be subjected to such a relationship and assign to

human consciousness everything that could not. Hence, the clear-cut division of body and

mind/soul.

In his 1945 work Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty challenges all of the

philosophical traditions that observe in some degree this dichotomy and proposes an ontology of

the human subject in which it is not just contingently, but in fact necessarily embodied.6 Human

experiences in the world are fundamentally taken in through an incarnated subjectivity, the body

being the very condition of having such experiences, the very site where an experience can

occur. To Taylor Carman, this condition of consciousness or body schema is comparable to the

5 For the distinctions between Edmund Husserl’s conceptions on the body and those of Merleau-Ponty’s, see Taylor

Carman, The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Philosophical Topics Vol. 27, No. 2, Fall 1999 6 Russel Keat, Phenomenology and the Body, p.2

4

Kantian notion of schemata, it is in this sense our epistemic horizon7. In Merleau-Ponty’s own

words, “The body is our general means of having a world”8. And again: “I am conscious of my

body via the world (just as) I am conscious of the world through the medium of my body.”9

This position effects a clear detachment from the classical epistemologies. Neither is data

perception made up of meaningless sensations nor is it reduced by transcendentals. Whatever

meaning I perceive in the external world is necessarily conditioned by my own bodily limits. The

peculiarity of the human senses and their disposition around the body, their simultaneous

engagement, my motor habits and the dexterity of the movements I am capable of - all of these

are my means of meeting the outside.

What is surprising is that despite the rigor that Merleau-Ponty applies in his written

thought (actively dialoguing with contemporary theories in psychology and confronting evidence

from neuroscience) his entire conception of the human body and its interdependence with other

bodies is an incredibly fluid system. In working out the consequences of these reflections, he

sees that the human body maintains a constant dialogue, a reciprocal relationship with the

environment and with other bodies on the level of pre-verbal awareness. The body is an open

system that is not simply a subject in a unilateral act of perception, but is rather a creative and

improvisatory living organ that continuously adjusts its relationship to other bodies and things in

the immediate surroundings. Merleau-Ponty even speaks of the animate nature with which the

body is approached from the outside, the sensible entities which beckon his senses or “put forth a

problem for his body to solve”.

“[…] a sensible quality, like the color blue, which is on the point of being felt sets a kind of

muddled problem for my body to solve. I must find the attitude which will provide it with the

means of becoming determinate, of showing up as blue; I must find the reply to a question which

is obscurely expressed.” 10

Merleau-Ponty is referring here to a total engagement of the body in the simplest of stimuli

perceived, something not far removed from his thoughts on synaesthesia. While taken to be a

rare human capacity in common parlance, for Merleau-Ponty synaesthesia is the rule in

perception: the blending and overlapping of the senses occurs incessantly. The senses are

separated one from the other with a much finer line than we are accustomed to think. And it is

here that the potential for somatic experience of art can be realized.

Text

One of the most intimate adulations of the body in literary theory comes up in Roland Barthes’

book “The Pleasure of the Text”. Adulation might on the first seem to be too strong of an epithet

– not so for anyone who has glanced through the pages of this slim book. The tone that Barthes

makes appeal to when speaking about the text, intimate and sensual, calls to mind a synaesthesia

of sorts: trying out the text inside one’s own body, cross them, make them overlap. After all,

7 Taylor Carman, Ibid., p.218-219

8 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception quoted in Ibid., p. 214

9 Ibid.,p.220

10 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. Quoted in David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, p. 54

5

“text means tissue” and Arab scholars, Barthes writes, referred to the text as to “a certain

body”.11

The character and structure of this book make it very difficult to reassume it whole; however, it

is safe to say that the one recurrent motif of Barthes’ is the organic delight that results from

annulment of distance between text and subject. Barthes wants to incorporate text through his

own somatic cavities and organs, relinquishing reading as the passive counterpart of writing. He

writes:

“The text supersedes grammatical attitudes: it is the undifferentiated eye through which an

excessive author (Angelus Silesius) describes: The eye by which I see God is the same eye by

which he sees me”12

.

This intimacy becomes erotic in the book. The proximity with the erotic connotation is pulsating

all throughout The Pleasure of the Text, bursting out in few direct references.

One such reference is the defining trait of the work: Barthes’ distinction between texts of

pleasure and texts of bliss.13

Bliss is the accommodation in English of the French jouissance, a

word which in the French language connotes not just any state of heightened delight, but that of

orgasm. But perhaps Barthes’ intent and attitude can be best conveyed through his own voice.

At the close of the book, he imagines, invents an aesthetic of textual pleasure (d’apres Philippe

Sollers), that of writing aloud. This final section of The Pleasure of the Text, quoted here at

large, shows how preeminently carnal Barthes’ approach to text is and of what order his

sensibility and attentiveness:

“In antiquity, rhetoric included a section which is forgotten, censored by classical commentators:

the actio, a group of formulae designed to allow for the corporeal exteriorization of discourse: it

dealt with a theater of expression, the actor-orator "expressing" his indignation, his compassion,

etc. Writing aloud is not expressive; it leaves expression to the pheno-text, to the regular code of

communication; it belongs to the geno-text, to significance; it is carried not by dramatic

inflections, subtle stresses, sympathetic accents, but by the grain of the voice, which is an erotic

mixture of timbre and language, and can therefore also be, along with diction, the substance of

an art: the art of guiding one's body (whence its importance in Far Eastern theaters). Due

allowance being made for the sounds of the language, writing aloud is not phonological but

phonetic; its aim is not the clarity of messages, the theater of emotions; what it searches for (in a

perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we

can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole

carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.

A certain art of singing can give an idea of this vocal writing; but since melody is dead, we may

find it more easily today at the cinema. In fact, it suffices that the cinema capture the sound of

speech close up (this is, in fact, the generalized definition of the "grain" of writing) and make us

hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a

whole presence of the human muzzle (that the voice, that writing, be as fresh, supple, lubricated,

11

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, p.16 12

Ibid., p.16 13

The first one (plaisir) corresponds to a “cultural” satisfaction: it is the sort of text which perpetuates established

cultural values; it is identified, it “confirms”. The second one (jouissance) is a subversion, a cut in the cultural; it is

delirious, it brings loss.

6

delicately granular and vibrant as an animal's muzzle), to succeed in shifting the signified a

great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it

granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss.”14

Song

In a shorter essay, The grain of the voice, Barthes transposes these thoughts to the domain of the

lied or the melodie. By the “grain of the voice”, he understands the friction between language

and the voice which makes the body felt all throughout, creating deep significance before the

meaning of the words or that of phrasing, dynamics or interpretation. On the first, it is tempting

to take what Barthes calls the grain of the voice for what is more commonly known as timbre–

the natural colour of the voice peculiar to each singer. But Barthes anticipates this

misunderstanding and corrects it: rather than a given, the grain of the voice comes out of a

concerted effort which mobilizes the entire body in every physical capacity available – and this

effort can palpably surface in the actuality of the voice. He identifies this singing quality and the

lack of it with two adapted terms: the geno-song and the pheno-song accordingly.15

At the same

time, he illustrates with one vocal performer each of the two, Charles Panzera16

and Dietrich

Fischer-Dieskau correspondingly. The geno-song and Panzera, Barthes says, belong to a tradition

in which musical diction is not accompanied by emotion but by a ‘gesture support’. Significance

comes from the somatic, not from the cerebral. It brings jouissance, it cuts a slit in culture, it

explodes semantic meaning. The pheno-song, on the contrary, attends to it; it takes care to instill

the quality of soul rather than body to a technically impeccable interpretation. The pheno-song

seeks the theater of emotions, bypassing its carnal origin.

“With FD, I seem only to hear the lungs, never the tongue, the glottis, the teeth, the mucous

membranes, the nose” – Barthes writes on Fischer-Dieskau.17

And yet, the tradition that gives the

body its due was already in Barthes’ times an art in extinction. The generation of singers who

grew up with the electric recording was more concerned with achieving the perfect pheno-

qualities (like phrasing or dynamics or exegesis) of anything they performed. Now that their art

was recordable (hence eternal), it was of paramount importance to a great deal of them to pass on

an irreproachable interpretation, almost an ideal that has to exclude the particular and the

contingent.

In reading this text, (which is once again poliedric and difficult to reassume as a whole) one

might wonder if the author is not passing his own prejudices or personal preferences as universal.

The author is not ignorant of this uncertainty on the part of his reader. He clarifies:

“If I perceive the 'grain' in a piece of music and accord this 'grain' a theoretical value (the

emergence of the text in the work), I inevitably set up a new scheme of evaluation which will

certainly be individual - I am determined to listen to my relation with the body of the man or

woman singing or playing and that relation is erotic - but in no way 'subjective' (it is not

14

Ibid., p. 67, my italics. 15

Barthes adapts these terms from Julia Kristeva’s corresponding pheno-text and geno-text . 16

According to Barthes, his connection to the Swiss Baritone Charles Panzera is not only that of an admirer towards

a performer: he reported to have taken singing lessons with him shortly before the outbreak of the Second World

War. 17

R. Barthes, The Grain of the Voice in Image Music Text, p. 183

7

the psychological 'subject' in me who is listening; the climactic pleasure hoped for is not going to

reinforce - to express -that subject but, on the contrary, to lose it)”.18

Towards the end of this essay, Barthes makes it clear that although he has written a text on the

art of classical singing, the distinctions he makes are not limited neither to the domain of

classical music, nor to the medium of the voice. Every experienced classical music listener will

agree on the limited, but certainly present timbric potential of the piano, the cello or the horn; a

quality of the tone beyond its frequency or dynamics – directly dependent on the bodily attitude

with which the instrument is approached.

What is the grain of the voice?

“The 'grain' is that: the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue.”19

Image

I set out to write of the body in order that I may imagine it as a primal, epistemic subject in

relation to the visual arts. But unlike text and song (which are more inherently connected to the

capacity of a body), contemporary visual arts only sometimes bear meaningful relations to the

body. Immediate points of reference are of course expressionist art or action painting and

performance. However, since I am hoping to make a wider, more generally applicable claim, I

will not turn specifically to any of these two. A reason more not to limit myself to these two

categories is that works bearing these designations can address the body (my body, the body of

whoever perceives) in the sense intended or not address it, just like any other work of art outside

of them.

Adapting Barthes’ quote from above to this new context, I am interested to see, consume, absorb

my relation with the artwork and that relation is erotic and individual – “but in no way

subjective”. It is not subjective because the address towards the bodily exists, I do not invent it. It

is individual because in every instance when I am approached by this address, it is my own body

which is reached out for, the only body I have.

Giuseppe Penone’s 1968 set of actions Alpi Marittime is a very appropriate example. Even

though today these gestures only survive documented through black and white photographs, they

effectively address the body, my body – the body of whoever is confronted with them.

Penone puts his own body in relation to nature.

In one of these actions, La mia altezza, la lunghezza delle mie braccia, il mio spessore in un

ruscello20

, he constructs a cement rectangle the dimensions of which are determined by the size

of the artist’s body. This drawing on the ground happens precisely in the place where there are

furrows from the previous spring torrents. When the next season a mass of water comes rushing

along the same line, the cement rectangle becomes a pool filled with water and even submerged.

As may be hinted from my writing so far, in referring to the bodily, in this instance I am not

interested in anything as literal as the fact of the body determining the dimensions of the

18

Ibid., p.188 19

Ibid., p.182 20

My height, the length of my arms, my thickness in a brook.

8

rectangular pool. It is something else, somewhat more difficult to articulate: the sensuous

interaction between the two waters: the stationary water, the one inside the rectangle and the one

permanently rippling above it. Granted, it is the same water all along; still something is

displaced.

It is the water rolling on water, rubbing or sliding one on top of the other that my body

understands: my response to this (as I can only speak of myself) is as unmediated as noticing I

am tired or thirsty; there is something elemental and familiar about the effect this simple action

yields. In fact, so elemental that it is difficult to elaborate on it any further.

We can call it an intensity.

This relationship between the body and an intensity is reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s

concept of Body without Organs. The BwO stands for a disarticulated body, one which has lost

its organizational and hierarchical complexity; it is an undifferentiated body which can only

absorb intensities. As Francesca Migliano Alfetti puts it:

(…) the BwO offers disarticulation as a property, experimentation as operation, and nomadism as

a series of movements. To disarticulate is to render one’s own body available to an entire series

of connections, conjunctions, concatenations, and paths open to the articulations of intensities

and flows.21

Both the concept of BwO and the term “intensity” recur in Deleuze’s work frequently and in

different forms.22

What is common to all of them is that they propose a strongly anti-

intellectualist stance: by intensities he means obscure currents that run deep in our bodies, almost

on the verge of what we are conscious about. It is this obscure depth, proto-consciousness that

needs addressing.

Giuseppe Penone, Alpi Marittime: La mia altezza, la lunghezza delle mie braccia, il mio

spessore in un ruscello

21

Francesca Migliano Alfetti, Extreme Bodies, p. 139 22

See for example, “Becoming Animal”, in A pour Animal in L’Abecedaire de Gilles Deleuze. Notably, Deleuze

insists on the idea that writers should write for the animals (or for the idiots). “For” meaning not “to the attention

of”, but “in the place of”. A writer needs to bend language to the point of writing gaiety, death, desire without

recurring to writing about gaiety, death or desire.

9

2. Au-delà

An Alchemist

I became interested in alchemy in the course of my work with salt in the past year.

Salt has an elemental, primal energy radiating from it, and at the same time it is so dry and

ascetic and contained; it is both corrosive and indispensable to life. According to a renaissance

tradition of alchemy, salt is the larger principle that represents the human body.

Alchemy relied on this type of obscure knowledge about the (ultra) sensual quality of matter in

order to bring it to the limit of being something else.

In Salt piece, I fire melted salt down to a door wedge crystal, like a congealed, dense version of a

body. These pieces are to be used as doorstops, or left available to be used for propping of

objects, furniture, windows. Just like salt in alchemy, they too stand in for a body – but in the

true physical sense.

In Is to Salt as Salt is to, I worked again with melting salt, but this time taking advantage of the

defective effects that salt unexpectedly took in the course of the previous project. At a certain

configuration of melting conditions (the precise combination of which remains a mystery to me),

the surface of the poured salt assumed a reflective glow, almost a mirror. The imaginative

potential of this transformation interested me: just as the alchemist attempts to transcend matter

through matter, I too was bridging the inert, inanimate into the animate. The grainy white salt

that is transformed not just in another physical state, but in a form of life, almost.23

The mirror in alchemy is also a symbol of the true, spiritual transformation of the alchemist.

Is to Salt as Salt is to (detail)

23

Mirrors are of course not living things, hence not really animate. Still, they have an affiliation with the animate

though popular superstition and their potential for the uncanny.

10

Salt piece, process

Salt Piece, detail

11

The Alchemist

The alchemist is known in popular culture both as a proto-chemist and as that strange

mythological figure which attempted transforming dirt into gold, sought to find the elixir of life

or to produce the universal medicine, panacea. This skeletal image no doubt does its part in

relegating alchemists to the repository of historical curiosities - naturally bypassing the idea of

alchemy as a metaphysical system.

Although the description above is valid for a large part of the obscure practitioners of this

bygone tradition, its connections to hermetic philosophy make it more than just a matter of

cultural history.

Practitioners as far apart as Zosimos of Panopolis (3rd

century AD) and Fulcanelli (early 20th

century) have left the testimony of the secret end of alchemy, reserved for the few (even among

alchemists). When inquired on the Grand Oeuvre by a modern chemist, Fulcanelli is reported to

have replied: The vital thing is not the transmutation of metals but that of the experimenter

himself. It is an ancient secret that a few people rediscover each century. Unfortunately, only a

handful are successful…24

The end of alchemy is a horizon, its true meaning being the

transformation of the alchemist himself.25

In the words of English scholar Urzsula Szulakowska,

“The form of the philosopher’s stone was said to be that of a ‘glorified’ matter transcending

dualities of body – spirit in a manner comparable to the resurrected body of Jesus Christ. It was

believed that in the course of this miraculous, quasi-religious process the alchemist would be

transformed into a superhuman being.”26

A statement such as this one is now all too easily taken as the customary slice of mystification

any metaphysics must produce to legitimize itself. But in my own experience, and what is more

through the experience of my work (see Is to Salt as Salt is to), the transformation intended is

entirely rooted in immanence. It is not through some sort of an obscure, supernatural change that

the experimenter is transfigured; rather the transformation is immanent in the search itself.

It is by virtue of a lifetime of daily efforts in faith - that the transformation can be effected. The

courage and strength of will to believe that our base condition can be transcended from here

below, with our own base material means, regardless of the unrewarded pursuit of this idea

across the centuries – this disciplined humility and breadth of spirit can palpably and in essence

transform a person.

24

Dennis W. Hauck, Sorcerer’s Stone, p.117, Citadel Press, 2004 25

This idea has become commonplace, ever since Carl Gustav Jung made extensive use of alchemy for his descent

into the human unconscious. However, while certain alchemists have professed awareness of this “secret”, many

others seem to have worked in complete innocence of such ideas, that is to say, in the domain of what we would

properly call proto-chemical work. 26

Urszula Szulakowska, The Influence of Alchemy on 20th

century art, p.4

12

The Alchemists

References to alchemy in modern and contemporary art are by no means frequent – but neither

are they rare. Starting from the early XX century, it was the artist who assumed the role of the

magus, the powerful mediator capable of transforming human knowledge and even human life.

This development coincided with a cultural revolt against reason, a general tendency to

undermine the precepts of positivist science. The two conditions contributed to the popularity

that this esoteric practice was to gain in the arts - through employing alchemy as metaphor,

staging it or appropriating its iconography.27

Antonin Artaud, Leonora Carrington and Rebecca Horn, Andre Breton, George Bataille and

Anselm Kiefer among many others have professed an inclination towards it.

Rarer on the other hand is the preoccupation with its potential in the domain of visual arts and

the prospect of innovative material practice it brings. In the next few pages I hope to clarify and

expand on this position by introducing alchemy in the context of Arte Povera, Joseph Beuys’ and

Sigmar Polke’s work.

In the case of the Arte Povera artists, it was the voice of Germano Celant that promoted the idea

of affinity between the young Italian artists and the figure of the alchemist. The artists

themselves make but a passing reference to it, sometimes almost as if to demonstrate coherence

with the manifest anti-rationalist direction of their work. Similarly to Sigmar Polke’s alchemy

related work, their dependence on the natural materials and phenomena is substantial and often

the immaterial presents a crucial component of their work.

Earth’s magnetic field, natural growth, heat, entropy, capillary force, humidity, filtration, light,

gravity, oxidation, odour. All that involves some sort of passage of traceable energy is abstracted

and recombined in the work of Giovanni Anselmo, Gilberto Zorio, Jannis Kounellis, Pier Paolo

Calzolari and Giuseppe Penone, among others.28

Admittedly, there is not much that is explicitly

alchemical, except in the work of Zorio where several reference points (the crucible and salts

such as copper sulphate) point to it. Still, the intimate knowledge that these artists show of these

natural processes gives relevance to the scope of my interest in this chapter.

As part of the post-minimalist panorama, the Arte Povera artists were trying to reach a kind of

elemental ground, one cleared of the constructions that justified the preceding artistic tendencies.

A new relationship with matter was at the center of these attempts.

Of course, the usage of materials not commonly associated with art was no novelty in the late

60s. But unlike the historical modernist avant-garde, Zorio’s generation of artists was the first

one to employ poor materials in a positive, constructive sense. Not as a means for deconstruction

or subversion of the accepted aesthetic values of the day, but rather for the imaginative, haptic or

esoteric charge that these materials have stored throughout the long centuries of civilization. If

the isms of the first half of the century that pioneered the use of modern materials through this

use were asking -why not?, then Calzolari, Anselmo, Zorio and others know precisely why the

27

The fact that alchemical stages(nigredo, albedo, citrinitas, rubedo) had each a distinct colour associated with them

is also a point of contact between alchemy and the arts. 28

In fact, to draw a connection with the previous chapter, it is no surprise to find that in 1960 the Italian cultural

scene lived a renaissance of phenomenological studies (through the School of Milan, founded by Antonio Banfi).

13

materials they use are the only possible in that moment and in that place.29

Each material comes

with a deeply rooted significance that transcends its physical reality. Matter participates in this

generation’s creations with more than just its phenomenological presence: coal is not just an

opaque black irregularly-shaped thing; honey is not simply a thick yellowish liquid. An affective

- non-intellectual charge accompanies its presence. In the case of Arte Povera, these states of

being of matter are juxtaposed on one another, blended one into the other: tobacco leaves and

neon, leather and salt, ice and lead, thus creating a new strongly suggestive identity. Bruno Corà

in an essay on Pier Paolo Calzolari referes to this primal, organic union as a “sublime populaire”

and hastens to add that Joseph Beuys himself often recurred to the same effect.30

Pier Paolo Calzolari:Non (Not), Tobacco leaves, pure tin bars and neon

The Arte Povera artists are thus engaged loosely in alchemical research inasmuch they recur to

the wedding of opposite material identities through a sort of intuitive gnosis. Corà is not

mistaken - Beuys is not at a large remove; still the differences in approach are quite evident.

As an illustration, we can consider a Beuys drawing entitled “Theory of Sculpture: Sulphur,

Mercury, Salt”. It references directly the alchemical trinity of Paracelsus, a XVI century

physician and alchemist.

Joseph Beuys, Theory of Sculpture: sulfur, mercury, salt

29

Pier Paolo Calzolari has frequently pointed out that unlike the avant-gardes, Arte Povera did not constitute itself

as a negation of the past, least a call for its destruction. The truth is, he says, that Arte Povera was not enforcing such

hierarchy (valuing the present over the past), but worked in a horizontal rather than vertical sense. 30

Bruno Corà, Pier Paolo Calzolari: Épiphanies et Visions de l’Absolu, p. 22

14

For Paracelsus, these three elements are representative of the three fundamental principles

governing the universe: Sulphur for Combustibility, Mercury for Volatility and Salt for Fixity.

Concerning man, they corresponded to the soul (emotions and desires), the spirit (imagination,

thought) and to the body accordingly. Concerning Christian theology, Sulphur stood for the

Father, Mercury for the Holy Spirit and Salt for the Son.

To Beuys, the three states of matter (which were not exclusively derived from Paracelsus as

Paracelsus himself took them over from the medieval tradition) “describe the passage of

everything in the world, physical or physiological, from a chaotic, undetermined state (Sulphur)

to a determined or ordered state (Salt, with the intermediate passage of Mercury)”31

. In

connection to the human dimension, Beuys shuffles Paracelsus’ given correspondences. In fact,

if Paracelsus’ analogies span the micro and macro-world, the human and the divine, biology and

theology at once, to Beuys these essential elements concern “the primary anthropological

material of mankind (as) thought, emotion and will”.32

chaos movement form

Sulfur Mercury Salt

will feeling thinking

potential, warmth, flow, mediation, consolidation,

turbulence in-between, definition, cold,

transformation hardening, static

Salt, according to Beuys, is the crystallized, over-determined state of human production. It is the

human spiritual stuff which has gone one step too far, which became too rationalized. Curiously

enough, alchemy itself, a system of occult knowledge constructed on a series of analogies (such

as the Paracelsian trinity above), can easily become a closed circuit by simply substituting terms

in the corresponding relationships. Does Beuys elude this danger?

A text by Antje von Graevenitz, Joseph Beuys: Breaking the Silence considers an “alchemical”

work of Beuys’.

Beuys’ (Thermisch/plastisches Urmeter)33

was presented in 1984 in the basement of a “small

leased house” in Basel as part of the exhibition Skulptur im 20 Jahrhundert . The damp space

that on the first seemed completely empty soon revealed the only visible occurrence in the room:

a small cloud of vapour rising from the moulding on one of the walls. But it is in the invisible

that the alchemical took place. Von Graevenitz describes in detail the steam apparatus behind the

scenes: water was heated in a copper kettle soldered with tin along its edges and the steam was

sent up through a galvanized iron tube. The choice of material is hardly accidental, the author

maintains, and taps into the centenary tradition of alchemical metallurgy which is once again

31

Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, p. 72 32

Antje von Graevenitz, Breaking the Silence, p. 31 in Breaking the Silence: Joseph Beuys on his ‘Challenger’,

Marcel Duchamp 33

First shown in the 1984 exhibition at the Merianpark in Basel.

15

working through analogy, erotic and spiritual at the same time: Copper is of the female sex, Iron

corresponds to the male. Copper is employed for the container, a stand-in for a womb, of Iron is

the pipe, constituting the phallus and the hot steam produced is the effect of erotic union of these

two opposing principles. This is a fundamental element in all alchemical discourse, as at the core

of the final transformation in the Magnum Opus is the conjunctio, the coitus as it were, the

chemical wedding of the two essential forces. The viewers perceive (per-sieve, filter in through

inhalation) only the little steaming breath borne out of this inspired (in-spired) “act of love”. The

author adds that although this mechanism was invisible to the visitors, Beuys did later on decide

to show it as a free-standing work, inverting the title (Plastisch/thermisches Urmeter).

Joseph Beuys, Thermisch/plastisches Urmeter

This work is, in my opinion felicitously composed. It is almost beyond doubt that Beuys was

aware of the symbology he was employing and having that in mind we can say that his

engagement with alchemy is more conscious in comparison to the Arte Povera artists. Maybe

even too conscious, to the point of largely depending on esoteric authority. This was a point for

which Beuys’ figure was criticized by Benjamin Buchloh34

. The strategy of substituting terms in

alchemist equations or that of reiterating the old dogmas (iron-virility/copper-feminine) gives

birth to closed system in which meaning is ossified, given once and for all.

To be fair, it is also true that Beuys’ work is vast. Such a short consideration doesn’t take into

account other works which although not outspokenly labeled alchemical, would do better justice

to their author. But we know that the question here is not Beuys’ work in particular but that of

marking a territory, or better a field of interest.

34

Benjamin Buchoh, The Twilight of the Idol

16

The artist who in my view best combines the material experimentation typical of Arte Povera

and Beuys’ knowledge and consciousness in the context of alchemy is undoubtedly Sigmar

Polke. His engagement with the discipline plays out both as an iconographic and material

interest and covers Polke’s painting as well as photographic practice.

To start out from the latter, as Charles Haxthausen points out, Sigmar Polke’s photographic work

uncovers “two discrete segments of time”. One is that of the exposure, the capturing of the image

on an intermediate medium, and the other one that of the developing bath that brings about the

final print. This latter step we observers usually take for granted - and usually no more so than

photographers would like us to. More often than not this step is rendered invisible, perfectly

transparent in the finished print. But to Polke, this overlooked alchemy of the dark room was

central: in fact, such is the emphasis on the second temporal segment of photography in his work

that it has been said, and rightly so, that Polke used photographic emulsion as a medium for

painting.35

Thus it is not very difficult to infer a continuity between Polke’s photographic and pictorial

practice. Both are based on radical experimentation with matter – and in the case of Polke this

often meant the deformation, partiality or inversion of the conquests of the Western craft

tradition. In other words, he proceeded, both in photography and painting, to sabotage la regola

d’arte36

, every good rule passed down to the maker in the centuries of cultural production: from

mixing water-based and non-water based paint to employing highly poisonous pigments and to

the usage of particularly unstable paints. With his restless studio experimentation, Polke pulled

matter out of its comfortable dialectics of compatibilities/incompatibilities. However, although

this manifest direction originated from his studio/darkroom explorations, the painter maintained

that it was his journeys to Australia and New Guinea of 1980/1981 that were the true stimulants.

There he came across a heritage of colour use that was wholly alien to the tradition of colour as

defined in the confines of European painting (notably, the use of the aboriginal painters’ own

blood as red paint); this brought to his attention the question of the material identity of colour. As

Polke himself described in an interview with Bice Curiger,

“…(I) started thinking about colour and its treatment, but I also thought about how, for example,

Hinduism explains and uses colour or how Australians use colour. The whole business of red and

yellow and green out of a tube which is perfectly valid, but I started thinking about what it is.”37

What Polke refers to here is an identity of colour that is linguistically, so to speak, not analogous

with an adjective. Colour is not a mere attribute but represents a more definite ontological entity

the archaic “meaning” of which has been neglected because of the instrumental relationship the

35

Charles Haxthausen attributes this remark to Ashley Wilkes in his text. 36

“A regola d’arte” is an Italian expression that originates from the time of the medieval guilds. It implies a high

standard in the technical execution of a crafted object. 37

As quoted in Haxthausen, The work of Art in the Age of its (Al)Chemical Transmutability, p. 197 in Sigmar

Polke, The Three Lies of Painting

17

Sigmar Polke, Wall painting with hygroscopic paint, cobalt-II-chloride, XLII Biennale in

Venice, Pavilion of the Federal Republic of Germany 1986

In the morning

In the afternoon

18

West has nurtured with it. Indeed, Polke recedes in, reverts to a pre-intellectual understanding of

colour. In the words of Hans Belting,

“In the technical age nature has also been banned as a motif in painting. Every recourse to nature

appears as an archaic attitude. This is where Polke protests, reminding us in this forbidden way

of forgotten wonders of painting which once caused astonishment in the way chemistry does

today. Nature returns to painting not in a motif but in a spectacle of natural forces (and their

counterpart in the form of synthetic chemicals).”38

The spectacle of the natural forces, or the chemical theater as Belting later calls it39

involves the

conflict of unorthodox substances, which chanced upon the painting surface, create the event for

which the painter (just like the alchemist) is only partially responsible. Sometimes, the effect is

material, the reaction is chemical and the outcome visible; at other times the substances remain

polarized and inert, radiating some sort of a charge somewhere below the visible spectrum.

Material in Polke’s work involves an interminable list of unheard of painting substances. Soot on

glass, arsenic on canvas, silver nitrate and iodine on textile, photograms exposed to uranium,

meteorite dust, ferrous mica, gunpowder, beeswax, …And the list continues.

Polke’s Athanor show at the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 1986 featured a large wall

painting for which hygroscopic paint (cobalt-II-chloride) was used. The light, ethereal painting

was in constant transformation of appearance because of the sharp fluctuations of air humidity in

the Venice Laguna: the surface was described to be in continuous evolvement between shades

ranging from azure blue to pale rose. The alchemy is not only material, but also visual. In

addition to hygro sensitive pigments, Polke has used thermo sensitive paints, and a surprisingly

eclectic variety of resins and lacquers which create surprising visual effects and at the same time,

disrupt the desire of the eye to grasp them fully. The reading of paintings like Hochsitz II (1984-

85), acrylic and artificial resin on printed fabric, depends largely of the angle at which one

positions oneself; because of the irregularly applied layers of resin, the color distribution and

reflection varies greatly with the change of position. Speaking about the three-part work

Negativwerte I-III of 1982 (Alkor, Mizar, Aldebaran), Polke fleetingly expresses interest in this

visual alchemy/elusive quality of his surfaces,

“…for example, the glow of my violet pictures that you just can’t take home with you, and yet

which does affect the retina and which awakens in us a longing for the unknown mysterium.”40

Sigmar Polke’s work is in constant oscillation between the high brow and low brow, irony and

sanctity; in fact so much so, that often it is difficult to see where the painter stands in relation to a

certain work. But this is precisely why Polke’s work is so effective: it is a fruit of unrestrained

experimentation with the very stuff of painting, creating images which withhold a mystery. It is

at the same time basic and very sophisticated. It is in a sense how many other painters have

worked, and in a sense, he is the only one who has worked in this way. And all of this is

validated again and again with every work – his fascination with alchemy is thorough enough for

38

Hans Belting, On Lies and Other Truths of painting, p.134 in Ibid. 39

After Theatrum Chemicum, a compendium of Alchemist’s writings published in 1602 40

As quoted in Martin Hentschel, Solve et Coagula, p.74 in Sigmar Polke, The Three Lies of Painting. My italics.

19

him to see in it an open system of infinite possibilities. Still countless clashes of matter to

attempt:

“One picture has one effect, the next picture, even with the same elements, will by no means

necessarily have the same effect. But I do know that if you sprinkle iron on it then the character

is different to when you sprinkle aluminium on it. Iron has a completely different effect to

copper, to zinc. And then I also work with tellurium and with apocryphal powders or with other

powdered elements, just to see: what will they do […]? Unpredictability – that’s the interesting

thing” 41

Sigmar Polke, Negativwert II (Mizar) 1982

41

Quoted in Ibid., p.76

20

Epilogue

When considered in depth at any given point, the notions au-deçà and au-delà, immanence and

transcendence collapse into each other.

The whole problem of immanence and transcendence in Western culture is a sober question that

starts from the body: what are the limits of my body? What can my body accomplish? There are

no two answers, one with the help of the supernatural and one that tells what the body can do on

its own. Every possibility is already in the body as we know it, even what we call transcendental.

And this defines the effort I make:

Produce work of unmediated contiguity with the body, something which the body can almost

understand on itself. But to excite the body, one needs to push its language to a limit, practice an

alchemy of matter - to the point of provoking a discharge of energy between the two.

21

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