Doug HarveyIn 1942, the financial adviser to the royal family of Lichtenstein asked
the artist Emma Kunz if she would attempt to “repolarize” Adolf Hitler from
a distance. Citing excessive negative energies, she at first declined. When
she later relented, the 63-centimeter metal spring Kunz used as a “transmitter”
flew up and began to slash at her body, before wresting itself from her grip
and flying across the room. As is often the case, art had failed to make an
impact on worldly events.
Kunz, who lived from 1892 to 1963, is one of three artists included in “3X Abstraction,”
a show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art by way of NYC’s Drawing Center. The
fact that I am able to include the preceding anecdote in a discussion of this
work is indicative of how far from the beaten definition of art these three
wandered; to various degrees, each saw her abstract paintings and drawings as
the minor physical manifestations of much larger cosmic forces. You wouldn’t
know it from the exhibit itself. Consisting of nicely framed and austerely installed
works on paper (and the occasional oil on canvas), “3X Abstraction” could easily
pass for a survey of little-known art-for-art’s-sake formalist abstractions.
Agnes Martin — the most famous of the three — was in fact widely misinterpreted
along these and related conceptualist lines throughout her career, her meditative
linear geometries usually finding themselves lumped in with crabby ’70s post-minimal
permutations by the likes of Sol LeWitt and Mel Bochner.
This was never a problem for Kunz, or the third artist in the show, Hilma af
Klint, as neither of them was really famous during her lifetime. Klint, an avid
theosophist who supported herself with conventional landscape and portrait commissions,
forbade the public display of most of her work until 20 years after her death
in 1944. Kunz didn’t even consider herself an artist, except insomuch as drawing
was a tool for her practice as a healer in the Swiss villages in which she spent
most of her life. Each of these women, in fact, was participating in what can
be considered the secret history of abstract painting — the use of abstraction
to visualize normally unseeable realities that underlie the tangible everyday
world.
In Martin’s case, her familiar rows of lines, boxes, dots, triangles, etc.,
rendered in a muted — to the point of almost not being there — palette of gray-blues
and beiges. Possessing an undeniable serenity (über-crab Hilton Kramer
famously described them as “almost a form of prayer”) and certainly informed
by Martin’s Beat-era dabblings in Buddhism and Taoism, her softly oscillating
optical fields are finally more grounded in the phenomenology of looking — a
central concern of the formalist late-Modernist milieu in which she came to
prominence — than in the kind of esoteric cosmologies detailed by the other
two. And perhaps not uncoincidentally, her work is the least compelling in the
show.
The Swedish af Klint always had one foot in the art world and one foot beyond
the grave. Already committed to both a conventional fine-art career and spiritualist
practice by the age of 17, she eventually combined the two during séances performed
with a group of like-minded women known as “The Five.” By 1907 they had filled
121 sketchbooks with automatist drawings generated by contact with the spirit
realm.
The year before, af Klint had started working on her own, producing a plethora
of strikingly designed geometric abstractions illustrating such concepts as
The Jews’ Standpoint at the Birth of Jesus and The Atom has found
its first quality — Orderliness and Cleanliness, which releases it from the
forces that pull it down. One of the most arresting works in the show is
the enormous canvas Series SUW, Group 4, No. 14, Swan, a white disc floating
in a black void, with a central triangle shooting off faint beams of primary
colors, which would probably have become an iconic milestone of modern art —
if it were by a dude and had been exhibited in Paris in 1914 when it was painted.
Seen only by a handful of fellow Blavatsky and Steiner acolytes during the artist’s
lifetime, af Klint’s abstract work was finally unveiled in LACMA’s 1986 exhibit
“The Spiritual in Art,” where it was afforded a retroactive art-historical context
alongside the spiritually grounded early abstract paintings of Malevich, Kandinsky
and Mondrian. This landmark show did a great service in undermining the monolithic
perception of abstract art as formalist Minimalism that had been promulgated
by the New York School and their critical and curatorial advocates led by Clement
Greenberg and MoMA czar Alfred Barr. As a result, “3X Abstraction” seems both
a better fit and less heretical in SMMOA than it would have back in Manhattan.
Throughout the 20th century, California was a breeding ground for theosophist
and other occult and non-Western spiritual traditions, and our own strain of
abstraction has always displayed a defiant streak of mysticism.
Hilma
af Klint, The Christian Religion,
Series II, No. 3d (1920)
Which just goes to show how underrated provincialism is. A case in point
is Swiss hermit Kunz — the great revelation in this show. Although she reproduced
her drawings in self-published books in the early 1950s, her originals have only
occasionally been included in European art exhibits, and usually with a bit of
the “crackpot” stigma attached. Kind of surprising when you consider she was the
only one of the three artists here with no art-world ambitions, yet she produced
what is easily the strongest body of work — and one that could stand up to the
crabbiest formal criteria. Fifteen of her large drawings on graph paper, composed
with the aid of a divining pendulum, are included here. Each comprises intricate
webs of line — sometimes resembling the finest string art, or spirograph patterns,
or a transverse schematic for a suspension bridge, or X-rays of some kind of crystalline
organism — but always mandala-like in their symmetry and complex color symbolism.
At once formally arresting and chock-full of meaning, these mostly 40-by-40-inch
colored pencil drawings brim with a mysterious sense of purpose. In fact, they
were never meant to be displayed on a museum wall, but to lie on the floor between
Kunz and one of her patients. For most of her life, Kunz remained in her hometown
of Brittnau, serving as a telepathic healer as well as preparing various non-pharmaceutical
medicines, including herbs and the healing stone from the Roman quarry at Würenlos,
which she discovered and named “AION A.” The drawings operated both as documentation
of research into and as conduits for patterns of vibrational energy that could
be used to realign the psychic imbalances underlying her patients’ medical conditions
and cure them. Functional Art.
Apart from the fact that they look so great, what kicks ass about this work is this: In a time when most art aspires to be good decoration, adequate entertainment, or inoffensive fodder for grant applications or tenure reviews, it is inspiring to consider the example of a woman who couldn’t be bothered to promote her work as “art” because that category was just too small. By the ’60s, when her drawings finally meshed with the times, Kunz had moved beyond the use of such intermediary tools as art, her link to the spirit world having grown so direct and powerful. But even though she ultimately abandoned object making, she understood art objects as powerful portals to deep transformational human energies, as tools that might be able to make an impact on worldly events. Now that the art world has accepted Kunz as one of its own, what it sorely needs is a dose of its own medicine.3X ABSTRACTION: New Methods of Drawing | Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica | Through August 13 | On Thursday, July 14, from 6 to 10 p.m., artist Christian Cummings, assisted by Michael Decker, will demonstrate (with audience participation encouraged) “Automatic Drawing Brought Forth Through the Ouija Board.”
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