First published for www.joshuamason.net

"Magic and the Material Thing"

The development of modern art, or concrete painting, appears to denote a consistent and steady withdrawl from the world of visible objects. (Even though it was the object and the analysis of the object that the development originated.)

The analytical eye singled out and isolated objects, dragging them from their hiding places of environment, what Alan Watts calls the 'environmental organism,' and instead isolated them from their own atmosphere, associations and processes. This isolating of objects came to be known as a genuine existential "antithesis."

In this antithesis the object assumed a personal character. A strange self-existent presence came over the material thing, and this relationship to the thing made its appearance around 1890. Van Gogh and Cezanne knew of this. Cubism can be seen as the first major push of this pscyhology, as the Cubists extracted the true visual configurations inherent in the thing, and then elaborated on it by purely pictorial and existential definition.

So we shall see that magic in the material thing was aided by insitutions of the artworld. Searching history one comes upon Uccelloo. Uccello lives in a time when the mind was moved to 'conquer' the reality of the exterior world. This happened first with the early Florentine masters, and they achieved their conquering of reality, no by observation but by imaginative pictorial defintions. (The observer cannot rid himself of himself in his mapping of the world).

The Florentines also defined the emobied thing, the imaginative pictorial definition, to the intellectual image of the exterior world. It is by adding to this imaginative "arcahic" thing-image, that increasingly accurate observations where acheived. Finally, during the Renaissance the illusionistic qualities of painting was accompilished.

In the conquest of the exterior world, then, the painter began with "arachic" images. These images were rooted in deep regions of the mind; the artist was able to render it so long as he possesed a mental image of it. This process of reality is an indivisible primitive unity of man and thing.

For example, the work of Henry Rousseau, who's paintings stand astonishingly outside the historical progression. Rousseau is a primitive genius, who without assistance and security of sylstic and cultural tradition, felt impelled to defin the exterior world in a completely inspiring way. He established his own reality and to used his own definitions to do so. He is in the same situation of Uccelloo, both sought to present a similarity of form. Rousseau, by calling upon his own inner reality, demonstrated the archaic dignity of the thing. Metaphysically, Rousseau's concept represented was to hm identical itht he ground of reality in which the world of things took root. Even though he was unable to capture the changing eflection of reality upon the eye, he took subjects with the sole purpose of describing them, and did so in way that conjured an imaginative, magical image as a thing.

 It is noticable that these thing-definitions of Rousseau's came very close to Picasso's still life paintings. Two methods of defining reality, with two different histories, converge. Picasso based his method on Cezanne, and strove to penetrate the surace of the representation so to remove everything - all culture, ideals, emotions, conventions, and environmental associations- that may "mask" their reality. Rousseau's images of reality are from an imaginative ground that was also untouched by culture and convention. Both acheived, or strove to achieve, a second reality 'parallel to nature.' The thing became the material of the world of expression.

Out of a ground of reality a second reality grows - a reality of the inner imagination. This inner reality reduces things of the world to a special particular event. Dream and reality fuse as we see the material thing as something magical. It was this experience of the magic in the material thing which revolutionary painters sought. In the desire to define reality, the artists stumbled upon the magic in reality.

Describing this phenomenon, Wassily Kandinsky called it, "the greater reality." The critic Roh spoke of "magic realism." Labels of course vary from the intellectual culture in which they were invented, and to the painter himself, the picture merely emanated from the imaginaion as an indiputable reality.

Perhaps, the upper reaches of the modern culture pressed the need to clarify a new experience of thing and reality. Perhaps, it was alienation from the world of objects which created the distance proper enought so the object could be thought of as something independent, 'other,' strange and remote...So what can one say about the magic in the material thing?

One thing is clear, before 1890 the idea of the magic inherent in the material thing was not entirely concieved, something happened within art which served to fix our attention toward things and objects, and we all now live it's legacy in the monster enterprise which is globalisation, and thing-fetish consumerism.

I guess the question I am trying to ask is the following, if art led us into an arachic relationship to the magical properties of the thing, and in turn, over the centuries this magical thing grew into the magical allure of certain objects of manufacture, or the magical icons of the corporate symbol for which the consumers worship, cannot art help rid humankind of it's worship of objects?

Is there not an even greater reality hidden in the thing, a reality beyond the magic of the imaginative, a reality which lies in the realm of the contemplative?

If so objects beome transparent....