Nina St-Pierre – March 14 2019
Lemuria was pure hypothesis, a
19th-century paleontologist’s explanation for how lemurs crossed from Madagascar into India. The discovery of modern
plate tectonics put the theory to bed, but Lemuria’s legend has persisted for
almost 200 years. After a brief period of reclamation by Tamil nationalists,
who called the hypothetical continent Kumari Kandam, the charge of Lemuria as a
peak civilization lost to sea was taken up by occultists and theosophists.
Like a game of telephone, authors
built on the story of Lemuria. Madame Blavatsky’s esoteric cosmology posited
the Lemurians as a “root race” in human evolution. Australian professor Robert
Dixon theorized that Lemuria was a stand in for post-colonial British malaise. Finally,
and this is what interested Pynchon, Lemuria was a continent sunken at vague
coordinates in the Pacific Ocean. And then the
Lemurians came to California.
Maybe the simple truth is that I can’t read Pynchon
because I, too, want to keep believing. I want to believe that someone,
somewhere, can explain in concrete terms the seekers of lost cities, the
not-of-this-earth, those leaving behind broken histories and families,
searching for a way to disappear and, in turn, find themselves.
Blavatsky, Emerson and the Tree of Knowledge
Lewis Connelly - 8
April 2019
I would
identify the author of this movement to be Madame Blavatsky, and I would
identify her forerunner to be our very own Ralph Waldo Emerson. Moving from
Emerson to Blavatsky – contemporaries of one another - there is undeniably, in
my opinion, a thick line of influence….Madame Blavatsky then was at the helm of
esotericism or occultism, or modern spirituality’s sudden rise to prominence. Theosophists
themselves speculate that the reason for this sudden rise was on account of the
hidden masters themselves, who perhaps convened in some clandestine fashion to
orchestrate the emergence of this ancient truth, to aid humanity in our ongoing
spiritual betterment. And who knows? I’m obviously a sceptic when it come to
this stuff, but here I am talking about it, so, make of that what you will. It
does resonate on some level as meaningful to me.
An Occult Art History of the American West
Fiffy Guyver – 12 September
2019
During the
19th century, the American frontier moved ever-westward. The so-called new
territories quickly became rich sites for innovative forms of Western
spirituality, which operated outside of organized religion. One such practice,
Theosophy – established in New York
in 1875 by occultist Helena P. Blavatsky – proved influential in the
development of abstract painting and Western modernism more broadly. A new
book, titled Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy, the Arts and the American
West (2019), charts the religious movement’s influence on art history.
In 1938, in
the small town of Taos, New Mexico, a number of artists formed the
Transcendental Painting Group. Inspired by occult teachings, including
theosophical literature, they conducted experiments in abstraction….One member
of the group, Agnes Pelton, moved to the California
desert in 1932, where she began to create surreal, luminous paintings. Among
Pelton’s influences was Blavatsky’s core text, The Key to Theosophy (1889),
and her works are suffused with occult symbolism.
he German
artist, animator and filmmaker Oskar Fischinger is perhaps best-known for his
pioneering contributions to abstract cinema: he collaborated with Fritz Lang on
his 1929 film Woman in the Moon and influenced Walt Disney’s Fantasia
(1940). Although not a member of the Transcendental Painting Group,
Fischinger was particularly influenced by Theosophical ideas after moving to Hollywood in 1936.
Mar 13–June 28, 2020
https://whitney.org/exhibitions/agnes-pelton
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