| This group exhibition—which takes its title from the infamous 1962 book by Sven Berlin—explores the influence of folklore, mysticism, mythology and the occult on the development of British modernism. Berlin’s novel is a fictional critique of an artist colony. It captures the topographical forces that tether the dark manipulation of symbolic forms. |  |
Alun Rowlands curated The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art, on view October 9, 2009-January 10, 2010 at Tate St Ives, U.K.
This group exhibition—which takes its title from the infamous 1962 book by Sven Berlin—explores the influence of folklore, mysticism, mythology and the occult on the development of British modernism. Berlin’s novel is a fictional critique of an artist colony. It captures the topographical forces that tether the dark manipulation of symbolic forms. Amidst its recalcitrant chapters there is a tension between a progressive modernity and the otherness of a romantic knowledge. It is this tension, focusing on landscape encoded with mystical notions of history as both geological and magical, that the exhibition seeks to traverse.
The Dark Monarch will critically examine magic as a counterpoint to liberal understanding of modernity’s transparency and rational progress. The exhibition will attend to the ways in which magic’s forms of faith and skepticism, revelation, and concealment supplement each other. Here, magic is designated a conceptual field—shared with notions of fetishism, witchcraft, the occult, totem, mana, and taboo—that was predominantly made to define the antithesis of modernity. It is a production of illusion and delusion that was thought to recede and disappear through secularization. The works exhibited will confront the sentimentalist, poetic, or voluntaristic tendencies they excluded, tendencies that were harnessed by romantic visions that become fundamental to the vagaries of aesthetic ruination. The Dark Monarch contends that magic belongs to modernity, revealing the correspondences and nostalgias by which the magical can come to haunt modernity.
The Dark Monarch aims to be a constellation that evokes and fuses the real with the imaginary: automatic drawing, wax sculptures, botanical collage, esoteric busts, appropriated imagery, and evocative film are manipulated with transformative effect across generations of British art. The exhibition will traverse historical points where artists relish the degradation of the known and the perversion of a rational culture. The exhibition and related events will weave together interconnected fictions that form a landscape of broken connections. Signposting the way will be artworks colluding to form an entropic trail that defines a restless territory of romantic knowledge, a knowledge that seeks to confront a lacuna, the absent fiction at the heart of Berlin’s novel.
Drawn from archives and works from the Tate collection by historic and contemporary artists, as well as major a number of loans, the exhibition will realign the influence of early modernism, and the reappearance of neo-romantic and arcane references, on a significant strand of current international arts practice.
