Politics of the Occult

On September 14, 2007, the New York-based artist Panos Tsagaris performed Whom I Love I Chastise with Many Rods in Galerie fur Zeitgenossische Kunst, in Leipzig, Germany. In front of talismanic icons of sacred symbols and words, he   “housed” himself and a 10-year-old girl within a magical circle that he made with charcoal from burned wood. He then performed a purifying ritual reminiscent of African magic, due to selective employment of ritualistic materials (such as oils and flower scents) and objects (such as the African figurine kept in one of the two boxes that he ceremoniously placed in the purified areas of the circle.) Once the exorcism of evil was finished, the girl wrote (in German) “I FORGIVE YOU” on 55 sheets of paper, which the artist then passed to the audience. Gifting the viewers with the material evidence of a child’s forgiveness, he hoped to make them wonder about the adult mistakes they were forgiven for—to awaken us to all kinds of personal and collective guilt. And yet there is a historical “mistake” behind his performance: the ongoing unforgivable atrocities in Darfur. The work was inspired by a 2006 article that put a face on Darfuri sexual victims by chronicling the martyrdom of Sadia, a 10-year-old girl who was multiply gang-raped and shot by the Janjaweed militias before the eyes of her pregnant sister (who was also multiply raped.) With the charcoal referencing the burned villages in Darfur, the girl signifying Sadia, and the ritualistically hatched figurine evoking both African culture and the massacred Darfuris, Tsagaris neither forgave nor exorcised the mass crimes licensed by American and European indifference about the first genocide of the century. Instead, he unsettled the apathy of the viewers, awakening them to social consciousness, and sent a humanitarian message to and through them—long before the U.N. intensified its promises for peacemaking intervention in Sudan.

Whom I Love I Chastise with Many Rods qualifies as a protest performance, but it is the personal politics of the occult, underscoring Tsagaris’ production, wherein, to me, lies the artist’s debatable radicalism as a form of resistance to the contemporary hypertrophy of art-as-big-business and commodified aesthetics. Recalling Rudolf Steiner’s axiom that art is the daughter of divinity, Tsagaris’ artistic practice of “magic” aims at “revealing the divinity of the everyday,” while his multiples and public performances endeavor to communicate them to a larger audience. While his material production consists of objects, paintings, photographs, and videos (mostly as documentation,) Tsagaris is, above all, a performer of private rituals of purification that aim at “bringing him and his viewers closer to a state of catharsis.” Born and raised in Greece, Tsagaris studied art in Vancouver where he began teaching himself the art of Western mysticism that now informs his life, his overall understanding of the proximity of art and magic, and the diverse ritualistic practices and materials (ranging from essential oils to Pendelic marble dust) that he employs in his rituals. While these sacred practices and materials are laden with symbolism significant to various tenets of Western mysticism, they are also imbued with personal meaning, often fuelled by Tsagaris’ upbringing in Greece and the daily rituals of Orthodox Christianity practiced by his mother and grandmother.

Exemplary of his self-proclaimed “offers of love and unity” is Kiss (2005)—a kiss ritualistically performed in collaboration with his partner Kim Norcott after certain purification rituals. The film stills of the sequential union of the two lovers (with their heads obscured by white hoods, Tsagaris’ signature everyday garment, evocative of asceticism) were exhibited in New York, published in Cream Magazine, and sold as a cheap series of multiples through New York galleries and art spaces, including Dia Art Foundation. Recalling Marina Abramovic’s and Ulay’s bodily explorations of their relationship, Tsagaris’ Kiss, conversely, restores the spirituality of such an utterly commodified gesture of love—the kiss—capturing, as he believes, the gesture’s intrinsic divinity.

Mystic rather than erotic, this union of man and woman is exemplary of the vital codependence of humans in life that is multiply manifested in his work, including his symbolic use of the number 55. For example, Tsagaris passed 55 purified roses to the viewers during his 2006 performance, The Inability to Interpret Sensations in the Excess of Light, at his first solo exhibition in Galerie Davide Gallo, Berlin. Among the many meanings of the number 55, the artist identifies the number five’s signification of the most powerful symbol of Western mysticism—the pentacle—and, following the esoteric belief that each man and woman is a star, emphasizes its coupling in 55. Furthermore, it is a human that the artist has authorized, in case of emergency, to save the world, according to the artist’s instructions which—sealed with hair, gold, and diamonds—have been ceremonially deposited in a small case (In a Sense Something Between God and Naught [2005])—an ultimate gesture of love and trust toward humanity and an acknowledgment of human responsibility for both destruction and salvation.

Consummating the self-sacrificial aspect of his work, Tsagaris’ blood paintings are both literally and metaphorically his signature works. Meant to be protective icons, they are products of private rituals and constitute slowly—almost diacritically—completed essays in body écriture: they are painted by ritualistically collected blood from nosebleeds that the artist has experienced since childhood as bodily reactions to emotional pain and distress. Some are comprised of found diagrams replicating mystic seals and symbols (such as Sigillum Dei Ameth, [2007.]) Others, approximating conceptual art, spell out various messages (Selfless, Promise, [2006.]) In one way or another they are all infused with personal, nearly autobiographic, significance, as those whose “paint” was the byproduct of the artist’s grief during the temporary separation from his partner. Explicitly political are those representing inverted insignias of royal power: a private exorcism of the de facto abuse of power rather than a parodic dethroning of symbols. I consider his self-portraits to be among his most controversial works, varying from a wrinkled sheet of gold leaf to photographic portraits of himself with “found” halos of natural or electric light. While these could be easily read as signs of Kleinian megalomania or tricksterism, according to the artist they are intended as humble proof of the divinity in everyone, since the quasi-divine glow washes out, rather than highlights, the individual features of the artist.

A kind of romantic conceptualist, Tsagaris adopts, both in life and in art, the persona of a 21st century magus, to use the Renaissance term for the magician—both because it evokes the Renaissance’s respectful view of magic as an act of piety (a theological and political challenge to the totality of the relationship between man and god as postulated by religious orthodoxy according to Frank L. Borchardt) and because it conforms with Tsagaris’ perception of magic as the benevolent result of mental discipline and spiritual exercise that exhumes the divinity in everyday life. Heir to 20th century artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein and, above all, Joseph Beuys and Bas Jan Ader (the latter two he greatly admires), he continues the “artistic renewal of mythical spirituality” that, according to Benjamin Buchloh, has dialectically fought the “secularization driven by commodity seduction” precipitated by Warhol. 

Because the estrangement of art from religion and/or the occult is not only a result of the secularization of society but of art critics’ and historians’ quasi-scientific specialization, Tsagaris presents us with the same unresolved question as his predecessors: mystic or mystifier, magus or populist of the occult? While I am convinced by his firm belief in his ascetic practice, my opinion would not be the answer, neither, because it is too soon to judge an emerging artist not yet (if ever) surrendered to the art market, nor because I am unqualified to judge his assorted axioms of Western mysticism. Writing towards the end of a decade that saw various gods bless wars, at the end of a year that saw the bubble of the art market growing bigger and Damien Hirst’s diamond-studded  invocation of the “love of God” costing more than would suffice to save thousands of African children from famine and abuse, reading between the lines of those who rated the “Best of 2007” art for the year’s last Artforum a renewed interest in both political art and the spiritual, and taking into consideration this past year’s neglected performances in New York (such as Lisa Paul Streitfeld’s The Alchemy of Love), I cannot help but wonder if Tsagaris’ turn to the occult is not just an idiosyncratic artistic maneuver but a radically resistant, and not merely timely, turn to the spiritual. After all, it is Buchloh, Beuys’ fiercest critic, who also pondered, in light of Gerhard Richter’s stained-glass contribution to the Cologne Cathedral, whether it is a sign of “an actual desire for a return to the folds of the spiritual, the religious, and the transcendental as immutable conditions of experience that have to be remobilized in the present with more urgency than at any other time during the past fifty years of art production.”