The Creative Acts exhibition at State Library Victoria
explores the creative process and its intersection with cultural and spiritual
practices that allow artists to transcend boundaries and push the limits of
their experience. The exhibition features writer Peter Carey, artists Dr Deanne
Gilson, Barry William Hale and Bundit Puangthong, and choreographer and dancer
Dr Chandrabhanu, alongside State Library Victoria’s archive of Vali Myers, and
incredible objects such as Annie Yoffa’s 4000 automatic drawings. These are
complemented by display cases that explore the artists’ processes using objects
from the collection, some loans, objects from individual artist’s own archives,
and labels in the artist’s words. Objects from the Library’s collection are
used alone and in combination to shed light on the artists’ practice, trace the
roots of these practices, explain concepts and to elaborate on the artists
biography or practice.
I have had the great honour of curating renowned
occult artist Barry William Hale for this exhibition. To complement Hale’s
commissioned artwork, ‘Demonomania Rhizomata’, I curated seven cases which feature
a mix of material including books from the state collection, antiquities loaned
from other institutions, and personal possessions of the artist. In this series
of blog posts, Barry and I will dive deep into the exhibition and explain he
relationship between objects in the cases and Hale’s commissioned artwork, his
other artistic output, and magickal practice. In this first instalment, I
explain the cases generally. Subsequent blog posts will drill down and examine
individual or groups of objects within the cases.
When explaining Hale’s work to an audience, I often
start at Case BH1 which contains examples of various types of magical and
ecstatic religious practice that span the centuries from the ancient world
until today. To the right of this is Case BH4, which aims to evoke Hale’s use of
notions of contagion, multiplicity, the rhizome, and zoanthropy or becoming
animal, to think about non-filial modes of reproduction in reference to his
automatism and the daimon / demon manifestation process. Moving around to the left
is Case BH5 which focuses on the animate nature of Hale’s art, in this case,
paper cutouts designed to be brought to life by ritual. Next to this is Case BH6,
which elucidates how anthropomorphic elements emerge from Hale’s abstract mark
making. At the north end of the area is Case BH3, which shows how the
Spiritualist techniques of automatism applied in an artistic context replaced
the spiritual agency with a Freudian model of the unconscious mind. Across from
these cases nearer the center of the gallery is Case BH2 which contains Hale’s
first automatic drawings that he produced every sunset for 144 days after
performing Aleister Crowley’s ritual, the “Mass of the Phoenix” with a reading
from “Liber Tzaddi” from The Holy Books of Thelema. Further down the
gallery space is Case BH7, which displays many years’ worth of Hale’s magical diaries
and artist’s notebooks. These feature various sorts of drawings and experiments
with text and letters that demonstrate his devotion to magical research that
informs his artistic practice. On the wall above this case is a series of
slides depicting Hale’s student art performance work, and to the right, an Ipad
featuring more of his work, Hypercube 210.
