BEYOND THE PANDEMIC CHARM

A PROPOSAL FOR A CLIMB-THROUGH 'TOLMEN STONE' IN BANFF, (ALBERTA, CANADA).

On one trip to Dartmoor as a child, Pope remembers his grandmother climbing through a hole in a rock which stands in the North Teign river. This stone – a Tolmen Stone – is well-known locally for its magical properties. Climbing through it is said to cure illnesses and brings luck. The rock is made of granite, and  appears massive once you clamber into it. It is cold in contrast to your body; smooth and unyielding. 

This movement of a body in relation to the stone – a clambering through – led us to develop ideas for a public artwork that could replicate this experience. A charm would be performed through the act of clambering through an aperture; a wish, a hopefully gesture to right wrongs, to heal damage, and to bring protection.

Working as a family group in the studio, we modelled some rough coronavirus-like forms in clay. Having let them dry-out, we took them to the nearby beach, made a small fire, on threw them in. Their combustion –  violent explosions that flung shards of hot, blackened clay across the sand – wrought a basic charm, symbolically destroying the virus through transforming a its material representation. This process of exploding charms, was suggested to us by Chris Gosden in his book (2019 p.35-36) where he writes of evidence of ceramic work, found in Dolní Věstonice in the Czech Republic and dated from 27,000-24,000 years ago.  In side a "magician's hut" were found some '2,300 small clay figurines... mainly effigies of animals that had been deliberately exploded the kiln.'  We are interested here in the ways in which ;the sound, heat and danger of particles of exploding clay... made for an intense set of experiences...'; and in Gosden's claims that these were  'experiments, perhaps in forms of participation, in order to understand to what extent and in what ways people are entangled with animals and with the earth from which figurines were made.'

Our first experiments took place on the beach at AGP.  By punching holes in an old, rusty metal bucket we were able to stoke-up a roaring fire – hot enough to guarantee that any unfired ceramics placed within them would burst into fragments. After tossing the dozen or so charms into the flames, it was only a matter of minutes before the fragments fly, making violent impact with the sides of bucket and sometimes being flung far beyond. 

We  performed  this work during the March 2023 MOTHRA residency (images below).

In September 2021 we delivered a proposal to the Canadian Clay & Glass gallery in Ontario for a new artwork, based on the early-stages of the production process for our "exploding charms" experiments. The production of charms by participants, (and even involvement in their "explosion") indicates a way in which we can develop this project further, working beyond our family unit.

Illuminated sign in our studio, 2021

Back in 1991, pop music and fashion entrepreneur Malcolm McLaren directed and featured in a television documentary which opened with his song Magic's Back. This tune is a reference to the action/intervention that McLaren claimed to have performed when an art student in London. As a provocation to Establishment institutions, he is reputed to have thrown a brick, on which was painted the phrase "MAGICS BACK" (sic),  through a church window.  In a sense, this performance is positioned by McLaren as representative of his ambitions – expressed later in his artistic adventures through his work with the New York Dolls, The Sex Pistols, and Bow Wow Wow –  to challenge orthodoxies and conventions. The video that accompanies the Magic's Back  track (available here) establishes evidence of this otherwise apocryphal act, showing McLaren, the self-proclaimed agent provocateur throwing the brick through the window of a Hawksmoor church. 

We are interested in several things here: most obviously perhaps, the bold statement that McLaren made on the persistence and continued possibility of magic; and also in the ways that McLaren's generation and their children are known for their adherence to magical thinking – perhaps out of a nostalgia for their Eighties hay-day, when anything seemed possible and opportunities could be conjured , apparently out of thin air . We are less interested in McLaren's action as an anti-establishment gesture here. Rather, we wonder at the ways in which this kind of playful, contrarian, anti-establishment pop cultural action is generated from a culture of magical thinking – a semiotic playfulness – which worked well at a certain historical juncture, but now appears naive,  deluded even, once the link between words and the world have been reestablished at a time of climate catastrophe and during the current pandemic.  Magical thinking, right now, has its consequences, and we are interested in drawing attention to it as a dominant cultural trope. 

MAGICSBACK

PopeCullen (2021)

6' x 10' vinyl banner

This is the second of our textworks which play with the conventions of the 'abracadabra' charm, once used to ward-off disease in the Roman era and in 17th century London.

Our first was a charm to banish SARS-CoV-2, repeating the term NOVELCORONAVIRUS, removing the first letter on each new line to form a triangular shape.

In this latest version we use the phrase MAGICSBACK (sic), taken from an early artwork by pop culture provocateur Malcolm McLaren. Here. we build-up the phrase, adding a letter at a time, creating an inverted triangle. Having brought magic back, we wonder at its consequences: we're interested in how magical thinking has thrived during the pandemic, enabling many to believe that thoughts and words alone can protect against viral infection. And yet, as archaeologist Chris Gosden points out, popular magic might play a vital role in revitalizing human relationships with the material world at a time of climate crisis. Our banners are experiments that grapple with these things.