Dictation from the Other Side

Dictation from the Other Side offers a history of the variegated metaphysical strains operating in tandem with atavistic notions of resistance across twentieth-century art. Across its two rooms, the exhibition brings into view the unconscious, dream, ritual, chance, material intelligence, musical improvisation, ancestral knowledge, spirit, and the collective force of images. These practices did not form a coherent movement, and the artists did not share a single belief. What they shared was a refusal of the world as it had been made available to them.

They sought the metaphysical as tools for peace and balance rather than material gain. They used themselves as instruments and interlocutors in order to bring their viewers into a domain that often becomes prohibitive: a domain in which the terms of reality are not established in advance by the state, the market, the institution, the machine, or the authority of sanctioned knowledge. The work is not a retreat from politics into the occult. It begins from the recognition that political power reaches into consciousness itself, and that any serious opposition must contest the mechanisms through which perception, desire, memory, language, and fear are organized.

The first room begins with the Surrealists’ arrival in New York under the pressure of war and displacement. Their turn toward magical traditions, Kabbalah, alchemy, automatism, and ritual must be understood in relation to fascism’s seizure of mythic and symbolic force as it reorganized symbols, myth, archetype, dream, and collective feeling, making them serve domination. The Surrealists and their American interlocutors understood that one could not answer such an apparatus only by opposing its visible institutions. They sought counter-symbols, counter-rituals, counter-images, and counter-transmissions. Their work attempted to break the spell by which power installs itself inside perception.

That is the substance of their dissent. It lies in refusing the monopoly of official reality. A magical ritual, an automatic image, a bebop improvisation, a Kabbalistic diagram, a collage, or an occult publication could become a site at which the world’s administered meanings were interrupted. These practices did not claim innocence. They took place in the same charged territory of myth, ritual, and the unconscious that authoritarianism had exploited. But they redirected that territory away from obedience, hierarchy, extraction, and death, toward collective transformation, protection, erotic freedom, irreverence, and the difficult work of imagining a world otherwise.

The historical instances gathered in this exhibition show that collective philosophies and collaborations in metaphysical technologies have enabled artists and their communities to outlast and, at crucial moments, overcome authoritarian force. They did so by keeping alive forms of relation that authoritarian systems require people to abandon: friendship, ritual, study, sound, gatherings, images, and collaboration. Their philosophies moved through friendship, ritual, study, sound, gatherings, images, and collaboration, assembling a counterforce where authoritarian power demands isolation, obedience, and psychic defeat.

What connects these works is not a single doctrine, nor a claim that all of these artists were channelers. It is their conviction that art could open onto forms of knowledge and experience that exceed the sovereign, rational self. Some artists named spirits or intelligences with whom they worked; others located this encounter in the unconscious, improvisation, memory, chance, ritual, material process, or the generative intelligence of plant life. The second room gathers the resulting practices of dictation: trance, dreams, clairvoyance, automatic drawing, esoteric cosmologies, and the unpredictable behavior of materials. What joins them is not a creed, but a willingness to work without claiming complete command over what would appear.

That question returns now with renewed force. The vast movement of autocratic power from humanity to the machine is not simply a rearrangement of labor, information, or decision-making. It is the further subjugation of the human to systems whose purpose is accumulation, surveillance, extraction, and control. The human being is pressed into the role of a usable remainder: a profile to be harvested, a body to be optimized, an attention span to be captured, a source of labor, consumption, and data, and a response in great threat of being subjugated. What is disabled is not only public influence, but public feeling itself: the collective sense that human beings can still intervene in the forces that organize their lives.

Their achievement was to refuse psychic defeat. In situations of war, fascism, dispossession, and profound imbalance, artists made themselves instruments and interlocutors in order to enter into relation with forces that could not be converted into property, utility, or command. They sought the metaphysical as tools for peace and balance rather than material gain. Through friendship, ritual, study, sound, gatherings, images, and collaboration, they assembled a counterforce against the psychic and symbolic violences of authoritarianism.

Donati’s Fist condenses this proposition. Created as a talisman for an Enochian ritual associated with the publication of Seligmann’s The Mirror of Magic, it recalls a period in which artists turned to hermetic traditions as a counterforce to fascism’s manipulation of symbols and belief. Yet the raised hand, as Michael Carter pointed out, also anticipates the more familiar twentieth-century emblem of collective struggle. Its force lies in that doubleness: resistance is not only the public gesture of refusal. It is also the work of refusing the inward conditions of subjugation.

To recover this history is not to ask for a return to its historical conditions, or to offer the occult as a remedy. It is to remember that artists have developed ways to remain inwardly ungoverned when conventional avenues of agency seemed foreclosed. They remind us that a disempowered humanity has not lost its capacities altogether. The human capacity to enter in relation with what exceeds us remains available.

The histories gathered here insist that fascism has been met before with psychic resistance, and that war has been opposed through the ritualized intensities of collective life. These metaphysical strains must again be joined, not as a return, but as a living resistance to the autocratic powers now seeking to determine the fate of the human.

-Laura Whitcomb, Label Curatorial