As Above, So Below: Portals, Visions, Spirits & Mystics is IMMA‘s current tentpole exhibition exploring how art deals with spirituality. Contributing artist Alan Butler and co-curator Rachel Thomas reflect on the topic.
Strap yourself in – this article is going to go deeply meta. The ideas we’re dealing with are a tangled web of maps of reality, maps on reality, replicating reality, shaping reality and perceiving reality. And how art and religion and video games are all, essentially, the same thing (that opinion is the opinion of this author and not the people quoted herein (with the exception perhaps of Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari)).
As Above, So Below: Portals, Visions, Spirits & Mystics is currently running at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA – until 27 August 2017). The exhibition explores how art deals with spirituality. It begins this exploration just over 100 years ago, the oldest artwork in the exhibition dating from 1896, and brings it right up to now, with pieces commissioned this year. The scale of this exploration is significant, with 40 artists and just under 200 artworks featured. Contributors include (in no particular order) Steve McQueen, Wassily Kandinsky, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Hilma af Klint.
The tramping ground of the artist is often the phenomena or ideas that lie on the fringes of the mainstream, outside what is accepted. The exploration of spirituality that As Above, So Below undertakes goes to these fringe realms, these shadowy spaces, with a collection of pieces that connect to the occult, the psychedelic, the magical and the emergent technological/digital realm – not the one that’s already here, but weirder technological realities coming down the line. The exhibition is not a treatment of mainstream, organised religion. As one of the contributing Irish artists Alan Butler says, “The question of spirituality was broken wide open by the curators and all the artists were interpreting what that meant.”
“The exhibition title suggests parallel worlds, which is something that happens on one level of reality can also take place in another reality.” (from the exhibition pamphlet)
In doing research for this article, I visited Alan Butler in his studio to talk to him about his contribution to the exhibition, On Exactitude in Science. The piece features a frame for frame recreation of the 1982 Godfrey Reggio film Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance. Alan used scenes from the video game Grand Theft Auto V (GTAV) to recreate the movie. Butler’s recreation, titled KOYAANISGTAV, is shown synchronously alongside the original Reggio film, an unnerving simulacrum. The two films running on two identical screens side by side together make up On Exactitude in Science. At moments, the virtual reality and the reality reality become indistinguishable or interchangeable.
As I talk to Butler, we sit in his studio in front of a large screen on which a new video game he’s exploring, Watch Dogs 2, runs. Alan’s character in the game, a Matrix-y hacker guy, stands about idly on street corners as we chat, unmoored from Alan’s directions. Every so often, a homeless person shambles onto the screen and Alan breaks from our chat to make his avatar whip out a smartphone and snap a portrait of the simulant down and out. This odd behaviour seems to be reflexive for Butler, emerging from an ongoing project he has, Down and Out in Los Santos, in which he flaneurs around the landscape of GTAV photographing the homeless figures who inhabit the fringes of the game’s narrative. He shares these creepily lifelike images on Instragram, hashtagging them with photojournalism and streetphotography, as though they were the posts of your average urban camera slinger. Down and Out in Los Santos and On Exactitude in Science seem to me to be two faces of the same coin, different points on the spectrum of Alan’s work.
I ask him how On Exactitude in Science connects to As Above, So Below’s theme of art dealing with spirituality.
Alan: “I’m not a spiritual person at all… I could use the term ‘the spiritual’ but what I might be actually talking about is that sense of the unconscious connection that is who we are or who we’re becoming or who we want to be … [pauses to take a picture of a homeless person in the game] … via, let’s say, the technology we use and how the society as a whole is expressed – I look at spirituality in those kinds of ways. Like, there’s nothing interesting about any one individual’s Twitter account – what’s interesting is Twitter as a swarm and I think the spiritual can be found within that. We [Alan, and exhibition co-curators Rachael Thomas and Sam Thorne] were having a conversation about the word ‘spiritualised’, to be spiritualised. I liked the idea that it sounds like it’s something that’s done to you. An external force that’s mediating or conducting the spiritualisation.
What I was really thinking about in terms of Koyaanisqatsi was that it didn’t have a screenplay, it ended up being this film that was very emotionally structured … it’s this experiential narrative that’s based on the media, the sight and sound. And because of that I think Koyaanisqatsi is something that’s done to you, it’s not a narrative you engage with, like The Sopranos. It washes over you. It’s like a downpour of all sorts of things. You don’t need to know anything about Constructivist cinema to enjoy it. I think video games are really like that as well, you can navigate them on your own terms.”
We talk about a recent article by Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari, in which he places religion and consumerism in the same category as virtual reality games. “What is a religion if not a big virtual reality game played by millions of people together? … As religions show us, the virtual reality need not be encased inside an isolated box. Rather, it can be superimposed on the physical reality.”
The title of Butler’s piece in the exhibition, On Exactitude in Science, is borrowed from that of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, a one-paragraph rumination on the realities of creating a one to one scale map of the world. Butler’s engagement with the realities of living in ‘late capitalism’ through a video game simulation of that condition, within the context of an exhibition addressing spirituality, creates a dizzying hall of mirrors effect.
In discussing her personal attitude to spirituality and art, Rachael Thomas, co-curator of the exhibition, quotes Susan Sontag: I was inspired by Susan Sontag’s quote below on spirituality and by looking at definitions by artists and the way that they are redrawing and remapping the human condition.
Sontag said “Every era has to reinvent the project of ‘spirituality’ for itself. (Spirituality = plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment aimed at the resolution of painful structural contradictions inherent in the human situation, at the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence.) Art, itself a form of mystification, endures a succession of crises of demystification; older artistic goals are assailed and, ostensibly, replaced; outgrown maps of consciousness are redrawn.”
The final words here, ‘outgrown maps of consciousness are redrawn’, echoes one of the, for me, overarching (or underpinning) aspects of As Above, So Below: the exhibition is exploring one map that’s been placed on reality (spirituality) via another one (art). This is a big theme, and there’s a huge amount of detail and nuance and beauty to be found within it, expressed in the almost-200 pieces that make up the exhibition and traverse multiple periods and cultures.
Words: Rachel Donnelly
Image Credits: Alan Butler, On Exactitude in Science, film still, 2017, two channel HD video, 5.1 audio, 86 min. Courtesy of the artist. The motion picture Koyaanisqatsi (1983) has been generously provided by the director Godfrey Reggio
Hilma af Klint, Altarpiece, No. 1, Group X, Series Altarpieces 1915, oil and metal leaf on canvas, 237.5 x 179.5 cm Photo: Albin Dahsltrom / Moderna Museet
Susan Hiller, Homage to Marcel Duchamp: Aura (Blue Boy) 2011, digital C-type archival colour print on Dibond, 187.9 x 126.9 cm
© Susan Hiller; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
