Mindful Activism
Hilma’s Ghost’s inward journey toward breaking external power structures.
“We live in dark times” has become a cliché phrase in social media — one that vaguely points at the enormous upheaval in the world with the breaking apart of the international order, the rise of authoritarianism everywhere, the increasing Middle East crisis, war in Gaza, and the bleak prospect of our world destroyed by global warming and A.I. taking over our lives. Life today is a split screen of collective doom and personal mundanity, where we feel the need to say “we live in dark times” as preface to justify the sharing of any good news or to feel better about sharing a positive family moment or activity in one’s studio.
Amidst the aforementioned darkness that has dominated the past few years, the personal search for wholeness in the form of mental and physical health is very real. A 2021 McKinsey & Company issue explored how wellness was already a $1.5 trillion dollar market. Wellness in this study was broken down in the following categories: health, fitness, nutrition, appearance, sleep, and mindfulness. On this last category, which is the one that I have been reflecting upon the most, the McKinsey article says: “Better mindfulness has gained mainstream consumer acceptance relatively recently, in the form of meditation-focused apps, such as Headspace and Calm, and relaxation- and meditation-oriented offerings, such as Travaasa and Soothe. During the COVID-19 crisis, reports of mental distress have increased globally; more than half of consumers in each of our surveyed countries said they want to prioritize mindfulness more. Half of the consumers said they wished that more mindfulness products and services were available, indicating an opportunity for companies.”
Of course this study was made right at the height of the Covid pandemic, which likely refocused collective interest in wellness and might not feel representative of long-term trends. But other, more recent studies are even more astounding: for example, a 2023 study presents that the global wellness industry has ballooned to $5.6 trillion in 2022, growing 12% annually since 2020 and grow by 52% by 2027. In addition to that, and relatedly, the spiritual and devotional product market is estimated to double in size over the next decade.
The important question to me is not so much about why wellness and spirituality is such a profitable market now, but what does that societal need say about our current cultural moment and how in art we can harness that collective trend constructively. But first one has to consider how artists often react to these moments.
The impulse to retrench or withdraw from the external world and search for meaning inwards and/or in the spiritual is an understandable one for everyone, including artists. I have felt it constantly as an artist, more significantly after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, when I turned into more meditative practices. Then there is the recurring comment by artists and critics is that amidst the current political upheaval it makes sense to turn to abstraction. What needs to be clarified is that these inward acts do not necessarily represent escapism or a desire to withdraw, but they can also be courageous, and even activist, acts.
One can think of several moments in the 20th century that somehow simulate ours and may offer glimpses of how this moment might be misread in the future. For example, historical analyses of surrealism often begin by discussing how the trauma of World War I became the springboard for the movement, which sought to explore the realm of the subconscious (André Breton used to work in a psychiatric hospital where he used Freud’s psychoanalytic methods to help soldiers with PTSD). Yet, surrealism was not just, as often is thought about, a mere hedonistic or bourgeois escape from reality: while the embrace of the subconscious as a creative force might have been seen as a way to claim the freedom of the mind from totalitarian political systems, many artists in the movement were very politically engaged. Initially aligned with the Marxist revolution, as Ara H. Merjiam has written, the group also had anti-fascist and anti-colonialist stances as presented in their “Murderous Humanitarianism Manifesto” of 1932, where they wrote: “In a France hideously inflated from having dismembered Europe, made mincemeat of Africa, polluted Oceania and ravaged whole tracts of Asia, we Surrealists pronounced ourselves in favor of changing the imperialist war, in its chronic and colonial form, into a civil war. Thus we placed our energies at the disposal of the revolution—of the proletariat and its struggles—and defined our attitude towards the colonial problem, and hence towards the color question.”
So it is important to consider on what specific terms today the personal that is political — as second wave feminism taught us— is being expressed as art forms, and how these art forms, while rooted on meditative, contemplative and spiritual processes, are by no means passive or withdrawn, but all of the contrary.
The one example I want to mention, which I have witnessed up close given my personal proximity to it, is the collective Hilma’s Ghost (full disclosure for the handful who don’t know this already: half of that collective is also my better half). Formed by Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray, Hilma’s Ghost creates projects using the lens of feminism, spirituality and abstraction to “to build community and reckon with patriarchal art histories that have excluded women, trans, and nonbinary practitioners”.
The collective’s many different projects have included the creation an Abstract Futures Tarot Deck, collectively produced paintings, drawings and books, an ongoing feminist artist-run school, public art and many exhibition projects.
One of the most memorable and important projects by Hilma’s Ghost, in my view, took place at the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut, a collection of impressionist art opened to the public in 1901 by the architect and philanthropist Theodate Pope, who in her eventful life had survived the sinking of the Lusitania, been a suffragette and also a spiritualist. After visiting the historic house museum, the collective found, in Theodate’s room, a small theorem painting— an almost forgotten 19th century technique of painting onto felt. Dannielle and Sharmistha decided to learn the technique and make a concerted effort to channel Theodate, to see if they could make a series of theorem paintings in dialogue with her. Professional witch and medium Sarah Potter, who often collaborates with Hilma’s Ghost, came to Farmington to establish a dialogue. After connecting with Theodate’s spirit, Sarah relayed her message to Dannielle and Sharmistha: Theodate, Sarah informed them, said that she did not understand abstraction, but that she appreciated what they were doing and gave them her blessing.
Hilma’s Ghost started operating during the pandemic, and the immediate and strong embracing of its activities offered proof of how needed such a project was in that moment. As Dannielle mentioned to me, “the pandemic forced us to face mortality in a way that we had not done before. People were looking for rituals, looking for answers through conceptual approaches.” Facing the facts of environmental and economic collapse, it seems natural to look for a spiritual solution; and in the United States, where the health system makes it prohibitive to afford adequate care, “people turn to plant medicine and healing.” Furthermore, this search was also one that involved memory and participants’ relationship to it: “we have become disconnected from the religions we had in our childhood.”
For Hilma’s Ghost, the true modern precedent to 20th century inward thinking practices is not surrealism. As Sharmistha reminded me, “before surrealism there was spiritualism, which came out of Theosophy and abstraction in a very big way. Given what we know now, it is impossible to extricate spiritualism from modern abstraction. More importantly, Theosophy was a philosophical society created by a woman —madame Helena Blavatsky. Even though many of her views have been discredited, the fact that a woman-led movement ushered in a major artistic movement should not be understated. That period of fin-de-siecle Europe and America also coincided with major social and political groundswells --not unlike the challenges we are facing today with pandemics, ecological devastation, and the murmurs of war.”
In my inquiries to Sharmistha, one in particular stemmed from my sense that whenever artistic practices that are predicated on, or engage with, the metaphysical, spiritual, etc. they are sometimes dismissed/misread as forms of escapism— unplugging from the real world, instead of actively engaging with it. How can these practices be argued instead as being political acts? To which they answered: “Well, I guess the question is what is the real world? Is it based in the material world or the metaphysical one? We have been conditioned to view it one way, but really, it's only conditioning and concepts that we have all collectively decided to believe in. The word maya, which translates to "magic" or "illusion" in Sanskrit, comes from ancient Hindu philosophy, and it means the magic power with which a god can make human beings believe in what turns out to be an illusion. In our culture and society, that god is interchangeable with capitalism and patriarchy, which as we know are inextricable. If everything is an illusion, then a political act can be defined as active engagement with one's own consciousness to create new realities.”
Most recently, Hilma’s Ghost has been organizing a series of candle dinners at the Mary Ann Unger estate (Unger was the mother of artist Eve Biddle, who is also a co-founder of the Wassaic Project). At those dinners, which are collaborative and organized around magickal principles, bring together women curators, artists and writers to join in ritual and conversation.
As Dannielle pointed out, “healers played an active social role in their communities, and the spiritualism and women’s rights were closely aligned; Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president in the United States, was both involved in spiritualism and the suffragette movement. Many spiritualists were also abolitionists.”
As an outside (but granted, biased) observer, what strikes me the most about Hilma’s Ghost is its ability to translate a cultural trend (such as today’s search of mindfulness and spiritual meaning) into a meaningful and critically conscious rearranging of the timeline of abstraction with a feminist emphasis. The overwhelming response to the Guggenheim’s Hilma Af Klint exhibition, which had the highest attendance in the museum’s history, signaled the beginning of a new rethinking of the male-dominated origin history of abstraction, and the collective also took that impulse as a tributary to its projects. But the collective is much more than historical revisionism.
Mainly, those workshops, one-on-one readings, and community experiences they have created are both uniquely gentle and radical. In my conversation with Sharmistha, they concluded: “We have to condition ourselves to think differently about women's work and redefine what it means to be political --in a way, it's not that different from 70s slogans of the personal is political.” Hilma’s Ghost’s rituals and processes expand that very slogan to show, as Argentinian scholar Karina Felitti argued, that the spiritual is political.
hallelulah
I loved this....the candle dinners sound extraordinary.