The New Alchemists
Dr. Caterina Pizanias

At moments of intense social ferment, art can serve to retard, disguise, or misrepresent a society’s potential for change. Today, against all odds, art is performing the opposite role. Tracking the future, it senses avenues along which a new self may emerge into the light of redefined history.

Thomas McEvilley¹

A historical shift in attitude—if not politics—has been registering in the academy and art world alike relating to materiality and signification: the "real," the "material," and their "truth" are slowly being resurrected from their post-structuralist "death." It is my hope that this resurgence will not lapse into either the reductive/oppressive discourse of classical Marxism, or into postmodernism's objectifying/mastering discourses of simulacra and endlessly proliferating identities. Despite the persistent, exuberant vocalizations by the consecrators of art in western societies during the last twenty or so years that postmodernism will free us of the contradictions/antinomies of commodity capitalism (modernism), the “truth of the matter” is that nothing much has really changed. What is needed is art which will open up new spaces to re-examine life in the new millennium, and latter-day alchemists Burgess and Brennan have been doing such art for some time. Alchemy is a personal journey of transformation, a modality of redemption, which may be carried out as either physical or mental operations. “Alchemical” strains/influences can be found in the work of both artists: Brennan (“ritual magick,” and syncretic combinations of magick and religion, or writing) and Burgess (Jungian psychoanalysis). Both have always acted “heretically” towards the sculptural status quo and both are extremely “adept” in their metallurgical skills—as good-as-they-can-get latter-day “alchemists!”

Over the last twenty years the thread that has run through the eclectic body of work by Burgess and Brennan is a focus on transcendence/illumination of interior operations that are psychic and somatic, abstract and concrete.² There have been substantive interconnections in their art-making—from their installational approach to their use of codified information imbued in their work, giving it a talisman-like or poetic quality. Their art has been an invitation into the psychic backyard of memories and desires; their viewers need to go beyond logic to experience an-other world. This exhibit will tie together two elements of their artistic experience: the artistic “translation” of their subjectivity and the viewers’ willingness to travel across the many boundaries (some implicit others explicit) to enter into the duo’s inventive art world. As the viewers explore the plurality of their art’s aspects—formal, cognitive and emotional—the apocryphal web of their sources will unfold.

The organizing principle and intellectual “hook” of the exhibition is the exploration of gesture in ritual; gestures express attitudes or emotions, are individual and collective, and just like speech, gestures reflect the broader meanings and implications of the ambiguous nature of the relationship between knowledge (personal, social, artistic) and the individual self. Expression in language or art through gestures is the result of deliberate choices culled from privatized codes and “translated” through bodily manifestations such as voice, flesh, and movement. This ambiguity of gesture/speech coupled with the ambiguity of “position” (social, artistic, etc.) by Brennan and Burgess—to be inside and outside at the same time, to have steadfastly refused to become disembodied from either matter or the social—makes their art most creative and relevant to our times. In differing degrees and manner these artists have developed a practice that has operated outside the mainstream theoretical apparatuses yet they have never abandoned their belief in art-making as an intuitive, embodied process, as opposed to merely illustrating the latest theoretical “turn.” Burgess and Brennan, in one way or another, have made art that is a negotiation of memories, tensions, and unfinished business from their childhood years.

There is unrelenting fiction in every seemingly disconnected assembly of objects. Like when you look a person in front of you in the checkout line at Safeway and try to understand something about them from their groceries — toothpaste, pork hops, low calorie ice cream bars, tampons, the Spring issue of “Guns and Ammo.”

Blair Brennan³

Once upon a time there was a young steel sculptor, Blair Brennan, who took some time off to ponder the big questions of existence. Before that, through his thorny, garishly painted steel crowns proffered as steel sculpture, he had realized that all borders, even the leaden ones of formalist aesthetics are permeable. Ever since he has been reading about myths, legends, folklore and all things arcane; he has been writing about storytellers and their stories, and in the process he has been writing his own story through magick, a magick grounded in ritual and art, in the everyday and the supernatural.

“X Marks” (2003), is Brennan’s signature piece, a presentation of the self—it both marks his presence and lets us know that he is ready for the “work that needs to be done.” A literal interpretation would be that he has gathered his tools in the studio, the propane tank and torch, steel branding iron, gloves, and a test mark on the wall to see if all is in working order. Metaphorically it is much more interesting: the presence of fire, alchemy’s most basic means of transformation and purification; the mark of the cross, a symbol used for the phallus, the cosmos, and Christianity—areas that have played an important role throughout Blair’s life; the branding iron, the quintessential icon of Alberta’s cowboy culture, a means of marking ownership, and increasingly an effective way of communicating complex information as in the branding of consumer goods or in the identity statements of body art. Writing with fire or lead on skins, walls, or paper has been Brennan’s way to keep track of his life, like an adept alchemist burning away the inessential.

In “Baiting Jonah, Trapping Cain, Haunting Ahab” (2007), Brennan has once again gathered his paraphernalia, his tools of divination, and like the benevolent wizard that he is, has invoked the spirits of Jonah, Cain and Ahab through baiting, trapping and haunting. He has made them tell of their trials and tribulations against good and evil, of their travels through the Bible and literature, to see if they can be of help to him now. There is a makeshift wooden table, knives, sharpening stones, a frying pan, the branding irons, firewood, matches—objects that can be used for everyday chores and needs, or objects that can be used for a different job, one that might bait/trap/haunt folks who have been faced with some challenges a few times before. Brennan has toiled in the Bible, has found wisdom in apocryphal texts and the quirky works of such writers as William S. Burroughs, Harry Crews and Nick Tosches, and mainstream ones such as W. B. Yeats and Edmonton’s Greg Hollingshead, in his continuing search for self-knowledge. Over the years he has added new scribes and left others out. He has written words on paper, walls and skin, and time and again he has set out to see how things connect as “they do in my head, or they will someday.”⁴ Their stories have become his, and vice versa.

“Get your tools together and sort them for the work to be done, finish on time, save string, pray, and have the typewriter serviced.” The job at hand this time around for Brennan is to work on a new dictionary about somnambulism, an effort to compile—always after the fact—“some” openings to the scriptures but also to other books, “openings” or submissions that would keep at bay artificial, non-intentional closures. In this purposeful somnambulist trek, whatever intuitions have arisen have been burned onto a cow’s skin as “spells”: some, somebody, someday, somehow, someone, somersault, something, sometime, sometimes, somewhat, somewhere…words are magic and words are tools….concentrate the light through the fire of branding, a typography adept for skin or paper…inscribe and collect, collect and inscribe… “confidence comes from repetitive practice…”⁵ Above all remember: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”⁶

Brennan knows what he brings from within him and he knows what must be done. For “In any case the moon” (2007) the tools are assembled again: a curved piece of galvanized sheet metal, a frying pan filled with lead (heated and cast into one solid piece in the pan), a ball-shaped punch, and a hammer which Blair has used to “hammer” the lead in the pan. From above, a light shines on the piece, as if the sun was shining down, casting a shadow on the pan. The piece’s title comes from the last stanza of Jack Kerouac’s poem “The Moon”⁷—the poem holds the key to this work. The poem carries within it Brennan’s favourite archives, alchemy (the frying pan, lead, light, fire, moon), and from literature some of his favourite writers (Melville, Yeats) and intriguing characters (Billy Budd, Hanshan, Daniel Machree), “wall moongazers”⁸ all—but will this moon rising be a good or bad omen for them? Probably the former, since “In any case the moon” is also an alchemical tale of transformation from base—the lead of the frying pan—to the noble of the moon and the brilliance of Kerouac’s poem: the moon exists in spite of all the moon gazers and is certainly oblivious to their “many gentlemanly remarks.”⁹

In a series of drawings collectively entitled “Makeshift (a series of drawings), C. 1986-2007,” Brennan has gathered thirteen drawings that incorporate collected words and images. Many include found lists of things to do or buy, things to keep track of—not much is safe or neutral and everything needs to be negotiated each time. One needs to be on the lookout—there are “assembly instructions,” “tools required,” “things that he’ll need”…words and images collected for when the need arises, because unaided memory is not to be trusted.

Geometry has always had a sacred quality for me. Using it in my pieces allows me to situate the personal and mundane alongside the infinite and unknowable.

Catherine Burgess¹⁰

The birth of her daughter was the impetus for Catherine Burgess’ reevaluation of where she was going with her work as a denizen of the famed Sculpture City. She decided to move away from large pieces, and explore other materials like bronze, stone and wood. Over the years she developed a distinctly pared-down aesthetic. She simplified and downsized her objects, but the narrator in her came through with their placement in exhibitions, almost always in installation format. Her storytelling was never like Brennan’s; it was/is contemplative, serene—silent to those in a hurry, relating to the work on the visual/sculptural level.

From pre-classical Greek mathematicians, Carl Jung, and other apocryphal sources, the symbolism of geometrical shapes tells stories of life across the millennia and civilizations. Burgess, a proclaimed believer in a unified self, has used readings, dreams and other symbolic sources to create a minimal art that is a mystery play of a self in flux. The works in this exhibit are some of her most evocative, exemplifying at once her minimal aesthetic and concise storytelling. A life cycle has been completed and another one begins—her daughter has moved on to start her own life.

In “Choose,” a piece from 2004, Catherine Burgess takes us on a contemplative tour de force into the labyrinth that is our psyche. The disc on the wall made of the thinnest of steel appears to be lacking in substance, a black hole that attracts and keeps all that is needed to negotiate a balance between the inner and outer experiences of life. It can also be seen as Jung’s “psyche’s shadow” or Alchemy’s Sol niger, the one that “holds the opposites of light/dark, visible/invisible, and self and no-self together, and in so doing there is a light, an effulgence, or a shine that is hard to define or capture in any metaphysical language,”¹¹ the black sun that accompanies the most negative of psyche’s experiences and also the most exulted—only if one is willing to negotiate the inner experiences within the disc and the outer ones within the lead-covered sphere. Catherine has created a stillness by placing the disc and the sphere at an equidistance, forty inches each from the floor (disc) and the wall (sphere), only to activate this stillness with the inclusion of a cast iron hook that could be used to tap into either side of the experience, a tapping that carries its own unpredictability: the hook-like “pharmakon” in Greek can mean both a “remedy” and a “poison.” One needs to always be careful!

In “Four ways to be Round” (2007), a steel cross divides the space into four quadrants and in each Burgess has placed a concrete sphere, a circle, a cylinder and a hemisphere, all made of steel. This foursquare can be seen as a cross or mandala, a symbol of wholeness. In mystical geometry, and later in alchemy, the circle and the sphere were symbols for gold and eternity. The half sphere is a crucible-like vessel and it and the cylinder have both been used for rituals in alchemy. The piece signifies the completion of a cycle, it tells the story of a job well done and a life well lived.

While “Four ways to be Round” is about a life, “Where in the World” (2007) and “Leave” (2007) are both philosophical and playful at the same time. In these two pieces Catherine Burgess mixes symbols of the macro cosmos—the circle and the sphere—with those made by humans for their micro needs, such as the square and the cube. Sometimes these human-made shapes forcefully present themselves as is the case with the rectangle in “Where in the World,” yet other times are mere traces, as in the cube made of thin steel wire in “Leave.” While Burgess toys with the idea of the connection and inter-influence of the “above” with the “below,” she has made the most personal statement in Leave,” her most evocative and sculpturally perfomative of the pieces. There is the circle, the cube, the sphere, but on the steel circle she has placed a worn wooden boat, carved out of driftwood and unpainted. The steel circle becomes the water, a symbol of the unconscious, of emotions and the accumulated soul experience. The boat can be seen as representing Burgess, her journey through life, or new adventures to come—it is ambiguous, but so is life.

Some of us have come to realize that Postmodernism’s prejudices against norms and unities have been artistically and politically catastrophic, and that we need a language that alters with the spirit of the time, as Jung so aptly said. The times have changed, and these two artists are well suited to help us transgress the limitations and constraints that the art world is experiencing. Their works can open possibilities of locating a previous self or inventing a new one. While imagining their gestures—Brennan assembling his tools, branding or conducting magick, Burgess scavenging for the perfect find, arranging and rearranging her installation pieces to their purest geometry, listen to their stories and let art be full of life again: “…stories was everything and everything was stories. Everybody told stories. It was a way of saying who they were in the world. It was their understanding of themselves.”¹² Neither selves nor art should be bound in the new millennium—Burgess and Brennan have shown us the way.’

¹ Thomas McEvilley, Art and Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity, McPherson, 1992, p. 12.
² Caterina Pizanias, “Dissident Acts-Spirit and Matter,” Spring 2004 Issue of Artichoke-Writings About the Visual Arts, Volume 16 # 3, pp. 38-41; "Testimonial for Brennan," SNAP Newsletter, December 1993: 2-9. "Of Earth and Steel: Taming the Prairie in Canada," in Practicing the Arts in Canada, Canadian Issues, Volume 11, 1989: 113-126.
³ Blair Brennan, “Object Lesson,” from his installation work Caretaker and Tenants, in The Apartment Show, Edmonton, March 15-18, 2007.
⁴ Mary Christa O’ Keefe, “Blair Brennan is an open book in Sacra Privata” Vue Weekly, June 14-June 20, 2007, p. 18.
⁵ Ibid
⁶ The Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal of Gnostic gospel, not a canonical one, see: http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/gosthom.html, verse number 70.
⁷ Jack Kerouac, “The Moon”, published in Pomes All Sizes, City Lights Books, 1992.
⁸ Ibid
⁹ Ibid
¹⁰ Catherine Burgess, interview with the author, August 28, 2007.
¹¹ See Stanton Marlan, The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness, Texas A&M University Press, 2005, page 192.
¹² Harry Crews, quoted in Brennan, op. cit.

The New Alchemists