This text was originally published as a catalogue essay for Alex Maciver's exhibition New Works at Buratti Fine Art in Subiaco, Western Australia.
The gesture of bringing the hand to the forehead - which we enact almost without realising it in moments of confusion and disorientation, when we seem almost to have forgotten ourselves - recalls the ritual gesture of the cult of Genius.
A magician can conjure things from thin air. A hypnotist can put someone to sleep by touching them on the forehead. In 2011 the well known British hypnotist Derren Brown managed to implant in an unsuspecting member of the general public an ‘assassin’ persona which could be activated through exposure to a polka-dot pattern and a phone ringtone. When entering into the assassin persona the subject of the experiment would touch himself on the forehead in the vicinity of the third eye. Afterwards he would be unable to recall anything that he had done whilst in the trance, including firing a gun (filled with blanks) at Stephen Fry. This experiment mirrors the claims of Sirhan Sirhan, the man who assassinated Robert Kennedy and who claims that he was the victim of a conspiracy, possibly conducted by the CIA in relation to the MKUltra program, that he was hypnotised or in a trance state when he shot RFK, and that he cannot remember firing the gun. Sirhan Sirhan was sentenced to death in 1969, but this was later commuted to life in prison in 1972. The subject of Derren Brown’s experiment had his assassin persona erased.
The author’s gesture is attested to as a strange and incongruous presence in the work it has brought to life.
In 2013, at a memorial service for Nelson Mandela, a sign language interpreter failed to form a single intelligible sign while translating for a number of dignitaries including Barack Obama. He would later claim, in a interview with The Star, a South African newspaper, that he suffered a schizophrenic episode during the broadcast, that he had been hearing demonic voices, and that he had seen angels in the stadium that day. The incident is described as an embarrassment to the deaf community and Mandela’s memory. Another official sign language interpreter would later state that “only he can understand those gestures.”
The same gesture that deprives the author of all relevance nevertheless affirms his irreducible necessity.
During lulls in the swell or poor conditions surfers will sometimes pray to the semi-satirical surf-god known as Huey. This is often done by intermeshing the fingers and placing the knuckles of the thumbs against the lips and blowing (which can produce an owl-like whistle) or whispering the phrase “come on Huey bring us some waves.” Huey may also be presented with offerings in the form of spilt milk or handfuls of ocean water. It is unclear if anyone actually believes in Huey.
The author can only remain unsatisfied and unsaid in the work. He is the illegible someone who makes reading possible, the legendary emptiness.
Cleromancy is a form of sortition; the casting of lots, whereby things that might otherwise be considered the result of chance, such as rolling dice or the distribution of objects tossed into a preordained space, are instead elevated to a the status of magic or evidence of the divine. This form of divination occurs frequently in the Bible, including the book of Jonah in which the desperate sailors who count Jonah among themselves cast lots to see whose god is responsible for the storm they are enduring. When Jonah’s god is shown to be the culprit he is cast overboard and the storm immediately calms. The sailors then offer sacrifices to Jonah’s god and, as a consequence, Jonah is saved from drowning by a large, whale-like fish, which eats him. He then spends three days and three nights in its belly, desperately praying for forgiveness, before the giant fish-whale vomits him back up.
This definition agrees with the ancient tradition scrupulously followed by Kabbalists and Necromancers according to which magic is essentially a science of secret names.
Tacitus, a Roman historian who lived during the first century AD, describes in his monograph Germania the method of divination employed by the Germanic tribes. A branch of a fruit-bearing tree would be cut into small pieces and small symbols and runes would be carved into these pieces. These pieces would then be cast at random over a white sheet and read by either the village priest or the head of the family. In the ninth century a Frankish missionary named Anskar described how this process of divination was used by Danish people as a method of deciding whether an action would have the favour of the Norse or Christian gods. In one case a soothsayer determined that a man had offended the Christian god. That man later discovered a book in his house which his son had stolen from a Bishop. It is unclear whether the Norse gods approved of this theft.
Each thing, each being, has in addition to its manifest name another, hidden name to which it cannot fail to respond.
There is a conspiracy theory which claims that Lil Wayne, the well known rapper and producer, is the head of the Illuminati. This theory further claims that Young Money Entertainment, the record label owned by Lil Wayne, is in fact a cover for the the inner echelon of the secret society, and that the various artists signed to the label, including Nicki Minaj and Drake, are members of this inner circle. These artists are presumably aware of this conspiracy and seem to intentionally provoke its continues existence through gestures which they throw up in photographs online. One of these gestures is the ‘all seeing eye’ wherein the thumb and pointer finger and placed together while the rest of the fingers pointed directly upward, and the hand is placed against the forehead or one of they eyes in a fashion not dissimilar to the ‘evil eye’ used to curse or ward off evil in some European countries. Another is the ‘pyramid’ - where both hands are placed together to form a triangle, with the thumbs forming the base and the pointer fingers forming either side, in order to reference the famed pyramid motif of the Illuminati, present in many forms from the Egyptian pyramids to the American dollar bill. The most recent intermeshing of this conspiracy and the images produced by Young Money Entertainment is the permanent commitment of the ‘all seeing eye’ motif as a tattoo on Lil Wayne’s chin.
Pornography, which maintains the intangibility of its own fantasy in the same gesture with which it brings it closer - in a mode that is unbearable to look at - is the eschatological form of parody.
There is a story, something of an urban myth, that at some point in the history of the Vatican a particularly prudish Pope was so offended by the many exposed members of the marble sculptures around the holy city that he ordered them removed and replaced with fig leaves. The Vatican has denied this, instead claiming that the penises in question are removable and that they easily fall off. This myth bears some resemblance to a series of events which occurred in and around the Pincio Gardens in the Villa Borghese in 1985. Over eighty sculptures, including works by Bernini, had been vandalised, their noses smashed off. Eventually Italian police caught the culprit red-handed. He was discovered with a plastic bag containing the missing noses. He told police that the KGB were following him and then handed them a note which read “I am a UFO.”
The secret name is not so much the cipher of the thing’s subservience to the Magus’s speech as, rather, the monogram that sanctions its liberation from language.
Ectoplasm is a substance said to be excreted by mediums and ghosts during seances, possessions and other communications with the dead. It is often excreted from the orifices of mediums or draped over objects and people by spirits. The substance is sometimes visible and sometimes not, but can always be felt by the body. Ectoplasm can take the form of threads, ooze or lace-like webbing. The existence of ectoplasm has been deemed a hoax. It is often constructed from cheesecloth, butter or egg whites.
- Kieron Broadhurst 2016
*all italicised quotes in this text are from Giorgio Agamben’s Profanations (2015).