& # 39; Suspiria & # 39 ;, Hilma af Klint and female artists who are (self-possessed)

Warning: Spoilers for 'Suspiria' below!

Ballroom teacher, White (Tilda Swinton), tells Susie (Dakota Johnson), her star pupil, that in dance, she has to widen to become an empty vase, allowing the spirit of the room to live. his body.

"You are emptying so that his work can live in you," said White, his silver braid draped in the back.

When Susie dances, she looks like a woman possessed: she struggles like a beast, slips on the ground like a snake, soars like lightning. His movements are, as Blanc says, "a series of energetic forms", liberated from the fussy conventions of the world. These are fleshy configurations of poems, prayers or, as Susie says, spells.

The characterization of Susie makes sense, as in Luca Guadagnino's "Suspiria", a remake of Dario Argento's classic in 1977, the Markos Academy ballet school also plays the role of a coven. The film begins when Susie arrives at the Berlin Academy after leaving behind her rural Mennonite roots. In conversation, she is friendly and shy, often pulling locks of her coral hair behind her ear. Yet, dancing, Susie becomes someone else – or something else – entirely, something hungry and scolding.

"Suspiria" perfectly links the creative power of women to that of occult forces, placing art as a kind of alchemy in itself. White and her cohort fueled Susie's transformation to the culminating point of using dark magic, from a former witch named Helena Markos, who considers herself one of the three primordial mothers prior to the creation of God. At the academy, young dancers are trained to excellence and sacrificed to prevent Markos' decaying body from deteriorating.

"Suspiria" is a fiction, but it is rooted in history, in the equation between women's creativity and witchcraft. For centuries, men have described women's transgressions as witchcraft, calling women who consolidate power out of the patriarchal structures that bind them as enchanters. And so, foreigners populated the occult space, which became an abundant and accessible forum, without dogmas or guardians. For women and other people generally marginalized by conventional systems of governance and religion, the supernatural has begun to shine brightly with promises of agency and updating.

In recent years, more and more young women have identified themselves as witches, probably due, at least in part, to extreme disenchantment with men currently in power at all levels of society. But the tradition goes back several centuries. As in the second half of the nineteenth century, when X-ray innovations and subatomic particle research sparked interest in other types of invisible phenomena. The period was marked by a resurgence of mediums – most women – who used the supernatural to access directly to a supreme authority, beyond the domain reserved for men.

While "witch" was originally a label transplanted to women by men, "medium" was a title that women took for themselves. One of these women was the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint, who then directed her visions of the spirit realm to enigmatic and electrifying abstract paintings dating back to before Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky.

A retrospective of his work is currently on display at the Guggenheim, offering an intriguing eye-patch to "Suspiria" and its witch manners. Af Klint's interest in the supernatural increased after the death of her sister, when the artist was 18 years old. She began to hold regular sessions with four other women. Together they called themselves the Five and communed with mystical spirits known as the Great Masters – more specifically, the spirits were named Amaliel, Ananda, Clemens, Esther, Georg and Gregor.

Af Klint ended up taking the role of official medium of the group, giving up the control of his body so that it becomes a channel for the great beyond. In this liminal space, she transcribed automatic drawings dictated to her from above. Like Susie, af Klint has become an empty ship for the pleasure of her work.

Many female artists have represented and embodied witchcraft in their practice, including Leonor Fini, Ana Mendieta and the Cameron mononym. (Mendieta's estate actually sued "Suspiria" for allegedly plagiarizing the deceased artist's images in parts of the film, and the scenes in question were subsequently cut.)

But Klint embodied a different supernatural personality: the mystic who served as the human channel to the spiritual world.

His images do not depict people, places or things on earth; instead, they made visible emotions, presences and riddles with no concrete form. They combined elements of Swedish folk art, scientific diagrams and arcane spiritual symbols. These were abstract arts before we knew them.

In 1903, the Five would have received a message from their great masters, ordering that their automatic drawings be transformed into paintings, which would one day be hung in a large temple. A year later, these spirits appealed to Klint to lead what she called this "great commission".

Although the other members of the Five were invited to assist Klint in this task, they refused, fearing that such close contact with the divine would drive them crazy. Between 1906 and 1915, af Klint, working alone, painted 193 works, called cumulatively "The paintings for the temple". Majestic representations – lavender, redness and tangerine –nails floating between flower petals and crimps, orbs turning into unidentified organic organisms, punctuated by arcane messages scribbled curly cursive.

In 1930, Af Klint specified that these paintings would someday be housed in an "almost circular" temple, with four floors connected by a spiral staircase in the center. Around the same time, architect Hilla Rebay began to conceptualize a cylindrical building, with floors connected by a curved ramp that winds up to the sky, to house Solomon R. Guggenheim's collection. She described the museum which had not yet arrived as a "temple of non-objectivity and devotion", adding that "the temple is more beautiful than the church".

Today, Kl Klint's work is suspended in a temple strangely similar to the one she had predicted.

When "Suspiria" reaches its peak, White and her cabal prepare a complex ritual involving naked women entangled in pavements, furiously whipping their bodies to draw zigzags in the air. Some draw the bloody bowels of less fortunate ballet students while others sing hymns to the baritone. The purpose of the meeting is Susie's sacrifice. By the time she arrives on the scene, she knows what is expected of her and is honored to oblige.

"There will be nothing left inside," warns Helena Markos, whose archaic skin is like dried beef steeped in acid. "Only space, for me."

The statement echoes the lesson that Susie has repeatedly taught, that art requires emptying, sacrificing and worshiping. "It's not for vanity, "says Markos, to bring the point home. "This is art!"

Then comes the turning point: Susie – and not Helena Markos – is the all-powerful Mother Suspiriorum. She has always been. Her talent as a dancer did not depend on the thought of Madame Blanc; the powers were his.

"I'm her," said Susie, breathless, while a black lizard-demon sucks the life of poor Mrs. Markos. The demonic figure kills all of Markos' followers – sparing those who are loyal to White – while Thom Yorke sings moodily in the background.

"Death to any other mother," Susie said sadly, as if it was a dirty conversation. Right now she is dismissing the woman who is bored, with the idea that she – as a woman – should aspire to be something other than what she is. She massages her chest in ecstasy as piles of bloody corpses accumulate around her. She then peels the skin between her breasts to reveal a yonic opening. Inside, it is dense with something that flutters, black and gooey.

The artist is no longer an empty vase; she is full and dark and vital.

While "Suspiria" takes place in the all-female Dance Academy / Coven ecosystem, the Klint saga took place in real life. For the artist, a woman operating in the world of art dominated by men, mysticism had its own pragmatic benefits.

As David Max Horowitz writes in the catalog of the Guggenheim exhibition, "Swedish art schools taught that women were only able to copy, not innovate" . How, then, was Klint able to create such a revolutionary original work? His association with supernatural forces helped stunned men to contextualize it. His unprecedented visions did not come from a woman's brain, they thought, but from spiritual forces named Ananda and Esther. In one way or another, this last explanation was easier to understand.

In 1908, af Klint took a break from his temple commission to look after his recently blind mother. When she returns to work four years later, she takes more control over her creative process. Instead of transcribing images dictated by the great masters, she described the reception of their cosmic messages and their interpretation of how to visualize them herself. As Horowitz wrote, many female mediums moved away in the same way after being recognized by the outside world, as they had finally received the authority to speak (or paint ) for themselves.

Af Klint completely ceased to create mediumnique in 1916, although she continues to work. She knew that none of this would be recognized during her time, so she insisted that her paintings be exposed only 20 years after her death. In 2018, in addition to being aesthetically contemporary, the paintings are part of the vibrant atmosphere of occult spirituality. She was a woman who foresaw the future with foresight or who was endowed with an exceptional finesse and strategy. One may wonder whether Klint's spiritualistic narrative is in fact a wise brand, a conscious major of patriarchal structures in the path of his recognition.

"The world keeps you in the shackles," writes Klint in a notebook, dictated by the Grand Masters, "throw them aside."

In his critique of the current Kl Klint exhibition, Peter Schjeldahl of the New Yorker described the artist as "a foremost mystic, although he is a touch-to-paint". Later, Schjeldahl complains that Klint is turning away from his mystical side, calling the decision "ruinous".

Schjeldahl does not hesitate to give his opinion on what is wrong with Klint's career. "What happened, I think, was the loss of an extraordinary degree of freedom that had been granted to Klint by his convictions and secretly protected his vulgar eyes. She had been alone on a summit, until she was rejected by the feeling of being seen – and measured – by what she considered to be an irreproachable authority. "

Schjeldahl is precisely the type of authority he describes in the art world, a person who only embraces Klint's genius when it comes from an outside source. This opinion contrasts with that of New York Times critic Roberta Smith, who stated: "To be honest, I am no more interested in the details of the Af Klint belief systems than in the mysticism that Agnes Martin conveyed. talk about the delicate stripes and grids of his paintings. The quality of the art takes precedence over the artist's story, a privilege often accorded to "neutral" artists who are white, heterosexual and straight.

Suspiria and the retrospective af Klint offer interconnected narratives of the talent of supernatural women. In "Suspiria", the audience is led to believe that Helena Markos's coven makes Susie a great dancer, and then reveals that power is still present in her. Meanwhile, the Guggenheim presents a woman whose occult associations have freed her from the trap of being an artist during her lifetime, but who threaten to curb her legacy today.

Together, the two cultural landmarks reveal how rarely the female author is respected as such. I think that Klint, like Susie, had remarkable powers. But I do not think that the masters have communicated information on ready-made canvases. The author of these paintings, the inventor and the executor of their revolutionary formal qualities, is and has always been Hilma.

Self-possession, against all odds, is a mystical exploit.