Can You Imagine Anything Better? Christine Burgin on Spirit Photography and Conceptual Art

Christine Burgin, publisher and founder of the eponymous New York City gallery (1986–2007) that represented artists from the United States and Europe, helped to pioneer the curatorial connection of the work of contemporary artists with that of their 19th-century counterparts.

Reflecting on the relationship between spirit photography and conceptual art, Burgin sat down to discuss the mediumistic work of Hilma af Klint, Jackie Gleason’s library of the paranormal, and confronting the unseen.

Shannon Taggart

How did you become interested in 19th-century attempts to picture the invisible?

Christine Burgin

In college I studied Old English and modernist poetry. I was particularly interested in Ezra Pound—especially his translations from languages he didn’t speak—and in Ernest Fenollosa, whose ideas about the pictorial nature of Chinese characters was important to Pound. When I look back on what I studied, even though it is technically literature, it has always been a language of images that interests me. One of the things I love about Old English, for example, is that it is expressed visually. A sword, for example, is a “battle light,” a momentary glimmer we have lost.

When I opened my own gallery, I gravitated to work that existed between these two interconnected worlds: one spoken and the other visual, unspeakable. Jim Welling’s drapery Polaroids, which I showed in 1988, are a good example. These look like classic backdrops for photographing an object of art—but there is no object. A photograph that is both empty and full.

My first exhibition of 19th-century photographs was titled Lamp of Memory, after [John] Ruskin’s essay on memory and architecture, and focused on the Egyptian photographs of Maxime du Camp, Francis Frith, and others.

This show followed an exhibition I had made with Rodney Graham, Jeff Wall, and Robert Smithson. Jeff Wall’s light box  [an image of a landscape simultaneously real and metaphoric], Rodney Graham’s The System of Landor’s Cottage, and Robert Smithson [a non-site work, one location magically transposed to another] were all, like the works in the 19th-century show, presented as documents of a rational impulse, but all impossibly complicated by something invisible, irrational, romantic.

In the case of Frith and du Camp, this interesting complication lies in their choice of subject matter—Egypt, the embodiment of all things exotic and deeply mystical in the 19th century. In the case of Wall, Graham, and Smithson, a century later and more self conscious, it is the complicating influence of romantic and literary ideas within a framework of conceptual art that defines their work.

ST

At your gallery, you once showed Allen Ruppersberg’s 1972 work W.B. Yeats, consisting of photographs of a stanza of a Yeats poem rendered in words on a Scrabble board. It reminds me of the photographic artifacts from the Scole Experiment from the 1990s, where messages from Daguerre and poems from Wordsworth were etched onto 35mm slide film, like long scrolls. There’s an uncanny connection between the playful aesthetics of séance pictures and conceptual art.

CB

The similarity between Al’s work and the Scole photographs is definitely an interesting discussion! What a psychic researcher might consider failed evidence, a conceptual artist might see as art. This is particularly true of the West Coast conceptual artists of the ’70s and the Cal Arts artists who came to prominence immediately thereafter. Unlike East Coast conceptual art of a slightly earlier generation [Sol Lewitt, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin], the artists who became known as West Coast conceptual artists, like Al Ruppersberg, Bill Wegman, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Bill Leavitt, were not afraid to have a sense of humor. They took the formal structure of East Coast conceptual work and turned it on its head: premises are revealed to be faulty, systems are created only to be undermined, and nothing could be better.

Most of the West Coast artists were not trained as photographers, and this seemed to give them the freedom to play with photography and to question its ability to represent the truth: Ruppersberg’s To Tell the Truth or Directions to Goldie Hawn’s House; Wegman’s Reading Two Books or Three Mistakes; Leavitt’s installations; Baldessari’s Throwing 3 Balls. There was also a fascination with combining high and low subject matter—maybe not so surprising given that this was happening in LA—but pulp novels and fringe ideas certainly became part of the conceptual art vocabulary at this time.

ST

Were you among the first gallerists to show spirit photography in New York? What was the response?

CB

I may have been among the first galleries in New York to show 19th-century photography alongside conceptual art, but spirit photography began to be exhibited in the early ’90s by several 19th-century photo dealers. I didn’t actually show any of this material until the 2005 exhibition Twixt Two Worlds: Selections from the Collection of Ricky Jay. Ricky’s collection included a fantastic array of spiritualist material and spirit photographs, alongside examples of the many magicians who sought to capitalize on the success of spiritualism—namely Harry Houdini, who made a career debunking them.

In general, people really liked shows which included this vintage material, especially artists. If you are going around to galleries and looking at lots of contemporary art, 19th-century photography is a real surprise and seems quite radical!

ST

Regarding spirit photography, we share a love of the images that document the séance set-up. What is it that makes these pictures so compelling?

CB

These images are just my favorite. There are big questions in the set-up. They get to the heart of what is going on, to that unique mix of the rational and irrational that we find so appealing.

The impulse is a rational one: here is the set-up, here is a diagram of the chair arrangement, here is the recording device (the more dials, the better!). See, all completely reasonable. But most of the time these set-ups were not documented or, if they were, the participants certainly did not bother printing such an image. It was the spectacle they were after.

Dimly lit shots of ectoplasm, the appearance of a spirit guide, a medium mid-trance: this was the necessary proof, the shots that mattered. I know we both love these, too, but what I think we really like even more is the strangeness of the premise that is revealed so beautifully when you see these well-swept rooms in broad daylight.

ST

You made the point that much of the strange photographic history I discuss in my previous essays were made for scientific research, not art. How does this change things? Is it accidental art? Does it attest to science as also a way of imagining the world?

CB

I do think it is important to point out this connection between photography and scientific research. Much of the photography you mention—spirit photography, photographs of the life force, images of thoughts, paranormal research documentation—were not being made by artists and were not intended to be looked at as art. A photograph was proof of something, and it is somehow this belief that is at the heart of its beauty. This is true not just of photography, but for many other works created as part of a larger search for truth and meaning.

I remember visiting the Drawing Center’s 2005 exhibition 3 x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing by Emma Kunz, Hilma af Klint, and Agnes Martin, a wonderful exhibition which included the healing charts of Emma Kunz and the mediumistically assisted drawings of Hilma af Klint, and actually feeling bad for Agnes Martin. Kunz believed she was able to heal with her drawings, and af Klint was trying to get at important truths about mankind and the universe, but Martin, regardless of her spiritual beliefs, was making work destined to live only in the world of art and the art market.

ST

How does spirit art complicate questions of authorship?

CB

I’m working on a book with Doria Bramante about Hilma af Klint and De Fem (The Five).  These five women conducted séances for a decade, and together they developed many of the ideas and imagery that we now come to think of as the work of Hilma af Klint.

Within the art world, that of both dealers and art historians, authorship and the uniqueness of the object is everything. This is how a work is defined and given worth. But the drawings of De Fem and mediumistic works in general were valued by their creators not for aesthetic reasons, but because of the spiritual messages they were felt to contain.

In the case of af Klint, the drawings and séance journals produced during her years with De Fem merited a lifetime of contemplation. The De Fem drawings were also created by many. As instructed by the higher powers, different members of De Fem would take the pencil at different times. Most of the drawings are signed “DF” and, if there are initials, these are the initials of the members present, those who witnessed receipt of the message, not in most cases those who drew. The drawings De Fem produced between 1895 and 1910 are published as the spiritualist drawings of Hilma af Klint. Hilma, however, does not actually pick up the pencil to draw until December of 1903.

ST

What is one of your favorite moments from the history of picturing the unseen in the 19th century?

CB

My current love is William and Elizabeth Denton and their late-19th-century experiments with psychometry. In their 1888 book The Soul of Things; Or, Psychometric Researches and Discoveries, William Denton describes Elizabeth’s psychometric ability as follows:

Mrs. Denton, by means of this science of Psychometry, professes to be able, by putting a piece of matter, whatever be its nature, to her forehead, to see, either with her eyes closed or open, all that that piece of matter, figuratively speaking, ever saw, heard, or experienced.

When held in Elizabeth’s hand, shards of meteors told fantastic stories of the galaxies through which they traveled, fossils brought ancient creatures back to life, and ordinary stones told dramatic tales of their glacial travels. All matter and even the air contained the past—nothing is lost. A reassuring idea. It is the newly invented camera which again serves as proof that such a thing might be possible:

. . . in the world around us radiant forces are passing from all objects to all objects in their vicinity, and during every moment of the day and night are daguerreotyping the appearances of each upon the other; the images thus made not merely resting upon the surface, but sinking into the interior of them; there held with astonishing tenacity, and only waiting for a suitable application to reveal themselves to the inquiring gaze.

You cannot, then, enter a room by night or by day, but you leave on going out your portrait behind you. This is as true of the past as the present. From the first dawn of light upon this infant globe, when round its cradle the steamy curtain hung, to this moment, Nature has been busy photographing every moment. What a picture gallery is hers!

ST

Do you have a favorite moment from the history of picturing the unseen in the 20th-century?

CB

Andy Lampert and I are working on the next round of books in our Further Reading Library series, and one of them is Jackie Gleason’s Library of the Paranormal. Lots of new favorites from his library! One of them is Hans Holzer’s Psychic Photography: Threshold of a New Science?

Holzer documents psychic phenomena with a number of strangely normal photographs of people in their living rooms circa 1970. My favorite is the last entry in the book, the haunted trailer of a stripper. There is one photo of her posing delicately on her front steps, and another of the small fold-down table in the trailer kitchen. Just this tabletop with some paranormal sunlight coming through the window. Can you imagine anything better?▪︎

This is the third in the series Photography and the Invisible that explores the connections between photography, spiritualism, art, and the unseen. Explore more here.