Performance, Design, Display: Making Occultures in Ithell Colquhoun's Archive c.1920–1960
In 2019, Tate accessioned a significant body of artwork and archival materials relating to the British artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988). Approximately 5,000 items, previously held by the National Trust, joined a smaller collection of archival material which Colquhoun had bequeathed to Tate at the time of her death. Known within the discipline of history of art as a key figure in British Surrealism, my thesis takes into view this vast and largely uncatalogued archive to consider the ways in which Colquhoun’s occultism intersected with her artmaking, both within Surrealism and without. Specifically, I analyse three contexts which have been under-explored in critical literature on the artist to date: performance, design, and display. Chapter one evaluates how Colquhoun negotiated her nascent interest in the occult by way of work produced for and within performance contexts between 1920 and 1933. Chapter two considers how Colquhoun’s occultism intersected with her work in design contexts between 1933 and 1946. Chapter three appraises Colquhoun’s work in the context of display histories of the mid-century, specifically between 1946 and 1960. Across these chapters, I consider how Colquhoun negotiated her occult-artmaking as informed by interwar body cultures, wartime design discourses, post-war reconstruction, and developing consumerism. Exploring the intersection of these public-facing contexts with Colquhoun’s occultism expands upon newly established understandings of alternative belief systems as existing as much in the social realm as within private spaces. Whilst I look to highlight the social and cultural conditions in Britain between 1920 and 1960 in which Colquhoun lived and worked, I argue that the archive reveals her art and occult practices to have operated transnationally. Considering Colquhoun’s work across this period further seeks to disrupt modernist critical traditions, historically contingent upon a prevailing view of modernity as progressively secular or disenchanted. Building on a body of work which has challenged this view, I examine Colquhoun’s work in the contexts of performance, design, and display through the framework of ‘occulture’, originally theorised by Christopher Partridge, suggesting that where Colquhoun’s occultism intersected with her artmaking, it operated across private and public spheres, and high and low forms of cultural production. My use of ‘making’ further draws on the work of Nina Kokkinen in defining occulture in dynamic terms, and is used to signal Colquhoun’s agential capacity for remaking common cultural meanings, as well as the contemporary critical possibilities of reimagining the entanglements of modernity and enchantment. Across a postsecular reading of the archive, Colquhoun’s work is shown to modify, and itself be modified by, a transnational occultural milieu in which the discursive and imagined boundaries between magical and secular contexts are continually made and remade.
Archives, British Art, Occulture, Surrealism, Visual Culture
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