Body Electric
Ian Whittlesea has dedicated much of his practice to revisiting modernist and esoteric histories, and in particular the promise of transformation embodied in these legacies, whilst considering the mysticism within conceptual and minimal art and its physiological and psychic influence on the viewer. His work Becoming Invisible (2013) – an instruction manual and suite of photographs and paintings that drew on the theories of Rosicrucianism, theosophy and esoteric yoga, featured a text painting taken from the writings of scientist and alchemist Isaac Newton: “The changing of bodies into light, and light into bodies, is very comfortable to the course of Nature, which seems delighted with transmutations.” This sentence from Newton also forms the basis of A Breathing Bulb (2014), a light installation with a single Mazda lightbulb. This minimal work invokes the Mazdaznan breathing and movement exercises that abstract painter Johannes Itten taught in his foundation course at the Bauhaus school (1919—1922) to sate the spiritual hunger of his students after the trauma of WWI. Founded at the end of the 19th century by the self-proclaimed Dr. Otoman Zar-Adusht Ha’nish and loosely based on the Zoroastrian doctrine, Mazdaznan derived its name from “Mazda” and “Znan” in Persian, meaning “master thought”. Its occult philosophy was a variant of the Lebensreform (life-reform) movement in its propagation of a strict regime of vegetarianism, breathing, bowel, sexual and glandular practices for physical, spiritual and mental purification. It is only in recent years that the extent of its dark eugenicist and racist underpinnings, privileging a white humanity, have been acknowledged. Some have said Thomas Edison was influenced by Mazdaznan teachings, thus creating the namesake bulb in 1909; others have attributed Edison’s General Electric trademark to its association with Ahura Mazda, the transcendental and universal god in Zoroastrianism, generator of the light of wisdom. The incandescent light, at the center of Whittlesea’s A Breathing Bulb (2014), oscillates ceaselessly between brilliance and darkness for the entire period of the exhibition, calling to mind the constant rise and fall of one’s chest while breathing. A reminder of the self-regulatory body practices Itten dictated to his students, the lamp is a prompt that intermingles and transcends intangible and physical realities by way of the deceptively simple act of respiration. “This ‘water of life’ is the breath, the spirit, the essence of life, without which there is no consciousness of existence here in matter. One must learn to breathe consciously in order to at- tract this vital essence.” “(...) breathing is of the greatest importance. As we breathe, so do we think and so is the rhythm of our daily life.” Bodies keep time through breathing. Spiritus in Latin is the root of both “spirit” and “respiration”. Mazdaznan preaches that each breath functions in two ways, one being the spiritual and the other physical, and consciousness of each is key to maintaining one’s body. A Breathing Bulb fades in and out over the course of seven seconds, which according to Ha’nish’s manual (1), is the perfect rhythm to obtain wisdom as well as individuality, and emancipation. Whittlesea’s light’s slow throb, like a soundless metronome, establishes a temporal measure within the bare space, and can be seen as an invitation, or an (un-) conscious influence to take time and modulate one’s breathing pattern in its presence. Having sourced original Mazda bulbs for the installation, the artist transforms this utilitarian object into a portal where viewers can go beyond the faculty of perception, in order to awaken fundamental questions around life, and immateriality. Instead of being preoccupied by the past or future, it is a cue to go inwards, to regain control and inhabit a prolonged present moment – one that starts and ends every seven seconds – amidst the unending momentum that defines contemporary life. Additionally, by breathing in sync with the light, and perhaps with others, the work calls forth the possibility of extending the body out to reach a shared universal existence, while being alone in the world. For Romantic poets and thinkers a century before Ha’nish and Itten’s time, electricity served as a metaphor to imagine aesthetic experience in scientific, socio-political and spiritual terms. It is an immaterial life force, or even a spiritual medium, that has come to represent the human potential. Thinking back to Newton’s quote in Becoming Invisible, if A Breathing Bulb alludes to, or can be transformed into a body, whose body is it? The general lifespan of early incandescent bulbs can be up to 2000 hours, and their longevity can be prolonged if they are kept continuously lit. When looking in from outside the gallery windows, one could envisage the light source as the glowing core of the architectonic form, recasting the building into a beacon reverberating in the depths of the night. And yet, as one moves into the space, the fixture appears to be equal parts luminescence and figure, containing the potential of diffusing outwards in new directions and dimensions to cultivate a new self. Whittlesea has a longstanding interest in Modernism, and the question of how the body is scrutinised, or comes to be regulated, within the white cube and through the advent of abstraction in art. In fact, Itten believed that the most advanced Mazdaznan exercises (2) when conducted with humming and singing could induce auto-illumination, producing an intense light from within the body. In a photo documenting his white lab coat clad-students during their morning exercises, it is striking how hopeful these youngsters appear as they contort their bodies into awkward poses in anticipation of a bright future for humanity ahead. “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heart- beats an hour).” The motif of light and its ability to alter and in turn, transcend physical and internal vision and encounters has been consistently explored in Whittlesea’s oeuvre. In 2008, he presented a prolonged 15 day long ‘movie’ entitled A SLOW FADE . TO BLACK on a white wall visible from the street that gradually progressed, each day the wall being painted a darker shade of grey, until it eventually become black. Conversely, in Trataka (2020), named after a yogic meditation discipline that cultivates an inner sense of sight by focusing on a candle flame, the artist published a series of 200 photographs of a candle burning in daylight over a six-hour period. Apart from his existential and exhaustive journey of capturing and translating individual aesthetic and spiritual experiences into artworks, the candle stands for “the transubstantiation of matter into spirit and simultaneously act as a Memento Mori, a reminder that everything has its time, that the flame will inevitably go out.” (3) Ultimately, underneath Whittlesea’s profound and all-encompassing examination of conceptual art and the mystical lies an undeniable romantic urge to confront and embrace the transient and material nature of life and its demise. A Breathing Bulb, despite its generative link to the eugenicist ideologies and eccentric beliefs embedded within Mazdaznan thought, is in its essence an introspective probe into how transcendence, the body and immateriality can intersect and come into being. Contrary to Ha’nish’s quest for eternal life and beauty, from the bulb’s first inhale to its last exhale, Whittlesea’s undulating work is a personal invocation that embraces the fatality of our existence and our fleeting present, one breath at a time. Notes: 1) Whittlesea produced an illustrated and annotated edition of the manual in 2012, published by Open Editions and Stanley Picker Gallery (Kingston University), London.
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