Austin Osman Spare
Encyclopedia
Austin Osman Spare was an English
art
ist who developed idiosyncratic magical techniques including automatic writing
, automatic drawing and sigilization
based on his theories of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious self. His artistic work is characterized by skilled draughtsmanship exhibiting a mastery of the use of the line, and often employs monstrous or fantastic magical and sexual imagery.
, near Smithfield Market, London on 30 December 1886, the son of Philip Newton Spare, a City of London policeman who retired after 25 years of service, and Eliza Ann Adelaide Osman. He was the fifth of six children.
According to his mother Spare first began to show signs of his talent (and of his well known lack of interest in selling his work) at the age of four:
Spare's parents enrolled him in evening classes at Lambeth Art School in 1899, where he developed his skills under the guidance of Phillip Connard. At 14, he won a county council scholarship for ₤10 and one of his drawings was selected for inclusion in the British Art Section of the Paris International Exhibition. At fifteen he left school and began to work designing posters (briefly, at Causton's, producers of posters and other kinds of commercial art) and stained glass (at James Powell & Sons, Whitefriars Street). A promising stained glass design led to his being recommended for a free scholarship at The Royal College of Art, where he subsequently began formal study. His designs for stained glass undertaken for fellow employee Thomas Cowell are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Shortly thereafter, his father pressured him to send two drawings to the Royal Academy for consideration, with the result that one, an allegorical drawing was accepted. At the age of only sixteen or seventeen, Spare had his work exhibited by the Royal Academy, creating something of a sensation. At this young age he was already deeply involved in the development of his esoteric ideas. In a 1904 article he is quoted as saying, regarding religion:
In October 1907 Spare had his first major exhibition at Bruton Gallery in London's West End. The content of this exhibition was striking, arcane and grotesque, causing controversy. These elements appealed to avant-garde London intellectuals, and perhaps brought him to the attention of Aleister Crowley
, the infamous English mountaineer, magician and poet. However they met, the two men certainly knew each other. Their interaction appears to have begun some time around 1907 or 1908, as a copy of the 1907 edition of A Book of Satyrs with an inscription (dated 1908) from Spare to Crowley is said to exist in a private collection. The two also engaged in written correspondence. Spare almost certainly became a 'probationer' in the order A∴A∴ or Argenteum Astrum (Latin for "Silver Star"), founded by Crowley and George Cecil Jones
. Spare also contributed four small drawings to Crowley's periodical publication The Equinox, and a photograph exists which shows a young Spare with his hands at the sides of his face in the same pose which Crowley himself adopted in the famous 1910 photo with book, robe and hat.
Whatever the nature of the relationship between Crowley and Spare it appears to have been short-lived, and a passage in Spare's The Book of Pleasure leaves no doubt that he did not hold a favorable view of ceremonial magic or magicians:
Spare married the actress and dancer Eily Gertrude Shaw on the 4th of September 1911. The two had met some years before. Whatever influence she may have had upon Spare's work the marriage was short-lived, though never formally dissolved. The two separated around 1918-19. One known work of Spare's, inscribed, signed and dated as "Portrait of the Artist & His Wife March 26th 1912 AOS" is known. It shows the head of Spare executed in colored chalks and pencil. To one side, executed with only a few ghostly lines, we see the face of a woman with fine features, her head turned down and to the side, her eyes closed.
The Book of Pleasure, published by Spare himself in autumn of 1913, most likely with the assistance of private patrons, is the most complete exposition of his esoteric ideas. "Conceived initially as a pictorial allegory the book quickly evolved into a much deeper work, drawing inspiration from Taoism and Buddhism, but primarily from his experiences as an artist."
In 1917, during World War I, Spare was conscripted into the British army, serving as a medical orderly of the Royal Army Medical Corps in London hospitals, and was commissioned as an official War Artist in 1919. In this capacity he visited the battlefields of France to record the work of the R.A.M.C. Spare himself recalled, "When the war broke out, I joined the Army. When I left the Forces, the world was a very different place. Lots of things had changed. I found it very difficult to keep going on with what I had been doing. That pushed me into the abstract world - and there I have more or less remained."
By 1927 Spare had certainly taken a public stance indicating disgust with contemporary society. Perhaps the time he spent documenting images of the horrors of war, followed by a period of financial instability and failing ventures, combined with often hostile reviews of his work and ideas led to this state of affairs. Whatever the cause, Spare's loathing was clearly expressed in his work Anathema of Zos - Sermon To The Hypocrites, which was published in that year. It was to be his last published book.
Hannen Swaffer
, the British journalist, reports that in 1936 Spare wilfully rejected a chance for international fame. He relates that a member of the German Embassy, buying one of Spare's self-portraits, sent it to Hitler. According to Swaffer, the Fuehrer was so impressed (according to this account because the eyes and the moustache were somewhat like his own) that he invited Spare to go to Germany to paint him. Spare, instead, made a copy of it, which came into Swaffer's possession. Swaffer indicates that written at the top of the portrait is the reply that Spare "sent to the man who wanted to master Europe and dominate mankind". Swaffer reports the reply read as follows: “Only from negations can I wholesomely conceive you. For I know of no courage sufficient to stomach your aspirations and ultimates. If you are superman, let me be for ever animal.” This story is not the most incredible of the accounts which were (and are) in circulation regarding Spare. A number of anecdotes concerning Spare and his life have been recorded, many which include descriptions of magical occurrences, accurate divination or foreknowledge, and sorcerous manifestations. It should be said that whatever opinion one may hold regarding the truth of these tales, they are entirely in keeping with claims Spare himself is known to have made.
In 1941, fire and high explosive totally obliterated Spare's studio flat, depriving him of his home, his health and his equipment. For three years he struggled to regain the use of his arms until finally, in 1946, in a cramped basement in Brixton, he began to make pictures again, surrounded by stray cats. At the time he had no bed and worked in an old army shirt and tattered jacket. Yet he still charged only an average of £5 per picture. Clifford Bax
, a friend of Spare's and a one-time collaborator recalled:
Spare was quoted as saying, “I have had a hard life, but I blame nobody but myself. I am responsible for my own misfortunes. I am rather apt to butt at a brick wall at times, and find, in the end, I cannot do any good about it. I cannot change things, so I give it my best.” He died in London on 15 May 1956, at the age of 69.
Spare was regarded as an artist of considerable talent and good prospects, but his style was apparently controversial. Critical reaction to his work in period ranged from baffled but impressed, to patronizing and dismissive. An anonymous review of The Book of Satyrs published in December 1909, which must have appeared around the time of Spare's 23rd birthday, is by turns condescending and grudgingly respectful, "Mr. Spare's work is evidently that of young man of talent." However, "What is more important is the personality lying behind these various influences. And here we must credit Mr. Spare with a considerable fund of fancy and invention, although the activities of his mind still find vent through somewhat tortuous channels. Like most young men he seems to take himself somewhat too seriously". Our critic ends his review with the observation that Spare's "drawing is often more shapeless and confused than we trust it will be when he has assimilated better the excellent influences upon which he has formed his style."
Two years later another anonymous review (this time of The Starlit Mire, for which Spare provided ten drawings) suggests, "When Mr. Spare was first heard of six or seven years ago he was hailed in some quarters as the new Beardsley, and as the work of a young man of seventeen his drawings had a certain amount of vigour and originality. But the years have not dealt kindly with Mr. Spare, and he must not be content with producing in his majority what passed muster in his nonage. However, his designs are not inappropriate for the crude paradoxes that form the text of this book. It is far easier to imitate an epigram than to invent one."
In a 1914 review of The Book of Pleasure, the critic (again anonymous) seems resigned to bewilderment, "It is impossible for me to regard Mr. Spare's drawings otherwise than as diagrams of ideas which I have quite failed to unravel; I can only regret that a good draughtsman limits the scope of his appeal".
From October 1922 to July 1924 Spare edited, jointly with Clifford Bax
, the quarterly, Golden Hind for Chapman and Hall publishers. This was a short-lived project, but during its brief career it reproduced impressive figure drawing and lithographs by Spare and others. In 1925 Spare, Alan Odle, John Austen, and Harry Clarke showed together at the St George's Gallery, and in 1930 at the Godfrey Philips Galleries. The 1930 show was the last West End show Spare would have for 17 years.
Spare's obituary printed in The Times of May 16, 1956 states:
But Spare did not entirely disappear. During the late 30s he developed and exhibited a style of painting based on a logarithmic form of anamorphic projection which he called "siderealism". This work appears to have been well received. In 1947 he exhibited at the Archer Gallery, producing over 200 works for the show. It was a very successful show and led to something of a post-war renaissance of interest.
Public awareness of Spare seems to have declined somewhat in the 1960s before the slow but steady revival of interest in his work beginning in the mid 70s. The following passage in a discussion of an exhibit including Spare's work in the summer of 1965 suggests some critics had hoped he would disappear into obscurity forever. The critic writes that the curator of the exhibit
Robert Ansell summarized Spare's artistic contributions as follows:
Spare believed that intentionally repressed material would become enormously effective in the same way that "unwanted" (since not consciously provoked) repressions and complexes have tremendous power over the person and his or her shaping of reality. It was a logical conclusion to view the subconscious mind as the source of all magical power, which Spare soon did. In his opinion, a magical desire cannot become truly effective until it has become an organic part of the subconscious mind.
Spare "elaborated his sigils by condensing letters of the alphabet into diagrammatic glyphs of desire, which were to be integrated into postural (yogalike) practices—"monograms of thought, for the government of energy." Spare's work is contemporaneous with Hugo Ball
's attempts "to rediscover the evangelical concept of the 'word' (logos) as a magical complex image"—as well as with Walter Benjamin
's thesis that "Mediation, which is the immediacy of all mental communication, is the fundamental problem of linguistic theory, and if one chooses to call this immediacy magic, then the primary problem of language is its magic. Spare's 'sentient symbols' and his 'alphabet of desire' situate this mediatory magic in a libidinal framework of Tantric—which is to say cosmological—proportions."
.
Zos Kia Cultus is a form, style, or school of magic
developed by Spare. It focuses on one's individual universe and the influence of the magician's will on it.
While the Zos Kia Cultus has very few adherents today, it is widely considered an important influence on the rise of chaos magic.
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
ist who developed idiosyncratic magical techniques including automatic writing
Automatic writing
Automatic writing or psychography is writing which the writer states to be produced from a subconscious and/or spiritual source without conscious awareness of the content.-History:...
, automatic drawing and sigilization
Sigil (magic)
A sigil is a symbol created for a specific magical purpose. A sigil is usually made up of a complex combination of several specific symbols or geometric figures, each with a specific meaning or intent.- Name and origin :...
based on his theories of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious self. His artistic work is characterized by skilled draughtsmanship exhibiting a mastery of the use of the line, and often employs monstrous or fantastic magical and sexual imagery.
Biography
Spare was born in Snow HillSnow Hill
Snow Hill may refer to:in Antarctica* Snow Hill Island, Antarctica, where the Swedish Antarctic Expedition explorers over-wintered in 1902in the United Kingdom* Birmingham Snow Hill station** Snowhill, the development project adjacent to the station...
, near Smithfield Market, London on 30 December 1886, the son of Philip Newton Spare, a City of London policeman who retired after 25 years of service, and Eliza Ann Adelaide Osman. He was the fifth of six children.
According to his mother Spare first began to show signs of his talent (and of his well known lack of interest in selling his work) at the age of four:
All day long he would have a pencil in his hand, drawing anything that was placed before him - his parents, his sisters, or brothers. Nothing seemed to come amiss and we made up our minds that if it was at all possible he should be allowed to follow what was evidently his vocation. Of course it has been expensive to buy his board and paints, and all else that he requires, for, curiously enough, he can never be persuaded to sell any of his work. He is even averse to showing it to any one.
Spare's parents enrolled him in evening classes at Lambeth Art School in 1899, where he developed his skills under the guidance of Phillip Connard. At 14, he won a county council scholarship for ₤10 and one of his drawings was selected for inclusion in the British Art Section of the Paris International Exhibition. At fifteen he left school and began to work designing posters (briefly, at Causton's, producers of posters and other kinds of commercial art) and stained glass (at James Powell & Sons, Whitefriars Street). A promising stained glass design led to his being recommended for a free scholarship at The Royal College of Art, where he subsequently began formal study. His designs for stained glass undertaken for fellow employee Thomas Cowell are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Shortly thereafter, his father pressured him to send two drawings to the Royal Academy for consideration, with the result that one, an allegorical drawing was accepted. At the age of only sixteen or seventeen, Spare had his work exhibited by the Royal Academy, creating something of a sensation. At this young age he was already deeply involved in the development of his esoteric ideas. In a 1904 article he is quoted as saying, regarding religion:
I have practically none. I go anywhere. This life is but a reasonable development. All faiths are to me the same. I go to the Church in which I was born - the Established - but without the slightest faith. In fact, I am devising a religion of my own which embodies my conception of what we were, are, and shall be in the future.
Aleister Crowley
Aleister Crowley , born Edward Alexander Crowley, and also known as both Frater Perdurabo and The Great Beast, was an influential English occultist, astrologer, mystic and ceremonial magician, responsible for founding the religious philosophy of Thelema. He was also successful in various other...
, the infamous English mountaineer, magician and poet. However they met, the two men certainly knew each other. Their interaction appears to have begun some time around 1907 or 1908, as a copy of the 1907 edition of A Book of Satyrs with an inscription (dated 1908) from Spare to Crowley is said to exist in a private collection. The two also engaged in written correspondence. Spare almost certainly became a 'probationer' in the order A∴A∴ or Argenteum Astrum (Latin for "Silver Star"), founded by Crowley and George Cecil Jones
George Cecil Jones
George Cecil Jones was a Welsh chemist, occultist, one time member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and co-founder of the magical order A∴A∴...
. Spare also contributed four small drawings to Crowley's periodical publication The Equinox, and a photograph exists which shows a young Spare with his hands at the sides of his face in the same pose which Crowley himself adopted in the famous 1910 photo with book, robe and hat.
Whatever the nature of the relationship between Crowley and Spare it appears to have been short-lived, and a passage in Spare's The Book of Pleasure leaves no doubt that he did not hold a favorable view of ceremonial magic or magicians:
Others praise ceremonial Magic, and are supposed to suffer much Ecstasy! Our asylums are crowded, the stage is over-run! Is it by symbolising we become the symbolised? Were I to crown myself King, should I be King? Rather should I be an object of disgust or pity. These Magicians, whose insincerity is their safety, are but the unemployed dandies of the Brothels.
Spare married the actress and dancer Eily Gertrude Shaw on the 4th of September 1911. The two had met some years before. Whatever influence she may have had upon Spare's work the marriage was short-lived, though never formally dissolved. The two separated around 1918-19. One known work of Spare's, inscribed, signed and dated as "Portrait of the Artist & His Wife March 26th 1912 AOS" is known. It shows the head of Spare executed in colored chalks and pencil. To one side, executed with only a few ghostly lines, we see the face of a woman with fine features, her head turned down and to the side, her eyes closed.
The Book of Pleasure, published by Spare himself in autumn of 1913, most likely with the assistance of private patrons, is the most complete exposition of his esoteric ideas. "Conceived initially as a pictorial allegory the book quickly evolved into a much deeper work, drawing inspiration from Taoism and Buddhism, but primarily from his experiences as an artist."
In 1917, during World War I, Spare was conscripted into the British army, serving as a medical orderly of the Royal Army Medical Corps in London hospitals, and was commissioned as an official War Artist in 1919. In this capacity he visited the battlefields of France to record the work of the R.A.M.C. Spare himself recalled, "When the war broke out, I joined the Army. When I left the Forces, the world was a very different place. Lots of things had changed. I found it very difficult to keep going on with what I had been doing. That pushed me into the abstract world - and there I have more or less remained."
By 1927 Spare had certainly taken a public stance indicating disgust with contemporary society. Perhaps the time he spent documenting images of the horrors of war, followed by a period of financial instability and failing ventures, combined with often hostile reviews of his work and ideas led to this state of affairs. Whatever the cause, Spare's loathing was clearly expressed in his work Anathema of Zos - Sermon To The Hypocrites, which was published in that year. It was to be his last published book.
Dogs, devouring your own vomit! Cursed are ye all! Throwbacks, adulterers, sycophants, corpse devourers, pilferers and medicine swallowers! Think ye Heaven is an infirmary?
Hannen Swaffer
Hannen Swaffer
Hannen Swaffer was a British journalist and drama critic.Swaffer was educated at Stroud Green Grammar School, Kent.He joined the Daily Mail in 1902. He was editor of Weekly Dispatch and helped develop the Daily Mirror into a popular newspaper. In 1913, he initiated "Mr Gossip" for the Daily Sketch...
, the British journalist, reports that in 1936 Spare wilfully rejected a chance for international fame. He relates that a member of the German Embassy, buying one of Spare's self-portraits, sent it to Hitler. According to Swaffer, the Fuehrer was so impressed (according to this account because the eyes and the moustache were somewhat like his own) that he invited Spare to go to Germany to paint him. Spare, instead, made a copy of it, which came into Swaffer's possession. Swaffer indicates that written at the top of the portrait is the reply that Spare "sent to the man who wanted to master Europe and dominate mankind". Swaffer reports the reply read as follows: “Only from negations can I wholesomely conceive you. For I know of no courage sufficient to stomach your aspirations and ultimates. If you are superman, let me be for ever animal.” This story is not the most incredible of the accounts which were (and are) in circulation regarding Spare. A number of anecdotes concerning Spare and his life have been recorded, many which include descriptions of magical occurrences, accurate divination or foreknowledge, and sorcerous manifestations. It should be said that whatever opinion one may hold regarding the truth of these tales, they are entirely in keeping with claims Spare himself is known to have made.
In 1941, fire and high explosive totally obliterated Spare's studio flat, depriving him of his home, his health and his equipment. For three years he struggled to regain the use of his arms until finally, in 1946, in a cramped basement in Brixton, he began to make pictures again, surrounded by stray cats. At the time he had no bed and worked in an old army shirt and tattered jacket. Yet he still charged only an average of £5 per picture. Clifford Bax
Clifford Bax
Clifford Bax was a versatile English writer, known particularly as a playwright, a journalist, critic and editor, and a poet, lyricist and hymn writer. He also was a translator, for example of Goldoni...
, a friend of Spare's and a one-time collaborator recalled:
Spare knew the taste of life as it is for people to whom a penny and a ha'penny are very different coins, and he lived in a high bleak barrack-like tenement block, among men and women in whose life elegance and the arts had no place, and surrounded by their washing and their cats. He said to me once 'Don't put 'esquire' on your letters. We've only one other esquire in my block, and they think we're giving ourselves airs.' His attractive simplicity came out, too, when he said 'If you are ever passing my place, do drop in'; for it is seldom that anybody happens to be passing The Borough unless he lives there.
Spare was quoted as saying, “I have had a hard life, but I blame nobody but myself. I am responsible for my own misfortunes. I am rather apt to butt at a brick wall at times, and find, in the end, I cannot do any good about it. I cannot change things, so I give it my best.” He died in London on 15 May 1956, at the age of 69.
Spare the artist
Spare's work is remarkable for its variety, including paintings, a vast number of drawings, work with pastel, a few etchings, published books combining text with imagery, and even bizarre bookplates. He was productive from his earliest years until his death. According to Haydn Mackay, "rhythmic ornament grew from his hand seemingly without conscious effort."Spare was regarded as an artist of considerable talent and good prospects, but his style was apparently controversial. Critical reaction to his work in period ranged from baffled but impressed, to patronizing and dismissive. An anonymous review of The Book of Satyrs published in December 1909, which must have appeared around the time of Spare's 23rd birthday, is by turns condescending and grudgingly respectful, "Mr. Spare's work is evidently that of young man of talent." However, "What is more important is the personality lying behind these various influences. And here we must credit Mr. Spare with a considerable fund of fancy and invention, although the activities of his mind still find vent through somewhat tortuous channels. Like most young men he seems to take himself somewhat too seriously". Our critic ends his review with the observation that Spare's "drawing is often more shapeless and confused than we trust it will be when he has assimilated better the excellent influences upon which he has formed his style."
Two years later another anonymous review (this time of The Starlit Mire, for which Spare provided ten drawings) suggests, "When Mr. Spare was first heard of six or seven years ago he was hailed in some quarters as the new Beardsley, and as the work of a young man of seventeen his drawings had a certain amount of vigour and originality. But the years have not dealt kindly with Mr. Spare, and he must not be content with producing in his majority what passed muster in his nonage. However, his designs are not inappropriate for the crude paradoxes that form the text of this book. It is far easier to imitate an epigram than to invent one."
In a 1914 review of The Book of Pleasure, the critic (again anonymous) seems resigned to bewilderment, "It is impossible for me to regard Mr. Spare's drawings otherwise than as diagrams of ideas which I have quite failed to unravel; I can only regret that a good draughtsman limits the scope of his appeal".
From October 1922 to July 1924 Spare edited, jointly with Clifford Bax
Clifford Bax
Clifford Bax was a versatile English writer, known particularly as a playwright, a journalist, critic and editor, and a poet, lyricist and hymn writer. He also was a translator, for example of Goldoni...
, the quarterly, Golden Hind for Chapman and Hall publishers. This was a short-lived project, but during its brief career it reproduced impressive figure drawing and lithographs by Spare and others. In 1925 Spare, Alan Odle, John Austen, and Harry Clarke showed together at the St George's Gallery, and in 1930 at the Godfrey Philips Galleries. The 1930 show was the last West End show Spare would have for 17 years.
Spare's obituary printed in The Times of May 16, 1956 states:
Thereafter Spare was rarely found in the purlieus of Bond St. He would teach a little from January to June, then up to the end of October, would finish various works, and from the beginning of November to Christmas would hang his products in the living-room, bedroom, and kitchen of his flat in the Borough. There he kept open house; critics and purchasers would go down, ring the bell, be admitted, and inspect the pictures, often in the company of some of the models - working women of the neighbourhood. Spare was convinced that there was a great potential demand for pictures at 2 or 3 guineas each, and condemned the practice of asking ₤20 for "amateurish stuff". He worked chiefly in pastel or pencil, drawing rapidly, often taking no more than two hours over a picture. He was especially interested in delineating the old, and had various models over 70 and one as old as 93.
But Spare did not entirely disappear. During the late 30s he developed and exhibited a style of painting based on a logarithmic form of anamorphic projection which he called "siderealism". This work appears to have been well received. In 1947 he exhibited at the Archer Gallery, producing over 200 works for the show. It was a very successful show and led to something of a post-war renaissance of interest.
Public awareness of Spare seems to have declined somewhat in the 1960s before the slow but steady revival of interest in his work beginning in the mid 70s. The following passage in a discussion of an exhibit including Spare's work in the summer of 1965 suggests some critics had hoped he would disappear into obscurity forever. The critic writes that the curator of the exhibit
has resurrected an unknown English artist named Austin Osman Spare, who imitates etchings in pen and ink in the manner of Beardsley but really harks back to the macabre German romanticism. He tortured himself before the first war and would have inspired the surrealist movement had he been discovered early enough. He has come back in time to play a belated part in the revival of taste for art nouveau.
Robert Ansell summarized Spare's artistic contributions as follows:
During his lifetime, Spare left critics unable to place his work comfortably. Ithell Colquhoun supported his claim to have been a proto-Surrealist and posthumously the critic Mario Amaya made the case for Spare as a Pop Artist. Typically, he was both of these - and neither. A superb figurative artist in the mystical tradition, Spare may be regarded as one of the last English Symbolists, following closely his great influence George Frederick Watts. The recurrent motifs of androgyny, death, masks, dreams, vampires, satyrs and religious themes, so typical of the art of the French and Belgian Symbolists, find full expression in Spare's early work, along with a desire to shock the bourgeois.
Spare the magician
It has been argued that Spare's magic depended (at least in part) upon psychological repression. According to one author, Spare's magical rationale was as follows, "If the psyche represses certain impulses, desires, fears, and so on, and these then have the power to become so effective that they can mold or even determine entirely the entire conscious personality of a person right down to the most subtle detail, this means nothing more than the fact that through repression ("forgetting") many impulses, desires, etc. have the ability to create a reality to which they are denied access as long as they are either kept alive in the conscious mind or recalled into it. Under certain conditions, that which is repressed can become even more powerful than that which is held in the conscious mind."Spare believed that intentionally repressed material would become enormously effective in the same way that "unwanted" (since not consciously provoked) repressions and complexes have tremendous power over the person and his or her shaping of reality. It was a logical conclusion to view the subconscious mind as the source of all magical power, which Spare soon did. In his opinion, a magical desire cannot become truly effective until it has become an organic part of the subconscious mind.
Spare "elaborated his sigils by condensing letters of the alphabet into diagrammatic glyphs of desire, which were to be integrated into postural (yogalike) practices—"monograms of thought, for the government of energy." Spare's work is contemporaneous with Hugo Ball
Hugo Ball
Hugo Ball was a German author, poet and one of the leading Dada artists.Hugo Ball was born in Pirmasens, Germany and was raised in a middle-class Catholic family. He studied sociology and philosophy at the universities of Munich and Heidelberg...
's attempts "to rediscover the evangelical concept of the 'word' (logos) as a magical complex image"—as well as with Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist...
's thesis that "Mediation, which is the immediacy of all mental communication, is the fundamental problem of linguistic theory, and if one chooses to call this immediacy magic, then the primary problem of language is its magic. Spare's 'sentient symbols' and his 'alphabet of desire' situate this mediatory magic in a libidinal framework of Tantric—which is to say cosmological—proportions."
Influence on Chaos magic
Some of Spare's techniques, particularly the use of sigils and the creation of an "alphabet of desire" were adopted, adapted and popularized by Peter J. Carroll in the work Liber Null & Psychonaut. Carroll and other writers such as Ray Sherwin are seen as key figures in the emergence of some of Spare's ideas and techniques as a part of a magical movement loosely referred to as chaos magicChaos magic
Chaos magic is a school of the modern magical tradition which emphasizes the pragmatic use of belief systems and the creation of new and unorthodox methods.-General principles:...
.
Zos Kia Cultus is a form, style, or school of magic
Magic (paranormal)
Magic is the claimed art of manipulating aspects of reality either by supernatural means or through knowledge of occult laws unknown to science. It is in contrast to science, in that science does not accept anything not subject to either direct or indirect observation, and subject to logical...
developed by Spare. It focuses on one's individual universe and the influence of the magician's will on it.
While the Zos Kia Cultus has very few adherents today, it is widely considered an important influence on the rise of chaos magic.
Some known exhibitions
- Bruton Galleries, London, October 1907
- The Baillie Gallery, London, 11–31 October 1911
- The Baillie Gallery, London, 10–31 October 1912
- The Ryder Gallery, London, 17 April - 7 May 1912
- The Baillie Gallery, London, July 1914
- St. George’s Gallery, London, March 1927
- The Lefevre Galleries, London, April 1929
- Godfrey Phillips Galleries, London, November 1930
- Artist's studio, 56A Walworth Road, Elephant, London, Autumn, 1937
- Artist's studio, 56a Walworth Road, Elephant, London, Autumn, 1938
- Archer Gallery, London, July 3–30 November 1947
- The Temple Bar (Doctors), 286 Walworth Rd. London, 28 October – 29 November 1949
- The Mansion House Tavern, 12 June – 12 July 1952
- The White Bear, London, 19 November – 1 December 1953
- Archer Gallery, London, 25 October – 26 November 1955
- The Greenwich Gallery, London, 23 July – 12 August 1964
- Alpine Club Gallery (Group Exhibition), London, 22 June - 2 July 1965
- The Obelisk Gallery, London, 1972
- The Taranman Gallery, London, 2–23 September 1974
- Oliver Bradbury & James Birch Fine Art, London, 17 November – 8 December 1984
- The Morley College Gallery, London, September 1987
- Henry Boxer, London, November 1992
- Arnolfini, Bristol, 2007
- Cuming Museum, South London, September–November 2010
- Atlantis Bookshop, London, 2010
External links
- www.jerusalempress.co.uk: Publisher, Cockney Visionary, book and DVD. Forthcoming: The Book of Pleasure, new introductions by Alan Moore and Michael Staley
- AustinSpare.co.uk: Articles, Genealogy, and Bibliography
- Fulgur Limited: Gallery, Bibliography, Biography and Articles
- Spare's illustrations for The Starlit Mire by James Bertram and F. Russell
- Artist and Familiar by Joseph NechvatalJoseph NechvatalJoseph Nechvatal is a post-conceptual art digital artist and art theoretician who creates computer-assisted paintings and computer animations, often using custom-created computer viruses.-Life and work:Joseph Nechvatal was born in Chicago...
- A psychogeographical film of Austin Spare's London (part 1)