ˈnjuːmɪnəs
adjective
having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity.
A recent M.A. seminar stirred memories of an artist, musician, cartoonist and writer I'd not forgotten, but had not brought to mind for a long while; Peter Blegvad. Well known during the 1990's as the creator of the 'Leviathan' cartoon in the then refreshingly new paper 'The Independent On Sunday', he was already known to me as one of the musicians involved in a challenging recording called Kew.Rhone. released in 1977 on the same day and label as the Sex Pistol's 'Never Mind The Bollocks '. In many ways, the 'Pistols recording is easier to listen to than Blegvad's.
(The BBC review is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/wd8c/).
Blegvad has written extensively on the subject of procedure within drawing and visualisation in general and also on 'museology' and collecting, but one particular essay entitled 'On Numinous Objects and Their Manufacture' caught my attention after the seminar.
It wasn't simply the ideas within the writing which caught my attention at first, but the accompanying illustrations which Blegvad termed 'Morphological Tables'; they were uncannily similar to a small sketch I'd made a number of years ago. In common with Blegvad's diagrams, my drawing resembled a visual classification of objects and forms in regard to their 'resonance' - in my case; relating and linked to a specific and quite local environment, although the objects themselves have wider associations and meanings. Significant objects, common objects; reminders, remains and those which simply felt good in the hand.
(Blegvad's essay is here; http://www.ibiblio.org/mal/blegvad/numinous.html).
I suppose all artists are collectors of favourite things; I, like many others have objects in my studio which have travelled with me over the last four decades from studio to studio, like talismen. In general, these are cheap, throwaway and probably not very interesting to most folk; they may have an interesting patina, an intriguing shape or remind me of another object or form that exists in a similar manifestation 'out there'. But like most keepsakes, they are all ciphers for ideas, significant happenings or realities and they frequently turn up in my work. Likewise, Georgio Morandi's monochromatic depictions of generic pots and pans signify much more than receptacles of stews and coffee; they embody emotion, personality and place. They are deceptively powerful...I saw a large number of Morandi's paintings in New York a number of years ago. I was left speechless; simultaneously bereft and uplifted. Forget Rothko and the spiritual experience; for me, Morandi was just what you wanted as relief from a frenetic metropolis and to experience some sort of peace.
Returning to Blegvad and his ideas on the secret power of objects. Often the objects he imbues with an 'aura' are commonplace or those whose purpose is now no longer apparent. This is an idea attributed to the Surrealists and Andre Breton in particular. Breton stated in the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924; ‘Let us not mince words', he wrote, 'the marvellous is always beautiful, anything marvellous is beautiful, in fact only the marvellous is beautiful'. Breton was talking about the hidden potential within things, objects and other visual stimuli which he considered to have latent energies capable of sparking deep emotions and responses. The Surrealists experienced the 'marvellous' as a kind of jolt, an unexpected realisation that something commonplace or familiar suddenly takes on a previously unrecognised beauty or significance. Freud termed it 'the uncanny'. For Louis Aragon, one of Breton's contemporaries, something as commonplace as shop signage comes into that category. (See previous posts on Huntly and Grocer's shop signage.)
I think this is something very human and I reckon most of us have experienced it without realising; the sudden surprise that you've fallen in love with someone you've known for ages is a good example; most folk have beach-combed and picked up and pocketed unidentified objects because of their colour, shape or texture...placed them on the pile adjacent to the doorstep, because they thought of them as resonant. I think everyone has the latent ability to recognise the disturbance, as Breton called it, associated with things which at once seem familiar yet mysterious; the ability to recognise and covet some objects for their latent 'wonderment' has not been lost. Diminished, perhaps, but not lost.
Of course, a receptive receiver is required, i.e. you or I. As Blegvad states, 'this is merely another way of saying beauty is in the eye of the beholder'. You could argue that training; in my case an art schooling, makes me more receptive to the resonance of various objects and materials, but I would disagree. I may be able to reason and explain why one object contains more latent 'marvellousness' than another, but that wouldn't make my choice any more valid than anybody else's choice of 'thing'. And that's the beauty of the Surrealist's and Peter Blegvad's theories; such objects may be purpose built like 'art', where form, material and context are brought together purposefully to create 'numinosity' or they may be 'the most commonest thing to be picked up anywhere'. And context, a much used term in Arts education to validate ideas, is not the preserve of the arts educated, it's yours to attribute to anything you feel is important enough to keep and collect.