I have a bunch of things to post — including certain tarot exhibits! — but trying as ever to do many things all at once and not wanting to neglect things here for too long, I thought I might share a few new reads that are free and interesting. If you’re following my witterings, chances are something here might interest you, too.
Navigating the Avant-Garde
By Suzanne W. Churchill, Linda A. Kinnahan, and Susan Rosenbaum
Artist and writer Mina Loy (1882-1966) traversed continents, participated in Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism, and depicted poetic and painterly vistas ranging from lunar landscapes to the gritty streets of the Bowery. Travels with Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde, a companion text to the award-winning, multi-authored web resource Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde, offers an illustrated tour of Mina Loy’s long and varied career, contextualized with in-depth explorations of key places that shaped her life and work. Shedding new light on Loy’s poetic responses to Italy, her theatrical explorations in New York City, and her forays into the museums of Paris and New York, the book brings in newly discovered and critically overlooked Loy works, as well as fresh timelines and surveys of the critical corpus on her creative output. This essential guidebook to Mina Loy charts her migrations across geography, movements among artistic circles and people, and transit across arts to illuminate her evolving aesthetics, politics, and artistic commitments.
A little more niche and obviously of interest to me because it’s both esotericism and Finland, but more generally interesting about the intertwining of class, spiritism and Theosophy:
The Battle Against Materialism:
Spiritualism, Civic Engagement, and Religious Polemics in Early Twentieth-Century Finland
Juuso Järvenpää
Abstract
This article studies the first attempt to organize Spiritualism in Finland in the early twentieth century. The main visionary of the short-lived project was former labour activist Jaakko Jalmari Jalo-Kivi. He founded the first Finnish Spiritualist journal Spiritisti in 1909 and headed the Spiritist Society in Finland, which soon followed. The article examines Jalo-Kivi’s Spiritualist activities as a form of religious civic engagement at the intersection of Finnish civil society and the religious field. It is argued that the main motivation behind these activities was the felt need to battle the spread of materialism, which Spiritualists — along with members of various other social and religious movements and institutions — considered a serious moral and societal threat. Jalo-Kivi’s attempt to organize a specifically Spiritualist battlefront against materialism exemplifies how this widely shared opposition to materialism could encourage both religious cooperation and polemics. Methodologically, the article draws from biographical microhistory.
LA CASSSEROLE
And here are a couple pages from a humorous student newspaper from 1950s Paris (via the BnF naturellement) which includes a piece on the ‘jovial’ mage Papus! Yes, that gave me a chuckle. La Casserole includes the usual assortment of funny and cringe that you’d expect from (looks like all male) students at that time, though one of the cartoons did make me snort and then sigh at the long history of sexist assaults and how little transgressions are dismissed to make big ones possible — but then, we are soaking in it right now. Click on photos to embiggen or just visit Gallica.
You can also see the students’ opinion on American films which rely too much on sequels and remakes — ha!