"Using magic as a materialist practice with a critical purpose sounds like a contradiction in terms, if not like the world turned upside down - because what could be more ethereal and fanciful than esoteric knowledge? But as we know magic changes the terms of engagement - so might it not, in combination with art, also be used to change its own terms; to open its own secret doors as well as some of those in the world?

Magic is the shadow trailing processes of enlightenment. That is, as a knowledge form it is not compromised by teleology or the myth of progress. It is not meant to make us arrive at a point in space and time that has been designated by utopian ideal standards for living; nor is it subordinated to economic calculations. One could argue that this kind of knowledge is paranoid, in the original sense of the term whose etymology is constructed of ‘para' (next to) and ‘nous' (reason). In this context this shouldn't be taken to mean the loss of sanity through the disappearance into an interior world, but literally an order where things are next to reason [...]

[...] It is made increasingly difficult to gain an interpretive distance to the world, both in terms of space and time. To approach the world through a reason-next-to-reason, then, might help us establish a gaze on this state of affairs; a gaze that may be oblique, and that surely is not disembodied and disinterested, but that will help us consider - or get a feeling for - the totality of this cultural predicament. In this slightly convoluted way - but contemporary culture is nothing if not convoluted - magic may turn out to be the best antidote to a positivist universe. It is, in its own strange way, a tough medicine; but perhaps that is the awakening that is called for when our emotional attitude has been reduced to a neutral core.

[...] We usually associate magic anthropologically, with knowledge forms of so-called primitive cultures. However our own doesn't hold back in magic procedures: it pays tribute to ‘knowing' things by feeling them with the gut (...); or it establishes peculiar relations and exchanges between the properties of persons and things. Images appear as real beings and things become vital when they perform and ‘appear as' persons. This is a kind of capitalist animism in which things are not just dead, represented labour, but processes of living forms. Anyone who has interacted with the robotic half-presences that populate the Internet economy will know what I am talking about.

With an appropriately comical expression, the philosopher Henri Bergson called this accelerated, modern condition ‘topsy-turveydom'. The world is no less uprooted when things around us in this way begin to act on their own, making us hard pressed to tell for sure what is the other side and what is this side. In such a fluid modernity we need forms of critique that can go anywhere, and fast. With magic we can address what is literally deadly serious, if not tragic, about contemporary life, at the same time as it provides us the means to turn a trick or pull a bluff on the powers that be.

[...] Today the dialectics between nature and cultural reason has collapsed, because nature has been vanquished and economy has taken its place, which is what reason must now confront. And so magic does not seem more unreasonable than so many other things. In fact, exactly because its terrain is that of disembodied energies and uncontrolled intelligence it might serve as a starting point for re-addressing the desires and needs of persons, not things. With esoteric forms of knowledge we can inject opacity into exchanges of global information that are so rapid and flickering that they appear to be diaphanous. The question is, are those desires for real change and transformation, hybridization and métissage, so urgently felt in magic operations, necessarily anathema to processes of enlightenment?

This paradox embodies the way magic becomes tactical when employed as a knowledge form (to use the term developed by Aaron Gach and the Center for Tactical Magic). When we in this way cut magic free from its transcendental moorings of the ‘after' and the ‘beyond' and employ it in the here and now to navigate the grey zones between the rational and the irrational, it becomes an urgent address to the devices culture uses to reproduce itself.

[...] We usually take esoteric to mean something arcane and difficultly accessible that exists only for the initiated few. Knowledge that demands to be opened by way of secret codes. These codes you can learn, but then there is something more... you will have to believe too, in order to pronounce the codes convincingly; or you will even have to have been chosen to be one of the initiated few. However, examining the concept of the esoteric more closely, is describes something outside knowledge in the proper sense of that word: it is nobody's and it is everybody's since it deals with what cannot be known: death, emotional situations, what is beyond the limits of our body, what is culturally speaking out of place. In this case the esoteric is not something that implies a reduced number of hermetic access points, but is instead seen to open up a spectrum of accessibility. This is how magic can help us address the urgent questions of how to address and represent the social and the political in a post-social, post-political era."

Chus Martínez
Curator of the exhibition
[From the text ‘An Index of Ideas Taken
From the Other Side: Magic as a Case Study',
in the catalogue of the exhibition.
Frankfurter Kunstverein/MARCO, 2008]