Boo! How Artists Have Envisioned Ghosts Throughout the Centuries

People have believed in ghosts since time immemorial. Our enduring fascination with these spooky spectres has seen them haunt all manner of popular media, from folklore to film, and art. But, trapped between our earthly realm and whatever awaits, ghosts are often felt as an intangible presence. Only sometimes are sightings reported, so how best to represent the supernatural?

Ever inventive, artists have come up with different answers to this conceptual challenge over the centuries. “Ghosts: Visualizing the Supernatural,” a new survey at Kunstmuseum Basel, takes visitors on a 250-year journey from the 19th-century obsession with spiritualism, seance, and the occult, to modern-day apparitions. Among the 160 works and objects on display are conjurings by contemporary artists like Urs Fischer, Ryan Gander, Rachel Whiteread, Erwin Wurm, and Nicole Eisenman.

“Art and new forms of media share an interest in rendering things visible that are on the edges of our perception,” the exhibition’s curator Eva Reifert said. “Dealing with ghosts is an immensely creative undertaking, the imagination is liberated and the what ifs and how take it beyond the limits of materialistic reality.”

Depicting the Imperceptible

One reason for the rich variety of ghosts in art is the tantalizing impossibility of defining these entities. Are they benevolent or malevolent? “The idea that the past lives on is very powerful,” said Reifert, and “the idea that we can’t control [ghosts] appearances is, in turn, a very scary thought.” Their existence may resist and confound scientific rationality, but we can’t look away. After all, ghosts might be “figures of memory, of a person we loved, or, more probably, of violent and wrongful happenings in the past that have come to haunt the present.”

Inevitably, we are left to wonder whether what we sense is real or a phantom of the imagination. Or, as goes the Emily Dickinson poem quoted in the show’s catalogue: “One need not be a chamber–to be haunted, One need not be a House–, The Brain has Corridors–, surpassing, Material Place–.”

The mystery of in-between beings is well captured by Canadian painter William Blair Bruce’s (1888). A man cowers on a desolate, snowy plain, reaching out towards a strange, semi-translucent figure. “Is it the soul that leaves the body of the dying hunter?” Reifert asked. “Is it the phantom that leaves no traces in the snow but induces a ‘fear-chill like a shroud’?”

A filmy, loosely-rendered form is one way of evoking the “shift in atmosphere” associated with an invisible being. Another option is the loose white sheet, suggestive of a presence, or absence, beneath. The origins of this method can be traced back to the simple burial practice of wrapping the dead in a sheet in place of a coffin. “Many other aspects of ghostly appearances seem to be tied to the emergence of new media, like projection technologies or photography,” said Reifert. These can be used to “play with the theme of transparency, of blurred outlines, double or long exposure to indicate that the ghost is not fully of this world.”

Spiritualism and Spectacle

In challenging religion, the Enlightenment of the 18th century had promised a rational, controllable world, but one that paranormal activity threatened to upend. After all, novel uses of electricity began to power seemingly magical technologies, like the telegraph or the telephone, such that invisible forces suddenly felt real. In the late 19th century, many became fixated on the possibility of transcendence, whether by seeking channels of communication with new realms or probing inwards, toward previously unexplored layers of the psyche. No doubt, the spectacle and illusion of popular seances helped feed this appetite.

Several mediums with a special “gift” were also artists, including Madge Gill, Augustin Lesage, and Georgiana Houghton, whose works are included in the Basel show. They saw themselves not as authors in the traditional sense but as being conducted by a higher power. Therefore, an intuitive “automatic” process was used by Houghton to produce her intricate, semi-abstracted spirit drawings. Though her aims were distinct from the modernists that would come later, many of her achievements appear to pre-empt their work.

By the 20th-century, however, the avant-garde had inevitably put their own spin on the spiritual. Ghosts became “free-ranging agents of the irrational” and “metaphors for psychological extremes like trauma, anxiety or grief,” Reifert said. For the Surrealists, they were an avenue into the unconscious, appearing in the work of artists like Max Ernst, a pioneer of automatic painting techniques, and René Magritte.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com