Pictures Made By Angels And Spirits? The Drawing Center Showcases Art That Defies Explanation

When Jesus Christ visited a fourteen-year-old girl in Watervliet, NY, her community was overcome with visions of angels and saints. At first the Shaker elders encouraged it. The ecstatic dancing and glossolalia were treated as gifts, and the period was dubbed the Era of Manifestations.

But the bodily release of the young female “instruments” struck the Central Ministry as indecent: the sort of liberation that might corrupt young souls and threaten religious authority. In the late 1830s, after several years of visitations, the Ministry mandated that instruments submit their visions for expert review prior to sharing with the community. Dancing was forbidden. Visions were permitted only in women over the age of eighteen and had to be presented in writing.

What could have been the end of a spiritual awakening transformed instead into a period of artistic expression that retains the power to stir the spirit today. Gifts took a visual turn as the unintelligible words of angels and saints spread across the page in geometric arrangements embellished with flourishes that danced around the verbiage.

One of these “sacred sheets”, created by an anonymous instrument in 1843 and beguilingly titled Word of the Saviour, is the numinous centerpiece of a new Drawing Center exhibition. Of Mythic Worlds includes a thrilling selection of artworks related to ritual, faith, and mystery, but even amidst contributions by artistic luminaries including Lee Bontecou, Mel Chin, and Georgia O’Keeffe, the Shaker sacred sheet is mesmerizing.

A work from a very different era offers some perspective on what animates the sacred sheet. In 2014, the German-American artist Julia Phillips laid some coarse sand atop a metal plate and danced on it. She then used the plate to make a monoprint. The resulting image is a dense cloud of scratches that precisely document what happened yet betrays almost no information about it other than the intensity of her experience. We are simultaneously brought into the intimate space where the act of creation took place and left to imagine its form, content, and significance.

The spectral presence of the artist, which persists even a decade after she stepped away from the plate, imbues the monoprint with more than the eye can see. The Shaker drawing has a similar quality, except that it evokes the inner stirrings of the instrument who was condemned not to dance yet released her gift all the same.

The writing on Word of the Saviour is as remarkable as the drawing (if one can rightly differentiate between them). Some of the calligraphic script is recognizable but not decipherable, some is not legible, and some is asemic, having the aesthetic quality of text without any discernable lexical root. Although we will never know whether the instrument herself had the ability to read what she wrote – or whether it would have been intelligible to the spirits who moved her – we can at least begin to understand the effect it has on us by considering the work of another contributor to the Drawing Center exhibit: the eminent French semiotician Roland Barthes.

Barthes is not known for his art. But in the early 1970s, approximately a decade-and-a-half after he published Mythologies, he began to create works on paper with pastels, pens, and gouache. Beyond their preternatural artistic maturity – almost inexplicable given that Barthes was working as a novice – the drawings are extraordinary because they are so articulate without articulating anything a viewer can discern with certainty.

As a semiotician, Barthes was interested in the art of Cy Twombly, which shares some of the asemic qualities of his drawings and Shaker spirit sheets without having the appearance of either. His untitled works may have been motivated in part by the desire to learn Twombly’s secrets through reverse engineering.

But the sheer number of them – approximately five hundred – suggests that he was pursuing something more profound, which may be hinted at in the name he gave the series. Barthes called the drawings contre-écritures, suggesting an inversion of writing. It’s as if he set out to articulate all that could not be written with words, leaving the drawings as a record. Although we cannot reverse engineer whatever mental glossolalia possessed him, it’s awesome to be in the presence of the unwritable.

Awe is probably the best word to describe the experience induced by most of the works in Of Mythic Worlds, most especially the Shaker sacred sheet. Awe is a term that excuses or explains the state of being at a loss for words. Barthes himself composed the most articulate statement one can make in response to such art. Writing in the literary journal Luna-Park, where several of his contre-écritures were published in 1976, Barthes prepared the following author’s note: “If my graphisms are illegible, it is precisely in order to say No to commentary.” Yes, precisely.