Sorcha Dallas

The past few years have seen a notable resurgence of what Umberto Eco once called ‘Dreaming the Middle Ages’ (1973), in the form of a ‘curious oscillation between fantastic neomedievalism and responsible philological examination’. Tate Britain’s ‘Altermodern’ (2009) flirted with this, featuring a range of works that related to conspiracy theories (Mike Nelson, neo-paganism and theosophy (Olivia Plender), and shamanism (Marcus Coates). Today’s future sailors tend to fantasise about historical pressure points before and after science – fusions of science and spiritualism. In particular, they might be involved in a reassessment of pseudo-spiritual movements, of Romanticism or of early mystical Modernism. Rosicrucianism, neo-paganism and theosophy in particular offer the kind of curious, conspiratorial early-modernist aesthetic of faith and redemption that attracts the contemporary and neomedieval mind. This signals a global tendency to question the logic and presumptions of Western Enlightenment, bookending early Modernist’s similar concern regarding its limits.

Spartacus Chetwynd’s embrace of neomedieval forms of carnival is particularly evident in her use of troupes of mummers in seminal performances such as ‘Debt, A Medieval Play’ (2005). It would be wrong to castigate Chetwynd’s self-sufficient folkmate as a manifestation of the ‘new irrationalism’. Her art is allusive and analogous. Although they may be informed by history and anthropology in equal measure, the acts performed by her troupe aren’t consumed by the past; they are about the present. They are a proxy battle between today’s homogenising technocracy and its discontents (represented by the radical characters of darker ages). All of history speaks of this struggle. While ‘medieval’ is often a byword for negative clichés associated with the Middle Ages – creationism, paleoconservatism, torture, ganglords – neomedievalism could equally provide a focus on more progressive associations with the present, such as lack of institutional state regulation, Latin transnationalism, community and sensuality. The ‘liveness’ or performative aspect of Chetwynd’s enactments allows this version of the folktale to be both liberated and retold repeatedly. Its emphasis on social participation, on a creative commons, is a key sign that it’s part of our WorldWideWeb 2.0.

The connection between the Californian Ideology’s digital utopia of the collective conscious and the prelapsarian pastoral commons was made explicitly in ‘Disclosures II: The Middle Ages, Laxton’ (part of ‘Histories of the Present’, a series of exhibitions and events in historically significant places in and around Nottingham, produced by Nottingham Contemporary during 2008), a theme related to Plender’s contemporaneous exhibition of her video ‘Bring Back Robin Hood’ (2007) at Nottingham Castle Museum. Plender’s use of Kibbo Kift costumes is more archaeological than, say, Luke Collins’s embalming performances with Eucharistic surrogates and props or ‘Plastique Fantastique Ribbon Dance Ritual to Call Forth the Pre-Industrial Modern’ (2007, part of that year’s ‘The Event’, in Birmingham). However, these carnivals of costume stem from a similar desire to give a face to what otherwise is an amorphous, suffocating plenum, the aesthetic of disappearance that is the ambient culture of today.

This aspect of neomedievalism may seem like a naïve primitivism, fuelled by nostalgie de la boue. As in previous neo-Gothics, the search for a golden age of anarcho-communism based on classless social kinship can camouflage an underlying retreatism. Even so, we need to recognize that roleplay is crucial to how we overcome the limitations of more readily received ideas. Roleplay, as a form of escapism, has the potential to suppress the habitual response, which in turn allows space for a playful creative approach, a different way of visualising or a genuine synthesis emerge. It’s this aspect of neomedievalism that reintroduces the principle of subsidiary that the artworld sorely lacks.

‘Altermodern’ represented a concern with the neomedieval evident in other gallery-based exhibitions in the UK during the past year that have featured strong doses of sculpture, drawing and paintin: ‘Heavy Metal Mouth’ (2009, curated by Hyperground and Polarcap for the Edinburgh Annuale), ‘The Long Dark’ (curated by Michelle Cotton at International 3, Manchester and Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne), ‘The Dark Monarch’ (2009, Tate St Ives) and Alex Pollard and Clare Stephenson’s ‘Four Fatrasies’ (2010, Pump House Gallery, London). Is this a sign of the times? There are many ways in which the early twenty-first century mirrors medieval Europe – which suffered from global warming and economic meltdown as well as a pandemic that killed around half its population. But these are not explicit philological points of reference for contemporary dark-age fantasists more familiar with shoegazing and MMORPG than with ‘Beowulf’ (eight to eleventh century). Pollard and Sptephenson’s ‘Four Fatrasies’ lords over this fiefdom. Taking its lead from medieval nonsense poetry, this collaborative installation filters the Dark Ages through a Victorian neoromantic sensibility. Stephenson’s medieval sculptural guardians form a tableau to Pollard’s bespoke Italian sports shoes and his afforested paintings (many of which have featured Robin-Hood style vagabonds). This textural brogueing of the preindustrial, pre-Enlightenment and early modern is one that always remains self-consciously contemporary in perspective. Among artists schooled in the histories of Modernisms, there’s a high degree of self-awareness that a retreat into irrationalism and fantasy is expected to emerge at points of crisis in modernity. ‘The Long Dark’ explicitly relates this to John Ruskin and the neo-Gothic of late-nineteenth-century industrial England, ‘The Dark Monarch’ to its neoromantic progeny, ‘Heavy Metal Mouth’ to the new wave of British heavy metal’s ‘Fighting Fantasy’ power chords. ‘Four Fatrasies’ to a bricolage of neomedieval argots. Neomedievalism therefore is as much an invention of modernity as it is a response to it.

Torsten Lauschmann’s mixed medievalism is one that trades more unequivocally on contemporary practices of knowledge. His art rises from the folksonomy the Peasants’ Revolt as a smart mob. This energy is often channelled from the micro to the macro, as a successdul campaign to get Rage Against the Machine to the UK Christmas number one attests. Lauschmann shows us that it can be redirected. He is a master of slivercasting, the use of such emerging mass media to reach tiny audiences. Lauschmann’s solo show ‘The Darker Ages’ (2009, Mary Mary, Glasgow) gives this invisible culture form. He is a charmer, assigning things a talismanic energy and placing them within a wider web of consciousness. ‘The Darker Ages’ is a séance; one disposed to the hauntological tendencies within neomedievalism, to invocations of ambient or unseen relics and hidden phantasmagorical layers within the present. ‘The Darker Ages’ is a reliquary, with Lauchmann playing ham media archaeologist – he experiments in reverse, conjuring a mashup of digitally remastered vintage visuals to summon their ancestral boxes of tricks. The screen of a laptop is punctured by biro, a Luddite stylus in the digital works. The liquid crystal has blotted and congealed to form a sprite – a ghost in the machine that chants harmonically. ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hand’ (2009) is the digital semantic object as a new form of a miraculous artefact. Thanks to ambient intelligence, objects now answer us back. Things can contextualise themselves, allow is to question their very presence, then provide us with feedback on how we respond to them. Our environment is mutating, not mute. Our surroundings can’t play dumb, everything’s smart now. This encourages a neomedieval form of animism. Like many of the devotional objects venerated in the medieval period, this notebook remains very ordinary, oscillating between the sacred and the prosaic.

Such work reminds us that neomedievalism is structural rather than stylistic – a field rather than a form. As the artworld globalises, it is becoming increasingly balkanized into fiefs, city-states and overlapping territories. In this it resembles what, back in 1977, Hedley Bull prophesied as a new medievalism: a ‘system of overlapping authority and multiple loyalty’. Bull’s ideas are helpful when considering the infrastructure of the artworld – which as a highly opaque unregulated economy is remarkably similar to the disconnected, ungoverned space of medieval Europe. As in the high-medieval period, artisans in the 2000s have been participating in a reinvigorated preindustrial economy wherein objects are valued more highly than experiences. As more wealth concentrated in the hands of fewer people during the first decade of the twenty-first century, vassaldom has been responsible for the circulation of new holy relics and for the widespread retreat into cultural monasticism (the dealer-collector system). Curatorial celebrations of cultural supranationalism not only serve to mask the centrifugal forces of vassaldom that have dominated the artworld in the past ten years, they are a product of vassaldom.

Neomedievalism is particularly important now given the crisis in technologically advanced postindustrialism – artists are thus ordained to lose their rational minds in challenging the diluted positivism that is the experience economy. The neofeudalism generated in this contemporary narrative is one – with its emphasis on a complex mixture of individual autonomy and multiple loyalties – that fuses neatly with current Western geopolitical analyses of globalization. Neomedievalism, then, is a lens through which we identify and justify the present in the past and through which we narrate this past in terms of how we imagine our future. It has no logical conclusion.