• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

• 
• 
• 

The Magic is Dead, Long Live Magic

Mumbai based artist, Julius Macwan says that the magic of things died in 2005. He feels that he still holds some powers to evoke the magic of things and his latest solo show at the Stainless Gallery, New Delhi, titled ‘Death of Magic’ is an attempt to evoke the magic of things. Ashwini Pai Bahadur in conversation with the artist.

Ashwini Pai Bahadur : What is the philosophy of Death of Magic in a nutshell?

Julius Macwan: Let me share with you the statement I wrote about the philosophy in a nutshell. I said: 'Magic' was a part of the air around us. It made us see and experience things and events as imbued with a feeling that made us feel more meaningful and alive. We used to live life trying to keep this feeling and increase it, so that life would feel more fantastic.
Magic died in 2005. The air is now thinner. Things and events are no longer imbued with that feeling. We are blank, and there is no search for the feeling.
‘The Death Of Magic' is a work that becomes a marker of that point in time, and of the event of the change and the loss.

Now what I mean is, that there is a specific change that is not just internal. It is also external, in our environment, and in our collective consciousness, and in space and time.

A friend I was talking to today at the gallery gave me a beautiful example. He said it's like going to your grandmother's house and seeing things still exactly the way they had always been. You remember vividly how you used to feel, and how the air in the room used to feel. But now it just feels like it's a room with things in it. Blank.

Similarly, every place in the world, every life, has gone blank.
And people have become automatic. They talk, relate, work. But feel very little. Something's died.

That something is what I call magic. And I saw a shift take place, for everyone, in 2005. The shift was so complete that it also took place in our memory, making us forget what we lost. I didn't forget, and want to place a marker on that point in time, so that it doesn't disappear unnoticed, so that it is marked in our history and our consciousness.

APB: How does "Death of Magic" relate to your photographic works?
JM: I'm saying that magic died in 2005. When I started work for my last show, titled J, in 2007, I already wanted to follow it with a body of work about the death of magic. Late last year it was time to create work for Harsh Goenka's A Maz Ing show in Jehangir in February 2008. Like I always do, I saw a vision of the work I wanted to create for it – The Pieta, but with a girl in the place of Christ, and me in the place of Mary.

This was because I have always been putting the female in the place of the male in my works.

 I came across my model, who is Jamaican  and we photographed the reference image I wanted for the Pieta. In the process of the shoot, I also made my first photographic work of the girl on the cross. I have earlier painted the image of a crucified woman many times.
That then exploded into many more images, and the girl became a metaphor for magic. She is Magic in the work, and the photographs and paintings are imbued with the energy of magic, and its death.

Her images combined with the images of a grave and a tree that I had shot during the same period, and all the works together are a body containing the energy of all that was coming through me as I related to the death of magic.
APB: The women portrayed in your photographic works are in positions of power to entice, are there any other messages you are trying to give out?
JM: Sorry, they aren't in positions of power to entice. I have no idea where that came from. I think a woman's body may entice, but that may not be her intention. But it's not a problem. It is one of many natural consequences.
I am not trying to give out any messages. I never do. What I try to do with my work is this-
I live a certain way and am connected to a point of view, a source within me which feels a certain way. That source is an energy, and a dimension, and an experience.

My works come from this, and then function on their own as an experience, and as energy and phenomena.

APB: Can I have the inspiration behind the The Pieta , the only painting at the show?
 JM: Like I mentioned earlier, I had to create a work for Harsh' Goenkas '  show for February, and I was thinking and decided to do the Pieta. I've always loved Michelangelo, and I think we're similar in many ways. I probably would have been painting the same stuff if I were in his place, and I think he would have liked what I'm doing.

I also like referring, or referencing. I like it when works of art, or music, or literature, make references to other works, like when one singer might take another's song and recreate it. I think then both the original and the new become richer by it.

Then just by the simple act of reversing the genders by putting myself in Mary's place, and putting the girl in Christ's place, The work became a meeting ground of all my streams of thought, with the female body, the male-female gender polarity, religion, sex, life and death. It was fantastic.
And the way it fitted with the death of magic was that the girl was a metaphor for magic, and I wanted to use the greatest imagery of death of the greatest death of them all, of Christ, as a metaphor for the death of my idea of magic as an event. So it all came together, the Pieta and the Crucifixion and the Grave.

APB: Tell me something about your working methodology, your approach to your art.

JM: I live it. I am art, my life is art. The artist is at the forefront of all human thought and existence. When man created God, the artist gave him a face. I have a place in the line of all who have gone before me as artists, and I have something nobody has ever had and will ever have, just like them. A light that has to shine, a sword that has to cut.
 How this translates into a working methodology is – in every moment, I am 'working' (it's actually living), whether I'm actually in my studio or not, I am doing two things.      One, I am seeing a truth or a vision nobody else can see. Two, I am facing choices from which I must make the strongest choice, the truest choice, no matter how difficult it may be, and do it.
In the actual physical act of working, how this happens is that I see extremely difficult things to paint, sculpt and build. But I must put aside sleep, rest, tiredness and temptation, to go to battle and create it.

APB: Why so much emphasis on 2005? What event /incident must have taken place to have embedded itself so deeply into your consciousness to make such a strong declaration that "Magic died in 2005" .You have also said that you saw the shift in the magic take place for everyone around you.I s that how you saw it and you thought it was happening?

JM: My dear, I have detailed this a lot in my Magic Notes. Still, in a nutshell:
Lots of things have always happened with me, in 2005, 2006 and many other years. They were not the direct reason for me to come up with the death of magic. It just is the way it is. I have thought and enquired very deeply into this. It is a shift which took place towards the end of 2005, beginning of 2006.

By the end of January 2006, something was gone. EVERYWHERE. For EVERYONE. I got clarity about it a little later in 2006, after a lot of searching. I know it's a blanket statement I'm making. I may be wrong. Time will tell. I believe in retrospect it will, may be apparent, much, much later. Or maybe not, because its disappearance is also from all our memories except from mine. And probably some others like me. I'm just putting this as a statement and a body of work out there, in history and art history. It will serve as a marker for a point of change.

APB: Can you comment on the subject of your models integration with nature / sand/ roots / trees / sunlight etc. Please share with us some thoughts on Alicia , the model in your photographs.

JM: I found the model for the Pieta initially, and for the Crucifixion photograph. She became a physical embodiment of magic. I made the grave of magic as a sculpture. After making the grave, I looked for and found a graveyard. Graveyards hold the past much more than other things. And like I thought I would, I found that one could experience the remnants of times gone by.

So there was the model as the embodiment of magic, and the graveyard with its trees and sky and graves and grass as the spaces and things where the spirit of forces like magic have lived and left their traces. And there was the big city as the embodiment of the change and what the state of things has now become (eg. starless city skies). All these then took over in my head and started coming together as images.

I have no idea how Alicia walked into all this. I don't question these things. One day she was there in my studio, taking in whatever I told her about the work, and transforming herself into the work. I just caught it all. I must also mention and thank my dear friend Palash Bose who brought her to me and also took the photograph for the Pieta.