Richard Bright: Can we begin by you saying something about your background?

Jennifer Higgie: I studied painting in Australia: a BA at the Canberra School of Art and an MA at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. In the late 1990s, I was awarded a Murdoch Travelling Fellowship, came to London for nine months and I’m still here. I was at frieze magazine for more than two decades as reviews editor and then editor.

RB: Have there been any particular influences to your ideas and work?

JH: Too many to mention! So many books, music, paintings, poems, dreams, views from windows, sea swims, late nights, long walks, architecture, conversations with friends, family and colleagues, conversations overheard on buses, journeys, documentaries, films, TV, animals, the sky. Every day something or someone influences my thinking.

RB: There have been other writers and curators – for example, Herbert Read, James Elkins, Sixten Ringbom, Maurice Tuchman, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Robert Rosenblum and Jacquelynn Baas, Charlene Spretnak, to name but a few – who have ‘made the case’ for the acknowledgement of the spiritual content in many modern artworks. Your recent book, The Other Side presents the story in terms of women artists. Why did you take this approach?

JH: My research in recent years has focussed on the exclusions of traditional art history, especially the achievements of women artists. The more I discovered, the more astonished I was to discover how many female artists were and are influenced and inspired by what might loosely be called spiritualism – a catch-all term which can encompass anything from paying attention to dreams and reveries to organised religion, mediumship and more. Of course, there have been books and articles on many of the artists I discuss, but I wanted to bring them together in a book that was also part memoir, about my search for re-enchantment.

RB: How did the book come about?

JH: After leaving frieze in late 2019, I was exhausted; I returned to Australia, was caught up in the catastrophic bushfires and then came back to London at the beginning of the pandemic. Everything was upended: I was facing the challenges of becoming a freelance writer and reevaluating my own relationship to the artworld. Writing The Other Side was both a deep dive into research and a very personal experience: one that helped me through a particular period of my life and taught me a lot.

RB: How did your ideas and relationship to the subject change while working on this book?

JH: I often felt like Miss Marple or Alice in Wonderland, following leads and going down rabbit holes. The book evolved as I wrote it. Often, one artist or writer would lead me to another.

RB: For many years there was the assumption that the narrative of modern art could only be told (and taught) in terms laid out by MoMA in the mid-1930s, and in particularly by Alfred H. Barr’s exhibition catalogue, Cubism and Abstract Art. Why do you think this assumption was so strong and long-lasting and do you think this is still the accepted narrative in the professional art world?

(On a personal note, it was still very much prevalent when I was studying fine art and art history in the 70’s, while also writing my dissertation on the ‘spiritual aspect of early 20^th century art’ – and having many ‘spirited’ discussions with tutors).

JH: Thankfully, many of Barr’s exclusions have been strongly questioned. The belief that modernism meant formalism was true for some artists, but for many of the artists who Barr championed, such as Kandinsky, Mondrian and Klee, the evolution of their visual language was closely aligned to their explorations of spiritualism – he didn’t really acknowledge this. There’s a much more generous understanding of art history now – that it’s a work in progress, not carved in stone, that it’s made by humans, not just white men, and that the evolution of movements and ideas is messy and organic, not neat and linear. Each artist brings their personal and cultural experiences to the making of a work of art. If there was only one way to do it, the world would be sorely impoverished.

RB: Further to the previous question, there’s been a resurgence of the topic of the importance of the spiritual in the art world in recent years, with many artists being more open about their own spiritual beliefs and about how they inform their art practices. Why do you think that is?

JH: The reasons are myriad but it’s clear that many artists (many people!) are opening themselves up to exploring new ways of understanding the planet and their place in it. Perhaps it’s a reaction to the rampant materialism and militarism of late capitalism, or the need many people are feeling to reconnect with nature, to honour dreams and intuition or to be enriched by ancient rituals. Each artist has a different rationale.

RB: Are there other artists you would have liked to have included in The Other Side?

JH: So many! But The Other Side is in no way an encyclopaedic book; it’s personal and idiosyncratic. I could have kept going but my contract was to deliver the book in a year so I had to stop somewhere!

RB: Finally, how do you see the future of understanding the spiritual dimension in modern art?

JH: I think that the artworld now is far less rigid than it used to be and has a far greater respect for local and Indigenous knowledge. There’s no one dominant way of making art that is championed, and I think this is a very good thing. It’s now considered much more acceptable for an artist to explore a spiritual dimension in their work. In terms of the future, I’m excited to see what might evolve, but if I’ve learned anything, it’s that nothing is predictable.

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www.jenniferhiggie.com

Art, Creativity, Culture, Drawing, Religion, Spirituality