The intensity and increased frequency of individual wildfires, which now span the globe from Australia to Canada, can be spied as a single global omen of a forthcoming man-made climate catastrophe. Consequently, artists, writers, and curators are faced with a critical question: How can we effectively engage people to confront ecological destruction in a crowded cultural field that is intricately interconnected yet marred by disparities in wealth, resources, geography, desire, and power? Contemporary art and curatorial discourse have focused on three main strategies for building a sense of progressive solidarity: promoting the notion of care, encouraging empathy, and shaming complicity. “The Great Cosmic Mother,” the first major retrospective of Monica Sjöö (1938–2005), a Swedish British radical eco-witch, artist, organizer, and pamphleteer, traces the long preherstory of these approaches through her life’s work, yet braids them together through a fourth dimension, generally neglected today: spiritual unity.
The lodestar of the exhibition, which will travel to Modern Art Oxford in England and the Moderna Museet Malmö in Sweden, is Sjöö’s 1968 painting God Giving Birth, with its titanic, stoic female deity flanked by ringed exoplanets. Her face is half black and half white, a sort of yin-yang, while the painting’s overall tone, predominantly in grisaille, finds vibrancy through the use of loose impassioned brushwork. A child’s head emerges from within her as she squats, straddling a black orb, itself ringed by the painting’s title inscribed in eye-popping red lettering. The now-iconic image, which has become a symbol of the environmental feminist movement, is more famous than the artist who created it. Instead of proudly proclaiming this showstopper as the exhibition’s culmination, the curators (Moderna Museet’s Jo Widoff and Modern Art Oxford’s Amy Budd) situated God Giving Birth within Sjöö’s extensive oeuvre, represented here by nearly sixty artworks, including paintings as well as banners, political posters, and an expansive display of her publications along with other documents of her art and activism.
The collage The Beginning of the End of Patriarchy, 1993, frames a central black-and-white print of the birthing goddess with an ink-and-graphite drawing colored with orange and yellow crayon and gouache. It celebrates an action in which Sjöö and other eco-feminist activists interrupted a Sunday service at Bristol Cathedral in England to sing, as written on the image itself, the verses of the hymn “Burning Times.” With painted faces, and dressed in robes adorned with esoteric symbols, a chevron of women, backed by a phalanx of oversize lit candles whose bases are obscured by these apparent neo-pagans, confronts two priests in their vestments. The viewer is positioned behind the clerics so that we see their backs as the women look directly at them, and by extension, us. The huddled and elongated forms of the women and the candles melt into each other, at once emphasizing their solidarity and evoking the history of witches burned at the stake. While this setup could be read as a condemnation of the church and its long and still current history of suppressing women’s rights and rites, it also raises another question: Who is the moral arbiter of the world? Is it men, women, the church, or, as the pantheon of psychedelic goddesses seen in the exhibition’s other works suggest, some greater authority?
Several of the archival materials included in the exhibition document the artist’s visits to ancient pilgrimage sites, demonstrating how she drew inspiration from their iconographies. Whether “the before times” of pre-Christian civilization were more equitable or not, Sjöö’s investment in recycling potent mystical attractors of the past reveals a divinely inspired vision. It suggests that the only cure for fossil-fuel dipsomania might be a religiously inspired recourse to a higher power springing from the life-giving forces of the earth itself—as opposed to the disenchantments of capitalist secularism, which, like the preceding world order of the patriarchal church, appears to hold no qualms in burning our ancestors, both human and nonhuman, for power.
— Adam Kleinman