Ghosts

With Nicolai Abildgaard, Jenny Ahlström, Juliette Alexandre-Bisson, Wilhelmine Assmann, Huldine Beamish, John Beattie, Paul Benney, William Blair Bruce, William Blake, Marie Bouttier, Heidi Bucher, Édouard Isidore Buguet, Staveley Bulford, Corinne May Botz, Milly Canavero, Claudia Casarino, William Crawford, William Crookes, Ada Emma Deane, Angela Deane, Eugène Delacroix, Thomas Demand, Fernand Desmoulin, Willie Doherty, Madge Donohoe, Marcel Duchamp, Nicole Eisenman, Max Ernst, Urs Fischer, Katharina Fritsch, Huldine Fock, Johann Heinrich Füssli, Adam Fuss, William Hope, Frederick Hudson, Ryan Gander, Christoph Getzner, Markus Getzner, Madge Gill, Maria Hofman, Georgiana Houghton, Cindy Ji Hye Kim, Mike Kelley, Justinus Kerner, Paul Klee, Augustin Lesage, Glenn Ligon, Maria Löwstädt, Susan MacWilliam, René Magritte, Gabriel Cornelius von Max, John Everett Millais, William Mumler, Meret Oppenheim, Tony Oursler, Cornelia Parker, F.M. Parkes and Reeves, Philippe Parreno, George Henry Paulin, Laure Pigeon, Sigmar Polke, Odilon Redon, Richard Riemerschmid, Vittorio Santoro, Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing, Moritz von Schwind, Thomas Schütte, James Tissot, Toyen, Rosemarie Trockel, Bertha Valerius, Gillian Wearing, Benjamin West, Rachel Whiteread, Agatha Wojciechowski and Erwin Wurm

Over time, ideas about what ghosts look like have become common knowledge. Children already know that a white bedsheet is all it takes to evoke a specter. More than a century and a half ago, techniques of illusion such as “Pepper’s Ghost” played on our distrust in our own eyes when faced with the appearance and disappearance of a translucent figure. Even purely atmospheric elements such as flickering light, fog or smoke welling up in the dark, or cold drafts suggest the sphere of ghosts, while also providing clues as to where on the wide emotional spectrum between humor and horror a given phantom ranges. Yet even the most adorable little ghosts are in the end messengers from an intangible world that can be glimpsed wherever reason, science, and technology reach their limits: what we seek to repress returns—often in altered form; we have lively relationships with people who died long ago; above all, though, ghosts remind us of our own mortality and the fact that what comes after death is shrouded in darkness.

Many famous accounts of ghosts found their way from literature into the world of visual art. The venerable specter of the biblical prophet Samuel, for instance, was rendered by the painter Benjamin West in the late eighteenth century as an awe-inspiring figure cloaked in white. Artists including Henry Fuseli and William Blake vividly imagined the ghosts from William Shakespeare’s dramas. And the marked penchant of the nineteenth century for the eerie and uncanny—as in Dark Romanticism and Victorian-era Gothic tales—meant that artists were continually supplied with fresh inspiration, even if ghosts on the whole remained a niche motif. The uncertainty whether phantoms were part of objective reality, whether they were misperceptions of the senses or hallucinations, offered an opportunity to experiment with various artistic devices. Moreover, the charm of the subject was not limited to depictions of the disembodied phenomena as such. As John Everett Millais's painting illustrates, artists also welcomed the challenge of capturing the nocturnal atmosphere and the bewilderment prompted by the apparitions.

In the nineteenth century, Europe and the U.S. were buffeted by rapid social changes and technological advances. Science more and more forcefully shaped people’s perspectives on the world, which did not prevent the conviction from spreading that a spiritual world existed outside of material reality. Spiritualist gatherings blended mystical practices and entertainment with the genuine interest of researchers who methodically organized their observations and experiments. Media, and mediums, played a central role. Photography, then still a young technique, was thought by some to be able to represent phenomena beyond what the eye saw. Until the 1930s, spirit photographs catered to people’s hope for a life after death in an age plagued by disease and war. Human mediums, meanwhile, proposed to make contact with the spirit world, and those attending seances witnessed inexplicable occurrences. The will to believe and makebelieve were often intertwined; on the other hand, then as now, it was widely felt that fraudulent schemes needed to be exposed.

Within just a few decades, electric power spread virtually everywhere, bringing the telegraph, the telephone, sound recordings, and the radio—each a new medium of communication that harnessed invisible forces to operate across large distances. That is why the idea that human mediums might make contact with the spirit world seemed far from absurd in the age of technology. By surrendering to the control of supernatural presences, the theory went, such specially gifted people were able to receive instructions and transmit inspirations. Once they were in trance, spontaneous automatic drawings, sometimes complex works, were produced as if by a ghostly hand. Spiritualist mediums like Marie Bouttier, Madge Gill, Georgiana Houghton, and Augustin Lesage thought of themselves not as authors or creators of these works but as instruments of higher powers. Traditionally, their output was not categorized as art.

Endeavoring to understand the secretive and inexplicable facets of the human inner life, early scientific psychology took an interest in ghosts. In the case of the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung, an experience with a poltergeist involving a cracked knife marked the beginning of his research into spiritualist seances and trance states. He thought that ghosts were not entities stalking people but emblems of their internal conflicts, collective experiences, and unconscious processes: ghosts had found a new home in the human psyche. We have more to fear from the dark hallways of our minds than from the most sinister haunted house—that was the American poet Emily Dickinson’s conclusion. Rachel Whiteread's cabin, meanwhile, does not tell us from which real, symbolic, or psychological dimension the enraged poltergeist sprang that wrecked it. Its destructive force, however, is unmistakable.

By the early twentieth century, the efforts to track down ghosts had produced an abundance of enigmatic images, objects, and ideas. They now provided artists with new ways of
investigating the enigmatic aspects of our existence. Ghosts charted fresh paths for themselves, leaving their narrative contexts behind—or entirely going up in smoke: to this day, painting and photography test the limits of perception and technical feasibility in their explorations of the spectral. Omnipresent in everyday culture and entertainment, the ghosts of fine art, too, are no longer content with striking fear or amazement in our hearts; some challenge us to let our imaginations roam instead of relying on rational understanding. For artists reflecting on their own craft, the spiritualists’ attempts to communicate with the other world have served as an unexpected point of departure for meditations on the mystery of inspiration. Mike Kelley’s ectoplasm selfportraits not only recall the historic photographs of such materializations—he likens the artist’s existence to the medium’s.

Some histories leave deep wounds—on landscapes, on bodies, on collective memory. And time does not heal all wounds. In such instances, ghosts may signal the past’s unfinished business and its lingering effects that continue to shape our emotions, actions, and even entire societies. These ghosts are not loud poltergeists, but ghosts of silence. Their quiet, unsettling presences emerge in places marked by injustice and violence, and in the unspoken pain passed from generation to generation. They often remain invisible until we finally decide to confront them. When these ghosts emerge—ghosts of what has been repressed or denied—they force us to ask how we will remember, respond, or repair.

Encountering the unknown or the supernatural can be terrifying. But toned down and contained for the sake of a thrill, it is an essential part of any good ghost story. Some seek out this feeling, while others try to avoid it as much as possible. From the wide range of possible reactions, these two artists, Corrine May Botz with Haunted Houses (2000-2010) and Cornelia Parker with PsychoBarn (Cut-Up) (2023), represent starkly different approaches: one curious and documentary, the other deconstructive. Corinne May Botz spent time getting to know haunted places and their present inhabitants – people who live alongside their ghosts. Cornelia Parker, for her part, delves into the culturally well-rehearsed patterns of the uncanny. First, she reconstructed one of the most haunting houses of the collective unconscious: the set of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho. Then she proceeded to take it apart piece by piece.

We usually expect to encounter visible objects in an exhibition space. In Room 9, however, there is nothing left to see. (Only the lighting still hints at the position of the objects displayed in a previous exhibition.) A draft can be felt on the skin, a sudden, slightly unsettling change in the climatecontrolled museum rooms. This phenomenon, at times distinct and at other times barely perceptible, can be traced throughout the entire space.