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Ideas take root … The Botanical Mind at Camden Art Centre.
Ideas take root … The Botanical Mind at Camden Art Centre. Photograph: Rob Harris
Ideas take root … The Botanical Mind at Camden Art Centre. Photograph: Rob Harris

The Botanical Mind review – an overgrown garden of the subconscious

This article is more than 3 years old

Camden Art Centre, London
From intricate drawings to films that branch unexpectedly, this show on the all-pervasive influence of the plant kingdom on human imagery brims with ideas, but needs pruning

Clicking and clattering, whistling, whirring and churring, composer David Tudor’s 1968 evocation of the rainforest (composed to accompany a dance by Merce Cunningham) fills the air, as you climb the stairs to enter The Botanical Mind at Camden Art Centre. With more than a hundred exhibits, dating from 15th-century Italy to post-lockdown London, and encompassing cosmological maps and mandalas from Gujarat and Rajasthan, photographs of algae, automatic writings, mossy stones and a minimalist plank, The Botanical Mind intimates some overarching, secret cosmic order that is never quite revealed. But if the cosmos doesn’t get you, plant intelligence will.

Watching F Percy Smith’s short 1930 black and white film The Strangler, we see a convulvulus searching about, finding a flax plant then twining around the stem. I am troubled by this blindly questing tendril as it searches for its next victim. If I linger too long next to the lovely Philip Taaffe monoprints nearby it might have a go at my leg. Smith, a wonderful British naturalist and pioneer of micro and time-lapse cinematography, killed himself in 1945, and is one of the many curious and interesting figures in this frequently fascinating exhibition.

But as soon as you alight on one thing, you are swept away by the next. One minute I’m watching a man in his underpants waving his legs around, in a wild and sometimes threatening video by James Richards and Steve Reinke, the next I’m looking at psychoanalyst and thinker Carl Jung’s Tree of Life and his Philosopher’s Stone (all from his 1915-30 Red Book), with their overwrought calligraphy and fanciful illustrations. I hate to say it, but JRR Tolkien comes to mind. Then we’re plunged into Argentinian artist Delfina Muñoz de Toro’s recent painting depicting spiritual growth (all roots and butterflies, snakes and moons), guided by her spiritual studies with indigenous peoples in the Amazon rainforest. Somehow it all connects. Just don’t ask me how. With sections called things like As Above, So Below and As Within, So Without, Being Sessile and Botanical Mysticism, it all remains a bit of a mystery.

Spiritual … natural visions. Photograph: Rob Harris

Rediscovered modernist Hilma af Klint, Bauhaus artists Anni and Joseph Albers, and renegade surrealist Paul Masson join wannabe shamanists, outsiders and insiders, Amazonian weavers and kooky west-coast minimalists, jains, Buddhists, scientists, recluses and mystics, clairvoyants and theosophists, in an exhibition in which ideas and epochs constantly vie for attention. Almost every work demands a great deal of unpacking, even when it is apparently very simple and direct. Here comes a Norse god, there goes a high priest of modernism. The small paintings of visionary abstractionist, fisherman and (in today’s terminology) genderqueer artist Forrest Bess have a kind of haunting vulnerability and simplicity at odds with his troubled life. You want more, but then he’s gone.

Spooky heads, serpents, proliferating foliage, a plant that gives birth to a hairy pufferfish, the unbelievably complex diagrammatic drawings of Channa Horwitz and the microscopically detailed ink drawings of Bruce Conner, the quivering, juddering drawings Henri Michaux made under the influence of mescaline, and which Joachim Koester has turned into an animated jumble of scrabbling neurological twitches all have a cumulative effect, like a drug rush, with its moments of clarity swept into confusion and disorder. While religious fasts and meditative introspection reveal unseen and unverifiable universal truths, the electron microscope shows cells dividing, and the deeper structure of the cannabis plant and the splintery, arctic wastes of a lump of cocaine, in a further group of photographs by Koester.

Intricate … stencil prints. Photograph: Rob Harris

With its messages from the beyond and from the unconscious, the symbolic, the psychedelic, the decorative and the spiritual, this much delayed exhibition is as beguiling as it is frustrating, and altogether too complicated for its own good. Curatorial enthusiasm has run away with itself. I keep thinking back to several exhibitions curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev – most notably her 2012 Documenta 13 – and the deft and surprising ways she created a synthesis of art works and cultural artefacts. Brimming with ideas, The Botanical Mind tries to do too much in too little space, and spills over into an online project.

Fortunately, many works demand getting up close. This at least allows you to slow down. Cerith Wyn Evans uses Japanese katagami stencils, employed in the production of kimonos, to great and strange affect. Working with mulberry paper, silk thread and persimmon lacquer, these works transcend their vegetal origins, their sutured surfaces and areas of glinting pattern appearing and disappearing as your eye drifts over their dark surfaces, framed under glass. You keep meeting your own reflection as you find then lose the patterns. The more you try to focus, these fugitive works keep slipping away. They could be a metaphor for the whole exhibition. Or perhaps, for life itself. But let’s not get too carried away. Marvellous things, but a bit of a stew.

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