Who Is Breathing in This Room? The Artist as Heretic
Introduction to the Philosophy of the Heretic
The heretic chooses her own path. She goes against official doctrine and independently makes up her own mind. Originating from the Greek hairetikus, meaning “choice” or “option”, the heretic is an identity bound to free will.1 Despite this, the word has a negative connotation due to centuries of its subordination to power. The early-twentieth-century conservative Christian philosopher Gilbert K. Chesterton expressed nostalgia for a time in which man strived to be orthodox in his book Heretics (1905): “In former days the heretic was proud of not being a heretic. It was the kingdoms of the world and the police and the judges who were heretics. He was orthodox.”2 Chesterton lamented the open identification of thinkers with heresy, emphasizing that the word is synonymous with being wrong, but his definition belonged to a long-gone form of society whose structure necessitated a reworking of the word. The heretic is only “wrong” by reinterpreting dogma, as demonstrated by the heretics Martin Luther and John Calvin.3 Power benefits from a word that puts criticism and free thinking in line with the demonic, the possessed, and the queer that equates challenging power with stubbornness or egomania. St. Augustine connected the heretic to stubborn refusal to submit to authority in his Summa Theologiae.4 Criticism and free will, the questioning of authority thus became not something to be punished by God in the afterlife but a lack of reason applied to the critic, the commoner, and the political prisoner.
Unlike the heathen, the heretic is somebody who comes from within the system of thought that they challenge, and can even be an expert. Dissent in this form can occur only from within the system, similar to a whistleblower. Although charged by powers that be with crimes of rebellion, this often stems not from disbelief in its system but an unshakeable fervor of belief and sometimes extremism.5 Power only functions through belief or through imposition, and in the case of the heretic, denunciation is often followed by physical oppression and slander. One heretic alone is a madman, her power appears in the form of the cult. When the narrative of the heretic becomes more in tune with the world of the masses, it overpowers dogma and poses a challenge of credibility to the established apparatus. Thus, the heretic is always in relation to the cult and the potential mass.
Like the heretic, the cult is characterized as an unorthodox belief, a closed or inaccessible circle, it is sometimes led by a heretic leader and is similarly associated with radicality or extremism. Many cults are heretical by the standards of mainstream faith—all of which necessarily began as cults themselves. Like the heretic, the cult is only an outsider as long as it refuses to submit to power. Michel Foucault described the cult of Dionysus in his 1970–1971 lecture series On the Will to Know as an example of the inside-outside dynamic, which is formed in the underground and eventually becomes absorbed by the mainstream doctrine. He emphasized a distinction between the bourgeois cults to the gods Zeus and Athena compared to the peasants who worshipped Dionysus, associated with the rural harvest of grapes for wine-making.6 This class hierarchy roots authoritative spiritual distinction.
Mythical retelling and re-enactment have been a form of transmitting classic human knowledge through each human era. One of the twentieth century’s best-known practitioners of classical retellings was the Italian philosopher and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini. His queer, Marxist, and spiritual philosophy gave rise to his fame as a “heretical” philosopher.7 This definition breaks from the traditional line of describing those tried for heresy by the Catholic Church, since Pasolini actively worked with Catholic narratives and received awards from the Catholic Film Office.8 The word “heretic” today designates a more generalized description of a free thinker. This shift also follows the societal shift away from theological regimes to laic societies in which power has become more closely tied to institutions other than the church, including the art institution. Famously, Pasolini’s retelling of ancient Greek myths highlights queer and proto-feminist subjects such as Medea (1969) and Oedipus Rex (1967). Pasolini championed the Friulian dialect and the slang of Rome’s slums rather than standardized language. The peasant connection to the land, the queer subject, and the vernacular tongue become three pillars of the modern heretic tied to the theories and histories of Foucault and Pasolini.
Hereticism is a productive tension within society which pierces through power and conformism, affirming the value of free thought while seeking to establish itself as an orthodoxy. Similarly, orthodoxy strives to maintain its power through mechanisms of hypocrisy that give rise to the heretic in a circular system of power, leakage, criticism, and control. This is the dynamic that artists encounter within the apparatus of the contemporary art institution. Artists are valued for their innovation, creativity, and originality; yet, they produce a form of aesthetic heresy that is the lifeblood of the institution that lives off of original narratives while also holding the reins of what is platformed within the framework of orthodoxy (the canon).
The following reading of three contemporary art practices inspired by the heretic and the mystic connects the pillars of land, identity, and language to provide a context for thinking the contemporary conceptual artist as a descendant of the heretic rather than the artisan. Seen through the lens of Foucault’s cult of Dionysus, contemporary practice can be seen as a site of development within the institution and a moment of potential leakage for marginal, queer, and vernacular stories through cracks in the official apparatus.
Raisa Maudit: The Leak, the Underground
Raisa Maudit is an artist originally from the island of La Palma who practices feminist and geological dissent. This term refers to volcanic earth and cavities of her birthplace as a metaphor for the uncontrollable underground within a vision of planetary resistance. In her solo exhibition A Spiralling Ascent (2024) at La Virreina in Barcelona, which included sculptural and video-installations, the main reference were the medieval proto-feminist outsiders named the beguines. They served as a starting point for imagining what a contemporary underground feminist resistance might be and seek to achieve.9
The beguines were active from the twelfth century. They were a group of women in the Low Countries and the Rhineland who began to organize themselves outside of the two options available to them: marriage or the convent. This movement quickly spread throughout Europe.10 Beguines rejected patriarchal impositions and took no vows to the church. They chose to live in communities known as “beguinages”. These self-governed enclaves were economically autonomous and spiritually independent. They produced the first autobiographies in European vernacular literature and studied the bible fervently, creating public debate with theologians. The beguine Marguerite Porete wrote The Mirror of Simple Souls (ca. 1300) in Old French to spread the Christian word among the poor; she was officially accused of heresy and burned at the stake in June of 1310.11 Porete refused to recant her views, and stood by the need to write in Old French rather than Latin. The word “beguine” was originally an insult meaning “uninterpretable mumbling”, which connects the refusal of working in ecclesiastical Latin with the treason of thinking in the language of common people or having an opinion as a woman.
In Maudit’s exhibition, life-size statues of the beguines stood among magmatic stalactites. The volcano served as a geological metaphor for forces greater than institutional power that thud from beneath the surface, searching for crevices through which to erupt. In a mono-channel video, the artist writes computer code by hand on a manuscript using a quill. The implication is that these illegible signs may not be for her contemporaries but for other societies who, centuries later, can finally interpret and activate the script. For Maudit, this illegible codex, interpretable only to the initiated, points to the non-linear relation between the “uninterpretable mumbling” of the beguines and contemporary movements. The subjects of the queer, the vernacular, and the land fuse into an homage to centuries of feminist resistance that were, and continue to be, imprisoned and martyred as heretics.
Nils Alix-Tabeling: The Cross-Dresser at the Stake
The heretic is not a hermit but often garners a significant public profile. Joan of Arc famously won victories for the French army against the English during the Hundred Years’ War, claiming to be guided by the divine word. She wore men’s armor into battle and added morale to a recently defeated army, thus turning the tides of a drawn-out conflict. In 1430, she was captured by Burgundian troops and put on trial for heresy, specifically for cross-dressing and for being led by demonic visions.12 She was burned at the stake the next year. Heresy had become a political tool, used by bishops on one side or another in support of their war aims. Years later, her conviction of heresy was overturned by the Catholic Church, which cited flaws and oversights in the trial. She became a patron saint of France and part of national mythology.
Nils Alix-Tabeling compiled a library of references to Joan of Arc as a tribute to this early feminist figure. As part of his artistic research, a list of books and references became an archive in which Joan of Arc’s symbolism to queer communities is recognized as a radical refusal to accept the church’s gender norms. Alix-Tabeling describes Joan of Arc as a figure who had been “straightened” by the national consensus in order to fit into a new French national narrative, demonstrating how the queerness of the heretic remains heretical even after death. Although Joan of Arc’s sexuality cannot be scientifically confirmed, it is her conviction and death for being designated as a “relapsed heretic” after continuing to cross-dress despite the church’s orders that have secured her a place as a cult figure within queer communities. Like the case of Pasolini, Arc shows devotion to Catholicism even while breaking its institutional codifications and revealing its inner contradictions.
The connection between the heretic and the queer is made clear even in the passing connections found within texts that focus on other subjects. The only moment in which the heretic is named in Foucault’s Madness and Civilization is in relation to the soothsayer and sodomite Gilles de Rais, accused, in the fifteenth century, of having been and of being “a heretic, an apostate, a sorcerer, a sodomite, an invoker of evil spirits, a soothsayer, a slayer of innocents, an idolater, working evil by deviation from the faith”.13 Which demonstrates that even in times before contemporary notions of queerness were developed, the heretic was intrinsically tied to those who rebelled against imposed gender norms.
Alix-Tabeling has continued to develop a sculptural and narrative practice around the figure of the feminist fighter, finding inspiration in the figures of Ulrike Meinhof and Rosa Luxembourg for the exhibition But Who is Ulrike Mandrake? (2023) at the Dortmunder Kunstverein.14 The central characters are two female revolutionaries who were accused of terrorism and incitement of mutiny, respectively.15 Through the work of Alix-Tabeling, we can consider a direct inheritance from Joan of Arc to the political activities of Luxembourg and Meinhof, especially if we think through the reading of Marxist philosopher David Bensaid,16 who saw in Joan not only a devout Catholic but a peasant woman who rose through the ranks to lead and inspire a people’s revolution. Her figure fits plainly into Pasolini’s fixation on the working class and the figure of the queer in relation to the Catholic church, in which spiritual devotion falls outside of societal impositions of sexual orientation.
Regardless, the common thread in Alix-Tabeling’s work sees fantasy and mythology interwoven with religious and queer references in delicately crafted sculptural assemblages in which the human figure meshes with objects and botanical bits. His references splay out into the exhibition space, creating paths towards the combined marginality of the rural, the queer, the political outsider, and the symbolically transformed and remixed body that references the punishment of the heretic: the medieval torture mechanisms and the burning stake.
Inside Job: The Gasp
In 1912, Polish book dealer Wilfrid Voynich purchased a rare artefact that remains a mystery to this day. Dated to the fifteenth century, the Voynich Manuscript is written in undecipherable code accompanied by illustrations of people, unidentified plants, and astrological symbols.17 Unlike Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls, the codification of this book is not an attempt to open the hierarchy of knowledge but to maintain the secrets of a hermetic society. Uninterpretability is both a strategy of power to prevent ideas from spreading as well as a method of covertness necessary for secrecy.
The exhibition Will Spread (2024) at eastcontemporary in Milan by the artistic duo Inside Job (Ula Lucińska and Michał Knychaus) featured laser-cut metallic flowers sourced from the illustrations of the Voynich Manuscript.18 Their characteristic constructions made of industrial materials and scraps of dried herbs and flowers speak to a mystical imagination and alternate readings of the natural world. The plants are visible against the white gallery walls but also emerge from cocoon-like fabric capsules held together by black tubes. In the medieval manuscript, specific images show nude women swimming in green liquid surrounded by black tubes, providing a direct historical link to speculative environments of hermetic cults or mystic communities.
The reason for inventing this code is still under debate, but one plausible theory is that the manuscript might have been connected to one of various heretical sects. If so, this book might have been compromising and even life-threatening for its owner, thus requiring an intricate code in order to preserve its knowledge for an initiated community. The hermetic community also forms the central axis of Hopecraft Ceremony, a choreographic piece directed by Natasza Gerlach, for which Inside Job created a spatial scenographic installation. Within the installation, Inside Job’s recognizable aesthetic of undecipherable botanical inventions appears again in the form of blackened lilies and an environment of post-contamination.19
The performance, staged in Switzerland, included a sculptural installation of a toxic post-industrial landscape through which performers acted with small metallic air dispensers that served as a communal lifeline or sacred fluid. This ritual was performed within an olfactory space immersed in the acrid smell of toxic petrol. The post-contaminated landscape is a consistent reference in the work of Inside Job that refers to the conditions of life and work of a contemporary proletariat in the non-touristic and invisible zones of labor. The post-industrial botanical hybrids that populate their work are inspired by their own surroundings and trips to sites of mines, ports, and industrial brownfields spread through Eastern and Southern Europe. In their vision, botany and the creation of post-industrial symbols are a form of the earth itself becoming a source of renewed vernacular resistance to the creation of sacrificial zones. Within Hopecraft Ceremony, the hermetic community is a form of survival in a post-ecocidal land inherited by the descendants of its workers.
The performers engage with each other among a set of blackened lilies suspended through the room. The lily, known for its brilliant white, is rendered a blackened flower made of post-industrial scraps in an assemblage of exploded tires and dangling electric wires. Among them, the insider (performer) inhales and the outsider (the viewer) is confined to the toxic air and the inability to grasp sacred matter reserved for the initiated. While the viewer could theoretically join in this open performance without a stage, the complex rituals and codes require sustained study to decode, creating a barrier between the observer and the observed. The dancers became energized by the contents of the inhalers, sharing the breath among them, creating a community physically connected by lung and air. The only moment in which language enters the performance is with the word duch—a word stemming from proto-Slavic languages that spiritually connected the act of breathing with the spirit. This concept connects the breath and its communal interchange with a deeply resonating spirituality and the direct threat it faces by the contamination of the land. The inhabitants of the ruins of industrialization are the descendants of its proletariat; like Foucault’s cult of Dionysus, they revel in codes and rituals developed within a post-industrial air. Whether poison or antidote, the contents of these small containers produced physical and psychological effects and signaled the need for salvation from the passive inhalation of toxic air.
The valuation of scrap, the act of looking towards the abandoned wasteland, could constitute a heretical act if considered as an unorthodox choice for the direction of vision. This was a move performed by T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, one of the most important poems of the twentieth century, directly criticized by Chesterton. Choosing to look at what has been barred from access, what has been left abandoned by capital, and what nobody wants to admit surrounds us. During a residency in the Greek port of Elefsina, Inside Job worked on the connection between the abandoned post-industrial landscape and the cult of Dionysus. Elefsina was once a site of the ancient Eleusinian cult, the hermetic ritualistic society that remained closed to uninitiated Christians. Today, the port of Elefsina is haunted by the shipwrecked remains of vessels connected to its industry. This ancient site of ritual has been condemned to an ecological plight with ships half-submerged and lying on their sides.20 The white lilies were frequently used in Greek ritual and were specifically tied to the cult of Persephone—the goddess of harvest and rebirth associated with the Eleusinian mysteries.21 The geographical and temporal collapse between the cult of Dionysus, pagan resistance in Slavic vernacular, and the group dynamics of the cult connect contemporary working communities with the resistance against the ideological maintenance of our failed economic and ecocidal institutions.
Planetary Heretics
The three practices of Raisa Maudit, Nils Alix-Tabeling, and Inside Job relate to the heretic as a communal entity, a singular character, and the undefined masses. Language permeates all three as a point of contention in which the usage of vernacular, dialect, and even codified scripts pits the uninterpretable against the accepted. The queer figure emerges as central, even if only in speculation, as gender frameworks heavily controlled by state and religious institutions become a historically consistent battleground. The proletariat, the peasantry, and the poor are also reflected in all three, demonstrating the class-based systems of control designed to subdue the masses.
Heretical figures provide fertile ground for artistic research as the free-thinkers and counter-power of their era. Not only are they a subject of study, but they can be thought of as the precursors of post-conceptual artists whose work does not follow in the steps of the artisan, but searches for alternative viewpoints, repressed histories, and progressive ideas counter to the mainstream. The interdisciplinarity of the heretic as writer, illustrator, soldier, orator, or activist can be seen as the undefined role of the artist whose only guideline is to create something that is new.
The artist reacts to society and proposes alternate visions, not in relation to the church but mostly in relation to state cultural institutions and market-driven enterprises that at once sustain, support, and repress artistic freedom. Post-conceptual art has been the target of ultra-conservative political forces since the twentieth century,22 creating a long-standing genealogy of tension between conservative doctrine and tolerance towards the new. The heretic thus serves to consider a historical structural model to how thinkers can relate to the cult as a source of alternative power. To delve into the underground and openly recognize repression against thought within a Europe that is slipping ever closer towards full-out fascisms.