Agatha Wojciechowsky
(1896–1986)
Although these artists were active in different geographic locations, many of the visual qualities present in all of their works are surprisingly similar. Ethereal, elaborate and tightly packed, each work acts as a glimpse into another world or unknown consciousness. This commonality has led some viewers to posit the existence of a spiritual, universal, and otherworldly visual language. Yet, others have questioned the personal motivations behind such mediumistic artists’ spiritual claims. Is a mediumistic artist guided by a celestial voice, or following his or her own inner creativity and tapping images from the subconscious? Could it all be an elaborate alibi to free oneself from societal constraints and simply create? Indeed, later in his career, working-class artist Raphaël Lonné admitted that his mediumistic abilities were nothing but a convenient pretext for freely continuing his artistic practice.
Steffi Ibis Duarte and Valérie Rousseau, exhibition label for Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2020.
In 1923, Agatha Wojciechowsky (1896–1986) emigrated from Germany to the United States, where she worked menial jobs. She became a member of the Universal Spiritualist Association, receiving investiture into the priesthood in 1961. Spiritualism is the belief that spirits of the dead communicate with the living, usually through a medium. According to Charles O’Neal, a former student of Wojciechowsky, she was both a respected teacher of psychic development and a famous healer who travelled around the world. It was in her small New York apartment that she began her first automatic writings and paintings in 1951. Entirely self-taught, Wojciechowsky believed that spirits were controlling her hands as she created in a trance-like state. More than 550 works have been retrieved, including ten notebooks of automatic writings.
“Book with automatic writings” looks like a journal, written on a sixty-five-page standard lined notebook with a modest blue and black ballpoint pen. It comprises thirty-eight entries, which start on April 1, 1959, and end on October 11, 1964. The entries vary in length from eight pages to a small paragraph. As in the production of other self-taught artists, there is a saturation of the page throughout her work, in which every line is filled without margins or paragraph indentation. The profusion of written forms that occupy entire sheets of paper evokes a kind of absolute expression in which there is no room for interpretation or commentary. The notebook’s graphic “letters”—recalling Roman capitals, Greek, or Arabic letters—are usually detached, curved, and evenly spaced on a straight line. Although Wojciechowsky’s alphabet, which varies from simple shapes to complex rounded and sinuous entities, is indecipherable, her penmanship remains controlled. Wojciechowsky ended each writing séance by marking the date and, on occasion, the specific time of the day underneath.
Wojciechowsky would “just sit by the hour writing, not knowing what was written,” O’Neal explains. Her writing under the dicta-tion of the Spirits (from Latin spiro, to blow) is reminiscent of the utterances of prophets inspired by (that is, literally invaded by the breath of) God, of Sybils inspired by Apollo, or in a more profane vein, of poets inspired by the Muse. These texts were often written in an enigmatic language that was meant to be superior to everyday speech, and required endless exegesis. Her work also brings to mind the dream journals of Surrealists, although in Wojciechowsky’s case, it is not the individual Unconscious, but rather the Spirits of the deceased, who ceaselessly and imperiously dictate. Much like the Surrealists’ automatic writings, Wojciechowsky’s idiosyncratic work requires perpetual interpretation.
According to O’Neal, Wojciechowsky believed that “in the future, it would be possible to read these words which are written in a strange, variable alphabet.” Although to this date, their meaning remains obscure, Wojciechowsky’s notebook ultimately aims to function like a sacred text in which an unknown higher voice speaks through a chosen individual to reach the living.
Aurélie Bernard Wortsman, “Agatha Wojciechowsky: The Medium Is the Message,” in Valérie Rousseau (ed.), Vestiges & Verse: Notes from the Newfangled Epic, (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2018).