Vademecum

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Since the early 1970s Julia Morison’s work has revealed her interest in systems for arranging and understanding the world, from Greek mythology to number symbolism. With its sophisticated combination of archaic signs and symbols pared back to resemble modern logos, Vademecum was the first consolidated expression of this interest. Morison originally intended it to be the first in a series of ‘ten huge works, each one combining with the next to create one vast work’;1 the second work in the proposed series, the even more massive Golem, 1987, is also held in Te Papa’s collection.

The ten pages that form the bottom row of Vademecum (from the Latin vade mecum, which translates as ‘go with me’ and refers to a manual or guidebook) correspond to the Sephirot of the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, the ten attributes created by God through which the physical and metaphysical universe are manifested. Morison develops a ‘logo’ for each of these attributes, and then connects it to an alchemical material, rendering each logo in the material it represents — the symbol for lead in lead, silver in silver. The materials range from the bodily and worldly (blood, excrement) to the precious or transcendent (gold, ‘transparent’). As Morison later explained, ‘One of the things that drew me to [Kabbalah] is that it is a tool for understanding the world, a kind of model of the universe — so each person has to make their own use of it … I particularly like the way it encourages people to make connections between things that are often opposed — the sacred and the profane,
the sensual and the intellectual.’2

These ten logos and materials are combined and recombined, generating fifty-five pages of variations. Vademecum begins to resemble a system of arrangement and identification, a suggestion emphasised by Morison’s placement of images from art history and an encyclopaedia of illustration — Picasso’s outcasts, diagrams of the head, arrays of early surgical instruments — on the bottom corners of each page. But if Vademecum is a guidebook, it is a guidebook that throws the task of interpretation back to the viewer: a loose-leaf manual providing endless ways of framing and viewing the world.

Charlotte Huddleston

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In this large artwork assembled from individual panels, Julia Morison has created a handbook or 'vademecum' of signs and symbols for a forgotten system of knowledge. Morison has drawn inspiration from the Jewish Kabbalah and Greek Hermetic documents, both of which make reference of all kinds of ancient knowledge: religious, philosophical, magical, medical, astrological, and alchemical.

Systems and symbols
Visually, Vademecum represents the structure of the Kabbalah, in which humans, God, and the cosmos come together in a 'divine order'. Morison uses geometrical forms and elemental materials such as blood, lead, gold, and excrement, which suggest a continuum from profane to sacred. While the work appears to present a coherent communication system the symbols create a handbook that is ultimately a fiction, leaving the viewer searching for meaning that doesn't actually exist.

Feminism and new languages of art
In 1986 Morison described Vademecum as an 'antithesis', a work of art that was both meaningful and meaningless as a set of signs. At the time, she was one of a number of artists who were thinking about feminism and alternative systems of representation that were not patriarchal. Since Christianity is often viewed as a central source of patriarchal values, Morison's work uses subversive writings from the pre-Christian era in her search for alternative knowledge.

Contemporary art in the 1980s
Te Papa purchased this artwork in 1986 following its exhibition in Content/Context, a survey of contemporary art in New Zealand. Content/Context was an important review of local art practices, which were increasingly dealing with international models and issues.