This is not Concentricity 3. This is a premonition. This is a temporally-inverted reincarnation. This is a SPIRALoSCOPE™ sneak preview into the future just for you. This is a vision beamed in from a SPIRAL MANIFESTO: Heavenly Signs, a zine devoted to star signs, bad names, and heuristic hungers. (Where has Concentricity 3 gone? Follow the clues to find out!)

Maybe it’s a little juvenile to create an association from name alone, like the crudest book-objectification cliches. Maybe I am imposing my bullshit onto two unrelated works of art, but I’ll admit it – this Concentricity originated purely from two words being kinda similar. This Concentricity encourages you, dear connoisseur, to consider pairing Charles Sheeler’s 1946 painting Incantation with William Friedkin's 1977 film Sorcerer. 

After reading the title of Sheeler’s audacious painting, a cartoon light bulb appeared over my head and I knew immediately what I would do for my next Concentricity. I was drawn to the impulse in both of these works to graft the mystic onto the mechanical. In both a painting from the 1940s and a film from the 1970s, the title itself is an intervention. Their confrontational titling schemas superimpose tonal dissonance that necessitate a recontextualization of the work. 

Sans title, these two pieces depict technological and political struggles. Entitled, the works suddenly conjure images of religious mysticism and ancient rites – equating the esoteric technologies of the pagan past with the oily-mechanical technologies of 20th century capitalism. What is modernity but a facade for the past? Equally as ritualistic, as libidinal, and as incomprehensible – we have simply replaced different kinds of unknowing for others and constructed new categorical systems for old feelings. 

Incantation struck me first as aggressively defined, colorful but unflatteringly so. It is made of precise lines and geometric curves intercut by delineations of color and shadow (precisionism, I learn from Wikipedia, is the art style). The trick of Incantation, however, is its patience. Gradually its gradients of simplistic colors – aluminum greys, midmorning blues, and wounded reds – divulge something mechanistic. The shapes are a factory, perhaps a rooftop, made of steel drums and piping. There in the corner are rivets, there’s the shadow of a valve, and maybe that sandy cylinder is a smokestack, so that must be a roof in the background. Like a listless cloud (or the Windows 3D Pipes screensaver), the strange twists and intersections of the mechanical lines invite imagination. Is that a hand? A face? A building? A weapon? Are its machinations pounding a rhythmic tune or something more discordant? Is something out of place? The final clue to solve Sheeler’s puzzle is divulged not in the painting but on the placard. By titling this geometric cacophony Incantation, Sheeler confesses. If this is an incantation, what are we incanting? What good or ill will are we summoning?

On the other hand, Friedkin’s Sorcerer is an infamous titling boondoggle. A remake of the French film Wages of Fear, Friedkin first wanted to call it Ballbreaker before settling on the financially-disastrous but deeply prophetic ‘Sorcerer.’ The film is devoid of any witchcraft or wizardry. Instead, the name ‘Sorcerer,’ which Friedkin ripped from the Miles Davis album, ostensibly refers to one of two rusted behemoth trucks that are the principal setting and motivation for the film's plot. (In keeping with our theme, the other truck is named after the biblical resurrection of Lazarus.) As Friedkin would later explain, the titular Sorcerer was an invocation of cosmic Fate personified as an evil wizard. 

In Sorcerer, cruel Fate has intervened in the lives of four random men who find themselves exiled from their respective civil societies. In the wild jungles and the backwaters of social order, trapped beneath the unseen tides of power and money, they surrender to desperation and agree to an epic undertaking. At the behest of a multinational oil company, they agree to transport two trucks loaded-to-the-gills with highly-explosive nitroglycerin through the forest. Modernity is tested and stripped to its rawest material forms – rusted metal and sorcerous chemicals – pushed from the shining facades of society into the primordial furnaces of the jungle. Friedkin’s documentarian instincts slice through the film, pairing visual spectacle with moribund realism. Dwarfed by the incomprehensible machinations of geopolitical sorcerers, global capital leaves nothing but damnation and hellfire for those who fall under its spell. 

It’s a well-worn trope in the science-fiction genre to equate magic and technology. Star Wars, for example, metonymizes classical fantasy tropes with tech. Marvel, on the other hand, redefines the magnificence and wonder of multicultural folklore into Silicon-Valley-techbro PR-speak .But Incantation and Sorcerer, through title alone, invert that relationship. In both, technology is an echo of the arcane religions hidden beneath its foundation. Friedkin and Sheeler map the mysticism of the old world onto the recognizable one made of steel, fire, and rust. Like wizards, these artists use a magic word to tear away at the facades of our civilization and summon something new – or rather, something old.