Walking into an estate sale in downtown New York last year, Harrison Tenzer — who, following posts at Christie’s and Wright, is moving over to Sotheby’s as a specialist in contemporary art this month — discovered a trove of paintings by the late psychic and writer Ingo Swann. Fascinated by the works, Tenzer has curated “Ingo Swann: A Remote View,” the artist’s first public exhibition, on view at La MaMa Galleria June 17 through July 3. He recently spoke with BLOUIN ARTINFO’s Sara Roffino about the artist’s life, the complexity of his works, and the way it all came together.How did you discover Ingo Swann and his works? It was a pure coincidence. I live a few blocks away from his home and studio, which is on Bowery and 4th Street. One day, I saw that there was an estate sale going on. I walked in expecting it to be selling the types of items one would find at a mom-and-pop antique store. Instead, I walked in to paintings covering the walls and stacked unstretched on the floor. It was such an abundance of material, and each piece was very bright and captivating. It really grabbed my eye — I was immediately struck by the art. It took a second to realize that all the works were by the same artist. I spoke with Glen Leiner, who is overseeing the Ingo Swann estate, and he told me all of the works were by Swann, a figure I had never heard of. I started to research him, and I became really intrigued with his practice and who he was as a person.And how did the show come together?I spoke about the artist with my friend Matt Nasser, who is the director at La MaMa Galleria, which is also a couple of blocks away from Ingo’s home and has been around since the ’80s. He, too, was transfixed, and after researching Swann, realized that while he was living, he had been to the gallery a few times. We both really loved the work, and we thought it would be great to bring this to the public. A lot of these works have never been on display before, and we thought it would be especially exciting to show the work a couple blocks from where he lived. It was very exciting to find a body of work that felt new and fresh at a time when these types of rediscoveries of lost oeuvres are rarer and rarer, especially in Manhattan.Who was Ingo Swann? The answer to that for me changes all the time because he was such a complex person. But the basic facts are that Ingo Swann was a noted psychic, and he started writing about human energetics and psychic abilities in the ’60s. What he’s most known for is this idea of remote viewing, which is the ability to see spaces that are physically remote from an individual with nothing more than the coordinates of that place. Ingo wrote a lot about his own remote viewing abilities, which included seeing the surfaces of planets. He published over 10 books in his lifetime, and the main thesis behind a lot of his writing is that humans have perceptions above and beyond our five senses and that we should work to break free of those confines.And he worked for the U.S. government? Yes, during the Cold War, the U.S. government actually hired him as part of what was called the Stargate Project to help train American psychic spies, because it was thought that the Soviets may have had psychic spies of their own who could remote view and see important military sites in the U.S. What’s very interesting about that is that he was also a gay man. At this time it was still considered a mental disorder to be gay, and he was working for a very important agency in the U.S. government, so not only was he not able to talk about the projects he was working on, he could definitely not speak about his own sexual desires or any romances he was having. Even though he had such strong psychic abilities and strong desires, these were two things that couldn’t be fully integrated into his daily life — things he couldn’t disclose. Painting was one way that he was able to fully express himself and the way he saw the world.What was his relationship to the artists who were working around him? He started in the art world in New York in the late ’50s, and it’s interesting that a lot of his earliest paintings are full-on abstractions. There’s no writing that says he was inspired by Abstract Expressionism, but his early works bear a similarity to the painterly “all over” effect that was in vogue at the time. These abstract paintings are, according to him, depictions of pure energy sources. Very quickly he realized there wasn’t a market for the work he was doing and disavowed the critical circles of the New York art scene. He describes the type of artistic practice he was engaged with quite well in the forward to a book he edited called Cosmic Art.Can you tell me about Cosmic Art?It’s basically artwork that is outside of the mainstream. It can be figurative or abstract, and at heart it’s really about capturing transcendental, paranormal, or even religious ideas — so things that are actually quite ancient and universal. It’s not so focused on things such as style and doesn’t necessarily engage with formal issues or concerns. He was always an art world outsider and although some of his paintings of galaxies from the ’70s did find collectors and are in institutions, a lot of the works that will be in the show — especially the works dealing with the male nude and human bodies in general — really didn’t have a market. I think a lot of his work circulated among people who were engaged in the community that was interested in psychic abilities and energetics.What are you including in this exhibition?The exhibition focuses on the works that bookend his career, from the early ’60s and the ’80s, as well as some collage pieces from the ’90s. In “View From Red Mountain,” an early work from 1963, for example, you see Ingo’s transition from pure abstractions to a painting practice that includes the human form. Here, two human faces radiate out of the abyss of colorful impasto strokes. The abstractions surrounding the faces are the energy fields radiating from the figures. He saw people’s auras. He saw colors radiating from people. This exploration of human energetics is what he was engaged in for a lot of his early career. In the later part of his career in the ’80s the paintings become a lot flatter and include more figural referents to the world aside from the human form. For example with “Pollution Encroaching on All Sources of Pure Water,” you see this Janus figure as a pure fountain with smoke stacks behind it that in itself becomes a very direct, poignant message. Although he wouldn’t want to be that didactic, it’s clear what he’s talking about — at that point in his career he’s had decades to write, think, and paint, and you see these very crisp ways of communicating very complex ideas.What’s happening in the painting “Proto-Adam”? This one features a large, almost Greco-Roman torso that is conflated with beefcake muscle-daddy culture — something that might have been found in a gay periodical from the ’80s. You have this police figure, with the Eternity Chief hat, coiling around this Adam-esque figure, representing the serpent in the garden, and a pin-up girl coming out of his side, referencing the idea of Eve being born from man’s rib. It’s interesting that Ingo would conflate policemen with the attributes of the snake in the garden, right? Given the fact that when homosexuality was still outlawed, many cops would pose as gay men to entrap men like Ingo with promises of affection only to quickly turn on them and send them to jail, it’s not surprising. There are a lot of ideas of creation wrapped up in this painting. It’s hearkening back to ancient forms of Greco-Roman art, which is the foundation of the Western aesthetic.How did Ingo Swann’s ideas about the cosmos and extraterrestrial life influence the way he made the works? How did he deal with representation? It’s complicated. I’ve spoken a lot to Ingo’s niece, Elly Flippen, who knew him very well, and she told me that any time she would ask him about a painting — “What does this mean? Who is this figure? Who is this character?” — he would always respond by asking, “What do you see?” His paintings weren’t meant to be didactic. They weren’t meant to be illustrations, per se, of what he argues in a lot of his books. I would imagine that what he would like is for people to come to these works and have their own experiences and to be able to understand that they are engaging with this work with their five senses. But I think he wants you to be able to transcend those senses for a moment and to be able to understand all of the connections that we have with one another and with greater forces out there.“Ingo Swann: A Remote View” runs June 17-July 3 at La MaMa Galleria, in New York. A panel discussion will take place June 19, from 12pm to 2pm.
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