Giocato sul filo della magia è
la recente mostra al Broad Art Museum in Michigan, in cui sono
mescolate opere storiche e più contemporanee, da Duchamp a Gianni
Motti.
A table, an elephant, a bug
zapper, a bar of soap, a mirror, a thunderclap, a cat, a vending
machine, and fireflies are some of the objects encountered in The
Transported Man. They can be seen and understood as ordinary objects
but gain new meaning when more information is revealed and when new
interpretations are made possible. The table floats in mid-air (Roman
Signer, Table, 2009), the elephant performs an impossible trick
(Daniel Firman, Loxodonta, 2017), when the bug zapper kills a fly,
the building’s electricity shuts down (Fernando Ortega, Untitled
(Fly Electrocutor), 2003), the soap is the liposuctioned fat of an
Italian politician (Gianni Motti, Mani Pulite (Clean Hands), 2005),
the reverse side of the mirror is signed (Marcel Duchamp, Miroir
(Mirror), 1964), the thunder is performed by an orchestra (Hannah
Rickards, Thunder, 2005), the cat is ready for space travel (Werner
Reiterer, Beginnings of Space Travel, 2002), the vending machine
beams its cans to its far-away twin (Leopold Kessler, Sodamachine a
and b, 2006), and fireflies and crickets flash and chirp in
synchronicity (Robin Meier, Synchronicity, 2015). The Transported Man
also features a film by Georges Méliès from 1904 believed to have
been lost. Titled Match de Prestidigitation (A Wager Between Two
Magicians), this film has not been seen in over 100 years and
features Méliès himself as the protagonist. The film was recently
recovered at the National Film Archive in Prague, arriving as part of
an anonymous gift that included a reel with three films glued
together.
Inspired by a magic trick
described in Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel The Prestige, The
Transported Man exemplifies the three phases of a magic trick,
wherein a magician appears onstage (the Pledge), disappears through a
door (the Turn), and reappears immediately through another door (the
Prestige). But how can a magic trick help us understand an artwork?
The spectator of a magic trick wonders what happened in the ineffable
moment when a magician disappears and reappears at the other side of
the stage, in the same way a viewer might wonder what happened when a
piece of soap, a mirror, or a shoe reappears as a sculpture.
To be efficient, a magic trick,
like many other illusions, relies on a system of belief cultivated
between the magician and his or her audience. The wider the gap
between what the audience sees and what it is asked to believe, the
more efficient and spectacular the trick can be. A good trick works
only if the spectator can navigate between these two poles—between
the feeling of witnessing pure magic and the impression of seeing an
ordinary scene. If the spectator decides to consider only one of the
poles (a simple fact or pure magic), the trick won’t work. The
belief they attribute to what they see acts like a cursor in a field
implemented not by category but by intensity, wherein an object can
be transported between various states of presence while gaining the
power of embodying multiple identities.
The Transported Man is
organized by the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State
University and curated by Marc-Olivier Wahler, Director. Support for
this exhibition is provided by the MSU Federal Credit Union, the
Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, Audemars Piguet, the Eli and Edythe
Broad Endowed Exhibition Fund, and the MSU Broad’s general
exhibitions fund.
