The Magician Who Became an Artist

0:00Looking at magic, not as an end in itself, but as a means, and looking at it as a technical medium for the expression of other ideas, in a similar way that there are a lot of things that can function as a functional craft or that can be art.

0:21I'm Ben Davis, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

0:33One of the things I like about contemporary art is how flexible it is. I'm always learning new things because art spaces are always bringing new ways of making and thinking into the mix. Recently, unexpectedly, this has included magic. Specifically, I'm thinking here of Jeanette Andrews. Andrews began her career as a professional magician, but now works mainly in museums, creating a body of work that's something new, exploring magic as an expressive medium. Her works usually bring together the science of perception, the intrigue of coded messages, and the history of illusion as a craft. Andrews has performed parlor tricks, dreamed up by an algorithm to investigate human versus machine creativity, re-performed the earliest documented magic trick from 1584, and made art inspired by the use of sleight of hand, actual CIA espionage in the 1950s.

1:26Her explorations of this unusual creative space are actually getting their first dedicated museum exhibition soon at the Elmhurst Art Museum in Illinois. That's a little bit of news. We're breaking here on The Art Angle. As a matter of fact, you heard it here first. Earlier this month, I went to see one of Jeanette Andrews' most recent commissions in Boston at the MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology. And I can only describe it as a hybrid of stage magic and social experiment. The questions of why, if, and how magic fits in in the museum seem fascinating to me, so I was happy that Andrews agreed to talk about how she pulled off her biggest trick of all, making magic art.

2:09Jeanette, thank you for coming on the podcast. Talk to me about your work. I am so, so excited and honored to be on. Well, let's just get right into it. I'm bursting with questions for you, and you've done many projects that I want to introduce to the audience, but let's start with magic and then get into the art. How did you get into magic? How did you become a magician? Yeah, so I got my start in magic in a fairly traditional way. When I was four years old, I saw a Siegfried and Roy TV special, and I just fell in love. The guys with the tigers. Yeah, exactly. I know. Very different than where my style ended up going.

2:50But I looked at it and it was so visually arresting. And I saw it and I was like, that's what I'm going to do. Now, 365 days a year of my life for now 30 plus years, that's what I've done. And you trained as a magician. I mean, it's one of the things that interests me about it as a creative subculture or as an art that it is very craft based. It's a craft. It's not an academic craft. There's like a culture of magicians where people learn what they do, but it's not necessarily a school. How does it work? Yeah, absolutely. So that's one of my favorite parts of it too, is like it is a super technical craft and is something that I feel like is one of few things left that still really largely functions in this borderline like apprenticeship kind of model and being circulated in this very, for better or worse, insular community and in print books.

3:47Magic is still a very like print medium-based learning culture in terms of the actual technical teaching of it and kind of the circulation of technical manuals. So I studied as a technically trained magician from when I was four or five years old and still rigorously doing that sort of technical training to this day because that's a big part of what undergirds what I do. It almost seems to function to me the way that art used to function and no longer does, where there are sort of masters and apprentices. Totally. And the lore is passed down that way. That's dead on. And that's totally like, at least certainly within like, not only the technical aspects of it, but then kind of like stylistically in the schools of thought and things like that.

4:33It is very similar in that way. A lot of times you can see a performer and say like, okay, this person stylistically kind of in terms of their mannerisms or their movements or their propensities, is like very clearly, like in the community, we could see like, oh, this person came from this very like certain style of like the subculture of Spanish magicians, for example. And before you crossed over into this new genre that you've created or are a part of, the museum magician, if we want to call it that, you were just a working magician for quite a while. Am I correct about that? Totally correct.

5:08That was how I made my full-time living. And it was great because, but what ended up becoming basically like my kind of technical medium for the work that I make is something that's so reliant on understanding lived human behavior. And so having basically, you know, kind of like cutting your teeth on a lot of kind of trial and error in live performance for decades is massively informative and important for people that do this type of performance. I know that this is a passion of yours to reclaim the prestige of magic. There's an article that Katie White, my colleague, wrote about you a couple years ago.

5:48And one of the things you say in that article is, in the 1800s, going to a magic performance held the same esteem as the ballet. What do you think changed? A few things. Larger social things. So magic in the mid-1800s basically was something that essentially functioned for two audiences, which was basically like street performances. And then there was the birth of basically what we consider modern magic, which was born in Paris in the mid-1800s by a man named Robert Roudin. And that was something that was pretty exclusively for like the social elite. So this is the modernist turn in magic. It's the mid-1800s.

6:29It's about the time of modern art. Yes, exactly. So basically then it was like the scale of it was small. It was things presented. It was a type of magic that was born known as parlor magic. So it was something that was performed for people literally in their parlors for small groups that would have these longer form pieces. Maybe a single piece of magic would take 10 to 20 minutes to unfold. And that was the audience it was designed for. And it was also typically in the mix with things in sort of salon culture of the time. Like these types of performances were presented sort of in the salon culture and in tandem with these things, like their kind of scientific demonstrations of the day and chamber music and things like that.

7:09So then basically the arc of the fall, essentially, was we then saw the birth of big spectacle stage magic, which was still very well respected. And it had a lot of narrative structure and a lot of high production value. It was, you know, in large theaters that were designed explicitly for the performances and scenic design. And there'd be, you know, a narrative that was kind of undergirding the whole thing. And then we saw the sort of fall of that type of performance and the rise of the moving image. And so then suddenly then that's when we start to see the idea of live performance in that type of vein start to be replaced in some ways.

7:54And then we also very quickly thereafter see the birth of vaudeville. So suddenly what you had was performers that were coming from the sort of mass populist performance of having full scale like sets and things that were like sometimes really on par with what today would be like a Broadway set design. Yeah. I mean, like suddenly now that was basically in a very quick span of time, almost obsolete. and now in the span of vaudeville people had to make these really intricate things that then were now their whole performance because they were having to fit into a performance with other performers they couldn't take 10 minutes to do you know a single piece of magic they had to have their entire act happen in that 10 minutes so it lost a lot of the narrative quality and it lost a lot of the production value because suddenly you couldn't really build it.

8:54Everything had to be able to be disassembled and thrown on a train car and reassembled and just skirted around. And so you see the aesthetic change a lot during that time period. Basically then what happens is then there's like two more kind of interesting social turns where we see the Great Depression. This is essentially where we get the birth of the birthday party magician. Interesting. I didn't know this. And I find this fascinating because we see this in so many things in culture. And this is just one example of it. But like the thing that people associate with an entire industry, number one, is like relatively new compared to its long history and is like very niche.

9:36So basically, you had all these vaudeville matricians that had now already kind of had this stepwise progression of changing what they were doing. and you know in the span of 30 years we saw like the production value go down the vaudeville stuff happen then the great depression everyone's out of work and then it's like where can we make any money and so it's like any social thing that was still happening so it's like people were still marginally celebrating birthdays you know so people were like doing you know birthday party performances so that's then where we see things in the way that we do now like slapstick comedy type of magic and magic that's associated with children because magic was not a form that was really like explicitly designed for children in that way.

10:23Well, and I think it's also in that time period that the reverse happens, that films go from being a kind of a carnival entertainment to really being for adults. And that's a big phenomenon. The depression is the narrative film starting to dominate popular culture. And I guess this brings me back to what you do and reclaiming it, magic as an expressive medium and art form, because tell me if you think I'm off base. But one theory I have about this is that it's also about developments in media, that people are surrounded by images in a new way and thinking about what's real and what's not. And this comes up a lot in the texts around your magic in the museum, which is it's really thinking about misinformation.

11:13And then on the flip side, there's a sort of a question of like, whereas you can see almost anything in image form now, there is something about magic that happens in front of you. Its effect is inseparable from the fact that it's not mediated, that you're right there with the person. I totally agree with that. And I think there was a minute had probably, you know, 15, 20 years ago when, you know, video editing, you know, everyone suddenly had iMovie and people were like, oh my gosh, you know, is this going to make magic obsolete, you know, kind of thing again. We ended up seeing, I think speaking exactly to your point, we saw the opposite turn of like, as a great lover of phenomenological philosophy, like our embodied perception is so robust and so complex.

11:58We all understand this. We all understand that there is a very different lived experience of seeing something tangibly or intangibly unfold before you that you're viewing live with other people. There's a really interesting kind of social real-time fact-checking basically that's happening when you're watching something quote-unquote unbelievable happen live with other people. It's a very different cognitive experience. Yeah. What was your aha moment when the art part clicked in or you realized that you could do this in an art context? Did you find the art world or did it find you? I found it because of being so perplexed as like the front and back end that I was seeing so different, learning about the history of this and how it used to be a much more culturally respected form.

12:49And then in my teens, I just got really into philosophy kind of by chance. Now my view on this has changed a little bit, but the types of questions that philosophers were investigating through the lens of aesthetics and were really deeply interrogating through looking at painting and sculpture and later in dance and film were so central to a lot of the questions at the heart of magic. Now I'm really interested in sort of the epistemic and ontological questions that magic provides on top of the aesthetic ones. But to me, it was just like so painfully obvious that I was like, magic is this really rich medium to explore these really interesting philosophical questions that our whole lived experience, to me, it was just so painfully obvious.

13:35And I was like, why is no one doing this? And so basically that at about 15 became my life project, was trying to figure out not only how to recontextualize magic in terms of the sort of cultural regard that it used to have, but then how to also use it as an artistic medium to express ideas about our world. So you're from Chicago and some of the first versions of what you do now happened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, correct? Yeah. Maybe even you started more as a magician there for their first Fridays. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. So I was first asked to perform a very short two-minute piece of magic for their first Friday back, I think it was in 2012, if I have my math right, 2010, 2012, somewhere right around there, I think 2012.

14:28That's how we first came into contact with each other. That's almost more in the entertainer mode, but you've sort of moved from that to do multiple projects for them. So maybe describe some of those to give the audience a sense of where you went. Yeah. So I was really lucky in that I ended up doing three kind of pieces of work with them over the next probably eight years, which was a presentation of a work that I developed during my first artist residency, which was called Thresholds, which again, this was very like time specific, but it was and still very kind of in like entertainment mode, but they were gracious enough to still present it.

15:07That was basically magic for each of the five senses kind of moving through five different spaces in the museum. And that was presented with a surrealism retrospective that was happening at the time. But later, a couple of years after that was the museum's 50th anniversary. And they had commissioned me and several other Chicago-based artists to reflect or respond on several significant pieces that happened in the first couple of years of the museum. The piece I did was called Invisible Roses and was kind of meant to be in dialogue with the 1969 piece that Christo and Jean-Claude did at the MCA Chicago, which was one of their first large-scale building reps.

15:42Conceptual artists who wrap things and they wrap the whole building. So it's a very important work in art history that they were celebrating for their anniversary. What was that work? As part of their anniversary, they had just undergone a bunch of building renovations. And so my performances were happening in a new space that no one had ever been in before. And they were a little worried about people navigating there. So I ended up designing a bunch of maps to help people get there, which I hand printed in invisible ink. And people basically entered the museum and it was like, hey, if you want to see the performances happening today, like here's a map for how to get there.

16:17And they would unfold the maps and they were blank. And then there was just a little note on the bottom that said locate roses. And then almost like in the basement lobby of the museum, we had brought in 1 ,200 live roses and participants were given one and they would brush the head of the rose across the paper and it would basically develop the invisible ink, which then was a map that led them to this newly renovated space where my performances were happening. And then once people got there, the performance piece I did was for people who've seen Criston Jean-Claude's work, they have a very specific style of how they wrap things that is both kind of constrained and kind of messy and really unique and kind of, I don't know, I find it really gravitationally interesting.

16:59And so anyway, I had a large kind of pile of this wrapped fabric would slowly unwind it and there was a single rose and a bud base. I would snap the hat off the rose and crush all the petals and they'd fall to the floor, invite two people from the viewing audience, basically would stretch between them this about 20-foot length of fabric. And they would cut it in half. They would tie it back together. And then they would stretch it out between them again and the entire piece of fabric was restored. And then we would turn and look back at the kind of headless rose and the head of the rose has magically grown back.

17:36Wow. So how does that environment change magic as a performance? The thing I've been interested in is as I've kind of evolved, looking at magic, not as an end in itself, but as a means and looking at it as a technical medium for the expression of other ideas. In a similar way that there are a lot of things that can function as a functional craft or that can be art. We see this a lot in textile and fiber art. We see this a lot in ceramics, like things like that, where, you know, really cool mug here. This is a totally functional object. It is an end in itself. And then I've also seen amazing ceramic artists that are incredible.

18:19I see magic as a technical medium that's not dissimilar in that way. And so for me, a lot of it is looking at how to use magic, which does have very specific kind of features and functions and how to use that and play with certain aspects of that or downplay other aspects of that and how to have that basically act as like a small catalyst for the expression of the larger content. So do you view magic itself essentially as performance art or is there something that has to be added to it in the museum context? This is probably a hot take, but I don't inherently view it as a performance art. I think it default in our current social framing culture is entertainment typically.

19:04So you want to push beyond that to add some kind of element that questions the way people perceive in the art space. Totally, yeah.

19:22Okay, so I feel like you're unique in this emphasis on perception. A lot of magicians have a more occult aspect or interested in the occult. You're more interested in science, right? And that's really, you've done research work around perception, essentially. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's one of the things that I love. you know i think taking something where the complexity of it and the richness of it does have certain affordances like looking at something like how do we perceive the world to me there's there's so much happening there because magic from a technical standpoint is so multidisciplinary that a lot of times kind of looking at essentially almost the scientific angle of this As a magician, just from a technique standpoint, you have to basically create a live, flawless simulation of reality that functions exactly as reality would, and yet also technically or mechanically works completely differently.

20:27And so to do that, you have to understand or try to understand what the kind of confines of reality are. Just for example, like the coffee mug I have here, if I need something to look like a coffee mug, but it has to do something else, it has to functionally do something else, I have to spend a lot of time thinking about exactly how I pick that up, what a weight distribution is around a handle, how it's going to tip a certain way. And these are the sorts of things that intuitive physics, you know, explores a lot in terms of like early childhood development, how we look at basic understandings of how objects move in the world.

21:05And a lot of what from the back end goes into something like magic is these ideas of like the cognitive science piece of it, which is one of my great loves. These ideas of like the intuitive physics piece of it, the idea of there's a lot of math that's going into magic. There's a lot of object design. There's a lot of material science, which is another one of my loves. There's a lot of psychology, a lot of sociology, writing, all these things that I think are so ripe for like deep inquiry purely because of the fact that magic is functioning in such an anomalous way that that is sort of where a lot of the richness, I think, for some of the scientific inquiry comes from.

21:45I think the science piece also connects to the disinformation piece. I mean, They're both connected to information sciences. And I wanted to ask you about one of the artworks that brought you my attention at the Boca Raton Museum of Art a couple of years ago, where you worked with the CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception. I think that connects some of these aspects of the science and the craft and your interest in magic history. So tell me about that work, which I'm not even going to say the name because the name is Magician, but it's punctuated in a way. to emphasize the fact that the word CIA is hidden in the word magician, correct?

22:26I felt a little goofy about titling it that, but I was like, it's right here. I can't not do it. The CIA had declassified a bunch of information in the late aughts, and I think it was in around 2008, maybe, they had declassified some of this information under the budget of MKUltra, which was a lot of when the CIA was looking at a lot of mind control and poisoning and things like that. They had hired one of New York's main prominent close-up sleight-of-hand magicians to write a manual to train spies for how to use sleight-of-hand in the field. So I read this when it came out, and it literally is beat for beat.

23:08Honestly, it's a lot of kind of things that people would learn as like a technical coin magician, but swapped out instead of like doing something with a quarter. It's a lot of things with poison pills. This was a lot of things that I had learned as a child growing up in magic that was like with this end of like entertainment and fun. And here was used for the ultimate nefarious ends. It was one of the most fascinating and bone chilling things I've ever read. And it stuck with me for, you know, whatever, 15 years. And I'd been in dialogue with the curator for the show for a while. And she was really interested in learning the history of magic and asked me to recommend some books.

23:48And that one had escaped my memory. And I sat in her office and all of a sudden I realized I was like, oh, I told you about the John Mulholland CIA book. And she was like, what's that? And I explained it. And she looked at me dead in the eye and just said, do that. So what I ended up making was this piece that it was only the second or third piece that had no live performance in it. So that was definitely an interesting challenge for me. It was one of the main commissions of a large group show that happened at the museum. So, you know, it was the first time or one of the first times something lived without me for months.

24:24So the piece was basically this sort of kinetic book where I wrote, photographed and handmade this book that was an homage to the CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception, where it was situated in almost like a clean room style, like clear acrylic box that you like put your hands in either side of the box. And this was for viewers and visitors to do. And so they would flip through the book and essentially they'd flip through it and it was a black and white magic book, like a magic technical manual explaining history and kind of considerations when you're designing a magic performance. And they'd close the book and then they'd flip through the same book again.

25:02And then in their hands, the book transformed to this like bright red kind of spycraft manual that was images that then I had rendered the images in Morse code. And it was a whole bunch of other kind of information. So it was this book that would just transform as people read it. So that was one piece of it. And then the other piece of it was a film. It was my first longer, kind of longer short film that I ever made called The Attention. And it was all about how both the spycraft manual and the history of espionage and as magicians, there's so much about the direction and manipulation of attention.

25:41And so the film depicts me as a very kind of abstracted magician performing a piece of magic that was very widely performed in bars in the 1950s, especially in the Chicago area where I'm from. It's like a very technical piece of close-up card magic. And then you sort of start to see about midway, the worlds kind of start to fracture and you start to see everything kind of changes colors a little bit. And now you start to kind of get these inklings that maybe this person has some other background or intention and kind of flip into almost this other character. Long story short, and I'll just give the spoiler of the piece, but basically the piece of magic is an unseen spectator signs a playing card that disappears and then reappears.

26:27folded up in the foam head of their beer. And then you start to see me kind of beat for beat doing the same motions in the last split second of the work as you see the sort of almost spy character. You see something get dropped into a drink. So I was very interested in how the same gesture and sequences of movements, when we look at something like covert gestures, what the ends of that look like. So do you almost think of yourself then, You go from magic as very trivial birthday party tricks to hear magic as literally an instrument of assassination or killing people. And it seems to me, based on this work and the one that I saw, you almost work within this other tradition of magic, which is kind of debunking magic or letting people see how the trick is done.

27:21Is that complex for you? Because tricking people in a way is the whole game. You know, I'll be very explicit in that I'm never revealing how the techniques of magic are working and what I'm doing. That's something that I still ethically like hold very dear. It's controversial within the field, right? Very controversial. So obviously there's people like Penn and Teller that have sort of like basically early on made a name for themselves by doing that. I think I'm kind of of two minds on it, but I'm not revealing how things are done, partially because I think a lot of kind of these social and cognitive things that are happening are more interesting a lot of the times and are more relatable to people, honestly.