ABRACADABRAMAGIC
OR ART?
By Jeffrey Hogrefe
It
is Saturday night on the Lower East Side, and Mark Mitton is trying
to set fire to a mans tongue. Mitton looks like a nutty math professor
with his short, fair hair; thin lips; gray flannel suit; and bow tie.
But people seem to trust him because of his avuncular banter, deadpan
humor, and sure way with a fast-paced set of magic tricks. He has pulled
the guya tall, nice-looking man named Richfrom the audience,
and gotten him to take his shoes and socks off. Then hes surrounded
the mans body with 40,000 volts of electricity, which will cause
a flame to jump off his tongue when it comes in contact with a grounded
torch. Mitton calls the set Audience Torture.ú
OK.
When you see fire, be sure to throw the switch off. Mitton is talking
to an assistant, a young, pretty lady who was also plucked from the
audience.
Ready?
Nothing to worry about. We are going to light a torch off Richs tongue.
Simple solution. I will be throwing a lot of voltage around Richs body
and you can just go ahead and throw the switch. Just think of your body,
Rich, as a glass of water. OK, throw the switch. Ready, Rich?
Electric
sound.
Nothing
happens.
Mitton
tries again.
Here
we go. Ready? Dont touch me, Rich.
Electric
sound.
OK,
throw the switch. You can see Rich is all torqued up, ready for the
torch. 40,000 volts will surround his body. It doesnt work instantaneously.
When you see that spark come out of his tongue throw the switch.
Fails
again.
At
this point, Mitton is looking nervous. The audience is slightly embarrassed
for him. Quickly, he pulls Rich to the side, has the assistant take
off her shoes and socks. Then he surrounds her body with the electric
current and gets her tongue to catch fire immediately. The audience
applauds, Mitton takes a bow as Rich and the assistant return to their
seats. It would seem that Mitton has failed. But has he? The tension
in the room is up. People are feeling sorry for Rich, who seÐeemed to
have gone through some pain for nothing. (He later said that it didnt
really hurt at all, but thats not the sensation that was registering
on his face.) They are feeling sorry for Mitton, who doesnt seem to
be able to pull off an old carnie act. They are thinking they are in
on the trick, they know what the magician does. He has pulled back the
curtain and let them peer into the booth. But has he? Later, Mitton
confessed that the gag often fails with tall men like Rich.
I
found Mark Mitton while I was looking for some performers who were using
the principles of the 1920s and 30s surrealists in their work. Ive
been working on a biography of Salvador Dal’ for a number of years,
and Ive been interested in seeing how the principles of surrealisma
way of looking at the world as a menacing, dark, and comicly absurd
placehave been passed down through the generations. On some level,
surrealists like Dal’ were nothing more than magicians working in a
wider arena. Dal’ would have referred to what Mitton did to the audience
as cretinizing themconfusing them about the nature of reality. Helen
Varola, a New York-based art curator who has organized exhibitions of
art that magicians produce, suggested that I look into the world of
magic as it is being performed by people like Mitton.
Varola, whose husband is a professional magician and clown named PG
Varola, also introduced me to Jeff Sheridan, the surrealists magician,
who has taken the tricks that he performs in his magic acts and turned
them into art objects. Sheridan uses decks of cards, rope, and other
magicians props to create collages and assemblages. Sheridan was drawn
to surrealism as a student at the School of Visual Arts in New York
in the 60s. He especially likes the work of Max Ernst, who produced
collages that were directly influenced by a number of magi-cians working
in Europe in the 20s and 30s. When Sheridan was a street magician
in New York in the 60s and 70s, he met Dal’ in the St. Regis Hotel
and told him that he had discovered that surrealism was nothing more
than magic. Dal’ held a finger up to his lips and told him to shhh.
Sheridan
moved to Europe in the 80s and began to perform in clubs in Germany.
Last fall, he returned to New York for an exhibition of his artwork
in the lobby of a midtown bank. Before the show, Sheridan explained
to me that he has always want-ed to form a link between magic and art.
He discovered magic before he discovered art, and the connection has
always been clear to him. Working in Europe freed him to make the association
between the two forms of expression. He found many of the objects that
he used in the collages and assemblages in flea markets in large European
cities, and he said that just being in the same environment as the original
surrealists was a catalyst for him. At the opening, Sheridan performed
some of his magic tricks that were illustrated in the artworks. I could
see that there was a relationship between the two. But somehow I thought
that Sheridan was aligning himself too closely with the original surrealists.
His work seemed overly historical.
I
wanted to find someone who had taken surrealism beyond its historic
context, moved the energy of surrealism into the 90s. I found a few
other artists, thanks to Varola, who were using magic in their works.
Jonathan Allen, a British conceptual artist, uses lenticular photography
to create 3-D images that change as they are moved. His artworks move
from the visible to the invisible, much as a coin might disappear in
the hands of a magician. Still, I wanted more. Salley May, the curator
of PS 122s Avant-Garde-Arama series in Manhattan, where I first saw
Mitton perform, told me she doesnt usually hire magicians to perform
in that venue. She hired Mitton after watching a few minutes of a video
he sent to her. She has invited him to return and host Avant-Garde-Arama
this April.
That
line between where Salvador Dal’ was able to go because he wasnt crazy
but he was so talented and could understand these different kinds of
placesthats where I feel that performance really lies, May told me
before the Mitton act. I imagine you are interested in Mark because
he lives in that area. He goes to a different place. He has taken magic
to a different place. This is what always catches my eye. He goes into
the audience. He is a very full performer. He does wacky things like
cut his tongue off and throw it into the audience. He has just a ton
of energy in it. Everybody gets excited about energy. You dont see
itvery oftenin its highest form.
Robert
Prichard, who along with his wife, Jenny, runs Surf Realitya performance-art
space thats in their loft on Allen Street where Mitton has performedbelieves
that Mitton is a really skilled illusionist. His sleight of hand
is unbelievable. Sometimes he seems to struggle with certain tricks,
but people enjoy that. The thing about him is he has these flawless
results, but it doesnt seem flawless in execution. It looks like
theres a chance of failure. He sets it up that way and it creates
a lot of tension. Ive seen him perform at least twenty times and
I fall for it every time. I always worry.
I
meet Mitton in the Midtown Diner on Third Avenue and Sixtieth Street
in New York on a quiet autumn afternoon. He has been travellingto a
convention with other magicians in Europe and jobs for corporate clients
in different parts of America. A couple of weeks have elapsed since
I saw him perform at PS 122. I congratulate him on having been named
as host of the Avant-Garde-Arama in April. I ask if he has ever hosted
a show before. Going way back, he says, I used to do a kind of kids
show when I was a teenager. Mitton is Canadian by birth, but he grew
up in Superior, Wisconsin (next to Duluth, Minnesota). His father was
a history professor. Mark discovered magic through a magic kit that
he ordered from the back of a box of Chex cereal when he was nine years
old.
On first blush, there is nothing about Mittons manner that suggests
the qualities generally associated with a downtown performance artist.
He lives on Central Park West with his wife, Susanna, and a pair of
doves that he has used in his magic. He dresses conservatively and regularly
attends religious services at a Presbyterian church. He even admits
that he sometimes feels aittle fraudulent working downtown. Five years
ago, he was hired by Coca Cola to tour the country with a group of downtown
performance artists on a promotion for Fruitopia. That was his big break
into the rarified world of downtown clubs. Ironically, they were looking
for downtown performance artists. When they learned that I wasnt one,
that gave me the community I had been looking for, Mitton tells me.
Mitton
arrived in the downtown scene a fully formed artist. Listening to him
talk about the many things he has done on the way to developing his
art is exhausting. He has studied with some of the great magicians and
teachers of comedy and acting. Even as an undergraduate at Haverford
College in Pennsylvania he was making meaningful connections between
Max Malinis essay Malini and His Magic and the physics lectures of
Richard Feynman. When I suggest that he might be a tad too analytical
for a serious performer, he says, What is really silly is that I am
sure it has held me back. Nonetheless, Salley May believes that Mittons
erudition is what makes him exceptional at this point in his career.
My
magic was always in this quirky area because I was somewhere in between.
I had never considered myself more than jus t a magician, Mitton tells
me. In college I started a vaudeville troupe and we went around to
community centers and old folks homes because I always loved performing.
So when I got to college, and people were performing for other students
and their families, it was a big shock. I said to them, Wait a minute
youre supposed to be gigging, you know, for people you dont know.
We started this community service which did quite well. It was inspired
by a guy named Ron Jenkins, who wrote a book called Acrobats of the
Soul. He has a PhD in clowning from Harvard.
A
PhD in clowning? From Harvard? Yes. He wrote his thesis on Dan Rice,
the original Uncle Sam. To Mitton, this is serious business. I really
remember the moment that I set off on my quest to understand performance
and how things work. I think it is a moment that has cost me so many
years. It was in my senior year in college. I had just done this show
that had gone really well and was big and festive and ended up with
this really big bang. Ron Jenkins says, Your show worked today but
do you know why. Mitton did not know why. He moved to New York and
became a street per-former in South Street Seaport, studied with a Commedia
dellArte troupe in Rome and Tuscany, and was an apprentice to the world-famous
Slydini, aka Quintino Marucci.
When I started with Slydini, my teacher, he was 83 years old,
Italian, very Old World. Mitton lets me in on the development
of his talent. Slydini, he had explained to me earlier, was a popular
magician in the 60s. He often appeared on TV on The Dick Cavett
Show. That is what changed things. Going there I did understand [what
Slydini did] much better, the culture and what he was trying to tell
me. All the referencesbecause of the way that he responds to Michelangelowere
right from his heart, or the way he referred to an opera. It was in
him.
I
ask Mitton what his worst moment was performing, the time when everything
backfired. As it turned out, it was also his best moment, since he revels
in creating highly tuned artistry in which everything suddenly seems
to fall apart and then comes back together. I did this bit with
[performer] James Godwin where it looked like he was just helping me
out. I was supposedly balancing this plate on my nose on the end of
a long pole. He was doing this Doors song and instead of singing he
would just talk it spoken-word style, very dramatically. I tried to
do the bit. I put the pole on my head and I balanced it and I was getting
ready to put the pie up there.
I
was getting more and more frustrated so I threw down the pole and I
started having this big argument with him. It came off like a real argument.
We just started attacking each other. One thing led to another and we
started chasing each other with a pie. At the last moment, he got it
and I got out of the way and we beaned somebody in the audience really
badly. The guy we hithe knew we were going to hit him. But it
looked like a real mistake. So we brought him up on the stage to apologize
and realized that nobody got it.
There was this moment where I could have released the tension
and said, Hey, this is so-and-so and he is in on it. The
tension was so interesting that what I did was wipe the cream off his
chest and I started massaging the cream into his back, spreading this
stuff all around him. Mitton looks pleased with himself for having
done something naughty in the name of art. The audience was completely
and totally horrified. I had all of this set up and I had all the lines
ready to release. And then something inside of me wanted to keep it
in. You have to be ready for every contingency. The whole thing was
planned. What I hadnt planned on was that the audience would buy
the whole thing. I thought it might be just like the joke it was.
Mitton
stops to take a sip of Pepsi and then goes on to offer a little more
of his philosophy of performing. In those situations, the stakes are
so much higher that you have to do the right thing. In clowning, I never
liked the clowns who didnt care about their art. Then there were the
clowns who had mastered their art and you didnt even laugh. The guy
on the tightrope who looks like he is dizzyhe is doing these astounding
things. He is in trouble or he is busy. You get those levels. Thats
exactly what makes those levels work. Thats where I am right now. I
am at the process of being so analytical that I am letting go. Thats
really joyous and really terrifying because to be a magician you have
to be a control freak, to be a comedian you have to be a control freak,
to be really good you have to let it all go and just trust yourself,
trust all the little details and trust that everything is going to work
out no matter what happens.
For
someone who considered himself nothing more than a garden-variety magician,
Mitton has developed into something that is worthy of the original surrealists.
He doesnt know why, cant analyze his own work any more, and is glad
that he has been able to break free of his intellectual constraints.
Downtown is really great, he says near the end of our talk, because
if you try something new and you fail, they are more excited than if
you havent done something new.
Jeffrey
Hogrefe is the author of OKeefe: The Life of an American Legend
(Bantam).