Black Book

 

ABRACADABRA—MAGIC OR ART?

By Jeffrey Hogrefe

It is Saturday night on the Lower East Side, and Mark Mitton is trying to set fire to a man’s 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 guy—a tall, nice-looking man named Rich—from the audience, and gotten him to take his shoes and socks off. Then he’s surrounded the man’s 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 Rich’s tongue. Simple solution. I will be throwing a lot of voltage around Rich’s 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? Don’t 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 doesn’t 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 didn’t really hurt at all, but that’s not the sensation that was registering on his face.) They are feeling sorry for Mitton, who doesn’t 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. I’ve been working on a biography of Salvador Dal’ for a number of years, and I’ve been interested in seeing how the principles of surrealism—a way of looking at the world as a menacing, dark, and comicly absurd place—have 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” them—confusing 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 surrealist’s 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 122’s Avant-Garde-Arama series in Manhattan, where I first saw Mitton perform, told me she doesn’t 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 wasn’t crazy but he was so talented and could understand these different kinds of places—that’s 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 don’t see it—very often—in its highest form.”

Robert Prichard, who along with his wife, Jenny, runs Surf Reality—a performance-art space that’s in their loft on Allen Street where Mitton has performed—believes 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 doesn’t seem flawless in execution. It looks like there’s a chance of failure. He sets it up that way and it creates a lot of tension. I’ve 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 travelling—to 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 kid’s 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 Mitton’s 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 wasn’t 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 Malini’s 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 Mitton’s 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 just 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 you’re supposed to be gigging, you know, for people you don’t 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 dell’Arte 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 references—because of the way that he responds to Michelangelo—were 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 hit—he 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 hadn’t 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 didn’t care about their art. Then there were the clowns who had mastered their art and you didn’t even laugh. The guy on the tightrope who looks like he is dizzy—he is doing these astounding things. He is in trouble or he is busy. You get those levels. That’s exactly what makes those levels work. That’s where I am right now. I am at the process of being so analytical that I am letting go. That’s 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 doesn’t know why, can’t 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 haven’t done something new.”

“Jeffrey Hogrefe is the author of O’Keefe: The Life of an American Legend (Bantam).”