OTR Comment - November, 2003

For Daupo and a conversation at a Queens diner.

On October 20th, 2003, David Blaine emerged from a glass box that he had inhabited for forty-four days as it was suspended by a crane next to the River Thames in London. He didn’t look so well. His only sustenance had been glucose-enhanced water. Before entering the box he had fully expected to lose his mind, at least temporarily, by the thirtieth day.

The question that emerges after this latest venture is a simple one. What, exactly, is he doing? In recent years Mr. Blaine has encased himself in ice for sixty-one hours, stood on a platform 22 inches in diameter and 109 feet high for two days and two nights, and buried himself in a plexiglass ‘coffin’ for seven days, consuming only four tablespoons of water a day. By profession, if it can be put that way, David Blaine is a magician. His Street Magic act and the television specials produced out of it made him a star a few years ago. The act was impressive to many and generally resented by professional magicians. It eschewed all of the overproduced glam of the David Copperfield style of magic and brought him in direct contact with the proverbial man on the street. There he would amaze them, often shock them. In fact, it was this shock that gave the performance its particular aura, it was the looks on the faces of the people he was doing his tricks for. They were being presented with something that they couldn’t fathom. Such expressions cannot be manufactured and it is always affecting to witness another human being in a state of such genuine and all-consuming amazement.

In this, he had found a way to update and freshen something that is compelling about magic in the first place. For all modern magic is about doing things that shouldn’t be able to be done given our normal experiences and expectations of the world. All magicians therefore have something of the mystic about them. They gesture to a different kind of cosmic order than that of the laws of nature as we have come to understand them. They are like leftovers from a pre-modern past in which the relations between things can be influenced in all manner of ways. One thinks of a late Medieval figure like Paracelsus; a philosopher, mystic, scientist, alchemist, and theologian all in one. Magic, in this sense, is an alternate version of the dream of the human capacity to affect and shape the world that ultimately became modern science. David Blaine is thus a kind of Bizarro Roger Bacon, a remnant from a different historical trajectory.

Mr. Blaine is obviously aware of some of these themes. He has participated in voodoo ceremonies in Haiti and has infiltrated an isolated tribe in the South American rain forest. He toys with the idea of being a mystic, of having a relation to forces and powers that are not of the rational order. Of his platform performance, he noted, “The idea for this challenge dates back to the 5th Century. There is a group of ascetics, called Stylites or pillar-hermits. The most famous one was San Simeon. The Stylites stood on pillars as an act of protests against the decadence of their time. San Simeon believed this brought him closer to God.” Asked about whether magic ‘exists,’ he said, "Yeah, of course. You can try to explain everything or you can be mystified. People who try to be logical about everything live in a sceptical, cynical world." At the same time, when asked what drew him to magic, he responded, “I think it was a love for mathematics and science. I think it was kind of a natural love for those two subjects.”

There are thus two David Blaines, as there are two sides of magic; one in continuity with modernity and sharing the root impulses that also drive mathematics and science, the other in some kind of opposition to the essentially rational conception of the world that is the result and progenitor of mathematical and scientific inquiry. In this, Mr. Blaine is similar to his self-stated hero and greatest influence, Houdini. Houdini also played with the tension between those two aspects of magic, performing tricks and illusions on the one hand and feats of daring, endurance and physical stamina on the other. Some of Blaine’s challenges (as he calls them), like being buried in the box, were directly modeled after things that Houdini had done or tried to do. But the same question can be asked of Blaine as of Houdini: what is it that unites the tricks and the acts of physical endurance, making them both magic?

Here we come to the bad faith inherent in magic and its demonic underbelly. Magic is based inherently on a lie. It cannot deliver on its promise, even on its own terms, and must therefore resort to outright trickery. Magicians are fooling you, creating an experience that is based on a root contradiction between appearance and reality. The magician is always thus part con-man. And if the magician weren’t part con-man then he might be in league with the devil. So he is a particularly dangerous con-man in that he either possesses terrifying powers or is able to create a persuasive simulation of having such powers. Even being able to create such potent illusions of power is a kind of power. But it is a power that operates through cheating even as it gestures to that glimmer of hope that gives magic its allure. It’s a lie that everyone is in on at the same time that it maintains a capacity to compel.

I suspect there is something about this bad faith that drove Houdini to start experimenting with new kinds of magic and that has been handed down to David Blaine. An instructive example of the issue can be seen in the famous acts by Penn and Teller where they expose how various tricks and illusions are actually done. The overall effect is to suggest a possible rapprochement between magic and the self-avowed clarity and transparency of modern practices, and scientific practices in particular. Penn and Teller go about this through a ruthless and satirical process of the self-criticism and ‘self-confession’ of magic. They extend this to other practices like fire-walking and to an attack on television personalities that purport to communicate with the dead as well as to stories of alien abduction and so forth. The aim is a kind of coming clean, an attempt to expose the lie and thereby eventually to make up for the bad faith.

David Blaine’s Houdiniesque approach to the problem has some similarities with Penn and Teller. There is much to do about clarity, truth, and coming clean in his challenges. The challenges are always presented in such a way that transparency is at the forefront. He is in a transparent box with no way to hide anything or to cheat in any obvious way. He is in a situation where there is little possibility that the experience could be produced through a trick. But there is also something different about the way that Blaine addresses the issue of bad faith. His challenges are an attempt to capture something fundamental about the allure of magic, its relationship to human possibility and its limits, while doing away with the outright falseness that goes along with the lie of magic.

But then you have to wonder whether it has given up something important about what makes something magic and not something else. When asked what he thought of Blaine’s frozen-in-ice challenge, Penn said, “Well, that's not really a trick. And he wasn't really frozen. He was a little chilly, like being in a phone booth with a bunch of ice cubes. . . . And I'm not sure what we're supposed to be learning from it—except how far people will go for celebrity. His stunt was more like Survivor than us.” The interesting thing about Penn’s comment is how frustrated he seems to be by what Blaine is doing. He wants to expose something in it as he is inclined to do in general but his first inclination is to expose the fact that there is nothing to expose. “Well,” he says, “that’s not really a trick.” So Blaine’s trick is in not really doing a trick at all. And then Penn says that Blaine also wasn’t really frozen, so there was some trick involved. Except that Blaine never really claimed to actually be frozen, just that he would stay in the block of ice for sixty hours. Finally, Penn admits that he simply isn’t sure what it is supposed to be about. And Blaine himself seems sometimes unsure about how to categorize his exploits.

Speaking about Above the Below, his latest challenge on the River Thames, Blaine says, “I think it is worth it for my art even if I drop dead.” Here he is not speaking of magic, but of art. And he does perhaps resemble something more like a performance artist than a magician in his challenges. Indeed, it’s difficult to look at pictures and read descriptions of Above the Below without associating it with Kafka’s Hunger Artist and thereby with artists like Chris Burden and Marina Abramovic with her experiments on human limits and endurance. Blaine himself sees it that way, sees what he is doing as an experiment in what the human body can do. He says, "We are all capable of infinitely more than we believe. We are stronger and more resourceful than we know, and we can endure much more than we think we can. In truth, the only restrictions on our capacity to astonish ourselves and each other are imposed by our own minds." The first part of this quote sounds like it could belong to some kind of Modernist manifesto - there is a ring of materialism about it - but then the last sentence returns to a kind of mysticism and anti-rationalism.

Ultimately that is the difference between Blaine and Penn and Teller. Penn and Teller are willing to expose everything, to admit that everything about magic is tricks, tricks that can be explained and understood and taught. Perhaps the greatest revelation in Penn and Teller is the revelation that even after we accept that magic simply uses and misuses the same laws and appearances and realities as everything else in the world it is still interesting. Revealing that there is no ghost in the machine does not make the machine any less compelling. Here their disgust at the faux mysticism of Blaine is refreshing. Penn and Teller do not need to wrap themselves in the mysterious air of another world in order to produce astonishment in ours. And yet their claim that Blaine’s challenges are simply boring because they aren’t even tricks doesn’t quite seem to do justice to the phenomenon either.

There is something amazing about Blaine’s challenges, something exciting about them, something maybe even inspiring about them. For he is able to do things just at the very limit of what the human body can do. Perhaps he realizes that that is even more astounding than the performing of some sleight of hand that, however amazing, is known to be a trick by everyone involved. I think it is clear at this point that Blaine is actually doing everything he claims to be doing. It is as real as the self-aware trick expositions that Penn and Teller perform. Only, Blaine has dispensed, in his challenges, with the normal trappings of magic altogether and thus with the element of irony that is necessary for Penn and Teller’s act. Not having the history of magic to deconstruct, as do Penn and Teller, he seems to rely on the dream of magic and its possibilities in order to perform his acts of experimentation on human potentiality.

But the mystical foundation from which he precedes has a self-subverting element to it. The mystical impulse at its most speculative made claims unbounded by any form of reason or known experience. Ultimately it laid claim to something absolute and beyond the strictures of the effable. Blaine’s mysticism lands us back directly in the here and now. We must reach beyond our minds, he suggests, but for what? To astonish ourselves. How? By sitting in a box for forty-four days with very little to eat. This is mysticism fully at the service of materialism whether Blaine sees it or not. A box (space), forty-four days (time), a man (the subject). At the end of Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist,” the artist, who has been forgotten in his cage, wasting away, is rediscovered and finally reveals that he has performed his hunger artistry all along simply because he couldn’t find the proper thing to eat. Blaine is kind of like that. He works himself into the most extraordinary situations simply to end back at the mundane, a human being and his constraints. But it is a better mundane for it, for Mr. Blaine’s incredible magic of the ordinary world.

Morgan Meis is an OTR Editor.