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December 17, 2010
He stirred people’s imagination
The magic and mystery of Harry Houdini is on display at New York’s Jewish Museum.
SHELLEY LIGHTBURN
As a great American performer and as a Jewish Hungarian immigrant, Harry Houdini still manages to capture hearts and imaginations almost a century after his death. In celebration of the escape artist, showman and vaudeville performer, the Jewish Museum in New York is presenting Houdini: Art and Magic, on until March 27. It displays an array of archival materials and artifacts, including photographs, film reels, posters, Houdini’s straight jacket and milk can, in addition to the works of artists featuring Houdini as alter ego and muse in their work.
Houdini: Art and Magic looks to the icon as a symbol of resilience, inspiration and transformation. “The show examines how contemporary culture transforms Houdini across three centuries,” said curator Brooke Kamin Rapaport in an interview with the Independent. “Houdini was always pushing forward. He was a master showman always one step ahead in promoting himself, and because of that there is a clear record of his performances.”
The show reached out to many collectors and artists to bring together a show that not only highlights Houdini’s accomplishments but his transcendental influence on the public, Rapaport added.
Houdini was born Erik Weisz (later changed to Ehrich Weiss) in Budapest, Hungary, on March 24, 1874. He was four years old when his family moved to the United States, first to Appleton, Wis., and later to the “Gateway to America,” New York City.
A natural athlete, at nine years of age, Houdini made his first appearance on the trapeze, performing as “Ehrich: The Prince of Air.” Inspired by French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, the young performer took the name “Harry Houdini,” a moniker that eventually became his legal name. Although he had acts on the vaudeville circuit, in dime museums and sideshows for several years, his big break came in 1899, when he impressed manager Martin Beck with one of his handcuff tricks. By this time, Houdini was in his 20s and already married to fellow performer Wilhelminia Beatrice (Bess) Rahner.
Houdini began focusing solely on feats of escape, such as from nailed packing crates, a milk can and, his most famous act, the Chinese water torture tank escape.
“Houdini not only escaped from physical constraints and potentially deadly situations but was himself an exemplar of the American dream, escaping the past and succeeding in the new world,” explain promotional materials for the exhibit.
Visitors can see an array of the various handcuffs Houdini used, a photograph of him capsized in a water torture tank, as well as Vancouver artist Tim Lee’s 2004 self-portrait “Upside down Torture Chamber, Harry Houdini, 1913.” In it, Lee, a Korean Canadian immigrant, is seen sitting bound to a chair, contemplating an inverted copy of Collected Writings by artist Robert Smithson. The photograph seems out of place and innocuous next to the grandeur of Houdini, until one recognizes that, in fact, Lee is literally upside down and the book is right side up, a feat of magic in and of itself.
Visitors can also find a weathered straight jacket belonging to Houdini that is displayed in contrast with American artist Raymond Pettibone’s pen, ink and gouache on paper, “No Title (The Desire To), 2009,” depicting a man whimsically tumbling from the sky with the lengthy banner, “The desire to seize and grasp all that was nearest bound him to earth and caused his narrowing circle. Yet in that very power of adhesion to outward things might be discerned as the strength destined to live beyond them.”
The exhibit also features evidence of Houdini as someone who overcame and broke free from the indignities of racism and xenophobia in 19th- and early 20th-century America. As Rapaport explained, “That relationship with his Jewishness is not an unusual story ... issues of antisemitism [and] anti-immigration were very much prevalent at that time. Houdini’s first brush with antisemitism came when he married his wife, Bess, who was Catholic, whose family refused to speak to her for marrying a Jewish man.”
Apparently, after Bess’ death, her family refused to have her buried with Houdini, who himself insisted on being buried alongside his mother, in a Jewish cemetery. In a poignant link with another community’s experience, after finding success, the Houdinis purchased a brownstone on 113th Street in Harlem, in a neighborhood that at the time had a large Jewish population and was to become the central address for African Americans and the heart of the Harlem Renaissance art movement.
One of the more interactive pieces included in the exhibit is “Ehrich Weiss Suite (1997),” part of Mathew Barney’s Cremaster series, and what is, in essence, a living sculpture of Jacobin pigeons (yes, real, live pigeons) that freely roam amid images and objects in a climate-controlled room. The piece is striking against a backdrop of archival pieces representing the past. “The pigeons serve as a symbol of nature and life enduring, while fame dissipates,” explained Rapaport. While Ehrich Weiss had passed on, she continued, “Harry Houdini endures, pushing forward to the next level.”
Though there is mythology surrounding Houdini’s death (some believe he drowned in a water chamber during one of his famous escapes, as dramatized later in two movies). In fact, Houdini died in 1926, having suffered peritonitis.
Houdini, ever enduring, had been suffering appendicitis for several days with a 104 degree Fahrenheit fever, but persevered with his act, goading his audience with the claim that he could take any blow. After several blows to the stomach by McGill University student J. Gordon Whitehead, Houdini suffered the ruptured appendix that led to his untimely death. Perhaps he believed a little too whole-heartedly in his own immortality; evidence shows that Houdini would have died of peritonitis regardless of the blows landed by Whitehead.
Though his audience would never know how Houdini would have continued to forge ahead into the future, visitors to the exhibit are left asking questions: Would Houdini have simply faded or would his art have continued to be appreciated by an adoring public?
“Houdini came to fame when there wasn’t a dizzying entertainment culture as there is today,” noted Rapaport. Indeed, she said, Houdini’s success was due in part to the times in which he lived.
Houdini used available media, art posters and flyers, for example, to his full advantage to promote himself, right at the time the world was embarking on its own transformation. With the First World War, the Great Migration of African Americans to industrial cities in the north, the onset of the Jazz Age, the Harlem Renaissance and new proletarian social movements, this America was the perfect backdrop for Houdini’s escapades.
Despite the great showman’s hold on the collective imagination, Houdini, to whom Rapaport endearingly refers as “the Apostle of Audacity,” was vehemently against claims of the supernatural. He went so far as to actively debunk frauds claiming psychic powers, and made clear that his physical and mental abilities were honed by sheer practise and discipline. Though astonishing, Houdini’s feats were humanly possible and represented the very essence of what has been referred to as the American archetype of “hard work, ingenuity, modernity and renewal.” Houdini was small in stature, with the ability to hold his breath for several minutes. He could expand and contract his chest through breath exercises and dislocate some of his bones, allowing him to wriggle out of tightened restraints.
Seeing the striking images and fascinating film footage of his feats, Houdini’s strong features staring back at the viewer, one can get a sense of his grandeur. Through his humble beginnings and his very human death, the magic of Houdini contains hints of the hope and possibility he came to symbolize.
For more information, visit thejewishmuseum.org.
Shelley Lightburn lives and works in New York City.
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