Houdini at the Jewish Museum in New York

As Darwin means evolution and Freud means sex, Houdini means magic: The name and the thing are interchangeable. Harry Houdini perfected his stunts a hundred years ago, and some magicians have replicated them since. But no one will ever recreate the combination of man and moment that enabled Houdini to become not merely the symbol of his ancient craft but the craft itself incarnate.

Who was the man? Erik Weisz, a.k.a. Ehrich Weiss, was born in Budapest in 1874, a Jew in a hotbed of anti-Semitism. His father, a rabbi, emigrated to Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1878, where Jews were no doubt too rare to be actively hated. From being all too visible, he went to being nearly invisible: the quintessential Diaspora experience.

Every Jew in the New World has inherited this paradox, of being seen and not seen, present and not present, at the same time. Woody Allen made a fine and almost forgotten movie about it: Zelig. Harry Houdini, as Weisz/Weiss (adopting the name of a famous French magician) would come to call himself, turned the paradox into a calling, and a living: the ultimate Jewish success story. His genius was not to disappear and reappear, to enact the most primitive of childhood games and the most sacred of religious rituals, but to make his audience care.

For fifteen hundred years Jews had been wished off the planet by what had become the most powerful faith in the world, or tolerated merely as the symbol of reprobation or the harbinger of apocalypse. Houdini was the first Jew since Jesus who got people to care about his miraculous survival, and to witness his self-resurrection day-by-day and year-by-year. What's more, he got them to pay good money to see it.

Jumping handcuffed from a bridge

Performance art is by definition a perishable commodity, but it was inevitable that the Jewish Museum in New York would get around to a Houdini exhibition. No artist in history has ever made personal identity the subject of his art as Houdini did, not by asserting his ego— the usual technique— but by concealing it. His showmanship was sure and innate, but, as with all great showmen, it contained a streak of naiveté, of self-effacement, that won audiences to him instantly.

The current exhibition includes a few films of Houdini performing his stunts, including one in which he jumps handcuffed off a bridge and emerges, arms waving, from the river below. What's interesting isn't so much the stunt itself as the preparation for it, as Houdini rapidly sheds the outer clothing he wears over his bathing suit and gets himself cuffed. Houdini is all business here, a short, supple man completely uninterested in building crowd interest and tension (he has that already), but simply getting on with it, as if simulated suicide were the most natural thing in the world.

Ritual Jewish drowning

The background of this particular performance, unstated and without doubt unconscious on Houdini's part, is a reenactment of the familiar medieval ritual of drowning Jews. In this case, however, it's the Jew who is master of the event— who pronounces sentence, enacts the punishment and accords himself pardon all in one, only to repeat the show in ever-varied formats and ever-new places. Houdini in a strait jacket; Houdini in a sealed milk drum or a trunk; Houdini shackled upside down and dangled between skyscrapers: a man defying personal mortality and rescuing his race from collective extinction, and all this, in the most innocent way possible, as entertainment.

Houdini could attract an audience of 80,000 just by showing up, as he did one day in Providence, Rhode Island. (A very canny businessman, Houdini knew that al fresco exhibitions, particularly in front of newspaper offices, were the best way to attract a paying indoor crowd at night.)

Today, brief footage, still photos, old posters and retired equipment (some reconstructed) are all that remain of the Houdini phenomenon. But Houdini has proven a fascinating subject for later artists, and much of the Jewish Museum's show is devoted to work inspired by him.

Mailer's papal blessing

Perhaps the best known of this art is Parts II and V of Matthew Barney's Cremaster series, which made a stir when it was exhibited in the 1990s. Part II, recreated here, consists of flightless Jacobin pigeons in a decorated cage whose principal object is a small iron coffin. In Part V, we see a rear view of Norman Mailer (the anti-Houdini, a man whose life was in large part dedicated to calling attention to himself), his arms upraised in what looks, according to taste, like a papal blessing or a dictator's salute.

Numerous other artists are represented as well, notably Whitney Bedford, Petah Coyne, Jane Hammond, Tim Lee, Vik Muniz, Ikuo Nakamura, Deborah Orapallo, Raymond Pettibon and Christopher Wood. For Oropallo, in particular, Houdini seems a continuing presence.

Houdini has of course inspired films as well, clips of which are on display too. None of these, inevitably, is terribly good— the 1953 Tony Curtis version is perhaps the best known— but they keep getting made. It seems as though we're still waiting for one last, death-defying escape by the man variously known as The Supreme Ruler of Mystery, The World-Famous Self-Liberator, The Handcuff King and— my personal favorite— The Prince of the Air.

Spiritualist quacks

The darkened halls of the exhibition rooms convey a crypt-like feel, appropriately enough. Might the great magician, indeed, reappear?

But Houdini spent much of the last decade of his life— he died, prosaically enough, of peritonitis— on a quixotic crusade to expose the fraudulent claims of the then-popular Spiritualist movement, which claimed to be able to communicate with the dead. His intense and inconsolable grief at the loss of his mother no doubt underlay this preoccupation.

But the Master of Mortality was professionally offended as well. The cheap tricks of Spiritualism—table-rapping, plaster apparitions, etc.— gave honest magic a bad name. You're either fully resurrected in the flesh, as Houdini so often was, or not at all.♦


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