Tuesday, December 5, 2023

Magical Thinking in Contemporary Art

The First Art Newspaper on the Net

Established in 1996

Tuesday, December 5, 2023

Smoke and Mirrors: Magical Thinking in Contemporary Art


Film still from Imponderable, by Tony Oursler. 5-D feature length film, 90 minutes (2015).
BOCA RATON, FLA.- As South Florida's museums present their highly anticipated offerings for Art Basel Season, the Boca Raton Museum of Art is especially poised to lead the pack with the world premiere of Smoke and Mirrors: Magical Thinking in Contemporary Art, and the sleek new high-speed rail station just blocks from the Museum's front door, luring visitors with a quick escape off the beaten path from the art fairs. The new group show is curated by Kathleen Goncharov, the Museum’s Senior Curator, and features 30 contemporary artists. This is the only exhibition in South Florida (and in the entire Southeast U.S.) to win the prestigious Teiger Foundation 2023 Grant Award for Curator-Led Projects (among only 13 museum shows selected nationwide in the Single Exhibition category), recognizing boundary-pushing curatorial work. The works in this exhibition crack through the looking glass of illusion and beliefs. While performative magic is certainly celebrated here, many of these artists are acclaimed for tackling the thorny issues of disinformation, hoaxes, cults, conspiracy theories, “alternative facts,” and the rise of deceptive artificial technologies in our culture. When exposed, these deepfakes often reveal a greater truth. According to the Teiger Foundation site, the competition “Acknowledges the uncertainty, fear, and loss in our time of enormous change, and supports innovative curatorial work committed to experimentation and creativity in exhibitions, championing curators who engage in the pressing conversations of our time. Curators are thinkers and leaders who play multiple, changing roles in their communities.” Portrait of the artist Jeanette Andrews. Photograph by Saverio Truglia. The exhibition is anchored by an entire gallery of phantasmagorical installations by the globally acclaimed artist Tony Oursler, celebrated for asking the pressing question: what happens when the occult is confronted by its mirror image of technology? Among the 30 artists are: Urs Fischer, Alfredo Jaar, Jim Shaw, Sarah Charlesworth, Glenn Kaino, Christian Jankowski, Kristin Lucas, Jane Hammond, Gavin Turk, Michael Ray Charles, Faisal Abdu'Allah, Mark Thomas Gibson, Robin Tewes, Jeanette Andrews, Stephen Berkman, Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A.), Jacob Hicks, and The Yes Men. This timely exploration pulls back the curtain on modern-day deceptions, often perpetrated for political or financial gain – before our very eyes. Today’s hoaxes, and the blatant lies posted on social media, are often fabricated with new technology yet have earlier precedents in America’s history. The exhibition’s temporal twist juxtaposes parallels between our current struggles and the same peculiar fascinations with magical thinking during the late 1800s and early 1900s – when the deadly flu pandemic and World War I created an epidemic of fake mediums, seances, and the golden age of stage magic. Fast-forward to today, and these artists investigate how the trauma of our own pandemic, climate change, political extremism, violence, and the disruption of societal norms are spurring belief and fascination with the paranormal. An explosive increase in supernatural characters in popular culture, and dangerous hoaxes that are proving difficult to discredit, are rampant again now.“Our City is honored by this national acclaim, and that this museum exhibition is the only one in the entire Southeastern U.S. selected by the Teiger Foundation 2023 Grant Award for Curator-Led Projects in the single exhibition category," says Scott Singer, the Mayor of the City of Boca Raton. "We are proud of the stellar team at the Boca Raton Museum of Art for shining the national spotlight on South Florida’s museum scene.” The Magician, by Jacob Hicks. This ChatGPT A.I. was trained by Hicks to imagine itself as a fortune teller, to be aware that it is an art project, and to know that Hicks wants it to present as a false persona. (2023). “The caliber of the contemporary artists in this exhibition is earning major attention for the new season at the Boca Raton Museum of Art,” says Irvin Lippman, the Executive Director of the Museum. “The correlation between magic and artmaking has always loomed large, and this exhibition takes this idea one step further, revealing strong connections between today and earlier periods in history when crises led to magical thinking. Art itself is a process of alchemy, transforming physical medium into illusions of beauty, messages that have the power to both inspire and manipulate audiences.” HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE EXHIBITION The largest gallery in the exhibition is transformed by Tony Oursler into an otherworldly landscape titled Creature Features. The Museum has commissioned several new installations by Oursler, exploring what the artist calls the “delicate balance between creativity, mysticism and scientific ingenuity.” Based on American folklore, legends, and hoaxes likened to today’s urban myths, viewers will walk into a dream world where the artist’s collection of the unbelievable comes to life. Tony Oursler is one of the world’s foremost pioneers of video art, working with moving images, installation and projection. His inspirations include conspiracy, mysticism, narrative evolution and facial recognition technologies. Viewers are often disoriented and disarmed upon entering his installations. Oursler’s video art is celebrated for transcending traditional screens, TV monitors and surfaces. His work jumps out at viewers via visual experimentation, described by his gallerists as harking back to camera obscura and psychedelia – through the surreal environments he creates with bots and intimate digital effigies, optical devices, sculptures, and ethereal talking automatons. Central to Oursler’s work is his endless fascination with how technology impacts humanity. For several decades, the artist has amassed a vast archive of more than 3,000 historical materials pertaining to the paranormal fringes, pseudo-science that connects to cults, and the intersection of science and the occult. The Amazing Randi, movie poster The realms of magic and illusion are generationally embedded into the artist’s DNA. Oursler’s grandfather was a magician who exposed trickery used in seances by the Spiritualists of his era, who lied to desperate widows yearning to communicate with relatives who died in World War I. Oursler’s father founded a magazine titled Angels on Earth, dedicated to spiritual encounters. The artist’s spirit world fascination also includes his admiration for mediums and mystics who never charged for their services, falling outside the realm of financial fraud. Imponderable, Oursler’s cinematic 5-D experience, has only been exhibited at MoMA in New York and was created using Pepper’s Ghost, a mirror illusion technique first used in the 1800s in theatrical ghost plays. Other installations in Oursler’s Creature Features landscape include: Fairy (a fantasy projection of a performance by Katiana Rangel); Cardiff Giant (Oursler’s never-before-seen life-size recreation of one of the most famous archaeological hoaxes in American history); Flatwoods Monster (a re-living of the 1952 legendary UFO extraterrestrial folklore encounter); Alice Cooper Head (inspired by The Amazing Randi’s infamous creations for Alice Cooper’s concert tour in the 1970s); Crystals (created in part with artificial intelligence, exploring the digital divine, 5-D technology, near-death experiences, and hallucinogenic states); Charles Doyle Fairy Painting (based on his fantastical paintings of Victorian-era fairies and other fantasy themes; and Merma (described as “beautiful in a horrifying way”). In 2000, Oursler was awarded the U.S. Art Critics Association ICA New Media Award. Oursler has been selected for solo exhibitions throughout the United States and is currently one of America’s most internationally exhibited artists (with solo shows in more than 25 countries). Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund’s installation In Event of Moon Disaster was made using sophisticated deepfake technology. In 1969 most of the world celebrated the Apollo 11 crew’s first successful moon landing, the exceptions being conspiracy theorists claiming it was all staged. In this work, Panetta and Burgund ask: what would have happened if the mission had gone wrong? Levitating Woman, by Sarah Charlesworth. Cibachrome with lacquered wood frame (1992-93). Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery. ©The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth. Their Moon Disaster installation reimagines this seminal event to illustrate the possibilities of deep-fake technologies. In this alternative history, visitors time-travel to a Florida living room where Richard Nixon appears on a television set to announce the tragedy. “We hope our work will spark critical awareness among the public. We want them to be alert to what is possible with today’s technology, to explore their own susceptibility, and to be ready to question what they see and hear as we enter a future fraught with challenges over the question of truth,” said Francesca Panetta. The spirit of the beloved magician, author and actor, Ricky Jay is also prominent in this exhibition. He was famous for tricks in which he threw playing cards, and was able to pierce a watermelon with a playing card from 160 feet. The artist Glenn Kaino tips his hat to Ricky Jay by creating a large-scale wall portrait of Ricky Jay by throwing cards that will puncture and adhere to the museum wall, forming the shape of the famous magician’s face. This throwing cards trick is one of Ricky Jay’s stage mysteries, and can only be installed at museums by special preparators with no other witnesses around, to avoid revealing the late magician’s secrets. The celebrated artists/activist duo known as The Yes Men have been exposing corporate malfeasance since the early 1990s, by convincingly impersonating government officials, corporate officers, and salesmen at real-life events. In addition to videos of the pair’s many hoaxes, their installation features the inflatable Survivaball, an imagined “new Halliburton product” the Yes Men presented at an insurance conference about catastrophic loss, tricking the attendees of the conference into believing it was all real. Two timely experiences will confront museumgoers in this exhibition: one is an artwork by Jacob Hicks utilizing ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence, and the other is a video about deepfakes edited by the Museum team. The new artwork by Hicks allows viewers to ask questions to a virtual magician and receive answers generated by the ChatGPT A.I. Jacob Hicks trained the ChatGPT A.I. to imagine itself as an ancient entity capable of telling the future, to be aware that it is an art project, and to be aware that Hicks wants it to present as a false persona. For the deepfakes video encounter, the Museum team will regularly update a video screen titled DEEPFAKE-O-RAMA with the latest deepfakes in the political news cycle during the run of the exhibition. The Museum commissioned the artist Jeanette Andrews (also a professional magician) to create a new interactive work titled magi.cia.n, inspired by the recently declassified CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception, written by two professional magicians. She created a “clean room” in the museum – an enclosed, transparent box with two holes equipped with gloves used by the viewer to flip through a blank journal that visually transforms into a magic book and then into a spy craft technical manual before one’s very eyes. The installation, surrounded by black curtains, also includes a video in which Andrews oscillates between her intricate sleight-of-hand as a stage magician, and then, into a CIA agent that uses the same skills for espionage in the real world. Both of her parallel realms rely on learning secret information, rehearsing until she gets it just right, and split-second timing. Also featured is a major video artwork by Christian Jankowski titled Magic Numbers ruminating on the parallels between magic tricks and the world of finance, and the very real power of illusion; Lindsey White’s leg of the famous illusionist Harry Blackstone suspended from the ceiling; Faisal Abdu’Allah’s Duppy Conqueror II, an Afro-Caribbean conjuror spirit; Gavin Turk’s video recreation of the infamous 18th-century Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing automaton; the late Sarah Charlesworth’s entire Natural Magic suite of eleven large color photographs; a self-portrait by Alfredo Jaar dressed up as a magician; and the fantastical photographs by Stephen Berkman, where he resurrects a vanished world of imaginary characters using period photographic lenses from the 1800s and an archaic glass plate process. THE AMAZING RANDI The exhibition also features an homage to one of the most notorious investigators of the paranormal, James Randi (a.k.a. The Amazing Randi, 1928-2020). Randi lived near the Boca Raton Museum with his husband and life partner of 34 years, the artist Jose Alvarez D.O.P.A. Randi was known for sponsoring the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, offering one million dollars to anyone who could prove a supernatural or paranormal ability under agreed-upon scientific testing criteria. More than a thousand people applied to this challenge between 1964 and 2015, but none were successful. Randi originally defined himself as a conjuror, and began his career as a professional stage magician and escape-artist in 1946. In later years, he preferred to call himself a skeptical educator, and was a MacArthur Fellow "Genius Grant" winner. He maintained that magicians are honest liars because the audience is in on the deception. The section in the Smoke and Mirrors exhibition honoring the life of The Amazing Randi includes ephemera from his storied career, including his numerous television appearances on NBC's Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and never-before-seen curiosities from Randi’s life-long collection of arcana, including his tour with the wildly theatrical 1970s rock star Alice Cooper. Two of Jose Alvarez D.O.P.A.’s current magic-related paintings are featured in the exhibition. The PBS film An Honest Liar documented Randi’s investigations to expose charlatans. Watch the trailer at imdb.com/title/tt2246565 From the PBS website: “He discovered that faith healers, fortune tellers, and psychics were using his beloved magic tricks to swindle money from the credulous. Randi devoted his life to exposing con artists, with wit and over-the-top showmanship all his own. An acolyte of Harry Houdini, Randi became a famed magician-turned-debunker, with a series of unparalleled investigations and elaborate hoaxes. His grand schemes fooled scientists, the news media, and a gullible public, but always in service of demonstrating the importance of skepticism and the dangers of magical thinking.”

Hydrofoil Tech

Hydrofoil Comeback?

It seems like a child’s daydream—what if you mashed together a boat and a plane? As Magdalena Del Valle reports for Businessweek, that was the thinking for Soviet inventors in the 1960s, who invented the ekranoplan, or screenplane, a vehicle that could skim the surface of the water.

Viceroy 12-passenger seaglider by Regent. Source: Regent

But are they … back? She writes:

Billy Thalheimer says it’s time for another look, at least when the idea is paired with hydrofoil technology. By adding electric propulsion and hydrofoils to improve balance, a revamped ekranoplan—he calls it a seaglider—can offer a carbon-free alternative for overwater routes such as New York to Boston, Los Angeles to San Diego, or Miami to the Bahamas. “There is something inherently novel about a seaglider,” says Thalheimer, an aerospace engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who in 2020 co-founded Regent Craft Inc., a Rhode Island company dedicated to reviving the idea.

There is some serious money behind Regent:

Regent, an acronym for Regional Electric Ground Effect Nautical Transport, is backed by Silicon Valley heavyweights Peter Thiel and Mark Cuban, and in April it appointed Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing Co.’s former chief executive officer, to its advisory board. In October, Regent raised $60 million from investors including Japan Airlines, Lockheed Martin, and the UAE’s Strategic Development Fund.

For more on this retrofuturistic boat-plane, go here.

In the 1960s, Soviet engineers built a mashup of a plane and a boat that could fly a few feet above an ocean or lake at high speeds. The vehicle, which they called the ekranoplan, or screenplane, took advantage of a property of airflow that gives extra lift by pushing air down to the surface. But only a few dozen ekranoplans were produced—including one dubbed the Caspian Sea Monster—and the idea was largely forgotten.

Billy Thalheimer says it’s time for another look, at least when the idea is paired with hydrofoil technology. By adding electric propulsion and hydrofoils to improve balance, a revamped ekranoplan—he calls it a seaglider—can offer a carbon-free alternative for overwater routes such as New York to Boston, Los Angeles to San Diego, or Miami to the Bahamas. “There is something inherently novel about a seaglider,” says Thalheimer, an aerospace engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who in 2020 co-founded Regent Craft Inc., a Rhode Island company dedicated to reviving the idea.

Regent says the hydrofoils—winglike structures under the hull—can solve the limitations the Soviets faced, such as instability, difficulty operating in rough seas and the high speeds needed for takeoff. And without kerosene-burning jet engines, Thalheimer says, seagliders will cost far less than commercial aircraft to operate and maintain.

Regent, an acronym for Regional Electric Ground Effect Nautical Transport, is backed by Silicon Valley heavyweights Peter Thiel and Mark Cuban, and in April it appointed Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing Co.’s former chief executive officer, to its advisory board. In October, Regent raised $60 million from investors including Japan Airlines, Lockheed Martin, and the UAE’s Strategic Development Fund.

The company says seagliders can be technically classified as boats even though they’re designed to fly about 30 feet above the water. Consequently, in most places, they would fall under maritime authority; In the US, that means regulation by the Coast Guard rather than the Federal Aviation Administration, which could make the route to market quicker. Thalheimer, though, insists Regent will adhere to all flight security guidelines. “There is an incredible amount of safety analysis and procedure that goes in,” he says.

Thalheimer says the company has completed successful tests of a remote-controlled prototype with an 18-foot wingspan. And it’s working on a full-scale version with a wingspan of 64 feet—slightly more than a plane of similar capacity—that it plans to test next year. Regent aims to begin commercial operations as early as 2025, offering a 12-passenger model with a range of 180 miles. Later in the decade, it aims to introduce a version that will carry up to 100 passengers.

Richard Pat Anderson, an engineering professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida questions Regent’s ability to deploy its seaglider as quickly as Thalheimer predicts. Although the science behind the idea is sound, he says, a battery-powered Cessna prototype that seats 12 people has a range of only about 25 miles. And he says Regent is overly optimistic in its predictions regarding FAA approval. “If they’re forced to be regulated under FAA rules,” he says, “it could be years before it wins certification.”

The goal is to make craft that can be recharged in as little as 15 minutes. Regent says its aircraft will depart from standard docks or piers, cruising the harbor at low speeds while floating on their hulls. Once in open water, they’ll rise onto hydrofoils at about 50 miles per hour. Then taking advantage of what’s called the wing in ground effect, they’ll lift off from the hydrofoils and travel just above the surface at speeds up to 180 mph, meaning it might take just over an hour to reach downtown Boston from Manhattan.

France’s Brittany Ferries, Philippine air charter operator INAEC, and Hawaiian regional carrier Mokulele Airlines have placed nonbinding orders for the two models. “We believe they will be successful and that they will be timely,” says Stan Little, CEO of Surf Air Mobility, the parent of Mokulele. “The team they have assembled proved to us that they have the best shot at perfecting the technology.”