Post Cards for Designers (2)- The Magician
8
WHAT IF LE CORBUSIER HAD LAVISHED AS MUCH PRAISE ON THE TAXIDERMIST OR THE MAGICIAN, AS THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGINEER?
Transcript of Post Cards for Designers (2)- The Magician
WHAT IF LE CORBUSIER HAD LAVISHED AS MUCH PRAISE ON THE TAXIDERMIST OR THE MAGICIAN, AS THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGINEER?
!
A wizard in evening dress, the professional magician is a master of applied psychology. He begins by demonstrating an underlying connection between typical-looking objects, behaviours and apparently immutable principles, then proceeds to subvert these laws, with gusto. !
It is an oddly predictable and complicit kind of wonderment. The objects purport to be ‘ordinary’, even while their appearance off-stage would be uncanny.
And yet they have a strong, emotional connection with everyday anxieties: the possession that is lost and found, the body that is broken and restored, the mind that can be read.
* * *
The performance of magic is a curious mixture of showmanship and salesmanship, a superstitious ritual and a popular scientific demonstration.
* * *
The performance shows how cultural stereotypes and sensory cues frame the idea of an application or a function.
* * *
Close-up, the cardboard and plastic ‘props’, have the ‘immateriality’ of a concept car, a perfume brand, or a medical placebo.
[Images taken from Max Andrew’s Vampire Magic Catalogue 1954]. !
