The
Transubstantiation of Tommy Angel | feature article | MAGIC MAGAZINE -
Las Vegas | FEB 2006
The
Transubstantiation of Tommy Angel
By Alan Howard
Both “unredeeming and unredeemable,” Tommy Angel is not your
typical gospel magician. He is a brutal, narcissistic evangelist. Who
is it that has such harsh words for Mr. Angel? None other than his creator,
Jonathan Allen.Tommy Angel is a fictional gospel magician, the central
figure in a contemporary art project that bears his name. British artist
Jonathan Allen inhabits this faux religious performer, bringing him to
life primarily for a continuing series of black-and-white photographs.
His evocative images create a mood of combative faith, juxtaposing the
world of devotional religion with that of performance conjuring.
Allen’s own background lies not only in the visual arts, with five
years of university study in Fine Art, but in the world of magic as well.
Growing up in Surrey, Jonathan first encountered stage magic at the age
of seven. “The first trick I ever witnessed,” he recalls,
“was the sliding Die Box, performed at my school by none other than
the current president of the Magic Circle, Alan Shaxon."
His
other childhood influences were his two grandfathers. One of them had
a hobby of making “miniature fairground models which I helped paint
and assemble in a workshop which was full of trickery.” There, he
came across double-headed coins, loaded dice, and a mirror with a semi-circular
cut-out which Jonathan later discovered “had been an attempt to
recreate The Spider & The Fly illusion as described in Hopkins’
Magic, using my mother as the spider.” Jonathan’s other grandfather,
a research metallurgist, later took up landscape painting. “When
I came across his canvases and brushes in the family attic, a space which
I was already using to devise trick routines, the contents of my conjuring
box and his paint box got mixed up and have remained so, metaphorically,
ever since.”
The dual interests took hold. Allen performed regularly in his teens,
working birthday parties and other informal events. Without the presence
of formal magic schools, his higher education became focused largely on
“the study of the illusionism of painting.” Since that time,
his work as a visual artist has continued to explore the way in which
illusion interweaves with everyday life, and shapes contemporary culture
in often unexpected ways.
A number of years ago, Allen turned his attention to religious belief.
“I realized that gospel magic as we know it in the magic community
had left untouched a vast reservoir of imagery,” he says. “Theatricalised
magic performances (such as the beheading of John the Baptist) were a
part of the European medieval mystery plays well before gospel magic’s
father figure, Rev Charles H.Woolston, began performing his ‘object
lessons’ to Pennsylvanian congregations in the early 1900’s.
Being familiar with both art history and magic history, I sensed that
I could draw the two traditions together to develop a series of photographic
images on the theme of belief. With conflicting religious fundamentalism
reshaping global history, the theme seemed apposite. His performance persona
of “a gospel-magician-losing-his-faith” has grown into the
Tommy Angel character of today. Allen calls it “a visual exploration
of the affinity between the character of the evangelist and that of the
magician, both of which have the capacity to hold an audience in a spell
of enchantment through a careful manipulation of its systems of belief.”
Although conceived photographically, Tommy Angel’s first manifestation
was in the form of a live performance Allen gave in 2002 as part of A
Night of Performance Magic at a small theatre in Sheffield, England. Allen
recalls, “This event was mainly directed towards a performance art
audience and explored the way in which artists had drawn inspiration from,
or referenced the traditions of stage magic.” In that first show,
Allen/Angel levitated a cross, presented D’lites as a stigmata routine,
and pulled Jesus silks out of a church offering bag. His current ten-minute
act opens with him arrogantly striding onstage, pounding a wooden cross
into the palm of his hand like a hammer. After levitating it, he points
the cross at a female plant in the audience, who is drawn onstage and
‘converted’ into his assistant Miss.Direction. Angel then
shoots her with a Bang Gun, which unfurls a banner that reads “Faith.”
A remote-controlled statue of Jesus carrying a cross rolls across the
stage on a small wheeled platform, a glass floats in the air beneath a
bottle pouring communion wine, a bible bursts into flame, and Kevin James’
severed hand illusion is presented as a holy relic.
Commenting on his Tommy Angel show, Jonathan Allen says, “The material
is primarily satirical and gets a strong reaction from audiences who seem
to have no trouble unraveling the Christian and magic content with what
often feels from the stage like a kind of shocked empathy.”
Allen does not perform regularly, and certainly does not make his living
as a gospel magician. Photography is the medium in which Angel primarily
resides. The traditional relationship between performance and photography
is documentary, with the photographer documenting whatever takes place
on stage. Here the relationship is reversed, with Tommy Angel ‘stepping
out’ of the fictional world of Allen’s photographs to perform
live. Allen states, “Tommy Angel blurs the line between fact and
fiction, with the viewer never quite sure of his authenticity. In our
increasingly mediated culture, the idea that this somewhat malevolent
figure might be toying with our perceptions is an additionally suggestive
theme within the artwork itself.”
Allen uses the performances as a form of ‘live drawing,' helping
him to compose the still photographs in the same way a painter might make
studies before committing paint to canvas. “On stage, I sometimes
discover new choreographic gestures and imagery which I then selectively
recreate before the camera,” he says. Allen works closely with another
British photographer Mark Enstone to complete the life-sized photographic
tableaux he exhibits in galleries.
There are routines depicted in the photographs that are not necessarily
portrayed live onstage by Angel. Allen wants his viewers to pick up on
“the associations between the rich iconography of both magic and
Christian history.” To that end, his photos have reinterpreted a
dove act “in a way that reminds the viewer of the many scenes of
Christ’s baptism in Renaissance paintings, when the holy spirit
descended in the form of a white dove.” The traditional black-and-white
magician’s wand has become a cross, just one of many in a suitcase
full of such items, including a rope-cross, a diminishing cross, and a
cross with playing card pips at its ends. The ‘Pharos’ black
art self-decapitation recollects the beheading of John the Baptist, and
a paper-tearing routine — which in others’ hands would read
the word “Hello” — instead reads “Hell”
for Angel.
Allen feels he was probably drawn to the theme of religious belief due
to its strong presence in his childhood. “One of the first details
of magic history that struck me was the theory, often quoted by historians,
that the term ‘hocus pocus’ was derived from a lay mishearing
of the Catholic priests words as he transubstantiates the host, saying
in Latin ‘hoc est corpus’ (‘this is His body’).
Whether true or not, the seeds of the idea that conjuring and religious
belief were somehow connected were planted. You can feel the link by looking
at the word 'conjure' itself, the root of which is in the Latin verb conjurare,
meaning 'to swear together', or 'to form a conspiracy. I delighted in
stories of Catholic monks using wires and ‘engines’ to make
statues blink and cry, in the same way that priests had used stage illusion
technology to impress upon believers in earlier times.
Tommy Angel’s creator/portrayer intends that his acts “put
Christian history on a collision course with the history of magic whilst
at the same time suggesting a subtext about contemporary political culture.
Tommy Angel has been described as Billy Graham meeting David Copperfield
via Donald Rumsfeld.” Allen hopes that such layered meanings are
comprehensible both to viewers of the photographs and to audiences when
he performs live. “My wider message as an artist, and indeed as
a magician, is that the more subtle our expressivity becomes, the more
chance we have of navigating our through the uncertain world which we
seem to be creating for ourselves.”
Allen was one of the moving spirits behind a major art exhibition held
at the Site Gallery in Sheffield in 2002, entitled ‘Con Art’.
He describes the show as “an exploration of the way in which magicians
and visual artists ‘share an imagination’…we wanted
to find out what both communities could learn from one another, both historically
and in terms of contemporary practice.” The show came about after
Jonathan happened to sit next to Amercian art curator Helen Varola at
Monday Night Magic in New York in 1998. Jackie Flosso had encouraged Allen
to attend after Allen photographed him in his Manhattan shop the day before.
Featuring the work of other artists as well as Allen’s own, essays
in the catalogue for “Con Art” were written by, among others,
Eddie Dawes and Jeff Sheridan. The Tommy Angel photographs recently gained
media attention while on display as part of the contemporary art exhibition
“Variety” at the De La Warr Pavilion in the UK last year.
Tommy/Jonathan will be seen in more exhibitions in London this month,
as well as featuring in the first international Singapore Contemporary
Art Biennale this fall.
Allen has remained involved in the magic world outside of his Angelic
endeavors. A chance meeting with illusion designer Paul Kieve more than
six years ago has resulted in several collaborations. In 2004 they worked
together on Carnesky’s GhostTrain, including a version of Pepper’s
Ghost which allowed a performer to dance live with dozens of white doves.
The previous year, Allen assisted Kieve with his work for the film Harry
Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Other collaborators include British
magician Scott Penrose, with whom Allen performed onstage at the Magic
Circle, as the head in Penrose’s recreation of the Joseph Hartz
presentation of The Sphinx. In 2005, he assisted Penrose again for Dirty
Tricks, “a scurrilous television series recently screened on Britain’s
Channel4 television.” As consultants, both Kieve and Penrose have
contributed to Tommy Angel’s arsenal of evangelical weaponary.
Jonathan Allen has made a serious study of the culture of gospel magic,
more as an artist and sociologist than as an insider. “I do not
share the beliefs or evangelistic ambitions of the community we know as
gospel magicians,” he says. “The images I make are a meditation
on contemporary religious belief set against the political landscape of
our time. I sensed that there might be someone like Tommy Angel out there,
but I couldn’t find him. So I had to become him.”
The artist is committed to increasing magic’s “suggestiveness,”
and to exploring how magic as an art form “ought perhaps recognize
that it is profoundly resonant in a culture that is being increasing shaped
by illusions and fictions of many kinds.
“I have no problem whatsoever with magic being entertaining, and
even light... it’s just when it becomes only entertaining or only
light that I feel it can become culturally trivial.”
Jonathan Allen’s Tommy Angel photographs will be showing at David
Risley Gallery, London Jan12-Feb19. Tommy Angel will perform at Tate Britain
on February 3rd. Jonathan’s work will be featured at the first Singapore
Contemporary Art Biennale, an international exhibition with the theme
of “Belief,” running from September 4 through November 12,
2006."
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