first encountered The Magician this past September
at the New York Art Book Fair at PS1 in Brooklyn.
Seated behind the deluxe boxed edition prototype
and a dramatic white-gloved instructional video
was The Magician’s assistant, silently awaiting
onlookers’ questions. Behind him, an imposing wall
of empty rope-strewn boxes ready to receive their
sharpened tomes. I introduced myself, asked about
the work’s creator, and handled a few of the volumes
while watching sequences of the instructional video in
order to check my work. The assistant was also doling
out little info nuggets as I went from one black book
to the next. As it turns out, the creator was on a plane
en route—which, later I learned was a fairly common
activity for him, almost unsettlingly so. I ran through
the complete selection once and said I would return
later after his arrival. When I did, I said my “hellos”
and was almost immediately displaced by a mountain
of a man wearing Google glass® and demonstrating
an air of palpable excitability. I had met my match for
the day at The Magician’s table and retreated to one of
the hundreds of other tables at the fair.
Weeks later, a storage trunk was delivered while I
was on my lunch break. Alongside said steamer was a
single item in a box, a specially configured magician’s
top hat with a power cord tailing it. The large silver
travel container was covered in the usual stickers
and simple directives—nothing to alert you to its
specialized contents. Once home, I parked the two
companions in my living area and flipped the locks
on the case. Nestled in a green foam void, there lay
a simple black wooden box sunken into the center
like a freshly buried coffin. A matching bottom plate
with caster wheels lay adjacent on the surface with
its movable parts pointing skyward. A blister pack of
double A’s was also at the ready.
I pulled the hat out of the cardboard flaps and set
it on the side of the table near the power outlet. Then,
placing a hand on the top and bottom of the black
box, I exhumed the case and brought it to the table
for examination, resting it on the matching wheeled
platform. And yet, I was told I would have to wait until
the morning to really dig in, as The Magician’s assistant
would be arriving at my doorstep. To convincingly
do the trick, one must learn from either a master, or
barring that, his assistant. The creator was again on a
plane. Neither my many years of opening and closing
books professionally—nor reading the signs inherent
in visual art—had apparently prepared me adequately
for such an endeavor. I waited in turn, and then I
watched. Then, once the assistant had left, I retraced
the steps and recreated the experience for myself.
The Magician in question is, in fact, an elaborate
artist’s book and object all in one, wondrously devised
and beautifully executed by Chris Byrne with the
Iassistance of Scott Newton (said assistant) and several other noteworthy collaborators. The project was an obsession for well over 10 years for Byrne, sketched out over time in notebooks and drawings, spanning the gamut of restroom signage and playing card
images, shadow puppets and animal forms, thinly-veiled sexuality, and a network of signs that flows
back and again throughout the dozen documents
housed within the box.
A solid plywood housing painted semi-gloss black
measures over a foot high and deep, with the width
housing the books and objects. The volumes vary in
format and materials and are inserted flush, like the
long flat-bladed knives that are slowly inserted into
the magician’s box with his beautiful assistant locked
inside. The black box is festooned with braided
white rope—though I prefer to imagine a spiraling
bathroom tissue helix—that wraps all sides, drawing
a capital “M” over the largest panels.
Appropriately enough, the cycle starts with
Theogony, a quarto-sized volume that details the
beginnings of our eponymous subject. Thus the
toilet paper roll opens as blank canvas, which after
use sets the ancient landform Pangea back into place,
the squares folding into an origami rabbit and into
the porcelain bowl, who, popping up, portends the
bathroom beginnings of The Magician on the following
page. All of the action is told through clean, graphic
renderings in primarily blacks and whites with cobalt
blue, yellow, red, and green accents. Mimicking
public bathroom signage and airplane safety manual
imagery, the story moves ahead utilizing a series of
graphic novel vignettes and panels. There are pull-up
flaps, double reveals with tab-pull hourglass birthing
action, family crest formation via parricide, a spinning
wheel prism with locking ring trick, an eye peering
