signs of stendhal — [La magie nouvelle] C’est un art dont le langage...

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[La magie nouvelle] C’est un art dont le langage est le détournement du réel dans le réel. La magie est un moyen de se situer par rapport au réel – l’espace, le temps, les objets… – de manière spécifique. Le cinéma et la peinture détournent le réel dans l’espace plastique de l’image. Le théâtre et la littérature le suggèrent dans un espace métaphorique. La magie nouvelle, elle, se joue du réel dans le réel : c’est-à-dire dans le même espace-temps que ce que la perception offre à appréhender. Les images ne correspondent plus à une activité d’illusion; elles constituent un ordre propre de la réalité.

-Avant garde magician Raphaël Navarro, in an issue of Stradda, distinguishes his domain’s latest movement from other art forms and from previous types of magic that worked by falsifying representations of reality:

[‘La magie nouvelle’, or, ‘The New Magic’] is an art whose language is the re-appropriation of the real within the real. Magic is a way of relating to reality — space, time, objects… — in a specific way. Movies and paintings use images to re-appropriate reality. Theatre and literature do so with metaphor. But La magie nouvelle plays with the real within the real, which is to say, in the same space and time as its sensory perception. The images no longer correspond to an “illusion”; they constitute an order of their own reality.

Naturally I’m a big fan of the idea of art as a language — a system of signifiers that expresses meaning (i.e., a reality) from a certain point of view. Navarro makes the interesting claim that performance art is a pure language in that meaning can ‘speak itself’ without being translated into abstract signifiers, provided the spectacle consist of creative re-presentations of reality rather than the deceptions characteristic of traditional “magic.”