EDIFYING, Christine Rebet, Poison Lecture, New York

EDIFYING
Christine Rebet, Poison Lecture
Wednesday, January 13th, 7 p.m.
At X INITIATIVE, 548 W 22nd Street


The Bruce High Quality Foundation University is pleased to announce its fourth Edifying evening.
In the lineage of John Cage's Lecture on Nothing (1950), or Robert Morris’s 1964 performance 21.3 where the artist lip-synched a film of art historian Erwin Panofsky reading his Studies On Iconology (1939), Edifying, a series of performance-lectures curated by Beatrice Gross, presents a selection of contemporary performative events concerned with the dramatization of knowledge and its dissemination.

Installation view, "Modern Magician by Jonathan Mulholland," 2009.

Christine Rebet's Poison Lecture, originally commissioned by Future Art Research (F.A.R.) at Arizona State University, re-stages the first formal lecture ever dedicated to the art of magic, delivered in Boston in 1927 by renowned conjuror John Mulholland.

The re-created text, derived from Mulholland's numerous, now-declassified reports and manuals (Quicker than the Eyes, The Art of Illusion or Magic in the Making), carries hidden references to his later career during the Cold War, teaching secrets of the trade to Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) operative agents. Lending his unusual abilities to the service of his country's safety and leadership, Mulholland revealed himself a valuable master of patriotic trickery and deception to American spies in the 1950s.

While Mulholland (Zach Rockhill) delivers an authoritative expose about the history and mechanisms of magic, his assistant, a young professional magician (Josh Rand), demonstrates, with the help of makeshift props, tricks inspired by legendary conjurors such as Robert Houdin, Dai Vernon or Harry Lorayne,complementing live the slide-projection of found images culled from textbooks, catalogues and newspapers. Unraveling a dazzling polyphony of text, still and moving illustrations, Rebet's performative piece combines the secretive worlds of magic and espionnage, entertainment and geopolitics, mass captivation and government, to wittily expose their kindred spirit.

With a background in painting and scenography, Christine Rebet has mainly developed in the past ten years animated films and performances. Her work has been shown internationally, among others locations, at Le Magasin, Grenoble; Musée d’Art contemporain, Lyon (France); Ittinger Kunst Museum, Switzerland; Parasol-unit, London; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo; Moore Space, Miami; Guild and Greyskhul Gallery, and The Kings County Biennial/James Fuentes & Kidd Yellin, New York. Rebet's work will be included in the next SITE/Santa Fe Biennial.

Christine Rebet is represented by Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris.

For further information, visit:

Christine Rebet