Ricky Jay, "HOKUM THAT STANDS THE TEST OF TIME" By Michael Kimmelman

November 15, 2007

HOKUM THAT STANDS THE TEST OF TIME

By Michael Kimmelman

Los Angeles - Before I arrived here, a flier was
in my mailbox, an advertisement for "China China
- Le Grand Cirque." It described "an
unprecedented dimension of body control,
acrobatic precision and unbelievable capability."

My neighbors tossed their copies into the recycling bin.

Obviously they didn't know about Ricky Jay. For
years Mr. Jay, the sleight-of-hand artist and
archivist of all sorts of eccentric
entertainments, has been collecting historic
equivalents of the circus broadside, some dating
back to Shakespeare's day.

These are handbills mostly, not posters: single
sheets, usually printed on a letter press with
lots of hyperbolic language, not much color and
only sometimes a crude illustration, rarely fine
ones. They trumpet horses that jump through
hoops, armless dulcimer players, German
strongwomen who lift anvils with their hair,
contortionists, fire eaters, magicians and
pig-faced ladies.

"Extraordinary Exhibitions," here at the Hammer
Museum (it's only on until Nov. 25, so consider
yourself forewarned), presents part of his
collection, about 80 marvelous works. I got
together with Mr. Jay the other day. He was eager
to show me some prints related to Mathew
Buchinger, "The Little Man of Nuremberg," who
grew to 29 inches, married four times, fathered
14 children before he died, in his mid-60s, in
1739, and became famous for his exhibitions of
conjuring, swordplay, dancing, and the playing of
various musical instruments. Buchinger had no
arms or legs.

He drew too: incredible micrographic pictures,
visible only through a magnifying glass. Mr. Jay
owns Buchinger's great self-portrait with the
Psalms and the Lord's Prayer written into the
curls of his hair. "I am not amazed that people
kept remarkable samples of Buchinger's
calligraphy and microscopy, " Mr. Jay said -
neither was I - "but I am surprised that small,
undistinguished announcements of his appearances
at fairground booths and rooms in public houses
also survived."

He was talking about the plain handbills,
advertising Buchinger and others; like nearly
everything in the show they weren't supposed to
last longer than what they ballyhooed. Mr. Jay
calls them the "Thai menus of their day."

But the handbills must have been appreciated, or
else they landed by mistake in a pile on
someone's desk or inside someone's library, as
bookmarks, avoiding leaky roofs, small children
with soiled hands and generations of tidy owners,
to transmute into prized artifacts that passed to
the antiquarian market, from which Mr. Jay, a
century or two or three after they were printed,
acquired them.

And now they've landed in an art museum.

Art works that way. It can turn up, unexpectedly,
and once you see it, you can't imagine how you
missed it in the first place. The art is there in
the worn, throwaway sheets, dog-eared or tattooed
with the rusty imprints of paper clips. It's in
the typefaces, varied to catch your eye, and in
the wacky texts, which interest Mr. Jay, "as
much, if not more, than illustrations," he said.
"As I think of it now, I like either the
classically elegant or the downright peculiar.
That's what you would see in my house: a
black-and-white stone lithograph of Barnum, so
delicate most people think it is a pencil
drawing, in between an 18th-century unillustrated
playbill of a 'teritoepiest painter' capable of
rendering a picture in under two minutes of a
subject mentally chosen by a spectator, and an
image of a juggler balancing a piano on his head
while playing a trumpet."

Akin to that last one, there's an 18th-century
broadside here, an illustration for Duncan
MacDonald, a Scottish slack-wire walker. He is on
the wire, wearing stilts, balancing on his right
toe, a wheel supporting a plate sustaining a rack
of 16 wine glasses holding up a globe that props
up a piece of straw. At the same time he plays
the trumpet and the French horn, while two eggs
rest atop the hilt of a sword, whose tip is
poised on his nose. Also, a dog perches on a
chair that MacDonald balances on his left
forefinger. Beneath him spikes replace a safety
net.

It's hokum, no doubt, and the handbill may even
have been some Scottish piece of anti-Jacobean
propaganda, not an actual advertisement for a
real performer, as Mr. Jay mentions in the show's
accompanying book. But, whatever, it's glorious,
and an example of another sort of art: the art of
salesmanship.

Part of the attraction of these printed
curiosities, after all, stems from the sheer
chutzpah of their hucksterism. Any idiot can sell
a quality product that people need at a
reasonable price. But try passing off tickets for
a singing mouse or for an enormous head ("18 feet
in Length, 7 Feet in Breadth, and Weighing 1700
Pounds"), or for Joice Heth, age 161, now a
"living skeleton," weighing 46 pounds, once nurse
to infant George Washington, or so the handbill,
from 1835 claims. Surely patrons went to such
entertainments not because they were more
gullible than we are (considering what our
politicians have been selling us, how could they
be?), but because they wanted to judge for
themselves the quality of the con. Salesmanship,
in its extreme form, is a sleight of hand, a
trick, whereby people are persuaded, to buy in
cash or just mentally speaking, what is patently
not true and unbelievable.

Art is also about what's inexplicable and out of
the ordinary. Painting is the world's oldest
conjuring act, colored dirt smeared on a flat
surface to create an illusion. We may know it's
not real, but we still enjoy seeing how the magic
is done.

"Yes, yes, yes!" Mr. Jay said, about that
analogy. From Buchinger to the Chinese circus,
clearly nothing changes, except maybe the
refinement of the handbill. Life was just as rich
and perverse centuries ago, and people delighted
in the bizarre and subversive, just as we do.
It's history that sanitizes the past, makes order
out of chaos.

But art - whether it's the mnemonic art of Rabbi
Hirsch Dänemark, remembered in the show via a
19th-century German handbill, beautifully printed
in Fraktur typefaces on luxurious mold-made
paper, or whether it's the art of those ancient
pornographers who left naughty mosaics at Pompeii
- reminds us that the world has always been
messy, weird and wonderful.

"I like to show artist and designer friends
Buchinger's work," Mr. Jay said. He covers the
name while they look. Then, "after they rave, I
remove my hand so they can read the tag: 'Drawn
by me, Mathew Buchinger, without hands or arms.'"

Presto!

Slide Show @
<http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/11/14/arts/20071115_RICKYJAY_SLIDESHOW_in
dex.html>

<http://www.hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/131/work_707.htm>

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