‘Far from being the simple expression of individual emotions, magic takes every opportunity to coerce actions and locutions. Everything is fixed and becomes precisely determined. Rules and patterns are imposed. Magical formulas are muttered or sung on one note to special rhythms …Gestures are regulated with an equally fine precision. The magician does everything in a rhythmical fashion as in dancing: and ritual rules tell him which hand or finger he should use, which foot he should step forward with. When he sits, stands up, lies down, jumps, shouts, walks in any direction, it is because it is all prescribed. Even when he is alone he is not freer than the priest at his altar… Moreover, words are pronounced or actions are performed facing a certain direction, the most common rule being that the magician should face the direction of the person at whom the rite is aimed.’

Marcel Mauss, General Theory of Magic [1950] tr. Robert Brain, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972, p.58.
Harry Houdini, inventor of a modern form of magic, debunker of spiritualism and improver of police handcuffs on several continents, featured amongst the earliest works of Simon Patterson. These were the 'Name Paintings' -– a modern form of portraiture consisting of the name in American typewriter script, silk–screened onto prepared canvas. As a student at Goldsmiths College, London, Patterson had been intrigued by a performance by Jon Thompson on the theme of escape, and followed it up through conversation with Thompson and by reading Houdini’s books on magic in the college library. Over a decade later, in the research and making of Escape Routine – a long-meditated piece in which Houdini’s classic tricks are relocated to the aisle of a civilian aircraft – Patterson has gone so far as to claim that in a way Houdini has functioned as a kind of alter-ego for him.

This is a striking thing for an artist to say. What does Patterson mean by it? Not knowing much about Houdini, I turned to a book. Houdini’s Box: On The Arts of Escape, by the psychotherapist Adam Phillips, is a fascinating retelling of Houdini’s life and captures well what was so original about the satisfactions his escapes offered to a paying audience. A man, getting into containers and restraints he had himself designed or had adapted from those in use by the police, prisons and psychiatric hospitals, and then getting out of them, unchanged. A man whose skills made him sought after by criminals seeking private lessons wherever he went, but whose appeal was not that of the law-breaking itself -- he was a respectable son, husband and father. A man who came to Britain to see Blériot’s flight across the English Channel in 1909, and came to Australia in 1910 to make what he hoped would be the first public flight there; a modern magician who recognized that powered flight transformed for good one age-old dream of escape.

Phillips writes: ‘For Houdini the way to be a good man in a bad time was to be an honest magician.’ That construction, ‘an honest magician’ perhaps reverberates with the choices facing contemporary artists. Patterson’s works have succeeded in retaining an honesty about what kind of escape or mental flight or pleasure art can offer; they are tricks carried out in full view of the audience, with, in intention, nothing concealed from view. His means as an artist are nevertheless quite different, as are the times. In varying ways he likes to cross-wire systems of thought so that the brain is licensed to seek connections, and to enjoy the peculiarities of recall and association; though this takes place in contexts that often stress route-finding, intellectual order (the periodic table, for example) and standardisation. In three works the Pantone system of colour identification has been linked with the ordered tones of football score announcements on the radio and the evocative power of football club names, present and historic, in Scotland, England and France. An airline and a tube map have been recast so that each node or destination on a possible journey is replaced with a name to be reprieved, or not, from somewhere in one’s brain: Toshiro Mifune, Amy Johnson, Fred Quimby, Oliver North. These works are highly popular with audiences, who return to them, and it is worth asking what they are returning to in these collisions of sense and order (the presentation is always lucid) with the illicit forms of mental and linguistic activity that names call forth. (Who was Fred Quimby and why, while we are trying to remember, does his name possess such aesthetic rightness? That honest monosyllable paired with the surname that sounds like an adjective that should exist: ‘I’m feeling a bit Quimby today.’ The name deserves a footnote in this case as it is relevant to the popular arts of escape. Quimby is the last name you see on the credits of Tom and Jerry: modern creatures who, having got into awful scrapes, come back for more with unabated enthusiasm. They are some of the only analogues Phillips finds, in his book, for the strangeness of what Houdini was actually doing for his audiences.)

Escape Routine, the work finally made as a result of Patterson’s interest in Houdini, is built around dualities. It is two sections, not quite repetitions of each other, and begins with stock footage of the take-off of a Boeing 747-400. Two male and two female flight attendants, in dark blue livery, demonstrate some of the familiar safety routine, a procedure that in many aircraft now is replaced by video instruction. The first half is narrated by Dilly Barlow in English, and is signed in an inset panel, the signer functioning as a solitary member of the audience when there are no words to translate. The second half is narrated by Togo Ogawa in Japanese, and is subtitled in English; bland music is heard throughout. Sometimes you are strongly aware of passengers acting as an audience for the flight attendants, sometimes the aircraft appears strangely empty and the strongly directed gaze of the crew singles you out as a spectator. ‘It is far more difficult to give a trial show to a house full of seats and one manager than to a packed house and no manager’, the narration informs us: for the safety announcements are interspersed with extracts from Houdini’s writings offering practical advice and instruction to performers. The escapes, when they happen, are done in a no nonsense way -- ‘In winning your audience remember that “manners make fortunes”.’ Though a man wriggling out of a straitjacket or a mail sack will always present a disturbing spectacle, a temporary maniac: we imagine that a transformation must surely be taking place, out of view, but when he emerges the man can only be himself again.

Transformation of a different kind is nevertheless offered in Escape Routine. When the aircraft fills with smoke, in imitation of a fire, it clears to reveal the flight attendants relocated to the stage of a theatre. (It can be revealed that two of the performers are actual escapologists, two are actual flight attendants, and that each had to learn each other’s routines. It is not quite clear if Patterson intends us to use this knowledge as we watch, and try to imagine who is the ‘real’ escapologist, the real flight attendant, or whether it was simply a part of the conception for the piece and a way of ensuring a degree of authenticity in the performances of both roles.) A Navy Colt pistol on what Patterson describes as a Wild West cushion -- that part of the world where the law is being defined being a significant part of Patterson’s imaginary, explored in many works -- appears before us. It is employed by the flight attendants in the catching of a bullet between the teeth. The sugar glass between the shootist and the 'catcher' shatters. At the end of the second section, the smoke filling the aircraft fades to the same blue curtain and gold proscenium, but the performance that takes place is one Houdini’s classic escapes. It is performed by Shahid Malik, an exceptional contemporary escape artist based in the north of England, assisted by his wife Lisa. Malik’s feet are chained and he is hoisted aloft. When free from the jacket ater wild wriggling he must use his powerful stomach muscles to bend up to release his feet, before the chain can be lowered. He comes forward, as if to take a bow, but then simply holds himself proudly. The curtain -– bearing the legend ‘SAFETY CURTAIN’ – is lowered. (The straitjacket used by Malik is red and green, which are also the colours of Pakistan – from where he originates. It is no accident, incidentally, that all the other performers are white Europeans. Malik’s participation in the work invites comparison of his career as an escapologist with that of Houdini, born Ehrich Weiss to a not especially successful family of Hungarian Jewish immigrants.)

Patterson’s integration of safety instruction and escape is a reinvention, for him, of the bringing together of dualities on which his work is based. Safety routines in air travel are a secular rite, a prescribed formula that assures by its familiarity as much as by what it teaches. The passing of the tradition of performance by flight attendants in favour of the video version can be mourned, for in that slight embarrassment with which the seated passengers become a temporary audience, they take part in the rite, and the journey by air is confirmed as a potentially transformative experience. For professional escapologists, on the other hand, though they are no longer familiar figures in popular entertainment, escape is necessarily a routine, something known, practised and understood so that its real risks can be controlled. Escape Routine -– a title that reverberates in a similar way to the phrase ‘an honest magician’ – is a revealing and unusually personal work for its maker. Amongst other matters it asks us what and perhaps whether we wish to escape, and also confirms air travel, familiar as it now is, as a modern experience of transformation, aided by carriers in their thousands of varied liveries. But my interpretations are intended as hesitant, and are offered cautiously. And Patterson himself can only show, not interpret; when he does talk about his own work, and this is curious, it is as though he is talking about it from the position of the audience rather than the creator. It is the quality of the showing that takes place in his work that is really of interest. Indeed, in the production of the work in Newcastle Patterson has himself mastered the wordless art of escaping from a straitjacket.
Ian Hunt
February, 2002.