Even for those of us, like myself, who didn’t live through the Apollo 11 moon landing, there’s something familiar and comforting about “In the Event of Moon Disaster,” an immersive installation from Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund (pictured above). Part of the Boca Raton Museum of Art’s sprawling, insightful and troubling “Smoke and Mirrors” exhibition, the piece invites viewers to step into a simulacrum of an American suburban living room ca. 1969. I’ve seen enough depictions of the moon landing broadcast—where 650 million viewers took in the astonishing feat in real time—that I felt right at home entering the artist’s detail-oriented tribute, my eyes scanning the vintage bar cart, the ficus trees, the wicker furniture, the oversized ashtray on the coffee table, the palm tree wallpaper.
Visitors are invited to sit on the sectional sofa and take in the news beaming from a boxy Zenith: It’s President Nixon, reporting on the events. But wait—apparently, tragedy his struck in the vacuum of space, as Nixon somberly informs us. “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.”
The words are real; they came from an eloquent memo, penned by political columnist William Safire in July of 1969, to be read if Armstrong and Aldrin’s interstellar adventure went south. Nixon, of course, never actually spoke these words, though a less-informed spectator could easily be duped. Such is the perilous reality of the A.I.-generated deepfake—the ability to conjure and manipulate reality, visually and aurally, through the tinkering of ones and zeroes. “In the Event of Moon Disaster” is a fascinating, three-dimensional experiment in alternative history, but it’s also a warning. When anything can be faked, whom can we trust?
Such considerations are at the heart of “Smoke and Mirrors.” They don’t constitute the entirety of the exhibition, which consumes the first floor of the museum, but they act as a shadowy terminus of sort, the natural end point of magical thinking, where innocent stagecraft is manipulated for more nefarious means. For all the humor and whimsy in the exhibition, it’s a show about the double-edged sword of deception.
It opens, appropriately enough, with a tribute to a globally admired stage magician in “The Amazing” James Randi, who celebrated the mechanics of a well-mastered illusion—and pursued a dual career debunking those who claimed to be real-life conjurers. A gallery wall is plastered with newspaper articles about Randi and his many spectacular tricks: dangling upside-down from a ski lift, suspending himself on a wire above Niagara Falls, decapitating Alice Cooper on one of the shock rocker’s tours.
On the opposite wall are works by Randi’s widow, the artist Jose Alvarez, who has continued to champion Randi’s engrained skepticism toward the supernatural. His video work “The Guessing Game” presents a humiliating montage of the celebrity medium James Van Praagh deploying what appear to be cold-reading techniques on audiences—speaking in generalities, throwing out random letters supposedly indicating the names of lost loved ones, recycling his own material. The problem with works like this is that they don’t prove anything, especially when anti-spiritualism is its own dogma. An advocate for mediumship could just as easily compile a collage of Van Praagh’s remarkable and specific “hits.” (Not that I would trust the objectivity of that approach, either; I for one am more skeptical of editing than I am of psychic power.)
I was more taken with Alvarez’s “Dejeurner Sur Le Dish,” in which the artist, adopting a mystical persona, carries a cane around a radio telescope, moving the object around like it’s a divining rod. The inclusion of an eerie soundtrack tricks our brains into believing we’re watching something otherworldly; such is the power of outside stimuli to disarm our defenses.
These pointed examinations into the relationship between reality and illusions segue into works that are closer to pure fun. Through the sly and meta videos and photographs of Christian Jankowski, we meet the members of an Italian cultural fund that integrates magic into its workdays. We see an executive perform a dice trick on one hand while on a business call on the other; in one video, a coworker converses with the severed head of another. This magical multitasking suggests the power of illusion to infuse childlike joy into the mundane.
So too does Jenny Dixon’s “Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit,” a collection of ceramic sculptures of bunnies in various states of emergence from top hats, which whimsically plays off one of the oldest tricks in the book. Absurdist humor is central to Kristin Lucas’ “Magic Eyes Cream Headache Sandwich,” a video triptych, on three tilted televisions, in which a child attempts to eat a piece of cake with hands that are probably not his own.
There are so many dazzling works in “Smoke and Mirrors” that I could spend all day writing about them—just as you could spend a full day at the museum enjoying them all. Like Glenn Kaino’s tribute to magician Ricky Jay, which offers the iconic trickster’s silhouette in the form of playing cards lodged into the gallery walls like Chinese stars. Or Sarah Charlesworth’s “Acts of Illusion” series of magical phenomena in oval and oblong frames against black voids, which lend a stark sense of realism to the acts simply by erasing context. In her “Proof of Telekinesis,” bent cutlery floats across the canvas like so much space debris.
There’s an entire gallery at the end of “Smoke and Mirrors” devoted to the work of Tony Oursler that is like a cabinet of curiosities on steroids. A fiberglass merman with a video-projected human face mutters to us, and seems to follow our gaze like the Mona Lisa. Nearby, a life-size recreation of the Cardiff Giant hoax lies at rest on a coffin. A couple of steps away, the severed head of Alice Cooper serves as a callback to the beginning of the exhibition, and there’s a literal hall of mirrors in the form of “Crystals,” a quartzlike cluster embedded with religious, psychedelic and magical visions that, like so much of this exhibition, we’re not sure are real.
I haven’t even touched on the gallery devoted to the sociopolitical pranksters the Yes Men, the critique of the addictive allure of ChatGPT, and artist Jeanette Andrews’ interactive exploration of the relationship between magic and spycraft. This is partly because I don’t want to spoil too much. This exhibition is so wonderful because it is so surprising. There is so much to see and do in “Smoke and Mirrors,” and if you’re like me, you’ll grow to appreciate the feeling of being thrown off guard by what’s in front of you—as a truth-seeking traveler navigating the nebulous ether between art and life, magic and mystery, knowns and unknowns.
“Smoke and Mirrors” runs through May 12 at Boca Raton Museum of Art, 501 Plaza Real, Boca Raton. Call 561/392-2500 or visit bocamuseum.org.
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