"Review of Wordplay: Matthais Buchinger's Drawings from the Collection of Ricky Jay (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 8 January – 11 April 2016)," Renaissance Studies 31:5 (November)

Wordplay: Matthias Buchinger's Drawings from the Collection of Ricky Jay (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 8 January-11 April 2016). Exhibition publication Ricky Jay, Matthias Buchinger: 'The Greatest German Living. Los Angeles: Siglio, 2016. 160pp, colour illustrations, 39. 95, ISBN 978-1-938221-12-5. A few weeks ago, I visited the famous Coney Island Circus Sideshow for the first time. It was a weekday afternoon, and there were only a handful of visitors in attendance, but they were enthusiastic. Ray Valenz served as the master of ceremonies, as well as the main performer. He was the Human Blockhead, and hammered nails into his face with a casual sangfroid. He sat an audience member (who admitted to having heart problems) on an 'electric chair', and lit lightbulbs and then torches off her tongue; he ate some fire. Valenz introduced Betty Bloomerz as his sister, though her bio tells us that she 'arrived in Coney Island blindfolded and bound, suspended upside down, carried by a giant stork with a plastic for an eyepatch'. ' She swallowed swords with admirable élan, and then served as the Human Pincushion. There was a yo-yo master. The show was lively and enjoyable, though not quite thrilling, perhaps in part because al of the performers were, in essence, normative in their bodies, though they used them in unusual and impressive ways. The heyday of the sideshow is now long past, though there are still a few performers at the Sideshow who appear under the banner of 'human oddity? As Katharine Park and Lorraine J. Daston have chronicled, the Early Modern period was an era of great fascination with the same sorts of wonders that would come to be known as sideshow freaks. 'Monsters were in great vogue' and 'appeared in almost every forum of discussion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. " While monsters and prodigies had been of interest since the ancient period, as Daston and Park note, there has been some change in cultural interpretations of these phenomena. After 1500, there is less focus on divine judgment, and more on the wonder of nature, as wel as a general loosening of the boundaries between various conceptual categories (such as prodigy, deformity, monster). There was also an increase in the display of non-normative bodies for the interest and amusement of the public. * Such displays occurred at large fairs and festivals, but also in small, informal venues like pubs and cafés. " From 1133 to 1855, the Bartholomew Fair ran in West Smithfield, London, and from the Early Modem period through the start of the nineteenth century, housed what William Wordsworth called a 'Parliament of monsters'? Non-normative bodies were also a subject of study among academics: the Royal Society held many meetings dedicated to various 'monstrous births' such as 'children born without brains (1697, 1711), various dwarfs and 'gigantic' children (1744, 1746, 1750, 1751) ', and so on. Indeed, the Society kept a cabinet of curiosities through the late eighteenth century. '