Houdini first worked as an apprentice at a locksmith's, where he learned the intimate workings of the tool he was later to defy as the world's greatest escapologist. He was a cross-country runner, a trapeze artist, then in 1899 managed to break into the Vaudeville circuit, with a leg-up from Martin Beck, a theatre owner whom he met in a beer hall. He began travelling Europe and took to challenging local police – not before submitting himself to a full body search – to bind him in chains, locks and cuffs. In 1913, to outdo a growing number of imitators, he invented an act that would remain unparalleled: The Chinese Water Torture Cell. Bound in chains, suspended upside-down with his feet locked into a steel frame, Houdini would be submerged into a glass-and-iron cage filled to the brim with water. Within three minutes he would wriggle out of his chains and take a deep bow, wearing nothing but a little sodden pair of pants.

A real-life Superman, his fame spread internationally. Something about Houdini was intoxicating. America had liberated its people, yet simultaneously shackled them into a remorseless circuit of material production and consumption, chained to a market of apparent luxury and comfort. Houdini became a verb. In the 1920 edition of the Funk & Wagnall's dictionary, "Houdinize" meant "to release or extricate oneself (from confinement, bonds or the like) as by wriggling out". He represented, and still represents, the ultimate escape.

Where are the Houdinis of our time? David Blaine? There surely is a substantial qualitative gap. And most of it lies in how they perceive and hence portray themselves. In 1926, after being locked in an airtight bronze coffin for an hour and a half, a journalist asked Houdini, "Had it been rigged?" He replied, "There is no invention to it, there is no trick, there is no fake; you simply lie in a coffin and breathe quietly." The answers that spout from Blaine are far more ambiguous: "I will show you something that will transcend the mind." No thanks. Show me scantily clad handcuff acts, not a forty-day fast unpleasantly echoing some biblical sacrifice. And it seems the British public are with me on that; pelting him with eggs and cakes; some page-three models even flashed for his hungry pleasure. Comedian Marcus Brigstocke claimed his "Drowned Alive" act showed Blaine is "not special; not magic; just a moistened git."

Houdini did not shroud himself in a mystical, spiritual cloak, nor claim to be "transcending" anything. He was a sworn enemy and active investigator of the Spiritualist movement of the time, infiltrating seances in disguise and exposing them as a fraud, which brought him the lasting enmity of their followers like Arthur Conan Doyle. As a magician, he merely escaped, time and time again – reminding us that our freedom could be one of many illusions.

Houdini died on Hallowe'en night, 1926. His death has been subject to wild speculations, and his relatives are currently pressing for his body to be exhumed and the causes clarified. We will see. Part of me won't be surprised if it turns out he Houdinized himself out of his last stunt, and is escaping still.

It is difficult to say why these stories helped my work at this time. Calvino, like Kafka, seems a very non-visual writer. Even when the optical is the subject of Calvino's fiction, as in "Mr Palomar", it seems to be addressed to the impossibility of seeing. Nonetheless, I found many of his stories seem to induce powerful images even though these images were often settings for a kind of universal blindness.

A few months ago I came across a new edition of Cosmicomics and discovered several stories that had not been included in the first English translation. One of these was "The Night Driver". As soon as I had finished reading it for the first time, I had exactly the same sensation of the presence of a powerful but indefinable image that I remembered on my first encounter with these stories.

Recently, whilst working with the pages of jewellery catalogues, I was trying out vertical and diagonal cuts in collages that were designed to cut out the central object of attention and retain its spotlight. When I used a vertical cut, the collage reminded me of Newman, but when I used a diagonal one I thought of Fontana. I knew that the diagonal worked better, but I couldn't see why until I realized that I had before me the image of Calvino's "Night Driver" and of that cone of light to which he is reduced. JS