The Blazing World

Editor’s Introduction

“All intellectual and artistic endeavors, even jokes, ironies, and parodies, fare better in the mind of the crowd when the crowd knows that somewhere behind the great work or the great spoof it can locate a cock and a pair of balls.” In 2003, I ran across this provocative sentence in a letter to the editor that was published in an issue of The Open Eye, an interdisciplinary journal I had been reading faithfully for several years. The letter’s author, Richard Brickman, did not write the sentence. He was quoting an artist whose name I had never seen in print before: Harriet Burden. Brickman claimed that Burden had written him a long letter about a project she wanted him to make public. Although Burden had exhibited her work in New York City in the 1970s and ’80s, she had been disappointed by its reception and had withdrawn from the art world altogether. Sometime in the late nineties, she began an experiment that took her five years to complete. According to Brickman, Burden engaged three men to act as fronts for her own creative work. Three solo shows in three New York galleries, attributed to Anton Tish (1998), Phineas Q. Eldridge (2002), and the artist known only as Rune (2003), had actually been made by Burden. She titled the project as a whole Maskings, and declared that it was meant not only to expose the antifemale bias of the art world, but to uncover the complex workings of human perception and how unconscious ideas about gender, race, and celebrity influence a viewer’s understanding of a given work of art.

But Brickman went further. He argued that Burden insisted that the pseudonym she adopted changed the character of the art she made. In other words, the man she used as a mask played a role in the kind of art she produced: “Each artist mask became for Burden a ‘poetized personality,’ a visual elaboration of a ‘hermaphroditic self,’ which cannot be said to belong to either her or to the mask, but to ‘a mingled reality created between them.’” As a professor of aesthetics, I was immediately fascinated by the project for its ambition, but also for its philosophical complexity and sophistication.

At the same time, Brickman’s letter puzzled me. Why hadn’t Burden published her own statement? Why would she allow Brickman to speak for her? Brickman claimed that the sixty-page letter Burden called “Missive from the Realm of Fictional Being” had arrived unannounced in his mailbox and that he had no knowledge of the artist beforehand. The tone of Brickman’s letter is also curious: It alternates between condescension and admiration. He criticizes Burden’s letter as hyperbolic and unsuited for publication in an academic journal but then quotes other passages he attributes to her with seeming approval. I was left with a muddled impression of the letter, as well as a feeling of irritation with Brickman, whose commentary effectively smothers Burden’s original text. I immediately looked up the three exhibitions, The History of Western Art by Tish, The Suffocation Rooms by Eldridge, and Beneath by Rune, each of which was visually distinct from the other two. Nevertheless, I gleaned what I would call a “family resemblance” among the three. The Tish, Eldridge, and Rune shows Burden had allegedly invented were all compelling as art, but I was especially intrigued by Burden’s experiment because it resonated with my own intellectual concerns.

My teaching schedule was heavy that year. I had duties as temporary chair of my department, and I wasn’t able to satisfy my curiosity about Maskings until three years later, when I took a sabbatical leave to work on my book Plural Voices and Multiple Visions, in which I discuss the work of Søren Kierkegaard, M. M. Bakhtin, and the art historian Aby Warburg. Brickman’s description of Burden’s project and her poetized personalities (the latter expression is Kierkegaard’s) meshed perfectly with my own thoughts, so I decided to track Brickman down through The Open Eye and hear what he had to say for himself.

Peter Wentworth, the editor of the journal, retrieved e-mail correspondence from Brickman to him — several short, dry, business-related notes. When I tried to contact Brickman, however, I discovered the address was defunct. Wentworth produced an essay Brickman had published in the journal two years before his letter in The Open Eye, which I belatedly remembered having read: an abstruse paper critiquing the ongoing debates about concepts in analytical philosophy, a subject remote from my own interests. According to Wentworth, Brickman had earned a PhD in philosophy from Emory University and was an assistant professor at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. When I contacted St. Olaf, however, it turned out that no person named Richard Brickman was teaching or had ever taught in that department. Needless to say, Emory University had no records of a PhD candidate by that name either. I decided to go straight to Harriet Burden, but by the time I tracked her down in New York through her daughter, Maisie Lord, Burden had been dead for two years.

The idea for this book was born during my first telephone conversation with Maisie Lord. Although she knew about Brickman’s letter, she was surprised to hear that its author was not the person he had purported to be, if indeed he was anyone at all. She assumed her mother had been in touch with him but knew nothing about the particulars of their connection. Harriet Burden’s artworks had all been catalogued and stored by the time I spoke to Maisie, and she had been at work on a documentary film about her mother for several years. The film includes voice-over excerpts from the twenty-four private journals her mother began keeping after her husband, Felix Lord, died in 1995, each one labeled with a letter of the alphabet. As far as Maisie knew, none of the diaries mentioned Brickman. (I found two references to R.B., presumably Richard Brickman, but nothing more revealing than that.) Maisie, however, felt sure her mother had left a number of “clues” inside the journals, not only to her pseudonymous project but also to what she called “the secrets of my mother’s personality.”

Two weeks after our phone call, I flew to New York, where I met with Maisie, her brother, Ethan Lord, and Burden’s companion, Bruno Kleinfeld, all of whom spoke to me at great length. I viewed hundreds of artworks Burden had never shown anywhere, and her children informed me that her work had just been taken by the prestigious Grace Gallery in New York City. The Burden retrospective mounted in 2008 would garner the respect and recognition the artist had so desperately longed for, essentially launching her career posthumously. Maisie showed me rushes from her unfinished film and, most crucially, gave me access to the notebooks.

While reading the hundreds of pages Burden had written, I found myself by turns fascinated, provoked, and frustrated. She kept many journals simultaneously. She dated some entries, but not others. She had a system of cross-referencing the notebooks that was sometimes straightforward but at other times appeared byzantine in its complexity or nonsensical. In the end, I gave up trying to decode it. Her handwriting shrinks into illegibility on some pages and on others grows so large that a few sentences take up an entire page. Some of her texts are obscured by drawings that intrude into the written passages. A few of the notebooks were full to bursting and others contained only a few paragraphs. Notebook A and Notebook U were mostly autobiographical, but not entirely. She kept elaborate notes on artists she loved, some of whom take up many pages of a notebook. Vermeer and Velázquez share V, for example. Louise Bourgeois has her own notebook under L, not B, but L contains digressions on childhood and psychoanalysis. William Wechsler, Notebook W, contains notes on Wechsler’s work but also lengthy asides on Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Eliza Heywood’s Fantomina, as well as a commentary on Horace.

Many of the journals are essentially notes on her reading, which was voluminous and darted in and out of many fields: literature, philosophy, linguistics, history, psychology, and neuroscience. For unknown reasons, John Milton and Emily Dickinson shared a notebook labeled G. Kierkegaard is in K, but Burden also writes about Kafka in it, with several passages on cemeteries as well. Notebook H, on Edmund Husserl, has pages on Husserl’s idea about “the intersubjective constitution of objectivity” and the consequences of such an idea on the natural sciences, but also tangents on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mary Douglas, and a “Fantasy Scenario” on artificial intelligence. Q is devoted to quantum theory and its possible use for a theoretical model of the brain. On the first page of Notebook F (for female, apparently), Burden writes, “Hymns to the Fair Sex.” Page after page of quotations follow. A small sample will suffice to give the flavor. Hesiod: “Who trusts a woman, that man trusts a swindler.” Tertullian: “You [woman] are the devil’s gateway.” Victor Hugo: “God became man, granted. The devil became a woman.” Pound (Canto XXIX): “The female / Is an element, the female / Is chaos, an octopus / A biological process.” Along with these examples of blatant misogyny, Burden had stapled dozens of newspaper and magazine articles onto a single page with the word suppressed written on it. There was no common theme to these miscellaneous pieces, and I wondered why they had been lumped together. And then it dawned on me that what they shared were lists. Every article included a list of contemporary visual artists, novelists, philosophers, and scientists, in which no woman’s name appeared.

In V, Burden also quotes scholarly books, with and without citation. I found this quotation: “The ‘woman-as-monster’ image — with women depicted as snakes, spiders, extraterrestrials, and scorpions — is very common in boys’ literature, not only in the United States but also in Europe and Japan (see T, p. 97).” The parenthetical reference is to Burden’s own Notebook T, for teratology, the study of monsters, which, as Burden explains on its first page, is “the category that is not a category, the category to hold what can’t be held.” Burden was preoccupied by monsters and collected references to them in both science and literature. On page 97 of Notebook T, Burden quotes Rabelais, whose comic monsters changed the face of literature, noting that Gargantua is not born through the usual orifice: “Thanks to this unfortunate accident there took place a weakening of the uterus; the child leapt up through the Fallopian tubes to a hollow vein and, scrambling across the diaphragm to the upper arm where this vein divides in two, he left the fork and crawled out through the left ear” (Book I, Chapter 6). Immediately after this, she writes, “But the monster is not always a Rabelaisian wonder of hearty appetites and boundless hilarity. She is often lonely and misunderstood (see M and N).”

Two densely filled notebooks (M and N) treat the work of Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673), and the materialist organicism she developed as a thinker in her maturity. These two notebooks, however, also discuss the work of Descartes, Hobbes, More, and Gassendi. Burden links Cavendish to contemporary philosophers such as Suzanne Langer and David Chalmers, but also to the phenomenologist Dan Zahavi and the neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese, among others. After reading the passages in question, a colleague of mine in neurobiology, Stan Dickerson, who had never heard of either Burden or Cavendish, declared Burden’s argument “a bit wild but cogent and learned.”

Despite the fact that Cavendish lived in the seventeenth century, she served Harriet Burden as an alter ego. During her lifetime, the Duchess of Newcastle published poetry, fiction, and natural philosophy. Although a few people defended and admired her work at the time — most notably her husband, William Cavendish — the duchess felt brutally constricted by her sex and repeatedly articulated the hope that she would find readers and acclaim in posterity. Snubbed by many with whom she would have liked to engage in dialogue, Cavendish created a world of interlocutors in her writing. As with Cavendish, I believe that Burden cannot be understood unless the dialogical quality of her thought and art is taken into consideration. All of Burden’s notebooks may be read as forms of dialogue. She continually shifts from the first person into the second and then to the third. Some passages are written as arguments between two versions of herself. One voice makes a statement. Another disputes it. Her notebooks became the ground where her conflicted anger and divided intellect could do battle on the page.

Burden complains bitterly about sexism in the culture, the art world in particular, but she also laments her “intellectual loneliness.” She broods on her isolation and lashes out at her many perceived enemies. At the same time, her writing (like Cavendish’s) is colored by extravagance and grandiosity: “I am an Opera. A Riot. A Menace,” she writes in an entry that directly discusses her spiritual kinship to Cavendish. Like Cavendish, Burden’s desire for recognition in her lifetime was ultimately transmuted into a hope that her work would finally be noticed, if not while she was alive, then after her death.

Burden wrote so much and so broadly that my dilemma as an editor turned on the crucial question: What do I put in and what do I leave out? Some of the notebooks contain esoteric material unintelligible except to those well versed in the history of philosophy or science or art history. I found myself stumped by some of her references, and even after I had traced them, their meanings in the context of her writing often remained obscure to me. I have focused my attention on Maskings and included only passages that directly or indirectly relate to the pseudonymous project. The first excerpts from Burden’s journals in this volume were taken from Notebook C (Confessions? Confidences?), the memoir Burden began writing sometime in early 2002 after her sixty-second birthday, but which she appears to have abandoned to return to her other notebooks and a more fragmentary style.

Nevertheless, I found it expedient to try to construct a story of sorts out of the diverse material Burden left behind. Ethan Lord suggested I gather written or oral statements from people close to his mother to give additional perspectives to Maskings, and I agreed. I then decided to solicit information from those who knew about or had somehow been involved in the pseudonymous project.

Since the Grace exhibition, interest in Harriet Burden’s work has grown exponentially, despite the fact that controversy still surrounds her “masks,” especially her involvement with the last and by far the most famous artist of the three, Rune. Although there is a consensus that Burden made Tish’s The History of Western Art as well as Eldridge’s Suffocation Rooms, there is little agreement about what actually happened between her and Rune. There are those who believe Burden is not responsible for Beneath or contributed very little to the installation, and others who are convinced that Burden created it without Rune. Still others argue that Beneath was a collaborative effort. It may not be possible to determine absolutely who generated that work, although it is clear that Burden felt betrayed by Rune and turned against him. She also became convinced he had stolen four works from her studio, although no one can explain how the theft could have happened. The building was locked and protected by an alarm system. Windows, a series of twelve pieces, was sold as artwork by Rune. The dozen boxes resemble constructions made by Burden and it is at least possible that four of them were hers, not Rune’s.

Rune’s version of events could not be included in this anthology. His widely publicized death in 2004, which may or may not have been suicide, became a sensational media story. Rune’s career has been extensively documented. His work was widely reviewed, and there are also many critical articles and several books on him and his work available to anyone who is interested. Nevertheless, I wanted Rune’s view to be represented in this collection, and I asked Oswald Case, a journalist as well as a friend and biographer of Rune, to contribute to the volume. He graciously accepted. Other contributors include Bruno Kleinfeld; Maisie and Ethan Lord; Rachel Briefman, a close friend of Burden’s; Phineas Q. Eldridge, Burden’s second “mask”; Alan Dudek (also known as the Barometer), who lived with Burden; and Sweet Autumn Pinkney, who worked as an assistant on The History of Western Art and knew Anton Tish.

Despite Herculean efforts on my part, I was unable to contact Tish, whose account of his involvement with Burden would have been invaluable. A short interview with him, however, is part of this collection. In 2008, I wrote to Rune’s sister, Kirsten Larsen Smith, asking her for an interview about her brother’s involvement with Burden, but she demurred, saying that she was not able to talk about her brother because she was too distressed about his untimely death. Then, in March 2011, after I had compiled and edited all the materials for the book, Smith called me and explained that she had decided to accept my request for an interview. My conversation with her has now been added to the book. I am deeply grateful for her courage and honesty in speaking about her brother.

I have included a short essay by the art critic Rosemary Lerner, who is currently working on a book about Burden; interviews with two of the art dealers who showed Burden’s “masks”; and a couple of brief reviews that were published after the opening of The Suffocation Rooms, an exhibition that received far less attention than the other two shows that are part of the Maskings trilogy. Timothy Hardwick’s article, published after Rune’s death, was added to the anthology because it addresses Rune’s views on artificial intelligence, a subject that interested Burden as well, although her notes on the subject suggest that the two of them were not in agreement.

I feel obliged to touch upon the question of mental illness. Although, in an essay on Burden in Art Lights, Alison Shaw called the artist “a paragon of sanity in an insanely biased world,” Alfred Tong, in an article for Blank: A Magazine of the Arts, takes the opposite position:

Harriet Burden was rich. She never had to work after she married the renowned art dealer and collector Felix Lord. When he died in 1995, she suffered a complete mental breakdown and was treated by a psychiatrist. She remained in his care the rest of her life. By all accounts, Burden was eccentric, paranoid, belligerent, hysterical, and even violent. Several people watched her physically attack Rune in Red Hook near the water. One of the eyewitnesses told me personally that Rune left the scene bloody and bruised. I am hard pressed to understand why anyone would believe that she was even close to stable enough to produce Beneath, a rigorous, complicated installation that may be Rune’s greatest work.

In the excerpts from the journals that follow, Burden writes about her suffering after her husband’s death, and she writes about Dr. Adam Fertig, to whom she felt indebted. Tong is right that she continued to see Fertig, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, for the eight remaining years of her life. She went to him for psychotherapy twice a week. It is also true that she punched Rune in front of a number of witnesses. The conclusions Tong draws from these facts, however, are largely unfounded. The author of the notebooks is sensitive, tormented, angry, and, like most of us, prone to neurotic blind spots. For example, Burden often seems to forget that it was her decision to leave the art world. She exhibited her work behind at least two, if not three, male masks, but she refused to show the art she had amassed over many years to a single dealer, a fact that more than hints at self-sabotage.

My careful reading of the twenty-four notebooks, along with the texts and statements of those who knew her well, has provided me with a nuanced view of Harriet Burden, the artist and the woman; but while I worked on this book intermittently over the course of six years — interpreting her handwriting, doing my best to track down her references and cross-references, and trying to make sense of her multiple meanings — I confess I sometimes had the uncomfortable feeling that the ghost of Harriet Burden was laughing over my shoulder. She referred to herself several times in her journals as a “trickster,” and she seems to have delighted in all kinds of ruses and games. There are only two letters missing from Burden’s alphabet of notebooks: I and O. The letter I is, of course, the first-person pronoun in English, and I began to wonder how Burden could have resisted keeping a notebook under that letter and whether she hadn’t hidden it somewhere, if only to tease people like me, whom she had obviously hoped would eventually take notice of her and her work. There appear to be two parenthetical references to I, although she may have meant the number 1 instead. As for O, it is a number as well as a letter, a nullity, an opening, a void. Perhaps she purposely left that letter out of her alphabet. I don’t know. And Richard Brickman? There are hundreds of Richard Brickmans in the United States, but my guess is that Brickman was another of Burden’s pseudonyms. When Ethan told me his mother had published at least one critical work in 1986, using the preposterous name Roger Raison, I began to feel quite sure of my hypothesis, although I have no evidence to substantiate it whatsoever.

The best policy may be to let the reader of what follows judge for him- or herself exactly what Harriet Burden meant or didn’t mean and whether her account of herself can be trusted. The story that emerges from this anthology of voices is intimate, contradictory, and, I admit, rather strange. I have done my best to assemble the texts into a reasonable order and to provide notes for Burden’s writing when needed for clarification, but the words belong to the contributors, and I have let them stand with only minor editorial intervention.

Finally, I must add a few words about the title of this volume. In Notebook R (possibly for revenant, revisit, or repetition—all three words appear multiple times), after twenty pages on ghosts and dreaming, there is a blank space followed by the words Monsters at Home. This served as my working title until I had received all the texts, organized them into the present order, and read them through. I decided that the title Burden borrowed from Cavendish and gave to the last work of art she was able to complete before her death was better suited to the narrative as a whole: The Blazing World.

I. V. Hess

Postscript

Just as this book was going to press, I was contacted by Maisie and Ethan Lord, who reported that they had just recovered another notebook: Notebook O. The entries in O provide further information on Harriet Burden’s relationship with Rune and reveal that Richard Brickman is, as I had guessed, a pseudonym for Burden herself. The most significant pages from that notebook have been added to this volume, but as they have not fundamentally altered my view of the artist, I have not revised my introduction. If at some point there is a second edition of this text, and if Notebook I (which I now feel certain exists) is discovered, I may well have to return to my text and change it accordingly.

(I. V. H.)