The Blazing World

Cynthia Clark (interview with former owner of the Clark Gallery, NYC, April 6, 2009)

Hess: Do you remember the first time you met Harriet Burden?

Clark: Yes, Felix brought her around to the gallery. He was divorced from Sarah by then, and he walks in with this gigantic girl, big as a house, really, and va-va-va-voom shapely, but with a long, peculiar face. They used to call her the Amazon.

Hess: Were you familiar with her work then?

Clark: No, but to be honest, no one was familiar with her work. I’ve seen it now, the early pieces, but the truth is nobody in the art world would have picked it up back then. It was too busy, too off the beaten track. It didn’t fit into any schema. There were a lot of art wars, you know, in the late sixties, early seventies. She wasn’t Judy Chicago either, making a feminist statement. And I guess Felix was a problem for her, too. He couldn’t represent her, after all, it would have been nepotism.

Hess: Is there any other impression of her, besides her appearance, that you noted and would like to share for the book?

Clark: She made a scene once at a dinner. It was years ago, around eighty-five, I think. She was talking to Rodney Farrell, the critic — he faded, but he had some power then — anyway, something he said must have set her off, and this woman, who we all thought of as very quiet, burst out and rattled on about philosophy, art, language. She was very loud, lecturing, unpleasant. I don’t think anyone had the slightest idea what she was saying. Frankly, I thought it might have been gibberish. Everyone stopped talking. And then she started laughing, crazy, nutty laughter, and left the table. Felix was upset. He hated scenes.

Hess: And the pseudonyms? Did you suspect anything?

Clark: Absolutely not. After Felix died, she disappeared. No one talked about her.

Hess: Weren’t you surprised by the sophistication of Anton Tish’s work? He was only twenty-four at the time, seemed to come out of nowhere, and in interviews he was strikingly inarticulate and seemed to have only superficial thoughts about his own work.

Clark: I’ve shown many artists who weren’t able to say what they were about. I’ve always believed that the work is supposed to speak and that the pressure put on artists to explain themselves is misplaced.

Hess: I agree with you, and yet The History of Western Art is a complex joke about art, full of references, quotations, puns, and anagrams. There is an allusion to Diderot on a Chardin canvas shown at the Academy’s annual Salon show, taken from the French edition. That particular essay had not been translated into English. The boy did not speak French.

Clark: Listen, I’ve said this before. It’s all very well and good to look back now and ask how on earth we could have been taken in. You can cite all the examples you want. I wasn’t pondering how he did it. He gave me the work. It caused a stir. It sold. I visited his studio and there were works in progress all over the place. What would you have thought?

Hess: I’m not sure.

Clark: There’s nothing cut-and-dried about this, you know. One can easily argue that the posing, the performance, was part of the work itself, that it all goes together, and as you well know, pieces from that show signed by Anton Tish command high prices. I don’t regret for a second that I showed them.

Hess: I think the real question is: Would you have shown them if you had been aware of who had really made them?

Clark: I believe I would have. Yes, I think I would have.