The Blazing World

William Burridge (interview, December 5, 2010)

Hess: I know that you don’t give many interviews, so I’d first like to thank you for agreeing to participate in this project. I know you’re off to the airport soon, so I’ll try to be brief. One journalist wrote that you are an art dealer with “the Midas handshake,” by which he meant that when you take on an artist, his or her reputation rises among collectors. Your relationship with Rune began at the end of the nineties, but I would like to focus on the controversy over Beneath. I’m curious to know if you had any suspicion that Harriet Burden had been involved in the creation of that installation.

Burridge: I knew that Harriet Lord collected Rune, and he mentioned that she had helped fund Beneath. Felix Lord and I were acquaintances, and I knew his wife a little. She gave some great dinners at their apartment. I found her a little odd and silent, but awfully chic, and perfect for Felix. You know, when she was young, she looked like a painting, an early Matisse circa 1905 or that famous Modigliani canvas Woman with Blue Eyes. I knew she had dabbled as an artist, but the story that came my way was that after Felix died she had a nervous breakdown and then reemerged a few years later to build on the Lord collection. I know she sold a Lichtenstein and bought several works by a young artist, Sandra Burke, who has since done very well. The word was Harriet had a sharp eye, but the thought that she was involved in making Rune’s work never occurred to me. She didn’t even attend the opening of Beneath, although she was invited to it and to the dinner afterward. You have to remember that Rune was a hot commodity. The Banality of Glamour was a hit, and he followed that hit with the crosses. I thought it was very smart work. Reviewers and critics loved the guy, even though there were some who dumped on the crosses.

Hess: The letter to the editor in The Open Eye announced that Burden was the artist behind not only Beneath, but also Anton Tish’s The History of Western Art and Phineas Q. Eldridge’s The Suffocation Rooms. How did you respond?

Burridge: I hadn’t seen The Suffocation Rooms. I didn’t even know about that show. The gallery is off the beaten track, and it didn’t get much attention. I had seen the Tish show. I thought there was too much going on in it to really lift it off the ground, if you know what I mean, but the kid was someone to watch. I received an e-mail from a friend that included a link to the Open Eye article. I read it, and let’s face it, it’s not for your average reader — and those weird feminist comments about smelly balls. She sounded like a man-hating flake. I can think of a lot better ways to go public. It’s hardly a mainstream publication. You get to the end of it and say, huh? And who the hell is Richard Brickman?

Hess: Well, I couldn’t find him. There are many Richard Brickmans, as it turns out, but not a single one of them who could have written that piece. A Richard Brickman did publish a paper in The Open Eye about a year before, a rather dull but intelligent examination of John McDowell’s arguments about the conceptual structures of human experience, after which he made a counterargument.

Burridge: What are you saying?

Hess: There are reasons to believe that Harriet Burden wrote both Brickman pieces.

Burridge: But why?

Hess: I think she wanted her coming out to be something more than a hoax, but also more than the articulation of an ideological position about women in the art world. She wanted everyone to understand how complicated perception is, that there is no objective way of seeing anything. Brickman became another character in the larger artwork, another mask, this time textual, which is part of a philosophical comedy, if you will.

Burridge: Philosophical comedy? Doesn’t this Brickman character criticize Harriet Lord? Doesn’t he call her irrational? Why would she want that?

Hess: It’s an ironic treatment of her own position.

Burridge: Well, I have to say I don’t get it. Anyway, I called Rune right away and asked him straight out about the article, and he said there was nothing to it. He found himself in an awkward position. Harriet was an important collector, but she was unbalanced, a bit of a fruitcake, megalomaniacal.

Hess: And you believed him?

Burridge: Well, it squared with the talk I’d heard, that she’d been ill. Rune used the word delusional.

Hess: But hadn’t Larsen told conflicting stories about at least one period of his life? I believe you tried to contact him then. In his book, Oswald Case speculates that Rune might have been hospitalized with manic depression.

Burridge: He disappeared. That’s for sure. I don’t think anybody really knows where he was. Those stories he told to journalists were part of his shtick, a kind of tongue-in-cheek self-promotion, making a mystery of himself. It’s hardly new. Look at Joseph Beuys. Let me put it this way. It’s not that I couldn’t see him participating in a scam like the one Burden suggests. It was that I couldn’t really see him denying it. It was just the kind of thing he would have loved doing, so when he said it was crap, I took him at his word. By the way, I was his dealer, not his best friend. I liked representing him, but we weren’t into heart-to-heart talks or anything like that. There was something dazzling about Rune. He was highly intelligent, very well read, but we were never close. It wasn’t until Art Lights published the article by Eldridge that I started to wonder. By then, Rune was into his next act, Houdini Smash, the one that killed him.

Hess: Before we go into that, I want to know what you thought about Beneath. Didn’t it strike you as a bit out of character for Rune?

Burridge: Listen, this was a guy who once answered the door wearing a dress. Didn’t say a word, just talked away like it was normal. I couldn’t tell you what was in or out of character for Rune. The plans for the work really impressed me, even though I thought the 9/11 references were risky. He had taken a lot of photos and films downtown right afterward, but he didn’t end up using most of them except the one of the cars and the shoes. I’m not saying he did the installation alone. I don’t believe that anymore. I’m sure Harriet had a hand in it. What I don’t buy was that she did it alone, and he put his name on it.

Hess: Why not?

Burridge: Harriet just never struck me as someone who could pull off a work like that solo. I’ve seen the quirky dollhouse stuff she did early on, and I realize she has a following now, and the work sells, but her art runs in a tradition — Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Annette Messager: round feminine shapes, mutant bodies, that kind of thing. Beneath is hard, geometrical, a real engineering feat. It’s just not her style, but it made sense for Rune.

Hess: Even if he had a dress on?

Burridge: I guess that’s clever.

Hess: No, not at all. I’m just pointing out that such thinking can be a trap. Burden wrote about Rune in her journals, and there is nothing to suggest that they were equal collaborators on Beneath. She regarded him as her third mask.

Burridge: Doesn’t it come down to he said, she said?

Hess: You suspect that she was lying in her private journals? Wouldn’t that be unusual?

Burridge: I’ve gotten used to unusual in this business. And if she was as clever as you say, inventing writers for highbrow magazines, why not believe that she left behind, well, a novel of sorts. Rune said she was desperate to be noticed, that she was bitter and angry and would do absolutely anything to get attention. He also said that she lived in a fantasy world of her own making a good part of the time, so maybe she made things up without even knowing it. Felix once said to me that his wife was lost in her own imagination.

Hess: That could mean many things. There are four other pieces in dispute that were sold as Runes, but which may be Burdens. In a journal entry, she wrote that four works were missing from her studio. It’s likely they were made around the time she knew and met regularly with Rune. Although she did not describe them in detail, they seem to have been reminiscent of Beneath, four small windows that look onto various objects and scenes.

Burridge: There are twelve windows altogether, part of a series. I sold them all. Twelve, not four, and none of them was signed by Burden. Didn’t she sign her work?

Hess: Some pieces, but not all, it seems. The series includes twelve windows, four of which may have been stolen from Burden’s studio and eight more that may be works by Rune imitating Burden.

Burridge: You know there are hours and hours of film of Rune working on Beneath with assistants in his studio. Harriet appears, but she isn’t giving instructions. Let me put it this way: Why would he need her? Why would he steal from her? It makes no sense. She sent him deranged hate mail, left screeching messages on his voice mail. There’s a story that she attacked him, you know, physically. The woman was not all there. She howls about Felix on those tapes. She accused Rune of having an affair with her husband. That’s motive for revenge, don’t you think?

Hess: No one seems to know what the nature of that relationship was. My guess is that Rune may have used his connection to Felix Lord against Burden, but it was secondary. If he stole those works from her, he did it once he had realized that Beneath was his greatest success, and the article in The Open Eye, if taken seriously, would have upset that triumph. This is a man who died in front of a camera in his studio, after all. I think it might be somewhat difficult to make a case for him as a paragon of mental stability.

Burridge: I think he thought he’d live through it. That was the whole point — a twist on Houdini. He wanted it on camera. That was going to be the piece: his resurrection.

Hess: Oswald Case believes it was a spectacular suicide.

Burridge: Case’s book is heavy on speculation and gossip. I’m not complaining. It helped cement Rune’s reputation and turn him into a hero or antihero, either one is good for the work. But my feeling is that risking death was part of it for him. But Rune was not suicidal. He wanted to be a spectacle. Of course, I had no idea beforehand that he planned to insert himself into the architectural contraption he had built, that his body was part of the artwork. The autopsy showed he took Klonopin. It’s very hard to kill yourself with Klonopin, apparently. He died of heart failure, a condition he most likely didn’t know about. It was really rough on Rebecca. She found him, poor kid.

Hess: Yes, it’s a film now, but the film doesn’t help with motive, does it? He’s the actor but there’s no narration. And yet, as horrible as it is, Houdini Smash borrows from Beneath. The geometries of the maze have been broken. The walls are tipped at skewed angles and appear to be falling over. In fact,the architecture resembles a number of works by Burden that were never shown, but which have now been photographed and catalogued.

Burridge: Are you telling me that she made Houdini, too?

Hess: No. I don’t believe she had anything to do with it. The purpose of this interview is simply to get another perspective on the Burden-Rune relationship. More information may surface in time, but it may not. My interest is not purely in determining the facts — who did what when. If that were possible, it still wouldn’t resolve the larger question. Even if Rune never had a single idea, drew a line of the plans, or lifted a finger in the construction of Beneath, I believe Burden would have said it could not have existed without him, that it was in some important way created between her and him. That is probably also true of Houdini, except that he made it.

Burridge: Are you saying that he was part of Beneath or not part of it? It’s one way or the other.

Hess: I think not. Even if Rune had nothing to do with their creation, extricating him from Beneath and those twelve windows connected to it is still impossible. Burden knew that Rune was embedded in the project, necessary to how it would be understood. Rune, in turn, was influenced by his role as her mask. Masks are all over Beneath, after all. It changed his work forever and, whatever his intention was for Houdini, it couldn’t have existed without Burden.

Burridge: You’re saying the influence went both ways, is that it?

Hess: Yes, and I think she was enormously ambitious. As Brickman writes, she wanted to include the “proliferations” as part of a larger work. For her, Rune was an essential character in the theater she called Maskings, probably the most important one, because the two of them seemed to have been involved in some kind of one-upmanship and competition that played itself out in numerous ways. His death came as a blow to her, and from her writings it’s clear she felt implicated in some way.

Burridge: I thought you were interviewing me.

Hess: You’re right. I’ve been carried away. Is there anything else you would like to say before you run?

Burridge: Yes. Unlike you, I actually knew Harriet Lord, I mean Burden. She was a quiet, elegant lady with some talent, I admit, and a shrewd collector, but it strikes me as far-fetched that she was some virago mastermind who cooked up these elaborate plots or was playing some game of wits with Rune.

Hess: But you said earlier that you thought she might have fictionalized her diaries.

Burridge: Well, who knows? It’s a possibility. I believe she had some input in Rune’s work. She did some drawings. That’s proven, but he called her a muse in an interview, you know. The piece by Eldridge was mostly hers. He came right out and admitted it. Tish, well, maybe. But Rune? No, I don’t believe it. She played some small part in it, that’s for sure, but isn’t it just possible that she used his reputation to lift herself up into the limelight? I mean, let’s face it, as an artist, she was nobody. As I said before, her journals might be her own wishful version of events.

Hess: I think she did want Larsen as a vehicle “to lift her up,” as you say, but he reneged on their agreement. There are other people who were close to Burden who have stories to tell. Her journals are not the sole source of information. What was your term, virago mastermind?

Burridge: That’s what you’re proposing, isn’t it?

Hess: It may depend on your definition of virago, but perhaps it is. Thank you so much for your time.

Burridge: Thank you, and good luck with the book.