The Blazing World

Timothy Hardwick (“Rune’s Ego Machine: Harbinger of the New Aesthetics” in Visibility: A Magazine of the Arts, February 2009)

Rune’s final work, Houdini Smash, which now exists as both a film and as an architectural relic of the “performance,” calls upon the critic to examine, yet again, questions about the nature of art itself. Arthur Danto persuasively argued that the dominant narrative of Western art came to its end at the moment Warhol created art that was indistinguishable from objects in the supermarket. In the post-Warhol era, Rune’s Houdini Smash figures as a meditation on the idea of beginnings and endings, not only of art, but of the breakdown between the biological and the artificial, categories that are swiftly becoming indistinguishable. We have entered an era of the hybrid bio-robot, an age when scientists are building computational models of the meta-representational structures of consciousness itself. There are many who believe it is a matter of two, perhaps three, decades before the neural correlates of consciousness will be discovered and replicated artificially. The mystery, one long viewed as impossible to penetrate, will be solved. The hard problem of consciousness will go the way of the double helix.

Rune’s Houdini Smash anticipates the birth of the ego machine, a humanly created artistic product that is itself conscious, the arrival of a technology that will radically transform the meaning of creativity because artists will generate art objects that have self-models, that is, they will be able to make aesthetic creatures or robotic offspring who think and act. In an interview he gave in Art Assembly, Rune discussed his fascination with artificial intelligence and its radical potentiality. Citing Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, he said, “AI is the cutting edge in art, whether people know it or not. It will revolutionize artistic practice by providing artists with tools for works that are animate and intelligent.” Kurzweil articulated his utopian view in the following statement: “As we gradually learn to harness the optimal computing capacity of matter, our intelligence will spread through the universe at (or exceeding) the speed of light, eventually leading to a sublime, universe-wide awakening.” It seems unlikely that Rune endorsed the optimism of a futurist such as Kurzweil.

Although there are those who maintain that Rune intended to die from the drug he ceremoniously ingests in the film, this critic suspects the opposite. Rune planned for his hours of sleep and eventual reawakening to be recorded by multiple cameras as part of the work’s cycle as a homage to his own version of Futurism. In the construction, the artist’s body functions merely as one section, organ, or member of what must be regarded as a larger anatomical machine. The biological body cannot be regarded as distinct from the artificial limbs, digital screens, and collapsing walls and pathways in which that body is enclosed. Borrowing heavily on the work that preceded it — the complex, grand-scale maze installation, Beneath—Rune built a far more compact maze structure that looks as if it has fallen in on itself, has become essentially a ruined fragment of the former work. In the highly praised Beneath, he used the repetition of objects and films, some of which were pointed allusions to the devastation of September 11, to introduce a mournful, lyrical quality to his art for the first time. Houdini Smash, on the other hand, evokes mechanistic delirium, not dissimilar to the effects he garnered in The Banality of Glamour. Rune’s sublime is not Kurzweil’s utopia, but a darker vision of ecstatic metamorphosis, which he articulated in the same Art Assembly interview: “The artist will no longer control his art. It will function independently of the designer, and therefore create exciting and dangerous new zones of interaction.”

In Houdini, the viewer sees the artist crawl into the coffinlike space at the center of the piece, outfitted with plush pink satin lining and a pillow covered with red crosses, yet another allusion to his earlier work. The viewer sees Rune slowly smoke a cigarette, extinguish it, reach into his pocket, hold out a fist to the camera, then open his left palm to reveal a handful of white pills, which he then swallows with a glass of water. He inserts the empty glass into a cup holder beside him and, like a shaman performing a ritual, covers his face with a soft mask, identical to the masks displayed in the windows of Beneath, lies back, and stares at one of the cameras, which is filming him from above. Once he is settled inside his container, the viewer witnesses the transformation of Rune’s body from the human to the posthuman. An immense helmetlike form is fitted over his head, and the multiple gleaming aluminum limbs that protrude from the box slowly begin to move. Although the allusions to sci-fi movies from the fifties are immediately obvious, the startling character of the film is only produced over time. The limbs move more and more quickly, and the views of multiple cameras picked up by multiple screens refract and fragment the hybrid anatomy from multiple angles. The eyes close. The ego machine sleeps, but its limbs and the multiple digital images continue for hours and then slowly come to a halt.

When Rebecca Daniels entered the studio the following day, Rune had died, and his body had gone into rigor mortis. The cameras that recorded the work also filmed her discovery, but the Burridge Gallery suppressed the latter portions of the film to protect Daniels’s privacy. While this is entirely understandable, it may be argued that although the beginning of the film is determined, the ending of the film is arbitrary. Whether intentional or not, the artwork itself becomes a “container” for death, a coffin machine for the artist’s corpse, but the machine “survives” its biological part. Houdini is not, as Elizabeth Cooper claimed in Art Digest, “a snuff film” or “horror narrative, in which doctor and monster merge.” It is a spectacle of simulacra. In his essay “Simulacra and Science Fiction,” Baudrillard writes, “The stage is now set for simulation, in the cybernetics sense of the word — that is to say, for all kinds of manipulation of these models (hypothetical scenarios, the creation of simulated situations, etc.) but now nothing distinguishes this management-manipulation from the real itself: There is no more fiction.” The real and the imaginary, animate and inanimate, artist and product, have entered the zone of the hyperreal, the zone in which these antiquated distinctions will soon be wholly erased.