I’m not sure Harry really liked the thing she bought by Rune—the video screen with faces cut to bits and put back together again, a movie mishmash of glamour and gore. It was a multiple—which meant “not that expensive.” One afternoon, I parked myself in front of the screen and gave it a yeoman’s try. “Let me be fair,” I said, “and not loaded with prejudice just because the artist is an asshole. T. S. Eliot was no paragon, was he? Are these bloody mugs and sliced cheeks any good? Am I interested? Do I care?” To be honest, the darned thing stumped me. I told Harry it made me feel lonely, and she laughed, but then she said it made her lonely, too. “It’s not about communion,” she said. I didn’t know at the time that Rune was ripe to be her last stand. In her head, he was vehicle numero uno. If she could harness his star power, she could prove how the machinery worked, how ideas of greatness make greatness, and once she had triumphed, the great unmasking would take place! Harriet Burden, her own woman.
And so we two, Harry and Bruno, duked it out and then made it up in our domains in Red Hook, one grand, one puny, but each domicile reliable in its own way. Around us the city buzzed and screeched, and the foghorns blew, and the clouds moved overhead. It rained and it thundered and then it brightened, and the seasons changed. But every day the sun rose, and the sun set, and when we stepped outside, the street was there, and Harry’s truck was there, and the Manhattan skyline was there. And then New York City was slammed from the outside. From blue sky to smoking sky in minutes—we heard the second plane, low and loud, and we saw it hit. We saw it again on television. I tried to understand it, but I couldn’t. I knew and I didn’t know. Once we had found out that Maisie had retrieved Aven from kindergarten at the Little Red School House on Sixth Avenue in the West Village, that Oscar had not had to travel to Brooklyn that day, that Ethan was in his apartment in Williamsburg, that my daughter Cleo, the only Kleinfeld offspring who lived in New York, was indeed in her office in the Brill Building in Midtown, that Phinny and Ulysses and the Barometer had not yet budged for the day, we watched through the window as the winds carried the diseased dust and debris over Red Hook. We shut the windows against the unspeakable stench, and spent much of the early afternoon tending to the Barometer. The man’s cosmological delusions bumped and lurched this way and that in ordinary weather. The smoke, the explosions, the falling papers, pulverized plastic, and flesh tipped him into a state of nonstop gibberish and stiff, machine-like gestures. With his wild hair and beard, his dirty Grateful Dead T-shirt, and his torn khaki pants that hung about his bony, bowed legs, he expounded mechanically about the “groaning sublimity of transportable tempers and their combustible storm-patriots romping in divine intercourse with God’s archangels” (excerpt from P.Q.E.’s tape. The Barometer’s language is impossible to remember). I prayed. I prayed he’d shut up. The carnage meant nothing to the Raver. Mass murder didn’t touch him. He was lost in his own power fantasies of control, which the day had exploded or confirmed (I’m not sure which). Ulysses produced a Xanax, which we eventually managed to cajole him into taking. We put the nut job to sleep.
Ladder 101. All seven firefighters who answered the call died.
Days later, I remember Harry at the window. She made a low noise that came from her chest, not her mouth. Then she said, “Human beings are the only animals who kill for ideas.”
When I think back, I realize no one I knew lusted for vengeance. For a period of weeks, it seemed to me that nearly every New Yorker who was still alive became a saint. We spoke to strangers on the subway and asked them, “Are you okay?” meaning “Did you lose anyone?” We donated shovels, clothes, flashlights. We lined up to give blood, even though that blood turned out to be useless. You had either died or you had survived. Rune grabbed a camera and filmed guerrilla-style. The area was cordoned off, but he must have wormed in past the cops. I know he called Harry. She worried aloud about his lust for photos. Did the mentally sick get sicker after September 11? There must be some goddamned report on it out there somewhere.
Most New Yorkers comported themselves like angels, but the pundits, commentators, and journalists yapped their pieties, waved their clichés, and brandished their platitudes. And in the years that followed, Bush and his cronies erected one big lie after another over the incinerated corpses in lower Manhattan. Soaring collective goodness can’t last. We regressed to our sniping, smart-mouthed, but also intermittently kind and helpful selves and, because one day after another came and went without a subway explosion, bridge collapse, or skyscraper meltdown, we were lulled back to what Warren G. Harding called “normalcy,” code for just-the-regular-day-to-day-crap-life-offers, thank you very much: work doldrums, adulterous affairs, family squabbles, all manner of neuroses, asthma, stomach ulcers, rheumatisms, and acid reflux.
When Harry told me not long after the attacks that Rune had agreed to take a turn as the last actor in her grand tripartite scheme, I burst out with a big why-the-hell-would-he-want-to-do-that? Harry’s reasoning was bollixed up by her wishes, but it had various strands. The subterfuge was right up Rune’s alley, a ploy that wowed him because, if it all went as planned, he could become the biggest art world kidder of them all. He would expose the critics (some of whom he hoped to draw and quarter) as clowns. This was the man’s vulnerability, Harry claimed. There were those who called him a con artist, a panderer. Plus the market scared him. Up one day, down the next. He didn’t want to go the way of Sandro Chia, dumped on the market by Saatchi, never to recover. Rune lived like a pasha, indulged himself; he needed upkeep. He would turn the tables on his naysayers. When they mocked his latest, he could produce Harry to confound them. But she also claimed that she had wrenched the great Rune’s thoughts, remade his inner world, and that the horrific event downtown had exploded his plotline. It didn’t work out like that. In the end, the simpleton Bruno knew more than the Grande Dame of irony.
What does a woman want? What did Harry want? She did not want to be Rune. She did not want to sell her work for millions of dollars. She knew the art world was mostly a stink hole of vain poseurs who bought names to launder their money. “I want to be understood,” she would wail at me. Hers was a heady game, a philosophical fairy tale. Oh, Harry had explanations, justifications, arguments. But I ask you, in what world was this understanding going to take place? In Harry’s magic kingdom, where the citizens lounged about reading philosophy and science and arguing about perception? It’s a crude world, old girl, I used to tell her. “Look at what’s happened to poetry! It’s become quaint, cute, and ‘accessible.’ ” Harry wanted her pseudonymous tale to be read by illiterates. Obsession is what she had, and obsession is a machine that grinds and clanks and hisses hour after hour, day after day, month after month, year after year. She hated my poem. I hated her fairy tale. She built Rune a magnum opus, a maze of her own private dance of grief, and he stole it. When she told me he wasn’t going to go through with her plan, she was flat on her back in her studio ogling a big, fat lady with forceps and a cowbell she had hung from the ceiling. Edgar and two other assistants, Ursula and Carlos, had gone home. It was about six in the evening. She had called me a few minutes before. “Come over, Brune. Something’s happened.” Her voice, hurt and faltering. She didn’t look at me once while the story rolled out of her, word by word, slowly, deliberately. Only her mouth moved. The rest of Harry had turned into a rock.
Rune had shown her a video of himself with Felix Lord. It was nothing, she kept saying, nothing at all, just the two of them sitting on a sofa in a nondescript room she had never seen before, not saying a word to each other, thirty, forty seconds of silence and one smile exchanged between them. The dead husband had roared back on film. “Why didn’t you tell me you knew Felix?” Harry had asked him. And he had said, “Does it matter?”
“Does it matter, Bruno?”
You bet it does, I said. It’s sneaky as hell. I told her I’d like to take my bat and smash his brains out.
And Harry said, “This is not a cartoon, Bruno.”
So much is gone now, of our conversations, I mean. The nights we lay and burbled into the wee hours, we two, my big, warm Harry and me, my pet, my heartsease, all lost, not a word left, but This is not a cartoon, Bruno is stamped into the furrows of my brain forever. I have perfect recall for this exchange. I went mum then, mute as a man who’d lost his larynx. She made me feel like some stupid jerk in a gorilla suit, blindly swinging because he can’t see out the eyeholes.
When I asked Harry what it meant, she said she didn’t know. Rune wouldn’t say. “He said that it’s just part of the game.”
I asked, “What game? What game?” I pressed her. I pressed her hard. “Blackmail?”
Harry stared at the ceiling and shook her head. She said she thought Rune was playing mind games with her and that the bastard would do anything to win. She said he wanted to worm an idea into her brain, that he had been Lord’s lover, maybe, or that he had known all about her from Felix before they met, something, anything. Once there is a secret, Harry said, you can fill up the hole with suspicion. When he was alive, Felix had secrets. Harry set her jaw and her eyes narrowed. She didn’t look at me. “He’s going to say Beneath is his. But it’s too late,” she said. “He won’t get away with it.”
Lord’s grave was never quiet. I wanted to shake Harry, force her to end it. Now was her chance to stop the merry-go-round, to jump off. I would help her. Bruno, her hero and protector, would swoop in to save her from herself. “Let’s go away,” I said. “Let’s leave.”
Harry shook her head.
I told her I loved her. I love you to high heaven, I said. I love you. Do you hear me?
She heard me. “I love you, too,” she said. She was not thinking of me.
Bruno, high on his noble sentiments, Mr. Rescue: All I needed was a phone booth where I could change into the suit. There aren’t phone booths anymore, old man.
I remember the sun made rectangles of light on the wood floor. I remember Harry’s sad face, and I remember the words that popped up to be quoted on that palimpsest in my mind. They came from the book of Ruth, King James version, the words of a woman who trailed after another woman and refused to turn back.
Whither thou goest, I will go, I said to Harry. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried.
Harry smiled a wobbly smile. “That’s nice, Bruno,” she said.
It felt like a kick to the gut.
Oswald Case
(written statement)
Rune never gave up on irony. That was his victory. Despite the general nothing-will-ever-be-the-same-again moaning and hand-wringing and great American soul-searching that went on in the aftermath of 9/11, if you ask yourself whether the art world was permanently altered by that day, the answer is an earsplitting no. After all is said and done, three thousand dead downtown ranks as a sneeze in the market, a momentary convulsion of conscience. Yes, artists whined about meaninglessness and a new beginning, but a few months later, it was life comme d’habitude. Mea culpa. I am the author of “Irony Died at Ground Zero,” published in The Gothamite the week of September 23. Let me put it this way: When I banished irony, that most necessary of all forms of thought, I meant it. Lower Manhattan was a freshly dug graveyard, and I thought I had been remade as Monsieur Sincère. Furthermore, I have since acknowledged my error. That is more than I can say for any number of my esteemed colleagues who poured their thwarted literary ambitions into cringingly bad articles. They forgot the motto of our noble profession: here today, gone tomorrow. My offering to the end-of-irony moment was not nearly as bathetic as most of the garbage that was published after 9/11. How many times did I read: “Who could have imagined it?” Every two-bit screenwriter in Hollywood had already imagined it. Rune had it right. He knew the spectacle would be used, exploited, rewritten in a thousand different and, mostly, tawdry ways.
When I interviewed him in 2002, he talked about his struggle with catastrophe as art. How could a slaughter that had already been manipulated into multiple narratives be represented? He talked about the speed of technology, about simulation, and finally, about awe. He said he’d never experienced it—awe. He hadn’t felt it before 9/11. He called it “emotional superconductivity.” He wanted it in the work. I know that Harriet Burden believed she had found a third cover for her this-woman-can-become-a-celebrity-artist-too campaign. The question is, did she intervene enough to rob Larsen of credit for the works, which would be shown a year and a half later? I think not. I think he knew exactly what he was doing. Beneath hit the art world like a tornado. The timing was brilliant. He knew that to show the images everyone saw on television on 9/11, and for a few days after, would not do, not in New York City. But if you had to walk through a maze, and look at black-and-white film footage of devastated cars or kiddy shoes covered in dust, along with that weird mask fantasy sequence (which I believe Rune directed), the viewer’s experience would increase in intensity. He used Harriet Burden as a muse. I give her credit for that, but mingling the fantasy images with others that were completely banal—Rune with a coffee cup looking out the window or snow falling—directly referenced Banality. Also, the robotic motions of the dancers are pure Rune. Beneath looks nothing like those squishy Burden works that are being shown now.
Well before my interview with him, Rune had become a bad-boy celebrity, which of course means that he was not nice. He was too complicated to be a nice guy, but then, niceness is not only overrated, it is far less attractive than it’s cracked up to be. People love a large, meaty ME. They say they don’t, but in the art world a cowardly, shrinking personality is repellent (unless it has been highly cultivated as a type), and narcissism is a magnet. The artist’s persona is part of the sell. Picasso was a genius, but look at the mythology. He ate people for breakfast. He had lots of women and loved torturing them. He was King of Confidence, a bloated, swaggering tower of talent whose scribbles on napkins are worth more than I will earn in a lifetime. If you don’t seduce people, you don’t have a chance. Look at Schnabel in his pajamas. Entitlement works.
In that first interview, Rune revealed his savvy for the ins and outs of the market. When I asked him about his last show, he said, “The Banality of Glamour did well because collectors found it edgy. They liked the reference to Hannah Arendt, even though they’d never read her book. I’ve never read it either. But the play on glamour and evil is fun because evil is not supposed to be banal but now glamour is.” By then, Rune had recorded himself daily for years: the life of the artist as a young man about town. I shall take this opportunity to correct a tired old truism: “Beauty is skin deep.” It is not. It is life down deep. Beauty makes you. Six-three, blond, blue-eyed, and fine-featured, Rune’s northern European roots blared as loudly as the commercials on TV that run at several decibels higher than the regular shows. His eyes were pale blue. There were times when I looked at him and felt as if I were talking to one of the replicants in Blade Runner.
For a while in the nineties, he adopted metrosexual affectations—cologne, manicures, hair mousse, body scrubs, self-tanners—and dutifully filmed all these applications for his diary. Then he stopped. He turned himself into an art cowboy au naturel—stiff jeans, boots, sweaty T-shirt. Not long after his Western incarnation, he appeared everywhere in sleek Italian suits and made loud statements about this or that artist, which entered the rumor mill. He understood his image, understood that he was his own object, a body to be sculpted in his work. “It’s fake,” he said. “The film diary is a big fake. That’s the point. It’s not that I staged it. It’s me waking up. It’s me at the parties. The fakeness comes from the fact that you believe you’re seeing something when you’re not seeing anything except what you put into the picture. That’s what celebrity culture is. It’s not about anything except your desire that can be bought for a price. I know that if I stick to some story about myself, I’ll get boring. Look at Madonna. My reinventions mean that I have no looks, no style. I’m bland, a bland blond. I haven’t created anything new. It’s been done before, but I’ve added
little twists and turns, and people like it. I actively fight against every trace of originality.”
His stance was a tease, a smart, complicated tease about America as consumer heaven where things are neither original nor real. Whether they knew what he was talking about or not, Rune made people around him feel hip. The colored crosses were so simple, they excited people. They were as easy to read as road signs, but hard to read, too. What did they mean? Modeled on the Red Cross symbol in different colors, they could have been an ironic reference to the whole history of Christianity or to the Crusades. After 9/11 they looked prescient: East-and-West conflict, civilizations at war. Or were they just a shape? Yes, some critics went after him, but I didn’t notice that collectors cared. The true irony is that September 11 did change him. He felt he needed a new aesthetic, at least for a while. Maybe this led him to Burden, an artist so obscure she wasn’t even a has-been. Personally, I find her work to be little more than neo-Romantic gushing—high-flown, sentimental, and embarrassing—one big agonized groan that reminds me of a half-baked Existentialism. I have yet to penetrate the supposed interest of her “metamorphs.”
Political correctness and identity politics have infiltrated the visual arts as well as every other aspect of cosmopolitan American culture and account for a good part of the applause that her work now receives. The poor, neglected woman who couldn’t find a gallery! Poor Harriet Burden, rich as Croesus in five-hundred-dollar hats, the widow of one of the shrewdest dealers ever to work in New York City. My heart goes out to her. It throbs with sympathy. Art is not a democracy, but this blatant truth must not even be whispered in our prickly, tickly city of do-gooder, liberal, decaffeinated-skim-latte-drinking mediocrities blind to the facts. To suggest, even for an instant, that there might be more men than women in art because men are better artists is to risk being tortured by the thought police. And yet, read The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, distinguished psychologist and a bold prophet of the new frontier—genetics-based sociobiology—and then tell me that men and women are identical, that they have the same strengths, that “gender” difference is environmental. Test after test in brain science has determined that men score higher on visual/spatial skills and mental rotation tests than women. Might this not, in part at least, be related to the dominant position of men in the visual arts? It’s evolutionary. It’s in the cards. Men are hunters and fighters, active, not passive, doers and makers. Women have been nurturers, caring for children. They had to stay close to the nest. Has there been discrimination and prejudice against women? Of course there has, but feminism hasn’t helped the cause; feminists have screamed about numbers and quotas and turned women artists into political tools. The good ones want nothing to do with feminism. Harriet Burden is the latest craze in a venerable tradition: the woman victimized by a “phallocentric” world, which stomped on her greatness.
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