The Blazing World: A Novel

by Siri Hustvedt

  Nevertheless, Rune was looking for a way to mix up his work—to add a retrograde element, to introduce something of the past, some nostalgia for the avant-garde, for Expressionism, for art before Warholian accommodation to the ultimate consumer fantasy—the world before Campbell’s soup. I think he found it in Burden. She didn’t find him. He found her. Later, he told me as much. The woman was well placed, and he had known her husband. Just for the record, Rune wasn’t gay. Women were all over the man. They sidled up to him. They brushed against him, as if by accident. They cooed and babbled at him with silly, dumbstruck expressions on their faces. Young and beautiful women and not-so-young-and-not-so-beautiful women couldn’t get enough of him. I recall a pool game Rune and I played together downtown. Afterward, we had a beer at the bar. A babe in her twenties, a real babe (forgive me if I ruffle any delicate feathers with this mild slang for “gorgeous female”) with dark hair and a tight shirt tied at her waist, so her navel with a little gold ring in it was just visible, walked over and sat down on the stool next to him. She didn’t say a word. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t buy her a drink. Niente. He turned to me and said, “Night, Ozzie.” I watched them leave the bar together and turn right at the corner.

  For the profile on Rune I needed the facts. They’re sticklers for facts at The Gothamite. They check and recheck the facts. The joke on all this fastidious fact-checking is that you’re allowed to humiliate anybody, as long as the subject’s birth date, hometown, and all numbers connected to him are flawless. And you can quote out-and-out liars, as long as you quote them correctly. It gives roundness to a piece: a bit of positive, a bit of negative. We like balanced reporting. But balance is most important in things serious. Politics is serious. Muckraking is serious, and it must have prose to match. War zones require that all humor and/or irony cease and desist. The arts are not serious, not in the U.S. of A. They do not involve life and death. We are not French. In reviews of the arts, if you spell the guy’s name right, you can write whatever you want. You can send hate mail to whichever pompous ass you choose in the form of a review and make a reputation for yourself in the bargain. Do I offend? Excusez-moi.

  H. L. Mencken once wrote that if a critic “devotes himself to advocating the transient platitudes in a sonorous manner,” he gets respect. The contemporary platitudes are: Dump on white males, encourage diversity, and destroy the canon; or conversely, wave the flag for the canon and old-fashioned artistic virtues. Of course, Mencken was writing back in the day when college meant literacy. It no longer does. I could regale you for hours with stories of our interns, fresh from the Ivy League, who cannot distinguish between like and as, who cannot conjugate the verb to lie (as in lie down on the floor), whose diction errors give me gooseflesh, but from their semiliterate mouths come one transient “right-thinking” platitude after the other. How I yearn for the future, when these people who cannot write a cursive hand have taken over the world.

  In the visual arts, Clement Greenberg was a successful dictator while his reign lasted, but that world is finished. And yet, the more writing generated around an artist, the better, especially if the arguments for said artist’s greatness sound suitably abstruse. I wasn’t reviewing Rune, however. For the profile and later for my book, I needed his life story. The facts are these: Born in Clinton, Iowa, in 1965 to Hiram and Sharon Larsen. One younger sibling: Kirsten. Father, owner of car repair shop. Mother takes in sewing. Described by neighbor as “a quiet, polite boy.” Attends Clinton High School. 1980, wins first at science fair. 1981, mother commits suicide by sleeping pills. 1982, arrest by local police for vandalism (decapitating garden dwarf in neighbor’s yard). Attends Beloit College for one year on scholarship. Transfers to University of Minnesota. Takes classes in engineering and media studies. Drops out after six semesters. Erratic transcript. Hitchhikes to New York City. 1987, cast as extra in the movie City Slaves. Same year becomes attached to Rena Dewitt, author of the novel City Slaves, who is briefly famous. Dewitt, daughter of the Percy Dewitt, heiress to pharmaceutical fortune, introduces new boyfriend to joys of big money—Hamptons parties, nightlife, and art world. 1988, begins self-documentary. 1989, declares himself an artist of one name only—Rune—in his Diary, ceremoniously amputating family name by holding up sheet of paper and cutting loose Larsen with a pair of scissors. 1991, debut in group show at P.S. 1: Just a Regular Guy [Diary entry 1556], film of Rune painted blue, à la Yves Klein, narrating his day to a small robot that nods its head up and down. Noted in New York Times as show highlight. Befriends and is often seen with model Luisa Fontana. Luisa comes to a bad end. She jumps from the eleventh floor of her apartment on East Sixty-seventh Street in April. Sad death of beautiful girl merits big story in the New York Post. Rune is mentioned as one of her coterie of friends.

  (No known source of income between 1986 and 1992.) 1992, Breaking Up Is Hard to Do [Diary entry 1825] shown at the Zeit Gallery. Two films run simultaneously: (1) Documentary film of Rune and Dewitt’s histrionic parting of the ways in huge glamorous apartment on Central Park West owned by Dewitt. Considerable athleticism displayed by both parties in hurling of shoes. (2) Animated “cybernetic” version of two figures enacting identical gestures. Generates press attention. William Burridge takes notice. Rune leaves Zeit for Burridge Gallery. Several hypocritical articles published by journalists moaning about invasion of privacy. Isn’t that what we do? Rune claims Dewitt knew about camera and both versions are “simulations.” Dewitt claims she forgot the camera was there. October 1995, Hiram Larsen dies in Clinton family house of head wounds sustained after falling down stairs to his basement workshop. Rune attends funeral in Iowa. November 1995, William Burridge attempts to contact Rune in Williamsburg, where he had moved in with Katy Hale, but to no avail. Breaks with her after two months, takes up with India Anand. No film, video, or digital recording. Autobiography stops until 1996, when Rune resurfaces in New York City. No fixed address until November.

  October 1997, blockbuster show The Banality of Glamour at Burridge Gallery using facial morphing technology to incrementally alter his features in video sequence of himself waking up, walking in streets, and attending an opening at night wearing T-shirt that says Artificial Man. Simultaneous films of plastic-surgery patients under the knife (both cosmetic and reconstructive) mixed with images of prosthetic and robotic hands, arms, legs, as well as crucifixes and crosses. Bricks poised at various junctures in gallery with simple inscriptions: Art, Artificial, Art Man, Man Art, Manart, Artman, Cross, Crosses, and Crucifix. Brisk business in bricks. Art Assembly publishes article “Rune: Constructing the Non-Self.” Shows in Cologne and Tokyo. Cross show in September 1999. Yellow cross sells for three million.

  “In heaven,” someone wrote, “all the interesting people are missing.” Rune was surely an interesting person. He told every journalist a different story about his missing period, not a vague or general narrative but highly specific accounts, which each reporter swallowed whole. A synopsis:

  1. He left New York heartbroken after his affair with Dewitt and moved to Newfane, Vermont, where he lived under another name, Peter Granger, and did odd carpentry jobs to make a living.

  2. He escaped to Berkeley and, after losing a job as a clerk at Cody’s Bookstore, ended up homeless and lived among a roving group of bums in San Francisco.

  3. He lived in his car for those months, driving from one place to another, taking work where he could get it but never staying anywhere for more than three weeks.

  Nobody I spoke to in Newfane had ever heard of Peter Granger. The people at Cody’s knew nothing of Rune, and the on-the-road tale could not be verified one way or another.

  Rune fed me a fourth version. After the fiasco with Rena Dewitt and his father’s death, he felt not depressed but elated. “I could do no wrong,” he said. “I was so up, I never walked; I soared. The feeling was way beyond good. It was ecstasy. I spent money. I had sex, sometimes five women a day. I danced, sang, and jerked off. I had visions, man. No drugs, just wild mirag
es of big red beasts and women with dog teeth. Scared me shitless. One of my sex partners, who just happened to be a psychiatrist, took me to Psych Emergency at New York Hospital after we had fucked. Well, fucked and fought. Imagine that, one minute you’re panting over a sexy shrink, and the next thing you know you’re an inpatient in a locked ward.”

  Although I tried to check this story, privacy laws for psychiatric patients in New York State impeded me at every turn. I tend to go with number four, not because I was the recipient of this explanation but because it is bizarre and, having made my way into solid middle age, I have heard enough of the world to know that the truth often sounds invented and the invented has the ring of truth. It is at least plausible that Larsen had some kind of breakdown, although it has not been confirmed.

  Doing research for my book after Rune’s death, I understood that his sister, Kirsten, knew where her brother had been during much of that unrecorded period of his life. Kirsten Larsen is a craniofacial technician in Minneapolis. She makes facial prostheses for cancer patients and others who have lost noses, ears, cheeks, chins, and jaws, et cetera. Although it is admittedly difficult to imagine this as a life’s calling, during our phone conversation she spoke of it as a noble profession, waxing grandiloquent on the challenges of forming just the right proboscis in “biocompatible materials” for the man who has lost his own, and cheerfully acknowledged that her work had played a role in The Banality of Glamour. She was far more reticent when it came to her brother’s disappearance, however, and spoke vaguely of his need “to find himself.” Rune had wanted solitude. She was “not in a position to say,” et cetera. When asked point-blank about possible mental illness, she said very quietly, “I think he had to be crazy to die like that, don’t you? That’s all I’ll say.” “And your father’s death? Was it very hard on him?” There was a long silence. I waited patiently. Then I heard sniffling. I lowered my voice and adopted the consoling lilt I have perfected over time; it had not been my intention to upset her. Their father’s accident must have been a shock, a terrible shock. Sobs on the other end of the line. “He found him. Don’t you understand how terrible that was? He found him dead.” And then, growling, she said, “The dead deserve some respect. Don’t you get that? Mom, Dad, Rune. They’re all dead. But they ought to be respected.”

  Investigative reporting can be trying, and one has to get used to the intrusions that are necessary for a story. I had adapted to the tearful faces and choked-up voices long ago, but here was a woman who wasn’t willing to talk, and I liked her for it. We live in a world in which those desperate for media attention regularly sell their souls for a turn on TV. The mere mention of my magazine brightens eyes and loosens tongues, but as the ironies pile up, one on top of another, it must be said that Rune lusted after attention. I said this to Kirsten. “Don’t you think your brother would have wanted a book about him? Wasn’t his last gesture for art and technology? I believe he made it clear that his death was an aesthetic statement, and that was how he chose to do it.”

  Before she hung up the telephone, Kirsten Larsen said, “I don’t think you understand anything.”

  Rena Dewitt released a statement articulating her “shock and sadness” after the death, and then vanished behind the legal wall that inevitably surrounds billions of dollars. I have hours of taped conversations with Katy and India, however, who provided minutiae about their mutual paramour’s likes and dislikes, his childhood stories, his eating habits—the real Rune, as it were. There was some agreement. He read a lot, especially science fiction, comics, biographies of artists. He loved Nietzsche and liked to quote Marinetti, the Italian Futurist, who kicked every drippy sentiment in the pants. All the particulars are revealed in my book, but to make a long story pithy: The reports on his personal life did not match. Interview after interview with friends and acquaintances uncovered not one person but several. He loved his mother. He called her a “cold bitch.” His relations with his mother were “troubled.” He was alienated from his father, who used to beat him. He admired his father, but found him a bit “simpleminded and conventional.” He had taken a number of hallucinogens in college. He had never touched drugs but had spontaneous hallucinations. I can confirm that he liked whiskey. One night when we were out, he put his arm around me after four drinks and said, “You know why I like you, Ozzie, old man?” After I had dutifully said, “No, Rune, why?” “Because we get it. The world is shit.”

  This may pass for a philosophical statement, I suppose. We were both confirmed atheists, but what fascinated me about the man was that with me, too, he changed from one day to the next. He talked a lot about “honing his image” and his “self-presentation,” his need to “nail down a game plan.” But then he would confess to a desire to make art that would “slice people open” and “shake them hard.” According to Katy, he wept regularly over newspaper articles about dead and/or abused children, gave money to a host of animal charities, and professed vegetarianism. It may have been a phase. With me, he ate meat.

  Rune was a fabulist. He reinvented himself again and again ceaselessly until the end. In this respect, he was a man of our time, a creature of the media and of virtual realities, an avatar walking the earth, a digitized being. No one knew him. His comment about his autobiography as a “fake” is at once deep and shallow. And that is the point. There can be no depth in our world, no personality, no true story, only images without substance projected anywhere and everywhere instantaneously. Soon we will have communication devices implanted directly into our brains. The distinctions between reality and image are already fading. People live in their screens. Social media is replacing social life.

  I saw Harriet Burden with Rune once at his place not long after Beneath had been mounted. I liked to refer to Rune’s warehouse conversion as “Versailles on the Hudson.” The elevator held twenty. The rooms were stupendously large, with monumental sofas and overstuffed chairs covered in brocades, silks, and velvets in brilliant colors, streaming with light. “I wanted it to look like a Hitchcock movie, a Technicolor extravaganza,” he said. His own gigantic film stills were hanging everywhere. His girlfriend at the time, Fanny-something (former Victoria’s Secret model), drifted in and out wearing Ugg boots and cut-off jeans. “I need a pan for the brownies, Rune.”

  Sometime later, Felix Lord’s widow was ushered into the room by some underling who had answered the door, and there, in harsh contrast to the lithe and lovely Fanny, stood the enormous Harriet, a shrill presence even before she had opened her mouth. I knew she had been buying and selling art, had spied her at a few openings, but I had not spoken to her since the day I met her at Tish’s studio. She greeted me coldly, sat down, and said nothing for a while. Rune and I talked about AI, an interest we shared, when she interrupted us with a harsh comment to the effect that AI scientists couldn’t even make a robot that walked like a human being, for God’s sake. Then she started in on consciousness, as if she were some kind of expert, and then I mentioned Beneath. She called it a big change after the crosses. I was polite. I humored her. I said it was the oscillation in Rune’s work that was interesting—the movement from one position to the other—but that his work was always about bodies, technology, and simulation, this time in disaster mode.

  She interrupted us. “I don’t see how Beneath is about technology.”

  I mentioned the robot dance.

  “Why do you think those figures are robots?”

  Rune took my side. The dancers had robotic movements, he said, sure, in line with his earlier work. Most of the reviews, he said, had described them that way.

  I merely echoed this comment, saying that it was obvious to everyone.

  This set her off. Her voice rose an octave. She asked who “everyone” was, said I was blinded by context and so were the other fools, or something to that effect. She accused me of multiple failings as a writer, most of which I can’t remember. I was embarrassed for her, really, and wasn’t going to egg her on with a response. This annoyed her further. Women wh
o resort to wailing have always had a chilling effect on me. My admittedly brief marriage ended because I became allergic to my wife’s voice. Since then, I only consort with women who keep their tones low and dulcet. The Harriet tirade lasted seven, maybe ten minutes. Rune tried to placate her: “Harry, Harry, it’s not important. Relax. Come on.” The upset ended with her sweeping up her coat and hat and making a grand exit.

  I had no sense that the two were collaborators. It was obvious that Rune was calling the shots. I asked him what her problem was, and he said she was overly sensitive, a bit unstable, but a friend. I would like to note here that he defended her: “People don’t understand Harry, but she’s highly intelligent. She’s stuck on her own view, that’s all. I admire her for it.”