Siri Hustvedt
The Blazing World
Editor’s Introduction
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“All intellectual and artistic endeavors, even jokes, ironies, and parodies, fare better in the mind of the crowd when the crowd knows that somewhere behind the great work or the great spoof it can locate a cock and a pair of balls. ” In 2003, I ran across this provocative sentence in a letter to the editor that was published in an issue of The Open Eye, an interdisciplinary journal I had been reading faithfully for several years. The letter’s author, Richard Brickman, did not write the sentence. He was quoting an artist whose name I had never seen in print before: Harriet Burden. Brickman claimed that Burden had written him a long letter about a project she wanted him to make public. Although Burden had exhibited her work in New York City in the 1970s and ’80s, she had been disappointed by its reception and had withdrawn from the art world altogether. Sometime in the late nineties, she began an experiment that took her five years to complete. According to Brickman, Burden engaged three men to act as fronts for her own creative work. Three solo shows in three New York galleries, attributed to Anton Tish (1998), Phineas Q. Eldridge (2002), and the artist known only as Rune (2003), had actually been made by Burden. She titled the project as a whole Maskings, and declared that it was meant not only to expose the antifemale bias of the art world, but to uncover the complex workings of human perception and how unconscious ideas about gender, race, and celebrity influence a viewer’s understanding of a given work of art.
But Brickman went further.
He argued that Burden insisted that the pseudonym she adopted changed the character of the art she made. In other words, the man she used as a mask played a role in the
kind of art she produced: “Each artist mask became for Burden a ‘poetized personality,’ a visual elaboration of a ‘hermaphroditic self,’ which cannot be said to belong to either her or to the mask, but to ‘a mingled reality created between them. ’” As a professor of aesthetics, I was immediately fascinated by the project for its ambition, but also for its philosophical complexity and sophistication.
At the same time, Brickman’s letter puzzled me. Why hadn’t Burden published her own statement? Why would she allow Brickman to speak for her? Brickman claimed that the sixty-page letter Burden called “Missive from the Realm of Fictional Being” had arrived unannounced in his mailbox and that he had no knowledge of the artist beforehand. The tone of Brickman’s letter is also curious: It alternates between condescension and admiration. He criticizes Burden’s letter as hyperbolic and unsuited for publication in an academic journal but then quotes other passages he attributes to her with seeming approval. I was left with a muddled impression of the letter, as well as a feeling of irritation with Brickman, whose commentary effectively smothers Burden’s original text. I immediately looked up the three exhibitions, The History of Western Art by Tish, The Suffocation Rooms by Eldridge, and Beneath by Rune, each of which was visually distinct from the other two. Nevertheless, I gleaned what I would call a “family resemblance” among the three. The Tish, Eldridge, and Rune shows Burden had allegedly invented were all compelling as art, but I was especially intrigued by Burden’s experiment because it resonated with my own intellectual concerns.
