The Blazing World (39 page)

Burden’s admittedly hyperbolic argument is that her retreat behind men not only eliminated antifemale bias but that maleness
augments
the value of intellectual work and art objects for the public, which she posits as a kind of undifferentiated collective mind—clearly a rhetorical exaggeration.
^III
That bias exists, however, seems undeniable. An experiment designed with three female artists as well as the three male ones would have allowed a comparison between the two groups, but even under those circumstances, there are so many variables at work in the reception of any given artist’s creations that what Burden calls her “fairy tale constructed in three acts” may be ultimately elusive in terms of what it actually
means
. The New York art world can hardly be thought of as a laboratory of controlled circumstances. Furthermore, had the artworks been identical in each case, it would have been much easier to draw a conclusion from Burden’s experiment. There have, in fact, been many studies on the perception of race, gender, as well as age, most of which, but not all, reveal biases, often unconscious, and which vary from culture to culture.

Burden’s commentary on her second “fictional construct” or mask, Phineas Q. Eldridge, takes up the question of race and sexuality as essential factors in the perception of the exhibition she produced for him.

My two white boys, sleeping with the Other, as far as we know, anyway, are creatures without impediments to the bursting fullness of their particular characters. In other words, they have no identity. An oxymoron? No. Their freedom lies precisely in this: They
cannot
be defined by what they are
not
—not men, not straight, not white. And in this absence of circumscribed being, they are allowed to flourish in all their specificity. He picks his nose. He’s a dullard, a genius. He sings off-key. He reads Merleau-Ponty. His work will live in posterity. The art I made for them, for Tish and Rune, exists here and now without a single crippling adjective. But my Phinny mask, gay and black or black and gay, which hides my long white womanly face, pinches hard.

The presence of a hermaphrodite figure in Burden’s second show,
The Suffocation Rooms
, seems to have precipitated the reactions of reviewers, creating what she calls “the blindness of context,” a radical externalization and reduction of a person’s identity to stable and thus limiting categories of marginality. Burden duly credits her feminist sources—Simone de Beauvoir, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Judith Butler, Toril Moi, Elizabeth Wilson among them. Burden insists on ambiguity as a philosophical position, and furiously denies hard binary oppositions, even on the biological level of human sexuality, a view which, frankly, situates her as an extremist, one alien to my own position.
^IV

The letter takes a further turn into theories of self. Again, Burden seems to be aware of the philosophical and scientific debates on the nature of the self, and her letter escorts the reader on a convoluted path from Homer to the Stoics to Vico, leaping forward to W. T. H. Myers’s subliminal self, to Janet, Freud, and James, to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of time consciousness and intersubjectivity and then to contemporary infant research, as well as neuroscience findings about primordial selves, and locationist hypotheses which focus on the hypothalamus and periaqueductal gray areas of the brain, as well as a Finnish scholar, Pauli Pylkkö, who advances a notion of “aconceptual mind,” and an obscure novelist and essayist, Siri Hustvedt, whose position Burden calls “a moving target.” As far as I can tell, Burden attempts to undermine all conceptual borders, which, I believe, define human experience itself. I cannot say that her wild romp into the more peculiar aspects of continental philosophy convinced me. The woman flirts with the irrational.
^V

That notwithstanding, the artist’s stated ambition is to dismantle conventional modes of vision, to insist on her “unfettered personas” as “a medium of flight.” She staunchly maintains that adopting the masks allowed her greater fluidity as an artist, an ability to locate herself elsewhere, to alter her gestures, and to live out “a liberating duplicity and ambiguity.” 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.”

This declaration is, of course, a purely subjective one, but then the arts are not about objectivity. Burden’s
experiment
might be better named a
performance
or
performance narrative
. She regards the three exhibitions as a trio that together comprise a single work called
Maskings
, which has a strong theatrical and narrative component because she insists that it includes the reviews, notices, ads, and commentary the shows have generated, which she refers to as “the proliferations.” The proliferations, of which this essay is presumably one, project Burden’s fictional, poetized personalities into the broader conversation about art and perception.

Richard Brickman

I.
Burden as Brickman is referring to poststructuralist, continental theory, which maintains that perception of things in the world is socially created (constructed) and maintained in cultural tradition. If, as some recent science suggests, human perception is shaped by expectation, then the constructionists, Brickman argues, have a point.

II.
Blindsight is the name given to a condition in patients who, despite lesions in their primary visual cortex, retain visual capacities but insist they can see nothing. When presented with an object and asked to identify it, these patients guess correctly at a much higher level than chance, which implies that what they are missing is the awareness of an object they have registered implicitly. See Lawrence Weiskrantz, “Blindsight Revisited,”
Current Opinion in Neurobiology
6 (1996): 215–20. In visual masking studies, a visual stimulus, “the target,” becomes less visible due to interactions with other stimuli that are called “masks.” For example, when a target stimulus is presented to a viewer and then immediately followed by a mask, the target is rendered invisible. Nevertheless, research has demonstrated that the content of the target image can have a subliminal effect on the subject. See Hannula et al., “Masking and Implicit Perception,”
Nature Reviews Neuroscience
6 (2005), 247–55.

III.
Although the entire pseudonymous letter may be read as ironic, the ironies are more and less layered throughout. Brickman never mentions Kierkegaard by name, but Burden’s reference to the “crowd” in the quotation, supposedly in Burden’s own voice (a direct communication), must be read as an allusion to the Danish philosopher, who writes in
The Point of View, “
Even good-natured and worthy people become like totally different creatures as soon as they become the ‘crowd’ . . . One must see it close up, the callousness with which otherwise kind people act in the capacity of the public because their participation or nonparticipation seems to them a trifle—a trifle that with the contributions of the many becomes the monster” (
Kierkegaard’s Writings
, vol. XXII, 65). Her commentaries on Kierkegaard and “the crowd” in Notebook K suggest that Burden is making ironic sport of Brickman’s superior, authorial tone when he speaks of “rhetorical exaggeration.” Brickman’s language serves as the restrained context for the vulgarity and passion of the quotation.

IV.
Brickman’s assertion that Burden is an “extremist” resonates with many evolutionary sociobiologists who take an essentialist position on sexual difference. Writing in Notebook F, however, Burden does not deny sexual biological differences. She argues that beyond the obvious reproductive differences between the sexes, all other differences, should they exist, remain unknown. She refers to the burgeoning field of epigenetics and “the seamless relation between experience and gene expression.”

V.
This paragraph is so compressed it suggests parody. Even the somewhat obscure references, however, are not fictional. W. T. H. Myers was a psychical researcher and a friend of William James, who argued for a “subliminal self” in his magnum opus,
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
(London: Longman’s, Green & Co., 1906). Pierre Janet, neurologist and philosopher, was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud’s. Despite the fact that his idea of dissociation remained influential in psychiatry, he had been mostly lost as a thinker until recent years. See
The Major Symptoms of Hysteria: Fifteen Lectures Given in the Medical School of Harvard University
(London: Macmillan, 1907). The core or primordial self figures in neuroscience research. In Notebook P, Burden took notes on Jaak Panksepp’s
Affective Neuroscience
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 309–14. Pauli Pylkkö is the author of
The Aconceptual Mind: Heideggerian Themes in Holistic Naturalism
(Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998). Which works by Siri Hustvedt Brickman/Burden has in mind are unclear, although in Notebook H, she notes that the author’s novel
The Blindfold
is a “textual transvestite” and “a book of the uncanny, à la Freud.” Brickman’s final comment about “irrationality” may be glossed by Burden herself. In Notebook F, she writes, “In the history of the West, women have been continually choked, smothered, and suffocated by the word
irrational
.”

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?