The Blazing World (46 page)

We set up a hospice at the lodge, but Harry was worse, too weak to put up much of a fight, except now and again—a piercing wail or a gob of spit sent across the room. Sweet Autumn tiptoed in one day with a weird little mutt and a bag of her healing stones and shells and a lot of New Age craziness swirling in her head, and stayed until the end. We would have kicked her out, but Harry liked her. Harry liked her little heart-shaped face with her bright red lips and fairy princess blond curls and her chatter.

This is hard for me to write. These words come hard to me; each one begins as a stone in my mouth. Harry’s pain arrived in bolts that made her limbs stiffen. We turned up the drip. She whimpered as she lay stiffly flat on her back, and she allowed me to stroke her head, her neck, and her shoulders. I’ll be good, she whispered. I promise to be good, Bruno. Don’t leave me. I’m afraid. I told her I wouldn’t leave her, and I didn’t. She left me. Her last word was
no
. She said it several times, and before she died, she rattled. The noise came from deep in her lungs, shuddering, dry, and loud, and we watched. Harry died at three o’clock in the afternoon on April 18, 2004, with the window wide open in the room so the spring air and sunlight could reach her face.

Damn you, Harry. Damn you, for leaving me too soon.

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.

Kirsten Larsen Smith

(interview, November 2011)

Hess: You have not wanted to speak publicly about your brother since his death in 2003. Can you tell me why you decided to talk to me?

Smith: Ever since I read the book by Oswald Case on Rune, I’ve been thinking about setting a few things straight about my brother. It’s been eight years since he passed away, and after I spoke to you on the phone, I knew I was ready to say my piece. It’s been building up for years.

Hess: You feel the book misrepresented your brother?

Smith: You bet I do. First of all, he turns Rune into some underprivileged child. The way he writes it, you’d think he had grown up as a dirty little piece of white trash running around in the woods behind our trailer, wiping snot from his nose with his arm and eating dinner out of a can. Dad owned and operated the biggest garage in Clinton. Our mom had two years of college, and she was an excellent seamstress. She could have been a clothing designer in some other city. We were
not
poor. We lived in a nice house and drove two cars. Case never talked to anybody who really knew us, except Mrs. Huggenvik, who was senile by then and had always been a persnickety woman anyway.

Rune was older than me by four years. Dad said that from the day I could walk, I followed my brother around, and most of the time Rune was pretty nice to his little shadow. I know it’s hard to believe, considering how much he grew, but Rune was a short, fat kid. He loved candy, comics, Lego, and the movies. He used to read the newspaper every morning and take notes on the articles he liked in a little book he carried around with him in the back pocket of his jeans. If he had been a good athlete, that little book he kept with current events in it might not have mattered, but he stank at sports, so the other kids picked on him at school. Then he grew seven inches the year after he turned fourteen and, all of a sudden, he was this tall, handsome guy with girls calling him up on the phone and sending him love notes.

I’m sure Rune talked Case’s ear off about his life, but my brother stretched the truth. It became a habit with him. Even when he wasn’t lying straight out, he could pull the facts every which way, and sometimes, after all the pulling, there wasn’t much truth left.

Hess: But if I remember correctly, Case writes that Rune cultivated myths about himself. I don’t think he believed everything Rune told him.

Smith: No, he didn’t believe everything Rune told him by a long shot, but he made Rune’s fibs and exaggerations into some fabulous achievement. You know, his position was that Rune was so creative he told this story and that one, and isn’t it great that he lied and kept secrets from everybody? I think that’s perverted, don’t you? Case seems to think that if you’re a famous artist, you don’t need to be a moral person like the rest of us. And then, Case paints a portrait of Mom that is so crude, so nasty—it really upset me.

Hess: You felt your mother was portrayed inaccurately?

Smith: Mom drank. Case had that right. I don’t think we ever knew how much she really drank every day. She hid it, and the problem must have gotten worse and worse, but for years she coped pretty well. She was not a “pathetic, weepy, female boozehound.” That’s a quote from the book. My great-aunt Susie used to call Mom “Sunshine” because she had such a magical smile. Mom knew how to play with us kids better than any grown-up we knew. She could run and do cartwheels and swing upside down on the jungle gym we had behind the house. She worked hard at hemming skirts and pants and doing other alterations for her clients, and she liked to make fancy dress-up clothes and costumes for me and Rune. You should have seen us on Halloween. I think she liked my sparkly, frou-frou princess outfits even more than I did. You see, Mom had been one of those drop-dead beautiful girls. Every time she walked down the street, heads swiveled to look at her. She liked to tell us about the day she was walking down the street in Clinton, just minding her own business, when a man stopped her on the street and said, “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life.” That was all. He went on his way, but Mom’s eyes would get bright and glassy every time she told the story. When being beautiful is the best thing you’ve got, it’s bound to be disappointing because you have to get older. She called herself a dreamer. She used to say to me, “You’re the practical one, Kirsten. Rune’s the dreamer. You’re like your father. Rune’s like me.”