Rune’s version of events could not be included in this anthology. His widely publicized death in 2004, which may or may not have been suicide, became a sensational media story. Rune’s career has been extensively documented. His work was widely reviewed, and there are also many critical articles and several books on him and his work available to anyone who is interested. Nevertheless, I wanted Rune’s view to be represented in this collection, and I asked Oswald Case, a journalist as well as a friend and biographer of Rune, to contribute to the volume. He graciously accepted. Other contributors include Bruno Kleinfeld; Maisie and Ethan Lord; Rachel Briefman, a close friend of Burden’s; Phineas Q. Eldridge, Burden’s second “mask”; Alan Dudek (also known as the Barometer), who lived with Burden; and Sweet Autumn Pinkney, who worked as an assistant on The History of Western Art and knew Anton Tish.
Despite Herculean efforts on my part, I was unable to contact Tish, whose account of his involvement with Burden would have been invaluable. A short interview with him, however, is part of this collection. In 2008, I wrote to Rune’s sister, Kirsten Larsen Smith, asking her for an interview about her brother’s involvement with Burden, but she demurred, saying that she was not able to talk about her brother because she was too distressed about his untimely death. Then, in March 2011, after I had compiled and edited all the materials for the book, Smith called me and explained that she had decided to accept my request for an interview. My conversation with her has now been added to the book. I am deeply grateful for her courage and honesty in speaking about her brother.
I have included a short essay by the art critic Rosemary Lerner, who is currently working on a book about Burden; interviews with two of the art dealers who showed Burden’s “masks”; and a couple of brief reviews that were published after the opening of The Suffocation Rooms, an exhibition that received far less attention than the other two shows that are part of the Maskings trilogy. Timothy Hardwick’s article, published after Rune’s death, was added to the anthology because it addresses Rune’s views on artificial intelligence, a subject that interested Burden as well, although her notes on the subject suggest that the two of them were not in agreement.
I feel obliged to touch upon the question of mental illness. Although, in an essay on Burden in Art Lights, Alison Shaw called the artist “a paragon of sanity in an insanely biased world,” Alfred Tong, in an article for Blank: A Magazine of the Arts, takes the opposite position:
Harriet Burden was rich. She never had to work after she married the renowned art dealer and collector Felix Lord. When he died in 1995, she suffered a complete mental breakdown and was treated by a psychiatrist. She remained in his care the rest of her life. By all accounts, Burden was eccentric, paranoid, belligerent, hysterical, and even violent. Several people watched her physically attack Rune in Red Hook near the water. One of the eyewitnesses told me personally that Rune left the scene bloody and bruised. I am hard pressed to understand why anyone would believe that she was even close to stable enough to produce Beneath, a rigorous, complicated installation that may be Rune’s greatest work.
In the excerpts from the journals that follow, Burden writes about her suffering after her husband’s death, and she writes about Dr. Adam Fertig, to whom she felt indebted. Tong is right that she continued to see Fertig, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, for the eight remaining years of her life. She went to him for psychotherapy twice a week. It is also true that she punched Rune in front of a number of witnesses. The conclusions Tong draws from these facts, however, are largely unfounded. The author of the notebooks is sensitive, tormented, angry, and, like most of us, prone to neurotic blind spots. For example, Burden often seems to forget that it was her decision to leave the art world. She exhibited her work behind at least two, if not three, male masks, but she refused to show the art she had amassed over many years to a single dealer, a fact that more than hints at self-sabotage.
My careful reading of the twenty-four notebooks, along with the texts and statements of those who knew her well, has provided me with a nuanced view of Harriet Burden, the artist and the woman; but while I worked on this book intermittently over the course of six years — interpreting her handwriting, doing my best to track down her references and cross-references, and trying to make sense of her multiple meanings — I confess I sometimes had the uncomfortable feeling that the ghost of Harriet Burden was laughing over my shoulder. She referred to herself several times in her journals as a “trickster,” and she seems to have delighted in all kinds of ruses and games. There are only two letters missing from Burden’s alphabet of notebooks: I and O. The letter I is, of course, the first-person pronoun in English, and I began to wonder how Burden could have resisted keeping a notebook under that letter and whether she hadn’t hidden it somewhere, if only to tease people like me, whom she had obviously hoped would eventually take notice of her and her work. There appear to be two parenthetical references to I, although she may have meant the number 1 instead. As for O, it is a number as well as a letter, a nullity, an opening, a void. Perhaps she purposely left that letter out of her alphabet. I don’t know. And Richard Brickman? There are hundreds of Richard Brickmans in the United States, but my guess is that Brickman was another of Burden’s pseudonyms. When Ethan told me his mother had published at least one critical work in 1986, using the preposterous name Roger Raison, I began to feel quite sure of my hypothesis, although I have no evidence to substantiate it whatsoever.
The best policy may be to let the reader of what follows judge for him- or herself exactly what Harriet Burden meant or didn’t mean and whether her account of herself can be trusted. The story that emerges from this anthology of voices is intimate, contradictory, and, I admit, rather strange. I have done my best to assemble the texts into a reasonable order and to provide notes for Burden’s writing when needed for clarification, but the words belong to the contributors, and I have let them stand with only minor editorial intervention.
Finally, I must add a few words about the title of this volume. In Notebook R (possibly for revenant, revisit, or repetition—all three words appear multiple times), after twenty pages on ghosts and dreaming, there is a blank space followed by the words Monsters at Home. This served as my working title until I had received all the texts, organized them into the present order, and read them through. I decided that the title Burden borrowed from Cavendish and gave to the last work of art she was able to complete before her death was better suited to the narrative as a whole: The Blazing World.
I. V. Hess
Postscript
Just as this book was going to press, I was contacted by Maisie and Ethan Lord, who reported that they had just recovered another notebook: Notebook O. The entries in O provide further information on Harriet Burden’s relationship with Rune and reveal that Richard Brickman is, as I had guessed, a pseudonym for Burden herself. The most significant pages from that notebook have been added to this volume, but as they have not fundamentally altered my view of the artist, I have not revised my introduction. If at some point there is a second edition of this text, and if Notebook I (which I now feel certain exists) is discovered, I may well have to return to my text and change it accordingly.