(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 mirages 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.”