The parting from Harry tugged at me all evening, and I talked too much about it over my angel hair pasta, which annoyed Marcelo, and we had a spat. Of course, Marcelo had never lived with Harry. She’d never rubbed his back during a Bette Davis movie. He’d never seen her sit and talk quietly to the Barometer about his drawings to calm him down when he needed it or seen her quietly checking on the skinny madman at night to make sure he put Neosporin on his scratches. And Marcelo hadn’t seen Harry twirling around the room in the long violet shantung dress I helped her pick out at Bergdorf’s, singing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” at the top of her lungs before her sixtieth-birthday party. I couldn’t blame Marcelo for what he didn’t know.
Richard Brickman (letter to the editor in The Open Eye: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art and Perception Studies, Fall 2003)
To the Editor,
Ten days ago, I received a sixty-five-page letter delivered to me the old-fashioned way, through the U.S. Post Office. Why Harriet Burden, the author of the letter, entitled “Missive from the Realm of Fictional Being,” chose me as her confessor, I don’t quite know, but she said that she had read my paper published in the pages of this journal and thought my interest in the philosophy of self and the dynamics of perception made me a good recipient for her “revelation.” After verifying that a person named Harriet Burden does, in fact, exist, that she is an artist who a number of years ago exhibited her work in New York City, and that the three artists featured in her letter are also actual persons, I decided to accept her invitation to write my own letter about her letter in these pages. Burden’s “missive” is far too long to be published in full. Its style, at once peculiar and various, includes circumlocutions, elaborate tangents, extravagant quotation, as well as terse philosophical sentences and argumentative leaps which distance it from every standard readers have come to expect from an academic journal. Although I cannot agree with her conclusions, or with her mode of expression (which occasionally veers toward the fervid, exclamatory, and vulgar), I find Burden’s artistic experiment an interesting one, and I believe the readers of The Open Eye will find the material broadly relevant to their concerns.
Although this journal is committed to ongoing conversations among various disciplines, its pages have underscored the difficulties involved in such dialogues because epistemological approaches vary. The burgeoning research on perception in the neurosciences, Anglo-American analytical philosophy, a more unorthodox strain of thought that has emerged out of European phenomenology, as well as poststructuralist theory offer different answers to the question: How do we see?
Studies on change blindness (subjects missing blatant alterations in their visual field) and inattentional blindness (subjects who fail to notice an intrusive presence when attending to a task) suggest that, at the very least, there is much around us that we simply do not perceive. The role of learning in perception has also been crucial to understanding predictive visual schemas, which lend some support to constructionist theories of perception.I Most of the time we see what we expect to see; it is the surprise of novelty that forces us to adjust those schemas. Blindsight studies and masking studies have further illustrated how unconscious perceptions can and do shape our attitudes, thoughts, and emotions.II Burden appears to have closely followed the debates on perception and taken inspiration from various writers and researchers, some of whose papers have appeared in The Open Eye. On the second page of her letter, she asks what happens when a person looks at a work of art and produces the following sober formulations:
“I” and “you” hide in “it.” In this view, subject and object cannot be easily separated.
If we had no past visual experiences, we could not make sense of the visible world. Without repetition, the seen world is nonsense.
Every visible object is an emotional object. It attracts or repels. If it does neither, the thing cannot last in the mind, and it has no meaning. Emotionally charged objects stay alive in memory.
But the subliminal forces of an invisible underground also exercise a pull on us. More often than not, we do not know why we feel what we feel when we look at an art object.
In the letter, Harriet Burden claims responsibility for creating the works that appeared in three solo exhibitions in New York City: The History of Western Art by Anton Tish, The Suffocation Rooms by Phineas Q. Eldridge, and, most recently, Beneath by the artist known as Rune. Her articulated motive is simple: “I wanted to see how the reception of my art changed, depending on the persona of each mask.” She pointedly maintains that when she showed work under her own name in the past, few were interested, but her pseudonymous art, presented behind three “living male masks,” piqued the interest of both dealers and the public, albeit to varying degrees. Burden refers to this as the “masculine enhancement effect,” and she is quick to say that it affects women viewers as much as men:
The crowd is not divided by sex. The crowd is of one mind, and that mind is swayed and seduced by ideas. Here is a thing made by a woman. It stinks of sex. I smell it. 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 great spoof it can locate a cock and a pair of balls (odorless, of course). The pecker and beanbags need not be real. Oh no, the mere idea that they exist will suffice to goad the crowd into greater appreciation. Hence, I resort to the mental codpiece. Hail Aristophanes! Hail the fictional rod, the magic wand that opens eyes onto unseen worlds.
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.