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?
Hess: Well, I couldn’t find him. There are many Richard Brickmans, as it turns out, but not a single one of them who could have written that piece. A Richard Brickman did publish a paper in The Open Eye about a year before, a rather dull but intelligent examination of John McDowell’s arguments about the conceptual structures of human experience, after which he made a counterargument.
Burridge: What are you saying?
Hess: There are reasons to believe that Harriet Burden wrote both Brickman pieces.
Burridge: But why?
Hess: I think she wanted her coming out to be something more than a hoax, but also more than the articulation of an ideological position about women in the art world. She wanted everyone to understand how complicated perception is, that there is no objective way of seeing anything. Brickman became another character in the larger artwork, another mask, this time textual, which is part of a philosophical comedy, if you will.
Burridge: Philosophical comedy? Doesn’t this Brickman character criticize Harriet Lord? Doesn’t he call her irrational? Why would she want that?
Hess: It’s an ironic treatment of her own position.
Burridge: Well, I have to say I don’t get it. Anyway, I called Rune right away and asked him straight out about the article, and he said there was nothing to it. He found himself in an awkward position. Harriet was an important collector, but she was unbalanced, a bit of a fruitcake, megalomaniacal.
Hess: And you believed him?
Burridge: Well, it squared with the talk I’d heard, that she’d been ill. Rune used the word delusional.
Hess: But hadn’t Larsen told conflicting stories about at least one period of his life? I believe you tried to contact him then. In his book, Oswald Case speculates that Rune might have been hospitalized with manic depression.
Burridge: He disappeared. That’s for sure. I don’t think anybody really knows where he was. Those stories he told to journalists were part of his shtick, a kind of tongue-in-cheek self-promotion, making a mystery of himself. It’s hardly new. Look at Joseph Beuys. Let me put it this way. It’s not that I couldn’t see him participating in a scam like the one Burden suggests. It was that I couldn’t really see him denying it. It was just the kind of thing he would have loved doing, so when he said it was crap, I took him at his word. By the way, I was his dealer, not his best friend. I liked representing him, but we weren’t into heart-to-heart talks or anything like that. There was something dazzling about Rune. He was highly intelligent, very well read, but we were never close. It wasn’t until Art Lights published the article by Eldridge that I started to wonder. By then, Rune was into his next act, Houdini Smash, the one that killed him.
Hess: Before we go into that, I want to know what you thought about Beneath. Didn’t it strike you as a bit out of character for Rune?
Burridge: Listen, this was a guy who once answered the door wearing a dress. Didn’t say a word, just talked away like it was normal. I couldn’t tell you what was in or out of character for Rune. The plans for the work really impressed me, even though I thought the 9/11 references were risky. He had taken a lot of photos and films downtown right afterward, but he didn’t end up using most of them except the one of the cars and the shoes. I’m not saying he did the installation alone. I don’t believe that anymore. I’m sure Harriet had a hand in it. What I don’t buy was that she did it alone, and he put his name on it.
Hess: Why not?
Burridge: Harriet just never struck me as someone who could pull off a work like that solo. I’ve seen the quirky dollhouse stuff she did early on, and I realize she has a following now, and the work sells, but her art runs in a tradition — Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Annette Messager: round feminine shapes, mutant bodies, that kind of thing. Beneath is hard, geometrical, a real engineering feat. It’s just not her style, but it made sense for Rune.
Hess: Even if he had a dress on?
Burridge: I guess that’s clever.
Hess: No, not at all. I’m just pointing out that such thinking can be a trap. Burden wrote about Rune in her journals, and there is nothing to suggest that they were equal collaborators on Beneath. She regarded him as her third mask.