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.”
She was a fragile person. Sometimes I thought she’d break like glass, just shatter one day, and I guess she finally did. We worried about her all the time. We used to listen at her door in the morning to see if she was getting up. If we heard her walking around in the bedroom, we knew everything would be okay because she’d be at breakfast before school. On days when she was sick — that’s what Rune and I called it when she drank too much, being sick (alcoholism is a disease, so the word pretty much sums it up) — on the days when she was sick and couldn’t get up, Rune used to forge an excuse for school to stay home with her because Dad had to go to the garage. Rune would make her lunch and watch her eat it to make sure it went down. I know because I stayed home sometimes, too. He’d vacuum and pick up in the living room and clean the bathrooms. I mean, by the time he was nine or ten he was an expert. Yes, Mom was a sentimental drunk. It made her “lovey-dovey,” as Rune used to say. If we found a bottle of vodka we’d pour it down the toilet, but she was clever and obviously we never found all of them. She drank vodka because it doesn’t smell and she could mix it with anything. Sometimes she cried, and Rune would sit beside her, pat her, and give her Kleenex. “I’m so sorry, kids,” she’d say over and over, and then she’d hug us really hard.
Because Rune was older, he felt responsible for Mom and, although he didn’t show it, I think it made him angry underneath. He used to snitch things and hide them in his room: a couple of dollars from Mom’s purse or a new box of potato chips or cookies from the cupboard. I suspect he nabbed things from stores just for the thrill of it. He had key rings and flashlights and doodads you see hanging near the cash register at the grocery store in his “stash.” He needed to hide things, and he needed to have secrets. Rune invented a special code for the two of us. It wasn’t too complicated. For each letter in a word, we’d count two letters that came after it, and we’d have a secret message. We left Y and Z the way they were, so sometimes I’d come home after my clarinet lesson and see a note on the table: OQO KU UKEM. “Mom is sick.” We got good at that one. Not long before he died, Rune called me MKTUVGP on the phone, pronounced Mik-tuvga-pa. That’s how Kirsten came out. He hadn’t called me that for years. We had to put in vowels just to pronounce those crazy words, but you get the idea.