When Rune died in his own contraption, he made the cover of the New York Post and the Daily News, and page 9 of The New York Times. Innumerable other “outlets” opined on his tragic exit from the planet as well. Tributes to Rune spewed from the media maw, accompanied by photos of still-youthful brooding artist decoratively slouched beside his works, including Beneath, no, especially Beneath. Art magazines devoted issues to his legacy, speculating on what might have been, had the remarkable bad boy only lived. He suffered from depression, it seemed. He had, in fact, a whole drugstore of pharmaceuticals in his bathroom to treat the condition. Sympathy for the down-in-the-dumps artist oozed from journalistic pores. Depression is a chemical imbalance, they wrote. The poor guy was a victim of his own cracked brain chemistry.
Not a word about Harry. Her obliteration was total. The Open Eye and the Eldridge letter were meant to cast a spotlight on Harry, but somebody forgot to hit the switch. One night over a nice piece of hake and broccoli, Harry declared in that creepy cold voice I had heard on the day she saw Rune that she had wanted to hurt him, but now that he was dead, she felt nothing. He was dead, but she was dead to him, too, dead to the story, dead to the pseudonyms. Her shining vehicle had crashed before it reached its destination, just as his had. Harry did not believe he had wanted to kill himself. There was nothing to be done. She had been more right than she had even known. The powers-that-be would never accept her art, because it was hers. Harriet Burden was nobody, a big, fat, unrecognized nobody.
I had prayed for Harry to end her obsession, but the stiff, bitter, defeated woman on the other side of the table unnerved me. I longed for some old vigor and bite. I longed for the dragon lady to return, if only for an hour or so. In this spirit, I asked the lady pugilist if the two hard punches that bastard had taken from her hadn’t felt pretty good. But Harry just stared at me, frost in her eyes. The punches, she said, had meant nothing. They had meant nothing because they had not had the desired effect. She had wanted to humiliate and shame him, to make him grovel before her—or something to that effect. It hadn’t worked. I wondered about Harry then. I wondered about who she was and if I really understood her at all. She could be so hard.
When she said the story was dead, she must have believed what she was saying, but later I discovered that she hadn’t let go of it completely. One afternoon, I interrupted her in the studio to tell her about a starred review I had received in Publishers Weekly, which included the words uproarious and tender. I had let myself in to surprise her with it. I tiptoed in the door with review in hand and saw that she was sitting at her long wooden desk with a pair of scissors in her hands, hunched over a large book with a concentrated look on her face. When I approached her, I looked down to see what she was doing.
The book she had in front of her was called The Book of Runes. It turned out that Harry had read and clipped every article that had been written about Beneath and the now-deceased traitor to her cause and had pasted them carefully into a fat, old-fashioned scrapbook, as if she were a 1950s housewife saving recipes. She did not need to explain. They were documents of the struggle—texts Harry called “proliferations.”
After that day, we had a little less than a year left, but seven months of it passed before Harry’s diagnosis. Every once in a while she complained of bloating and constipation, but show me someone over sixty who doesn’t complain of bloating and constipation. She grew a little thinner because she often felt full and couldn’t eat more, but her weight loss wasn’t extreme. She didn’t feel “quite right,” just “a little off,” that’s all. She would check it out with her doctor.
When she told me what the scan had found, she was standing, white-faced in the kitchen: I can’t die now. How can I die now, Bruno?
Harry did not want to die.
I learned new terms: epithelial-stromal tumor, debulking surgery, and adjuvant chemotherapy. They debulked her, all right, scooped out as much of the cancer as they could, but it had gone to her liver. She was in stage four of ovarian cancer, for Christ’s sake, a death sentence, but the doctors murmured about procedures that just might possibly extend life expectancy and exceptional cases, although they were rare, very rare, it was true, their eyes averted or looking directly at you to show they weren’t wimps. The chemo made her pale, sick, weak, and dizzy. But the tumors didn’t shrink enough, not enough to save her.
With her fingers dug into her belly or pressed into her temples, Harry thrashed in her hospital bed, the pain blinding her, pain the morphine didn’t dent, and she howled against the fates. Her hollow face, her red eyes leaking tears, her mouth contorted, she cursed the doctors and the nurses and she cursed me, and she cursed whoever else happened to be around, in a voice that blasted like a siren through the ward. My dragon lady came back. Why are you torturing me? And the white and blue coats came running and those in them scolded her about the other patients: They have a right to some peace, too, don’t they? Harry was not the only sick person, after all. Look at Mrs. P., missing a leg, lost to a tumor. She was sicker than Harry, by God! Look at Mrs. P. She behaved herself. Mrs. P. was dying fast. Chastened momentarily and sorry for poor Mrs. P., Harry snuffled in her bed. I don’t want to die.
Harry had let them cut her open. She had let them gut her of all her reproductive organs plus more pieces of herself, had allowed them to sew her up and let her languish in the bed with mostly kind nurses, except one (Thelma). She had let them poison her with chemo and truss her up to IVs and talk down to her as if she were a five-year-old, because she wanted to live. She wanted them to save her, to work miracles on her, to bring her back to her old self. They shouldn’t have laid a goddamned hand on her. That’s what I say, not a goddamned hand. They should have sent her home with a truckload of narcotics and left her alone. Maisie and I disagreed. Maisie and I bickered. Maisie bustled and cleaned up and wiped her mother’s head and cleaned her thighs of errant urine and brought her sandwiches from Zabar’s she couldn’t eat. Let her be, I snapped at her once. Just let her be. Maisie cried. I apologized, and we made it up. Ethan had shell shock, the big-eyed, silent version. He leaned against the wall and watched. Every once in a while he would cross his arms on his chest, grab his upper arms, and rock back and forth.
We set up a hospice at the lodge, but Harry was worse, too weak to put up much of a fight, except now and again—a piercing wail or a gob of spit sent across the room. Sweet Autumn tiptoed in one day with a weird little mutt and a bag of her healing stones and shells and a lot of New Age craziness swirling in her head, and stayed until the end. We would have kicked her out, but Harry liked her. Harry liked her little heart-shaped face with her bright red lips and fairy princess blond curls and her chatter.
This is hard for me to write. These words come hard to me; each one begins as a stone in my mouth. Harry’s pain arrived in bolts that made her limbs stiffen. We turned up the drip. She whimpered as she lay stiffly flat on her back, and she allowed me to stroke her head, her neck, and her shoulders. I’ll be good, she whispered. I promise to be good, Bruno. Don’t leave me. I’m afraid. I told her I wouldn’t leave her, and I didn’t. She left me. Her last word was no. She said it several times, and before she died, she rattled. The noise came from deep in her lungs, shuddering, dry, and loud, and we watched. Harry died at three o’clock in the afternoon on April 18, 2004, with the window wide open in the room so the spring air and sunlight could reach her face.
Damn you, Harry. Damn you, for leaving me too soon.
Timothy Hardwick
(“Rune’s Ego Machine: Harbinger of the New Aesthetics” in Visibility: A Magazine of the Arts, February 2009)
Rune’s final work, Houdini Smash, which now exists as both a film and as an architectural relic of the “performance,” calls upon the critic to examine, yet again, questions about the nature of art itself. Arthur Danto persuasively argued that the dominant narrative of Western art came to its end at the moment Warhol created art that was indistinguishable from o
bjects in the supermarket. In the post-Warhol era, Rune’s Houdini Smash figures as a meditation on the idea of beginnings and endings, not only of art, but of the breakdown between the biological and the artificial, categories that are swiftly becoming indistinguishable. We have entered an era of the hybrid bio-robot, an age when scientists are building computational models of the meta-representational structures of consciousness itself. There are many who believe it is a matter of two, perhaps three, decades before the neural correlates of consciousness will be discovered and replicated artificially. The mystery, one long viewed as impossible to penetrate, will be solved. The hard problem of consciousness will go the way of the double helix.
Rune’s Houdini Smash anticipates the birth of the ego machine, a humanly created artistic product that is itself conscious, the arrival of a technology that will radically transform the meaning of creativity because artists will generate art objects that have self-models, that is, they will be able to make aesthetic creatures or robotic offspring who think and act. In an interview he gave in Art Assembly, Rune discussed his fascination with artificial intelligence and its radical potentiality. Citing Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, he said, “AI is the cutting edge in art, whether people know it or not. It will revolutionize artistic practice by providing artists with tools for works that are animate and intelligent.” Kurzweil articulated his utopian view in the following statement: “As we gradually learn to harness the optimal computing capacity of matter, our intelligence will spread through the universe at (or exceeding) the speed of light, eventually leading to a sublime, universe-wide awakening.” It seems unlikely that Rune endorsed the optimism of a futurist such as Kurzweil.
Although there are those who maintain that Rune intended to die from the drug he ceremoniously ingests in the film, this critic suspects the opposite. Rune planned for his hours of sleep and eventual reawakening to be recorded by multiple cameras as part of the work’s cycle as a homage to his own version of Futurism. In the construction, the artist’s body functions merely as one section, organ, or member of what must be regarded as a larger anatomical machine. The biological body cannot be regarded as distinct from the artificial limbs, digital screens, and collapsing walls and pathways in which that body is enclosed. Borrowing heavily on the work that preceded it—the complex, grand-scale maze installation, Beneath—Rune built a far more compact maze structure that looks as if it has fallen in on itself, has become essentially a ruined fragment of the former work. In the highly praised Beneath, he used the repetition of objects and films, some of which were pointed allusions to the devastation of September 11, to introduce a mournful, lyrical quality to his art for the first time. Houdini Smash, on the other hand, evokes mechanistic delirium, not dissimilar to the effects he garnered in The Banality of Glamour. Rune’s sublime is not Kurzweil’s utopia, but a darker vision of ecstatic metamorphosis, which he articulated in the same Art Assembly interview: “The artist will no longer control his art. It will function independently of the designer, and therefore create exciting and dangerous new zones of interaction.”
In Houdini, the viewer sees the artist crawl into the coffinlike space at the center of the piece, outfitted with plush pink satin lining and a pillow covered with red crosses, yet another allusion to his earlier work. The viewer sees Rune slowly smoke a cigarette, extinguish it, reach into his pocket, hold out a fist to the camera, then open his left palm to reveal a handful of white pills, which he then swallows with a glass of water. He inserts the empty glass into a cup holder beside him and, like a shaman performing a ritual, covers his face with a soft mask, identical to the masks displayed in the windows of Beneath, lies back, and stares at one of the cameras, which is filming him from above. Once he is settled inside his container, the viewer witnesses the transformation of Rune’s body from the human to the posthuman. An immense helmetlike form is fitted over his head, and the multiple gleaming aluminum limbs that protrude from the box slowly begin to move. Although the allusions to sci-fi movies from the fifties are immediately obvious, the startling character of the film is only produced over time. The limbs move more and more quickly, and the views of multiple cameras picked up by multiple screens refract and fragment the hybrid anatomy from multiple angles. The eyes close. The ego machine sleeps, but its limbs and the multiple digital images continue for hours and then slowly come to a halt.
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.”