The Blazing World: A Novel Read online

  Oswald Case

  (written statement)

  To the gaudy denizens of Manhattan’s nocturnal scene, I was known as the Crawler, as in night and club, but my column for Blitz was called “Head Case,” a fitting tribute to Mr. and Mrs. Case, to whom I naturally owed everything. At the magazine I developed my gift for gossip and the art of innuendo, puffing up and smacking down the rich and vain and much-photographed, wheedling dirt out of bouncers and waiters and hangers-on who imagined that fame was a quality that could be rubbed off onto them, when in fact it only laid bare their puny bridge-and-tunnel lives, but I encouraged them in their idle daydreams and that’s how the Crawler trawled them in.

  It is a delicate job, penning gossip, a balancing act not to be underestimated, and it is easy to go too far. Mutual dependence must always be recognized, that they need you and you need them. I hit my stride in the late seventies, in the glory days of Studio 54, nibbling up delectable tidbits here and there about Bianca and Andy and Calvin, and I had a blast, those long nights of cocaine and ludes and plain old booze and blind sex in big, fashionably empty lofts, typing for dollars in the late afternoons after I had regained consciousness. I miss those days. They had a patina now lost. Yes, glamour is gone for good, Virginia. It disappeared the moment it became democratic, and every loser could be Googled or find himself a star on YouTube. There is always an exclusive scene in the city, of course. But isn’t there something wearying about yet another celeb puking in a back room or punching a paparazzo or flashing a Brazilian wax job? Ennui set in, especially after I turned sober, the inevitable result of the decision to give up the wonders of intoxication to hold on to my liver and other body parts equally fragile.

  I drifted into less taxing forms of journalism, supposedly more elevated, but I have found that the human primate varies little. Grasping and grubbing and knocking over those in your way are omnipresent characteristics of the species, and every little urban band has its own hierarchy and cycles of highly entertaining antics fueled by envy. I turned to New York’s shrinking Culture Pages, strategically written for the declining numbers of middlebrow readers, and I pounded out articles on movies, art, books, and music as a freelancer. I reviewed, and I interviewed. As a writer, I knew that it was my tone that delivered the goods; that is what they wanted, a tone of boredom and superiority that mimicked my readers’ fantasies of a posh British accent and assured them that I knew better, just as they did. I wrote to inflate them. This meant never, ever making a reference they might not understand; anything too highbrow was a no-no. The idea was to stroke their insecurities, not to bring them out.

  As an interviewer, I quickly grasped that the key was to ingratiate myself with the subject, to be admiring, even humble, but not Heepish. (In an article, even Heepish would not be allowed to stand without explanation.) And then, after becoming suitably flattered and flaccid, the VIP might disgorge a verbal gem, a meaty indiscretion that could be used as a headline or a focus for my article, a word-for-word, wholly accurate quotation that caged the beast. I was a hunter for the media zoo. These techniques served me exceptionally well, and I found a niche for myself. I did my detective work, kept my sensitive auditory canals open and quivering, and familiarized myself with names, who was who and who was who to whom, and with my Crawler days long behind me, I found myself recognized as a cognoscente of the arts.

  Culture in the big city is private business and much of its funding is in the hands of wealthy white women who, although they may not always have the dough themselves, vie for rising status as supporters of the arts. They gleam at benefit dinners, coiffed and perfumed and oiled and lifted, while their hubbies, exhausted from the rigors of deal-making, glance around them in confusion and snore through the rubber chicken. The worst must be the annual PEN dinner, where gloomy writers and gloomier publishers don ill-fitting, frayed tuxedos or dumpy dresses and hideous shoes to eye one another suspiciously as they mingle with the money. Whatever my circumstances, and, rest assured, they have often been close to dire, I am never anything less than well turned out. Hadn’t Mrs. Case, daughter of a plumber in Milwaukee, had a sharp eye for the “right” clothes and good grammar? Hadn’t she sacrificed to send her boy to the “right” schools? Had I been a scholarship runt at Yale for nothing?

  And then, through my contacts (and hard work, I might add), I landed the plum, writing articles for The Gothamite on salary. They never would have hired me in the WASPy days of reliably dull but oh-so-clubby self-congratulation, but those days had passed, and they wanted a writer with a squirt of venom when needed. I was their man. The positively nubile, fresh-from-his-undergraduate-studies Anton Tish had made a splash at the Clark Gallery with his installation, The History of Western Art, and I was asked to write a “What’s On About Town” piece, a nod to the buzz. Jeff Koons had unveiled his Puppy a few years earlier, and I was expecting yet another silky huckster—not that I have anything against Koons. He is the American Dream.

  Like every good reporter, I did my research. As it turned out, the excitement had been caused not by “Flashbulb! Giant topiary dog!” but by the kid’s supposedly prodigious brain. He had made a puzzle that art wonks were trying to solve, and furthermore, he was mum about it, a buff little boy-genius, who insisted that all people had to do was look and read “a little.” Yes, he admitted the gigantic sculpture of a woman spread out in the gallery was an overblown, three-dimensional allusion to Giorgione’s painting of Venus, finished by Titian; she was in the same position, asleep, one hand behind her head, another at her crotch, red bolster, ochre draperies swimming beneath her nudity. The gimmick: Illustrated Woman. Her creamy body was covered with hundreds of minute reproductions, photographs and texts, some framed, some not, each one “a thought”: Greek vase with the classical male porno themes, erestes and eromenos, Madonna and Child, crucifixions, still lifes, a note that said “Just the West, please.” RESTRICTED was etched on her thumb. PRIMITIVE was scrawled on her forehead. Some smart-ass from Art Assembly had written that the picture of a Brillo box on Venus’s left buttock referred to the philosopher Arthur Danto, who had claimed that art came to an end with Warhol’s Brillo. Quotes from Vasari and Diderot had been uncovered, as well as fragments of Goya’s and Van Gogh’s letters. The all-too-predictable feminist critics had zeroed in on a reproduction of a self-portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola, a Renaissance painter (whom, they claimed, Michelangelo had admired), in Venus’s exposed armpit—a ha-ha about the dumped-on and ignored, women in art history. A photograph of the artist taking a piss in what looked like Duchamp’s urinal, Fountain, complete with R. Mutt inscription, amused some. All this amounted to a tour de force.

  There was lots of esoteric yammering about another sculpture in the room, a male mannequin dressed in a navy two-piece suit and red tie with his hands behind his back eyeing said naked lady. Deeply meaningful? Deeply unmeaningful? And what were those seven large wooden boxes scattered around her? The square crates were all numbered and had small barred windows, so curious visitors had to kneel and cut past one another to get a glimpse. Each “story” was lit from the inside to create an “eerie” light.

  Story 1. Small girl figure stands on a chair looking out a window in a miniature bedroom with her arms raised and mouth open. On the floor is a nasty arrangement of dirty paper towels, rags, bits of lace, and yarn. Ugly brown, green, and yellow stains cover all. From under the bed a man’s arm protrudes, its hand clenched in a fist.

  Story 2. Another room with sofa, two chairs, coffee table, bookshelves. On the table is a torn piece of paper with Don’t printed on it. Beside it: small wooden coffin with more words: she/he/it. Tiny painting hangs on wall. Portrait of figure looking much like girl in story 1 but boyish—arms raised, mouth open.

  Story 3. Same room as story 2. Female figure, disproportionately large for room, must bend head to fit under ceiling, stares down at chair. Message?

  Story 4. Disturbing fuzzy mammal, something like a rabbit, but not a rabbit, with two heads, lies on floor of
bedroom in story 1. Loose letters cut from construction paper are scattered on the bed: G R A T E L O O T Y.

  Story 5. Bathroom. Disproportionately large figure from story 3 huddled on floor clutching portrait of child from story 2 to her chest. One leg sticks out doorway and through wall of box. Bathtub filled with mucky brown water. Aargh!

  Story 6. Bathroom again. Tub drained but with dark ring. Floor piled with tiny books. One marked “M.S. 1818” appears to be leaking unidentifiable embryonic gelatinous something.

  Story 7. Bedroom, living room, bathroom from stories 1–6, with extra room, a study lined with books. The two-dimensional figures of a smiling man and a smiling woman that appear to have been cut out from the same old black-and-white photograph lie beside each other on a rug. Boy child stands in open doorway looking in, holding portrait of girl child up over his head.

  And who was this enfant terrible, born and bred in Youngstown, Ohio, attended Chaney High, liked his parents, met lots of “cool people” at the School of Visual Arts, thought New York was “great”? He played the naïf perfectly, the Forrest Gump of visual art, befuddled by sudden success, but he knew enough to carry it off. Large brown eyes darting off here and there as he considered the question. Big grin when asked about influences. Mentions Goya, Malevich, Cindy Sherman. “Basically, it’s a conceptual thing, you know.” A boy who looked as if he had started shaving last week became an instant hit. Then, after that single show, he disappeared. Like Cady Noland before him, he stopped showing art.

  I am as tickled by a good hoax as the next person, an Ern Malley, for instance, or David Bowie and William Boyd’s Nat Tate, or David Cerny’s Entropa, but a fiftyish woman who’s been hanging around the art world all her life can’t really be called a prodigy, can she? And the last of these ruses by the Queen of Deception went bad.

  When she took credit for Rune’s work, she went too far. I struck up a friendship with Rune when I interviewed him for a profile in The Gothamite in 2002. Not long after he committed suicide (yes, I believe it was intentional), on October 17, 2003, I began thinking about writing a book. I wanted the real story, to find out what actually happened to Rune. My book Martyred for Art (Mythrite Press, 2009) is Rune’s story, and I stand behind it. I spent a couple of years on it, doing in-depth reporting—making interviews, chasing clues and documents. Read the book! It’s at your local bookstore. Order it online.

  Harriet Burden bought and paid for Tish and Eldridge. Without her bags of money, neither of them would have fallen in with her. That’s a fact. Rune was a celebrity, an art star. His crosses were commanding millions. Rune didn’t need her. Whatever he did with her, he did as a lark, an amusement, an aesthetic dalliance. No one can blame her for wanting to latch onto his fame. The problem in the end was that Rune turned out to be a lot more than she had bargained for. His genius as an artist far outstripped her fussy, pretentious work. The twelve Larsen windows are triumphs. I do not believe she made any of them. And, of course, he outmanipulated her with one stupendous gesture: his own corpse. The film he took of his death will last. In it, he revealed the alienated truth of what we have become in this postmodern, soon-to-be cyborgian age.

  The first time I recall laying eyes on the woman was in Tish’s studio when I traveled to Brooklyn to snatch a couple of quotes for the piece. She looked like a cartoon character, big bust and hips, huge—six-five, maybe—a galumphing jump-shot-sized broad with long, muscular arms and giant hands, an unhappy combination of Mae West and Lennie in Of Mice and Men. She lumbered around the studio with a tool belt, and when I asked her what she did there, she told me she was “Anton’s friend” who “helps him out with things”—not inaccurate when you think about it now. Before I left, I shook her hand and said casually, “And what’s your opinion of Anton’s work?” She practically bit my head off. “There’s the outside and the inside; the question is: Where is the border?” I didn’t quote that obscurantist comment in the article, but I recorded it in my notes. I have it on tape. She went on for some time, waving those meaty hands, barking at me, nodding.

  She had one thing right. I don’t think she would have gone over with dealers or collectors, although who knows? They can get used to anything if it’s sold right. But whether they could have sold her without remodeling, I’m not convinced. She was too excited. She quoted Freud, big mistake—the colossal charlatan—and novelists and artists and scientists no one’s ever heard of. She dripped with earnestness. If there’s one thing that doesn’t fly in the art world, it’s an excess of sincerity. They like their geniuses coy, cool, or drunk and fighting in the Cedar Bar, depending on the era. Before I published the Tish article, I found out that the weird woman in the studio was Felix Lord’s widow, and the story clicked: a flush widow and her protégé. He was a kept boy, if not for his adorable, slender hips, then for his talent.

  What puzzled me was why I didn’t recognize her. I must have seen her multiple times before that day with Tish. I was a regular at openings and, at least twice, I’d been to cocktail receptions uptown at the Lords’ spacious digs—noisy, packed, stand-up dos with revolving hors d’oeuvres and snarky, competitive small talk. Still, I have a keen eye, and my ears can take in a suggestive sentence fragment from across the room, and yet Mrs. Felix Lord had left no trace whatsoever. For all practical purposes, she had been invisible. Well, I guess she’s having her fifteen minutes now—from the grave.

  Rachel Briefman

  (written statement)

  I agreed to contribute to this book only after long conversations with Maisie and Ethan Burden, as well as with Bruno Kleinfeld, the companion of Harriet’s last years. I also corresponded with Professor Hess and became convinced that this book about my friend Harriet Burden would illuminate aspects of her life and art for the many people who have now discovered her work.

  Harriet and I met in 1952 when we were twelve years old at Hunter High School. There were only girls at Hunter then. I sat beside Harriet in French class and, before I ever said a word to her, I watched her draw. Although she seemed to be wholly engaged in the class—always ready with a conjugation—she never stopped drawing. She drew faces, hands, bodies, machines, and flowers inside her notebooks, outside her notebooks, on bits of scrap paper, anywhere she could find a blank surface. Her hand appeared to move by itself, idly, but with uncanny precision. From a few lines sprang characters, scenes, still lifes. Who was this tall, solemn girl with the magic hand? I told her I was impressed, and she turned to me, waved her hand in the air, put on a faux-spooky voice, and said, “The Beast with Five Fingers.” The horror movie starring Peter Lorre featured a musician’s amputated hand that committed murders and played the piano.

  Years later in medical school, I read about neurological patients with alien hand syndrome. Some brain-damaged people have found themselves with an upstart hand that does exactly the opposite of what she or he wills it to do: unbuttoning a shirt that has just been buttoned, turning off the water before the glass is full, even masturbating in public. In general, alien hands cause dismay and havoc. At least one rebellious hand in the medical literature tried to strangle its owner. After I had read about these limbs with minds of their own, I called Harriet to tell her, and she laughed so hard she came down with a fit of the hiccoughs. I mention this because the joke still resonates. Harriet, who soon became Harry to me, was smart, gifted, and exquisitely sensitive. She could sulk for hours in silence when we were together, and then, just when I couldn’t tolerate it anymore, she would throw her arms around me and apologize. Although I wouldn’t have said it at the time, her drawings and later her paintings and sculptures seemed to have been made by a person I didn’t know, but whom she didn’t know either. She needed the Beast with Five Fingers, a creative imp that broke through the restraints that bound her as surely as ropes or chains.

  We studied together, and we daydreamed together. I imagined myself in a white coat with a stethoscope around my neck, marching down hospital corridors, ordering around nurses, and Harriet saw herself a
s a great artist or poet or intellectual—or all three. We were intimates as girls can be, unhampered by the masculine posing that plagues boys. We talked on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum when the weather was fine and often when it wasn’t. We shared our torments and analyzed the girls in our class. We were pretentious children who read books we didn’t understand and embraced politics we knew little about, but our pretenses protected us. We were a team of two against a hostile world of adolescent hierarchies. My mother once said to me, “Rachel, all you really need is one good friend, you know.” I found that friend in Harriet.

  Too much time has passed for me to recapture us as we were then. I have treated children and adolescents in my practice for many years now, and my knowledge of their stories, as well as my own analysis, has surely reconfigured my memories. Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past. The fact that I knew Harriet until she died in 2004 has also changed my understanding of our early friendship. I do know that the passionate girl became a passionate woman, an omnivore driven by an immense appetite for ingesting as much learning as she possibly could. That hunger never left her. There were other forces that impeded her path.

  I have a photograph of us taken when we were twelve or thirteen in my parents’ apartment on West Eighty-sixth Street. It requires no effort to return to the room. The apartment’s spaces live in my bones, but I must work harder to penetrate the young strangers in the snapshot. Tall Harry stands beside short Rachel. We are wearing cotton dresses, cinched at the waist by matching belts, and saddle shoes with anklets. Harriet’s hair is pulled back in a ponytail and mine is loose. Harriet’s body is blooming; mine is just beginning to bud. Neither of us looks comfortable in front of the camera, but we have acquiesced to the command “Cheese,” and the result is two strained, if not false, expressions. When I look at the picture now, I am struck by its banality, but also by how much it hides. As a vehicle of memory, it resists inner reality. The document of an instant, it records what we looked like then. The high feeling that ran between us, the secrecy of our confidences, the pact of friendship we made—all of that is missing.