There are nights when I can’t sleep, and I lie awake thinking about The Natural Mask, which means that I think about Mother and her story, and how to tell it in the film. I do not want it to be too neat and tidy. I do not want to explain away the mess. She would have hated that. Over and over, I have looked at my film of her just a year before she died. She is sitting in her studio beside the Empathy Box, talking into the camera. At one moment she speaks directly to me. She says my name, and when I hear it, I always feel a quickening inside me.
“We live inside our categories, Maisie, and we believe in them, but they often get scrambled. The scrambling is what interests me. The mess.”
Patrick Donan
(review of The Suffocation Rooms, Art Beats, NYC, March 27, 2002)
“I love the heat, don’t you?” Phineas Q. Eldridge smiles as he talks about his installation at the Alex Begley Gallery. His first solo show consists of seven enclosed kitchens connected railroad-style by doors. Each room is a little hotter than the one before, which means every visitor must get ready to sweat. The downtown performance artist, known for his gender-and-race-bending monologues at the Pink Lagoon, has made a move into visual art. Each kitchen of The Suffocation Rooms features two large stuffed figures, a chest, and a creepy wax character that might have popped in from another galaxy. Theater is part and parcel of installation art, but Eldridge has brought his overt staginess to this series of rooms.
According to Eldridge, the piece has no message. And yet, it is hard not to think of American culture wars while passing through his otherworldly kitchens. The eerie intersex person rising out of the seven chests speaks directly to the LGBT community. The box (perhaps a little too obviously) is also “the closet.” Eldridge came out in 1995 and has been exploring gay and racial identities in his work ever since he launched himself as part of the underground cabaret scene.
And the two oversized, stuffed humans? Could it be the white America of right-wing “family values”? Eldridge is noncommittal. Twisting Susan Sontag, he says, “Interpretation is dangerous.”
After 9/11 a lot of art has just looked irrelevant, but the claustrophobic atmosphere and the gradual decay and destruction of the seven rooms address the smug insulation of most Americans, who were locked in their own materialistic dreams until they were shocked out of their complacency by the terrible events of last September. Alex Begley offers his own take on suffocation. “This installation has genuine impact. It addresses our situation now.”
Zachary Dortmund
(review of The Suffocation Rooms, Art Assembly, March 30, 2001)
The interest of Phineas Q. Eldridge’s installation The Suffocation Rooms at Alex Begley lies in its subversion of the clean aesthetic associated with avant-garde modernism, as well as the easy pop consumerism of the Young British Artists. Its invitation to the spectator, however, remains private. Unlike the practice of an artist such as Tiravanija, whose open works invite DIY interaction, Eldridge’s closed rooms are walk-throughs. This is not fully relational art, to cite Nicolas Bourriaud. It is not altermodern. Nevertheless, the successive real environments may pack a punch that is ultimately more subversive than the accommodating relationalism advocated by Bourriaud. The transgendered figure that reappears in each room summons the delirious machine subjectivity of Guattari, a self-technology of desire and a body without organs, which echoes Eldridge’s life as a queering performer onstage. The chaos of the final room has genuine political bite.
Harriet Burden
Notebook K
April 19, 2001
He is clever, not as Felix was clever. Felix knew how to excite collectors, how to flatter them, how to make them imagine they were the ones who had truly seen and understood the work of art in front of them. This man wants all eyes on him all the time. He films himself every day, as if the camera tells him he is alive. He would like to be an escape artist—that, above all, I think. Defy nature or appear to defy nature’s limits.
I just want to work and pull off my scheme.
And yet, I like him. He has an almost weightless bounce. I have a feeling he will want to play, because the manipulation of appearances excites him. For him, the pleasure is almost sexual, a form of titillation, yes, of rising. Tumescence. This I can feel. It is not the aging Harriet who attracts him, but my talk. He is not Anton, my green mask, or Phinny, my blue one. Phinny and I were each other or enough of each other to skip along in tandem, a duet, two whistlers out for an adventure or misadventure, P & H. But Phinny is leaving me. He’s fallen in love with the Argentinian, and I can see the lights have turned on in his eyes. How I will miss him. It was easy for us to mingle.
Rune, a name made of stone, another pseudonym altogether: gray.
He has a tic. He licks his front teeth as if checking for food.
I want to stage Rune. I want to discover the works that are his works but which I will make. Rune will be my Johannes the Seducer: terrible, sly, brilliant mask. The Kierkegaard commentators have missed the heart of the ogre. They suppress the sadistic thrill.
Peel the onion of personas, from one to the next, moving further and further inside the book.
Listen to this, Harry. You remember when you first read it. The sentence comes right near the end of the first volume. You are still in Part I. It shook you hard. Remember? He was your own being, wasn’t he? Not Cordelia.
No, that’s a lie. Poor Cordelia. But that poor is the something you spit out, reject, cough up, vomit out. Not always, not always, but the seduction is complete, his of you, not as a woman but as a man. I am Johannes. The reader Johannes seduces becomes Johannes—in part. There’s the knot. Look at the knot. It is so dull, so familiar, so unjust being treated as a woman first, always as a woman. I rebel. Why womanliness first? Why this trait first? Inescapable.
Dr. F. noticed that I was wearing a skirt. He knows. It is only the second time in all these years, he said. It is noteworthy. It was a show of vulnerability. The ones in skirts are vulnerable. This is the history of women in skirts.
Women fall, drop from the skies, one after the other, falling and falling again. Open your thighs, beloved, and I will hurl you over the cliff to your death. Vagina as battleground. Vagina as ruin. But he never says, Let me in. That is the coup. Her only power is in not letting him in. I will cross my legs tightly.
Cross your thighs, Cordelia.
The Seducer writes, “Everything is a metaphor. I myself am a myth about myself, for is it not a myth that I hasten to this tryst? Who I am is irrelevant; everything finite and temporal is forgotten; only the eternal remains, the power of erotic longing, its bliss.”
The Seducer lives only on the page. He is a phantasm of A, who is a phantasm of Eremita, the editor of Either/Or, who is in turn a phantasm of Søren Kierkegaard, long dead and animated by his pages.
Isn’t A appalled by his own aesthetic invention?I
We are all myths to ourselves.
Johannes is going to fuck Cordelia.
And then he will leave her.
S.K. loved Regina, and he left her. He did not literally screw her, it seems. He left her virginity for another, but he hurt her to the quick.II
“I shall not bid her farewell,” writes Johannes, “nothing is more revolting than the feminine tears and pleas that alter everything and yet are essentially meaningless. I did love her, but from now on she can no longer occupy my soul. If I were a god, I would do for her what Neptune did for the nymph: transform her into a man.”
There they are, the last five words: the razor.
I will transform myself into a man through Rune.
Will I become Johannes?
But Johannes was not Søren. He wasn’t A. No, he was not. We know S.K. believed in women’s tears and women’s pleas and women’s prayers. And I am not Rune. And yet, and yet, and yet, I am he somewhere else, in the phantasmagoria. Let me whisper in your ear. Let me whisper that the fantasy
man with the dialectical whip is Søren, too. A trickster. I will borrow a trickster self.
Look at me, a Prometheus. I am myself a myth about myself. Who I am has nothing to do with it.
* * *
I. Burden compares the role she wants Rune to play to Kierkegaard’s use of Johannes, the pseudonymous author of “A Seducer’s Diary,” the final section of Either/Or, Part I. In the diary, Johannes writes about his seduction of Cordelia, which he manages with such consummate skill that she imagines she is pursuing him. Part I is an “onion” of pseudonymity. The editor, Victor Eremita, writes the preface for Part I. A is the character who occupies the aesthetic point of view in the first volume and declares himself the editor of “A Seducer’s Diary,” but not its author. Following Eremita, Burden understands that Johannes is A’s fictional creature, the pseudonym of a pseudonym, a “metaphor” and a “myth” that represents an extreme aesthetic position of reflection. A is horrified by his own creation. In the preface Eremita writes, “It really seems as if A himself has become afraid of his fiction, which, like a troubled dream, continued to make him feel uneasy, also in the telling” (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. III, 9).
II. Kierkegaard met Regina Olsen in 1837 when he was twenty-four and she was fourteen. They became engaged in 1840, but a year later he broke the engagement, leaving Regina by all accounts in despair. Kierkegaard writes, “So, there was nothing else for me to do but to venture to the uttermost, to support her, if possible, by means of a deception, to do everything to repel her from me in order to rekindle her pride.” Quoted in Joachim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 186. Although he repeatedly declares his love for her in his journals, the reason for his withdrawal from his promise has been the subject of endless scholarly speculation. Despite her fascination with Kierkegaard, Burden thought S.K.’s relations with Regina were “perverse.” In Notebook K, she writes, “Regina occupies the remote space assigned to all female love objects and muses. Poor Regina! Poor Cordelia! I turn the tables!”
Harriet Burden
Notebook A
May 4, 2001
Bruno is writing a memoir. I must not show that I am too happy about it. He’s just fooling around, he says, having a little fun. He’s waltzing. That’s what he should have done all along, the stubborn S.O.B., waltzed, had a little fun instead of bleeding out those verses for the millennium. But I must not gloat or preen or he may stop just to spite me. Dear Bear, what have you done with all those years of your life? I want you to write that caustic, tender, bullish man into a book. Make him up, darling, if you have to. He’s there.
A passage he read to me about ice cream on the boardwalk at Coney Island, about his mother pulling her hand away after he had reached for hers—the cold chocolate had run into his palm. So tiny, this moment, but taken as a slap, its sound reverberating over many years. What do they say? A difficult woman. She was a difficult woman. Heads shaking over difficult women. We are all difficult women. Was Bruno’s mother more difficult? No, but she was Bruno’s mother. Just now, this word difficult looks mad to me, an insane spelling of a word I cannot recognize anymore.
Aven told me that Julie said, “I won’t be your friend anymore.” Aven’s mouth stretched into a grimace. “But then,” she said, “you wouldn’t believe it. The next day she forgot!” Aven doesn’t forget. She is one of us.
Mother plays in my body like a tune. Her voice returns, old and hoarse, as she thinks through time. “He loved me more at the end.” And when I ask her what she means, she says, “More than he did in the beginning. I loved him. I put your father on a pedestal, but he ran away from me.”
And I see my father running away with long strides over hills and dales.
He punished her with silence.
“I rarely got a word in at a dinner party, you know. I brought in the food and I cleared the table and I listened, but when I began to speak, he would cut me off. Once, after a party, I brought it up. I said that I had felt bad about it, hurt. He didn’t answer me, but the next time we had a dinner, he said nothing, not a word.”
“That was cruel,” I said to Mother.
Dr. F. has heard it all now. I remember my mother.
“Don’t forget,” my mother said in the hospital. “You’re a Jew.”
“I won’t forget, Mother.”
The room in the hospital is ugly. My mother is recovering from septicemia. The nurse from Trinidad looks at me. “We were afraid she might leave us last night, but she’s tough.” My mother had roamed the hospital corridors, hallucinating with fever. She was back in Indianapolis in the old house, or rather parts of it, climbing the stairs at home in search of her room. “But I couldn’t find it. I opened door after door, Harriet.”
And I think to myself my father wanted his own kind, not me. His natural kind. No, Harry, sex is not a natural kind in philosophy.I Fish. Fowl. A two-headed calf.
Who would they have been, I wonder, the siblings that were never formed?
“What should I wear?” she asks.
“Wear, Mother?”
She is irritated, looking around. “To the faculty dinner. Where are my pearls? I will need my pearls. I don’t think that sweater suits you, Harriet.”
And I wished I could smile. I rubbed her feet because they were cold. Three pairs of socks and still cold.
I can see the East River, the gray waves, and the light, and inside the room, the IV drip, and the tape on my mother’s discolored arm, the sleeve of her lilac-colored robe pushed up.
Don’t die yet, I think.
Time is thick in the present, a distension, not a series of points, subjective time, that is, our inner time. We are forever retaining and projecting, anticipating the next note in the tune, recalling the whole phrase as we listen.II
I remember my protruding navel on my big, hard belly, the skin pulled tight in the last month—the strange push and pull of the life inside. My pink, swollen feet propped up on an ottoman before me. Felix with his ear pressed against the bump. Hey there, little fella, little chiquita. It was Maisie. Yes, I think it was Maisie.
* * *
I. Natural kind was first introduced by John Stuart Mill in 1895. Philosophy of Scientific Method, ed. Ernest Nagel (New York: Hafner, 1950), 303–4. The term implies that there are groupings in nature independent of human categories. There is considerable debate in analytical philosophy about whether natural kinds exist at all, and the question as to whether sex is a natural kind is part of that debate.
II. Burden is paraphrasing Husserl. The philosopher discusses listening to music as a primary example of the subjective experience of time, which includes more than is immediately present. It also includes succession and duration. The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966).
Harriet Burden
Notebook M
I am going to build a house-woman. She will have an inside and an outside, so that we can walk in and out of her. I am drawing her, drawing and thinking about her form. She must be large, and she must be a difficult woman, but she cannot be a natural horror or a fantasy creature with a vagina dentata. She cannot be a Picasso or a de Kooning monster or Madonna. No either/or for this woman. No, she must be true. She must have a head as important as her tail. And there will be characters inside that head, little men and women up to various pursuits. Let them write and sing and play instruments and dance and read very long speeches that put us all to sleep. Let her be my Lady Contemplation in honor of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, that seventeenth-century monstrosity: female intellectual. Author of plays, romances, poems, letters, natural philosophy, and a utopian fiction, The Blazing World. I will call my woman The Blazing World after the duchess. Anti-Cartesian, in the long run anti-atomist, anti-Hobbesian, an exiled Royalist in France, but she was a hard-bitten monist
and a materialist who didn’t, couldn’t quite leave God out of it. Her ideas overlap with Leibniz. Had my father known about Cavendish and her links to his hero?
Mad Madge was an embarrassment, a flamboyant boil on the face of nature. She made a spectacle of herself. Allowed once as a visitor to the Royal Society to watch experiments in 1666, the duchess in all her eccentric glory was duly recorded by Samuel Pepys, who recorded everything. He called her a “mad, conceited, ridiculous woman.” It was easy. It’s still easy. You simply refuse to answer the woman. You don’t engage in a dialogue. You let her words or her pictures die. You turn your head away. Centuries pass. The year the first woman was admitted to the Royal Society? 1945.
The duchess sometimes wore men’s clothes, vests and cavalier hats. She bowed rather than curtsied. She was a beardless astonishment, a confusion of roles. She staged herself as mask or masque. Cavalier hat off to you, Duchess. May its plumage wave.I