 Good afternoon. It's wonderful to have you all here today. It's not as cold as it was the last two days, but I was going to say, if it was so cold, we have a hot topic. I am Elizabeth Sackler, and it is a pleasure to welcome you to our eighth year of exhibitions and programming devoted to all things women. And our programs have been going on for these eight years, and if you have missed any of them, you can see them on www.brooklynmuseum.org slash EASCFA, Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art, EASCFA slash video. And we have hundreds of hours of programming having to do with all sorts of matters that are relevant, I think, to each and every one of us. So I invite you to do that. Herstory, as history is always the preface to the present, and Ceri Husvet's presence here today. In 2012, we had a significant increase of Norwegian visitors. Following a few months of this notable rise, I received the following email from our visitor services. Quote, I had some visitors, two couples, from Norway yesterday, they came to the museum because Queen Sonja of Norway had recently visited the museum, and when she returned to Norway, she spoke about the wonderful experience she has had at the Brooklyn Museum on Norwegian national television. The visitor told me that the queen had spoken about the museum for over 10 minutes, and that our museum was now her favorite in New York. The queen had been especially impressed with the Sackler Center, and that this was the first museum to have a dedicated gallery for women's and feminist art. And the two couple came to see the dinner party, but they were all so excited because the Keith Herring exhibit was up as well. They arrived a little after 11, and they didn't leave until after 4.30 p.m., because they were so impressed with the museum. This is a continued quote. I spoke with them briefly before they left the museum. They had a wonderful time, and they found our staff, the friendliest museum staff they'd ever experienced in New York. Not only were they impressed with the Sackler Center, they were also in love with the Dutch houses and the period rooms, and they loved connecting cultures and thought it was a marvelous introduction to the museum. They then said when they returned to Norway, they would tell their friends to skip the Manhattan Museum and come to the Brooklyn Museum. They had a great time and told me they would make time to come to the museum whenever they visited New York. And that is my preface, because that is what has begun a warm and happy relationship, and indeed a partnership of sharing of views and women and artists and women artists with the Norwegian Council General, with Siri, and with Queen Sonja herself. So we are here. I have asked Ellen to introduce Siri, who will read from The Blazing World, her wonderful book, and I then will be in discussion with her, and I hope we'll have an opportunity for Q&A afterwards, and of course then a book signing. And if you haven't read her book yet, I encourage you to purchase it. It is marvelous, it is brilliant, and it is not to be missed. It gives me great pleasure now to introduce Ellen Rongli, Norway's Council General in New York, representing Norway, Norwegian interests, and Norwegians in New York, and indeed in surrounding states. Before coming to New York, Ellen served as Minister Counselor at the Norwegian Embassy in Nairobi, and she and I actually shared a few discussions about Nairobi and how much she missed it after she left, and she was Policy Director of Renewable Energy at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Minister Counsel, Counselor at the Norwegian Embassy in Washington, D.C. Ellen began her career with the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1989, after receiving a Master's Degree in Political Science from the University of Oslo. So please join me in welcoming Ellen Rongli. Hello, everybody. It's so nice to see a good crowd here this afternoon. And I'm delighted and honored to be here this afternoon to introduce Sidi Hustvedt, an author I really admire. She's born in Norfield, Minnesota, to a Norwegian mother and a Norwegian-American father. And she is, as you know, celebrated as one of the most brilliant writers of her generation. She's an award-winning and international best-selling novelist, essayist, and poet. She is also much recognized for her knowledge about neuroscience. Her writing has been translated into more than 30 languages. And today we're looking forward to the reading, of course, and the discussion of Sirius' latest work, The Blazing World, which is an intellectual detective story set in the art world, a scene that is often a prominent theme in her work. And the novel unfolds a fascinating tale about an artist, Harriet Burden, who after years being ignored by the art world devises a plot to conceal her female identity behind three male fronts. It's a thrilling and provocative story. And this book is of particular interest to me and her work at the Consulate in New York. Gender equality is such an important issue to discuss and to continue to promote. And it's one of the top priorities for us at the Norwegian Consulate in New York. Before we begin today's program, I do want to take a brief moment to thank Elizabeth for her dedication to raising this agenda for us in New York. And I'm such a fan of Sackler Center and we at the Consulate treasure every moment we can work with you and the wonderful staff at the Brooklyn Museum. So again, thank you for inviting us to join you in the discussion today. And now I'm very excited to hear Siri read and to learn more about the thinking behind this book. The Placing book. So it is your city. Thank you, Elizabeth. Thank you, Ellen. As a Norwegian American feminist, I could not be in a better place. So I'm going to read you little excerpts. I'm going to be skipping around and I have chosen them because they all in one way or another are related to perhaps more of the political issues in the book. So I will just give you the name of the person speaking and not a lot of chit chat in between but we'll go straight ahead. This is the beginning of the editor's introduction who introduces the novel. Quote, all intellectual and artistic endeavors, even jokes, ironies and parodies fare better in the mind of the crowd when the crowd knows that somewhere behind the great work or the great spoof, it can locate a cock and a pair of balls. End quote. In 2003, I ran across this provocative sentence in a letter to the editor that was published in an issue of the open eye, an interdisciplinary journal I had been reading faithfully for several years. The letter's author, Richard Brickman, did not write the sentence. He was quoting an artist whose name I had never seen in print before, Harriet Burden. Brickman claimed that Burden had written him a long letter about a project. She wanted him to make public. Although Burden had exhibited her work in New York City in the 1970s and 80s, she had been disappointed by its reception and had withdrawn from the art world altogether. Sometime in the late 90s, she began an experiment that took her five years to complete. According to Brickman, Burden engaged three men to act as fronts for her own creative work. Three solo shows in three New York galleries attributed to Anton Tish, 1998, Phineas Q. Eldridge, 2002, and the artist known only as Rune, 2003, had actually been made by Burden. She titled the project as a whole Maskings and declared that it was meant not only to expose the anti-female bias of the art world, but to uncover the complex workings of human perception and how unconscious ideas about gender, race, and celebrity influence a viewer's understanding of a given work of art. But Brickman went further. He argued that Burden insisted that the pseudonym she adopted changed the character of the art she made. In other words, the man she used as a mask played a role in the kind of art she produced. Each artist's mask became for Burden a poetized personality, a visual elaboration of a hermaphroditic self, which cannot be said to belong to either her or to the mask, but to a mingled reality created between them. As a professor of aesthetics, I was immediately fascinated by the project for its ambition, but also for its philosophical complexity and sophistication. That's Ivy Hess, the editor. Harriet Burden, Notebook C Memoir Fragment. I started making them about a year after Felix died. Totems, fetishes, signs, creatures like him and not so like him, odd bodies of all kinds that frightened the children, even though they were grown up and didn't live with me anymore. They suspected a version of grief gone off the rails, especially after I decided that some of my carcasses had to be warm so that when you put your arms around them, you could feel the heat. Maisie told me to take it easy. Mom, it's too much. You have to stop, mom. You're not young, you know. And Ethan, true to his Ethan self, expressed his disapproval by naming them the maternal monsters, the dad things, and Peter, horribilus. Only Avan, wondrous grand babe, approved of my beloved beasties. She was not yet two at the time and approached them soberly and with great delicacy. She loved to lay her cheek against a radiant belly and coo. But I must back up and circle around. I am writing this because I don't trust time. I, Harriet Burden, also known as Harry to my old friends and select new friends, I'm 62. Not ancient, but well on my way to the end. And I have too much left to do before one of my aches turns out to be a tumor or loss of a name, dementia, or the errant truck leaps onto the sidewalk and flattens me against the wall never to breathe again. Life is walking tiptoe over landmines. We never know what's coming. And if you want my opinion, we don't have a good grip on what's behind us either, but we sure as hell can spin a story about it and break our brains trying to get it right. Beginnings are riddles, ma and da. The floating fetus ob ovo. These are, there are multiple moments in life, however, that might be called originating. We just have to recognize them for what they are. Felix and I were eating breakfast back in the old department at 1185 Park Avenue. He had cracked his soft boiled egg as he did every morning with a smart smack of his knife to the shell. And he had brought the spoon with its white and running yellow contents to his mouth. I was looking at him because he appeared to be on the brink of speaking to me. He looked surprised for just an instant. Then the spoon fell to the table, then to the floor, and he slumped over his forehead landing on a piece of buttered toast. The light from the window shown weekly on the table with its blue and white cloth, the discarded knife lay at an angle on the saucer of the coffee cup. The green salt and pepper shaker stood inches from his left ear. I couldn't have registered that image of my husband collapsed over his plate for more than a fraction of a second, but the picture was scored into my mind. And I still see it. I see it. Even though I leapt up and lifted his head, felt for his pulse, called for help, breathed into his mouth, prayed my muddled secular prayer sat in the back of the ambulance with the paramedics and listened to the siren scream. By then, I had become a stone woman, an observer who was also an actor in the scene. I remember it all vividly. And yet, part of me is still sitting there at the small table in the long, narrow kitchen near the window looking at Felix. It is the fragment of Harriet Burden that never stood up and went on. I crossed the bridge and bought a building in Brooklyn, a scruffier borough in those days than it is now. I wanted to flee the Manhattan art world, that incestuous, moneyed, whirring, globule, composed of persons who buy and sell aesthetic obje. In that a feat microcosm, it is fair to say Felix had been a giant dealer to the stars and I gargantua's artist wife. Wife outweighed artist, however, and with Felix gone, the inhabitants of that Beaumont cared little whether I stayed or left them for the remote region known as Red Hook. I had had two dealers, both had dropped me, one after the other. My work had never sold much and was little discussed, but for 30 years I served as hostess to the lot of them. The collectors, the artists, and the art writers, a mutually dependent club so ingrown and overgrown that their identities seemed to merge. By the time I bid goodbye to it all, the hot new properties fresh from art school had begun to look alike to me. With their film or performance art and their pretentious pattern garbled theoretical references, at least the kids were hopeful. They took their cues from the hopeless. Those morons who wrote for art assembly, the hermetic rag that regularly served up the cold leftovers of French literary theory to its eager, equally ignorant readers. For years I worked so hard to hold my tongue I nearly swallowed it. For years I had slid around the dining room table in various costumes of the bright eccentric variety opposite the clay, directing traffic with deaf signals and smiling, always smiling. Felix Lord discovered me standing in his gallery late one Saturday afternoon in Soho, contemplating an artist who has long since vanished but had a moment of glory in the 60s, Hieronymus Hirsch. I was 26, he was 48. I was 6'2, he was 5'10. He was rich, I was poor. He told me my hair made me look like a person who had survived an electrocution and that I should do something about it. It was love and orgasms, many of them, and soft, damp sheets. It was a haircut, very short. It was marriage, my first, his second. It was talk, painting, sculptures, photographs and installations and colors, a lot about colors. They stained us both, filled our insides. It was reading books aloud to each other and talking about them. He had a beautiful voice with a rasp in it from the cigarettes he could never quit smoking. It was babies, I loved looking at the little lords, sensuous delights of pudgy flesh and fluids. For at least three years I was a wash in milk and poop and piss and spit up and sweat and tears. It was paradise, it was exhausting, it was boring, it was sweet, exciting and sometimes curiously, very lonely. Maisie, maniacal narrator of Life Stream, the piping voice of boomin, buzzin, confusion. She still talks a lot, a lot, a lot. Ethan, child of method, first one foot, then the other in a parquet square, the rhythmic ambulatory contemplation of the hallway. It was talks about the children late into the night and the smell of Felix, his faint cologne and herbal shampoo, his thin fingers on my back. My Modigliani. He turned my long homely face into an artifact, Jolie Led. Nanny, so I could work and read, fat Lucian muscular Teresa. In the room I called my micro studio. I built tiny crooked houses with lots of writing on the walls. Cerebral, said Arthur Pigus, who once bothered to look. Gelatinous figures hovered near the ceiling held up by nearly invisible wires. One gripped a sign that said, what are these strangers doing here? I did my writing there, the exclamations nobody read. The wildnesses, even Felix didn't understand. Felix to the airport, his rows of suits in the closet, his ties and his deals, his collection. Felix the cat, we await you in Berlin next week. Madly, hotly, love, Alex and Sigrid. Inside pocket of the suit jacket on its way to the cleaners. His negligence, Rachel said, was a way to tell me about them without telling me. The secret life of Felix Lorde. It could be a book or a play. Ethan, my author boy, could write it if he knew that his father had been in love with a couple for three years. Felix with the distant eyes. And hadn't I also loved his illegibility? Hadn't it drawn me in and seduced me the way he seduced the others? Not with what was there, but with what was missing. First my father's death and my mother's death within a year of each other. And all the sick dreams, floods of them all night, every night the flashes of teeth and bone and blood that leaked from under countless doors that took me down hallways into rooms I should have recognized, but didn't. Time, how can I be so old? Where's little Harriet? What happened to the big ungainly frizz head who studied so hard? Only child, a professor and wife, philosopher and help meet wasp and Jew, wedded not always so blissfully on the upper west side, my left leaning frugal parents whose only luxury was doting on me, their cause celebre, their oversized Harry Burden who disappointed them in some ways and not in others. Like Felix, my father dropped dead before noon. One morning in his study after he had retrieved monodology from its home on the shelf across from his desk, his heart stopped beating. After that, my once noisy bustling mother became quieter and slower. I watched her dwindle. She seemed to shrink daily until I could hardly recognize the tiny figure in the hospital bed who in the end called out not for her husband or for me but for her mama over and over again. I was an agitated borner for all three of them, a big restless, pacing animal. Rachel says that no grief is simple and I've discovered that my old friend Dr. Rachel Briefman is mostly right about the strange doings of the psyche, psychoanalysis as you're calling and it's true that my first year of living without Felix was furious, vengeful, an implosion of misery about all I had done wrong and all I had wasted, a conundrum of hatred and love for us both. One afternoon, I threw away heaps of expensive clothes he had bought for me from Barney's and Bergdorff's and poor Maisie with her bulging belly looked into the closet and blubbered about saving father's presence and how could I be so cruel and I regretted the stupid act. I hid as much as I could from the children, the vodka that put me to sleep, the sense of unreality as I wandered among the rooms I knew so well and a terrible hunger for something I couldn't name. I couldn't hide the vomiting. I ate and the food came blasting up and out of me, splattering the toilet and walls. I couldn't stop it. When I think of it now, I can feel the smooth, cool surface of the toilet seat as I grip it, the gagging, wrenching paroxysms of throat and gut. I'm dying too, I thought disappearing. Tests and more tests, doctors and more doctors, nothing to be found than the very last stop for the so-called functional ailment for a possible conversion reaction for a body that usurps speech. Rachel referred me to a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst. I wept and talked and wept some more. Mother and father, the apartment on Riverside Drive, Cooper Union, my old and flattened ambitions, Felix and the children, what have I done? And then one afternoon at 310, just before the session ended, Dr. Fertig looked at me with his sad eyes, which must have seen so much sadness other than mine, no doubt so much sadness worse than mine and said in a low but emphatic voice, there's still time to change things, Harriet. There's still time to change things. The vomiting disappeared. Don't let anyone say, there aren't magic words. Cynthia Clark, interview with former owner of the Clark Gallery, NYC, April 6, 2009. The interviewer is Hess, the editor, Hess. Do you remember the first time you met Harriet Burden? Clark, yes, Felix brought her around to the gallery. He was divorced from Sarah by then and he walks in with this gigantic girl big as a house really and va, va, va, boom shapely, but with a long, peculiar face. They used to call her the Amazon, Hess. Were you familiar with her work then? Clark, no, but to be honest, no one was familiar with her work. I've seen it now, the early pieces, but the truth is nobody in the art world would have picked it up back then. It was too busy, too off the beaten track. It didn't fit into any schema. There were a lot of art wars in the late 60s, early 70s. She wasn't Judy Chicago either, making a feminist statement. And I guess Felix was a problem for her too. He couldn't represent her after all. It would have been nepotism, Hess. Is there any other impression of her besides her appearance that you noted and would like to share for the book? Clark, she made a scene once at a dinner. It was years ago, around 85, I think. She was talking to Rodney Ferrell, the critic. He faded, but he had some power then. Anyway, something he said must have set her off, and this woman, who we all thought of as very quiet, burst out and rattled on about philosophy, art, language. She was very loud, lecturing, unpleasant. I don't think anyone had the slightest idea of what she was saying. Frankly, I thought it might have been gibberish. Everyone stopped talking, and then she started laughing, crazy, nutty laughter, and left the table. Felix was upset. He hated scenes. Hess, and the pseudonyms? Did you suspect anything? Clark, absolutely not. After Felix died, she disappeared. No one talked about her. Hess, weren't you surprised by the sophistication of Anton Tisha's work? He was only 24 at the time. Seemed to come out of nowhere, and in interviews, he was strikingly inarticulate and seemed to have only superficial thoughts about his own work, Clark. I've shown many artists who weren't able to say what they were about. I've always believed that the work is supposed to speak, and that the pressure put on artists to explain themselves as misplaced. Hess, I agree with you. And yet the history of Western art is a complex joke about art full of references, quotations, puns, and anagrams. There is an allusion to Diderot on a Chardin canvas shown at the Academy's annual salon show taken from the French edition. That particular essay had not been translated into English. The boy did not speak French. Clark, listen, I've said this before. It's all very well and good to look back now and ask how on earth we could have been taken in. You can cite all the examples you want. I wasn't pondering how he did it. He gave me the work, it caused a stir, it sold. I visited his studio and there were works in progress all over the place. What would you have thought? Hess, I'm not sure. Clark, there's nothing cut and dried about this, you know. One can easily argue that the posing, the performance was part of the work itself, that it all goes together. And as you well know, pieces from that show signed by Anton Tisch command high prices. I don't regret for a second that I showed them. Hess, I think the real question is, would you have shown them if you had been aware of who had really made them? Clark, I believe I would have. Yes, I think I would have. This is an art critic, Rosemary Lerner. Written statement. There is a pronounced tendency in all the arts to mythologize the dead, by which I mean the creation of reductive narratives to explain artist's lives and works. I have been an art writer for more than 40 years and have witnessed this time and time again. The reasons for simplifications are often ideological, but sensational biographies can also erase all nuance when they appear to fit a prefigured character and script. Tragic hero or heroine, victim genius. It is helpful to undermine these wooden scenarios. Harriet Burden was not nearly as obscure or unnoticed as she has been made out to be in the stories that are now circulating about her career. Her work was represented in no less than five group shows in the 70s and I for one singled her out in a review I wrote for Art in New York in 1976. Quote, Harriet Burden's uncanny architectural piece with its slightly askew walls and floors, its emotionally charged figures, pastel palette, and dense use of text lingers in this reviewer's mind as a work of a brilliant and strikingly independent artist. End quote. All be it a minority view, I was not alone. Archie Frame, Beatrice Brownhurst, and Peter Grosswetter all commented favorably on her two one-woman shows, both at major New York galleries. Yes, both dealers let her go, but this is hardly a unique fate. It merely places Harriet Burden among the numerous distinguished visual artists, male and female, who were respected by other artists, received mixed reviews, and didn't attract big collectors to their work. Reviewers of every ilk like to feel they are above a work of art. If it puzzles them or if they are intimidated, they are more than likely to trash it. Many artists are not intellectuals, but Burden was, and her work reflected her wide learning. Her references span many fields and were often impossible to track. There was also a literary narrative quality to her art that many resisted. I'm convinced that her knowledge alone acted as an irritant to some reviewers. I once had a conversation with a man who had excoriated her first one-woman show. When I brought up his review and offered a defense of her work, he was hostile. He was not a stupid man and had written well on some artists I admired. He had attacked Burden's work as confused and naive. The very opposite, in fact, of what it was. I realized that he had been incapable of a fair-minded appraisal because, although he prided himself on his sophistication, the multiple meanings of her carefully orchestrated text had eluded him, and he had projected his own disorientation onto the work. His last words to me were, I hated it, okay? I just hated it. I don't give a damn about what she was referring to. That conversation has stayed with me, not as a story about Harriet Burden so much as a lesson for myself. Beware of the violent response and the sophisms you may use to explain it. Then there is the question of sex. It has often taken women longer to gain a hold in the art world than men. The remarkable Alice Neal worked without much attention until she was in her 70s. Louise Bourgeois made a breakthrough with her show at MoMA in 1982. She was 70. Like Bourden, these women were not ignored, but gained prominent recognition only late in their careers. During her lifetime, the painter Joan Mitchell was known and admired, but it wasn't until after her death that her place among second generation abstract expressionists began to grow enormously. Grace Hardigan was the only woman in MoMA's legendary New American painting exhibition in 1958, 59. Eva Hess, who was at Cooper Union only a few years before Bourden died in 1970 at age 34 of a brain tumor. She didn't live to see her star continue to rise or the power of her influence on younger artists. But when she was alive, she complained that her work did not receive the serious attention given to the work of her male colleagues and she was right. There were many reviewers who reviewed her life, not her art. Lee Krasner's work was subsumed by her husbands in the eyes of the art world. Jackson Pollock was and is deified as a romantic hero. A year before Krasner died, a retrospective of her work was mounted, but by then she said it was too late. Mostly the art business has been about men. And when it has been about women, it has often been about correcting past oversights. It is interesting that not all, but many women were celebrated only when their days as desirable sexual objects had passed. Although the number of women artists has exploded, it is no secret that New York galleries show women far less often than men. The figures hover around 20% of all one person shows in the city, despite the fact that almost half of those same galleries are run by women. The museums that exhibit contemporary art are no better, nor are the magazines that write about it. Every woman artist faces the insidious propagation of a male status quo. With almost no exceptions, art by men is far more expensive than art by women. Dollars tell the story. After giving up on public life as an artist, Brudden decided to experiment with the perception of her work through the use of masculine personas. The results were striking. When presented as the work of a man, her art suddenly found an enthusiastic audience. Caution is an order, however. Art world trends are constantly changing. The raw is in one day, the cooked the next. And there is an ever present hunger for youth, the latest ingenue or man genu on the menu. Might a young woman have served Brudden equally well? Probably not. But the story cannot simply be told as a feminist parable, even though it seems obvious that sexual bias played a determining role in the perception of Brudden's work. And yet, each of her masks seem to uncover a different aspect of her imagination. And it is not unfair to say that the trajectory of her artistic experimentation became a movement toward an increasing and almost sinister ambiguity. This is an excerpt from Bruno Klinefeld. He is on his first date with Harry. He's a failed poet and very poor. I listen to her. I am not cynical when I say this is the first rule of seduction. There is no seduction without big listening ears. Call me Harry, she said, I called her Harry. I listened to her tell me about her two grown up kids, one documentary filmmaker, one prose writer, and the grandchild who could do somersaults and had developed unusual passions for Buster Keaton and Peggy Lee. And about her dead husband who had been half Thai, half English, the son of a diplomat, a man who had been at home everywhere and nowhere. He sounded like a smoothie to me. A lot of money and a lot of angles. The kind of guy who steals into a smoke filled bar in one of those Hollywood movies from the 40s. Wearing a white dinner jacket as he scans the room with his foreigner's eyes. I couldn't really get a handle on Harry on who she was, that is. She was frank and forthright, but there was hesitation or two. She formed her sentences slowly as if she were thinking about each word. She spoke at some length about Bosch, about how much she loved his demons and mutations. She loved Goya. She called him a world apart. He was not afraid to look, she said, even though there are things that should not be seen. Sometime around the second glass of wine she lowered her voice as if she were afraid a couple at the next table would overhear her. There had been a little boy, she said, who lived under her bed in her family's apartment on Riverside Drive. He breathed fire. Her exact words, he breathed fire. Harry did not say imaginary boy or imaginary friend. She placed her long hands on the tablecloth, leaned toward me, inhaled and exhaled. I wanted to fly, you see, and breathe fire. Those were my dearest wishes, but it was forbidden, or I felt it was forbidden. It has taken me a very long time, a very long time to give myself permission to fly and breathe fire. I did not say I hoped she would breathe fire on me, although the hankering to say it was strong. I made some other crack and she laughed. She had good teeth, Harry did. Nice, even white teeth and a sonorous laugh, a big, fat laugh that gave me amnesia, that wiped out years of my life in the rat hole, that made me feel light and free and as I said to her unburdened, unburdened because Harriet Burden's laugh lifted L.I.U. and the poem and the chip linoleum right up and off of me. I don't know why, but my pun on her name made her serious and her lips quivered. I thought she might break down on the spot with the weepies and water her half-eaten chicken, so I swooped in. I swooped in with Thomas Trahearne. Nothing could have been better than my old Fred Tom, dead in 1674, an ecstatic versifier if there ever was one, a poet all but lost until 1896 when some anonymous but curious soul discovered a manuscript in a London bookstore. I had memorized Trahearne's poem, Wonder Years, earlier. All at once, the third stanza popped into my head and I read it straight off some sheet of paper inside my skull as the lady of my heart looked at me all a tremble. Harsh, ragged objects were concealed. Oppressions, tears and cries, sins, griefs, complaints, dissensions, weeping eyes were hid and only things revealed which heavenly spirits and the angels prize. The state of innocence and bliss, not trades and poverty's, did fill my sense. It was a wonder that we found each other. Harry and I, it's still a wonder. My Harry was a wonder. She took me home and when we walked into her gigantic place with the wall of windows that looked over the water and the long blue sofas, a space that was still raw but not raw, if you see what I mean, fashionably raw with art on one wall and floor to ceiling bookshelves with a couple of thousand volumes along the other and big old rugs on the floor and a shiny kitchen with pots hanging from a ceiling rack. I said to myself, it's paradise man, pure paradise. No cracks and crumbs and dust mites and roaches and it's right across the street. Then Harry showed me the studio floor right below. We walked down a flight of stairs. She flicked on some lights and I noted the long hallway lined with doors one after the other and I heard somebody snoring behind one of them. I didn't ask. It was all going so well, I didn't want to screw it up. Harry opened up double doors on the other side of the hall, turned on more lights to illuminate her workspace. I will not pretend that Harry's art didn't scare me a little. To be honest, that first night it gave me a voodoo feeling. I walked right under a flying cock as in penis, not rooster, authentic looking as hell. And there were several bodies in progress, at least five of the former spouse in miniature and other figures that were life sized with clothes on, lying around like so many corpses. She had massive machines and racks of tools that reminded me of medieval torture instruments. And in the middle of the floor there was a big glass box with mirrors inside it and a couple of human shapes that gave me the willies. Louise had said there were people in the hood who called her the witch. And I had said, come on, that's just stupid. But the place had an infernal quality, no doubt about it. I half expected that fire breathing brat, she had told me about it dinner to come flying out of the beams. The elegant lady of the coats was making some weird shit. And I confess that when I looked around that massive factory, I felt the minor character creeping up in me again. He was a shrinker and I shrank. Harry was so excited she didn't notice. She smiled and pointed at her creations and talked more fluently than she had all evening, telling me she was working through certain ideas. She wanted to represent ideas and bodies, embodied minds and play with perceptual expectations. She liked Husserl, another incomprehensible German she probably read on the F train. I read a lot, but philosophy tires me out fast. Give me Wallace Stevens version of philosophy any day. She wanted me to understand. She wanted me to get it. Operational intentionality. So the shrinker just nodded, yep, Husserl, yep, good, aha. Okay, okay, I was intimidated. It's one thing to be in a restaurant, a neutral territory. It's another to wind up in the woman's warehouse palace and discover an army of ghoulish dolls and body parts, some of which you could plug in and heat while she chattered on about upstairs books you'd never read. When I left Terry's studio, I had dwindled to the size of Tom Thumb and wasn't quoting anybody. I was ready to run out of there, but Harry put her hand on my arm and said, Bruno, you mustn't mind me. I'm wound up because it's so rare that I meet somebody I can really talk to and now here you are and I feel kind of dizzy. That ghoulish look was in her face again, not sad this time, but happy. We walked upstairs and she put on Sam Cooke singing, you send me, a song with the sweetest, dumbest lyrics and the nicest melody in the world. Darling, you send me. I know you send me, darling, you send me. Honest you do, honest you do. And Harry grinned at me with her big white teeth and she sang along and wiggled her hips and her shoulders and did a little soft shoe. I grew back to my full stature and once I was all grown again, I lunged. I threw my arms around her waist and buried my head between her butchess boobs and we didn't stop there. I'll censor the juicy business that transpired between us on that first night of the body's electric when the sparks flew and we breathed lots of red hot fire. It had been a long time for both of us, such a long time for Harry that when it was all over and we lay on our backs, spent and listless in her big bed, she started to cry. She didn't make any noise except for a few sniffs. I looked over at her and I watched the tears stream down the visible side of her face into her ear. She sat up, hugged her knees and the tears just kept coming, leaking steadily from her ducts until I guess they were finally dry. I know when to shut up. I didn't comment on those tears. I didn't say a word because I understood all about it. If she hadn't beaten me to it, it might have been me sitting on the bed, raining tears of relief onto those clean, soft, white. Sheets. This is a tiny little passage from the second mask or pseudonym or front, Phineas Q. Eldridge. They're on their way back from an art show. After bussing me in the taxi, Harry turned prickly irritable and sour. She had drunk too much and I could feel the self-pity mounting as she rolled off the names of women artists suppressed, dismissed or forgotten. She jumped up from the sofa and stomped back and forth across the room. Artemisia Gentileschi, treated with contempt by posterity, her best work attributed to her father. Judith Leicester admired in her day that erased her work handed over to Franz Halls. Camille Claudel's reputation swallowed whole by Rodin's. Dora Mars' big mistake, she screwed Picasso. A fact that had obliterated her brilliant surrealist photographs. Fathers, teachers and lovers suffocate women's reputations. These are four I remember Harry had an endless supply with women, Harry said, it's always personal. Love and muck, whom they fuck. And a favorite theme of Harry's? Women treated like children by paternal critics who refer to them by their first names. Artemisia, Judith, Camille, Dora. Finally, Harriet again. 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 17th 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. 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 Peeps 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, 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 mask, QUE. Cavalier hat off to you, Duchess. May its plumage wave. Cross-dressers run rampant in Cavendish. How else can a lady gallop into the world? How else can she be heard? She must become a man, or she must leave this world, or she must leave her body, her mean-born body, and blaze. The Duchess is a dreamer. Her characters wield their contradictory words like banners. She cannot decide. Polyphony is the only route to understanding her mafriditic polyphony. What noble mind can suffer a base servitude without rebellious passion, asked Lady Ward. But the ladies always win in her worlds. Through marriage, beauty, argument, and rank, wishful fantasy. Lord Courtship is thunderstruck by the woman's lucidity and feeling. He is born, reborn instantly. Is this not what I want? Look at my work. Look and see how to live. A life in the world or a world in the head. To be seen and recognized outside, or to hide and think inside, actor or hermit. Which is it? She wanted both. To be inside and outside. To ponder and to leap. She was painfully shy and suffered from melancholia. A drag on her gait. She bragged. She adored her husband. A few sages called her a genius. I am a riot. An opera. A menace. I am Mad Maj. Mad Hatter Harriet. A hideous anomaly who lives at the Heartbreak Hotel near Sunny's Bar on the water in Brooklyn with people straight from the funny papers. Bruno says there are those in the neighborhood who call me the witch. I take it on then. The enchantment of magic and the power of night which is procreative, fertile, wet. Isn't that where their fear lies? Don't women give birth? Don't we push those squalling babes into the world, suckle them and sing to them? Are we not the makers and shakers of generations? Tiny Gulliver and Brogdingnag looks up at a giant nurse who gives suck to an infant, quote. No sight disgusted me so much as her monstrous breast. Its size is alarming and every imperfection of the skin visible, end quote. A swiftian conflation of microscope and misogyny. But isn't every infant a dwarf at the breast? I want to blaze and rumble and roar. I want to hide and weep and hold onto my mother. But so do we all. Thank you. You're welcome, you're welcome. Thank you. I think we've all probably been to many readings and heard authors read their own words and it's always a pleasure. But this was particularly beautiful. You know, every once in a while it happens so rarely you see a play or you go to a ballet or you go to an opera and something magical has happened and you know somehow that you've seen something that doesn't happen every night. It doesn't happen perhaps the night before or three months later. And hearing you speak these words and having read the book has just been such a huge gift. Oh great, thank you. And I want to thank you very much for being here. And that of course brings us back a little bit for a moment to her story, which is that we met at Ellen's residence at the Council General's residence when Her Majesty, Queen Sonia was in for lunch. Yes. And there were a small group of us who were invited and Ciri was there. And as soon as I found out, well I listened to her, of course we all had an opportunity to speak and I was riveted by what you had to say immediately went out and bought the book. This is now already what, eight months ago? Yeah, yeah. And said, oh my goodness, Ciri absolutely has to come to the center and I'm so delighted to have you here today. I, we spoke a little bit earlier about the layers of this book. Ciri has very carefully picked out pieces of the book which gives us not only the plot line but of course the plot line that we're all following with Bated Breath, which has to do with women in the art world. But it's also very complicated in terms of the psychological issues and how gender and memory affect and affect. Yes. You have written nonfiction books as well as fiction. And I would like to read to you the names of your nonfiction books to the audience because I think it's really relevant. One is A Place for Arrows. Another, Mysteries of the Rectangle, Essays on Painting. A Third, The Shaking Woman or A Story of My Nerves. And for Living, Thinking, Looking. These are not fiction, these are nonfiction works. And I'm very interested in terms of your knowledge and the work that you've done and the studying you've done about neurology, neuroscience and how that relates to gender and gender construct. And where does that fall into play in this enormous world? I know, it's a big question. No, it's a big question, but it is interesting because I think that in contemporary culture we're often framing these kind of nature, nurture issues. And in feminism itself, of course, there's been longstanding arguments between what people call difference feminism, which is often accused as being essentialist, which means that women really are different in a number of essential or natural ways and versus, say, someone like Judith Butler who is really coming out of a post-structuralist tradition where it's the cultural constructs that are creating femininity and masculinity and she's making a bid for a much greater fluidity. I think that that debate falls into the larger debate which has misunderstood these two things as separate. So I'm actually working on this now. I'm working on a book called The Delusions of Certainty. And it's an essay about nature and nurture. And if you think about it this way, I mean, you can go all the way down to genetics. We all have this idea about the gene as a program for traits, right? People in everyday language, they say, there's a gene for getting long legs or blue eyes. In fact, of course, genes do not code directly for any traits. This is important to understand. So the gene is a organism of the cell. And without the cell, in other words, without the environment around it, it's completely inert. Now, this is an important point because the dynamics of genetics are so complex. You know, it's all kinds of things are happening. And rather than getting simpler, you know, it's not the Watson-Crick program. They get more and more complicated in molecular biology. Now, you can take this and make it bigger. As I was saying to you before, we think of things like, you know, books as part of our nurturing culture, right? You learn how to read and then we can all read books and the more books we read, the more books we have inside ourselves in one way or another. Of course, text is not biology. But once you've finished a book, while you're reading a book, it's part of your physiological processes and it becomes part of your memory, which is also a neurobiological process. So there's something so weird and artificial about teasing apart these two things as if we can say what's outside and what's inside. You know, it's like everybody's somewhere and we all become ourselves through the other. Right. Through the other. And I mean, you know, Harry is, you know, at the end of this last passage I read is talking about birth. Now, I at least really do feel that there, I mean, there are reproductive sexual differences between the sexes, you know. I mean, and giving birth is an experience that I have had personally and my husband has not had had personally and there's a reason for that. So I mean, I think sometimes these debates can become go into la-la land, you know. Yes, there are differences. But if you think about a biological organism, especially a human being as a dynamic creature as someone in constant change, always an interaction with others in the environment, that kind of, you know, what's essentially feminine or masculine is something actually that is simply not known. So I'm going to read from page five from the editors and the editor, of course, is fictional. Yes. You didn't understand that. But this goes back, it goes to what you're saying, but goes all the way back because it has to do with internalization of the information. Q is devoted to quantum theory. Oh, there are different books. Notebooks, so notebook M was one and then there's. So in the blazing world, the chapters are broken up various ways but part of the way in which they're broken up is by A through Z with the exception of I and O, which wasn't found until after she died, right? So these are from the different alphabetical orientations. So Q is devoted to quantum theory and it's possible to use for a theoretical model of the brain. On the first page of notebook F for female, apparently, Burden writes, hymns to the fair sex, page after page of quotations follow. A small sample will suffice to give the flavor. Hesiod, who trusts a woman that trusts that man. I'm going to say that again. Who trusts a woman that man trusts a swindler. Tertullian, you woman are the devil's gateway. Victor Hugo, God became man, granted. The devil became woman. Pound, canto, what is it, 29. The female is an element. The female is chaos. An octopus, a biological process. Along with these examples of blatant misogyny, Burden has stapled dozens of newspaper magazine articles into a single page with the word suppressed written on it. So I bring that up in relationship to what you have just said, which is to say that as we are growing up in our culture and as we are being educated, all of this information, as you're saying, is coming into us and is fed into us. And how does that then move along our neurological pathways to create who we are? Exactly. And of course, the suppression is important and this is why, of course, feminism has done us a great service in the sense that people like Margaret Cavendish really were resurrected by feminist scholars. Now Cavendish, interest me, I mean, this is sort of, you know, it's not gone into deeply in the book, but she's extremely interesting and is now, there are a number of dissertations, by the way, completely outside of feminist departments in philosophy that are being written about Cavendish because her understanding of the mind-body problem is and really anticipates a number of very contemporary ideas about what we are. So that's fascinating. Now as for the, you know, what happens? Well, the brain remains a mystery in many respects. So we don't know exactly how this works, but what is known is, and seems to be very, very clear, is that we perceive the world through our past perceptions of it. There was a 19th century German scientist, Wilhelm von Helmholtz, who had an idea of unconscious perceptual inference. Now Helmholtz was also suppressed, not only women are, you know, if the idea isn't, you know, going anywhere, people just ignore it. He too has been resurrected because it seems clear that the brain we have, or the most recent theory, is that we have a predictive brain. And it means that it may be that in an evolutionary sense, what the brain is designed to do is to predict the future. And the way you predict the future is through your experiential past, which is often unconscious. It's often, you know, the simplest example is, you know, a child learns that the burner is hot and never touches the burner again. And every time the child sees a burner, we know. That's it. My grandson is an example of how that doesn't really happen. Well, yes, there's also human development and, you know, the ability to suppress your urges. But no, so in terms of women, you know, I've thought about this, this idea of unconscious perceptual inference, especially in the West and what we think of as enlightened, you know, cultures, liberal people who vote democratic and all that, this prejudice is part of how we have, I think, learned to see works of art and that it really is true if you attach a woman. There's lots of studies on this. I mean, I could cite many of them, but, you know, we don't want to get too crazy, but that if you attach a woman's name to a work of art, it is instantly denigrated, devalued. And if you put a man's name on the same work of art, it's enhanced. So this is something that is not, by the way, it's not just men who are doing this, it's women too, because, of course, these perceptions are part of how we live in the world. I have to do a little commercial here. In 2017, we are having our 10th anniversary of the Sackler Center, and the entire museum is all of the curators throughout the museum and all of the departments are going to be going back and looking at all of their exhibitions and their didactics through a feminist or woman's lens. And the didactics will be rewritten and the exhibitions are going to be redone. And it will be the first time that an entire museum has actually done that. So it will be very, very interesting to see what happens, and I hope it'll all be here. It will be up all year. There are a few things I know we wanna cover about the art market, because that's part of what this, the deepness is all about, but there are two more questions I do wanna ask you. And that is about Harriet Burden's psychology and how she is as a woman. First of all, she's Harriet Burden, or Harry Burden, and her husband is Felix Lord. So we have a lord and we have a bird. Yes, all my names. I have been named. I have no doubt, I have no doubt. And she is very large and very va-va-voom and very Amazon and maybe a witch. So tell me a little bit, if you care to, about how you chose the protagonist to be, what kind of person was this going to be who was gonna take on a mass? Yeah, this is interesting. I wanted Harry to, I mean, I was born in 1955, and so Harry's a bit older than I am, and I wanted her to have grown up that feminism came to her later. In other words, second wave feminism hit her after she had had a childhood that was very much divided between male and female roles. And so in some way, I understood very early that Harry was, and even the editor says, that there are aspects of self-sabotage in Harry. And also huge repression, which is why I think after her husband dies, she gets sick. I mean, she becomes, she has hysterical symptoms, the vomiting, but also I wanted her to be enormous. I mean, I wanted her physically to represent a fear in the culture. You know, she's got gigantic breasts and she's huge and she's got this wild hair. So she was my monster. I mean, she identifies very heavily with Frankenstein's monster. I thought about Milton Satan all the time when I was writing her. So I wanted Harry to walk that line between realism and myth, you know, that she's huge and angry and kind of scary and also blind, you know, at times. And so her relationship with her father that keeps returning, not only in her notebooks, but through what she said to other people is very important. She wanted recognition from her father and in her fantasy, whether it's true or not. Yeah, true or not, she felt that had she been a son, her father would have recognized her, seen her, encouraged her work, instead of just sort of blotting it out of the radar. So these are areas, I think, whether or not you were born in the 1940s, 50s, or 60s, or 70s, that I think all women and young women can think about and self-reflect, I think. We were talking briefly about Judith Scott. Yes. And if all of you or some of you have had an opportunity to see Judith's work and know that for 45 years she was institutionalized and was isolated, essentially, from everything. So actually, I have one other question before we go to Judith Scott because I really don't believe you're wrong. How did you determine what kind of three men were going to be her masks? They're kind of like beards in the old times. Yeah, they're like beards. Yeah, well, I wanted them to be very different, so you get this kind of fresh-faced boy. Without spoiling. Yeah, those three, I mean, in a way, the editor kind of tells you the parable at the beginning of the novel and then you find out how it unfolds. But the first guy is this fresh-faced kid out of art school, and he's very easy for Harry to manipulate. And there are deep moral issues at hand and other people in her life know it. She's so dead set on the experiment that she is callous, frankly. The second one, I wanted to bring race and sexuality into it, so the second guy is black and gay, or gay and black, whichever comes first, it's sometimes one and sometimes the other, and they love each other. So the second work is a collaboration, a much deeper collaboration than any of the other two, and Finney is very sympathetic to the project itself. And he's the one, actually after that section I read about when Harry's walking back and forth, Finney starts whistling. He says, he does that when she sort of gets, and he says to her, in the United States black men were called boys, and he talks about southern ladies and the whole racist drama, and he also at certain points in the narrative says that Harry is not quite aware of how important her whiteness and her money are to her life. Without the money, she couldn't do this experiment, and she takes her whiteness for granted. So I wanted to mix that up, and then the last guy is really, I mean he's a kind of high narcissist, male narcissist, not uncommon in the art world, who is very good at manipulating people in part because he probably has very little remorse. And it was very important to me to put in a testament written by his sister that comes near the end of the book because you get a sense of his childhood, a sense of how this personality could have come to be. I think everybody, people who have not read the book really have a treat in store for them. You are familiar with Carl Jung's red book? Yes. And I am curious, it was at the Rubin Museum, I don't know if anybody had an opportunity to see it. I did a conversation with a Jungian analyst at the Rubin. And tell me, how has that influenced you? And what was the conversation? Well, I have to say that in the great debates about Freud and Jung, I'm much more Freudian than a Jungian. But I think this is a fascinating work. And I also think that Jung had extraordinary things to say about, in fact that Jung was of course much closer to, they're his paintings, yes. And he was much closer to the creative possibilities in psychosis, for example. I mean, he had some kind of a breakdown. And Freud treated artists with great respect, but he was very distant. He did not have, for example, the oceanic feeling. Jung was right in there. And I think that when I taught psychiatric patients at Payne Whitney for four years as a volunteer, I witnessed the extraordinary creativity that can be linked to psychosis. Psychosis both in schizophrenia and in manic depression. And I had to smile, I may have told my husband many times, but sometimes a doctor or someone on the staff would sit in on the class and do writing with us. And I was always shocked at how banal and bad a lot of the staff writing was and how some of these psychotic patients were just exploding with, I have stuff in my drawer. I mean, I haven't made it public. They're privacy issues, but there were certain, especially the discipline there is lacking. Narratives are very hard for psychotic patients, but poems and individual lines, you'd go, oh, God, I wish I had written that, it is fantastic. So there is a neurological component to creative activity. I mean, I'm sure of it. What was your dialogue like with the psychologist? Why were you, Sarah, brought in to have that dialogue on Jung's notebooks? I don't know, I think I've become known as a person, is like a interdisciplinary person who can talk about psychoanalysis, neuroscience, a little philosophy, and so I get these little geeks. And she can also, and Siri also has written the F word in the art world, which was on the opinion page. If you hadn't seen it of the New York Times, you can pull it up. It was December 4th, and you brought up of course the prices for Joan Mitchell. And I just wanted to point out, in case you hadn't, because I had been following it very closely in the early December, late November sale at Christie's, that there were 81 works of art up for sale and 79 of them were male, and three of them were women, 27 photographs by Cindy Sherman, one piece by Louise Bourgeois, and one by Joan Mitchell. The total sale price, the hammer price, for the 79 men was over $800 million, close to a billion dollars. The total price for the three women, which included the 27 photographs, Cindy Sherman, was just over $8 million. Jesus. And so I had the good fortune actually, the timing was quite wonderful. I was giving a lecture at the time in Italy, and I was talking to students, graduate students, and also to art students, both men and young men and young women, and I said to the young women, and so if you have any ideas about getting in the art world to get a piece of that pie, you can just forget it, because the pie's cooked in the oven and it's done. So one really needs to go back as a woman artist and think about why are you an artist? What is it that you want to produce and come up with alternative ways, which is the Sackler Center has, to really make that work available? Yeah, I mean it's interesting how intractable certain aspects of this are, and you want to think about ways to jiggle it. And I think one of the problems is that, I mean there's an artist I met in Portugal and she told me that, she does quite well, but she told me that most of her collectors are women, and that very few men collect her work. So this divide, I mean it's not just the art world, right? It's the literary world too. I mean I cannot tell you how many times people have, ask me to sign a book and they say, it's a man. I don't read fiction but my wife does. Would you sign the book to her? I always wonder where the wife is. You know, why didn't she come? If you don't read fiction, what are you doing here? But you know, it's this thing, it's this anxiety about being looking up or admiring a woman. And I mean I think these are deep things. I think it goes back to how dependent we all were on our mothers. And that it's harder for boys, you know, it's much easier for girls to say, I really want to grow up and be like my dad than a heterosexual boy to say, I want to be like my mom. There's something emasculating about that. And that goes on in the culture that hasn't been dealt with despite all our trends and pronoun issues and people who are blasting apart these sexual differences. We also live in a patriarchal world. I mean, this is the default. Exactly, so that buying a Jeff Koons, you know, is a, it's like a notch in your belt. And buying a Louise Bourgeois as a man, what does it suggest? I mean, you know, these are deep questions about masculinity and femininity and how we want to start I think nudging at these really intractable issues in the culture. I'd love to open the floor to questions if people would like to pose some to Siri or make statements, questions would be preferable. Yes? Please speak loudly since we don't have a roving mic repeated if necessary. I was just, one of the wonderful things about the book is the structure and all the kind of ways that all these little bits and pieces go into it. And I was just going to ask, since you refer to yourself in the book with a helpful footnote in case we don't know who you are, how your own masking process throughout the book and the construction of the book relates to Harry's masking of her own art? Yeah, well, that particular passage is probably the most deeply ironic and complex passage in the book. So it's Harriet Burden writing as Richard Brickman quoting herself in order to reveal herself or step out as the author of these three works. It is, I mean, she has buried herself in levels of irony in that passage that I had such fun writing it. I mean, it is a parody in a way of academic texts and it's also partly serious. I mean, everything, I think every footnote in that part is real. And I do refer to myself as a moving target and Harriet Burden supposedly has read some of my work. So of course I'm adding an additional layer of irony to the question of authorship and masks. What is a novelist, after all, except a person who is splitting him or herself into all these different personas that take over a narrative? You know, there's a form of masking. I've always thought about the masks in this book and masks in art in general, not merely as forms of disguise, but as forms of revelation. So that in my own work, I always feel that I'm exploring geographical territories of my own internal life. Often aspects of my own life that I have no idea is there, but that you're mining a certain geography of the self and they appear in almost like a multiple, in this book particularly as a multiple personality disorder kind of book. Well, that goes also a little bit in line with what we're talking about Judith Scott, which is the origin of creativity. And as a writer, you are bringing things up, I would imagine. Yeah, I think it's dredging, it's a bodily act. I think these, I think for example, the rhythms of a writer's prose, these begin way before language. They begin in a relational context, you know, in infancy. And that, you know, this is very, very deep stuff and it is strange. I mean, we are strangers to ourselves. We, you know, other people are strangers, but we're also strangers to ourselves. And I think art is a way of discovering aspects of that strangeness. Yes. Paul. I haven't known you for a very long time. I am aware of the fact that when you publish books, you never read the reviews of them. Oh yeah. But in this book, you haven't been reading them. I read everything. And I'm writing them to explain why. Yeah, this is because, you know, this is in our family, you know, as everyone knows, reviews can, you know, make you feel good or make you feel really, really bad. And after my first novel, I just retired because they, you know, I could be hurt. So it was a protective mechanism. With this novel, I was so curious. I read everything and I'll tell you why. Because every review became for me another aspect of Harry's project. So that it became what she calls in the book, proliferations. So everything that was written about her masking projects was a proliferation for her. And I began to treat the reviews as these proliferations. And indeed, in a number of reviews, aside from, you know, good or bad, you would see certain biases in the perception of the book coming up. You know, one, I think it was a Wall Street Journal. It was a woman and, you know, she didn't like Harry. But she liked Rachel, you know. So she had this idea that, you know, the truth was in Rachel's hands. And of course, the very idea of the book is that it keeps slipping. So the perceptual slippage is meant to throw the reader back on herself or himself to try to, you know, find out what she or he thinks. Not, you know, not take the side of one of the individual characters. That happened. There was another sort of little pissy review. I remember an early review. And it was, you know, something, you know, a series that seems to know a lot about the art world and philosophy or the, but she's fascinating. This was a man. But she's very best on mother-daughter relations. And I remember thinking, boy, this guy was scared to death. So the way, you know, the way you condescend, it's just like what Rose Blair and Lerner says, you know, if you're intimidated by work of art, you're more than likely to trash it. I mean, a lot of reviewers like to, you know, be hovering above it. And so they became fascinating for me in that regard. And actually they had less wounding power because they seemed to be just coming straight out of Harry's project. The public question really throughout the book is whose art? Yeah. Not what is art so much, but whose art is it? Yes. And actually I think one of the arguments would be that art is created, you know, in and through others to a large degree. And so the idea from the very start is that Harry is moved into another perspective depending on which man she is borrowing as her mask. So that it's not a static, but a highly dynamic process. Well, she does acknowledge that dynamic co-operation. Yes, yes. That partnership. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I was just going to ask about the relationships of the men and how Harry gets so very upset about being called amuse while having these kind of muse-like relationships with the three artists themselves. And I guess the question was something more like how is that relationship, which is traditionally a feminine line and we're kind of- Well, she doesn't call them her muses. They're her masks. They're her masks. And it's Rune, or Rune, if you're doing the Norwegian. Rune who steals, well, who anyway won't say it, but anyway, bad things happen. And he claims that Harry was his muse, mostly a financial muse, and she goes crazy. And of course it's true that the idea of, it's a very old idea, right, that men are inspired to creative heights by some beautiful woman or wife usually standing in the background looking ethereal. And the idea of, you see, the problem is the idea of female genius and female creativity is a troubled one in Western culture. It's been a troubled one for a very, very long time. And so the easy, yeah, well, it's an old thing. It's that Harry was intended to blast some of these binaries apart. She's passionate and she's also an intellectual. We don't like that. I've used this example many times, but I'll use it again. You go to a party, there are two people, I don't care what sex they are, and they look across the room and there is this absolutely gorgeous young woman in a low-cut dress, you know, her breasts are out, and she's drinking a glass of champagne. And one person looks at the other and says, you mean that beautiful girl over there is working on her second post-doc in molecular biology at Rockefeller? Well, we don't do that to the dashing young man who's working on his second post-doc. We just don't. I mean, we have these types and we're tough about it, you know? Things may be loosening up, but I still find this to be the case, which is one of the reasons why older women artists, writers, musicians, conductors, whatever, are granted a position in a way that younger women aren't. You know, you get wrinkled, you know, you sag, and then it's sort of okay to respect you. I mean, but these conversations aren't had so openly in the culture. I mean, that's why Alice, that's why all these women in their 70s and sometimes 80s who are sometimes dead are the ones who get shows who have been neglected their whole lives, you know? You received an honorary doctorate. I did. This beautiful woman to my left. It's a real doctorate. Received. Yes, I have a real doctorate. They said, well, I know you probably have two. This is the kind of doctorate, as I like to say, that you don't have to work for. Right, from the University of Oslo. Yeah, I have a real one and I have a pretend one. You were leaving for there when I met you and I thought maybe you could tell me a little bit about it. It was actually great. It was the first time in my life. No doubt, not for you, but they had a white tie dinner, which was so fancy. No doubt for you? Well, because I don't know. I have this idea that you're running around to white tie dinners a lot. No, I'm running around to the forum and to the center. No, anyway, please go ahead. Anyway, and no, it was nice. It was actually very nice. And I feel maybe I'm getting old enough now, so I'm actually getting another one in the fall from the University of Grenoble in France. So that will be my second easy doctorate. The first one was hard. Well, tell us what the hard one was. What the too easy one was. Yeah, I have a PhD in English literature from Columbia. And it took me seven years to do it, so. And the two easy's? Yeah, from the University of Oslo and then not, yeah, but then in. Literature, also literature? You know, they sort of acknowledged my various fields. They did an Oslo, and that was very nice, yeah. So they mentioned the science writing and the literature, and it was very nice. Would you like to talk a little bit about your new work up at Cornell? I'm very interested in that, and I think maybe your own. Yeah, I have this as a new thing. I wish I could remember the whole title because it's so complicated, but it is I am a lecturer in psychiatry at the DeWitt Wallace History of Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, Cornell Weill Medical School of Cornell University. That's truly, that's the whole thing. Anyway, I was nominated by a psychiatrist at Cornell Weill, and we're, I'm gonna give a series of lectures there, and the first one is called Writing in the Psychiatric Patient, and one of the idea that we're working on is to create some kind of program to train people, writers, and possibly doctors and medical students who are interested in teaching writing as a genuine therapeutic activity for psychiatric patients. The problem with the volunteer program is they send in anybody. I mean, you're fingerprinted, you're told what to do in case of fire, and then you're let in, and that's, I think, a problem. So the idea would be to get some kind of program so that people going in would know something about contemporary psychiatry, and possibly the history of uses of writing in psychiatry which goes back, I think particularly of someone like Pierre Genet, who used writing with his dissociated psychiatric patients with very interesting results. So to give some background and some training to people who want to go in and volunteer to teach writing. I know that there are a number of people because I recognize you who are very, very interested about women in the arts and the problems that women confront in the arts, and I would propose that this is an absolutely opportune moment to either make statement or pose a question. So I invite you. Silence, please, yes, I'm looking. You are the one I'm looking at, you. Yes. I'm not a woman. Yeah. Duchamp's move on the chessboard was to say that it's the spectator that creates the work of art, and that it's posterity that creates the masterpiece. Yes. And I just wonder how do you like that? It's a wonderful thing. I mean, how might you might respond to that in regards to your work? Yeah, no, this is very interesting. The other part about, you know, for me writing about art, I gave a lecture in Germany at the Academy of Arts in Munich, and I tried to formulate what, you know, this relationship. And, you know, over time, I really think about the relationship between the spectator and the work of art as not a relation between a thing and an it, but as an intersubjective relation. And I'm deeply immersed in phenomenology. So I think this is absolutely right. You know, there is, but there is a relation. In other words, it's not purely a case of projection, which one could maybe think from Duchamp's statement, which I don't think he actually meant, but that the, and that nobody comes naked to a work of art. This is very important. We would like to think we come naked. And that's why I also like to say art is like sex. If you don't relax, you won't enjoy it. And this openness to a work of art is very important. But then I think a kind of dialogue takes place. And the reason artworks are not it's, you know, Georges Poulet, who is a phenomenologist who's sort of been forgotten recently, but he writes very beautifully about, well, especially reading, but being occupied by, you know, whatever it is you're looking at. And that form of occupation is related to being in the presence of another consciousness, probably unconsciousness too. So that you really are establishing an intersubjective relationship, you know, between the spectator and the work of art. And I think, and you see in the culture, we don't treat works of art as just things. You look at the lengths to which people went to save art during the Second World War. You know, really as, you know, objects imbued with some kind of personness. You know, so I've sometimes talked about this as a quasi-person, you know. And that it's carrying a kind of intimacy that is unique. I mean, no matter how beautiful a chair is, we don't usually treat it in that way. It's so interesting, because that brings back Judith Scott again, because Judith had no relationship or care about her works once they were finished, how they were hung, where they went to, whether they were sold, whether they were published. None of that mattered. It was the creation of the work. And so what you're talking about is what a human being imbues into a work of art that is then held by the work of art. I mean, it's fascinating to walk around this exhibition and imagine what was going on for her. But the fact is that the whole construct, the art construct, the sale, the this, the this, this, everything that's been constructed around it, the art industry is totally irrelevant. It's totally missing, yeah, yeah. To the content of the work itself. And I think, you know, we can't deny, I mean, it's like all over this book, but you know, ideas of greatness cannot help, but influence our perception and vision. It's extremely hard to rid ourselves of that. And then, of course, sometimes greatness becomes so explosive that it ruins a work of art. I mean, the Mona Lisa is really dead as in a way, as a work of art. No one can see it, it's behind glass and there are 100 people standing in front of it and taking pictures of themselves looking at the Mona Lisa. It's just, you know, it's gone. I remember one of a painting I love, Girl with a Pearl Earring, the Vermeer. After that book and movie, you know, I was so angry at a way that this, I felt this painting had been kind of taken away. This is appropriate. You know, yeah, and you know, you walk in, we went, my husband and I were in the Hague and we walked in and there were, you know, hundreds of people in front of that picture. You know, right across the room was the view of Delft. One of the breathtakingly beautiful pictures that Vermeer made, nobody. And then you think, we can't all be sheep in that way. You know, we are better than this. We are capable of opening ourselves to even maybe strange and alienating works of art and trying to have some dialogue, but you can't do it unless you take time. That's for sure. Well, it's also, it's the overdraft of a celebrity. Yes, the overdraft of celebrity. Absolutely. Would you do me a favor and read this one last line and that we will end on this? Yes. Because it's so hard. It's the same one, you heard it before. I guess, yes. Everybody heard it before, but let's hear it one more time. I want to blaze and rumble and roar. I want to hide and weep and hold on to my mother, but so do we all. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.