Siri Hustvedt - The Blazing World

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.”

“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.”

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.

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