The installation Burden devises for one of her artist guises, Anton Tish, is an outrageous stew of references, made via quotations written all over the gallery walls and an accompanying sculpture of a woman. This has the effect of making the real art that pops up in the text, such as in Hess’s innocent footnote briefly describing the Guerilla Girls’ interventions, also seem madeup. The first of these motives is undermined and the second activated by the fact that Hustvedt’s character adapts her work for each surrogate artist, thus at least partially becoming them rather than, as Burden describes it, ‘wearing’ them.īurden’s affected artworks often come across as literal-minded and adolescent: for example, one work involves an effigy of her husband behind misty glass, made shortly after his death.
She is also consumed by ideas about ‘how we see’, and it is her intellectual and emotive wrangling with this issue that constitutes the wider interest of the novel beyond artworld mechanisms. Hess, who is researching the mysteries surrounding the artist and her ‘Maskings’ project, which had involved exhibiting her own work as if it were that of three complicit established male artists, in a plot to expose ‘them’: the ignorant dealers, artists, spectators and critics.īurden designs her project to expose what she sees as the heinous phallocentricity of the artworld, which she blames for stunting her career. Siri Hustvedt’s sixth work of fiction takes the form of an archive of documents gathered after Burden’s death by the scholar I.V. When her powerful art-dealer husband dies suddenly, Harriet Burden – or ‘Harry’ to her friends – an artist who feels her career has been overlooked because of her sex and her intellect, becomes obsessed with revenge.
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