16 The New York ReviewA Proliferation of Beauties
Jarrett EarnestFar From Respectable:
Dave Hickey and His Art
by Daniel Oppenheimer.
University of Texas Press,
141 pp., $24.The Invisible Dragon:
Essays on Beauty,
Revised and Expanded
by Dave Hickey.
University of Chicago Press,
123 pp., $15.00 (paper)Air Guitar :
Essays on Art and Democracy
by Dave Hickey.
Art Issues Press, 215 pp., $19.95 (paper)When Dave Hickey died last fall at
the age of eighty- two, he left behind a
singular contribution to the history of
art writing, along with a badly bruised
reputation, both routinely called “icon-
oclastic” for lack of anything more
precise. The magazines he’d published
in since the 1960s hardly took notice.
The perfunctory obituaries that did ap-
pear treated him as a kind of Hunter
S. Thompson of the contemporary
art world, ensconced as he was in Las
Vegas at the height of his fame. But
alongside the bluster of “the bad boy of
art criticism” was a neon Walter Pater
of the Southwest who almost single-
handedly remade the practice of art
writing with his first two collections,
The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on
Beauty (1993) and Air Guitar: Essays
on Art and Democracy (1997). In Far
From Respectable: Dave Hickey and
His Art, Daniel Oppenheimer compli-
cates the cartoon version of his life that
continues to shadow his reputation as
a writer. What remains is the difficult
task of taking stock of Hickey’s literary
achievement.
In the 1960s Hickey all but defended
a Ph.D. on the syntactical structures of
D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, and
Ernest Hemingway at the University of
Texas, wrote his own fiction and a col-
umn in the Texas Observer, and started
the first contemporary art gallery in
Austin, called A Clean Well- Lighted
Place. In the early 1970s he moved to
New York City, touring the outskirts
of the Warhol scene and briefly serving
as director of the Reese Palley Gallery,
from which he was fired, followed by a
short stint as editor of Art in America
magazine, from which he was also fired.
One day he went into an exhibition,
saw pieces of white paper pasted on the
gallery wall, and decided that rock and
roll was where he belonged. “Richard
Tuttle or Keith Richards?” Music was
more fun and the drugs were better.
Hickey then moved to Nashville,
where he worked as a songwriter, com-
posing lyrics for Dr. Hook, Bobby
Bare, and his then girlfriend Marshall
Chapman, and helped to define the
“outlaw” sensibility of his friends Way-
lon Jennings and Willie Nelson with
journalism that appeared regularly in
Country Music magazine. “Most pro-
fessional lyrics,” he said in a glowing
review of Dolly Parton in 1974,are made from literary, written En-
glish while country lyrics are made
from the language as it is spoken.
So what a country lyricist gives upin vocabulary, she gains by being
more sensitive to the interplay be-
tween the sound and meaning of
the language.That nexus of word and sound was his
recurrent passion.
By the end of the 1970s Hickey was
living with his mother in Fort Worth.
His father, a jazz musician also named
Dave, had committed suicide when he
was a teenager. Afterward, feeling like
the “leftover Dave” in his mother’s af-
fections, he’d moved into a converted
shed behind his grandparents’ flower
shop. Now pushing forty, he was back
in West Texas, a physical and financial
wreck with a serious drug problem.
His old friend Anne Livet was start-
ing to organize the first retrospective
of the California artist Ed Ruscha for
the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art. She felt Hickey was just the person
to confront Ruscha’s insouciant word-
play—enigmatic slogans like “WA S H,
THEN DANCE” or “HOSTILE POLY-
ESTER” painted on large- scale colored
canvases.The essay he produced, “Available
Light,” opens with a mise- en- scène of
Ruscha’s studio, set up by winking Hol-
lywood clichés:Tuesday turned up a dazzling Cal-
ifornia morning, my last in Los
Angeles and by nine o’clock the
artist and I were in his studio on
Western Avenue; and, I had no
doubt, some suntanned C.B. De
Mille nymph fluttered just without,
pouring washtubs of sunshine over
the transom into the clean, clut-tered space. A radically horizontal
canvas (20 inches high by 159 long)
rested on a double easel, glowing
with an empty, blue, empyrean
field, awaiting the day when the
artist, having made the heavens,
decided to make the earth.Hickey then drops back to reality: “At
the moment the artist was on his hands
and knees painting, in red enamel, the
words ‘NO DUMPING’ on an alumi-
num sheet.” The dialogue between art-
ist and critic unfolds like a play, dense
with unexplained references to things
seen and conversations held over the
preceding days of their visit.
In Hickey’s telling, the more you find
out about Ruscha as a person, the more
mysterious his art appears. While the
critic asks questions and postulates
about its motives or meaning, the art-
ist evades and deflects. Ruscha acts
dumb about reliquaries and purports
ambivalence about the Catholic God’s
“incarnate word,” until Hickey ties up
the scene with a thesis statement that
would reverberate throughout his crit-
icism for decades to come:Edward Ruscha just looked at me
and grinned, but I knew he be-
lieved in the power of the word. He
would have been just as happy if
I’d kept my mouth shut, but being a
critic is like being a medium, when
it comes on you you can’t not do it.
Usually, though, you can avoid
writing it down. When you can’t,
you should be careful to point out
that criticism is not about art, it
is only thinking “in the neighbor-
hood of art.” We really don’t need
to know the esthetic and moral pa-rameters of a work to love it— only
to know they are there.As the essay proceeds, all the un-
known names and allusions seeded in
the opening reappear and blossom.
Hickey becomes an art critic Philip
Marlowe, cruising the LA freeways,
going to dinners and parties with Ru-
scha and his friends. All the time he’s
letting the reader in on his thinking,
gathering clues to form an argument
and then letting them drift away, never
satisfied. (“The little bell went off at
this point, like an alarm awakening me
from a sweet dream. In ten minutes or
so, I would have a tidy little hypothe-
sis printed up. Just what I wanted. An
Hypothesis. I’d rather have a hat.”)
Broken into five sections, the narrative
goes from daydreams to ecclesiastic
fantasia, interlaced with references as
vivid as they are various: Karl Kraus,
Gladys Knight and the Pips, Under
the Volcano (“I am all the time buying
people copies of this book”), Maurice
Merleau- Ponty, Ellsworth Kelly, and
Thomas De Quincey, to name just a
glittering few. The essay ends on a des-
ert roadside with the two shoulder to
shoulder pissing into a ditch and look-
ing at a mountain silhouetted by sun-
set. “That’s the back of the Hollywood
mountain,” Ruscha tells Hickey.“I started doing Back of Holly-
wood drawings when I started
building my house and had to
make this drive pretty regularly.”
“Neato,” I said.
“You know what?” Ruscha said.
“What?”
“I don’t know what in the hell
I’m doing.”
“Neither do I,” I said.
“I guess it can’t be helped.”Nothing is explained or resolved. This
abrupt stop leaves readers with the
strange feeling that they might compre-
hend less about Ruscha than they did at
the beginning, but also with the sense
that they have thought deeply about his
art and could go on thinking, bringing
it into their daily lives, where, accord-
ing to Hickey, art truly belongs.
“Available Light,” which appears
freewheeling, is so meticulously con-
structed that quoting any part of it
excises it from a complex web of infer-
ence and resonance. It reaches back to
the linguistic pyrotechnics of the Belle
Époque, to Pater and John Ruskin,
who are Hickey’s closest antecedents—
writers for whom the consideration of
art was inseparable from an encom-
passing vision of society. The essay her-
alds Hickey’s effort to invent a mode of
writing that replicated the experience
of great art without reducing any of its
power, and to craft a living literature
disguised as art criticism.In the late 1980s Karen Marta was the
young New York editor of Parkett, an
art magazine that was the brainchild of
the curator Bice Curiger and published
in Zurich in English and German. Par-
kett was well funded and beautifully
produced, resembled a posh artist’s
book more than a magazine, and was
unique in devoting the bulk of each issueDave Hickey; illustration by Thomas GambleEarnest 16 21 .indd 16 5 / 25 / 22 4 : 06 PM