18 The New York Reviewto essays on a single artist, who made a
special artwork for the publication. When
she was organizing an issue on Ru-
scha, Marta fell in love with “Available
Light”— it struck her as a unique, if
mystifying, work of genius. She started
trying to track down this Dave Hickey,
whom nobody in New York seemed
to know— one person told her he was
dead. Finally she found him. Fed up
after a decade in Fort Worth spent
making songs in his makeshift attic stu-
dio and writing criticism for the Fort
Wor th Star- Telegram, he had moved to
San Diego to be near the water.
Marta commissioned him to write
a new text on Ruscha for Parkett. The
result was “Wacky Molière Lines: A
Listener’s Guide to ED- WERD REW-
SHAY.” It starts with Hickey hear-
ing himself say the name of a Ruscha
painting aloud to a friend: “SHE SURE
KNEW HER DEVOTIONALS! What’s
that about?” The question sparks an
analysis of the different iterations of
the “sh” phoneme in the phrase, allow-
ing him to flex his deep knowledge of
phonetic structure by way of his “unau-
thorized and non- canonical thoughts
about the sources of Ruscha’s work in
the audible world,” and finally to arrive
at a portrait of LA through the prose
of Thomas Pynchon. It seems like such
an obvious thing to do: taking seriously
the words themselves by attending to
them as sounds, but no one had ever
done it before, and the essay goes to
places previously unimaginable.
When Marta was editing a book on
an installation by her friend Robert
Gober at the Dia Center for the Arts,
she proposed commissioning Hickey.
The young sculptor had made a name
for himself by imbuing fastidiously
recreated domestic objects— drains,
sinks, cribs— with the restrained rigor
of Minimalism, thereby bestowing on
them maniacal psychological and emo-
tional valences. After spending time
with the work and Gober in New York,
Hickey sent a text in two parts, the first
of which, called “The Ghost of Gay
Nature,” begins by describing what
he sees as the ethical problem of liter-
ary realism, which purports to offer a
transparent view of the inner workings
of its characters— the kind of perfect
understanding impossible between two
living humans, including, if not espe-
cially, those closest to each other:It is exactly in this sense, I think,
that Robert Gober’s work is
opaque; for, even though it cer-
tainly qualifies as artifact, its ar-
tifice is so seductively cloaked in
surface clarity that, at its best, it
approaches the elusiveness and
mystery of everyday experience,
and very few works of art ven-
ture far into this haunted realm.
The defining qualities of Gober’s
work, for instance, are as easily
enumerated as those of our closest
friends, who are equally opaque.
You can isolate the work’s pen-
chant for metonymy and metamor-
phic transformation, allude to its
meticulous facture and its pristine
presentation, cite the cold banality
of its iconography, and enumerate
its exploitation of outré domestic
genres. But the more you learn, the
less you understand.Hickey goes on to read Gober’s stacks
of newspapers and boxes of rat poi-
son placed within a paint- by- numberswraparound wallpaper of a New En-
gland forest as situated between the
history of American transcendental-
ism and the raging AIDS crisis. He then
plunges into a discussion of Elaine
Scarry’s meditations on the effects of
torture, emotional dislocation, and
childhood alienation in her book The
Body in Pain (1985). The next section,
titled “Pip’s Recognition,” elegantly
retells Dickens’s Great Expectations,
as young Pip suddenly comes to under-
stand, after a perfectly calibrated dis-
closure, that his life’s fortunes are not
owed to comfortably moneyed Miss
Havisham but to the downtrodden
criminal he’d encountered as a child:It is, as they say, the odd thing
about Dickens: that all of his daz-
zling technical acuity should count
so little against this gorgeous in-
vestment of memory; and it is the
odd thing about Gober as well:
that all of his dazzling formal ac-
complishment should ultimately
matter so little. In our every ex-
perience of Gober’s work, I would
suggest, we undergo some version
of Pip’s recognition and must, as a
consequence, translate our “great
expectations” of thundering his-
torical resonance into something
more personal and political; there
is always, in our perception of it,
this destabilizing moment when it
“goes all strange” and our refined
connoisseurship dissolves into a
subtler and more intimate aware-
ness of what art can do.This passage epitomizes Hickey’s
unusual relationship to literature and
his uncanny ability to draw forward an
aspect of a poem or novel to explicate
an artwork without reducing either to
mere illustration. Instead he sets off a
chain reaction of implications at the
level of feeling. While he does not shy
away from Gober’s homosexuality, in
evoking Great Expectations Hickey
conjures a painful outsiderness, the
plane where the artist and writer meet,
all the while resisting any speculation
on individual biography. It’s an extraor-
dinarily sophisticated maneuver, one
that doesn’t ascribe intention based on
personal information but rather allows
the art to express its deeper content.
When Gober read the draft, he felt
that Hickey had understood something
profound about his work, without simpli-
fying either it or him. However, in reck-
oning with Gober’s politicized identity,
the artist felt that Hickey needed to put
himself on the line, to say who he was
and why he was writing about this art in
this way, and Gober suggested append-
ing a clarifying note to the beginning.
Hickey returned with several thousand
more words, adding a new opening sec-
tion a third of the total length. It begins,
“High thoughts in low places— my spe-
cialty,” and finds him at a slot machine
at midnight in the Vegas airport, wait-
ing for a flight to New York, then re-
counts getting to Dia bleary- eyed and
experiencing a mesmeric procession
through Gober’s installation as though
in real time.
This storytelling conceit allows
Hickey to write his thoughts and percep-
tions sequentially as a way of describ-
ing the installation, which was designed
to unspool as the visitor walked
around, while setting up the more
subtle theoretical points in the subse-
quent sections. Retitled “In the Dance-hall of the Dead,” it was the only text
in the catalog. The slim hardcover was
modeled on a children’s picture book
and designed under Gober’s precise
supervision, and it remains one of the
most perfect books on contemporary
art ever produced.Parkett ushered Hickey’s writing into
the center of the contemporary art
world in the way he’d always wanted:
he published a string of increasingly
inventive essays, including, for exam-
ple, an imagined scholarly text written
two hundred years in the future that
ruthlessly satirizes a real conversation
between the painter Gerhard Rich-
ter and the art historian Benjamin
H. D. Buchloh. (“Never, since Cardinal
Kajetan’s interview with Martin Luther
have two styles of moral seriousness col-
lided so spectacularly with so little intel-
lectual effect on either party.”) In 1991
he published “The Invisible Dragon” in
Parkett, which became a defining state-
ment for both Hickey and the next de-
cade of American art. The essay begins
with a bit of theater: Hickey bored, doo-
dling, during an interminable panel dis-
cussion. When asked what would be the
“Issue of the Nineties” he pronounced,
“Beauty.” “This sounded provocative to
me,” he writes, butthe audience continued to sit there,
unprovoked, and “beauty” just hov-
ered there... a word without a lan-
guage, quiet, amazing and alien in
that sleek, institutional space— like
a Pre- Raphaelite dragon aloft on
its leather wings.From there he launched into a dis-
cussion of the cinematic opening of Mi-
chel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish,
which contrasts the grisly public execu-
tions sanctioned by the king with the
internalized control of Benthamite sur-
veillance. Contemporary art, Hickey
argued, consigned beauty to the old
corrupt market, the regime of the king,
which cares only for appearances of
fealty while allowing internal freedom
for radical content to emerge; the pro-
fessionalized art world, in its quest for
moral goodness, replicates the most in-
sidious aspects of Bentham’s project by
demanding a transparency of political
and social intention and thus a more
punishing kind of internal control.
From there Hickey cites Caravaggio,
situating the painter’s “visual appeal
and corporeal authority” within the
ideological struggles of the Counter-
Reformation and seeing him as a pow-
erful participant in the culture wars of
his day.
This all lays the groundwork for
the argument’s true occasion: the
controversy surrounding the cancel-
lation of Robert Mapplethorpe’s ex-
hibition “The Perfect Moment” at
the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1989.
Hickey’s salvo was aimed not at right-
wing politicians— whom he completely
opposed— but at his colleagues:The American art community, at
the apogee of its power and privi-
lege, chose to play the ravaged vir-
gin, flinging itself prostrate across
the front pages of America and
fairly daring the fascist heel to
crush its outraged innocence.He accused critics and curators alike of
attempting to save their own jobs andof wrapping their defense in the tat-
tered garb of free expression and the
sanctity of art, while sidestepping the
content of the work itself.
According to Hickey, Senator Jesse
Helms looked at Mapplethorpe’s im-
ages and understood them very well as
an assault on the core principles of his
repressive, theocratic worldview. The
photographs were all the more threat-
ening because they harnessed the rhe-
torical force of the Baroque, making
the affront inexcusable precisely be-
cause it was also beautiful. And here
is where that tricky word— “beauty”—
becomes a double- edged blade: today
it is possible for us to celebrate Cara-
vaggio’s chiaroscuro as foremost an
achievement in form only because
its ideological work has been accom-
plished so completely; the “beauty”
we admire in those paintings was
in fact a visual weapon for changing
minds. Similarly, in Mapplethorpe’s
pictures, it was the incongruity with
which the artist fused his subject mat-
ter with an intoxicating mode of direct
address:So it is not the fact that men are
depicted having sex in Robert’s
images. At the time, they were reg-
ularly portrayed doing so on the
walls of private galleries and pub-
licly funded “alternative” spaces
all over the country. Thanks to the
cult of plain honesty, abjection,
and sincere appearance, however,
they were not portrayed as doing
so persuasively, powerfully, beau-
tifully. Robert makes it beautiful.Any attempt to decouple these two di-
mensions, to insist on form as the re-
deemer of content, as Hickey felt the
“art community” was doing, was an af-
front to the power of art to mean any-
thing at all. His criticism, circulated
in an international art magazine, was
leveled directly at the people who were
reading it.
In the stark divisions of the 1990s
culture wars, this kind of assault from
within the art world’s own ranks could
only be received with bad feelings.
The central stretch of Oppenheimer’s
monograph attends to the philosoph-
ical underpinnings of Hickey’s argu-
ments and reconstructs the reactions
(at times bewildering) of an embattled
art world. Adding to the outrage, it was
argued stylishly, imaginatively, and
clearly by an outsider, some guy living
out in the West.In 1989 Gary Kornblau was in his late
twenties and trying to escape his Ph.D.
on seventeenth- century philosophy
at Columbia by returning to the West
Coast. He noticed that the art scene
in his hometown of Los Angeles was
starting to be taken seriously by the
galleries and press in New York. LA
didn’t have a critical apparatus of its
own and he had the idea of starting a
magazine. He figured that if he paid
writers as much as Artforum did, he
could get whomever he wanted, with
the added attraction of fostering a new
kind of writing, more experimental in
form and wider- ranging in thought. He
called the publication Art issues. (with
a period in the title, like a statement)
and invited Hickey to write about any-
thing he’d like.
“Lost Boys,” published in 1990,
chronicles the lives of the VegasEarnest 16 21 .indd 18 5 / 25 / 22 4 : 06 PM