Because of this, our experience of any work of art is always, in some sense, a-historical in a way which our experience of text never is. My eye encodes it and my brain decodes it. If my brain finds what I have seen undecipherable, my eye tries to see it again, to write it again. DH Sort of: the eye writes and the mind reads. And I can always have my eye rewrite the visible field, because there is always more there than the eye can write.
SO Your piece on Liberace has a lot to do with self. Maybe it has to do with you coming out of the West, the other great American myth of rugged individualism and self-reliance. It calls up Hamlet, Faust, Keats, and Freud. You make me sound like Natty Bumpo, who is an Eastern figment of the West, anyway, just like all the myths about rugged individualism and self-reliance. It is a big, rough, dead, empty place whose basic virtues are the absence of trees, the absence of snow, and the impossibility of mistaking nature for culture.
The best I can say for it, intellectually, is that the West is a more quintessentially postmodern environment than the East, by virtue of its decenteredness, its denatured culture and its population of decentered selves. DH Well, to me, the West is a geographical void bereft of consciousness or sensibility. That is its virtue. I am the farthest thing from a populist, although I have been called one because I like popular culture: In fact, I am no more a populist than my hero, J.
Austin found ordinary language to be a more subtle, delicate and resourceful instrument than the scholastic, philosophical language of his day. I find vernacular culture to be a more subtle, delicate, adaptable and resourceful practice than that of high culture, which is burdened with a received vocabulary of scholastic terminologies.
So I believe in vernacular culture; I think it works. And I am comfortable with commercial culture, because I am engaged in commerce myself, in the commerce of ideas. And in my sad experience, free commerce in ideas becomes a lot more difficult when there is no free commerce in objects. This, I fear, is not something I believe, it is something I have found out at the price of considerable personal anguish and expense.
DH If so, I repudiate myself. All I hoped to imply is that art must violate our expectations, somehow, to become visible to us. So art must change, is going to change. Art-making is a cumulative, serial activity, not a historical sequence of preemptive propositions. DH Well, an ethic of transgression I can live with.
SO Start off in a garage. Travel around to places you never heard of. DH Exactly. Young artists are put in a terrible position these days, especially in graduate school, because if you are an artist, you are really working for your peers.
They are the people you live with till you die, and kids today end up pleasing parent-figures well into their thirties. The effect of this has been to slow down the style wheel enormously. I got interested in art from hanging out in galleries, because the Janis brothers would let me use the bathroom when I was in Midtown, where you can never find a place to pee. So I was hanging around in galleries a lot, being scruffy, when Pop swept Abstract Expressionism away.
It happened almost overnight. It was fucking cataclysmic and great, you know. But the institutional gridlock of the contemporary art world makes this sort of revolution just about impossible. What we have today will fall down before it changes, because institutions fall down. Markets change….
SO Greenberg made the argument that those institutions, having missed out on Abstract Expressionism, geared up never to miss out on anything ever again. DH They turned museums into boutiques. So we end up with the scorched-earth trendiness of boutique commerce and the vicious hierarchies of guardian institutions. I keep fumbling around in the past, trying to figure out where it all went wrong.
What made it possible for museums to become boutiques masquerading as kunsthalles? Stuff like that. Or is it you and me feeling that way? I mean, this may sound elitist, but given the social advantages that most artists grow up with, the extensiveness of their educations and the enormous public and private investment in their artistic freedom, it seems to me that art should be more interesting and exciting than rock and roll.
Maybe others find it so. At the moment, I do not. I think you have to break some rules that actually snap when broken. I love the prosody—those physical, classical cadences. Jesus, I heard something the other day and the weighted syllables just marched along.
They were positively Virgilian—like Latin hexameters, you know. And I always find myself thinking, when I listen to this stuff: is this meaner and more cynical than Exile on Main Street? The last time I was shocked was by a poorly-grounded Stratocaster laughter. Just the act of speaking it, you know.
Just the idea that these kids from fucking nowhere would work their butts off to remake the language and make it speakable, just stand up and speak it—that betrays a level of innocence and aspiration that breaks your fucking heart.
So you need all this face, all this aggressive front, to protect yourself from total humiliation, to disguise your infantile vulnerability. So you demand a response. And sometimes you get it. We will respond to that demand. SO But how does one resist license? DH If I have a choice between art being education or entertainment, I go with entertainment. What is this presumption that art cannot be entertaining? Holy shit, what else could it be?
Nobody gets killed. Entertainment at this point is a diversion. DH Well, I take a more flat-line view of human destiny than you do. For me, Oliver Twist and Pulp Fiction are similarly entertaining. Academic, body-hating, pretentious art is a diversion. Here we are, if not on the frontlines of the culture war, then at least among the reserve forces. Despite their very different cultural backgrounds, Tuymans and Marshall find common ground in their views of making and viewing art: its capacity to convey meaning, its frozen moment captured, its physicality, its value and effect.
But the idea of transformation has always been something that I romanticize in a work. Dave Hickey by Saul Ostrow. His two-page primer on Foucault did more work, more scintillatingly, than many whole books on the subject. He had also—and this is what tends to be missing from the common narrative—quietly and movingly sketched out something like an alternative vision of what art could do in the world: how it could bring into existence small coteries of people who put themselves on the line for objects they find persuasive and pleasure-inducing.
I wanted them to read the story immediately, so we could talk about it. He was not only a critic but an enthusiast, one who wanted, needed, his friends to see what he was seeing, hear what he was hearing, read what he was reading. He was also a fleshy old aesthete on the other side of decades of learning and experiencing, full up with stories about partying at the Factory, reading Foucault at the Dairy Queen, and shooting the shit with Lou Reed in Akron.
When he was on, hanging with him was an aesthetic experience in its own right. Dave at eighty is still very charming, but less generative of fresh payloads of charm than he once was. By the time I arrived in Santa Fe, with my wife and two sons, I knew this about him. Even so, it was surprising to see in person what rough shape he was in. I wanted the set piece of looking at art with Dave Hickey, of course, but I also just wanted to look at art with Dave, because he has seen things in the visual world that no one else has seen, and he has converted those perceptions into some of the most brilliantly and beautifully arresting prose of the last few decades.
I wanted a taste of that. As we walked from the street outside through the hotel lobby and into the restaurant, however, it was clear that no stroll into the city was possible. He had to stop two or three times before we made it to the table, leaning against railings or chairs to rest.
By the time we sat down he was exhausted. As it turned out he managed, barely, and over the three days I was in Santa Fe we got on. My last few hours alone with Dave and Libby, on Saturday afternoon, felt almost familial—just hanging out at their house, mostly in the kitchen, while they smoked cigarettes, I drank Diet Coke and we talked over the hum of MSNBC in the background.
We compared notes on TV shows we liked in common, and commiserated about Trump. Libby apologized for the state of their house, which was overrun by still-crated art and boxed-up books. I talked about my family and work. We listened for a while to the news about the Mueller report. I showed Dave an article on my phone about a former student of his, Gajin Fujita, whose art had just been featured on a new library card from the LA Public Library.
His friend was fine, and our talk drifted to the subject of mass shootings in general. George Wallace and Andy Warhol. This is worse. It transcends my ability to get it. Dave told me that he was in Las Vegas in when a man firing from a 32nd floor window of the Mandalay Bay Hotel killed 58 people at a country music concert below. It was the single worst mass shooting in American history. Dave was in town to give some lectures at UNLV, in the hopes of rekindling his affiliation with them, and was staying in an adjacent hotel.
Their clothes were soaked. That bright red, just pitched-out blood. Glow, glow, glow. And everybody at home is calling to say, Were you dead? And they were dead. Also a touch of pride in the artistry of his language in conveying it. It is a very Hickeyan moment. But the juice, with Dave, is not in that squeeze. In August , I drove across the country with my oldest friend Jason.
We started in our hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts, where Jason had spent the summer with his parents, and then headed west to Berkeley, where he was in his second year of a doctoral program in history. I would drop him off there, then fly back east. The plan was to make the trip fairly quickly, lingering only in those places where we knew someone and otherwise just stopping for sleep and regionally representative meals. We made an exception for New Orleans, which seemed to merit a few hours of dedicated touristing, and a smaller exception for SITE Santa Fe, which was hosting a biennial exhibition curated by my new writer crush, Dave Hickey.
The gift shop was selling surplus sunflowers and I bought two of them. I remember also, in a general way, that it was the sort of exhibition you would expect Dave Hickey to curate—smooth and bright and light—and that in that way it was of a piece with the whole drive, which was characterized by a distinct feeling that at that precise moment in time in America, at the tail end of the long Nineties, history and politics lay lightly upon the land.
A few days later we ate lunch at a diner in Birmingham, Alabama and were struck by how easygoing everyone seemed, and by how even in Birmingham, where history can drape so thickly, lightness has its moments. It was a good drive. The towers, the storms, the wars. They were the inexorable consequences of our sins, the just verdicts of history. We are being punished, and probably we deserve it. Yet I find myself resisting ever more urgently the conclusions that too easily follow from that—about what kind of art we should create and value, and about how we should be with ourselves and each other.
As I sit with Dave and Libby in their kitchen, cable news on in the background, I have no answers. Air Guitar , as lovely as it is, will not defeat Trump, end racism, bring peace to the Middle East or solve climate change. What has become clearer to me, though, is that Dave is right about what kind of art is not the answer. It will not be, and this almost goes without saying, anything that is made by Aryan muscle-boys of the right, with their bar-band covers of Heimat and Herrenvolk.
And it will not be work born of the mirrored galleries of the Aryan muscle-boy left, with their infinitely reflecting visions of carefully pruned souls endlessly watching and canceling and saving each other.
Whatever justice is made of and no doubt anger and judgment and maybe even surveillance are elements in the mix , art is not an extension, distraction, evasion or even, in a simple way, a complement to it. It is a rival source of value in the world. Art will not save us, but it might—unstably, unpredictably, miraculously—save us , you and me, for a little while.
Air Guitar , in particular, is less an argument against bureaucratic mediation than a series of literary efforts to conjure up a menagerie of beautiful Edens—visions, only briefly realizable if at all, of life as we would like it to be and of art as it occasionally can be. You up there! Waylon Jennings was charismatic. You have to be able to just walk in there and control the room. Tim Duncan has charisma. I was so sorry the Spurs lost this year — dammit!
I met him at some parties when I used to live down there. In basketball, the most charismatic players I know were Timmy and Hakeem Olajuwon. So many creative people, and especially men, feel entitled to an audience. Well, yeah. I can think of about architects who have never built a building. I know a lot of artists who have never shown any art — what the fuck is that about?
My rule is: You have to have done something before you can be said to have done something. The title of artist or architect or musician needs to somehow be earned. A lot of these 25 women are like that. They did a lot and felt privileged to do it.
Felt no hesitation. Y ou seem pretty able to talk about a wide variety of subjects with a certain amount of expertise. Except feminism. Uh, not much. You know. I would have done OK. I like women, I prefer their company. I just want to take care of them. And if it stops me I look at it. I like that kind of BANG.
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