Critical reflections

ArtForum, Summer, 1995 by Dave Hickey

In his time, Dave has authored fiction, run art galleries, written and performed country and rock songs, and engaged in hard living, lately much moderated, that once gave him interesting physical tics. Before I met Dave I heard the late great Scott Burton describe him to someone as "a combination of Peter Schjeldahl and Joe Cocker," which I already knew to take as a compliment to myself. He works (teaching at the University of Nevada) and lives in Las Vegas with his wife, art historian Libby Lumpkin, whom he married in a chapel on the Strip. To do Vegas with Dave is like having John Ruskin along on a tour of Venice.

As a writer, Dave is a deep stylist, one of the best in the language. He uses style to tell truths otherwise inaccessible. You can't separate his meaning from the timbre of his prose, whose repertoire includes plain American (which dogs and cats can understand, as Marianne Moore noted), philosophical precision, polemical scorched earth, and defrocked scholarly mandarin. His arguments are places of the heart: bright pastures or dark alleys where you are accompanied by a voice explaining things you suddenly feel you always knew.

Dave is partial to his own experience, of course. Without that qualification, there can be no criticism worth reading. But he goes beyond it to anticipate, and to welcome, the experiences of people who may or may not agree with him. (Both Dave and I swear by our friend Christopher Knight's oracle, "In a democracy, anybody gets to be an elitist.") Dave's The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, the biggest little book of our time, changes the intellectual focus of art-talk in the near future while, more important, changing its tone. He is art writing's democratic music teacher, whose harmonies make the walls of the city shake.

Colleagues of mine will tell you that people despise critics because they fear our power. But I know better. People despise critics because people despise weakness, and criticism is the weakest thing you can do in writing. It never stands alone. It never saves the things we love (as we would wish them saved) or ruins the things we hate. The Edinburgh Review could not destroy John Keats, nor Diderot Boucher, nor Ruskin Whistler; and I like that about criticism. It's a loser's game, and everybody knows it. Even ordinary citizens, when they discover you're a critic, respond as they would to a mortuary cosmetician - vaguely repelled by what you do, yet infinitely curious as to how you came to be doing it. And so, when asked, I always confess that I am an art critic today because, as a very young person, I set out to become a writer - and did so with a profoundly defective idea of what writing does and what it entails.

Specifically, I embarked upon a career in writing blithely undismayed by the fact that, as a writer, I was primarily interested in that which writing obliterates: in the living atmosphere of all that is shown, seen, touched, felt, smelled, heard, spoken, or sung. I knew this was a peculiar obsession, of course, but I thought writers were supposed to be peculiar. Moreover, I thought it was just a "problem," that it could be solved, and that, once solved, the enigmatic whoosh of ordinary experience would become my "great subject" - that I could then proceed to celebrate the ravishing complexity and sheer intellectual pleasure of simply being alive in the present moment forever after. I thought.

So I began by writing poems, quickly shifted to fiction, abandoned that for pharmaceutically assisted pastiche, and abandoned that for gonzo reportage - always trying to get out of the book, you see, trying to get closer to the moment, and always floating farther from it, slamming myself up against the fact that writing, even the best writing, invariably suppresses and displaces the greater and more intimate part of any experience that it seeks to express. Ultimately, I would be forced to admit that all the volumes of Proust were nothing, quantitatively, compared to the 20-minute experience of eating breakfast on a spring morning at a Denny's in Mobile - and that the more authoritatively and extensively I sought to encode such an experience, the more profoundly it was obliterated from the immediacy of memory and transported into the imaginary realm of remembrance, invested with identity, shorn of utility, and polished up as an object of delectation.

I would begin, every time, trying to approximate some fragment of that enigmatic whoosh and end up, every time, inevitably, writing an edited, imaginary version of myself. Which is simply to say that my "great subject" was, in fact, not a subject for writing at all. It was a cure for writing. The quotidian experience I was seeking to evoke in writing, as it turned out, was nothing other than a solvent for the identity I was imposing upon it by writing. That gauzy filigree of decentered awareness I was seeking to know in writing, it turned out, was the body's last defense against such codified self-knowledge. Like sex, which marks its final intensification, and art, which supplies its visceral hard copy, that experience was the quintessence of everything that is not writing.