The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty

ArtForum, Dec, 1993 by Lisa Liebmann

The Invisible Dragon is an eventful, sometimes jerky ride through known, gnarled terrain. In all four essays the garrulous author strikes what is essentially a classically libertarian, antistatist position, and, as often happens in such cases, tends to find himself aligned at once with the frontier tenets of, say, Goldwater Republicanism and with Abbie Hoffman's ideals for a Yippie Nation. Most fervently throughout, Hickey gives voice to the desire, shared by others including myself, to rid contemporary art of the hoary mantle of therapeutic value bestowed on it by what he describes as a "loose confederation" of institutions that exhibit, fund, teach, and generally support it nowadays. It is a wet-blanket bestowal, he contends, that has dampened the rhetorical prerogative of artists to seduce, outrage, and otherwise convince--with recourse, whenever necessary, to the whole post-Renaissance arsenal of compositional models and illusionistic effects. It is part of Hickey's argument that art, having been decreed good for culture a priori and therefore good for us, is neutered, left with little need to articulate any value but that of its own existence. And the subject of beauty itself, he laments, has become one tepid potato--a subject pooh-poohed recently by Hickey's own students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

The essays form a kind of loose-jointed picaresque, in which the author tilts bravely at windmills, and elevates what he perceives to be fallen women onto the high pedestal of his esteem. The windmills, quixotically enough, sometimes assume the form of the late Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the Museum of Modern Art's sainted founding director, who in the concluding essay is with total equanimity compared to two of the century's most infamous public officials. Indeed, on page 54, we may read that Joseph Stalin's "cultural commissars began legislating the absolute subordination of form to content in the name of the proletariat," while Barr, "in the service of inherited capital, proclaimed the absolute subordination of content to form," even as "Goebbels, the brightest and wickedest of them all, was orchestrating their perfect match."

As the title of his third essay, "Prom Night in Flatland," suggests, Hickey believes that mean old American puritanism, given a lift by what he calls the "therapeutic institution," has over the last fifty years flattened perspectives, both literally and metaphorically. This sounds pretty huffy-puffy to me. The old formalist canon apparently under attack has been an ailing horse, I think, for a while now, or at any rate one found bucking mainly on college campuses. And what, Dave Hickey, about revisionism? MoMA's very own exhibition, just a couple of seasons ago, of 1940s art from its collection--a riotous assortment of stuff, cacophonous with rhetoric, much of it obtained during the period in question--stands as evidence both of evolving contemporary tastes and of an institutional acquisitions program that was perhaps more catholic, even under Barr, than Hickey suggests.

Elsewhere, the gentlemanly Hickey pulls a number of punches. He quibbles for an instant with Michael Fried, in a fairly friendly way, but otherwise refrains from citing specific works or movements or even texts to do with high formalism or other such puritanical therapies, leaving us to wonder what sort of art it is, exactly, that he secretly deplores. Is it "flat" Color Field painting? Or could it be performance and installation art, whose recent proliferation he rather puckishly attributes to the aforementioned squelching of rhetoric in painting? My guess is that Hickey, a Texas-bred maverick, has no real beef with mid-century formalism, or with Minimalism, or with any other high-imperial manner of Modern art per se. He's certainly an avowed admirer of the courtly styles of more distant epochs. Rather, it seems, he inveighs against something more chimerical yet inevitable. The "invisible dragon" to be slain is not beauty, surely, but collusive power as it has been crystallized into dominant visual forms by professional players in places like New York.

Hickey is way too smart and far too cool to play the bad cop, or the Morley Safer. An outsider by temperament as well as geography, he is clearly much happier in the chivalric role of redeemer. With Caravaggio, Shakespeare, the Marquis de Sade, and--hello!--Gilles Deleuze as guardian fallen-angels, our hero finds his perfect Dulcinea in Robert Mapplethorpe, the star of the first half of the book, who is always referred to in the mythic-romantic mode, as "Robert."

Here the author's ideas and politics are more astutely ambiguous, more entertaining. (It may, for instance, amuse veteran Hickey-watchers to observe how effortlessly this chronically incorrect if enlightened thinker, critic, songwriter, and professor of art criticism and theory absorbs certain articles of recent gay and feminist political faith.) In the essay titled "Nothing Like the Son," Hickey discusses Mapplethorpe's notorious album of erotica, the "X Portfolio," and Caravaggio's The Incredulity of Saint Thomas in relation to Shakespeare's lubricious and supposedly "marginal" sonnets. (Some scholars, it seems, keep hoping that Shakespeare didn't write them.) It's a virtuous hybrid, profound and arcane, yet doubly enlivened by some rarely seen pictures and a dramatic turn by Senator Jesse Helms, who is accorded proper oedipal respect as "Father" and "Master of Laws." It is not the senator from North Carolina's only appearance in the book.