Do you understand? The Dave Hickey Experience

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2003 by Thomas McGovern

Throughout his recent lecture at California State University, San Bernardino, Dave Hickey rhetorically asked "Do you understand?" Fortunately, he never bothered to wait for a response, moving on in what appeared to be a stream-of-conscious monologue. If he had, the lecture would have bogged down to a crawl, with many of us shaking our heads answering "no". The Dave Hickey Experience is fascinating, intellectual, entertaining and a bit provocative; a seemingly effortless exhortation about contemporary art, academia, popular culture, politics and education. Hickey's delivery is so smooth that it appears extemporaneous, but like so many masters, his analyses and the provocative bombs he drops hit with such precision that he has figured this all out, and has played this tune before.

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He immediately stood out as an iconoclast. In the land of sneakers, hiking boots and designer footwear, Dave was the guy in cowboy boots. He smoked a lot, drank too much coffee and "fuck" seemed to be his favorite word. But this slightly grumpy demeanor and ruffled appearance belie an infectious charm that easily overpowered the audience. He began with shamelessly flattering us, saying that artists are special and definitely not "normal". At least that much we all understood and readily agreed with.

In his lecture, Art and Democracy, Hickey observed that democracy is run for average people and those "special" people (artists) are a big pain in the ass. Even when accepted by the establishment, any artist worth his/her salt can't mollify normative ideas, for to do so makes art invisible. Only art that challenges established ideas has a life, which makes it harder for artists to fit in, and that's as it should be. Unlike Europe where artists are "protected" from society, here it is society that needs protection. Good artists, in Hickey's view, are basically pissing in society's punch bowl and he chastised us to come to terms with this, stop trying to be normal, and start acting like great artists.

Hickey emphasized that our obsessive mobility is a great thing. Artists leave home to find places where they fit in and places that embrace chaos and change, because art cannot survive in an environment where change and excitement are not privileged. Our country is clearly divided between those places that resist and hate change and those places that embrace it: the red states versus the blue states. This makes art an almost exclusively cosmopolitan practice and separates it from provincial art, which confirms the assumptions of mainstream culture. This, he said, is the main difference between good and bad art; bad art is invisible precisely because it fulfills the standards of the moment, like the lyrics of an N'Sync song.

He addressed why some art gets recognized and embraced and some not. Hickey spoke of the constituencies that create support for new art, and that artists in the upper echelon have a constituency built on a complex and varying mix of other artists, critics, collectors, curators, scholars and dealers. Every painting in Renaissance Italy meant the same thing: the content was pre-ordained by the bishops with identical institutional values and meaning. By having to compare "like to like", the viewer's personal taste began to emerge apart from the content of the artwork, forming groups of like-minded individuals. It is this personal relationship to objects that creates constituencies and brings together otherwise disparate people by their love of, and association with the objects. Therefore, art has the ability to reorganize the world and this is the power of art.

Hickey argues that this has nothing to do with the artist's intentions--a shocking assertion since most of us artists are concerned about content. He goes on to say that art doesn't directly communicate so much as correlates, and correlation is based on our perceptions of the object and how it relates to other objects. Therefore, artists make things that people can use to serve their own purposes. He used a funny beer ad as an example. A fat guy is doing the twist in front of a beer bottle and after a moment the camera zooms in on the cap which reads "twist to open". It is clever and amusing, so the viewer is led to deduce that the company that uses such an ad probably makes good beer.

The notion that there is no relationship between what the artist intends and how it is interpreted is great. Art survives precisely because we are free to (mis)interpret it. How many different analyses have we heard over the years of any given artwork? After all, analysis and interpretation are the basis of art history. When we can reinterpret, the power of the object is enhanced and its ability to sustain a fixed message is undermined. Special, powerful people create art that can change and thus remains relevant and alive.

Hickey is a great speaker with a dry wit who seemed to delight in lobbing a few bombs at us professors, beating up on our cherished practice of group critique, saying it often only imposes more conformity on our students. From the nervous laughter, I bet I was not the only one who had a critique scheduled for the next day. He gleefully poked a few eyes when he said: "In academia, as in politics and life, stupidity flows down-hill. If your art department is run by jerks, there's not much you can do until they're gone." In a room full of students, college professors and department chairs, nervous laughter again followed.

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Do you understand? The Dave Hickey Experience

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2003 by Thomas McGovern

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