Dennis Hollingsworth

Art's Not Fair

Highly recommended: Dave Hickey's talk at The Smithsonian.

(BLOGPOST IN PROGRESS: This post is a monster and I am only beginning to sing the aria. There's no time yet to dress it out, as I am about to make my move into my new studio, three days of hustle... but I shall return and finish the job asap. The best part is yet to come.)

I came to it via these series of links: Modern Kicks, Art Fag City and simplepoise.Dave Hickey disdains groupthink, as the introduction goes, and that's putting it lightly. His critique is of unction, piety, hubris; people like Hickey are just what an art world who doesn't want him needs. His talk is a train of gored oxen: ethnic categories, sexual politics, the sanctity of the artist's biography, all institutions from universities to museums, the very idea of fairness itself. As can be seen in the interesting debate about his speech at simpleposie back in the beginning of this summer; for the more politically correct among us, he fits the profile of a misogynist. Signals abound: suspicious allegories of Raoul and Cynthia (the dynamite of race and sex); references to institutional players as "ninnies", artists as misfits and idiots; his disregard for the supposed efficacy of art school; his very existence as a white male Texan; his conception of American Exceptionalism; the form of arguments that while they are vested with what appears to be Marxian economic analysis, they are actually articulating a Hayakian or Adam Smithian worldview... all of this and more are solid indicators of the "other" of the intellectual elite including those who aspire to this designation. In the debate at simplepoise, interlocuter "JT" balances the scales with a defense against this accusation, although this vindication ends with a replacement of the designation of "creepy" and a slurry of slurs about his physical presence. It must not have helped matters much that during his speech, Hickey reopened what must be a chin nick from his razor and subsequently punctuated his talk in a humanizing, elegant way with an inelegant preoccupation with staunching the flow of blood.

His argument might at first appear to denigrate artists but it can be seen that he does this in order to finally praise them. The finest praise of all:

Because one of the problems with artist is that they have, like, moral principals. They are involved in a vocation where they have taken an oath to be free. They have taken an oath to have contempt to their peers to get up on the front of the wave in the absolute pretense of invulnerability, all these fragile people in the dark, pretending to be invulnerable...

Elegiac.

He wants the institutional world to dial it down, at least to see that their efforts in the art present distort art history, perhaps his message is a plea for the institutional realm to restrict their roles to an anthropological level by only documenting art that has lived and passed. By earnestly saying that "...artists can take care of themselves", he seems to believe that artists will sort themselves out in their own ways (with an internal negotiation of quality?), that "...we don't need no stinking badges!", that the multitudinous marketplace of granular assessments and negotiations of aesthetic value cannot be anticipated or replaced by a committee of any design.
Hickey sees postwar art as a strategy to prevent the downfall of the cresting American moment, the moment when the dominant object, aka high water modernism, won for America the identity of the avant-garde. When the institutions overlaid the new pecking order, they democratized the definition of art and watered down the threat of quality. The post-dominant art object turned the focus onto the biography of the artist, for the sake of the mass nurture of a gazillion artists, to open more doors into the walls that circumscribed quality... But he cautions with a quotation: "Nothing is more commonplace than the wish to be remarkable."

Democracy and particularly American democracy is fundamentally different from the world of art, incompatible, harmful even. His argument is striking: that at the institutional level, the less done for art, the better for it. His whole bit in reference to James Madison's Federalist 10 about failing by faction is that art thrives in a city but chokes in a village, that the multitude of communities will be domesticated to a fault in an overly institutional art world. Even the internet is implicated:

"Now motorcycle gangs have websites, couture has websites, so we reorganize ourselves into a nasty little mediterranean republic that will collapse of its own organization. And it?s all communitaze, because what we have done is turned the city, the vast city of the world into a village. And if it?s anything culture needs it?s not a village."

By this, he is saying that factions are prone to internecine failure. Is the internet diversely rich or does it ultimately radiate a homogenizing tendency? As is typical for my appreciation for Dave hickey's work, the contrapposto of his arguments is magnificent but the lean tends to come from small failures due to logical inconsistencies that lie outside of irony's saving grace. Is the internet diversely rich or does it ultimately radiate a homogenizing tendency? Aren't factions, communities in other words? Isn't it a longtime Hickeyian idea that an artist should have his/her own party, meaning: form one's own community rather than seek out an existing one to enlist in? Wasn't the early modern and postmodern art world a village? Isn't our city of an art world -meaning: a collection of communities so large that one cannot know them all- a recent phenomena?

Dave Hickey is providing us with his account of recent art history as he attempts to reposition the artist in what he seems to regard as the natural social order. Like Rousseau, he sports a creation story. He provides an allegory of The Beginning of the Art World: a glass of wine and an argument over preferences. Like Rousseau, he has a hard critique against (institutional) society, and a high regard for Natural Man, our imagined idyllic state in a land of plenty before we lived in concentrations large enough to compel the formation of society and the social structures needed to manage the ownership of property. To paraphrase him as best as I can on the fly:

"It's about jazz, rock and roll, surfing, rodeo, a place where everyone is assumed to be fucked up, a place where no one would dare get their feelings hurt, because this was about art... it doesn't matter to the artist who made the art. Who made the art doesn't matter in this environment."

In this natural social order, art is antithetical to democracy. Art is elitist, it tends toward the singularity of preeminence, as fugitive as it might be. Natural Man, like the Natural Artist, walks alone flying his/her freak flag in a land with plenty of elbow room. He invokes Madison again with "Genius is an accident but mediocrity is the rule." He tends to take the two poles to be absolute. A sympathetic reader must suspend disbelief in order to entertain the argument proffered. All arguments employ artifice, this is inescapable and a bit of wisdom lies therein. But look at how he ignores the possibility that there might be gradation between the two. Gradations can be ladders and Hickey is telling us in this lecture that ladders are a lie. Therefore art school is a lie... and who among us in my art world hasn't made a home for that particular thought? But to take the Hickey train of thought, one has to forget that even geniuses sometimes get better, sometimes get worse. One has to forget that while there is only one Duane Allman, there actually are legions of great musicians and the accidents of G-d abound. Start making your lists and you'll find its an endless task.

This point of view seems to be growing. Have you read Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash's recent opinion piece Are Our Writers as Lousy as Our Bankers? in 3QD?:

There is a certain kind of art made here in America for a lofty but banal purpose: to enliven the contemporary educated mind.

You know: the mind of you and me, dear 3QD reader -- the NPR listener, the New Yorker reader, the English major, the filmgoer who laps up subtitles, the gallery-goer who can tell a Koons from a Hirst.

This art is superior to the cascading pile of blockbuster kitsch-dreck-crap that passes for pop culture, but only superior by a few pips.

This art sure ain't Picasso, or Joyce, or Rossellini, or the Beatles, or even Sondheim. It's more Woody Allen than Ingmar Bergman, more Joyce Carol Oates than James Joyce, more Jeff Koons than Duchamp, more Arcade Fire than the Beatles.

It does not expand the borders of art or wreck the tyranny of the possible or enlarge our hungry little minds.

It is art of the day to inform the conversation of the day by the people of the day who need to be reassured that their taste is a little more elevated than that of the woman on the subway reading Nora Roberts.

For want of a better label, here's a suggested honorific for this kind of art:

Urban Intellectual Fodder.

If you read into the article, you'll find that Ash places Damian Hirst on the genius side of the ledger, Koons doesn't make the cut. I'd say it's the other way around.

The pike of Hickey's argument is that genius is an accident and by this the artist lives by the grace of G-d, happy to dwell in oblivion. You've either got it or you don't, and in this world the sad thing is that there are a lot of dead-artists-walking. Poseurs without a clue. Postmodernism is for Hickey, a fall from grace, a societal (institutional) overgrowth, a european invasion that supplanted the dominant object with an anti-materialist social democracy. Paganism, in his words. His Hail Mary pass is an entreaty for the institutional world to leave the living art world well enough alone.

"American institutions level things out. They cannot help. They want things to be fair, not to generate quality... There ought to be a refuge( for art) in America from America. Do you understand? There ought to be a place where the press ignores. We don't have to put all our children in silver balloons... Art can rescue us from that world (of leveled democracy)... I. You. Want. To. Be. Rescued."

He might as well ask the lions to refrain from eating the Christians.

By the way, did you catch the ballon boy reference? What an indictment of our overgrown institutional/information age that produces fruit such as Richard and Mayumi Heene.

Someone by the name of Mary Judge, who must have listened to Hickey's talk, sent in a question to Jerry Saltz recently in NY Mag.com's Vulture section:

Dear Jerry,

Dave Hickey said, "Start at the top, cause there is no ladder." True or false?

Mary Judge

Dear Mary,

I know and revere critic-cowboy-philosopher Dave Hickey. Hickey is a renegade shaman-metaphysician living on the edge of the art world in the desert (I hear he?s leaving Las Vegas and moving to Albuquerque to teach). He?s our Keith Richards and Emerson rolled into one ? our man in black. I have to disagree with him on this one, however. These days the art world is so big and comprised of so many people doing so many different things, with no established hierarchy of isms, styles, museums, or pecking order of artists, that there is no ?top? anymore. Now the art world is more of an amorphous cloud ? something that changes shapes, expands, contracts, appears, and disappears.

An art world so hyper-developed that it fell from grace, cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown? Or an art world occluded or colonized by a false, meritocratic-driven avatar, an impostor? Saltz' and Hickey's accounts of art history are two of a blossom that seems to be growing. We seem to be living in a time when people are finally asking the difficult question of whether recent art history has a pattern to it or not. Are we living in a post historical time, another end of history, or perhaps the final end of history?

But... when history is over, so is art.

Earlier this Spring, Platypus published an interview with Hal Foster by Bret Schneider and Omair Hussain:

Hal Foster is a prominent critic and art historian who contributes regularly to Artforum, New Left Review, and The Nation. He is also an editor of October. In the fall of 2009, he sent out a questionnaire to 70 critics and curators, asking them what ?contemporary? means today. Foster notes that the term ?contemporary? is not new, but that ?What is new is the sense that, in its very heterogeneity, much present practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment.? 35 critics and historians attempted to answer to the problems implied in this observation.

(Foster's initial questions can be read here, both links are well worth reading.)

Here is a summary of the responses:

Grant Kester (historian): the contemporary emerged when it was problematized by a shrinking world: cultural confrontation.

James Elkins (theorist): the contemporary is outside of history.

Miwon Kwon (art critic ): the contemporary is distributed into several subcultures.

Joshua Shannon (historian): "We might wonder whether a discipline too long afraid of the present has now become besotted with it."

Richard Meyer (theorist): contemporary history is an oxymoron.

Pamela Lee (scholar): the paradox of pin pointing the moment the present becomes past.

Mark Godfrey (curator): the postmodern era might prohibit successor eras.

Terry Smith (historian): the monstrous hyperpower juggernaut won't let us connect the dots!

Alex Alberro (historian): we are witnessing the emergence of a new technological imaginary.
(quotable: "the real is so mind-boggling that it is easier to comprehend by analogy")

Tim Griffin (editor): the notion of the contemporary is vulnerable to spontaneous niching, a paradox of distinction and branding.

Yates McKee (critic): resist branding.

T. J. Demos (historian): a loss of criticality is patronizing. Close the distance and you might find that generalizing is problematic.

Kelly Baum (curator): heterogeneity signals possibility.
(quotable: I think what we are seeing today is art miming its context. I think we are witnessing art performing ?agonism,? ?disaggregation,? and ?particularization.? Heterogeneity isn?t just contemporary art?s condition, in other words; it is its subject as well.)

Rachel Haidu (historian): the question is narcissistic.
(quotable: Why?other than for the narcissistic pleasures related to knowing?do we want a relationship to history?)

The results:

the contemporary is problematic: 12

the horizon is bright: 2

historians: 6

theorists: 2

critics: 2

scholars: 1

editors: 1

artists: 0

Aporia or can we see figures in the clouds? Impasse, puzzlement, doubt, & confusion as a permanent, emergent condition? The debate has just opened. Round and round, people are finally asking the important questions: where are we, where were we and where are we going?

What happens when you ask artists these questions? Over the summer, I listened to podcasts in the studio. A lot of them. One of them was the Bad at Sports Episode 245: Painters Painting at Apex Art, a panel discussion. Here's the intro:

Painter and Bad @ Sports NYC correspondent, Tom Sanford will moderate a panel of 5 other painters who will talk about painting. Kamrooz Aram, Holly Coulis, David Humphrey, Dike Blair and Deborah Kass not only represent three or four generations of New York painters and are all prominent voices among their cohort, but also represent a wide variety of approaches to the medium.

These, ?the Painters of Painting?, will discuss the current concerns in painting as well as painting?s enduring relevance as a humanistic and idiosyncratic antidote to the prevailing corporate culture of consensus and commodification.

To my ear, they were ultimately talking about the same issue: Where have we been? Where to go next?

Here are a few notes I made along the way, trying to record by paraphrase and comment briefly on what was said:

Time: 47:00

(A mismash of history, art and world and political history the question of position of painting in contemporary art.)

The time for consensus is so far gone...Tom wants to raise the stakes...

You want it to create a challenge...

Painting was critically marginalized by postmodernism..

But we did it anyway...

We were one of those people that deveolped those postmodern theories to counter a stringent modernism and all those rules... and what came of this of course was another set of rules... and now we are post-that...

"those rules"

They talk about the Frankfurt School: Tom's description: the autonomy of production, the work as a stand alone thing that has its own conditions of order sense a fictional elsewhere emerges from a solitude that is in itself a form of reistance an inconvienience to mass culture

depictions as picture fictions a fulfillment of the idea

(his definition of the Frankfurt school is a lowering the stakes)

that art constitutes itself as an autonomous realm whose fictional elsewhere character is a form of resistance.... Being an artist is a radical thing to be... if you are an artist, do your thing... that's enough to be radical

a challenge:

I don't kmow what's radical anymore,,we all get sucked into the capitalist scheme but then so what? You're just a person.

You just work for yourself, its really good...

(an artist in the panel) "I feel so guilty and useless being a painter." (friend: "You're not exploiting anybody...")

We're all having a guilty conscience about living in this consumerist world that's eating itself to death at least we can say, the one thing we can say is that we are not participating too much in that ...unless you end up being incredibly successful and a huge consumer....

(a reference to Richard Prince's lavish life, a citation of an artist who fought the Burmese government -not named-)

(anxiety of social efficacy)

Q&A:

painting as a resistance to mass distribution

(so elite distribution is ok?)

is it possible to innovate in painting?

yes, if it's a new subjectivity, that's new.

no, if you want a new frontier a l? Jackson Pollock (that's a bullshit model)

Pollock, Picasso: formal giants. You can only push against the one who made the "big move". There is no big move left to us.

There is no one to beat. That's the quagmire.

As I initially recorded in my notes, this talk is a mismash of history, art and world and political history. No wonder artists scored zero in the Foster game. But then, is this even our realm? Certainly in the reflective aspect of our productive lives. Artists should not feel inadequate in the face of Foster's company especially since an artist can expect to measure the art of communication in the work of historians, theorists, critics and curators. So yes, this mishmash is worthy of setting on a stage next to Hickey, Saltz and Foster. I see that all are preoccupied with the same issue.

Where are we?

Where were we?

Where are we going?

Well of course I couldn't have written so much, this deep into the blogpost unless I had a card to throw on the table. It's a proposal, a sketch, a hypothesis. It's a desire for a conversation. I've written about it before in this forum. But sometimes you have to repeat things before they can make a dent.

I look at the clouds of art history and I see something that I would like you to consider:

(BLOGPOST IN PROGRESS: This post is a monster and I am only beginning to sing the aria. There's no time yet to dress it out, I am about to make my move into my new studio, three days of hustle... but I shall return and finish the job asap The best part is yet to come.)

Posted by Dennis at September 29, 2010 9:36 AM