Tuesday, November 6, 2007

DAVE HICKEY Interviewed by Sheila Heti

November/December 2007

DAVE HICKEY; (ART CRITIC/JOURNALIST/SHORT-STORY WRITER)

Interview by Sheila Heti

"I THINK YOU WANT TO LEARN ABOUT ART BECAUSE YOU
HAD AN EXPERIENCE OF SOME SORT- A TOTALLY
NON-REDEMPTIVE BUT VAGUELY EXCITING EXPERIENCE,
LIKE BRUSHING UP AGAINST A GIRL WITH BIG BOOBS IN
THE SUBWAY."

Las Vegas attracts people who aren't:
Afraid
Country
Religious
Fucking depressed

"Ya know what I mean?" Dave Hickey likes to ask.
His voice is gentle and lyrical, slightly
tarnished by smoking, and very Southern. At
sixty-seven, he remarks, guffawing about his
large proportions, "rap has sort of reasserted my
body type." He's often in a Lakers cap. As much
as he likes talking, he will often interrupt
himself to ask a question: "So what sort of music
do you like?Š What's your plan in life?Š Why in
the hell is it called the Believer for?"

It's hard to gauge the place of art critic Dave
Hickey in the world. Though very well known, he's
not yet required reading-but that'll change. His
passions are idiosyncratic, he drives at no major
thesis, nor is he seeking a revolution in taste
or even acolytes. It seems he wants to construct
an edifice of true things-or, at least, the least
likely wrong things-that can be said about
whatever subjects are most interesting and at
hand.

Hickey is the author of a story collection and
two books of essays, including the classic Air
Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997). He
began his career in the 1960s as a freelance
journalist, but in the early '90s, he moved to
Las Vegas and joined the faculty of the
University of Nevada in the art department. Now
he teaches English. He's run galleries in New
York and Austin, and was executive editor of Art
in America. Six years ago, he was awarded a
MacArthur "genius" fellowship. Hickey counts
among his "professional acquaintances" Lester
Bangs, James Wolcott, and Hunter S. Thompson
("the puritan do-gooder").

He writes of his beginnings, "That was the
seventies-limos, homos, bimbos, resort
communities and cavernous stadiumsŠ the whole
culture in a giant, Technicolor Cuisinart,
whipping by, and I did love it so."

This interview took place in two locations: the
patio of a breakfast spot in Toronto around noon
on a sunny midsummer day, where he ordered eggs
and several coffees and waited a long time for a
fork. After speaking there for a couple of hours,
it continued in a hotel bar, where he could smoke
in the courtyard.

His manner is a mixture of courtly and cowboy.
It's easy to imagine him pissed off and unhappy,
but he is not the curmudgeon his reputation
suggests. For at the root of everything Hickey
writes about and speaks about is an advocacy for
what he loves-and a kind of regret, not
bitterness, at the popularity of what he doesn't.

At the end of our meeting, he said, with a hint
of resigned gallantry, "Please feel free to use
whatever I've told you, as you wish. It's not
like I'm worried about my, uh, reputation."

-Sheila Heti


I. "HONESTLY, I NEVER SIT DOWN
TO WRITE ANYTHING WITHOUT
THINKING, THIS IS A WEIRD
THING TO BE DOING! WHY AM
I SITTING HERE WRITING?"

SHEILA HETI: In your experience of knowing
artists, do you think there's a discrepancy
between why artists tell themselves they're
making art, and the actual reason you perceive
them to be making art?

DAVE HICKEY: In my experience, you always think
you know what you're doing; you always think you
can explain, but you always discover, years
later, that you didn't and you couldn't. This
leads me to suspect that the principal function
of human reason is to rationalize what your
lizard brain demands of you. That's my idea. Art
and writing come from somewhere down around the
lizard brain. It's a much more peculiar activity
than we like to think it is. The problems arise
when we try to domesticate the practice, to
pretend that it's a normal human activity and
that "everybody's creative." They're not.
Honestly, I never sit down to write anything
without thinking, This is a weird thing to be
doing! Why am I sitting here writing? Why am I
looking at the Ellsworth Kelly on my wall? I
don't know. It feels funny to do these things,
but it feels funnier not to, so I write and look.
My only justification for the lizard brain thing
is that, whatever I'm writing about and whatever
I'm writing on, it all comes out the same. If I'm
writing about furniture, Dick Cheney, Palladio,
or surfing-if I'm writing on coke, speed, acid,
smack, booze, panic, sorrow, or just cigarettes,
it all comes out Dave writing, so, if altering
one's consciousness doesn't alter the outcome,
maybe it's not about that.

SH: So if it's the kind of thing that comes from
the lizard brain and is not this gentle,
political thing people do at all, then this idea
of working hard, which is a very Protestant,
American valueŠ I mean, going to the studio from
nine in the morning to five at night-it sometimes
seems like there's such a professionalization of
art-making. Is it commensurable with this
activity that's-

DH: Well, let me put it like this. I think that
if you don't like it and it's not easy, you
shouldn't be doing it. You know what I mean?

SH: If it's not easy you shouldn't be doing it?

DH: I mean it's work, but it's not labor. You
have professional obligations like any adult, but
it's fun to solve problems. It's fun to sit there
by yourself with no one telling you what to do.
It's fun to nuance things that no one will notice
except in their lizard brains. I enjoy doing it,
and it's easy for me, but there are a lot of
people out there who are working too hard at it.
[Big laugh]

SH: Why do you think people are interested in art?

DH: I think they want to touch the source of
something, you know? It doesn't make people
better. It doesn't make them happier. It doesn't
make them smarter, and you can't teach people to
do it or like it. So who knows?

SH: Can you teach people how to see more sensitively?

DH: Danger makes us see more
sensitively-anxiety-the prospect of the gallows.
But you either see or you don't. I think you want
to learn about art because you had an experience
of some sort-a totally nonredemptive but vaguely
exciting experience, like brushing up against a
girl with big boobs in the subway. It's about
that level of intensity. So you want to find out
more about it since its sources are so
mysterious, and these sources reside in you as
well as in the object. But I have no evangelical
feelings about art at all. I despise art
education. Art doesn't lend itself to education.
There is no knowledge there. It's a set of
propositions about how things should look.

SH: Like an aesthetic proposition?

DH: Yeah. It doesn't contain any truth. It
doesn't contain any fact. It's just a proposition
to be argued for or against.

SH: There are a number of artists I know who want
to make art out of a political impulse, and this
impulse seems kind of incompatible with
art-making.

DH: The political impulse is fine but moot. Art
has political consequences, which is to say, it
reorganizes society and creates constituencies of
people around it. Miles Davis creates a
constituency. Andy Warhol creates a constituency,
and any object or occasion that organizes people
in terms of what they want is a political
constituency. The idea of political content is
irrelevant. Content is irrelevant. I always tell
my students, "Never forget you're writing words!
You know, word one, word two, word three, word
four. The words have to be organized. Nothing
else does."


II. "THE MFA THING IS AN
INVENTION OF THE '70S.
ITS RAISON D'ÊTRE IS EVAPORATING."

SH: So what makes you happy and what makes you sad in culture right now?

DH: You know, I'm deeply engaged in culture, but
I'm well out of the trenches, which means if I
talk, I talk Frank Gehry. I don't talk younger
architects. I talk Ellsworth Kelly. And I'm happy
for that, because when you're a younger critic
you can almost never get the chance to write
about people who are older than you are-people
who really influenced you-and that's kind of fun.
But there are no public venues to write about art
anymore, except for three or four permanent jobs
that my friends do and I never could. Mostly I
write for commercial galleries these days. There
are no serious art magazines.

SH: So there's no place to talk about art?

DH: No, and my particular age of the critic is
just over. There are no influential midcareer
critics today. I think part of that is
circumstance, in the sense that a whole
generation of critics died of AIDS in the '80s.
It was like the plague that wiped out two
generations of Neapolitan painters in the
sixteenth century. They're just gone, and those
dead guys from the '80s should be writing most of
what I'm writing now, and I should be left to
play blackjack.

SH: OK, so what are the supposed art magazines
interested in hearing about, if not about art?

DH: They want touting. In twenty years we've gone
from a totally academicized art world to a
totally commercialized art world, and in neither
case is criticism a function. We're all supposed
to be positive about art. Nobody plays defense! I
mean, my job, to a certain extent, is to be in
the net. My job is to mow stuff down.

SH: So in what kind of structure would there be a place for criticism?

DH: Well, I came into an art world of
volunteers-six thousand heavily medicated,
mysteriously employed human beings who were there
because they wanted to be, you know? And all they
wanted was to be right-not safe, not rich, not
fair, but right! Now we have this vast
bureaucratic structure of support. Everybody's a
poll watcher. Nobody's a voter. We've got
millions of people devoted to the whole idea that
art's supposed to be fair and good for you. But
art's not too fair, you know? Why should you be
publishing books and not your friends? Because
it's not fair, that's why.

SH: Yeah, whatever.

DH: Anyway, the art world is way too big right
now. The art world I came up into was very much
like the jazz world I grew up in, which is to
say, a relatively small thing. If you got to go
see Miles Davis in a little bar on La Brea, that
was great, and you didn't sit around saying,
"There was no coverage in the New York Times!
Miles is not going to get any reviews!" You know
what I'm saying?

SH: Sure, it was for yourself. You were happy.

DH: Right, you were happy to be there, and if the
art world today shrunk down to the size and scale
of the jazz world, I would be happier now. Things
would be freer and a lot less tedious.

SH: I suppose the schools have something to do
with the change-the craziness that you have to
get an MFA to be an artist.

DH: Thirty-five thousand MFAs a semester, 90
percent of whom never make another work of art.

SH: And do you think that that kind of system produces-

DH: Almost no one. Idiots with low-grade
depression. When I opened my gallery in the late
'60s, Peter Plagens-who's now the critic for
Newsweek and still shows his paintings-was the
only artist I represented who had been to
graduate school. The MFA thing is an invention of
the '70s. Its raison d'être is evaporating.

SH: Which is?

DH: Training sissies for teaching jobs. Well, the
official raison d'être was to create an
intellectual and pedagogical justification for
the most frivolous activity in Western culture,
so you go back and read things from the past.
It's the traditional Renaissance desire that
artists should be taken seriously, and that art
not be a practical but a liberal art. But I tend
to think it's a practice, like law or like
medicine.

SH: Right, and nobody wants to be a clown! No
artists want to be clowns. That's a shame.

DH: You have to check out my friend Scott
Grieger, who's a high culture clown, if only
because Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner rescued him
from the streets of L.A. and paid for his art
education.

SH: Do you think humor's a very important element of art?

DH: It would be if anybody could take a joke!
Alec Waugh proposes "seriousness" as a form of
infectious stupidity. I agree. Actually, Bruce
Nauman is pretty funny. Everybody pretends that
he's not, but clown torture is pretty funny! You
know? And, uh, I think Peter Saul is funny, he's
very witty, and I think Ellsworth Kelly is not
funny but he's witty, and Ed Ruscha is extremely
funny and extremely witty, you know?

SH: I love Serra but he's not funny.

DH: No, well, but Richard's smart. And he's an
artist. He can't talk without drawing. He's the
real fucking thing. Not nice.

SH: Not nice. No, he doesn't seem so nice. [Laughs]

DH: But Richard's really fun to go look at art
with, because he will look at anything, and he
likes to look at art, and when you see him you
don't sit around. He says, "Let's go look at
art," so that's what he does. He's kinda corny
because he's not hip at all. He doesn't know
anybody. He doesn't know who got AIDS, he doesn't
know who got fired. But he's a real artist to me
anyway.

SH: Well, and that idea of taking sculpture off
the pedestal-I love that, and I think the whole
culture's off the pedestal.

DH: And Tony Caro did that-he put it on the
ground. But in a sense what he did was make the
pedestal the art. Caro and Serra, Sol LeWitt, and
Don Judd-they made the pedestal the art. It's
like DJs transforming the turntable into an
instrument.


III. "GOSSIP IS THE CURRENCY OF
THE DISCOURSE, SO YOU SHOULD
SHUT UP ABOUT YOURSELF."

SH: Do you see anybody doing anything that-let's say radical-right now?

DH: First of all, let me say if I did, I probably wouldn't recognize it.

SH: You wouldn't recognize it?

DH: Let me put it this way. When I was a bright
young thing, my relationship to my elders was,
uh, problematic. It was like-[makes a gesture of
waving from across a chasm]. And I thought they
were wrong and I was right. And they were wrong,
but I'm probably as wrong today. As I always say,
the next great art movement may be dust bunnies,
you know what I mean? And I wouldn't recognize
it. It's like, whoa! What dust bunnies did you
get from out of your bag!?

SH: How much is the performance important? I
think of somebody like Warhol or Pollock, and
they had such strong public personas. Who they
are communicates their art as well, and, in
Warhol's case, his image is part of the work's
meaning.

DH: Well, the thing is, the work is not really
sufficient. Most famous artists are created by
their work and the idea of them as a character,
and if they're smart and ambitious, they
reinforce that character because they want to
win. They want their views to prevail. And you
must want to win. I don't want to be rich, but I
want to win. I want my enemies to fall in
shambles. I do not want to be fair. I want the
art I hate to go away. If you want your art to
stay around, and I hate it, get your own fucking
critic! So I am not in favor of art-I'm in favor
of the art I like.

SH: Yeah, totally. But so do you think an artist
has to be part of the discourse? Has to talk? To
give interviews?

DH: It's a social discourse. There ain't no Frank
Stellas at Montana State. But you've got to be
there, and you've got to be interested in other
people so you can talk about them. Gossip is the
currency of the discourse, so you should shut up
about yourself. Never confess, never explain,
never apologize, and never complain. But you got
to be there. The missing are presumed dead.

SH: OK, you say that art needs talent and courage
to be great or interesting, and-it's a weird
generalization to make-but I wonder if you've
noticed in artists that there's certain types of
ambition that lead to great works of art, and if
there's certain kinds of ambition that lead to
shitty work.

DH: Let's put it this way. If one artist likes
another artist, it's never quite the work, it's
the quality of the ambition they respect. Ed
Ruscha said to me once-he was talking about some
artist he didn't like, and I said, "Well, the
quality of the workŠ" And Ed says, "It's not the
quality of the work, it's the quality of the job."

SH: Quality of the job?

DH: I mean, are you doing something worth doing?
That's a reasonable question. When you really
respect somebody who does something different
from you, your respect is for the quality of the
job.

[His cell phone rings. He talks to his wife, the
art historian Libby Lumpkin. They have a brief,
confused discussion about whether or not she's
having two lunches today. He hangs up. I ask him
how long he's been married; about fifteen years,
he replies. Has he been married before? He's had
relationships with four women, he tells me-a
serial monogamist, he says.]

What I do is I find beautiful, intelligent women,
and invest them with enough confidence to leave
me.

SH: And do they all leave for the same reason?

DH: I guess. That's the chance you take if you
like bitches, if you prefer women who have their
own agendas and their own destinations. I like
singers, writers, dancers, social climbers, and
divas. So eventually, you're passed over. Part of
this is selfish, though. Writing for one is hard.
Writing for two is impossible. And sitting at
home writing about cowboys with cancer while
Betsy Sue teaches fifth-grade music casts a pall
and poses a question mark over every word you
write. Living off the work of others makes you a
slut or a shit. I've tried not to. Anyway, I get
along with all my exes. We're actually pretty
close.


IV. "PEOPLE DON'T MAKE
LITERATURE, ARCHITECTURE,
AND ART-THE CULTURE
MAKES THOSE THINGS."

DH: So what do you write about? Do you write about real people?

SH: Increasingly I'm less interested in writing
about fictional people, because it seems so
tiresome to make up a fake person and put them
through the paces of a fake story. I just-I can't
do it.

DH: I understand.

SH: It doesn't make sense to me. And the
complicated thing is, I like life so much. I love
being among people, I love being in the world,
and writing is the opposite of that.

DH: That's why I became a cultural journalist. I
wanted to write, but I wanted to have
adventures-I wanted to sit on the beach with
Keith Richards and some dude playing the
trombone. I wanted to be where it was, and I
sacrificed a great deal of literary value for
that, but I had a hell of a lot of fun. Back in
the '70s and '60s, if you could do this, to
length and on time-and not many people could, nor
can they now-then you could go anywhere you
wanted to, and look at whatever you wanted to.
But it makes me happy that I set out to make a
living out of the writing life and I have done
it. Not a great life, of course, or a famous one,
but a really cool one. The culture afforded me
that, and I am sad that that life is disappearing.

SH: OK, so you can make a living as an artist by
selling your work in the marketplace, or by
government grants, and they're both sort of
problematic, but which makes the better art, or
which is the lesser evil?

DH: I don't think the government should touch
art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage
risk-averse personalities to be artists. Some
good artists in their maturity-like me-will take
a job at a university and continue to produce
because they have trained themselves to produce.
But the university environment is not a
productive environment. It's oppressive.

SH: It's what?

DH: It's not free. You cannot say what you want
to. Let me explain. If I sell an article to
Vanity Fair, they give me some money and we're
quits. I can take that money and spend it on
heroin and Arab boys if I want to. But if I get
the money I make from the university every year,
that comes with a requirement that I not be a
pedophile, that I not be a drug addict, that I
not tell the truth, that I not say what I think
about the president of the university. That's
what that money is. And if I take a job at a
university and I'm a young person, I have six
years in which I can't express my opinion until I
get tenure. Now, are you going to remember your
opinions for six years? No!

SH: So if you eschew money from grants and from
the government, then you've got to make money
elsewhere-

DH: I wrote reviews of Porter Wagoner albums and
squibs for titty magazines, but I fucking wrote
them because I was trying to win and avoid all
unavoidable compromises that presented me with
the fantasies of comfort and security. I just
like to write lucid prose. That's my little
thing. Why should it be easier for me than it was
for Steve Tyler? Anyway, people don't make
literature, architecture, and art-the culture
makes those things. We make books, buildings, and
objects. We do our crummy little shit, and the
culture assigns value to it, and I don't think
the culture needs government help.


V. "YOU HAVE ALL THE WAY
TILL YOU'RE FORTY TO
TOTALLY FUCK UP YOUR LIFE."

SH: Yesterday you said you find yourself in the
midst of a generation of young artists with more
temperamental affinities than you've had with
young artists in many years. What's the nature of
those affinities?

DH: Well, it's very strange, and I think it had
to do with Vegas, because Vegas attracts people
who are not afraid, not religious, not country,
and OK with themselves-people who like to have
fun and like to work, people who aren't fucking
depressed, who don't have issues. For instance, I
was having dinner at Spago the other night with
Tim Bavington, who used to be my student and is
now a very successful painter, and Wolfram Putz,
who was one of my students at Sci-Arc [the
Southern California Institute of Architecture]
and is presently an ultrachic international
architect. Tim and Wolf are doing very well now,
much better than I, in fact, so I thought to
myself, Why them? First, I decided, it helps that
they are both cosmopolitan creatures. Tim is a
displaced Brit; Wolf is a displaced German; but
what else? And the answer was easy: I had never
seen either one of them in a bad mood.

SH: Wow.

DH: Never. They both have this steady level of
equanimity, and when I look at my ex-students
who've done well, the common factor is always
their good humor. The ups are not too up. The
downs are not too down. They're having a good
time by not compromising at what they love to do,
and my students and I are alike in this. I've
always had a good time, sometimes with bad
consequences, of course. I mean, I've blown up my
life three or four times-burned bridges while I
was still on them. But that just comes from rash
decision-making, that doesn't come from not
making decisions! [Laughs]

SH: [Laughs] Yeah, that's right. At least you can
say you've made decisions, goddamnit.

DH: I may have fucked up, but it was decisive!
[Laughs, hits the table] And I have a pretty high
level of equanimity day in and day out, and
probably you do too, listening to you talk.
Sometimes I get desperately depressed because I'm
not cute anymore, or because I haven't done what
I said I would, but otherwise I'm OK. If I can
get up, make coffee, look at the sunshine on the
wall-hey. I don't need a blow job before noon.
I'm OK. And I think that most artists and
writers-most of the ones that I know-are o-kay.
They like to go into their studios, they like to
see their friends, they like to chase girls or
boys or whatever they chase. They were OK when
they were a nobody, and now they're OK when
they're somebody.

SH: I wonder: what kind of teacher are you?

DH: With the artists, I don't teach, I coach. I
can't tell them how to make art. I tell them to
make more art. I tell them to get up early and
stay up late. I tell them not to quit. I tell
them if somebody else is already making their
work. My job is to be current with the discourse
and not be an asshole. That's all I wanted in a
professor.

So how old are you, anyway?

SH: Thirty.

DH: Great! You're a bright young thing. You have
all the way till you're forty to totally fuck up
your life. It takes that long, if you're really
talented, to really fuck everything up. You just
go up and up and up and up, and all of a sudden
you've got three ex-husbands, a broken-down
Porsche, a bunch of leather clothes, some
haute-couture accessories, and no prospects at
all. [Chuckles]

SH: [Laughs] Yeah, I keep thinking the fifth
husband will be the one. That's my new goal.

DH: That's right. Exactly. Hm. It must be hard to find boyfriends in Canada.

SH: How come?

DH: Because it's such a healthy place! I never
have been able to put a name on it, but I really
do love the darkness, I really do love the edge.

SH: Wait. I want to ask you a question about
America, 'cause you said-it is the superpower-and
is there any work that you think has been able to
represent the nature of America's empire?

DH: I think Don Judd, Dan Flavin, and Andy Warhol
were trying to. I think they conceived of
themselves as the Augustan artists of the
American empire. The Vietnam War ruined the
moment, but they did it. They created this
steady-state, history-less, past-less,
future-less moment in art with no precedent and
really no consequences-it's just this
stuff-purely American stuff, totally abstract and
totally bland. And I like that. I don't like too
much blood or too many explosions. I like bland.
I like blank.


Sheila Heti is the author of Ticknor and The
Middle Stories. She lives in Toronto, and is
currently collaborating on a reality show with
the painter Margaux Williamson.


© 2003-2007 The Believer and its contributors. All rights reserved.

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