Air Guitar (Essays on Art and Democracy)

by Dave Hickey

Reviewed by Lee Lady

Dave Hickey is one of those writers like Bana Witt and Alice Adams who writes prose so delightful that it would be almost a crime to summarize or paraphrase it. So, at the risk that his lawyers will come knocking at my door in the middle of the night complaining of copyright violation, I will let him explain in his own words what sort of book this is.

I have never taken anything in a book to heart that was not somehow confirmed in my ordinary experience -- and did not, to some extent, reform and redeem that experience. Nor have I had any experience of high art that was not somehow confirmed in my experience of ordinary culture -- and did not, to some extent, reform and redeem that.

When I was a kid, books and paintings and music were all around me, all the time, but never in the guise of culture....

The whole cultural enterprise, when I was growing up, was at once intimate and a little mysterious. It took place at home, in other people's homes, and in little stores. Everywhere my family went to live, there were bookstores and record shops, art galleries and jazz clubs, where otherwise normal people did all these cool things. And nobody knew anything about it. My teachers didn't know about it. The newspapers, my scoutmasters, the television, my friends, nobody knew about it.

I chose to dwell in that underground empire for the first forty-seven years of my life -- in record stores, honky tonks, art bars, hot-rod shops, recording studios, commercial art galleries, city rooms, jazz clubs, cocktail lounges, surf shops, bookstores, rock-and-roll bars, editorial offices, discos, and song factories. I lived the freelance life, in other words, until 1987 when, faced with the unavailability of health insurance, I began to take teaching gigs in universities. There I discovered that, according to the masters of my new universe, all the cruelties and inequities of this civilization derived from the greed and philistinism of shopkeepers, the people who ran these little stores, who bought things and sold them, as I had done.

I found this amazing, because the problem for me had never been who sold the dumb object, or bought it, but how you acquired the privilege of talking about it -- how you found people with whom you could talk about it. I wondered what my new masters would have thought of Sumpter Bruton, a tasty jazz drummer by night and shopkeeper by day, who ran the little record store where I learned about everything from bel canto to Blind Lemon to Erik Satie, who loved every kind of noise that human beings made -- with the possible exception of the noises made by Neil Diamond. And what would they have thought of Harold Garner and David Smith, whose bookstore was their baby and the site upon which I discovered Twentysix Gasoline Stations and Logique du Sens, who would order weird books because they thought I might be interested in them, and never tell me if they weren't returnable? The books I didn't buy would just lie around, gathering dust, until I figured that out. And then I would buy them for cost, and cheap at the price.

The best thing about little stores was that if you were a nobody like me, and didn't know anything, you could go into one of them and find things out. People would talk to you, not because you were going to buy something, but because they loved the stuff they had to sell. The guy in the Billabong Surf Shop, I can assure you, wants to talk about his boards. Even if you want to buy one, right now, he still wants to talk about them, will talk you out into the street, you with the board under your arm, if he is a true child of the high water.

And I love that kind of talk, have lived on it and lived by it, writing that kind of talk for magazines. To me, it has always been the heart of mystery, the heart of the heart: the way people talk about loving things, which things, and why. Thus it was, after two years on university campuses without hearing anything approximating this kind of talk, it finally dawned on me that in this place that we had set aside to nurture culture and study its workings, culture didn't work. Because in universities, books and paintings and music were not ``cool stuff.'' In ordinary society, they were the occasions for gossip -- for opinions, where there is no truth. In school, they were the occasion for mastery where there is no truth -- an even more dangerous proposition -- although my colleagues, being masters, had no choice but to behave masterfully. Exempted by their status from the whims of affection and the commerce of opinion, professors could only mark territory from the podium, with footnotes, and speak in the language of authority about things which they did not love.

This book is about other, more ordinary uses for art and books and music -- about what they seem to do and how they seem to do it on a day-to-day basis. It is not about how they should work, or must work, just about the way they seem to have worked in my experience, and the ways that I have seen them work for others.

Only as he prepared to submit his work to a committee for approval of his dissertation plan, did it occur to him that what he had was completely unacceptable anywhere within the academic world.

For the past three years, I had been studying great writing as a young painter might study great painting, struggling to understand the nuts and bolts of actual practice, seeking insight into the physical nuances of the medium. It had been very interesting and enormously rewarding, but the written result of my efforts, I found, sounded more like a repudiation of graduate study than an example of it.

And then I thought: What if I actually won? What if I confronted the professors on my committee and prevailed. The optimal positive outcome would be a little job at a big university in a place where it snows -- and a six-year battle for tenure.

So I dropped the white stack of white bond back into its box and put it in a drawer. I walked into the kitchen and said to my wife, ``I think I'm going to quite this shit.'' She stared at me for a minute, smiled, and said, ``Great!'' That night, I called up all my artist pals and told them I was going to become an art dealer, and they all said, ``Great!''

Within the next two weeks, I had borrowed ten grand from a local banker who hung out in rock-and-roll bars, rented a space downstairs from a lawyer who defended drug offenders, had some stationery printed up by an outlaw printer in South Austin, and got a tax number from the State Comptroller.

In Hickey, we have a critic who has good things that say about Norman Rockwell (``Most of the artists I have known actually like Normal Rockwell and understand what he is doing. The preachers, professors, social critics, and radical sectarians who hate Rockwell invariably mistake the artist's profession for their own; they accuse him of imposing norms and passing judgements, which he never does''), Johnny Mercer (``Years before I heard of John Donne, I learned about the intricate atmospherics of `metaphysical conceits' just by walking down the sidewalks singing, Fools rush in / Where wise men fear to tread, / And so I come to you my love, / My heart above my head'') and Liberace (``Liberace was without doubt and in his every facet a genuine rhinestone, a heart without malice, whose only flaw was a penchant for imitation pearls -- a certifiable neon icon, a light onto his people, with an inexplicable proclivity for phony sunsets. Bad taste is bad taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege. Liberace cultivated both in equal parts, and often to disastrous effect. But if by his reactions -- his antiques and his denials -- he reinforced a tattered and tatty tradition of `Old World' respectability, by his shows and his `showmanship' (which showed what could not, at that time, be told) he demonstrated to my generation the power of subversive theatricality to make manifest attitudes about sex and race and politics that could not, for the moment, be explicitly avowed'').

Hickey analyses the evolution of the art market in this century by seeing it as completely comparable to the evolution of the automotive market. (``It was clear that the large institutions of the art world, like the Whitney Museum uptown and the art school out at Yale, functioned like General Motors, establishing brand names, institutional agendas, and heirarchies of values out of materials provided by the custom market [analogous to the market for custom cars]. I could live with this as long as Richard Bellamy, in his little gallery downtown, continued to function like George Barris in his Kustom Kar Shop out in Los Angeles -- promoting rebellions, proposing outrageous reconfigurations and different ideas of how the world should look.'')

In addition to Liberace and Normal Rockwell, Hickey has lots to say about Cezanne, Jackson Pollack, Pontormo, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Chet Baker, Flaubert, psychedelic art, Hank Williams, Perry Mason, basketball, Las Vegas, and the Glorious Ladies of Wrestling.

This is a delightful book for anyone interested in the arts, especially those who have an aversion to ``criticism'' of the usual kind. More than this, it should be Required Reading for anyone starting graduate school. Because I think it would be a good thing if anyone, before entering the academic world, might consider the possibility that although there are real virtues to the academic approach to the world, which takes things very seriously and champions an intense narrow focus, there might also be something to be said for an approach that favors a focus that is broad and inclusive, and takes the attitude that the study of any subject, whether it be art or philosophy or mathematics, should sometimes be fun.

Jazz presumes that it might be nice if the four of us, while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best we can only be free one or two at a time, while the other dudes hold onto the wire.

Rock and roll, on the other hand, presumes that the four of us -- as damaged and as anti-social as we are -- might possibly get it to-fucking-gether, man, and play this simple song. And play it right, okay? Just this once, in tune and on the beat. But we can't. The song's too simple, and we're too complicated and excited. We try like hell, but the guitars distort, the intonation bends, and the beat just moves, imperceptibly, whether we want it to or not. Thus we create this hurricane of noise, this finitely complicated fractal filigree of delicate distinctions.

I mean look at the Stones. Keith Richards is always on top of the beat, and Bill Wyman, until he quit, was always behind it, because Richards is leading the band and Charlie Watts is listening to him and Wyman is listening to Watts. So the beat is sliding on those tiny neural lapses, not so you can tell, of course, but so you can feel it in your stomach. And the intonation is wavering too, with the pulse in the finger on the amplified string. This is the delicacy of rock and roll. And it has its virtues, because jazz only works if we're trying to be free and are in fact together. And rock and roll works because we're all a bunch of flakes. That's something you can depend on, and a good thing too, because in the Twentieth Century that's all there is: jazz and rock and roll. The rest is term papers and advertising.