Dave Hickey introducing himself to his students:
I’m happy you’re all here. This is my e-mail, in case you have any questions, because I am paid by the university and I want to be a good employee. Personally, I don’t give a fuck.
Hickey didn’t write it, he said to his students in a class at the University of Nevada Las Vegas titled, LA Noir. We know this because student Simon Horning in the 2009 class took notes and published them with disclaimers:
Many sentences were reconstructed from fragments and memory. I did not use a recorder…This piece, therefore, is what I heard and not necessarily what Dave Hickey said.
I hope Horning got an A. As he remembered Hickey telling the class:
Get excited about telling a story. Make up the fucking material. When
John Ashbery was asked how he wrote so much, he said, ‘It’s like
television. There’s always something on.’
Hickey is the great tap-dancing art critic of our time. He can link any X to any Y and produce the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I remember the specific thrill of reading his connection between Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of St.Thomas and Robert Mapplethorpe’s Lou, who is sticking a finger in his penis, in The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty. (Individual essay online here.)
Hickey no longer teaches art because, as he told Sarah Thornton who quoted him in her book, Seven Days in the Art World, he doubts the value of the process.
My one rule is that I do not do group crits. They are social
occasions that reinforce the norm. They impose a standardized discourse.
They privilege unfinished, incompetent art…
If you’re not sick, don’t call the doctor…I don’t care about an artist’s intentions. I care if the work looks
like it might have some consequences.
He moved over to the English department, where he hopes to do less damage but still be paid. Below, to give the flavor, a few quotes from the text. (Thanks to Nathan Lippens for the recommendation.)
On aging:
I haven’t had to look presentable for twenty years.
On non-rugged individualism:
I’m the one who stands on his own two feet, having no other available
feet.
Reading the Bible:
In the West, high art and popular art can be divided from each other like the Bible can be divided into Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. The Proverbs tell you to be a good person, not to do drugs, be home before ten o’clock, and don’t listen to Jane’s Addiction at four in the morning. The prophetic books like Ecclesiastes are about death, violence, and protecting Israel, and this creates prophetic cultures that produce high art.
Understanding LA:
Los Angeles is a city of bubbles. You have body-builder bubbles, nudist bubbles, surfer bubbles, rich bubbles, poor bubbles. So, how do you write a novel about a city with all of these bubbles? Until Raymond Chandler came along and created the private eye, you really couldn’t. The private eye can move from one bubble to another and tie them together. He’s there to take you to all the places you can’t go.
This stuff is not morally redemptive. I mean, Keith Richards is not morally redemptive.
LA is a city of secrets. LA noir is kind of about privacy
because the private eyes are opposed to public eyes like the cops and
the press. The classic image of the genre is a room with the blinds
closed. This is important because of the decay of privacy we have had
since these books were written.Detective
novels are designed to deal with people in stores.If you lived in LA, you know it’s a new
world every day.
Referring to Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand:
Auden compares British noir novels with American noir and says that in the British novels, there is a snake in the garden, whereas in the American novels there is a presumption of the general corruption of everyone and everything.
Know your enemy:
I drive to think. I’ll drive out to Red Rock. Then I’ll drive to the
Mormon church to remind me of who the enemy is. Sorry, Mormons, but it
does look like America’s going to end the same way as Rome. A bunch of
crazy Christians are going to ruin it.
More on know-your-enemy:
My most famous colleague is a war criminal. So now
everyone in New York wants me to write something about Professor Jay
Bybee, who’s a Mormon, and this endorsement of torture. I’ll tell
you my opinion of Jay Bybee. I don’t think he just gave those torture
memos to the White House. I think he gave them to the UNLA
administrators and that people are being tortured somewhere on campus
right now.
Writing advice:
Leave questions unanswered and digress.
Enrich scenes with pressure of the story.
The trick is wherever it’s boring, put something weird. In students’ drafts, I have written, ‘Something crazy here.’
It’s really a matter of feeling the pace of the prose. Pay attention to the speed of things.
On teaching:
It took me a few years to realize you can’t talk to other English
teachers about literature. You can talk to them about their pets, though.
That’s why you want to learn all the names of the professors’ pets, so
when you see them in the hall you can ask, ‘How’s Roscoe?’ and they will
go on for half an hour, and you can nod along and think about whatever
you want.
Enter Douglas Unger, English department chair.
DU: May I please talk to you during your break?
DH: Yeah. That’s fine.
DU: Thanks. (Exit)
DH: I hope he got my ounce.The point of tenure is to fit in. The point of
succeeding is to stand out.
Best blurb ever written, for Chemical Pink:
‘Your fingers will stick to the pages.’
Also true of Lady Gaga:
Everything about Chinese opera is great except for the music.
My hero:
I left the Reese Palley Gallery when my boss wanted to show art by Yoko, and I said, ‘Oh no.’
Life advice:
Stick with friends, and make good friends. In the early eighties, I was totally broke. I drove a ’72 Datsun. When I was forty-two years old, I lived in my car for ten months. I t is better to have a car than a house. I got on the phone, called friends, and took one-semester teaching jobs at Texas, San Diego, and Albuquerque.
You will first wake up frustrated with the noise and the pressure of living in a big city and want to move to a place like Idaho where things are quiet and calm. There is a reason things are quiet and calm. It’s because people are really fucking stupid. If you go, you will be the weird one. They will throw you in jail and say you’re a pedophile.
I don’t mean to bum you out. You can go from nowhere to somewhere, with eye contact, thank you notes, doing things on time, and avoiding dorkness.
The problem a lot of you had is that you made the assignment harder than it was. That’s because you’re doofuses. I do understand the ways of the doofi.
Outside the university, the cultural world is run by and for the young. The old feel insecure because they don’t have a place in the world, they don’t have the respect they feel they deserve, and they don’t have hair. My friend Billy Joe Shaver wrote, ‘I’m just an old chunk of coal, but I’m gonna be a diamond someday.’ He was one of those kind who, on acid, sees Jesus.
I hope Hickey has become a non-smoker by now for his health’s sake!
The Chinese opera comment reminds me of what Ned Rorum wrote in his diaries: “Opera should be seen and not heard.”
Reading Hickey is like watching a barrel of rattlesnakes. Not a particularly edifying experience, but damned if you can tear your eyes away.
I wish Hickey came back to Texas more often; he’s a great talker.
re: opera, don’t forget Mark Twain’s “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.”
It is a personal curiosity for me to admit that I agree with Hickey’s comments that he used to feel that there were too many artists and now he feels that there are way too many artists.
For myself, it is easy to observe that colleges are turning them out by the thousands and shouldn’t something be done to clarify this situation?
Being an artist, I’d suppose that I should feel the guilt that is borne of hypocricy. Further, and with more guilt, he made those comments at my old alma mater, SVA.
It bothers me that art colleges are the observers of trends who then impart their observations on those trends to their students who are then directed to go out and create some more trends so that these institutions will have some more trends to observe and impart to the next burgeoning group and so on….
And so my question is this: Wouldn’t the bell of authenticity ring so much sweeter if more credence were given to an art that emanates from the actuality of living a life?
The self perpetuating cycle from university to student and from student back to university seems a bit self-serving to me, and to be honest, when considering enormous student debt, a bit predatory.
With my own hypocricy, would I then be the first to throw my aspirations upon the pyre?
I’ll never forget Seattle artist Polly Clark whom I met while she was in her late seventies or early eighties. This nice lady directed me to a room in her home where her unsold art was piled high and while she lamented the fact that folks were no longer interested in her paintings and now what should she do with all of this stuff?
Polly’s plight is not an unusual one and it is sobering if one multiplies this scenario by the hundreds of thousands who toil and make their art and make the vain attempt to wipe from conciousness all thoughts of those pesky student loans.
This made my day, especially as I try to furiously get done with office work so I can finally head into the studio for the weekend.
As an art department faculty member who cannot stand this recent trend of students constantly contacting their instructors about every little thing, most of which I have no control over – I’m not the registrar afterall – I wish I had the nerve to say a similar thing regarding my email address. Thanks for sharing.
I wonder what Hickey will say when he discovers that many of us think he is the doofus. Regarding his casual disdain for others, his trumpeting of countercultural ties, (Wow, how cool he smokes dope, wow.) well thats more of a reflection on him than those others. Yet personally I don’t give a shit either… Hickey’s just one more Gomer Pyle.
I always love to hear what Hickey has to say. Unlike most people who talk and write and cannot help but follow the path of the boring, predictible, and mundane norms, Hickey gives off sparks, sparks that set fires, fires, which whether you see it his way or not, force you, entertainingly, to form an opinion, come to some conclusion, about what he says.
Of course everything he says about group critiques in studio art goes double for the creative writing “workshop.”
And Mormons aren’t Christians–they’re more like Mithras worshippers.
This is terrific stuff!! Here I am bringing the evening’s movie over to the neighbor’s and I’ve been laughing too much to leave for 20 minutes. Damn you Hickey. I mean you rule. Hair? every detail is perfect.
thx
Susannah