Archives for 2009

By Devin Hurd

This is not rocket science. Ignorance is as good a reason to speculate as impudence or curiosity. Thousands of brilliant readings have arisen out of ignorance–some of them mine, none of them Freud’s.

Did I read this right? Is Dave Hickey praising his own ignorance at the expense of Sigmund Freud? This is a strange turn in a book of essays that has more than its share of strange turns and flare-ups of intellectual anger.

On the other hand:

The subject here is “beauty”–not what it is but what it does–its rhetorical function in our discourse with images. Secondarily, the subject is how in the final two-thirds of the twentieth century we have done without it by reassigning its traditional function to a loose confederation of museums, universities, bureaus, foundations, publications, and endowments. I characterize this cloud of bureaucracies generally as the “therapeutic institution,” although other names might do. One might call it an “academy,” I suppose, except for the fact that it upholds no standards and proposes no secular agenda beyond its own soothing assurance that the “experience of art,” under its politically correct auspices, will be redemptive–an assurance founded upon an even deeper faith in “art-watching” as a form of grace that, by its very nature, is good for both our spiritual health and our personal growth–regardless and in spite of the crazy shit that individual works might egregiously recommend.

This opening paragraph of “After the Great Tsunami: On Beauty and the Therapeutic Institution” best captures the overall thrust of this book. The casual–and well placed–profanity providing the lens through which Hickey views all institutions. A commentary upon the impulse to supplant beauty and transcendence with “meaning” as an effort to contain the difficult avenues opened up by unfettered curiosity.

Transplanted into the realm of instrumental music–with its own beauties and abstractions–I am reminded of my own graduate school experience within an institution of “higher learning.” In particular, the writings of Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff as an effort to apply linguistic theory to tonal language representing a direct effort to ascribe “meaning” to an inherently abstract medium. A Generative Theory of Tonal Music was particularly popular with the music cognition crowd and an unsubtle effort to marginalize non-tonal music as “opaque” and inherently “without meaning.” At the time I was operating under the influence of John Cage and puzzled at why “meaning” was the endgame of creating or perceiving music in the first place. After a lifetime of imposed “meanings” from the forces of both organized religion and academia, the notion of “meaninglessness” was the attractive retreat and reflexive reaction that drew me toward the study and creation of music in the first place. In retrospect, I question the fake divide between tonal and non-tonal languages or even the concept that “language” is the right metaphor to begin with. “Language” and “meaning” became tools for reducing the experiential reality of music and doing away with beauty in the very manner described by Hickey in all five of his essays on the topic.

The observation that institutions are at best dysfunctional is easily arrived at. And a fortunate reality in that beauty might not survive otherwise. Beauty is to the institutions of academia, museums and endowments as spirituality is to organized religion. It is best experienced when these establishments get out of the way.

The essays that make up The Invisible Dragon are both noble and frustrating. They are flawed and engaging at the same time. The thick, academic language coming off with a self-loathing as Hickey rails against the failings of institutions with a writing style propped up by many of those same organizations. The introduction to this new edition reveals the persecution complex that fuels the emotional fire found in these texts. The ideas that eventually seep through (at least to this reader) bubble to the surface as a challenge to renew one’s personal sensibilities and honest assessment of artistic experience. As well as a reminder to regard institutional assessments and group think with proper suspicion. In the end, one’s personal curiosities should and do trump barriers placed by external interpretation.

By Alexandra Gardner

Okay, I admit it–this book made my head spin. In order to reframe some ideas that I absolutely do find applicable to music, I kept imagining silly scenarios that would illustrate the different ways in which beauty can be dangerous.

***

Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!

Attention spectators!

Welcome to a rivalry that is centuries old. These two opponents have been challenging one another for as long as anyone can remember, and every match is different. One never knows how things will play out between these two!

In one corner we haaaave….BEAUTY!!
(crowd goes wild, clapping, stomping, yelling)

And in the opposing corner please welcome….CONTENT!!!
(smattered clapping, low murmuring…a little hoot from the nosebleed seats)

We’re VERY glad we could engage them both today! When Beauty shows up alone, the situation quickly becomes gooey and sappy and self-indulgent. Content alone is just as bad, especially when it brings along a translator to help out, such as the dreaded program note (*gasp*) which can be long-winded and monotonous.

So let’s go, people! Get ready to rumble!! (Referee blows whistle)

Scenario 1:
Beauty and Content dance in a circle around the ring. After a few spins, Beauty, who is looking quite dashing, lunges towards well-dressed hipsterish Content, grabs it and lifts it up overhead. The two remain in this pose triumphantly as the crowd cheers enthusiastically for both. Win-win!!

This is Beauty for the Forces of Good–in my world, anyway–drawing the spectator into Content that it might not normally look at/listen to or have any knowledge about. It is the sort of beauty that Hickey describes as “vaguely surprising”, and that can serve as an agent of change. Too much independent thinking can be dangerous from the point of view of the Institution (whatever that may be). A personal example of this harmonious integration of beauty and content is Steve Reich’s early tape piece, Come Out, which pretty much altered the course of my life when I was a college student. I was flabbergasted at the way he took a recording of someone describing a very bad situation and transformed it into something totally beautiful, without altering the politically charged nature of the content.

Let’s play this out another way:

Scenario 2:
This Beauty is Very Expansive, Frilly and Strangely Alluring–so much so that the audience can’t help but stare. Beauty immediately slams poor little bookish Content onto the floor, then dives on top of Content, pinning it and completely obscuring it from view. Audience is stunned into silence. (Cue crickets chirping)

Sometimes Beauty can be so overwhelming that it lulls people into complacency, masking Content. For instance, the Sting Song “Every Breath You Take,” has been played at weddings everywhere, having been totally misconstrued as an earnest romantic love song, rather than the ranting of an obsessed stalker that it is….much to the dismay of the artist. This situation presents a danger to the artist and to the audience by twisting the message into something it’s not.

There is another danger here–this scenario may also make certain artists and audiences skeptical of beauty, and dismiss a work of art without giving it a opportunity to communicate something. In the same way that extremely beautiful women are presumed to be not so bright, if a work of art is TOO beautiful, it is often thought to be devoid of content. It has no teeth.

Plenty of composers struggle with beauty vs. content. Just the other day in a rehearsal I heard a composer tell the performers, “When I was working on this section, the music just became more and more beautiful, and I didn’t know how to handle it….I kept wondering, what will people think??”.

By Amanda MacBlane

Hickey’s interpretation of the dominant-submissive dynamic between a
work of art and its beholder, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of
Masoch and Sade, claims that:

The traditional, contractual alliance between the image and its
beholder (of which beauty is the signature, and in which there is no
presumption of received virtue) has been supplanted by a hierarchical
one between art, presumed virtuous, and a beholder presumed in need of
it. This is the signature of the therapeutic institution.”

More succinctly, Hickey contends that beauty requires that a beholders relationship to a work be based on free consent, while the experience of art in the institution leaves us victimized–“ignored, disenfranchised, and instructed. Then we are told that it is ‘good’ for us.”



Going back to the very first post, trying to see if Hickey’s argument
holds true in the world of “abstract, instrumental music”, in order to
draw a parallel we would look at the relationship between the work and
the listener. Yet, there is something missing from the equation. Music
offers a way into the work that visual art does not–performing.

As a musician, whether or not the actual piece of music is immediately
gratifying, playing it is often a pleasure. Performers, by their very
nature, are both submissive to the work and enfranchised to develop
their own interpretation. I don’t think that it is a coincidence that
pieces I’ve played often stick with me longer than pieces I’ve just
heard. The simple experience of playing music, makes you listen to it
differently than a non-musician would. I would never say that my
opinion is therefore more valid than a non-musician’s, just that what
I want from the music–what will bring that pleasure and
transformation–might be different.

Furthermore, music (instrumental or not) is capable of eliciting
emotions without requiring that we rationalize them or assign them a
verbal meaning. Like Elvis Costello said, “Writing about music is like
dancing about architecture.” Just because there isn’t a blatant
message that can be summed up in words doesn’t necessarily mean that
nothing is being communicate and a musician is more likely to be in
tune with this as they spend hours living with a piece to determine
how to interpret it.

So having lived in this musician’s dynamic for so long, as I imagine
most of the other book club participants have, I do not necessarily
expect or desire an immediate grasp of the
art/music/film/dance/theater etc. that is set before me. Part of the
pleasure I get is from the puzzle–figuring it out, adding my own
interpretation, trying to link it to the world around me. While
institutions might try to control what I see, it is a personal
decision to submit to their teachings.

Of course this doesn’t solve the mystery of why some things beckon to
me, while I simply say “sayonara” (thanks Marc G.!) to others. I guess
that is up to me. In the end, it’s hard to shake off the values that
have been beaten into us including that “beauty is in the eye of the
beholder” and, in my life, I am that beholder.

I just reread all the posts we’ve contributed to book club this week and, like Matthew, am feeling well satisfied that the time we’ve invested in wrestling with Hickey’s text and trying it on in a music context was an investment well made. Vamping in front of a mirror is almost always guaranteed fun, whether you intend to buy the dress or not.

One issue that hasn’t come up here yet is the idea that some of what Hickey finds missing in today’s art is not missing from the art itself but from the conversation about the art and our experience with it, things that “remain verbally invisible and therefore accidental to any determination we might make in ‘serious’ discourse about the virtues of the work.”

Still, if we don’t talk about it, isn’t it in danger of being misplaced and forgotten? This sentiment connected up in a way with an essay my colleague Trevor Hunter had sent me early last week, a meditation by Jon Baskin on the work and underlying philosophy of David Foster Wallace. Baskin suggests that Wallace worried that his contemporaries were failing to do what he felt their readers needed them to do, “to offer counsel on questions of judgment, emotion, and truth” and instead indulging in “hip nihilism, ‘value-neutral’ morality and an essentially ironic response to life’s challenges.”

Perhaps I overstep, but I think this at least parallels what Hickey is trying to direct our attention to: that we need art, need it to interact and communicate with us, not merely perform a series of clever tricks or abstract theories in front of us. Wallace asks for something similar, and acknowledges how difficult a road it will be:

In contrast to “the old postmodern insurgents [who] risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship… the next real literary ‘rebels’ might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.'”

I passed the essay to Corey and he suggested that “perhaps the naivete we ‘post-whatever’ artists associate with old-fashioned ideas like subjective consciousness is exactly what’s needed to rediscover ‘meaning,’ to reaffirm that we are human ‘subjects,’ not merely automatons or non-entities, which is, as [Baskin] points out, an end to the conversation. Maybe that naivete is required when we address aesthetic beauty as well.”

Inspired, as per usual, by my reading of Wallace and my conversation with Corey, I went back and dug into an earlier piece of Wallace’s that Baskin had heavily referenced, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction. I ended up entangled in additional connections (though, admittedly, these perhaps exist only in my own head, so bear with). With a nod toward the need for “the strange” in “the beautiful” we’ve discussed this week, here’s Wallace at some length considering the issue in the context of American fiction and television viewing:

Realistic fiction’s big job used to be to afford easements across boarders, to help readers leap over walls of self and locale and show us unseen or -dreamed-of people and cultures and ways to be. Realism made the strange familiar. Today, when we eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching Soviet-satellite newscast of the Berlin Wall’s fall–i.e., when darn near everything presents itself as familiar–it’s not a surprise that some of today’s most ambitious “realistic” fiction is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In doing so, in demanding fictional access behind lenses and screens and headlines and re-imagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, image, and appearance, image-fiction is paradoxically trying to restore what’s (mis)taken for “real” to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that, almost without exception, image-fiction doesn’t satisfy its own agenda. Instead, it most often degenerates into a kind of jeering, surfacy look “behind the scenes” of the very televisual front people already jeer at, and can already get behind the scenes of via Entertainment Tonight and Remote Control.

I carried this passage around with me for a couple of days because it both challenges us to get over ourselves (and our affected pretensions) and to realize that if and when we man up enough to meet our readers, our viewers, our audiences, in this way, creating something that will truly move them is going to be a hell of a lot harder than we ever could have imagined.

By Matthew Guerrieri

This week’s discussion of Hickey’s book around these parts has been by
and large skeptical-critical, which kind of gives the impression that
the book was a chore. But (for me, at least) I had a good time
disagreeing with it–I read the book a second time and had more
fun disagreeing with it. So, just to say thank you for by far the
highest-quality procrastination of the week, here’s something I liked
about the book: Hickey’s defense of French
Structuralism.

Somehow, the delicate instrumentalities of
continental thought had been transmuted by the American professoriat
into a highfalutin, pseudo-progressive billy club with which to beat
dissenters about the head and shoulders.

… Foucault’s
ruthless, timely dismantling of the human sciences had simply
vanished. It had, in fact, been surgically amputated and a dumbed-down
travesty of Frankfurt School sociology sewn onto its place. Barthes’s
dead author walked the steppes as an avatar of ethnic and sexual
identity, replete with neediness and aura. Foucault’s Panopticon and
Lacan’s gaze were untidily bundled into one lumpy paranoid concept….
(p. xix)

Though I would say that the caricature of
Continental thought came as much from outside as inside (my alma
mater’s former
president, after all, was known for spitting about the Frankfurt
School like John Lithgow in Footloose), the reminder that the
original thinkers were more elegant, subtle, and even playful than you
might get from their reputation is always welcome. I never dip back
into them without feeling refreshed (even Foucault, who can be pretty
heavy going in translation). So even though I didn’t quite buy
Hickey’s application of the Bentham-Chardin divide from Foucault’s Discipline
and Punish (pp. 5-8), it was still my favorite part of the
book, and put a lot of the rest of his criticism of institutions in a
more complex and useful context. In some ways, disagreeing with
someone who’s read Barthes et al. can be more invigorating that
agreeing with someone who hasn’t.

By Marc Geelhoed

I was struck by the radically American democratic call to arms (I almost wrote cri de coeur) that runs through each of Hickey’s five essays. He writes, “Art is either a democratic political instrument, or it is not,” on page 15, about the response of Senator Jesse Helms to Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, and goes on to write later about the value of an essentially intuited notion of “beauty” that should govern our choices about what is valuable in art as well as what the market deems valuable. He starts out by writing about the chilly reception he and his book received the first time they were published (the book, at least; Hickey’d been around for years) in 1993, with lecture halls filled with hissing students and faculty who marched out en masse. Anyone who cares not what the public thinks so long as they’re read is an elitist, at best, and that doesn’t explain Hickey at all.

Hickey’s aim is, as others in the book group have already said, to reinstate the notion of beauty as an artistic criterion on the level of all the others we cherish, and somewhat removing the intellectual appeal of art for something that’s more immediately gratifying. It’s the immediate gratification that leads us to pay attention in the first place, and which lead to its ultimate staying power. “Beauty is precedent,” he writes, with his own italics. “Beautiful works survive sans virtue. Virtuous works sans beauty do not. In a democratic society, we express our discomfort with Beauty’s off-site rationale by dispensing with it. But we keep the beauty.” So, we excise the reason(s) we think something beautiful, but keep the beautiful object.

I’d argue that the rationale was never even really dispensed with, since it was never arrived at or wrestled with in the first place. I think–and how to prove this I have no idea–that most people when confronted with a painting, a novel, a symphony, or The Sopranos, make a gut judgment about whether it excites them and they find it worth revisiting, or they leave it by the wayside. The why, the how, the mysteries of its creation, these aren’t exactly their focus. They want to be entertained, not to be treated as fools, and if the work on display achieves that, hey, great. If it doesn’t, sayonara.

Which leads me to wonder about his castigation of institutions and the “bureaucrats” who staff them, and their neutral, “therapeutic,” education-oriented attitudes. I say this not just because I am one of those bureaucrats who’s all-too-aware of their goals and the compromises that go into achieving them, but that I’m honestly a little puzzled by why the institutions are worth going after with tooth and nail. I mean, someone’s got to put this stuff on display, and that takes a great deal of planning and preparation and deal-making and negotiation, and compromise and a fair amount of artistic knowledge and a willingness to play nice and a willingness to give someone the what-for, and those seem like small prices to pay for the chance to go to the Met Museum and look at altarpieces, or go to Orchestra Hall, ahem, and hear the Chicago Symphony. I’ll grant in an instant that there are excesses and excessive timidity in certain cases, but those aren’t deal breakers.

A lengthy quotation:

“The experience of art within the therapeutic institution, by contrast, is presumed to be an end in itself. Under its auspices, we play a minor role in the master’s narrative–the artist’s tale–and celebrate his autonomous acts even as we are offhandedly victimized by the work’s philosophical power and ruthless authority. […] Whatever we get, we deserve–and what we get most prominently is ignored, disenfranchised, and instructed. Then we are told that it is ‘good’ for us.”

(“Victimized”? Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art sells a t-shirt that says “FEAR NO ART,” but I don’t think Hickey’s assaulting art is what they had in mind.)

Again, this is super democratic and basically a call for self-education, and while I think that autodidacts make fascinating people and would make an outstanding cadre of curators, I’m not yet ready to pronounce them the final arbiters. If nothing else, who’s going to do the fund-raising? And is it really so bad to have to look at a painting on a wall in a museum? Is coming across it as you backpack through Florence so superior?

By Matthew Guerrieri

Here’s where he really lost me:

In the restructured
modernist dynamic, the role of the beholder is to be dominsated and
awestruck by the work of art, which undergoes a sex change and is
recast as a simulacrum of the male artist’s autonomous, impenetrable
self.
…
Under these revised priorities, the validity of
receding illusionistic space in painting was immediately called into
question. This imaginary space had been traditionally, and quite
rightly, perceived as “community property,” shared by the work, its
creator, and its beholder. The new, modern priorities insisted that no
such community existed. The flat picture plane came to represent the
property line dividing the mundane world of the beholder from the
exalted territory of the artist’s incarnate philosophy. (pp.
41-42)

Earlier (p. 36), Hickey really lays down the law:
“Today we are content to slither through the flatland of Baudelairian
modernity, trapped like cocker spaniels in the eternal, positive
presentness of a terrain so visually impoverished that we cannot even
lie to any effect in its language of images–nor imagine with
any authority–nor even remember.”

As someone with an Ellsworth
Kelly print hanging above his piano, I can only say, this is not the
way I perceive beauty. I think the problem is this: Hickey is very
concerned about modernism’s elimination of the illusion of three
dimensions in Renaissance painting. But he doesn’t seem to be
considering that the plane of a painting is a convenient fiction as
well–all paintings are three-dimensional objects, we experience
them in three dimensions, because we experience the world in three
dimensions. And the “flat picture plane” is just as much an
illusion as Renaissance perspective.

A big difference between
the two is how that illusion changes as the work is regarded from
different angles in the real, three-dimensional world. For
traditional, representative perspective, any viewing angle but
straight on collapses the illusion. But for abstracts, the
different angles produce different images, different proportions–the
“flat plane” illusion not only holds, it enables–the illusion
of a flat picture plane makes possible manifold relationships between
the work and the viewer.

My initial reaction was that this
difference–between seeing abstraction as a boundary and seeing it as a
source of possibility–might be roughly analogous to reacting to
analysis of a piece of music and reacting to a live performance. But the
more I re-read the book, I find it hard to see how any of its
arguments about beauty and the relationship between art and audience
can carry over into any music that doesn’t come pre-packaged with a
programmatic frame of reference. This might be because the book
doesn’t ever explain what Hickey likes about abstraction–he
gives Frank Stella a hard time but elsewhere gives an approving
shout-out to Morris Louis, which is a little cognitively dissonant to
me. (I’d be really interested to know what he thinks about painters
like Seurat or Matisse.) But going on what’s there, beauty seems to be
defined at the intersection of a work’s visual pleasure and its
representative content–which I can see for representative, figurative
art, but falls apart when the content is not immediately recognizable
or easily agreed upon.

Page 71: “So we talk, because the
experience of American beauty is inextricable from its optimal social
consequence: our membership in a happy coalition of citizens who agree
on what is beautiful, valuable, and just.” I have real problems with
that one–not because I don’t think it accurately describes a lot of
the way people perceive art nowadays, but because Hickey seems to
think it a good thing. Notice that this is now shifting the viewer’s
pleasure from their viewing of the work to the crowd’s validation of
their opinion. I think this need for validation inevitably warps
artistic values to market values–but those market values aren’t a
reflection of artistic value, but of ease of marketability. On
both these counts–a privileging of representative art and a need for
like-minded validation–an awful lot of the music I find beautiful–any
music, really, that doesn’t have an obvious textual or cultural
frame–is bound to come up short, because it a) such music tends to
require a less passive interpretive engagement on the part of the
listener, which means everyone’s going to build up their own
different, individual interpretive framework, and b) music is hard to
talk about. The fact that I still experience such music as beautiful
isn’t diminished by the possible lack of a “happy coalition.” The
secret ballot is a hallmark of democracy as well.