Archives for 2009

By Marc Weidenbaum

I’ve struggled with Dave Hickey’s book. It’s good to struggle, and I’m glad for this group, ’cause maybe I could get some help.

It’s a book about “beauty,” and the appreciation of beauty, and the way that beauty isn’t enough the subject of discussion and concern for those who are concerned with discussing art. I find that idea fascinating. Hickey dissects how beauty, the idea of beauty, is often ignored, and when he does so, it’s like watching a highly experienced (if at times self-involved and poetically opaque) sushi chef at work–or perhaps a highly experienced coroner, but I’ve never had that pleasure.

It’s a book largely concerned with a specific photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, with a specific, charged social and political context intrinsic to his work’s consumption (at least, to Hickey’s point, at this stage, when we’re still too close in time to its production to ignore that context). I find that photographer’s work, not to mention his courage, inspiring. Hickey views those photos through a literary critical lens that proves illuminating, especially when his focus is Michel Foucault.

But in reading Invisible Dragon, I came to wonder if Hickey’s emphasis on the latter overshadowed the former to the point of essentially putting beauty back in a rhetorical dustbin. There’s so much about how the marginal is an essential component of beauty, that in the end, I feel like we’re back near stage one, where it’s mostly context, theory, politics, and the market that are the subject–and that combined, they are the source of validation: a socio-political lattice to support a proposition of beauty.

I fully appreciate that strange can be beautiful, but the ongoing suggestion here seems to be that strange is a necessity for beauty, and that doesn’t seem to play out. Forgive me for thinking of this simplistically, but: Would a subject of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos find them and their content strange, or for that matter, more broadly, would an individual for whom that milieu is highly familiar? And if not, would those people then not be capable of finding these photos beautiful? And in a world that is increasingly accepting of the community that Mapplethorpe documented/celebrated/witnessed, is it therefore a matter that his work is less beautiful? Is Hickey saying that only the strange can be beautiful, that that which we think is beautiful but is not strange cannot be beautiful?

I know strange, like funny, means different things to different people. So perhaps all Hickey’s asking us to do is find the strange in whatever we find beautiful, and to find the beauty in things we find strange. But if so, that’s never as clear to me as the more paradoxical thing above that I was wrestling with.

That’s just part of my struggle, but it’s a start.

Mind the Gap is getting some new guest visitors from Google, people searching for answers to big questions such as, “What is beauty?” After 2 a.m., who knows what windows open up that compel us to ask a machine such a question.

Anyway, these late night visitors were of some comfort to me because Hickey’s text has left me digging around deep in the mush of my own definitions of things. Much of my musing is focused on the ways in which institutions deflate the risk out of experiencing art, and the impact that has on culture. My friend Rebecca likes to joke about all the bizarre (which is often also code for “cheap”) places we go in search of musical experiences: old warehouses, dirty basements, venues that require ferry boat rides. If I think about it, in this unsanctioned wildness, we do confront the art more empowered than when sitting meekly at Carnegie Hall (others may not sit meekly there, but I certainly haven’t overcome that, even after all these years). And for this or some other reason I have not identified, the art itself means more to me, resonates longer, when it is good, even if more often than not it is forgettably bad. I’m not sure how to describe it exactly, but I think it is only under these circumstances that I could truly be gobsmacked by music.

As I mosey down that path further, I come to another passage of Hickey’s discussion that hits a nerve (especially in this economy):

If we entertain, even for a moment, the slightest presumption that an institution, suddenly and demonstrably bereft of its social and philosophical underpinnings, is liable to imminent collapse, we have committed what George Bernard Shaw considered the most suicidal error that a citizen can. As Shaw pointed out, institutions die from loss of funding, not lack of meaning. We die from lack of meaning and of joy.

Later he highlights the disconnect between our appointed guardians (bureaucrats, academics, etc.), who “labor to protect us from error and danger, so we must forgive their distress at the tumult in the street” and our own goals, which are slightly at odds. “Guardians are concerned with securing our Safety. We are pursuing our Happiness.” A cruel sleight of hand, and all too true, no?

*

Admittedly, suddenly everything I’m reading seems connected to this discussion, so forgive me if I stretch too far here. While the institutions may be looking after us with the good intentions of a Mother Superior, the steely hand of the commercial marketplace offers dangerous harbor of another stripe. Hickey notes that beautiful art sells, and that’s why people are suspicious of it.

If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells something else, it is a seductive advertisement. Art is not idolatry, they argue, nor is it advertising. Idolatry and advertising, however, are indeed art, and the greatest works of art are always and inevitably a bit of both.

No matter where you fall in this debate, by anyone’s accounting, this Target/Black Eyed Peas promotion kind of follows the argument to its horrifying conclusion to a factor of 10–comepletely unbeautiful music shilling for a discount store. So while at first I thought the fear of commerce was irrational–isn’t everyone selling something?–later I acknowledged that there were degrees on that scale. But I have long believed that some of our ages most brilliant artistic minds are working in advertising, not in Chelsea. So what about the recent Prius ad package, say? How much art is in there? Does that make it any “better”? Does that lend it any value outside how many cars it sells?

By Corey Dargel

The author, Dave Hickey, writes in response to the question of how to transplant his argument from visual art to music:

The argument I’m making is essentially formal and abstract. It does presuppose culturally acquired musical assumptions, of course. I am proposing that works of art that are sufficiently patterned and sufficiently surprising are receptive to radical interpretation regardless of their narrative content.

In culture, formal devices can take on ambient and often fleeting meanings that speak to extra-formal issues. Some pop examples: As Wilson Pickett said, “The back beat IS the midnight hour.” James Brown jumping the downbeat became an icon of black aspiration. Reggae dropping the downbeat creates what a friend of mine called the “mary jane swoon.” Octave jumps and octave drops in melodic structures are associated with attenuated and rising aspiration because melodies usually retreat after octave jumps and rise after an octave drops (“Over the Rainbow;” “Shining Hour”). Keith Richard’s I-V rock and roll chords and open fifth country harmonies both speak of cultural instability because [the major/minor third is missing]. The cultural aggression of the Rolling Stones derives absolutely from Keith playing on top of the beat with Jagger and Watts behind it. The first rule of disco–cover every note length with a pattern–actually teaches you how to dance.

These, I realize, are very tiny, simple devices but they have large consequences. They demonstrate the way formal manipulations acquire cultural meanings.

Contemporary composers of my acquaintance, of course, sneer at pattern and pulse. They should listen to “Heart of Glass.”

I am taken by the phrase “sufficiently patterned and sufficiently surprising” which is a variation on what Hickey writes on pages 9-10 of The Invisible Dragon:

Without the urgent intention of reconstructing the beholder’s view of things, the image has no reason to exist, much less to be beautiful. The comfort of the familiar always bears with it the frisson of the exotic, and the effect of this conflation, ideally, is persuasive excitement–visual pleasure. As Baudelaire says, “the beautiful is always strange,” by which he means, of course, that it is always strangely familiar and vaguely surprising.

It seems to me that the composers who sneer at pattern and pulse no longer have a monopoly on any but the most conservative musical institutions (and they certainly never had any clout in the marketplace). The most obvious examples–in contemporary classical music–of “sufficiently patterned and sufficiently surprising” can be found in late minimalism and post-minimalism. Not surprisingly, then, these genres of contemporary classical music have had the most appeal outside of academic and institutional circles.

By Corey Dargel

In the first essay from The Invisible Dragon, Dave Hickey argues that arbiters and artists care too much about the meaning of art and not enough about whether it gives us pleasure. His focus is on visual art:

Since pleasure is the true occasion for looking at anything, any theory of images that is not grounded in the pleasure of the beholder begs the question of art’s efficacy and dooms itself to inconsequence… If [images] only do things after we have talked about them, then they aren’t doing things, we are. [p. 2]

However, Hickey believes that beautiful works of art tend to use their beauty to persuade us. They make something strange look beautiful, in order to seduce the viewer into accepting and ultimately appreciating what is portrayed. The artwork’s power comes not from criticizing the mainstream–which only acknowledges the mainstream’s importance and ghettoizes the artist–but from celebrating the margins of society, and doing so “persuasively, powerfully, and beautifully.” [p. 15]. Of Robert Mapplethorpe’s pornographic photographs (NSFW), which inspired the essay, Hickey writes:

A single artist with a single group of images had somehow overcome the aura of moral isolation, gentrification, and mystification that surrounds the practice of contemporary art in this nation and directly threatened those in actual power with his celebration of marginality… It was the celebration… that made these images dangerous. [p. 14]

Can Hickey’s argument be transplanted from the genre of visual art to the genre of music? I am skeptical but anxious to be persuaded. The problem, it seems to me, is that instrumental music is too abstract to “celebrate the margins of society” in a way that would be apparent to all listeners. Music that relies on text has an easier time celebrating the margins–songs by The Smiths and operas by Robert Ashley come to mind–as does music that interacts with other disciplines like Meredith Monk’s Ellis Island. Are we allowed to take the artist’s biography and background into consideration, for example in the cases of Arthur Russell, Harry Partch, and Julius Eastman?

Tell me if I’m missing something: Can you think of any music that celebrates the margins, that makes something strange seem beautiful, without resorting to textual or visual elements, and without requiring a knowledge of the composer’s or performer’s biography?

* Andy Warhol, Ambulance Disaster, 1963-64. Founding Collection, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

Welcome to the second Blogger Book Club. Today we dive into Dave Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty. For anyone out there who would like to play along, please don’t be shy about jumping in. We’ll pass the Chex Mix your way.

In preparation for this convo, Corey and I had a quick phone chat yesterday about how Hickey’s arguments, based in the world of visual art, can and cannot be applied to the field of music. Has music faced the same conflicts in the 20th century that Hickey points to in the art world? Has the result been the same? Corey and I came up with a lot of questions about approaching these ideas, but I can’t say we hit on any brilliant summary judgments just yet.

On the surface of things, there were some easy parallels to chart as I read. Something of a “Who Cares If You Look?” change in the relationship between the artist, the art, and the observer, in which the observer–once the point in this ménage à trois–was made to feel unwelcome, abused, or blatantly ignored. Yup, that arguments has a familiar refrain to it. Then, there was Hickey’s mention of the sheer wrongness of approaching the work of a living artist in the same way we approach classics from the canon whose context and political struggles are so far detached from our own reality. Been there, seen that in music as well. But the most frequent point the essays came back to was how it’s not the marketplace, but the protective institutions that have sprung up around the “art” and the “bureaucrats” who run them that filters our consumption of art and skews how we digest it, all in the name of good shepherding. Our private impressions of art outside of these institutions and the language we most respond to is something different than the experience of encountering art on a white wall and reading a wall tag about it, and the cultural impact of that is huge. Hickey suggests that new art might do well to exist outside the museums for a bit, that there might be “work for them to do in the world among the living” first. Can we say the same when it comes to music?

The book, of course, is a collection of “essays on beauty”, not so much describing what it is (For definitions, he points to Baudelaire: that what is beautiful is “always strangely familiar and vaguely surprising.”) as what it can do (sell, seduce, advertise, connect, challenge, change). What is beauty in music and is it employed to do the same kinds of things?

I’m cruising (okay, okay, more like trudging) through the end of next week’s blogger book club book: The Invisible Dragon, by Dave Hickey. I’ve found it to be a great read, brimming with ideas I want to try out in the context of music, but it’s also been a challenge. There are a considerable number of visual art scene insider references and grad-school vocabulary words. Seriously, it’s really only at times like these that I think I may have missed out by passing on getting an advanced degree. I haven’t done a lot of reading or argument analysis in this style of rhetoric, as the pace at which I have consumed this slim 120-page volume attests.

Still, Hickey’s thinking has brought out some interesting concepts that I’m greatly looking forward to exploring with the gang next week. I’ll give you a taste of what we’re in for with this quote from the book’s final essay (One of the more easily digestible ones, promise):

As Americans, we are citizens of a large, secular, commercial democracy; we are relentlessly borne forth on the flux of historical change, routinely flung laterally by the exigencies of dreams and commerce. We are bereft of the internalized commonalities of race, culture, language, region, and religion that traditionally define “peoples.” As such we are social creatures charged with inventing the conditions of our sociability out of the fragile resource of our private pleasures and secret desires. So, lacking the terms for communication, we correlate. We gather around icons from the worlds of fashion, sports, the arts, and entertainment as we would about the hearth. We trace infinite lines of transit around these strange attractors. We organize ourselves in nonexclusive communities of desire. We stay or go according to the whims of romance or the climate of the times. This “weather map” model of social organization may be construed as beguiling or appalling, but there us no denying its efficacy, its appropriateness, or its provenance.

Okay, yeah, obviously. But still, isn’t that a concept that our average audience expansion and development initiatives in the arts seem never to have fully acknowledged/integrated? Enjoyed, when it happens for them, sure, but not really taken advantage of or (successfully, artificially) engineered. Maybe it can’t be, but something about The Bachelorette still being on the air makes me think it can.