Mind the Gap

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.

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?