Dan Oppenheimer, John Pistelli, Paul Franz and I had the idea of writing a bit around a common object/topic, giving our already somewhat overlapping Substacks less of the spirit of Old Man Shouts at Cloud and more, I guess, of middle aged men shouting at cloud, or, let’s see, at each other (Ashbery at fifty says: you… turned your face fully toward night/ Speaking into it like a megaphone).
We settled on the new, thirtieth-anniversary edition of the art critic Dave Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon. In part making a virtue of convenience and self-interest (Dan wrote the book about Hickey, which I reviewed for Tablet, where his brother works—it’s a merit-based system, folks) and thrift, since the majority of us already had review copies. But it’s also possible to invent an after-the-fact internal justification (when isn’t it?), drawn from the text himself.
Hickey is the preeminent booster for the way our contagious excitements about aesthetic—that is, beautiful and ugly—things become talk and talk becomes writing. Here’s what he says about that in “The Empire of Talk” (1999), one of the previously uncollected essays that Gary Kornblau, Hickey’s editor, includes in the present edition of Invisible Dragon:
Everybody has an agenda, and meaning arises out of the perpetual referendum of conflicting interests that constitutes discourse…
The whole discourse of Western art… begins when artists commissioned to produce ideologically identical works of art to adorn the churches of Rome began to develop private constituencies, and when artists commissioned to produce soft-core pornography for princely bedrooms began to develop public constituencies. It begins, specifically, when Guido and Salvatore, visiting from Ferrara, sit down with a glass of wine after a day of wandering through the Eternal City and decide that they prefer Raphael to Michaelangelo, for reasons they don’t quite understand and will continue to discuss on the long ride home. In the preference for Raphael over Michaelangelo, Guido and Salvatore affirm that, even though the intended meanings and significations that inform the works are virtually identical, the consequences of the works themselves are different enough to talk about, to occasion a preference and cause the quarrels that have continued from that time to this.
The discourse of Western art, in other words, begins in talk, in quarrels… the sociability of these objects… The cruel, brilliant, happy, brave, stupid atmosphere in which art lives and dies.
I love the above! I’ll say in a bit what I think is dangerously stupid about it. But I want to affirm first how literally, autobiographically true it is for me, since not only am I now engaged in a kind of informal off-hand writing that seems to approach talking (more later on that, and its problems) even as we, as it were, speak but also because I first encountered Hickey in college as my then-boyfriend read me aloud one of the particularly sublime-ridiculous passages from his essay on Liberace, “A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz,” which is every bit as lusciously bonkers as the Fitzgerald story its title riffs. In the long quote above, I guess you got a sense of Hickey at his Frenchified and half-PhD-ed but not at his wild, extravagant, cock-out-for-prog-rock prose style as he uses it in the Liberace essay—it’s an acquired taste.
I hated it. My ex is one of those guys—they make them in every orientation—who can appreciate Ken Russell, Iron Maiden, Parliament Funkadelic, Sun Ra, Kenneth Anger, Frank O’Hara, Marc Almond, Scott Walker, Jobriath, Wallace Stevens of “The Comedian as the Letter C,” Russ Meyer, all those explosions impossible to classify as serious or comic, camp, ironic, glittery, fiery, shoutingly tender, are-they-putting-me-on-with-this-shit.
And Hickey, first in his range of appreciations, is such a person: Liberace along with Dolly Parton, Siegfried and Roy, the climax of “Un Coeur Simple,” Mapplethorpe’s fisting photos, the attention-demanding always-leave-‘em-wanting more show-stoppers and here’s-something-weird! numbers.
His writing can also be like what he appreciates. Here’s the beginning of the first essay of the original edition of Invisible Dragon (which Kornblau has put second to make room for an earlier essay on Dolly Parton that frankly isn’t that interesting but since people have lately re-deified Dolly as a kind of—as Hickey noted already in the early 70s, but approvingly—strangely sexless monument of abstract, good-natured sex appeal, of jiggling neon American apple pie post-feminist wholesome for everyone cunt-without-cunt, drag-without-bite, I’m sure it will move copies!):
I was drifting, daydreaming really, through the waning moment of a panel discussion on the subject of “What’s Happening Now,” drawing cartoon daggers on a yellow pad and vaguely formulating strategies for avoiding punch and cookies, when I realized that I was being addressed from the audience. A lanky graduate student had risen to his feet and had solicited my opinion as to what the “Issue of the Nineties” would be. Snatched from my reverie, I said, “Beauty,” and then, more firmly, “The issue of the Nineties will be beauty!”—a total improvisatory goof—an off-the-wall, jump-start free association that rose unbidden to my lips from God knows where. Or perhaps I was being ironic, wishing it so but not believing it likely? I don’t know, but the total uncomprehending silence that greeted this modest proposal lent it immediate credence for me.
My interlocutor plopped back into his seat, exuding dismay, and, out of sheer perversity, I resolved to follow beauty where it led into the silence…
Now this delights me; then—I was I guess twenty-two, trying to learn how to write like a scholar, to be clear and simple, to do the things that now I throw away, at least when no editor tells me to keep doing them—and I’ve never been as much a fan of that exuberant excess (I can’t stand, for example, Rabelais; I’d have Paglia shot) as my ex, surely because I need a lot of negativity, and needed a decade or more of scholarly writing, as a counter-weight to my own internal ‘voice,’ which sounds more like my writing here than any elsewhere, and its manic, piling-on, show-boating, Hickeyian qualities (my ‘real life’ is towards the far end of quiet and withdrawal—a few friends, days mostly empty in the middle, without responsibilities, nudged by little interests [which can seem big only in my even smaller life, the mundanities of which are like the plastic treasure chests and castles of an aquarium] to read this or that without having to believe much in the ‘importance’ of what I’m doing—and perhaps all that 99.9% of easy gray sliding on is the air that has to be breathed for the sake of what must otherwise seem the breathless loud intensity of the kind of writing I’m doing here?)
Of course what Hickey is actually up to in the above—unlike the purely self-aggrandizing coked-up way Paglia would have told the story—is in fact mannered, crafted, controlled by his irony. There’s first the “not me claiming beauty is the issue of the 90s; it was only a goof,” and then the construction of his—which is to be our, the reader’s—seduction (a keyword of Hickey’s criticism) into beauty as he gets heatedly drawn into the void left by his unresponsive audience-in-the-story, where we, the audience-of-the-story are made to follow him.
Right off suspicions should be raised about whether what’s going on is spontaneity—doubtful whether “beauty!” appeared like that out of talk’s ether, and doubtfuller whether what Hickey has done on the page here is anything like a lark or free association (who more of a bullying tight-ass in his office, and polished stylist on the page, than Freud, who tells us what a great technique he’s invented in free association?).
Hickey did, though, for me begin in talk, and in that very kind of talk he means about the merits of something aesthetic, in this case, his own essay on Liberace and whether it was any good or more of the sort of noodly self-indulgent guitar odyssey shit my ex and his straight dude friends would enjoy while I sat in another room with long-suffering ceramicist or librarian girlfriends. The two genders, and they are both me.
Sontag says in her diary—which Hickey was right to say her son ought to have been shot for publishing—I’m having a lot of people shot today!—that you have to be something like four genders to be a great writer: the obsédé who collects material, the idiot who lets it out, as well as the stylist and critic who can say ‘no’ and ‘hmmm’ to all that catching and pitching.
Life without a certain—let me gender it, briefly, gently, male—meathead-savant vitality that thinks a fifteen-minute metal version of Rime of the Ancient Mariner would be AWESOME is unlivably quiet, polite, and MFA-y. But of course life only with it, that Anselm Kiefer enormousness, Big Chungus Lit Bro shit and Criterion-felching here’s-an-assbreakingly-slow-singleshot-four-hour-movie-from-a-Jankistani-dissident-director-my-girlfriend-hates-it-lol, would be as exhausting as that night I got too high listening to The Clones of Dr Funkenstein with my ex and his moid friends.
‘This rocks//Ugh, no’ is the more fundamental rhythm, at least in the aesthetic sphere, than male-female.
I love and hate talk as Hickey celebrates it—being a fan of being a fan—and I dread the implications of imagining that it is not just the energy in which we live, but something to be abstracted from that living and upheld as good (this is why I hate, too, every cloying, grotesquely sincere essay on “I Appreciate this Good Thing” about the liberal arts, life of the mind, reading, friendship, etc, even/especially when my friends write them—because, as I’ll quote myself saying more in a minute, these things become lies removed from their unthematized everyday ongoing backgroundness). And said so two years ago in my review of Dan’s book on Hickey:
Collectors, hobbyists, dilettantes, and cranks of every kind create what are in effect denominations of taste, whose members gather to venerate such varied idols as classic cars, Italo-disco, or football prodigies. Anyone who has ever heard two fans debate the relative merits of their favorite players, bands, etc., or gotten an earful from a frustrated amateur who knows exactly how the play should have been run, or of what better, less famous album the one you were just enjoying is a pale derivation, knows that they have a religious flavor, with the same lively, erudite, argumentative quality as the wrangles of theology students. In either case, we tolerate the obvious annoyances of such conversations, in which interlocutors aggrandize themselves and aggress each other through their mastery of niceties that escape the attention of novices, because we know, whatever their ostensible topic, that they concern the most important things. Across such talk, our traditions teach us how to experience, and share experiences of, beauty, incorporating us into a community of fellow worshippers and—in the most intense moments of aesthetic pleasure—dislocating us from our familiar self and social set, opening us to a potentially transformative encounter with something transcendent.
I thought that was a pretty good paragraph! And given what I’ve already said, it’s also clearly a memory, nasty and nostalgic, of men—whom I love and hate, let inside me and push out of me, being one and not one, just like everyone else—of whatever orientation talking to each other, from a perspective of being a resentful off-center over-hearer.
Hickey celebrates talk against what he calls writing—the officializing, normative, institutional, theory-driven attempt to codify the vitality of our ongoing, primordial immersion in discourse about art, that is about beauty and ugliness, into something meant to be permanent. Discourse, Kojeve says, is the rainbow arising from the waterfall of life. We, the drops of water, go crashing into our disappearance, while the stream and the rainbow seem stable, enduring arcs. The retardedness of rating either the onrush of mortalities or the illusions of duration one above the other, would seem obvious, but, as if it weren’t, Hickey writes (writes, that is) of a “war between talk and writing.”
Now this sounds dumb—although maybe to you generative—in the abstract, but it did light me up as he moves into the following particulars: Diderot’s letters on the Salons, which are written as if they were notes to friends on the art on display, maintain ‘the ebullient status of talk” and should be contrasted, in their “middle style” with the “contrary middle style of spoken writing, now practiced at university symposia.” Anyone who has heard someone read a paper knows exactly what Hickey means, and how vital that distinction between the two middle styles is—even if the polarity between talk and writing cries to Heaven for deconstruction.
But the supposedly desirable middle style of written talk (as opposed to the academic conference-presenter’s spoken writing is now the stuff of social media (to which apparently Hickey was rather sadly and embarrassingly—or at least embarrassingly for his editor and friend Kornblau—addicted in his last years). And it’s terrible!
Now I’m going to very self-indulgently quote myself from another essay (one of the purposes of this Substack, after all, is not only to do some new thinking preparatory of future essays, but also to call old ones to attention) at length to copy-and-paste what I take issue with in this optimism about talk, and how present day social media makes the problems with written talk (even-and-especially if that’s what I myself am doing here-now) rather obvious. I summarize in the first part of this essay the aesthetic theory of Hannah Arendt, which was, in a more worked-out way than in Hickey, posited our talk about beauty and ugliness (what she called “judgment”) as the foundation for our social and political life, to reject what Hickey calls writing and what she calls philosophy, those imperious attempts to impose on talk an authoritative order:
But the most powerful critique of her theory was suggested by Arendt herself in her 1964 essay on Nathalie Sarraute. Born Natalia Tcherniak, Sarraute (1900-1999) emigrated to France with her Russian Jewish family at the age of 2. She was one of the most original novelists of modern French literature, and the subject of Arendt’s essay, Sarraute’s 1963 novel The Golden Fruits (Les Fruits d’Or), is her masterpiece. Sarraute developed an innovative style which, instead of dialogue, presents readers elaborately metaphorical descriptions or monologues revealing what characters really think as they speak to each other. In the silent darkness from which apparently benign remarks emerge writhe tangled, nasty motives.
Sarraute drew out the vicious pettiness behind the superficialities of everyday conversation. In The Golden Fruits, she satirized the literary establishment, showing how judgments about the merits of a book—in this case a fictional novel also titled The Golden Fruits—are about anything but the book itself. Over the course of the story, the fictional novel’s reputation rises, becoming an obligatory topic of praise, and then falls, becoming a nearly universal object of derision. But no one ever cites a line of it, or has an authentic opinion—each character frantically tries to score points with the others by expressing a clever variation on the dominant mood.
Arendt found The Golden Fruits “exquisitely funny” in its attacks on “the milieu of the presumably ‘inner-directed’ elite of ‘good taste’ ... intellectuals boasting of the highest standards.” Such people, who imagine themselves as being the best equipped to make aesthetic judgments, are in fact beholden to clichés. But Arendt did not seem to notice that the characters in The Golden Fruits seem to be good Arendtians, exchanging their judgments in democratic fashion. “They exhaust all aspects, all arguments and outdo each other,” using their rhetorical skills to try to seduce each other into new perspectives. But all this talk is only a frantic effort to escape the “hell” of isolation in a modern liberal society, no less profound than the isolation of a totalitarian regime.
“‘They’ are all alike,” Arendt said of Sarraute’s characters, because, yearning for human connection, they try to use their superficially insightful twists on the ruling opinion as “passwords and talismans” that grant them entry into some select club of “those who belong together.” They cannot share personal experiences of the book with others, because their experiences have been impersonal from the outset, warped by their anxious desire to generate statements about it that will signal both their loyalty to the fashion of the moment and their individual brilliance. A ubiquitous and totalizing media conversation has made it impossible to speak one’s mind because no one thus exposed to the din of so many voices and anxious to join them, can have a mind of their own to speak.
Now that makes for a rather awkward way to start off a conversation about The Invisible Dragon—declaring from the outset that we don’t even have ‘experiences’ to talk about, that talk is from the outset animated by, if not writing than by the organizing principles of a discursive matrix that, worse than compelling us merely to repeat what is already known, obliges us to becomes speaking subjects through the addition of some new twist, some N+1, as the magazine says, on what has been said, a twist that, of course, was always-already implicit in the what-it-is-possible-to-say.
Hickey was into Foucault—in a rather superficial way—but not into that early, Gothic Structuralist Foucault who suspected that talk, the sayable, was determined already from the outset, and that beyond it were only the unintelligible screams of the mad, with whom one might in a moment of misplaced romanticism identify freedom, and oneself, but only at the risk of either yet more already-determined play-acting, or fatal dissolution.
Having, uh, said, all this, there is still so much more to say—some of which, it being already implicit in the Discursive Matrix, will doubtless get said by my three interlocutors or indeed by me in a podcast that Dan and I will be doing in a couple of weeks with the editor of The Invisible Dragon, Gary Kornblau.
One thing I adumbrated in my review, but which I’d like to call more attention to here, is the tension in Hickey’s thought—and it’s one I take to be widespread—between an appreciation of art’s seductive aspect and its shattering one. Beauty draws us in but also scrambles us, making it difficult to valorize something like The Beautiful or The Aesthetic, to say that they are somehow good for us. Unless we mean that to be taken in by the beauty of a cigarette ad, life on the road, an unfunded arts degree, a femme fatale, rough trade, to be conned and duped and robbed and humiliated by beauty—which Hickey agrees in his wonderful essay on John Rechy’s hustler novel Numbers is, like writers who conjure it, a whore—beyond the consequences in our fragile and only life, on some other transcendent or at any rate separate and impersonal level, is good (for whom?).
Stupid!
But Hickey does at times turn apologist for the messiness and danger of beauty. Against those who would say that art is either about doing good moral-political work, or that the aesthetic experience is edifying and therapeutic, he insists that beauty is a rhetoric of seduction always also trying to sell us something else (likely fatal) as well as itself… but nevertheless he is continually falling into the role of pageant-master at the Concours de beauté universel, celebrating not just each of his particular enthrallments but the fact of our enthrallment—which is like lifting talk out of its unnoticed always-already-ongoing noise to misguidedly singularize it with praise.
This is a kind of stupidity related to—and in some complicated way having to do with German Idealism kin of—the stupidity by which “queer” has become not only
1) The name of various sexual minorities taken in an assemblage
2) The name of the antinormative, uncanny dimension of sexuality, or psychic life, at work in all subjects but, in a constantly renegotiated cultural process, symbolically identified with the populations in the first category
But also
3) The name of a morally and politically desirable form of (by now largely pseudo-)transgression linked with the demands or cultural work of people from 1, and with the exercise—the ‘liberation’ or ‘representation’ of 2.
Now ‘queer’ criticism in another world might be about decoupling 2 and 1—saying that gay trans etc people are not after all rightly made out to be the bearers of sexuality’s qualities of abjection, compulsion, self-destruction etc.—that although everyone may not be a little bit gay (homosexual) everyone is very much queer (because that’s what sexuality is—excessive, intolerable, outrageous, ecstatic ambivalent—for everybody).
And thus not that there are, strictly speaking, no homosexuals and no straights either, but that there are no ‘normative’ and ‘queer’ subjects (subjectivity being as such the encounter between normativity and queerness, law and desire), only subjects assigned, in contingent processes in which we can intervene, identities linked to normativity or queerness.
Apparently this is a little over everyone’s heads!
What we have instead is a ‘queer’ project out to sneakily and incoherently try to combine
1) The promotion of the well-being—or at least the cultural visibility of certain—sexual minorities (some more than others)
2) The celebration of the anti-normative sexual energies (wrongly! contingently!) identified with those minorities
3) A progressive egalitarian politics that, of course, does not actually believe in doing away with norms or with insiders-and-outsiders, but which merely, qua political movement, wants to erect a new set of rules and distinctions said to be more inclusive and humane but which, necessarily (and I’m not saying this is even a bad thing, but just a feature of our being human) rewrite the terms of normativity and queerness, making, as I’ve said elsewhere, supposedly ‘queer’ progressives into the normative subjects and the erstwhile normative ones into the ‘new queers’
All of this is already in Lee Edelman’s No Future; don’t shoot the messenger (shoot, if you’ve been keeping track, Camille Paglia and David Rieff).
This sort of tragically ubiquitous guff is what Gary Kornblau—who I should say must be a man of infinite patience and perspicacity to have identified Hickey’s genius, and gotten Hickey’s shit sufficiently together to publish him—ropes Hickey into in his afterword, making the critic out to have been not just a straight gay who shared—in the way my ex and his straight friends shared, or indeed as part of me shares with him and my own straight friends—a particular way of appreciating excess that we might call camp but shouldn’t (unless we are ready to consider Straight Male Camp, with its gay male appreciators, in all its variety from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls [how was it we—gays—didn’t make it?] to lines like Barthelme’s “her legs were as long and thin as my hope of Heaven.” There is unfortunately a whiff of pussy, and pussy-hounding, in this kind of theatricality—Smell the Glove!) but the sort of 1-2-3 Queer Inc mush, such that Hickey’s delight in Liberace, Mapplethorpe, etc., starts to sound like a lib-lady-who-lunches gushing about the ‘importance’ of protecting Drag Queen Story Hour. Gays becoming queers, and queers becoming tokens of transgression, and transgression becoming the name not of real improprieties but of the politically correct. Quite a glissage (where frottage was called for).
Part of this is just the sort of eternal, but always changing cant that I was complaining about a few days ago, and that Jonson tells us to speak but not think, and that I should learn better not to mind. Getting Hickey republished and read by a new audience means mispackaging him as an Ally and his enjoyment as Political(ly Good)—just as, for whatever reason, gay men for the moment have to imagine themselves as part of a Queer Intersectional Assemblage and bearers of sexual transgression of a just-right type that moves History forward (it’s never quite explained, and again always changing, what sorts of practices and speech are, as faux transgression, to be welcomed and celebrated, or, as true transgression, banished. Public pup play? Liberatory! Age gaps? Problematic! Although I may be out of date; I’ll have to check) as good but still somehow excitingly bad.
The men of my own stock
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wonted to,
They are used to the lies I tell.
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy and sell.
Rather than complain about that—or flesh out what may or may not be obvious as the parallels between, or identity of, Kornblau’s misidentification of Hickey with this 1-2-3 smushed-together ‘queerness’ and Hickey’s own lapses into Praise of Beauty (both of which forget the difference, in a classic error, maybe the error-of-errors, between the good-for-us and That Something Else, which may be Beauty, Desire, Transgression, etc., which we have need of in our lives to make them ours rather than life’s merely, or merely simperingly good; TSE which can taste better than good ever does—but which is not, except in such small doses, survivable), I want to end by pointing out—as the gay man in our group of four not terribly diverse interlocutors—how strange it strikes me that Kornblau makes this point through what he frames as his own initial gay hesitancy to engage with Hickey, a problematic straight man who ended his life doing what I guess was right-wing Boomer-posting on Facebook, and found women attractive, as he makes clear in the essay on Dolly, which is a sort of prose equivalent of the cartoon wolf’s tongue unrolling like a red-carpet (Aooooga!).
His Afterword and Foreword both begin with throat-clearing bits about how Hickey might seem like a pig—leering, misogynist, Texan, male—and thus both politically objectionable in general, and homophobic to Kornblau in particular. Of course, in a double operation that ‘queerness’ incoherently makes possible, he turns out to be neither, to be wholly recuperable and indeed personally charming in an admittedly very curmudgeonly way. To be actually queerer than Kornblau, who in their first meeting admonishes Hickey for not using an ashtray (who’s the agent of normativity now?).
Kornblau’s discomfort with Hickey talking about Dolly is not dissimilarly-spirited from the beginning of this 3-part conversation between Hickey and Jarrett Earnest (Dave Hickey: In Conversation With Jarrett Earnest - SFAQ / NYAQ / LXAQ), a gay male art critic who is also trying to wring a book out of Hickey’s posterity (he reviewed Dan’s book on Hickey for the NYT).
Earnest starts his piece, too, with a performance of ‘I am leveraging a relationship with Hickey [in his case for professional advancement into NYC art critical establishment] but I am also a good gay guy and respect women etc’… as if (and as if Hickey’s work and engagement with gay themes didn’t remind us) there weren’t of course a disturbingly erotic charge to our relationship to “beauty” which is unsurprisingly going to find some unwoke expression among both straight and gay men… which, it seems rather silly to whitewash as ‘queer’ (and therefore for some reason more acceptable) ‘transgression’ ‘outlaw’ ‘pirate’ etc-ness; somehow in the abstract being transgressive and sexual can be championed as anti-normative because I guess we’re imagining some oppressed marginal abject person doing it, but when a straight guy is going hubba-hubba over Dolly’s tits-and-smile then the jig is up!
But really, what’s with this, ‘I’m afraid this straight cowboy Daddy is going to hurt me and say bad things about women?’ since, said in passing—or rather said by way of not passing for the ‘right kind’ of gay—are gay men not, uh, problematically sexual and themselves—myself—misogynist? Or, in fact, who hates women more than women? This sort of preamble to an interview is like the internal monologue of a well-meaning but racist white liberal on his way to talk to a black guy, circa. 1950! ‘I was scared at first but some of them are good!’
Possibly this railing about the way gay male critics talk is just an as it were closet drama of my own seething, but at the point of closing this less of an essay than bid to open a conversation—some written talk, although I forget already which end of the polarity, the bad or the good, that term named—I’d like to insist that it’s precisely in its proximity to whatever is loathsome, embarrassing to watch and degrading to undergo, about sexuality that desire, our response to the beautiful that then becomes talk and writing, is queer, perhaps particularly so in the present moment when a straight man is the site of it.
A delicious take on Dragon and my Afterword. To be disciplined and punished is my most secret desire. Can't wait to talk to you about it on the podcast!
"How did a straight guy(s) make Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" really is one of those eternal questions.