ART / CATHY CURTIS : ‘Dragon’: Criticism With the Blinkers Off

Dave Hickey, who lectured at the Newport Harbor Art Museum recently, has racked up numerous art-world credits: associate professor of Art Criticism and Theory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; executive editor of Art in America magazine; directing two art galleries, writing for a stack of major publications. He also does stuff the art world doesn’t give you any points for, like writing fiction and serving as staff song writer for a music publisher in Nashville.

But what really sets him apart from hordes of art critics writing theory-clotted--or conservatively close-minded--screeds of one sort or another is that he is a highly original thinker, a witty and supple writer, and a person who embraces the contradictions and political implications of living in a postmodern culture. Steeped in any number of allied subjects, he can shift references--from a post-structuralist writer to a TV wrestler--with the ease of a race car driver changing gears.

I’ve just read his new book, “The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty” (Art Issues Press, Los Angeles, $12.95), and I can’t stop thinking about it. This slender paperback (just 64 pages long) has made me view contemporary art and its problems in a new way--and confirmed some vague, sneaky suspicions in terms I might never have had the guts or the smarts to express.

First, a bit of background: Ask the average person what’s good about, say, Impressionist painting and he or she is liable to say, “It’s beautiful.” That same person may be puzzled or put off by much contemporary art because it is “ugly” or because it doesn’t offer much of anything to look at.

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Ask an art critic or cutting-edge artist about beauty, on the other hand, and you’re apt to get a pained sigh. Everyone knows that the patriarchal notion of a single agreed-upon standard of taste has given way to a multiplicity of equally valid views, and that marketplace hacks vending pretty baubles don’t care about the purity and sincerity of art-as-idea.

Important art is not about surfaces, say the members of the cutting edge. Or at least, such art is about surfaces only insofar as the artist is careful to negate them with ironic references to a culture that accepts surfaces as truth.

Here’s where Hickey steps in. (My apologies if I’ve misconstrued any portion of his argument, which I’ve had to drastically simplify and abridge to fit in this space).

In the first essay, “Enter the Dragon,” he writes that he was participating in a dull panel discussion in 1988 when the epiphany struck. Near the end of the session, a member of the audience roused him from his doodling to ask what the “issue of the ‘90s” was going to be.

Some renegade impulse prompted him to reply, “Beauty.” After all, he explained, beautiful images give viewers pleasure. What was the point of any theory of images that failed to take notice of that simple fact?

No one seemed to be paying attention. No one even had a rejoinder--a striking phenomenon in itself, Hickey mused. For some reason, sophisticated people could talk about the influence of taste on the art produced in centuries past, but they couldn’t deal with the degree of pleasure afforded by images made in their own time.

The point is not that meaning doesn’t matter in art, mind you. Rather, it’s that the pleasure of looking at beautiful surfaces has everything to do with meaning--but in wonderfully devious ways.

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Hickey writes about “the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation,” imagery that “cannot be trusted” and “is always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it.”

During the Counter-Reformation, for example, beautifully rendered saints and other religious figures (by such artists as Caravaggio, Rubens and Bernini) cannily pleaded the cause of Catholicism. Seduced by so much corporeal--sometimes even frankly sexual--visual material, the viewer was primed to fall under the sway of the Mother Church.

In the 17th Century, when anti-Catholic persecution was a burning issue, such paintings were nothing if not “relevant”; now, we look at them and see mostly elegant formal compositions and incredible realism. Hickey asks whether the surface appeal of such work would have been the same, however, had the artists not used it to convey a highly specific and immensely vital religious agenda.

Turning to our own time and the controversy endangered by Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs depicting various homoerotic acts, Hickey finds the arguments offered in support of showing this work to be misconstrued, ignoring the real issues underlying these photographs.

The art community “chose to play the ravished virgin,” he writes, “to fling itself prostrate across the front pages of America and fairly dare the fascist heel to crush its outraged innocence.”

At the 1990 obscenity trial of Contemporary Arts Center director Dennis Barrie in Cincinnati (where the traveling show of Mapplethorpe photographs was on view), witnesses for the defense told the jury (presumably with straight faces) that the photographs were really about “figure composition” and “light.”

It was as if the formal qualities of the photographs were so bizarrely overpowering that a sophisticated person couldn’t even see the seemingly grotesque acts they depicted.

But, as Hickey writes, “It is insane and morally ignorant . . . to confront the work of a living (and at that time, dying) artist . . . with forgiving connoisseurship--to ‘appreciate’ his passionate, partisan and politician celebrations of the American margin--and in so doing, refuse to engage their ‘content’ or argue the arguments that deal so intimately with trust, pain, love and the giving up of the self.”

Note that Hickey is not agreeing with Sen. Jesse Helms and Mapplethorpe’s other appalled detractors; rather, he is urging an end to a blinkered institutional approach to exhibiting very powerful art as something that’s simply “good for us” without addressing its essential meaning.

Oddly enough, as Hickey remarks, nobody seemed to be noticing that these photographs were doing what galleries full of similarly social agenda-enriched art had failed to do: Get people to look at them and feel passionate about them. Why was this? Because Mapplethorpe’s immaculate technique made these bizarre, transgressive and frankly painful sexual acts look as beautiful as his formally exquisite photographs of flowers.

Why weren’t ordinary folks up in arms over concurrent public exhibitions of paintings of sordid doings by Francis Bacon or photographs of disgusting freaks by Joel-Peter Witkin, Hickey asks rhetorically. Because those artists don’t make beautiful, visually seductive work in the old-fashioned manner; they don’t seduce the unwary.

Instead, these artists deal with their subjects in ambivalent ways that acknowledge the doubts and despair accompanying outre personal expression. The average viewer isn’t going to get exercised by arty stuff like that. But show him a nasty situation that looks like gorgeous fun--like a luscious fashion magazine layout or one of those “collector’s edition” volumes of pornography--and you’ve got him hooked, and angry.

Meanwhile, however, the puritans of contemporary art go right on believing, as Hickey writes, that “we will look at art, however banal, because looking at art is somehow ‘good’ for us, regardless--and, ultimately, in spite of--whatever specific ‘good’ the individual work or artist might urgently propose to us.”

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To my mind, this fallacy goes hand-in-hand with many serious-minded artists’ curiously willful disregard of the importance of making work that has a genuine presence. (By presence, I mean the same thing stage reviewers mean when they give glowing reviews to actors you can’t take your eyes off.)

In the “puritan” view, it seems, investing a work with sufficient visual enticements for the viewer somehow betrays the work’s higher purpose.

This argument is reminiscent of the notion that a woman’s ideas are bound to come across more forcefully the more she departs from feminine norms in matters of dress and demeanor. That idea flies in the face of the sad-but-true reality that no matter what women wear or don’t wear, do or don’t do, they always are being judged according to gender-defined norms of behavior in our society.

Inevitably, art reviewers praising banal-looking work with a heavy ideological agenda insist that it will “compel the viewer” to confront his or her notion of such-and-such or ideas of so-and-so. But that’s precisely what doesn’t happen! The viewer walks right past all the long texts and mystifyingly boring photographs (or the dogmatic-looking installation) and remains blissfully uncompelled. People do judge books by their covers--to decide whether or not to read them.

The answer is not to go back to painting in the style of Caravaggio or Rubens, needless to say. There is plenty of work in contemporary styles and formats, by artists as different as Anselm Kiefer, Nam June Paik, Edward Ruscha and Sophie Calle, that does tease the eye as a gateway to the mind.

“The vernacular of beauty, in its democratic appeal, remains a potent instrument for change in this civilization,” Hickey writes. Understood on his own terms--not as pathetic wish for the return of polite Impressionist paintings, but as a desire to make good on the toothless promises of politically aware art for our time--this statement is incredibly brave and powerful. It is only one of the startlingly honest thoughts that make Hickey’s book required reading for anyone who cares about the future of art.

* “The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty” is available by mail ($14 including tax and postage) from Art issues Press, 8721 Santa Monica Blvd., Suite No. 6, Los Angeles, CA 90069.