Monday, Oct. 13, 1997 | 9:27 a.m.
Most art critics, I've concluded, must live like veal, in small, enclosed (albeit exquisitely white-walled) spaces. Reading their claustrophobic treatises, you get the feeling they rarely breathe anything but their own recirculated breath. Or perhaps it's better to think of them as monks, every review a scroll.
Las Vegan Dave Hickey is different (or, of course, I wouldn't be writing about him). He's done stuff. He's been out there amid the bright jangle of pop and consumer culture, and he's kinda liked it. He watches "Perry Mason" reruns and basketball; he likes cars and Siegfried and Roy.
Evidence of such unfashionable enthusiasms turn up frequently in the 23 essays collected in Hickey's latest book, "Air Guitar" (Art issues. Press, $17.95). Don't be spooked by the subtitle, "Essays on Art and Democracy"; this isn't the veal thing.
At the core of most of these pieces is a fragment of Hickey's autobiography. He dangles a thread of his memory into American culture like string in sugar water, then describes the intricate crystals that accrete there. It amounts, he writes, to a "memoir without tears," a record of his experiences with art and culture, minus the confessional psychodrama that marks the modern memoir.
So, before getting into Norman Rockwell's gift for capturing the quotidian occurrences and ordinary decency of everyday life, he gives us an evocative childhood recollection of attending a jam session with his jazzman dad. What artist, he wonders, could have captured the generosity of spirit, the good-natured interplay, of that occasion? "To my own surprise," he writes, "I came up with Norman Rockwell of the Saturday Evening Post. For worse or for glory, I realized, he was the dude to do it."
It's a fine example of Hickey's taste for culture that happens outside the museums and nonprofit galleries of the official art world, and in a few deft strokes, his essay changed my mind about Rockwell. Like a lot of art snobs, I'd always dismissed him as a slick conservative propagandist, fobbing off on gullible readers of the Post an essentially false, morning-in-America view of this country as a place of gentle mishaps and heartwarming domestic misadventures. Where's the big social picture, I wanted to know; where's the racism, the class stratification? Nowhere in the Rockwells I ever saw did he do more than allude to such things.
In "Shining Hours/Forgiving Rhyme," however, Hickey points out that, for the most part, life is gentle mishaps and domestic misadventures. "It was Norman Rockwell's great gift to see that life in 20th century America, though far from perfect, has been exceptional in the extreme. This is what he celebrates and insists upon: That 'normal life' in this country is not normal at all -- that we all exist in a general state of social and physical equanimity that is unparalleled in the history of humans."
Well, yes, of course. I feel dopey for not having seen it that way before.
There are many such perspective-changing moments in "Air Guitar." He connects such disparate topics as Catholic icon painting and low-rider culture, or "Perry Mason" and the dynamics of a rock band, and makes it look easy: "A rock 'n' roll band, at its heart, aspires to be just the sort of working family that is idealized in 'Perry Mason.'" And both "Perry Mason" and rock 'n' roll have the same social agenda -- "the affirmation of American innocence in the face of pervasive guilt and complacency." Well, yes, of course.
In "The Heresy of the Zone Defense," he dissects Julius Irving's famous up-and-under move against Kareem Abdul Jabbar in the 1980 NBA Finals, a play that, he recalls, made him buoyant with joy when he saw it on TV.
He points out that it required more than just the balletic skill of Dr. J; it also took perfect defense from Jabbar and, more importantly, a beneficial evolution in the rules of the game effected by rule-makers who in no way could imagine Irving's move. Which brings him to a discussion of social rules in general, specifically the difference between rules that liberate us and rules that govern us. Somewhere in there, he mentions Jackson Pollock.
The penultimate piece, "Frivolity and Unction," is a stirring and heretical argument against the prevailing notion -- foisted off on us by museum bureaucrats and similar guardians of the culture -- that art is "good for us." It's not, Hickey says; that's a fund-raising ploy used to justify public investments in art.
"Why don't all of us art-types summon up the moral courage to admit that what we do has no intrinsic value or virtue -- that it has its moments and it has its functions, but otherwise, all things considered, in its ordinary state, unredeemed by courage or talent, it is a bad, silly, frivolous thing to do."
That, he insists, would free artists from the hypocritical burden of being virtuous; adopting a "So what?" attitude, they could venture into the world and stimulate the discussion on what the culture should look like without worrying about the approval of museums and public patrons.
Ultimately, I've concluded, this book is about taking things personally. Art, it argues, shouldn't be genuflected in front of simply because it symbolizes "high culture." It should be valued for the way it functions in one's own life, whether as "a remarkable domestic accoutrement" or an organizing principle uniting disparate people in appreciation of an object or piece of music. The way jazz let him experience his dad riffing with his musicians.
"I have never taken anything printed in a book to heart that was not somehow confirmed in my ordinary experience," he writes.
"So this book is about the other, more ordinary, uses for art and books and music -- about what they seem to do and how they seem to do it on a day-to-day basis. It is not about how they should work, or must work, just about the way they seem to have worked in my experience ..."
If, like me, you're of middling intelligence, many of the ideas Hickey throws off casually will shimmer just at the edge of your understanding. You can often see them but not quite grasp them. This is good; you have to work toward them. So take note, and don't check your dictionary at the door -- you will encounter the occasional reference to, say, "dialectical materialism."
Despite its basis in experience and a definite regular-fella openness (by the standards of art criticism, anyway), "Air Guitar" is a complicated, sophisticated, rewarding book by a writer who may be the least regular of fellas.
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