Art
The Art Guy
Renegade critic and philosopher Dave Hickey finds beauty where others find banality and integrity where others see glitz.
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Is Hickey an aesthete’s Martin Luther, telling people to ignore the priests (the critics and the professors) and go to the source, or is he just a smartass kid, lighting stink bombs and pissing off the Establishment? Like many grand weirdos, Hickey is both prophet and troublemaker. He was born in 1939 in Fort Worth and grew up there and in Dallas, Louisiana, and Southern California. His father worked for General Motors but played jazz saxophone and clarinet in his spare time; his mother, an economics professor with Marxist leanings at Texas Christian University, painted in hers. In one of the more moving essays in Air Guitar, Hickey remembers a Texas jam session that included his father, his father’s redneck buddy, a Latino bongo player, two black beboppers, and a Jewish neighbor who had fled the Nazis. Less than three years later his father would kill himself; he wasn’t the first in the bloodline to do so.
Hickey enrolled at Southern Methodist University at age fifteen as an engineering student. Three years later he transferred to TCU and changed his major to English after taking a class from John Graves. He eluded the draft in the early sixties by enrolling in graduate school in linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. “I worshipped at the Church of Difficult Art, Improvisational Politics, and Dangerous Drugs,” he later wrote about his time in Austin. He was crafting gorgeous short stories (many of which would be collected in the 1989 book Prior Convictions) and writing and editing articles for Riata, the campus literary magazine, and the Ranger, the humor magazine. A 1964 trip to New York and Europe introduced him to the paintings of Warhol, Ruscha, and Roy Lichtenstein. Three years later Hickey dropped out of grad school and he and his first wife, Mary Jane Taylor, opened a pioneering contemporary-art gallery in Austin, A Clean Well-Lighted Place. He was already indulging his passion for both the High and the Low—selling modern art, playing in rock bands, doing drugs.
In 1971 Hickey and Taylor moved to New York, where he hung out with Warhol and got a job running the Reese Palley Gallery in SoHo. Hickey spent a year editing the influential magazine Art in America before going freelance in 1973 and writing about rock and roll and country music for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice. “I was always pretty good about sensing continental drifts,” he says, including the Outlaw country movement, which he was the first to write seriously about, giving it its name in a 1974 Country Music magazine piece. At the same time he was one of the first chroniclers of the nascent punk rock scene at CBGB’s in New York.
Hickey wasn’t always easy to work with. One editor remembers going over copy with him. “Dave was often enhanced,” he says with a laugh. “I had a small office, and it was like trying to handle a hundred-and-eighty-pound pinball machine.” Another editor remembers Hickey coming in just before deadline and pulling scraps of paper from his pockets: “Some just had a name written on them, or a year, but many had a phrase that was either a good image or the germ of a good idea. I kept those and told him what I thought he needed to do and gave him a pep talk. Two days later he turned in a typically brilliant Hickey piece.”
In the late seventies Hickey lived in Nashville and wrote songs, some of which would be covered by such redneck connoisseurs as David Allan Coe and Bobby Bare. Sitting in the Las Vegas apartment he shares with his second wife, writer and art professor Libby Lumpkin, he pulls out an acoustic guitar and plays me a song he says country statesman Porter Wagoner recorded but never released, a ballad of the common man with a pretty melody and Rockwellian images. In a high, almost breathless voice, he sings, “In the last light of evening, is there anything that’s sweeter/Than a house on a street in a town beside the road?”
After eighteen years of the freelance life, when he was 52, Hickey took a job as an associate professor at UNLV. He jokes that it was his need for health insurance that forced him to join the enemy, academia. “I’m the catcher in the rye,” he says with a laugh when I ask him how he justifies the move. “That’s my job—to protect them, not from life but from school.” Childless, he calls his students “my kids” and hangs their artwork on his walls. He is clearly energized by their enthusiasm and attention. Indeed, it is Hickey’s sway with the young—the way they gather around him for autographs after lectures—that seems to particularly gall his critics. And his peers. Once, when another UNLV professor told him they had to be role models for their students, Hickey says he replied, “Well, great: ‘Kids, take drugs for thirty years and live in your car as much as possible! That’s what I did!’”
Sitting at his dining room table, Hickey breaks into a mischievous, chattering laugh, punching out clouds of smoke from the Marlboro Lights 100’s he keeps firing up. He doesn’t drink anymore or do drugs, except coffee, which he swallows as if fatigue were the ultimate enemy. A gambler, Hickey loves Las Vegas, which he says is egalitarian and honest about its deceit. It’s a place where an optimist like him can have some fun. But the veteran hedonist has always had a ferocious work ethic, getting up five days a week at three in the morning and writing until eight—producing, lately, twelve vignettes based on Zodiac personality characteristics for Stardumb, an illustrated short novel that came out in November. He’s also working on a screenplay for a movie about the Allman Brothers Band, even though he hates movies: “Movies generally suck. They don’t have real stories anymore—they’ve been ruined by writing programs.”
He also claims to be not particularly fond of his home state. “It’s the most profoundly anti-intellectual environment,” he rants, “and I have never been able to figure out why. The damn place can’t keep certain kinds of eccentric people. It ran John Rechy to L.A. It ran Don Barthelme to New York. It ran Robert Rauschenberg out. It runs out anybody that’s queer or critical or witty or angular.” He has always been critical of Texas writers who can’t write about the modern world—especially those who write “narcissistic redneck melodramas. You know, ‘I love you more than a bottle of Wildroot Cream Oil.’” He loves Barthelme and his mentor Graves; he doesn’t like Cormac McCarthy. “I was about fifteen pages into The Crossing when some Mexican guy on a horse looks off and says, ‘It is a very old country,’ and I just said, ‘Cormac, I’ve seen this movie. I’m out of here.’”
The truth is, most of his Texas diatribes are just show. “He loves Texas,” says Jack Massing, half of the Houston postmodern duo the Art Guys. “He just loves to tell people how horrible it is here.” The other Art Guy, Michael Galbreth, remembers a dinner party in San Francisco where Hickey, who likes to talk and knows people like to listen, went on a tear. “Dave didn’t let up, giving Texas artists hell,” he says. “‘All art in Texas sucks! I’ll never set foot in that goddam state again!’ We were dying laughing.” In fact, Hickey comes to Texas several times a year, as he did last summer for photographer Nic Nicosia’s show at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. If anything, Hickey is loyal to Texas artists to a fault, and his support is a link between such disparate and far-flung eccentrics as the Art Guys, Rauschenberg, Nicosia, and Terry Allen.
To say that Hickey delights in chaos and confusion would be an understatement. But, he says, there has been a logic to his life: “When you’re a third-generation suicide, you can’t ignore it and you can’t cure it. An ordinary life of quiet desperation is not sufficient to overcome the invitation to oblivion. So any risk is worth taking.” And for all his troublemaking, Hickey clearly enjoys his current position as top dog, no matter how much he sometimes mocks it. “Good artists want to win,” he says. “I want to win—I want my views to prevail.” He’s a lot like the complicated, peculiar, doomed artists he writes about—his father, Liberace, Brammer, Mapplethorpe, Warhol, Carpenter—each an acolyte of beauty, in his or her own fashion, and each redeemed, if at all, by light, color, and four-minute blasts of pure pop nothingness.
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