Air Guitar

by Dave Hickey

  This would have been a wonderful argument if a painting by Edward Ruscha or Jacques-Louis David were any less “conceptual” than a pile of dirt on a museum floor—or if that pile of dirt were any less “commercial” for being financed by minions of the corporate state. My own experience of the facts suggested quite the reverse: that non-object, non-portable art arose in the mid sixties as a strategic reaction to a commercial reality; to wit, all the walls were full! After fifteen years of the greatest and most broadly-based painting market in the history of the world, every inch of available wall space was expensively inhabited by Pollocks and Poonses, Rothkos and Rosenquists. Thus, the fashion for conceptual, documentary, and installation art arose (“floor and drawer art,” as Richard Serra called it). Over the next seven or eight years, this new art had its commercial cynosure, and no one I knew even considered the possibility that it couldn’t be sold. As a dealer friend told me at the time, “Anybody who can’t sell a handful of air with a dream in it doesn’t deserve to call himself an American, much less an art dealer.” That was the temper of the time.

  In the early seventies, however, as these “new” practices began to lose steam in the natural course of things (as other practices had lost steam before them) they were adopted by a whole new set of venues, by museums, kunsthalles, and alternative spaces across the country, first as trendy, economical exhibition fodder for the provinces, and then as “official, noncommercial, anti-art”—as part of a puritanical, haut bourgeois, institutional reaction to the increasing “aesthetification” of American commerce in general. Works of art, after all, had been commercial objects for two hundred years, but commercial objects, like the cars we loved, had only recently become works of art—and they did so in response to the market conditions that would ultimately create the post-industrial world. As Warhol was fond of telling us, the strange thing about the sixties was not that Western art was becoming commercialized but that Western commerce was becoming so much more artistic.

  So, to return to the lingua franca of cars, we should remember that America’s industrial base—and its automotive industry particularly—came out of World War II in great shape. Its production potential was greatly expanded, its technology much improved, and its facilities unscathed by the conflict. Its products, however, were no longer being consumed by violence, so it soon became clear that if these enterprises were to continue at postwar production levels with prewar marketing and design strategies, they would almost immediately out-supply demand and effectively put themselves out of business. Thus, American industry found itself facing the challenge that has confronted every artist since Watteau, that of a finite, demanding market for a necessarily overabundant supply of speculative products.

  The problem is this: As any dealer will tell you, it is perfectly possible for any artist with decent work habits to produce more work in three or four years than there are buyers worldwide who might possibly acquire them, ever. The pool of probable purchasers is even tinier. So the logic is inescapable: Somebody, sometime, is going to have to buy more than one. In the years following World War II, American mercantile culture found itself in exactly the same situation, and in response to this challenge, those enterprises that survived completely transformed their design, production, and marketing strategies to an artistic model.

  First, companies introduced a hierarchy of “lines.” As an artist might produce prints, drawings, and paintings, American manufacturers began introducing “economy” and “luxury” lines to bracket their mid-range product—thus creating the possibility of the consumer “moving up” without moving out. Second, and again like artists in the nineteenth century, these manufacturers began designing visual obsolescence into their products by institutionalizing style change. In this way, manufacturers hoped to create cyclical demand for their products by shifting emphasis from their value or utility to their extrinsic “currency,” by having one style supplant another.

  And, finally, American business stopped advertising products for what they were, or for what they could do, and began advertising them for what they meant—as sign systems within the broader culture—emphasizing what every collector wants to know: who owned them and where they were owned. Thus, rather than producing and marketing infinitely replicable objects that adequately served unchanging needs, American commerce began creating finite sets of objects that embodied ideology for a finite audience at a particular moment—objects that created desire rather than fulfilling needs. This is nothing more or less than an art market. If you don’t think so, price out a 1965 Ford Thunderbird.

  The Leonardo of this new art market (or more precisely, its Monet) was an ex-custom-car designer from Hollywood named Harley Earl, who headed the design division at General Motors during the postwar period. Earl’s most visible and legendary contributions to American culture were the Cadillac tailfin (based on the tail assembly of the P-38 Fighter plane) and the pastel paint-job—design innovations that, when combined, as they often were, simultaneously “masculinized” and “feminized” the American automobile, translating it into a distinct, all-purpose polymorphous object of desire in the best tradition of the Rococo.

  Most importantly, however, Earl invented the four-year style-change cycle linked to the Platonic hierarchy of General Motors cars, and this revolutionary dynamic created the post-industrial world. Basically, what Earl invented was a market situation in which the consumer moved up the status-ladder within the cosmology of General Motors products—from Chevrolet to Pontiac to Buick to Oldsmobile to Cadillac—as the tailfin or some other contagious motif moved down the price-ladder, from Cadillac to Chevrolet, year by year, as styles changed incrementally.

  From the viewpoint of production, this sliding dynamic greatly mitigated the cost problems that traditionally proved the downfall of rapid style-change in mass-produced products; to wit, the accelerated obsolescence of hugely expensive production technology. In Earl’s scheme, the tailfin technology, say, that had become stylistically obsolete on the Cadillac, could be retooled and used to produce Oldsmobiles, then Buicks, then Pontiacs, then Chevrolets, by which time it had been totally redesigned. From a marketing point of view, it was heaven. It bound consumers to the parent company and invited them to make incremental steps up the price ladder, as that exquisite, finny grail gradually descended toward their aspiring spirit.

  As a consequence, the “commercial art” that advertised American commodities during this period (1950-1970) took on the qualities and functions that “religious art,” “courtly art,” and “official art” served in other eras. It became a theater and a palimpsest of the competing values and contexts that made the wheels go round—a contextualizing discourse for the democracy of objects we all inhabit. Like the courtly, religious, and official art of the past, then, these images functioned in aid of commerce, society, religion, and official policy, illustrating without actually embodying those particular values. The task of embodying cultural values, in all their multifarious complexity, has fallen, in this century, to “art objects” like Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, the Brillo Boxes, or the Pink Cadillac. These objects propose for moral and monetary investment those redeemed values that are distorted and submerged by the advocacy of the market or the institution.

  Today, of course, it is all an art market, the whole of American commerce. We can’t make a toaster anymore, a VCR, or even a decent faucet, but we can create desire. We can make fetching footwear, beautiful games, exquisite motorcycles, hot TV, great rock-and-roll records, and dazzling movies. Such artifacts constitute our principle contributions to global commerce. The alternative discourse of embodied dissent, however, has all but disappeared. Those customized and hopped-up objects and images we might expect, that demonstrate against the standards of the republic and advocate their own refined vision of power and loveliness, are nowhere to be seen—since power and loveliness themselves are presumed to be at issue—as if they might be talked away, along with the image, the object, and commerce itself, as evidence of human vanity,
so that art might more closely approach the paper body of bureaucracy.

  In today’s art world, then, in place of the ongoing struggle for refinement and redemption, we have pre-millennial renunciation. In place of the tumultuous forum, we have the incestuous cloister, and in place of customized art, we have an academic art, which, like the commercial, courtly, religious, and official art of yesteryear, is content to advertise its pre-approved corporate values and agendas. Why? What Happened? My own suspicion is that something new came into being and could not be let to stand. So let me return for a moment to my conversation with Luis Jiménez in that bar in El Paso in the late sixties. On that afternoon, while we were talking about cars and art, Luis explained to me that his earliest ideas of becoming an artist had come from watching the glimmering lowriders cruising the streets of Juárez and El Paso. They seemed to him, he said, the ultimate synthesis of painting and sculpture—the ultimate accommodation of solidity and translucency—and more importantly, for Luis, they seemed a bridge between the past and the future because he recognized the visual language of the Baroque in these magical automobiles, in the way the smooth folds of steel and the hundreds of coats of transparent lacquer caught the light and held it as the cars slipped through the bright streets like liquid color—like Caravaggio meets Bernini, on wheels.

  Now, let me carry Luis’s argument one step further and suggest the precise manner in which these wonderful cars fit into the visual tradition that Hispanic America inherited from the age of the Baroque. First, we must remember that the technique of glazing transparent color was invented in fifteenth-century Italy to do one thing: to paint the body of Christ as a physical being filled with light. This image of luminous materiality stood as a metaphor for the central tenant of Western Catholicism: that Christ was the word of God made flesh—the Incarnate Word—a creature who had lived and suffered and experienced temptation in corporeal form . . . and died a real death. This is the central message of the Eucharist and of the polychrome sculptures that still populate the churches and homes of Hispanic America.

  After World War II, however, Chicano car-cultists in the American Southwest began secularizing this central, sacramental metaphor, creating gleaming, iconic automobiles that embodied, not the Word of God, but the freedom and promise of effortless mobility—honoring the traditions of democratic America that they had inherited, as well. Then, under the aegis of custom-car designer Harley Earl, Detroit would begin to incorporate the principles of lowrider design into its products, and, in doing so, effect one of the great iconographic syntheses in the history of Western culture. The masters of American industry would embody—in the Catholic language of material light, of chrome and polychrome—the disembodied intellectual tenants of the Enlightenment: the values of Protestant America’s founding fathers.

  Thereafter, the emblem of the automobile as an embodiment of the promise of America—as an icon of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—would permeate the entire culture, Catholic and Protestant alike, and this metaphor of corporeal intelligence would be reinforced throughout the nineteen fifties and sixties by other proliferating iconographies of embodied light: by the luminous materiality of new plastics and Technicolor film and by refinements in color photography. Then, amazingly, the metaphor would be confirmed by the new science of genetics, which would inadvertently prove those antique Popes to have been right in their wrongness by demonstrating scientifically that we are all, indeed, the genetic word made flesh.

  So this is my idea: The historical confluence of accident, insight, commerce, and iconography in postwar America created the nineteen sixties as America’s transcendent Mediterranean moment—gave birth to the big, beautiful art market as an embodied discourse of democratic values that partook, in equal parts, of the Eucharist and the stock exchange. Thus, the United States emerged from the sixties as the only nation in the history of the world with a freely-elected, fully-embodied iconography of promise—and we might have one yet, I suspect, if the sages of puritan New England had chosen that moment to do what they desperately wished to do: secede from a Union they saw sinking into the mire of idolatry and democracy—vices they might just tolerate in politics, but never in culture. Never.

  So, what we got was a secular Reformation—a return of the Word at the expense of the flesh and a new jihad against idolaters, now guilty of “commodification.” The old quarrel between “grace” and “works” was reconstituted as a new quarrel between “theory” and “practice.” Once again, we drove the money-changers from the Temple of Art, which was not a temple, nor ever had been, not in America, where it had always been a secular discourse in the form of a market. Even so, academic civil servants of the word, horrified by the image and scandalized by looking, mounted an attack on them both on behalf of their own practice—a “critique of representation,” which, at it’s heart, was a critique of representative government—bald advocacy for a new civil service of cultural police.

  And for what transgression did we suffer all this theological nit-picking and sensory deprivation? Well, a bunch of citizens made some objects that other citizens thought looked great. Still other citizens thought they could make them look even greater and manifested their dissent by customizing these objects. Other citizens thought these new objects did indeed look greater. They argued with the advocates of the previous objects, and since these objects didn’t do anything, weren’t worth anything, and came without labels or instructions, people were actually arguing about the values they perceived to be embodied in these objects, values they held dearly enough to argue about and invest in.

  It was, in fact, nothing more dangerous than a democratic forum of free opinion that, in its protean liveliness and free-form contingency could only expand, did expand, in fact, and persists today in all our quotidian discussions of popular art in this nation. In the world of high art, however, a bunch of tight-assed, puritanical, haut bourgeois intellectuals simply legislated customized art out of existence, in a fury of self-important resentment. Because Hollywood trash like Harley Earl and lowriders like Luis Jiménez became conversant with the economics of their beautiful, powerful game.

  A LIFE IN THE ARTS

  When a friend of John O’Hara’s called to inform him of George Gershwin’s death, O’Hara responded appropriately, shouting into the phone: “I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to!” Would that I could have been so willful. When Terry Allen called me in San Diego with the news that Chet Baker was dead, I just said, “Aw, shit!” and hung up. Because I believed it, and believing it, I sat there for a long time in that cool, shadowy room, looking out at the California morning. I stared at the blazing white stucco wall of the bungalow across the street. I gazed at the coco palm rising above its dark green roof. Three chrome-green, renegade parrots had taken up residence among its dusty fronds. They squawked and flickered in the sunshine.

  Above and beyond the bungalow and the palm, the slate-gray Pacific rose to the pale line of the horizon, and this vision of ordinary paradise seemed an appropriate, funereal vista for the ruined prince of West Coast cool. So I sat shivah for Baker in that quiet room, acutely aware of my own breathing—aware, as well, that I had been listening to Baker breathe though his trumpet and through the language for more than thirty years. Now, suddenly, Chet Baker wasn’t breathing any more, and I missed him immediately. In more ways than I could count, he had been the secret sharer and unwitting accomplice in the best and most disgusting of my adventures.

  I only met him once, in the nineteen seventies, in a little pub called Stryker’s in Manhattan. That night, he moved and talked like some kind of noir athlete, at once tough and passive, obsessed with little things, a hangnail, a fever blister on his lip—the physical business of making music. Beyond that, he just seemed “out there,” untroubled in any serious way, comfortably embarked on his own secret journey. Now, knowing that he was dead, I realized that somehow, day in, day out, as I had gone about my own fugitive endeavors, just knowing that Chet was out there too,
somewhere in the drift, had been a kind of validation. Just knowing that someone else, more gifted than I, whom I respected, had made the same foolish, draconian decisions and made it work, had made it better.

  Baker was, after all, the first artist whose work I had discovered—the first artist whom I had never heard of, whom no one had told me about, who spoke to me purely out of the air—whose work I was forced to divine by the pure logic of sense. That was in 1954. As I did every day after school and before my paper route, I was flipping through the jazz albums in Sumpter Bruton’s record shop when I came across a Chet Baker Quartet album and decided, on impulse, to buy it, because I thought the cover was cool. (It was, I must admit, an early ab-ex effort of Robert Irwin’s). I took the record up to the counter, and Sumpter, who was a jazzman himself, approved of my purchase, so I took the record home and was hardly through Happy Little Sunbeam before I realized that for once, finally, I had found my own place.

  My dad had been a jazz musician—an old swing guy with aspirations to bebop. My friends were all hillbillies. Chet Baker’s music was in some new place between them. It was horizontal music that flowed in a steady groove and sang those haunting double lines that—from Bob Wills’s twin-fiddles to The Allman Brothers’ twin-guitars—put unrequited sadness into country music. Chet, however, infected that Oklahoma lonesome with L.A. city-lights tristesse, so, the songs seemed to glide past me like low-riders down Pico Boulevard, sleek and self-contained, with the fleet glimmer of the city chasing down their dark reflective surfaces. And it did swing, with the shrewd harmonics of hard bop, but without its hyperkinetic posturing.

  Everybody else, I realized, was playing jazz. Chet Baker was playing the song, and, innervated as I was by the ornament of bebop, this seemed like an incredibly neat idea to me. So I went back to Sumpter’s the next day and bought Chet Baker Sings, my all-time favorite record—and, not coincidentally, the best make-out record in the history of modern romance. I played it all the time, morning and night, and it spoke to me then of a special kind of elegiac cool; it dispensed with all pretension to musical heroism without repudiating the idea of heroism itself; it muffled the sentiment of the sung lyrics without denying the possibility that somewhere, at some time, for someone, such sentiments might have had a certain validity. Today, having written some songs myself, I see that Baker knew what all songwriters know, what singers like Judy Garland and Patsy Cline and Karen Carpenter knew most profoundly, that all songs are sad songs, borne as they are on the insubstantial substance of our fleeting breath. So, Chet Baker Sings sang the quintessential postwar, white-boy blues, but it did more than that.