by Dave Hickey
So, in general, we might say that these anti-academic styles prioritize complexity over simplicity, pattern over form, repetition over composition, feminine over masculine, curvilinear over rectilinear, and the fractal, the differential, and the chaotic over Euclidean order. They celebrate the idea of space over the idea of volume, the space before the object over the volume within it. They elevate concepts of externalized consciousness over constructions of the alienated, interior self. They are literally and figuratively “outside” styles. Decorative and demotic, they resist institutional appropriation and always have. They distinguish themselves from apparently anti-academic styles like European Surrealism and gestural abstraction, which are easily academicized—whose transgressions against form are easily forgiven because they celebrate masculine interiority. For all their pretense to rebellion, these styles are only truly rebellious in their ebullient, pop-psychedelic appropriation.
What these anti-academic styles do not represent, however, is a radical tradition. They each signify a dissent from their own present and resemble one another only insofar as all post-enlightenment academic styles resemble one another. So all these psychedelic styles function as dialectical repudiations, spinning angrily away from the centrist ideology of their particular moment. To achieve the Rococo one merely turns the Baroque inside out, privileging space over volume. To become a Pre-Raphaelite, one need only repudiate Joshua Reynolds, point by point, with Fra Angelico in mind. To generate a Psychedelic style, then, one need only do Albers backwards—inside out, too much and exactly wrong—or willfully elaborate any other unctuous manifestation of elitist taste.
Finally, however, the influence of psychedelic experience on psychedelic style remains a slippery issue, and rather than consulting some text that might inadvertently cite Alan Watts or Timothy Leary, I feel confident enough in my own experience with art and drugs to suggest that the efficacy of psychedelics with regard to art has to do with their ability to render language weightless, as fluid and ephemeral as those famous “bubble letters” of the sixties. Psychedelics, I think, disconnect both the signifier and the signified from their purported referents in the phenomenal world—simultaneously bestowing upon us a visceral insight into the cultural mechanics of language, and a terrifying inference of the tumultuous nature that swirls beyond it. In my own experience, it always seemed as if language was a tablecloth positioned neatly upon the table of phenomenal nature until some celestial busboy suddenly shook it out, fluttering and floating it, and letting it fall back upon the world in not quite the same position as before—thereby giving me a vertiginous glimpse into the abyss that divides the world from our knowing of it. And it is into this abyss that the horror vacui of psychedelic art deploys itself like an incandescent bridge. Because it is one thing to believe, on theoretical evidence, that we live in the prison-house of language. It is quite another to know it, to actually peek into the slippery emptiness as the Bastille explodes around you. Yet psychedelic art takes this apparent occasion for despair and celebrates our escape from linguistic control by flowing out, filling that rippling void with meaningful light, laughter, and a gorgeous profusion.
THE DELICACY OF ROCK-AND-ROLL
In the mid nineteen sixties, when I was attending the University of Texas at Austin, Thursday nights were “Underground Flick Nite” at the Y on the Drag. The movies were supposed to start promptly at 7:00 P.M., but the projectionist was also a dedicated revolutionary, so they never really started until the New Left cabals, which also met at the Y, had adjourned for the day. So we always went. After a hot afternoon plotting the destruction of bourgeois society—and barring some previously scheduled eruption of spontaneous civil disobedience—Flick Nite was sort of radicals’ night out. Imagine Mystery Science Theater 3000 with a hot Texas mise en scène: The clatter of the projector in the glimmering darkness. Smoke curling up through the silvered ambiance. Insects swooping. The ongoing murmur of impudent commentary from the audience. References to Althusser, Marcuse, group sex. Like that.
On the evening I want to tell you about, the evening I experienced the paradigm shift, the program began with a couple of Stan Brakhage films. I don’t remember the titles but they might be characterized thematically as “very nervous” and sort of about “film itself.” As I recall, there was a great deal of panning, swooping, jiggling, dipping, and zooming—a great many explosions (the “film itself” seeming to catch on fire, at one point)—and, overall, a bit more montage than I would have preferred. A young woman sitting in front of me in the darkness kept waving her cigarette languidly on the pivot of her wrist and muttering, “Boy, boy, boy, boy, boy, boy, boy,” in a very bored voice.
She had a point. I can imagine these films coming back into vogue now, in this revisionist momento macho. Today, they would be minimalist action flicks—Die Hard sans Bruce Willis. Back then, they were the same old apocalypse—kinetic action paintings. People tended to mention Jackson Pollock when they talked about them. They were doing this when the second half of Flick Nite began—and we thought Brakhage was dull! In this new flick, the camera just sat there, trained on this guy who just sat there, too, sideways to the camera in a chair, like Whistler’s mother’s gay nephew, getting a haircut. That was it. The barber was out of the frame. All we saw were his hands, the scissors, and the comb, fluttering around this guy’s head. Clip-clip! Clip-clip-clip!
We couldn’t fucking believe it. This was really boring. Mesmerizing, too, of course, but not mesmerizing enough to keep us from moaning, keening almost, and swaying in our chairs. Clip-clip! But we kept looking at the screen even though we knew, after the first minute, that this was going to be it: that it was just a guy getting a haircut. Still, we watched, and it just went on and on. Clip! Clip-clip-clip! In truth, it was no more than five or six minutes, but that’s a long time in a movie, approximately the length of a Siberian winter. So, I began thinking about theory. “What about the clip-clip of the scissors and the clip-clip of the projector?” I wondered. “The analogy of the ‘actual’ and ‘represented’ white noise? What about that?”
Then it happened. The guy getting the haircut reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes and casually lit one up! Major action! Applause. Tumultuous joy and release! Chanting even. And the joy may have been ironic (it almost certainly was), but the release was quite genuine. I remember every instant of Henry lighting up that cigarette and the laughter I could not suppress. Because it was fun, and amazing to realize how seriously you had been fucked with. The haircut continued at that point (clip-clip!), but we were alive now. Fifteen minutes earlier we had been dozing through Brakhage’s visual Armageddon. Now we were cheering for some guy lighting a Lucky Strike.
Clearly, Mr. Warhol was onto something here. It was stupid, but it was miraculous, too. His film had totally recalibrated the perceptions of a roomful of sex-crazed adolescent revolutionaries into a field of tiny increments. It had restored the breath and texture to things and then, with the flip of a Zippo, had given us a little bang in the bargain—and by accident, I have no doubt. We all knew, of course, that the events in a work of art are only large or small relative to one another, but our bodies had forgotten. Our bodies had become inured to explosions. The delicate increments of individual response needed to be reinscribed, and Haircut did that. When the lights came up, we were all looking at one another with new eyes.
“There has got to be some political application,” the projectionist said to me as we stood around on the porch, finishing our beer. I doubted it, but I didn’t say so, because I wanted to see more Warhol flicks, and I feared that once the critical instrumentalities of dialectical materialism were unleashed upon Haircut, it would become only too clear that Andy’s film dissolved the idea of history and narrative into something tinier, more complicated and contingent. And for us, at that time, there were no politics without history. Politics were history—and vice versa—although, in truth, I found myself preferring the political morality of Warhol’s film to Brakhage�
��s. It was sadder and funnier, too.
Today, I know this wasn’t quite fair to Brakhage, but at that moment the rhetoric of expressionist freedom had reached the point of rapidly diminishing returns. It just wasn’t working anymore. I think I was correct, however, in assuming that Brakhage’s practice (if it was not purely formal) was essentially tragic. His films strove toward a condition of freedom and autonomy, fully aware that the work itself, for all its abstract materiality, could never free itself from cultural expectations. Nor could the artist, for all the aleatory and improvisatory privileges he granted himself, free his practice from the traditions of picture-making. So, no matter how much you admired Brakhage’s bird-on-a-wire lungings toward existential freedom, you had to admit, finally, that all the energy was in the wire.
Warhol’s film turned that energy on its head. Warhol could not invent enough wires, nor try hard enough to impose normative simplicity—to avoid freedom at all costs—nor fail more spectacularly. The static camera, the static subject, the idiot narrative armature, the tiny non-individuated events (clip-clip!), only served to theatricalize the inherent imperfection and disorder of the endeavor, only served to foreground the sheer, silly ebullient muchness of the image moving in time. Thus, Warhol’s self-inhibiting strategies liberated him as an artist and liberated his beholders, as well, into an essentially comic universe.
Brakhage told us what we already knew as children of the Cold War, that no matter how hard we tried, we could not be free—thus inviting us, paradoxically, into the rigors of utopian political orthodoxy. Warhol’s film, on the other hand, told us what we needed to know, that, no matter how hard we tried, we could not be ordered—that insofar as we were tiny, raggedy, damaged and disorganized human beings, we probably were free, in some small degree, whether we liked it or not. All of this is probably self-evident to anyone who has lived through the past thirty years. The effect of these films on me, on that hot, Texas night, however, was nothing short of cataclysmic.
I knew, you see, that my encounter with Brakhage and Warhol was not, in any sense, a “high art” experience. It couldn’t have been. I didn’t know anything about high art—I knew about radical politics, jazz, rock-and-roll, and linguistics—and understanding this, then, I have gradually come to distrust the very idea of high art in a democracy. I mean, what would it be like? Aristocratic cultures have a high and low. They have higher-ups and lower-downs, and consequently they may, on occasion, create a socially engaged, commercially disinterested high art that trickles down to instruct and inform the “lower orders.” In a mercantile democracy, however, the only refuge from the marketplace is in the academy. So democracies, I fear, must content themselves with commercial, popular art that informs the culture and noncommercial, academic art that critiques it—with the caveat that, even though most popular art exploits the vernacular, some popular art redeems it—even though it’s still for sale.
To reach this conclusion, I asked myself these questions: Is a painting by Jackson Pollock or a film by Stan Brakhage high art? Yes? Well, if so, could the art of Pollock or Brakhage exist without the imprimatur of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker? Could I have understood it without its being informed by the cultural context of American jazz? Without the free-form exuberance of bebop? My answer: No way, José. And, conversely, could bebop exist without Jackson Pollock and Stan Brakhage? You betcha. And could rock-and-roll exist without Warhol? Yep. And could Andy Warhol exist without rock-and-roll? I don’t think so. These answers, of course, tend to confirm my own predisposition to regard recorded popular music as the dominant art form of this American century. My point is that Pollock and Warhol do not exploit the lumpen vernacular, they redeem it—elevating its eccentricities into the realm of public discourse. As a consequence, the work of Pollock and Warhol, like that of Rembrandt or Dickens or David, is the best that popular, commercial art can be—doing the best things it can do.
So now I think of that evening in Texas as marking the end of the Age of Jazz and the beginning of the Age of Rock-and-Roll—the end of tragic theater in American popular culture and the beginning of comic delicacy. Both ages make art that succeeds by failing, but each exploits failure in different ways. Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us—simpatico dudes that we are—while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best, we can only be free one or two at a time—while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have, and sometimes it works—but it doesn’t feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosphere of formal dialectic, beyond our social concerns.
Rock-and-roll, on the other hand, presumes that the four of us—as damaged and anti-social as we are—might possibly get it to-fucking-gether, man, and play this simple song. And play it right, okay? Just this once, in tune and on the beat. But we can’t. The song’s too simple, and we’re too complicated and too excited. We try like hell, but the guitars distort, the intonation bends, and the beat just moves, imperceptibly, against our formal expectations, whether we want it to or not. Just because we’re breathing, man. Thus, in the process of trying to play this very simple song together, we create this hurricane of noise, this infinitely complicated, fractal filigree of delicate distinctions.
And you can thank the wanking eighties, if you wish, and digital sequencers, too, for proving to everyone that technologically “perfect” rock—like “free” jazz—sucks rockets. Because order sucks. I mean, look at the Stones. Keith Richards is always on top of the beat, and Bill Wyman, until he quit, was always behind it, because Richards is leading the band and Charlie Watts is listening to him and Wyman is listening to Watts. So the beat is sliding on those tiny neural lapses, not so you can tell, of course, but so you can feel it in your stomach. And the intonation is wavering, too, with the pulse in the finger on the amplified string. This is the delicacy of rock-and-roll, the bodily rhetoric of tiny increments, necessary imperfections, and contingent community. And it has its virtues, because jazz only works if we’re trying to be free and are, in fact, together. Rock-and-roll works because we’re all a bunch of flakes. That’s something you can depend on, and a good thing too, because in the twentieth century, that’s all there is: jazz and rock-and-roll. The rest is term papers and advertising.
DEALING
I spent the summer of 1967 at the University of Texas winding up a dissertation in literature and linguistics. Taking Henry James’s advice, I had invented what I called a “paragraph grammar”—a model for encoding written English that took the paragraph rather than the sentence as its basic unit. I wanted to describe the chaotic flow of prose as one describes other dynamic systems, so the encoded text might reflect the musical aspects of literary practice: the pace of syntactic and lexical repetition, the shifting proportion of new and redundant information, the modulation of syntactical subordination, things like that. Specifically, I wanted to encode literary manuscripts in sequential states of revision—to discover just exactly what could be said, on good evidence, about authorial intentions.
My professors, I felt, were helplessly and seductively circular on this subject. They would cite Freud to suggest D.H. Lawrence’s “latent homosexuality,” then cite Marx to infer his “class consciousness”—then presume henceforth that the textual evidence they had discovered of Lawrence’s “latent homosexuality” and “class consciousness” somehow validated their faith in Freud and Marx—and this just would not do. If you believe in God, and you get wet when it rains, you may quite logically, on good, textual evidence, propose that God has caused your dampness. Your wet raincoat, however, does not confirm the existence of God. Nor would a million wet raincoats.
In search of one-way causation, then, I raided the university manuscript collection for texts by Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein in sequential states of revision. I encoded them and then compared them, to see what could be said about t
hese demonstrably consequent, willful acts. Because, even though there could be no connective evidence that a particular text by Hemingway had been occasioned by his neuroses, his “class consciousness,” or his family background, there was visible evidence that he first wrote “cows, bullocks and muddy-flanked water buffalo” then replaced it with it with “cattle”—and evidence as well that this substitution of the more general term for the more specific was programmatic in Hemingway’s revision. I could also demonstrate that Hemingway habitually flattened the hierarchies of subordination in his prose and slowed the pace at which new information was introduced into his writing, substantially reducing its quantity.
These, it seemed to me, were things you could actually talk about—so the things that you said would be caused by what Hemingway actually did, and not by what he might have consciously or unconsciously intended to do as a consequence of some disembodied cause. In any case, by September of 1967, I had the project pretty much nailed, and only then, unfortunately, did its true eccentricity begin to dawn on me—only then did I begin to realize that there was no support anywhere in the academic world for what I was doing, nor was there any inkling that such support might be forthcoming. For the past three years, I had been studying great writing as a young painter might study great painting, struggling to understand the nuts and bolts of actual practice, seeking insight into the physical nuances of the medium. It had been very interesting and enormously rewarding, but the written result of my efforts, I found, sounded more like a repudiation of graduate study than an example of it—and this was far from my “intention.”
I had just fucked up, and this realization came as a bit of a downer, to be sure, although it certainly explained the sense of nauseous dread I had been feeling at the prospect of laying my labors before my “interdisciplinary” committee. Because I knew what would happen. The two post-structuralists, confronted with the “empiricism” of my practice, would almost certainly fling themselves upon the barricades. The literary humanist, faced with the prospect of calculus, would go catatonic; and the two linguistics wonks, who spent their summers taping Hopis and thought Gertrude Stein was something you drank beer out of, would bitch and moan about my “unscientific” literary parameters and probably resign from the committee. I figured I was looking at twelve months of spite, recrimination, misprision, and power politics. So I thought: What if I actually won? What if I confronted them and prevailed? The optimal positive outcome would be a little job at a big university in a place where it snows—and a six-year battle for tenure.