by Dave Hickey
And maybe that is my job these days. Maybe it’s just old fashioned of me to think that young artists should bring their own stuff with them into the art world, and bring their own friends, as well, simply because democratic institutions (even frivolous ones like the art world) respond to constituencies of people, not objects. That’s why I still endorse Peter Schjeldahl’s advice on how to become an artist: “You move to a city. You hang out in bars. You form a gang, turn it into a scene, and turn that into a movement.” Then, I would suggest, when your movement hits the museum, abandon it. Your demure emblem now adorns the smooth state—resides in the domain of normative expression, its status greatly magnified and its rich social contextuality effectively sterilized. Whatever happy contingencies fluttered around it disperse, as it departs society and enters “the culture,” where it must necessarily mean less, but to a lot more people. It's spectator-food, now, scholar-fodder, so you may safely stick a fork in it, tell yourself you’ve won, and go to your room.
In recent decades, however, changes in American institutional life have made this scenario exponentially more difficult to pursue. First, Richard Nixon’s expansion of the National Endowment for the Arts in the nineteen seventies has, over the years, effectively transformed the institutional art world into a government-regulated industry dedicated to maintaining a strict consensus of virtue. Second, the extended adolescence imposed on art students by lengthy tenures in graduate schools has effectively isolated them from their peers among whom they might discover their true, new constituencies. Third, the massive consequences of Frampton Comes Alive in the record industry and Star Wars in the movie industry have instituted a reign of consensus in the world of commercial entertainment, as well—a quest for a consensus of desire, dedicated to producing “blockbusters” that please everyone, every time.
So, young artists find themselves confronted with two smooth juggernauts, one dedicated to a regulated consensus of virtue, the other dedicated to a calculated consensus of desire, neither dedicated to the more elusive and redeeming consensus of virtue and desire. Nor is there any reason to suspect that this will change, beyond my wishing that it would—and what do I know? Maybe young artists like the art world the way it is. Maybe they are willing to undergo extensive indoctrination in order to adapt to it. And if they do adapt, well maybe the art world will truck in looky-loos for their performances. I don’t think so, but it could happen. If it does, the idea of art as a social practice may be declared officially dead, along with the idea that the practice of art in a democracy, under optimal conditions, is a game played by voluntary participants within the textures of the larger world—a game without rules, coaches, referees, or, God help us, spectators.
Without that liberating ideal, we will be left with a ritualized cultural exchange in which artists and objects, selected by professionals, submit themselves to the vagaries of casual, public spectatorship in officially sanctioned venues. We will divide the world into “artists” who have been trained in special schools, “spectators” who will admire the consequences of this training, and salaried “support workers” who will select the product and deliver it to market. In the popular arts, these spectators will support the artist by buying a ticket, or a CD, or a paperback. In the “fine arts,” spectators will buy tickets too, but the ticket will not be construed as support for the artist, but as support for “the arts,” which is to say, as a contribution to the salaries of the support workers who facilitate our public spectatorship. With the suppression of wicked commerce, then, fine artists will be required to support themselves otherwise than by their work, and the practice will be restricted to those who can.
This world would be fine, too, if art were nothing more than the production of sanctioned professionals, but it is more—and less, as well. It is a mode of social discourse, a participatory republic, an accumulation of small, fragile, social occasions that provide the binding agent of fugitive communities. It is made in small places and flourishes in environments only slightly less intimate. So, even if your art ends up in a museum—even if your “underground rave-performance event” ends up in the Los Angeles Times—even if your band ends up playing coliseums—you may be assured that what is being glorified in public splendor is just the residue, a mere simulacrum from which disinterested spectators may infer the experience of participants. This is why those works of arts that enter the public domain without participatory constituencies are instantly recognizable as pale impostors, as institutional furniture purporting to represent constituencies that have yet to materialize. Waylon put it best that night on the bus: “When I play a little club,” he said, “I’m playing songs for people I know. Up there in the lights in front of a stadium crowd, I’m just playin’ Waylon for strangers.”
THE HERESY OF ZONE DEFENSE
It’s in the third quarter. The fifth game of the 1980 NBA Finals. Lakers versus Seventy-Sixers. Maurice Cheeks is bringing the ball up the court for the Sixers. He snaps the rock off to Julius Erving, and Julius is driving to the basket from the right side of the lane against Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Julius takes the ball in one hand and elevates, leaves the floor. Kareem goes up to block his path, arms above his head. Julius ducks, passes under Kareem’s outside arm and then under the backboard. He looks like he’s flying out of bounds. But no! Somehow, Erving turns his body in the air, reaches back under the backboard from behind, and lays the ball up into the basket from the left side!
When Erving makes this shot, I rise into the air and hang there for an instant, held aloft by sympathetic magic. When I return to earth, everybody in the room is screaming, “I gotta see the replay!” They replay it. And there it is again. Jesus, what an amazing play! Just the celestial athleticism of it is stunning, but the tenacity and purposefulness of it, the fluid stream of instantaneous micro-decisions that go into Erving’s completing it . . . Well, it just breaks your heart. It’s everything you want to do by way of finishing under pressure, beyond the point of no return, faced with adversity, and I am still amazed when I think of it.
In retrospect, however, I am less intrigued by the play itself than by the joy attendant upon Erving’s making it, because it was well nigh universal. Everyone who cares about basketball knows this play, has seen it replayed a thousand times, and marveled at it. Everyone who writes about basketball has written about it. At the time, the crowd went completely berserk. Even Kareem, after the game, remarked that he would pay to see Doctor J make that play against someone else. Kareem’s remark clouds the issue, however, because the play was as much his as it was Erving’s, since it was Kareem’s perfect defense that made Erving’s instantaneous, pluperfect response to it both necessary and possible—thus the joy, because everyone behaved perfectly, eloquently, with mutual respect, and something magic happened—thus the joy, at the triumph of civil society in an act that was clearly the product of talent and will accommodating itself to liberating rules.
Consider this for a moment: Julius Erving’s play was at once new and fair! The rules, made by people who couldn’t begin to imagine Erving’s play, made it possible. If this doesn’t intrigue you, it certainly intrigues me, because, to be blunt, I have always had a problem with “the rules,” as much now as when I was younger. Thanks to an unruled and unruly childhood, however, I have never doubted the necessity of having them, even though they all go bad, and despite the fact that I have never been able to internalize them. To this day, I never stop at a stop sign without mentally patting myself on the back for my act of good citizenship, but I do stop (usually) because the alternative to living with rules—as I discovered when I finally learned some—is just hell. It is a life of perpetual terror, self-conscious wariness, and self-deluding ferocity, which is not just barbarity, but the condition of not knowing that you are a barbarian.
And this is never to know the lightness of joy—or even the possibility of it—because such joys as are attendant upon Julius Erving’s play require civilizing rules that attenuate violence and defer death. They require rules
that translate the pain of violent conflict into the pleasures of disputation—into the excitements of politics, the delights of rhetorical art, and competitive sport. Moreover, the maintenance of such joys requires that we recognize, as Thomas Jefferson did, that the liberating rule that civilized us yesterday will, almost inevitably, seek to govern us tomorrow, by suppressing both the pleasure and the disputation. In so doing, it becomes a form of violence itself.
An instance: I can remember being buoyed up, as a youth, by reading about Jackson Pollock in a magazine and seeing photographs of him painting. I was heartened by the stupid little rule through which Pollock civilized his violence. It’s okay to drip paint, Jackson said. The magazine seemed to acquiesce: Yeah, Jackson’s right, it seemed to say, grudgingly, Dripping paint is now within the rules. Discovering this, I was a little bit more free than I was before, and I know, that it was a “boy thing,” about privileging prowess at the edge of control and having the confidence to let things go all strange—and I know, as well, that, in my adolescent Weltanschauung, the fact that Jackson Pollock dripped paint somehow justified my not clearing the debris from the floor of my room (which usually, presciently, resembled a Rauschenberg combine). Even so, I had a right to be shocked a few years later when I enrolled in a university and discovered that Pollock’s joyous permission had been translated into a prohibitive, institutional edict: It’s bad not to drip! the art coaches said. It means you got no soul! Yikes!
Henceforth, it has always seemed to me that the trick of civilization lies in recognizing the moment when a rule ceases to liberate and begins to govern—and this brings us back to the glory of hoops. Because among all the arts of disputation our culture provides, basketball has been supreme in recognizing this moment of portending government and in deflecting it, by changing the rules when they threaten to make the game less beautiful and less visible, when the game stops liberating and begins to educate. And even though basketball is not a fine art—even though it is merely an armature upon which we project the image of our desire, while art purports to embody that image—the fact remains that every style change that basketball has undergone in this century has been motivated by a desire to make the game more joyful, various, and articulate, while nearly every style change in fine art has been, in some way, motivated by the opposite agenda. Thus basketball, which began this century as a pedagogical discipline, concludes it as a much beloved public spectacle, while fine art, which began this century as a much-beloved public spectacle, has ended up where basketball began—in the YMCA or its equivalent—governed rather than liberated by its rules.
Basketball’s fluidity and adaptability in this century has been considerably enhanced by the fact that it has no past to repudiate—by the fact that it was invented, and amazingly well-designed as a passionate, indoor game. It was less well-designed to serve its original purpose, which was to stave off a delinquency problem in Springfield, Massachusetts in the winter of 1891, where the “incorrigible” working-class youth who hung out at the Y were perceived as needing some form of socially redeeming “physical expression” during those months when football and baseball were unfeasible. Ideally, this diversion would involve some intense (i.e., exhausting) physical activity that would leave both the gymnasium and the young hoodlums physically intact.
James Naismith was enlisted in December of that year to design such a game. So he evolved some Guiding Principles. He combined the most democratic, least territorial aspects of rugby and lacrosse, and invented basketball—and succeeded well beyond his wildest dreams. Within three years, literally thousands of gymnasiums, in every corner of the nation, smelled like teen spirit. Not long thereafter, the YMCA newsletter New Era began running a series entitled “Is Basketball a Danger?” It posed the following questions: Was basketball getting too rough? Was it too exciting for America’s youth? Did it incite unruly behavior in its fans and participants? Did kids neglect their studies to “play it all the time”? And was it, therefore, losing the pedagogical aura of gentlemanly American sport and becoming professionalized? The answer to all these questions, in 1894, was Yes.
Within four years of Naismith’s inventing the game, basketball’s ground rules were in place. By 1894, the size of the court and the five-player team were normalized. The backboard was added to discourage spectators from goaltending, and the rules defining passing and dribbling were codified. And, amazingly, from that time until this, all subsequent legislative changes to the game have been made in the interest of aesthetics—to alter those rules that no longer liberate its players, that have begun to govern the game through tedium and inequity. And all of these changes probably would have come to pass more rapidly had Naismith codified his most profound insight into the game that he invented: It does not require a coach.
Naismith thought his game would teach itself, which it does, and that the players, trying to win, would teach one another, which they do. But coaches were a part of the gentlemanly, parental tradition of American sport, so basketball got coaches whether it needed them or not. But consider the potential consequences had Naismith acted on his original intuition: Without coaches, there would be no “education.” And without education, there would be no basketball gyms at universities. And without basketball gyms, there would be no “basketball programs.” And without basketball programs—designed to exploit the unpaid labor of impoverished city kids by lying to them and corrupting their adolescence, by teasing them with the false promise of an education and the faint hope of a pro career—basketball would still be a brave and beautiful game.
The long-standing reform coalition comprised of players, fans, and professional owners would have doubtless seen to that, since these aesthetes have never aspired to anything else. They have never wanted anything but for their team to win beautifully, to score more points, to play faster, and to equalize the opportunity of taller and shorter players—to privilege improvisation, so that gifted athletes, who must play as a team to win (because the game is so well-designed), might express their unique talents in a visible way. Opposing this coalition of ebullient fops is the patriarchal cult of college-basketball coaches and their university employers, who have always wanted to slow the game down, to govern, to achieve continuity, to ensure security and maintain stability.
These academic bureaucrats want a “winning program” and plot to win programmatically, by fitting interchangeable players into preassigned “positions” within the “system.” And if this entails compelling gifted athletes to guard little patches of hardwood in static zone defenses and to trot around on offense in repetitive, pre-choreographed patterns until they and their fans slip off into narcoleptic coma, then so be it. That’s the way Coach wants it. Fortunately, almost no one else does; and thus under pressure from the professional game, college basketball today is either an enormously profitable, high-speed moral disgrace or a stolid, cerebral celebration of the coach-as-auteur—which should tell us something about the wedding of art and education.
In professional basketball, however, art wins. Every major rule change in the past sixty years has been instituted to forestall either the Administrator’s Solution (Do nothing and hold on to your advantage) or the Bureaucratic Imperative (Guard your little piece of territory like a mad rat in a hole). The “ten-second rule” that requires a team to advance the ball aggressively, and the “shot-clock rule” that requires a team to shoot the ball within twenty-four seconds of gaining possession of it, have pretty much eliminated the option of holding the ball and doing nothing with it, since, at various points in the history of the game, this simulacrum of college administration has nearly destroyed it.
The “illegal-defense rule” which banned zone defenses, however, did more than save the game. It moved professional basketball into the fluid complexity of post-industrial culture—leaving the college game with its zoned parcels of real estate behind. Since zone defenses were first forbidden in 1946, the rules against them have undergone considerable refinement, but basically they now require that ever
y defensive player on the court defend another player on the court, anywhere on the court, all the time. All offensive players need not be guarded, of course, and two defensive players may double-team a single offensive player, but nobody can just defend a space. Initially, it was feared that this legislated man-to-man defense would resolve competition in terms of “natural comparative advantage” (as an economist might call it), since if each player is matched with a player on the other team, the player with the most height, bulk, speed, or quickness would seem to have a permanent advantage. But you don’t have to guard the same man all the time; you can switch, and this permission has created the beautiful “match-up game” in which both teams run patterns, picks, and switches in order to create advantageous situations for the offense or the defense—to generate the shifting interplay of man-made comparative advantage that characterizes most post-industrial commerce. And once you learn what to watch in this game (basically, everything), it is civilized complexity incarnate—quite literally made flesh.
This is not to say that basketball is a religion. It is better than a religion. It is a gift and a pure allegory. Whatever local moralities I wish to assign to it, I may, and so may you, as you and I gaze down through the lens of hoops into the old barbarity that the game has elevated into joy. In doing so, of course, we recognize that the rules that once elevated us into joy now govern us. Still, in the complexity of the game, there is the promise of solutions as daring as Doctor J’s. And they are personal solutions, because my basketball is not your basketball, and you are not me.