by Dave Hickey
Reading about all these short, perilous Renaissance lives on a quiet, desert morning in the late twentieth century must have sharpened my awareness of time whooshing by, because I suddenly remembered that I had to make a telephone call. Closing Shearman's book, I pulled over my Rolodex and flipped it open immediately, accidentally, to the late Scott Burton's card. I wasn't surprised to find it, since I stopped clearing dead people out of my Rolodex years ago. Throwing those little cards away into the trash is a very depressing chore—and leaving them there, with their disconnected numbers intact and their abandoned addresses appended, is a way of remembering, of being reminded in the midst of life. On this occasion, seeing Scott's name there, on the little white tombstone of his file card, in the midst of reading about mortality and Renaissance portraits, made me think of how nice it would be to go somewhere and see a full-blown, luminous sixteenth-century portrait of the artist in his glory.
I could have pulled an exhibition catalogue off the shelf and looked at a photograph, of course, but photographs are nailed in the moment of their making, and when the subject is dead, this distance from the present only reminds you of that. I would have preferred an image that reminded me, persuasively, physically, that Scott had once been alive, that we had told some jokes, had some laughs—something that caught the little tremor that flickered around Scott's upper lip, always threatening to burst into a smile or a sneer, you never knew which. That's what painting used to do—what only painting can do—and does no longer, and this seemed a pity, since regardless of fashions in image-making, we continue to die at an alarming rate.
When I was a kid and stupid about art, I used to love Cézanne because he made me feel smart. Everything that I had been taught about modern art by modernist professors, I could find in his paintings: the declaration of the paint, the plastic language of the mark, the taut picture plane, the objecthood of the image, the inference of primary structures made manifest by the substitution of haptic information for pictorial data, the vertiginous tension between the depth implied by the image and the lateral dance of flat chromatics across the surface of the paint, and all the rest of it. And above all, I discovered in these formal attributes clear evidence of those American virtues my professors had appended to this Frenchman’s practice. At one glance, I could see the strength and the honesty, the modesty and the simplicity. They seemed as evident to me in Cézanne’s pictures as those qualities seemed admirable to me in the world.
Not long thereafter I began to outgrow this manly modernism. Gradually, what had once seemed strong to me in Cézanne’s pictures began to seem obdurate. The bluntness that I had reflexively attributed to his honesty began to seem stubbornly provincial. Where I had once inferred taciturn modesty in the work, I now saw willful, tight-fisted passive aggression—and then one day I could no longer remember why simplicity was a virtue, nor why paint was so important. Apparently, I had grown up (if only a little) and so, in order to keep Cézanne and dispense with homely heroism, I rigged up a camp aesthetic that dumbed-down the pictures, that invested their misanthropic false naïveté with a kind of hip innocence—a rhetoric of studied clunkiness and sophisticated duh.
But Cézanne is not a painter who will stay stupid for long, and one afternoon in the National Gallery, after lingering with the swift and naughty Fragonards, I stopped in front of a Cézanne and it began teaching me. “Now, notice the dynamic of picture and painting, of image and paint. And don’t be insensitive to the device that redeems the bottom-weighting of the image. And don’t forget,” (finger wagging) “here’s the picture plane. Right here! Notice how I insist upon its flatness, how I insist upon its paintedness. I’m not trying to trick you like that libertine Frago, I’m going to show you how to see a painting. For your own good. “
Since I was by this time an advanced student, I was expected to respond. I was supposed to say, “Yes, I see, and I am stunned by the mastery of that yellow mark. It is so strong, so casually laid into the background of the image, and yet it advances so strenuously that it asserts, at once, the hillside foliage of the French countryside, the irrevocable flatness of the painting, and the compositional power of its upper right-hand quadrant—and the light, of course! I could go on about the light . . .” After all this, hopefully, the picture might approve of my looking at it; and I realized then that, when I was a kid, Cézanne’s pictures had made me feel smart by presuming, correctly, that I was stupid. They had treated me like a child who was ignorant of picture-making and its decorum.
Now that I was an adult, they continued to do so, although I no longer much cared. At this point, I was struck, for the first time, by the strangeness of the endeavor. I had always just taken it for granted that viewers were supposed to be concerned with such trivia, but when you thought about it, why would modernist painters expend so much time and energy trying to educate a justifiably ignorant public in the specialized business of making pictures with paint? And why would any member of the public care to know, since, even at their most ingenious, these procedures are only marginally interesting to the nonpractitioner? I didn’t know, but clearly, once modernists embarked upon this pedagogical mission, there was no length to which they would not carry it in order to maintain their professorial status. Ultimately, they would perpetuate the public’s education in painterly practice for nearly a hundred years, obsessively postponing our graduation by coming up with ever more ordinary truths about painting upon which we might be lectured (It’s a rectangle! Wow! But it doesn’t have to be a rectangle! Yikes!), thus infinitely deferring the public’s accreditation as cultural equals. So these veridical lessons, being nothing if not teachable, got taught and were learned, although having learned them, one was left with little else to do but to teach others, equally deluded, that the pleasures of art depend upon our appreciation of its most paralyzingly obvious attributes and limitations.
So, I wanted to have a chat with Cézanne, as I stood before his painting in the National Gallery. “Paul,” I wanted to say, “about this picture plane thing . . . uh . . . I know it’s there, and I know that you know it’s there. So, couldn’t we both just sorta agree that it’s there and fucking get on with it?” But then I thought, Get on with what? Certainly nothing in the realm of Frago’s idea of getting on with it, since once you look at a Cézanne, it has done what it does. It has slammed the door on the lived past in the name of painting’s tradition—has provided us with allusions to Puvis de Chavannes, David, and Poussin in lieu of living memory. In short, by pushing the picture plane forward and insisting on its own materiality, Cézanne destroys the three-hundred-year-old syntactical tense structure of painterly practice, suppressing the inference of the past (or remoteness from the factual present) that is intrinsic to the illusionistic image, insisting on the priority of the present object over the past image.
Beyond that fiat, with Cézanne, lie the subtle pleasures of connoisseurship, which needless to say are substantial, but ultimately, this primary flatness is a great deal more than “a formal issue.” It is always an argument for the importance of the visible, veridical present over the lost past, or the problematic vision, or the hitherto invisible objects that constitute the subject matter of pictorial illusion. In fact, if anyone who has thought about it for a moment can seriously suggest that anyone in the history of modern culture has ever suspected the picture plane of any picture, however expertly rendered, to be any place other than where it is, they have a better imagination than I do.
My point here is that pictorial illusion only has power as illusion. It is only interesting as an excerpted, ideological re-creation of what is lost, past, or only imaginable. Modeling and perspectival rendering do for an image what tense structure and negative constructions do for an utterance: They reconstitute the painting as extended discourse, framing it, temporalizing it, and more than cubing the amount of relational information that its structure can bear. They free its signifiers from their referents in present reality and make it possible for us to lie, to imagine, and to prop
ose the problematic in a persuasive way. Like the card tricks of Ricky Jay, pictorial illusion is magic for people who do not believe in magic.
Those who do believe in magic need not concern us here. They exist outside the discourse and beyond contemporary culture, and thus, should we discover that the illusions of Ricky Jay or of Correggio really are magic, they would merit neither our attention nor our amazement, because this discovery would mean that we are, in fact, not the prisoners of time—and illusions are about nothing else. They are always about time—time past, remote, or imagined—and always a matter of timing, the subject of all our mourning. For three centuries, illusionistic images aimed to slow life down—to make visible the fluid, violent, and often invisible constituents of temporal cultural experience. Then, in the nineteenth century, with the apotheosis of modernity, artists stopped slowing down life into images and began slowing down the images themselves.
Thus, in modern painting, our comfort level with illusion is always a matter of how exquisitely we delay the illusion’s taking hold, since, for reasons of ideological fashion, we must always pay obeisance to the material present before we experience the imagined past. So the painter’s mark in the nineteenth century becomes, quite literally, the matter of time, the vehicle by which we are allowed access—at the proper or improper speed—into the imaginary realm of the image. The tiny, transparent demi-tone of Bouguereau’s mark, for instance, transports us much too swiftly and in much too bodily a manner through the promiscuously open picture plane; it deceives us instantaneously, robbing us in a wink of our millennial modernity and arousing in us deep, bourgeois fears of educated rhetoric—of being seduced! (Eeek!). The furious gestural brilliance in an oil sketch by Sargent, on the other hand, defers the resolution of the image for far too long, it makes us work for the image, and in that working, Sargent makes us aware of our unmodern need for it.
The nice, medium-sized, middle-class daubs of your average Monet, however, are just right; they allow us to throw a bone to the present object and then they float us away, disembodied, ever so gradually, into the Arcadian world of suburban real estate. The black-and-white photograph, with its chromatic phase shift, does very much the same thing, allowing us to have our modernity and our melancholia too—since both idioms, due to the attenuated nature of our transport into the domain of the image, tend to prioritize the plangent lostness of the past over the living conception of it that you find in, say, a portrait by Raphael. Thus, over and above their more obvious virtues, Impressionist painting and its descendants, along with black-and-white modernist photography, function as ideal viewing material for people who only hope they don’t believe in magic and are consequently fearful of anything that looks like it—fearful, I suppose, that, on account of some moral or educational deficiency, they might be seduced into delusion or despair by some persuasive man-made piece of rhetoric.
With modernists, this is a more-or-less forgivable pathology, due to the pervasive teleological mindset of those times. Its persistence into the subtle twilight of postmodernity in the age of AIDS and poison rivers is somewhat more difficult to fathom, unless we attribute it to the return of the repressed—to vestigial Marxism or some covert, utopian longing that has somehow survived into an age which has supposedly disarmed and dismantled History into a million herstories and histories. In any case, the prospect of a chromatically glamorous verisimilar image seen through a sleek open picture plane—whether by Raphael or Cibachrome—remains as outré and ominous as Linda Lovelace at a church picnic, lurking there to suck us in.
One wonders at the primitive terror that lurks behind this obsession with de-professionalizing the mechanics of painterly illusion, restricting its practice with training wheels and keeping it operational within the bounds of lay perception, neither too fast to mitigate the volition of innocents nor too slow to occlude their perception. Finally, I suspect, this ostensibly parental concern for innocents who might be seduced by illusionistic images is little more than a mask disguising the even more pervasive illusion that people, by looking at boring “honest” images, will somehow be cured of their affection for looking at interesting “dishonest” ones. Not very likely, I think.
The extent to which we long for the delight of illusion and distrust its efficacy is probably best demonstrated by the New York vogue of card handler Ricky Jay, who packed the house at the Second Stage theater for 106 performances a few years ago with his show entitled “Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants.” Jay is, indeed, a masterful illusionist, and he refuses to divulge his tricks on the grounds of professional etiquette, but the devices by which his illusions are framed and made safe for New York audiences speak directly to that audience’s prevailing anxiety over illusion. Basically, David Mamet’s production of Jay’s act does for magic what Cézanne does for painting—it replaces a living history of meaning with a technical tradition of professional achievement.
The setting for Jay’s production, then, is not a field of dreams, but a library; and in Jay’s educational patter, Dai Vernon and Charlie Miller provide the historical validation that Puvis de Chavannes and Poussin provide for Cézanne. Jay eschews the intimidating guise of Sorcerer and opts instead for the role of avuncular practitioner. Like Cézanne, he is a professor of his practice, whose tricks have footnotes and aspire, not to the secrets of the universe, but to the mastery of that practice. In this way, Jay’s tricks are contextualized into “formalist magic” that invites our connoisseurship of arcana. Our innocent delight at being harmlessly seduced is ennobled in a brown haze of pedagogical earnestness.
This strategy of historically contextualizing forbidden subjects under the guise of “education for the masses,” is probably as old as the idea of forbidden subjects itself. The interest lies in what is forbidden where. Here in Las Vegas, every showgirl revue peddles sex to middle Americans in much the same way that Ricky Jay peddles magic to New Yorkers, by providing the audience with nothing so risqué as contemporary bare-breasted babes, but rather a short course in the history of bare-breasted babes down through the ages. This points up an interesting distinction, since in Las Vegas we like our magic as mysterious as New Yorkers like their sex au natural. It is a matter of taste, perhaps, but the rules would seem to be: What cannot be naturalized in New York must be contextualized. What cannot be mystified in Las Vegas must be contextualized. Which, I suspect, is why Las Vegas exists, and why the hottest ticket in town is Siegfried and Roy at the Mirage, a magical extravaganza in which the business of illusion has been given its full complement of Wagnerian subtexts.
Thus, during Siegfried and Roy at the Mirage, when Roy ascends into the heavens on the back of a white tiger poised on a mirror ball, the subtext of levitation as a metaphor for transcending nature is explicitly made. In much the same way, the instability of gender, species, and identity is foregrounded in a sequence of metamorphic illusions in which a Valkyrie is transformed into Roy, who is transformed into an eagle, who is transformed into Siegfried, who is transformed back into Roy. At the climax of the show, an elephant disappears—and the chorus breaks into a gospel song inciting the magicians to bring the elephant back. When the elephant is made to reappear, the whole tradition of disappearing things and restoring them is located where it should be: in rituals of death and resurrection. And no one in the audience has been seduced by these illusions into believing anything. Quite the reverse. The grandeur of the promise around which these illusions are constructed demystifies the illusions themselves. You never think, How was it done? You simply take pleasure in seeing the impossible appear possible and the invisible made visible. Because if these illusions were not just illusions, we should not be what we are: mortal creatures, who miss our dead friends, and thus can appreciate levitating tigers and portraits by Raphael for what they are—songs of mortality sung by the prisoners of time.
GODIVA SPEAKS
My years as Lady Godiva . . . First, I have to admit that I hesitated to tell this story. Because straight America makes you hesitate. But I’m n
ot a girl who hesitates for long, and, also, I’m not embarrassed. I look at my life, and it’s not like I’m some “artiste” whose been influenced by pop culture. I am pop culture: Barbie, Pez dispensers, heavy metal, professional wrestling, cheese-flavored dog food. That’s me. So to cut to the chase: How did I become a “lady wrestler”? Well, I grew up here in Las Vegas as a normal suburban kid, who looked like a perfect suburban kid, because I was always blonde and cute and smart, and when everybody began to get figures, I got a great one. And when everybody had to do drawings in class, I was good at it, and when we all went out for sports, I could do that, too. So that was me in everybody’s eyes: Little Miss Perfect.
I decided to be an artist when I was in high school, so when I graduated, I got an art scholarship to UNLV and spent three years there, scribbling away, still being Little Miss Perfect. Then, bang! I couldn’t be perfect anymore. I just bailed. Right down I-15. Escape to L.A.! I got a house in the Hollywood Hills and waited tables in Santa Monica. I hung out in rock-and-roll clubs and partied my ass off. Enjoying my early twenties, don’tcha know. Then one night a friend from high school called me up: “Hey, Dawn,” she said, “Come back and do this wrestling thing with me!” I said, “Wrestling thing! You got to be kidding! I’d never do anything like that!” Then I thought, “Hey, why not?” So I threw enough clothes for two weeks in my Toyota and headed back up I-15 to Vegas, back to Vegas. (Like I said, I’m not a big hesitater.) Three months later, I let go of my house in Hollywood. And that’s how I became one of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling.