Anchored in the bay where all men ride?
A response to Daniel Oppenheimer, Blake Smith, and John Pistelli on Dave Hickey's The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty and Other Matters, edited by Gary Kornblau
My first thought was of Yeats, for whom the “dragon” is not beauty (as
glosses the title of the late art critic, gambler, gallerist, Nashville lyricist, and all-around wild man Dave Hickey’s 1993 essay collection The Invisible Dragon, now reissued in a deluxe edition by his longtime Art Issues editor ), but thought. Or rather (to spare the great man the charge of having always, as he did sometimes, agreed with Malibu Stacy that “thinking too much gives you wrinkles”), not Yeats himself, but one his “masks,” the scholar Michael Robartes, whom he sets in bantering dialogue with a young Dancer:He. Opinion is not worth a rush;
In this altar-piece the knight,
Who grips his long spear so to push
That dragon through the fading light,
Loved the lady; and it’s plain
The half-dead dragon was her thought,
That every morning rose again
And dug its claws and shrieked and fought.
Could the impossible come to pass
She would have time to turn her eyes,
Her lover thought, upon the glass
And on the instant would grow wise.
Could anything be less Hickeyan than that first line? Though the dialogue form suggests otherwise (as does the Dancer’s deflating reply: “You mean they argued”), we should not mistake the setting here for Hickey’s “Empire of Talk”—as the critic names art’s ideal homeland in a hitherto uncollected essay that goes on to suggest that the whole “discourse of Western art” begins with a fundamental “misprision”:
It begins when artists commissioned to produce ideologically identical works of art to adorn the churches of Rome began to develop private constituencies, and when artists commissioned to produce soft-core pornography for princely bedrooms began to develop public constituencies. It begins, specifically, when Guido and Salvatore, visiting from Ferrara, sit down with a glass of wine after a day of wandering through the Eternal City and decide that they prefer Raphael to Michelangelo, for reasons they don’t understand and will continue to discuss on the long ride home. In the preference for Raphael over Michelangelo, Guido and Salvatore affirm that, even though the intended meanings and significations that inform the works are virtually identical, the consequences of the works themselves are different enough to talk about, to occasion a preference and cause the quarrels that have continued from that time until this.
“Opinion is not worth a rush”? Ah yes, but whose? Opinion, for Hickey, is at once everything and nothing—or rather, doctrine is nothing, opinion everything, and the opinions that count are about beauty. As
has put it, quoting the same passage: “Hickey is the preeminent booster for the way our contagious excitements about aesthetic—that is, beautiful and ugly—things become talk and talk becomes writing.” The task for writing about art, then, is first of all not to think of itself as a task, to remain spontaneous and personal, and above all not to calcify into doctrine (whose medium is writing).The Yeats who distinguishes between “poetry” (that is, language-as-art) and “rhetoric” (that is, the tendentious, but also implicitly servile and—I use the term advisedly—meretricious use of language) as man’s “quarrel with himself” and his “quarrel with his neighbors” similarly seems far from the Hickey for whom “rhetoric” is a recurring and not at all stigmatized term in the discussion of visual art (where it names, among other things, the formal means by which is achieved art’s aim of “seduction”). Beautiful things never find Hickey falling silent in contemplation—which is not to say he fails to retain a strong sense of the gestural.1 A “con-versation” itself, after all, is a “turning together”—where just as important as finding shared excitements (“How like you this?”) might be those on whom the participants turn their shoulders.
Hence, in part, how we seem asked to understand Hickey’s fascination with Robert Mapplethorpe’s ‘X’ Portfolio of hardcore gay BDSM chiaroscuro photographs: they, too, revealed for him the inextricability of beauty and talk. This episode in Hickey’s career has already been much and well discussed by my precursors in this symposium (if, joining so late, I may rightly claim to take part in it).
, in his book Far From Respectable, and Blake Smith, in his essay on it for Tablet, each tell how Hickey recognized, in Mapplethorpe’s conservative antagonists, a feeling for art’s power denied to its liberal champions, whose stand on the otherwise unobjectionable basis of “free speech” abetted that art’s reduction to an etiolated formalism—such that even an image of (if I may quote Frederick Seidel out of context) a “fist-fucking anus swallowing a fist” found itself diminished to a matter of masses and forms. Hickey’s own brand of freedom could never be indifferent to what art had to say.On the unconfessed commonality between the old and the new “enforcers of conscience,” Oppenheimer is eloquent:
In the great mystery of the disappeared beauty, the whodunnit that fueled The Invisible Dragon, it turned out that it was the therapeutic institution [i.e., the congeries of museums, academic art critics, and grant-making agencies that interpose themselves between the public and a culture that they sponsor and thereby assert the right to define] that dunnit. It had squirted so many trillions of gallons of obfuscating ink into the ocean over so many decades that beauty, and the delicate social ecosystems that fostered its coalescence, could barely aspirate. Why the therapeutic institution did this, for Hickey, was simple. Power. Control. Fear of freedom and pleasure and undisciplined feeling. It was the eternally recurring revenge of the dour old Patriarch who had been haunting our dreams, since we came up from the desert, with his schemas of logic, strength, autonomy, and abstraction, asserting control against the wiles and seductions of the feminine and her emanations of care, vulnerability, delicacy, dependence, joy, and decoration. It was the expression of God’s anger in the Garden of Eden when Eve and Adam defied Him to bite from the juicy apple of knowledge and freedom.
This sense of joy as something snatched from under the Father’s nose recurs in Oppenheimer’s account, channeling Hickey, of Mapplethorpe’s ‘X’ Portfolio itself. Here, “Power” and “Control” make their return, but as transfigured by “care”—thus prefiguring what Hickey will describe, channeling Deleuze, as the asymmetry between Sadism and Masochism (in the latter of which, with its voluntary and contractual alienation of power, he finds an unlikely figure for representative government):
Mapplethorpe’s pictures, though, were something else entirely, a real cannon blast against the battlements of heterosexual normativity. […] Mapplethorpe was using orthodox pictorial techniques to bring to light a world of pleasure, pain, male-male sex, bondage, power, trust, desire, control, violation, submission, love, and self-love that had been banished to the dark alleyways, boudoirs, bathhouses, and rest stops of the West since the decline of Athens. And he was doing so masterfully, in the language of fine art, in the high houses of American culture.
Those “high houses of American culture” are, however, the bastions of “opinion” in the bad sense, and to see Mapplethorpe’s standard raised upon their battlements cannot have failed to fill Hickey with a certain misgiving—as if the dragon had been turned into damsel needing to be rescued before she is married off to a dull and respectable prince. (Or, as the fairy tale has it, to some old king who just happens to be her own father.)
Hence the observable double movement of Hickey’s writing. If his prose is a little polished, for my tastes, to quite convey the intended air of loucheness, he made up for it with his offbeat enthusiasms, and the cannily samizdat nature of his publications for Kornblau’s Art Issues. (In a recent blog post, Oppenheimer recalls the first edition of The Invisible Dragon being “so cool that when it came out, it wasn’t even available for sale.”) You might think there was an irony in this, given Hickey’s numerous pleas on behalf of the market, that we take it seriously and thereby recognize the non-institutional settings where art accrues a “constituency” and without which canonization is—as the term suggests—a matter of self-reinforcing fiat. For Hickey, though, when “money talks,” it talks—the market, on this (somewhat idealistic) view, merely expressing (and more candidly, in the mode of revealed versus stated preferences) the always implicitly discursive values that for him were fundamental. Which isn’t to rule out a shrewd sense for the power of niche marketing, here tailored to suggest the semi- or illegitimate corners in which his favored transactions took place.
For Hickey, you might say, the art world was a strip club, and if Yeats’s muse was a Dancer, he knew what kind. Her credo might be that of the male hustler Hickey ventriloquizes in another freshly collected essay: “love me, admire me, bow down before me, pay me for being what I am—beautiful.” Not that there is anything new under the sun, of course. It is the same credo, Hickey asserts, as that of Keats’s Grecian Urn.
Much to admire in all this, no doubt. But must I confess there is something that gives me pause, something that makes me want to whisper, “Take care, ye who fight with normativity, lest you too become normative”? (I here echo a reservation voiced earlier in this conversation by Blake Smith, who observes—of the recent edition’s effort to “queer” Hickey—that a “progressive egalitarian politics might simply rewrite the terms of normativity and queerness, making […] supposedly ‘queer’ progressives into the normative subjects and the erstwhile normative ones into the ‘new queers.’”) For one thing, I find myself reluctant to sign onto the contrast, drawn by Oppenheimer if not by Hickey, between Mapplethorpe’s work and that of Andres Serrano, whose Piss Christ similarly ran afoul of the 1990s Moral Majority, and whom Oppenheimer makes a foil, in his residual orthodoxy and piety, for the more oppositional Mapplethorpe.2 I say this not because I dispute the interpretation of Serrano (who was, Oppenheimer writes, “mostly using new means to say some very old things about the mystery of the incarnation and the corporeality of Christ”), but because I find in him an authentic indifference to audience—a wish to pay tribute irrespective of sponsor (NEA grant or no NEA grant) and, indeed, in full expectation of rejection.3
Conversely, when I read of Mapplethorpe’s “cannon blast against the battlements of heterosexual normativity,” I cannot help sensing, perhaps less in the artist’s work than in his champions, an impurity of motive, which is to say an excess of purity, an effort all too legible in the terms of the dominant culture, including, yes, the old modernist idiom of transcending, smashing, overcoming, and so on, that Hickey would otherwise have us dispense with. Or, if “motive” seems too strong, call it an impurity of justification—a sign of something that, despite or because of Hickey’s efforts, remains all too “visible” in our account of our responses to art. Call it the dragon reduced to a circus animal—made to breathe fire on command. Which is a way of registering, I suppose, my own misgiving about Kornblau’s current effort to “queer” Hickey—when “queer” is made into a kind of redemptive antinormativity, hence something strangely pious and discreetly removed from sex.
But let me return to Yeats—for, if there is one signal convergence between his and Hickey’s views, it is on this matter of the relation between art’s underlying impulses and those of official culture. For both men, this takes the form of the suspicion that art, as it becomes—for Yeats actually and Hickey ostensibly—more “democratic,” it becomes at the same time more “official,” more alienated from the secret knowledge held among private constituencies, those erotic fascinations whose laundering as culture comes at the price of denaturing them. Consider the most mischievous and profoundest moment in “Michael Robartes and the Dancer”—and one that the ascendancy of the “therapeutic institution” is apt to leave many unable (publicly, anyhow) to construe:
She. May I not put myself to college?
He. Go pluck Athena by the hair;
For what mere book can grant a knowledge
With an impassioned gravity
Appropriate to that beating breast,
That vigorous thigh, that dreaming eye?
And may the devil take the rest.
She. And must no beautiful woman be
Learned like a man?
He. Paul Veronese
And all his sacred company
Imagined bodies all their days
By the lagoon you love so much,
For proud, soft, ceremonious proof
That all must come to sight and touch;
While Michael Angelo’s Sistine roof
His ‘Morning’ and his ‘Night’ disclose
How sinew that has been pulled tight,
Or it may be loosened in repose,
Can rule by supernatural right
Yet be but sinew.
Even if the Dancer does go to school, her interlocutor tells her, she will do so with a fateful belatedness—since what did those she might study there spend their time doing, what was therefore the secret meaning and principle of their work, but the contemplation of beautiful bodies, the very thing she is, and could yet be perfectly, were it not that the “dragon” thought had spawned division within her? Why, Michael Robartes asks, be an interloper peering over the shoulders of Paul Veronese and friends, when she could learn everything they wished to know by planting herself before the mirror and gazing upon… herself?4
As an observation about the “dumb luck” that makes beauty alight on one rather than another, such that even the one so visited may wish to be free of it, so as to enjoy steadier—because earned—attachments, this seems less successful, because less delicate and debonair, than another poem of Yeats’s, “For Anne Gregory,” which has the additional virtue of reclaiming as something sportive that pedantry which, in “Michael Robartes and the Dancer,” never quite sloughs off its earnestness:
‘Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.’
‘But I can get a hair-dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.’
‘I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair’.
Here we see beauty at something like its full stature—undiminished, and indeed intensified, by the je ne sais quoi of that “yellow” in place of, say, “blond” or “gold” hair—that is, as something sublime and alien to which both are subordinated, beholder and beheld, lover and beloved.
Underlying the wish to tame this force, to make it something that can be, if not taught, then taught about, is a democratic impulse—though not that wild democracy of Hickey’s “pagan America.” Rather, this impulse is: (a) iconoclastic, because resentful—after the fashion immortally lampooned by Harold Brodkey in his story “Innocence” (“To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die […] you had to decide whether such personal distinction had a right to exist or if she belonged to the state and ought to be shadowed in, reduced in scale, made lesser, laughed at”); (b) sanctimonious (in its claim to unite beauty and virtue, such the former, rightly construed, implies the latter); and (c), more creditably, invested in fairness—in the belief (again, professed by Yeats’s Dancer and Anne Gregory) that honors must be earned. (Though this last is itself equivocal from the democratic standpoint, since earned honors raise the possibility of a superior nature, whereas windfalls, if kept within reasonable limits—i.e., perhaps, they must not be too small!—do not give rise to the same envy.) Inasmuch as Yeats sets himself against all of these impulses, he and Hickey would seem to be at one—and yet, I will suggest that in the decisive respect they are not.
This difference—and it makes a difference, if, as I am, you are not ready to part with the ideals of modern art so easily—can be brought out most clearly if we take a detour through what seems to me the most suggestive essay in Hickey’s original collection, “Prom Night in Flatland” (subtitled: “On the Gender of Works of Art”). The “flatland” of the title is not Texas (though it is partly that, the setting of the Kimmell Art Museum in Fort Worth, through whose galleries Hickey takes us on a salon-like tour from painting’s pre-seventeenth-century apex to what is for him its Baroque and Romantic decline), nor does it refer to, say, the “sensible shoes” worn by those questionable women who (as another essay has it), along with “painters, dealers, critics, shopkeepers, second sons, Russian epicures, Spanish parvenus, […] American expatriates, […] Jews, […] homosexuals, bisexuals, [and] Bolsheviks” constituted “for nearly seventy years, during the adolescence of modernity,” the art market—before the “professors, curators, and academicians” got in and ruined the party. What Hickey has in mind is, rather, the influential view, associated with Clement Greenberg (here strangely unnamed, but represented by his then-avatars the painter and critic Frank Stella and the critic and scholar Michael Fried), according to which modern painting discovers its essence in “flatness,” a supposedly repressed property of the medium that—per the modernist doctrine of medium specificity—it now became the business of all paintings to express.
Hickey’s insight, as his subtitle intimates, is to grasp this shift as an affair of gender. “The demotic of Vasari’s time,” he writes, “invested work with attributes traditionally characterized as ‘feminine’: beauty, harmony, generosity. Modern critical language validates artworks on the basis of their ‘masculine’ characteristics: strength, singularity, autonomy.” Yet this shift in not just in language, but in the form (for Hickey, the “rhetoric”) of paintings themselves. The once permeable, penetrable image receding into imaginary space has been transformed, thanks to the seventeenth-century “rotation of the picture-plane,” into a rostrum of darkness from which leer out figures in judgment of you, the viewer.
We have gotten to this point, Hickey tells us, via the reconfiguration of an originary “ménage à trois” between painter, painting, and beholder:
At its most sophisticated, the sixteenth-century dynamic of perception assumed a bond of common education, religion, and gender (male) between the artist and beholder. […] These comrades were presumed to stand side-by-side confronting the otherness of the work’s rapidly receding pictorial space. This illusion of recession evoked both the prospect of a heavenly arcadia and the mystery of an “erotic other.” The invitation of the open picture plane offers both a window into spiritual succor and the prospect of a “heavenly cunt” (potta del cielo) to the beholder, who might gain access via the blessed virgin or the symbolic maidenhead, according to his Neoplatonic proclivity.
Yes, dear reader, you read that—“heavenly cunt”—correctly. Just the sort of thing that gets Hickey into trouble these days, that outrageous, all-too masculine masculinity from which Kornblau, in his afterword, means to save him. And yet, did not Hickey tell us earlier in the same essay that this transformation marks the coming about of a “blatantly sexist and homophobic situation,” with Stella and Fried as the agents of a patriarchal criticism? For now, the crucial point to note is that the “patriarchal” dimension Hickey speaks of is, again, the result of a masculinization both of artistic discourse and the artwork itself. Today, Hickey writes,
The bond of commonality between artist and beholder is dissolved. The presumption that the two parties have equal insight into the mysteries of the work is dispensed with, as the artist is invested with prophetic singularity. The bond of work of art with its artist is now assessed in terms of “strength,” its bond with the beholder in terms of “weakness.” Insofar as I have been able to tease meaning out of usage, “strength,” in contemporary criticism, is a straightforward euphemism for the medieval concept of “virtue,” a gender-sensitive term of approbation connoting virility and power in men and chastity in women; by analogy, “weakness” implies effeminacy in men and promiscuity in women. In the restructured modernist dynamic, the role of the beholder is to be dominated and awestruck by the work of art, which undergoes a sex change and is recast as a simulacrum of the male artist’s autonomous, impenetrable self.
The artist, once a pandar, is now determined not to prostitute himself—as how could he not risk doing, the painting having ceased to be a representation he exhibits, but a presentation of himself? For it is really that last phrase—the “male artist’s autonomous, impenetrable self”—that is the key one, as it makes clear that Hickey’s complaint encompasses works that seek, not solely to dominate or awe the viewer, but simply to exist independently of him (let us keep the male pronoun for now), to ignore him, which apparently also means to reduce him to nothing, to “obliviate” him (if I may adopt a term from Hickey’s self-chosen nemesis, Michael Fried); perhaps, even, to reduce him to her: an Echo to his Narcissus. And so it is that Hickey arrives at his most cunning torque on our received ideas about gender and art—in a sentence in which the “ravishing” femme fatale morphs before our eyes into the figure, we have reason to believe, of Hickey’s obsession all along:
Over years of such confrontations, it has become increasingly clear to me that our twentieth-century characterizations of the work of art as a ravishing, autonomous entity that we spend our lives vainly trying to understand, that makes demands of us while pretending that we are not there, is simply a recasting of the work of art in the role of the remote and dysfunctional male parent […]. Even art critics deserve more than this sort of abusive neglect.
Does it matter that Hickey’s account of the modernist embrace of “flatness” is not, strictly speaking, true? Here is Michael Fried, writing in the introduction to the 1988 book version of Art and Objecthood, against those who—after the fashion of unskilled readers of scholastic philosophy, unaccustomed to its rhythms of exposition and disputation—ascribed to him the caricature of Greenberg’s position that he meant to reject. Fried begins by quoting Greenberg himself:
The flatness toward which Modernist painting orients itself can never be an utter flatness. The heightened sensitivity of the picture plane may no longer permit sculptural illusion, or trompe l’oeil, but it does and must permit optical illusion. The first mark made on a surface destroys its virtual flatness, and the configurations of a Mondrian still suggest a kind of illusion of a kind of third dimension. Only now it is a strictly pictorial, strictly optical dimension. Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine oneself walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye.
“Illusion”—a key term in Hickey’s work, as that which modern art puritanically excises or taboos—is not the first word one associates with Fried or Greenberg, and yet it is, Fried notes, essential to distinguishing “art,” however much it seeks union with its own material “support,” from the mere self-identity—or, what Fried will call the exaggeratedly self-indicating “theatricality”5—of “objecthood.” The reasons for this distinction become clear in Fried’s rehearsal of his critique of the Minimalists, for whom, he writes, “all conflict between the literal character of the support and illusion of any kind is intolerable[.]” So, the nub of the matter:
The continuing problem of how to acknowledge the literal character of the support—of what counts as that acknowledgement—has been at least as crucial to the development of modernist painting as the fact of its literalness, and the problem has been eliminated, not solved, by the artists in question. Their pieces cannot be said to acknowledge literalness; they simply are literal.
The self-identity of an artwork, then, can never be a simple self-identity; it must be reflexive and, as such, an achievement. The union of content and form is a peak experience, whether as registered in the infamous question, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” or in the apparently more low-key mode imagined (and lightly parodied) in “Michael Robartes and the Dancer”:
He. I have principles to prove me right.
It follows from this Latin text
That blest souls are not composite,
And that all beautiful women may
Live in uncomposite blessedness,
And lead us to the like—if they
Will banish every thought, unless
The lineaments that please their view
When the long looking-glass is full,
Even from the foot-sole think it too.
Less plausible, no doubt, than the wisdom cited by the “old religious man” in “For Anne Gregory,” this poem’s “Latin text” nevertheless imagines “uncomposite blessedness” as a possibility, not a fact—as something that “all beautiful women may” achieve “if.” Total coincidence with one’s form, the yearning of every dancer (a stand-in for the yearning of every artist), such that the mind conceals nothing from the mirror (the dragon of beauty driving out the dragon of thought) turns out to be just that, a yearning, a fantasy (in this instance, voiced by Michael Robartes, not the Dancer herself). As such, it is a jealous desire, a demand of total candor, yet also one that might not wish to be utterly satisfied. Apparently total accessibility is nothing without an inner remoteness—call it the ever-imperfect opacity of the mask, which is nothing without the suggestion of something behind it. If there were no gap, there would be nothing to sacrifice, no transcendence, no surrender. For the sublunary Yeats, there always remains something to “banish” or “cast out.”6
But perhaps I have gotten away from myself. Have I not, with Yeats’s Dancer, substituted a traditional image of the artwork as female, when Hickey has been telling us that this is precisely what the moderns rejected, casting aside what Hickey calls (with politically correct pleonasm) “attributes traditionally characterized as ‘feminine’” in favor of the “‘masculine’ characteristics [of] strength, singularity, autonomy”?
The answer, dear reader, is I think yes and no—though to explain why it will help to take one more detour, to consider the painting that, surely, must be the modern one to come closest to Hickey’s ménage-a-trois of painter/pandar, viewer, and artwork—yet which may turn out to be the exception proving the rule.
I am thinking, naturally, of Gustave Courbet’s Origine du Monde. If you are unfamiliar with the painting, feel free to look it up (so long as you are at home, and unobserved). Suffice it to call it a genre piece whose subject has become vastly more popular in the era of photography and the internet; I will add only that it is the rare painting—and this stems in no small, if nonetheless mysterious, part from the fact that it is a painting—whose appeal to the senses is at least as much olfactory as visual. (And no, I don’t mean the “sulphurous odor” mentioned in a recent newspaper piece on the subject.) What might the partisans of the artwork as closed-off simulacrum of the artist himself have to say about that?
Amazingly—they confirm Hickey’s suggestion. Or, at least, Michael Fried does, in a passage from his 1990 study of Courbet’s Realism that is either an unparalleled case of special pleading, an extraordinary insight into this most occulted aspect of modern painting, or both.
After surveying various instances of Courbet’s landscape painting whose fascination with “caves, crevices, and grottoes” gives them the feeling, you might say, of a potta della terra to match the potta del cielo of Hickey’s post-Raphaelite, pre-Caravaggiesque skyscapes, Fried dissents from the standard interpretation of these elements as manifestations of “‘a panerotic mode of experience that perceives in nature a female creature and consequently projects the experience of cave and grotto into the female body’” (Fried here quotes the art historian Werner Hofmann). “Obviously there is something to [these] observations,” Fried writes,
And yet from the perspective of this study the connections they emphasize as well as the unconscious motivations they attribute to Courbet seem reductive. Without exception, caves and grottoes in Courbet’s paintings are not simply enclosing spaces toward which the artist regressively was drawn; they are also sources of water coursing outward toward the painter-beholder, a direction of flow I have described as reciprocating the latter’s quasi-corporeal movement into the painting and thus as indirectly representing that movement.
(So opposites represent each other? That is quite indirect! But nevermind—interpretation is never an affair of rules. Though one might wonder whether that outflowing water really plays the role in refutation it seems tasked with…) In any event, Fried continues:
But once we recognize that what finally is at stake in all these works isn’t simply a fascination with a central dark vaginal-like opening or womblike enclosure but rather a double movement into and out from the painting, the strictly morphological resemblance between, for example, the Zurich and Buffalo versions of the Source of the Loue on the one hand and the Nude with White Stockings or The Origin of the World on the other comes to seem, while not exactly irrelevant, at any rate not quite the key to the meaning of either.
The “double movement into and out from the painting” is, on one level, exactly as sexual as it sounds; yet, it soon becomes clear that what is at stake in this sexual movement is not taking pleasure in the ordinary sense, but an effort at “merger”: what one might well call (in one of Blake Smith’s several proposed extended senses) the “queer” project of a dissolution and perhaps transcending of identities in the crucible of the encounter—an attempt at union that is fated to fail, and of which the visual image is the precipitate, or residue.7
So what will Fried have to say about the painting that would most seem—were it not for a blunt literalism that dispenses with much of the fun—to invite a return, if not to that “erotic, participatory extravagance of Rococo space,” then to what Hickey identifies as its scarcely veiled subtext? Fried’s argument here is, to repeat, shockingly exact as an exception proving the rule. Pairing The Origin of the World with Nude with White Stockings (the two works, he notes, that “go farther in the direction of outright pornography than any others in Courbet’s oeuvre”), he observes that “both paintings evoke the notion of an act of sexual possession”—a quasi-euphemism, incidentally, that seems inapposite in this context and perhaps in general—“of the woman, and implicitly the painting, by the painter-beholder. A more corporeal relation between painting and painter-beholder could hardly be imagined.” (Shades of Pygmalion—the myth of the artist in love with his creation that Hickey argues modernity has supplanted with the myth of Frankenstein—here raise their heads after all…) And yet:
It’s worth noting […] that, with respect to the painter-beholder, one concomitant of such an act would be a complete undoing of distance and hence of spectatorship, which is what Leo Steinberg means when he remarks apropos certain works by Picasso that the sexual embrace is “blind.” This for me is the gist of any analogy between the overtly erotic paintings and Courbet’s pictures of caves and grottos, though I would add that there is also in the erotic works a phantom image of reflection, if we imagine a male body exactly covering the female one […].
Upon which final, weird image—confessedly unsupported by any evidence—I will leave my reader to ruminate (for now). For, in fact, Fried will force us to turn to one more painting—Courbet’s early Bacchante—to find brought together the various strands of his unlikely reading of Origine and Courbet’s other erotic works in relation to his landscapes in terms of this “project of merger.”
This time, what is at issue is frankly the painting’s “unmistakable aura of sexual aftermath.” This aura, Fried writes,
suggests that it represents not just a moment following the unrepresentable one of physical union but specifically the mutual falling back of both partners—of the painter-beholder and the painting—into separate realms. Seen in this light, the foreshortening of the trunk and upper body that makes the bacchante so tangible-seeming a presence is less a provocation to possession than the form of a memory, while representability is thematized as deriving from the inevitable failure of a project of merger. […] Finally, to the extent that a metaphor of sexual possession has been implicit in my account of the painter-beholder seeking to translate himself quasi-corporeally into paintings […] via figures of women, his effort to do so emerges as figuratively masculine, a point already acknowledged by my discussion of phallic metaphors for the artist’s paintbrush. But—
and here things take a turn for the even more interesting—
just as the phallus/paintbrush in those paintings in characterized by feminine attributes and thus is other than the unitary masculine entity phallic objects have classically been theorized to be, so possession turns out to have unexpected consequences as the painter-beholder all but becomes his female surrogates. Here as elsewhere in Courbet’s art, the difficult question—in this context an inescapably political one—is how exactly to assess the force of that all but.
Setting aside that final qualification—whose assertion of the “inescapably political” nature of the question calls to mind similar handwringing both on Hickey’s behalf and, as we have seen, in Hickey himself—we find here a strikingly dialectical limit case. On the surface, there could be no more definitive confirmation of Hickey’s thesis about the gender of modern art as “a simulacrum of the male artist’s autonomous, impenetrable self” than these reflections by his chief antagonist. Fried’s Origine du Monde is, yes, a pornographic crotch shot, hence something that the “painter-beholder” wants to fuck (we may dispense, I think, which the metaphor of “possession,” which, as I have said, is only half a euphemism: clearly worse than what it disguises), making him somewhat like the artist in Hickey’s pre-modern ménage à trois (though note Fried’s use of the collocation “painter-beholder” to capture the otherwise absent third person in this arrangement, now collapsed—in another confirmation of Hickey’s thesis—into an aspect of the originating artist). Yet that want has itself been transfigured (though when was it ever so simple, really?) into a wish for “merger,” an asymptotic, bound-to-be-frustrated yearning that has as its compassed end the obliteration of vision, such that the resulting image is, at it were, the (postcoital) testament to success-cum-failure. (That this implies some union has indeed occurred is accounted for by the totality of Fried’s argument, which notes motifs in Courbet’s paintings that serve as emblems of, for instance, the artist’s right and left hands, which are thus so to speak taken up into the artwork.) Talk about a reconfigured ménage!
And yet—there is more to the picture than meets the eye. I am thinking, first, of Fried’s observation (if we can call it that) that “there is also in the erotic works a phantom image of reflection, if we imagine a male body exactly covering the female one,” but above all of that remark on the not altogether masculine attributes of the phallic paintbrush. These passages would seem to suggest that, even if Hickey’s observation about the gender-shift of modern art is, as some contemporary purveyors of flimflam like to put it, “directionally true,” the matter of art’s gender remains complex—not least in what, for Fried, turn out to be some “unexpected consequences” of “possession” in Courbet’s work: “the painter-beholder all but becomes his female surrogates.” Is this not true, in some sense, of Yeats as well?
Time for a second confession: I remain (if it was not clear already) rather more partial (as is my fellow contributor John Pistelli, who goes so far as to convert Hickey posthumously to the faith) to the old, hieratic view of art (call it “the old high kind of love”) than Hickey is, such that when I read of the modern “work” or “works of art” transformed into a “a ravishing, autonomous entity,” or even into “radical, autonomous twins of their alienated auteurs,” I find myself scoring the margin: “You say it like it’s a bad thing.” In the spirit, then, in that in which I earlier expressed my own simmering preference for Serrano’s Piss-Christ, as less susceptible to being mobilized for the normative-anti-normative dichotomy than Mapplethorpe as here interpreted, let me—after first joining my fellow contributors in saluting Gary Kornblau, not just for his heroic efforts in publishing Hickey, both originally and in this splendidly appointed new collection (not to mention for gamely tolerating this sprawling and no doubt at times uncongenial set of reflections occasioned by it)—also join in voicing my suspicion as to whether (I here quote Smith again), “Getting Hickey republished and read by a new audience means mispackaging him as an Ally and his enjoyment as Politically Good.”
But, then again, I am not altogether convinced that making Hickey out to be “Politically Good” is a misreading of him per se. I have already intimated my suspicion as to a fuzziness in Hickey’s writing, whose premium placed on “talk” too easily shades into (the wrong kind of, because unaesthetic) advocacy. Though, having said that, let me register one sense in which Hickey’s intervention does strike me as “politically” “good” in a genuine, that is, in a tonic and not at all stuffy, way. For Hickey’s charge against what he calls the “blatantly sexist and homophobic situation” of the then-contemporary art world differs altogether from the more familiar feminist critique of art as “objectifying,” or, as a ubiquitously cited essay on “narrative cinema” has it, catering to the “male gaze.” (A similar judgment, voiced in a prim tone only the naive would have thought its author’s Marxism to have spared him, informs Fredric Jameson’s book on cinema, Signatures of the Visible, which declares: “The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination.”)
Rather, Hickey—for whom, recall, the present impasse is the result of a twofold transformation, wherein the artist, normatively male, in identifying himself with the artwork has refused thereby to take on the feminine characteristics of pleasingness, willingness to be beheld, availability, and so on—makes the far more suggestive critique of sexism and homophobia that finds the standard inveighing against those things tainted by what they deplore. For what else can it be but a profound misogyny (one that, doubtless, lies at the root of much homophobia itself) that holds that the worst thing to be, the most degraded, the most shaming of the one it conceives of as so submitted, and rightly shaming (could the world be made just) of the one so submitting another, is—whether by member or eye—to be fucked? (“He treats objects like women, man,” as the Dude put it, saying more than he knew—and joining thereby the ineluctable sodality of the risible.)
This tonic aside, Hickey’s portrayal of modern artistic autonomy seems to me, in other respects, too simplistic—too transparently disclosing, within the adult man, the son of an art-loving, jazz-musician father who fled the hearth by killing himself the morning of the day his family was to move into their first purchased home—and hence gives off too much the air of a needy child, demanding of compensatory maternal attention, impatient with a femininity that could combine beauty and remoteness, sexed presence with being about its own business. And this weakness, if I may call it that, whatever its personal sources, is an aesthetic one, as well.
As such, it invites comparison with a similarly perceptive account of the “gender of modern art” that is, in its own way, strangely blinkered. Camille Paglia, in her few mentions of Yeats in Sexual Personae, tends to make his work hinge on a transformation akin to what Hickey observes in the movement from pre-seventeenth-century to modern art, a shift that, in Yeats’s case, is not insignificantly away from an early pre-Raphaelitism (the modern movement that most overtly sought a return from mannerism to the feminine and decorative). For Paglia, the turning-point is “Leda and the Swan”—her obsessive touchstone for Yeats’s work—in which, she writes, the poet “sexually normalizes” the motif of the dominant woman as he inherits it from Swinburne and Pater—by making her a man:
Adopting the sexual syncretism of Swinburne’s vampires, Pater makes Mona Lisa both Leda and St Anne (Mary’s weird double in Leonardo). Pater’s mother demon thus kicks off both the classical and Christian historical cycles, an idea Yeats borrows for Leda in “Leda and the Swan” and for Mary in “Two Songs from a Play.” But Yeats makes a crucial sexual revision, inspired by his own anxieties. His Leda is raped and impregnated by a harshly masculine Zeus. Pater’s Mona Lisa needs no partner: she gives birth to phenomena by parthenogenesis. So “Leda and the Swan,” the premiere twentieth-century poem, was itself a ritual of exorcism by which Yeats freed himself from Pater, fin-de-siecle Decadence, and his own lingering Swinburnian dreams of sexual servitude.
Yet this view of epochal transformation—a more mythic and individual and therefore more vital version of the otherwise standard academic account of the “high modernists” as having masculinized literature (which was to be, as Pound or Eliot puts it somewhere, “No longer an affair for ladies”)—is itself in need of revision on two counts. The first, conceded elsewhere by Paglia—and, incidentally, urged by John Pistelli and in my own unpublished doctoral dissertation—concerns the poem “Leda and the Swan” itself, in which Pistelli is surely right to observe “the poet’s implied identification with the raped girl,” or, as I argued, with both figures in this scene of rape.8 (That Paglia equates masculinity with rape—and thereby suggests a tacit affinity between her own and the “sex negative” position of, e.g., an Andrea Dworkin—may itself call out for commentary; though, in this instance, the exegete may fairly be said to follow her author—albeit, apparently, not closely enough.) As for the second, it will take us back into the heart of the dynamics Fried identified in Courbet, and, perhaps, in modern art writ large.
For there remains, does there not, something strange in the gendering of Yeats’s women—think of Crazy Jane’s “woman can be proud and stiff / When on love intent,” or the literal pissing contest that earns the same character’s esteem for “great-bladdered”—hence abundantly fertile—Emer, in the uncollected poem “Crazy Jane on the Mountain”? Or, again, think of the “Morning” and the “Night” of “Michael Angelo’s Sistene roof” in “Michael Robartes and the Dancer.” Michelangelo’s women were, notoriously, drawn from male models; no wonder Yeats’s Robartes finds they show “How sinew that has been pulled tight ... Can rule by supernatural right.” (The word “sinew” appears in another poem of Yeats’s, “Supernatural Songs,” as that which—along with “bone”—is “transfigured” by sublime ecstasy; its unrelated homophone, “sinuous”—think of Coleridge’s gashed and fecund “gardens bright with sinuous rills”—figures in his poems not at all.) And yet, if this is, in Paglia’s terms, a masculinization, it is so without maleness.
Where Paglia sees a once and done masculinization, then, we might be more inclined to see an inner transformation of her central figure of the androgyne—one resulting in a new emblematic figure for art’s aspiration and desire. (I might add that Yeats’s great, uncategorizable prose work A Vision, about which I hope to write more another time, can be thought of, indifferently, as a masculinization of the moon phase or a feminization of male types via their association with that notoriously labile celestial body.9) And so we are led back, again, to Fried’s remarks on Courbet, in which we find (what for Hickey will be modern art’s characteristic perversity) that the female figures in those paintings are at once their thematic subject and something that the artist wishes—through absorption into the canvas—to become. Does this not add a crucial qualification to Hickey’s notion of the artwork as a simulacrum of the artist’s (masculine) self? Might we not—if we come to see Courbet as less exceptional than typical in this regard—come to feel that the modern artist is, in fact, a synthesis of Pygmalion and Frankenstein, and that the normative modern artwork is at once an object of desire and that into which the artist—in what amounts to self-divestiture far more than simple intensification of self—wishes to be transfigured?
All of these dimensions are present, it seems to me, in Yeats’s aspiration towards his Muse figures, a Muse who inspires and incites, one might even say implants the germ of, that bringing-forth of self as other that Yeats describes in one of his late prose statements:
A poet writes always of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness; he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always a phantasmagoria, ... he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.
To be reborn as something “complete”—that is, as something quite different from the letting-it-all-hang-out Hickey (for whom, surely, the breakfast table was terra ignota)—is to be reborn as the dancer-impossibly-without-thought. The dancer is female because yearned towards, desired, and, yes, because normatively body rather than mind; yet she represents a condition that he—though apparently not she, the “empirical” Dancer of Yeats’s dialogue—would assume.10 Due allowance being made for his unveiling of the “deeply patriarchal and misogynistic” basis of contemporary aesthetics, I find too little in Hickey—apart from that fine essay on John Rechy’s Numbers, with its hard-to-get hustler—of these dynamics; or, if present, they are in residual form as that which he would expel in the name of the playful.
All of which points to something enigmatic in Hickey’s relation to beauty, which in these essays seems strangely less charged than we would expect. In trying to find a word for a response that seems at once warm and strangely distanced, what comes to mind is “indulgent,” almost paternal—the obverse, you might say, of Hickey’s startling parental image of the autonomous artwork. So, the needy child becomes an indulgent father. (I am here put in mind of Edmund Burke’s sexist remark, in his Sublime and Beautiful essay—another turning point in that movement from premodern to modern aesthetics, being at once the last gasp of the premodern, with its tacit discrimination of its title values into “his” and “hers,” and a herald of the new—that “love approaches much nearer to contempt than is commonly imagined.”) When what one might have supposed Hickey to be after, and what I think several of us in this discussion are after as well, is a perspective in which the beautiful and sublime are not distinct, but fused in one shocking, amoral force.11
In calling for an art that would eschew strict demands, that would not require the viewer’s exclusive surrender, Hickey may have been said to have been calling for an art without jealousy. He seems to have wanted—with his potta, with his chummy confraternity among the punters at the celestial strip club—to have been (to take a line from his beloved Shakespeare’s Sonnets) “Anchored in the bay where all men ride.” Of course, as Hickey knew well, not all men are anchored there, and one of his insights was to insist, with much generosity of spirit, upon the heterogeneity—which is to say, sometimes, the homogeneity—of human desires. But in extending this benevolence to others’ desires, he might have been more strenuous in defense of his own. A pagan god, too, is a jealous god.
The unfenced borderland between bodily deportment and parsible communication was the subject of Hickey’s abandoned PhD thesis on the “phonotext” in D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. Oddly enough, another scholar, one Garrett Stewart, appears to have gone on to write a seemingly identical book on nearly the same authors.
Oppenheimer goes on to quote Serrano saying, “I think if the Vatican is smart, someday they’ll collect my work. I am not a heretic.”
As indeed appears to have been the case: Mapplethorpe is today far the more canonical figure. While it is true that Serrano was, ultimately, invited by Pope Francis to a gathering of artists at the Vatican in June 2023, this papal imprimatur seems scarcely more likely to endear him to the “therapeutic institution” than, say, the experiments with flamelike emulsions of blood, semen, and piss that grace the covers of two Metallica albums from the 1990s.
These lines join a long series of reflections by Yeats on the unerotic nature of official education. Compare “that beautiful mild woman” in “Adam’s Curse,” who tells the poet-speaker, “‘To be born woman is to know— / Although they do not talk of it at school— / That we must labour to be beautiful,” or, for that matter, “Sailing to Byzantium,” where we learn, “Nor is there singing school but studying / Monuments of its own magnificence,” in which, however, the erotic element ends up “purged” away in “God’s holy fire.” “Among Schoolchildren” is the most famous, but to my mind one of the more belabored and less interesting instances of the motif.
The homophobic subtext of this claim is brought out by John Pistelli, who notes how, in a 1960s letter, unearthed by some industrious researcher but now apparently purged from his Wikipedia page, Fried’s discourse upon “Objecthood” in terms of “faggot sensibility” confirms “the gender-and-sexuality subtext that Hickey only guessed at.” That said, however, the Absorption/Objecthood distinction is too closely connected to major themes in European philosophical modernity (as I have noted elsewhere) to be simply reducible to this subtext.
In A Vision, Yeats’s occult typology of artistic personalities in terms of lunar phases, “some” and “many beautiful women” appear at Phases 14 and 16, respectively; that is, as the cycle approaches and declines away from “Unity of Being,” of which there is “No description, except that this is a phase of complete beauty.” (Yeats does go on to venture one, however.)
Earlier, Fried has told us that Courbet’s compositions tend to feature “central, foreground figures depicted from the rear” and that “are in various respects surrogates for the painter (or, as I shall chiefly say, the painter-beholder) and moreover that they evoke the possibility of quasi-corporeal merger between the painter-beholder and themselves.” I here suppress the Dalian speculation as to whether the autonomous artwork is here “auto-sodomized by the horns of [its] own chastity.”
As I wrote there:
What about Yeats’ own late poetry of the body? When he praised Women in Love and The Rainbow for having “brought back the material of literature, after the error of the last 30 years,” we may assume that by “error” he meant “realism,” the absence of “passion” he saw implicit even in a “satirical” modernism overly bound to the naturalist spirit of the nineteenth-century. We understand nothing about this phase of Yeats’s work if we fail to understand its hostility to realism and naturalism, both of which he saw as fundamentally allied with a despised middle-class disposition to “add the halfpence to the pence / And prayer to shivering prayer” (“September, 1913”). Against this sensibility, Yeats asserted that “only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious & studious mind – sex & the dead”; he cultivated an extremist sensibility designed to shock – but no doubt also excite – his “conservative” readers. Yeats’s late poetry displays a fascination with abrupt, violent power, a violence of which he thrills to imagine himself both the recipient and agent. The frisson of “The Mother of God,” with its annunciation that falls like a lightning bolt through the ear of its speaker, the Virgin Mary, is in this respect no less characteristic than “Leda and the Swan,” a poem whose split identification evidently seeks to answer at the level of sensibility the questions it poses as rhetoric, summoning the victim as witness to its own self-enthralled conviction of having “put on” the “power” and mindless “knowledge” of the aggressor.
For a yet stronger criticism of the poem, I invite the reader to compare Harold Bloom’s comment in his 1970 study Yeats; there, he rejects the poem’s rhetorical question, “Did she put on his knowledge with his power?” as spurious; reading through Yeats’s drafts, Bloom finds a fascination with mindless power supervening upon the interest in knowledge that still persisted in the earlier versions. (Bloom also compares the poem, unfavorably, with the account of the rape of Thesis by Jupiter in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, with its greater “skepticism about divine power and knowledge” and the “pulsation of the artery” passage in Blake’s Milton.) This suggestive passage incidentally shows that what Bloom famously calls “strength” and “weakness” (i.e., in the distinction “strong” vs “weak poets”—elaborated subsequent to the Yeats study) has nothing in principle to do with masculine brute force (though it may, in a complex way, have something to do with feminine virtue-qua-self-containedness), being instead a matter of originality and, as such, just as likely to reside in the rejection of such things. So, Bloom’s Shelley, with his “skepticism about divine power and knowledge,” and so, too, the moving contrast he draws between Yeats and Wilfred Owen, whom the former famously excluded from his Oxford Book of Modern Verse on the (clearly gendered) grounds that “passive suffering is no theme for poetry”: “Owen, despite his limitations, was a great poet, and a purer Romantic visionary than Yeats. A contrast between Owen’s The Show or his Strange Meeting and The Second Coming or Leda and the Swan exposes a subtle fault in Yeats’s poems of vision, the inability to create as much through compassion as through other emotions” (Bloom, Yeats, p. 257). But does not the pathos of Yeats’s poem on Leda mark his own, unconfessed, admission of error?
If there is a revision of a traditional gender identification here, then, it would seem not to lie in the a new identification with the patriarchal god, but rather in a revision of the gendered situation of Socratic pedagogy—in its origins, pederasty—whose ghostly lineaments may seen in the situation that finds Michael Robartes in the role of smitten lover-teacher imparting advice to a beautiful youth/dancer through whom—but also in whom—he gains a glimpse of the Beautiful. If there is a sexism in Yeats, it is thus a deep sexism (or, perhaps better, genderism)—that implicit in its conjoint revision to the sex and the goal of Socratic pederasty. For, in a cunning reversal, the Platonic ascent is here, in a typically “modern” move, revealed as not or not altogether an ascent from the bodily to the eternal Good and True and Beautiful; rather, the Eternal and Good—at least as these are the subject of art—are revealed as having at their core the contemplation of a suitably superhuman, or transcendently poised, “mere body.” Or, as Owen Aherne (another of Yeats’s masks) puts it in his own dialogue poem with Michael Robartes: “All dreams of the soul / End in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body.” For the sense in which all pedagogy in some degree represents an aspiration toward becoming—the teacher wanting to be reborn and thereby perpetuated within the student—as well as for some counsel on how a properly liberal pedagogy represents a dialectical refinement (i.e., partial disavowal, or transfiguration) of that aim, it is again Blake Smith who offers the best commentary.
Hickey would no doubt raise his eyebrows at this formulation, seeing in it an echo of his “Sadism,” in contrast to the voluntary surrender of his “Masochism.” Two points on this. First, it just is the case that beauty is not always voluntarily surrendered to; it can indeed be—as Brodkey puts it of Orra Perkins in his “Innocence”—“like a force that struck you.” Second, Hickey’s version of “Masochism” is indeed suggestive; but one wonders why this concept, if elaborated, would not have provided the basis for reincorporating into his framework precisely those more forbidding Modern artworks that he seemed to jettison. Surely many viewers/readers/etc do voluntarily experience such things.
Well worth the wait, Paul! And this I think does sum up my own view: "a perspective in which the beautiful and sublime are not distinct, but fused in one shocking, amoral force." Which, as you note, I somewhat ended up recruiting Hickey to malgre lui when I fused him with Lawrence, who, like Yeats in "Leda," textually becomes the women whose ravishment he describes or even advocates. (Currently reading, alongside A Vision, if I can be described as reading A Vision: The Plumed Serpent.)
This is delightfully a lot to think about! Probably better to discuss over email sometime, but reading this and seeing you and John's sometime discussions in comments elsewhere on Yeats make me want to look at some of the secondary literature (I love his poetry but don't know any of the scholarship), since he's so much in the background of the best author in American gay lit, Andrew Holleran...