Nov 1, 2023·edited Nov 1, 2023Liked by Daniel Oppenheimer
You're so right to point us to "My Weimar"--thinking now, it's strange our conservations so far haven't touched on it! It's absolutely one of my favorites (have you heard Laurie Anderson's reading? https://soundcloud.com/penamerican/laurie-anderson-reads-my )-- and it makes for a wonderful counter-point to the review of Rechy's 'Numbers' that Kornblau makes central (again, so rightly) to the re-issue of Invisible Dragon... in both cases a certain gay/queer highly erotic commercialism, tying art/criticism to desire and prostitution, is both played against a stuffy, self-serious, institutional world, but also cast as its own very serious sort of demand to remake oneself ("you must change your life" the hot torso says). There's something, too, one might think through about the professorial/pedagogical figure who is queeny/sissy/Jewish/commercial, the apparent opposite of whatever 'Aryan muscle boy' names, but also also--paralleling the Foucauldian themes of BDSM in Invisible Dragon--demands what could be coded as a very 'masculine' sort of discipline/ascesis.
There's an interesting thing in Hickey where 'the market' or 'the commercial' appears both as a glittering place of decadent pleasure and as shot through with stern demands for excellence, at once 'Cabaret' and 'Triumph of the Will,' in contrast to the bureaucratic-therapeutic apparatus that is both lifelessly moralizing and coddling away the possibility of stern ascesis. I'm not sure how much in actual life we do find this exciting fusion! And in fact there's the irony, too, that 'My Weimar' is in the distinctly uncommercial nowhere of provincial academia... and that while Hickey lionized figures like the brilliantly self-promoting Picasso, making Les Demoiselles d'Avignon for modernist millionaires, and sees Rechy's male whole as a kind of archetype of the artist or writer--the production and circulation of his own work, as you say here, rather defies the logics of the market!
So I wonder if it's possible to account for Hickey's own best work by means of the theories he provides...Hickey seemed to resist both 'the Blob' *and* the market for much of his career!
The title you've used here is an excellent one, although I can understand why one wouldn't go with it, it suggests something rather more Andrea Chu than Dave Hickey-although then again perhaps that might not be terribly far off from the theme of this symposium!
You're so right to point us to "My Weimar"--thinking now, it's strange our conservations so far haven't touched on it! It's absolutely one of my favorites (have you heard Laurie Anderson's reading? https://soundcloud.com/penamerican/laurie-anderson-reads-my )-- and it makes for a wonderful counter-point to the review of Rechy's 'Numbers' that Kornblau makes central (again, so rightly) to the re-issue of Invisible Dragon... in both cases a certain gay/queer highly erotic commercialism, tying art/criticism to desire and prostitution, is both played against a stuffy, self-serious, institutional world, but also cast as its own very serious sort of demand to remake oneself ("you must change your life" the hot torso says). There's something, too, one might think through about the professorial/pedagogical figure who is queeny/sissy/Jewish/commercial, the apparent opposite of whatever 'Aryan muscle boy' names, but also also--paralleling the Foucauldian themes of BDSM in Invisible Dragon--demands what could be coded as a very 'masculine' sort of discipline/ascesis.
There's an interesting thing in Hickey where 'the market' or 'the commercial' appears both as a glittering place of decadent pleasure and as shot through with stern demands for excellence, at once 'Cabaret' and 'Triumph of the Will,' in contrast to the bureaucratic-therapeutic apparatus that is both lifelessly moralizing and coddling away the possibility of stern ascesis. I'm not sure how much in actual life we do find this exciting fusion! And in fact there's the irony, too, that 'My Weimar' is in the distinctly uncommercial nowhere of provincial academia... and that while Hickey lionized figures like the brilliantly self-promoting Picasso, making Les Demoiselles d'Avignon for modernist millionaires, and sees Rechy's male whole as a kind of archetype of the artist or writer--the production and circulation of his own work, as you say here, rather defies the logics of the market!
So I wonder if it's possible to account for Hickey's own best work by means of the theories he provides...Hickey seemed to resist both 'the Blob' *and* the market for much of his career!
The title you've used here is an excellent one, although I can understand why one wouldn't go with it, it suggests something rather more Andrea Chu than Dave Hickey-although then again perhaps that might not be terribly far off from the theme of this symposium!