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!
Yeah it doesn't quite all add up, Hickey's theories. Volbach is so obviously, as you say, a masculine figure as well. And he's in the Academy, and Dave himself was in the Academy, teaching at UNLV, when he wrote his best stuff. Dave had his own very specific notion in mind of what commercialism looked like at its best, in particular the dealer Leo Castelli, who played a semi-mentorly role in introduce Dave to the wonders of modern art, and then also Dave's own gallery in Austin.
Those were real sites of vitality, of course, but the theory he extrapolates from them doesn't hold up, even or especially in Dave's own case. It was only when he found the haven of the university, and had health care and a regular paycheck and a community of sympathetic students, and then on top of that the benevolent but stern editorial patronage of Gary Kornblau (another queen/sissy/Jew father figure) and his distinctly uncommercial art magazine, that he was able to find his writerly groove. When he was just writing for a paycheck for the profit-driven media he was much worse!
None of which is to say that there's isn't potent theoretical juice in Dave's writing, just that it can't be taken on its own terms, it has to be sifted and modified and reimagined.
ahah yes--I mean the point of reading the life against the theory, I take it, is never to discredit either, but to see how they complement and play with/against each other...
the point about Hickey needing to be, for lack of a nicer word, somewhat 'institutionalized' is one you've made before (and about Freddie de Boer--who needs someone to make him stop posting on r/redscare!) but I guess it's just striking me for the first time how in tension this all is with Hickey's attacks on institutionality (of course Foucault and all those French guys also had jobs that allowed them to perform revolt while enjoying a decent salary!)...
...and how Hickey and Kornblau's actual relationship in some sense replicates Hickey's relationship, as he presents it, with Volbach--in both cases has Hickey needing to be whipped as it were into shape by a sort of unstraight paternal figure (this was also the case for Dante--he meets his old teacher, whom he calls a 'paternal image... who taught me how man becomes immortal through his works' running backwards in the Sodomites' Circle of Hell)... rather than the cowboy outlaw 'badboy' he comes off by these lights the 'I've been a bad boy....'! perhaps part of Hickey's fascination with BDSM and queeny dad-figures is his own sometimes self-undermining undisciplinedness--a fantasy of being made to get his shit together, lol
Also it occurs to me that Hickey is in 'My Weimar' (and maybe editorial relationship with Kornblau) sort of doing the intellectual version of 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy', where from the marble bloc of hetero schlubbiness is to be carved, by a demanding gay (or queer--a matter of debate!), something presentable!
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!
I too heard the whistle of a passing Chu-Chu train -- *if* of course one hears, as no doubt one ought, its title not as formed by analogy with king-dom (hence cognate with Old English dom/doom: 'judgment'), but rather with such recent phenomena as femdom and findom (female and financial domination, respectively, from Latin dominus, 'master'), of which, because it preceded their cultural emergence, Hickey's phrase would therefore seem to be prophetic. Yet here, too, a philological conundrum: is sissydom to be dominated *by* or *made into* a sissy? More on such subject-object confusions to come shortly in this symposium... from one who will, indeed, in due course of time, get his shit together!
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!
Yeah it doesn't quite all add up, Hickey's theories. Volbach is so obviously, as you say, a masculine figure as well. And he's in the Academy, and Dave himself was in the Academy, teaching at UNLV, when he wrote his best stuff. Dave had his own very specific notion in mind of what commercialism looked like at its best, in particular the dealer Leo Castelli, who played a semi-mentorly role in introduce Dave to the wonders of modern art, and then also Dave's own gallery in Austin.
Those were real sites of vitality, of course, but the theory he extrapolates from them doesn't hold up, even or especially in Dave's own case. It was only when he found the haven of the university, and had health care and a regular paycheck and a community of sympathetic students, and then on top of that the benevolent but stern editorial patronage of Gary Kornblau (another queen/sissy/Jew father figure) and his distinctly uncommercial art magazine, that he was able to find his writerly groove. When he was just writing for a paycheck for the profit-driven media he was much worse!
None of which is to say that there's isn't potent theoretical juice in Dave's writing, just that it can't be taken on its own terms, it has to be sifted and modified and reimagined.
ahah yes--I mean the point of reading the life against the theory, I take it, is never to discredit either, but to see how they complement and play with/against each other...
the point about Hickey needing to be, for lack of a nicer word, somewhat 'institutionalized' is one you've made before (and about Freddie de Boer--who needs someone to make him stop posting on r/redscare!) but I guess it's just striking me for the first time how in tension this all is with Hickey's attacks on institutionality (of course Foucault and all those French guys also had jobs that allowed them to perform revolt while enjoying a decent salary!)...
...and how Hickey and Kornblau's actual relationship in some sense replicates Hickey's relationship, as he presents it, with Volbach--in both cases has Hickey needing to be whipped as it were into shape by a sort of unstraight paternal figure (this was also the case for Dante--he meets his old teacher, whom he calls a 'paternal image... who taught me how man becomes immortal through his works' running backwards in the Sodomites' Circle of Hell)... rather than the cowboy outlaw 'badboy' he comes off by these lights the 'I've been a bad boy....'! perhaps part of Hickey's fascination with BDSM and queeny dad-figures is his own sometimes self-undermining undisciplinedness--a fantasy of being made to get his shit together, lol
Gary will have a field day with this, I think. Probably will agree. Love the idea of Dave as Gary's bad little boy.
Also it occurs to me that Hickey is in 'My Weimar' (and maybe editorial relationship with Kornblau) sort of doing the intellectual version of 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy', where from the marble bloc of hetero schlubbiness is to be carved, by a demanding gay (or queer--a matter of debate!), something presentable!
omg, you two are hilarious. I miss such reparte in my life. Thank you both for existing!
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 right it would be good, but they never would have let me use it. Too out there. Sigh.
I too heard the whistle of a passing Chu-Chu train -- *if* of course one hears, as no doubt one ought, its title not as formed by analogy with king-dom (hence cognate with Old English dom/doom: 'judgment'), but rather with such recent phenomena as femdom and findom (female and financial domination, respectively, from Latin dominus, 'master'), of which, because it preceded their cultural emergence, Hickey's phrase would therefore seem to be prophetic. Yet here, too, a philological conundrum: is sissydom to be dominated *by* or *made into* a sissy? More on such subject-object confusions to come shortly in this symposium... from one who will, indeed, in due course of time, get his shit together!