The Art Assignment Book Club: Musicians in Air Guitar
I read Air Guitar last month for The Art Assignment book club. The book has gone back to the library, so I can’t open it up and point to particular passages, but I’m still thinking about it. As a disgruntled member of academia myself, I took a perverse delight in the ways Dave Hickey offhandedly bashes it. His tale of finding the academy a place where people talk about art but don’t really like it or suppress their enthusiasm in favor of supposed “intellectual” engagement rings true. This approach is in obvious opposition to a John Greenesque “unironic enthusiasm.” Hickey wants to vindicate the commercialism of art—at least he doesn’t find that the commercial art world in any way hurts art, but instead was the place where he found a community of people who were most passionate about it. But I don’t necessarily agree with the reviewer who suggested that the book provides the freedom to be interested in art even if you have no intellectual background in it (though it’s perfectly fine that she feels that way). I don’t think the author is saying that not knowing about art is okay. His book is decidedly intellectual—in fact, it was perhaps too sophisticated for The Art Assignment? I don’t feel that I understood everything it had to say, and you can’t begin to do it justice in a short review. (Friendly note to Sarah: more book club members will come for the discussion and not just the wine and cheese if the reading is easier.)
The writing that was the most vivid for me was the chapters about musicians. The attitude of The Art Assignment is happily inclusive (meet in the middle, sit in the bathtub, weave a rug—it’s all Art!), but the book made me think a lot about the differences between art forms and or, perhaps more accurately, the way people who think about art perceive art forms differently. When I read Hickey writing about the visual arts, he seemed to be working hard to dismantle ideas that come from nineteenth-century Romanticism but that still permeate our ideas about art. Surrounded by Las Vegas, he recognizes we live in an artistic world bigger than just elite high art created by geniuses for stuffy museums where people tiptoe and whisper. And he recognizes the collaborative nature of making and living with art—this, of course, is right in line with a nerdfighter aesthetic. So I wasn’t surprised when John picked the example from the book of the jazz musicians playing together, as it fits his view of the communal nature of what he and other artists do. But there were three vivid vignettes of musicians—Chet Baker, Hank Williams, and Liberace—that focused on them as individuals. Were there similar portrayals of visual artists in the book? If there were, they didn’t stick in my memory.
When Air Guitar discusses musicians, it sometimes falls back into Romantic myths about art and artists. It really tries hard not to. The author says Chet Baker was a great player even if he didn’t “progress the art form” in accordance with the Romantic evolutionary model in which the only way art is successful is for geniuses to break previous rules and do something radically new. The author doesn’t romanticize Baker’s drug problem or Liberace’s homosexuality or Williams’s sexual proclivities—the problem is that these are still all at the center of his tellings. Maybe visual artists are normal enthusiasts in their commercial art galleries, going home after work to well-manicured suburbs not far from the Las Vegas strip, but get a load of those musicians: sex, drugs, rock ’n roll, and dying too young.
In the Hank Williams chapter Hickey takes on Williams’s voice to tell the story. At what point does this stop being art criticism and become fiction? I have no idea if Williams actually got a blow job from a waitress (or many blow jobs from many waitresses), and it’s okay with me if the author wants to become a novelist at this point and make his own art from his perception of Williams’s life. Just so we recognize that when he does so, he’s telling us more about himself than about Williams. It’s his own projection of a semi-fictionalized character.
The Williams story is especially compelling, a moment of raw humanness. We’re meant to see inside Williams, but that he comes off as childlike and unable to cope with the world, a deeply lost soul, plays on age-old stereotypes about what it takes to become an artist. To be an artist is to somehow be abnormal, to be flawed. Beethoven, deaf and angry, storms about and throws things, and crazy Van Gogh cuts off his ear. You can see this idea in the tone of incredulity in some of the journalism about John Green: “And the guy is a father of two who lives in Indianapolis.” What!? Indianapolis? Wiping snotty noses? He’s not wandering the gritty streets of New York taking drags on an unfiltered cigarette? He’s not staggering home from a bar in Paris in the early morning hours to pound out his latest masterpiece on a clunky manual typewriter?
I don’t think Hickey buys the myths about artists, but they are bigger and stronger than he is, and his book sometimes can’t help but suggest what’s already entrenched. The line between depicting artists as human—with all the messiness of being a human being—and being something very different, something “other” than us, is very thin. What I like about The Art Assignment is that it “normalizes” art, making it something that everyone can do. Hickey, too, wants to democratize art, but in another artistic genre, music, artists can remain mysteriously wounded and apart. Perhaps The Art Assignment should explore why art threatens us so much that we must construct images of artists to make them different from us.
[Note: I wrote this before I saw today’s video. For some musicians quite in line with the spirit of The Art Assignment, see the happy and enjoyable Bang on Can folks.]
