Far From Respectable by Daniel Oppenheimer
Author:Daniel Oppenheimer [Oppenheimer, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2021-06-01T00:00:00+00:00
Study #3 for Los Angeles County Museum on Fire. 1968.
Ed Ruscha, gunpowder and pencil on paper. 7-5/8 Ã 14-9/16 in.
âFirst, understand this,â wrote Hickey in the introduction to the new edition. âThe four essays that open this book are not characteristic of his writing. They are perfectly sincere, and he still believes everything he wrote in these essays. He just canât believe he wrote them. He imagines himself a teddy bear, the master of the sleepy wave. Usually, when he writes, he keeps a relaxed hand on the rein, the better to veer out of control at the slightest provocation. The four essays that open this bookâwritten in response to great provocationânever veer. Tendrils of black smoke curl from between the words. Whiffs of bad juju rise from the pages. Their ambience of hallucinated intensity and icy aggression is, perhaps, not that forgiving of everyday human fecklessness.â17
Hickey was embarrassed about aspects of the writing that werenât as controlled as he might have liked. He was genuinely sorry that he had hurt some feelings and maybe even some careers. He hadnât meant to. It was personal, but not in that way. In the new edition, he also showed a wistful affection for the days when he had believed that both he and his nemeses still mattered when it came to the creation, reception, and dissemination of art in their time. He had taken for granted that, however successful or unsuccessful he might be in his effort to fight the power, the power to critically influence the culture would persist in some form. He never expected that it would just evanesce, as in the years since first publishing The Invisible Dragon it largely had. In such a context, he couldnât re-up the old book without acknowledging that the power he had fought had mostly deflated in the meantime.
âEven today,â he wrote, âwith the evil ghosts pretty much defunct, they still inhabit these writings as absent adversaries. The reader must reimagine them to make the tone feel right.â18
There was an irony in Hickeyâs concern that his latter-day readers wouldnât be able to easily imagine the tone or force of the people he was writing against. In 2009, this anxiety was plausible. The art world had both expanded and fractured to the point where no person, school, museum, university department, or magazine had sufficient power or coherence to shape a dominant discourse or provoke a meaningful reaction. By 2020, however, it was clear that the orthodoxies and tendencies that Hickey was resisting back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when they existed in their concentrated form in academia and the art world, hadnât so much evaporated as percolated down to the groundwater of American culture, welling up from there to infuse whole new realms of cultural and political life, rendering more legible than ever what was most dissident in his writing. It had not lost the dialectical charge he feared it would, though the landscape of contestation had spread out and diffused. The
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