There are many reasons to be put off by Dave Hickey’s new book, 25 Women, which seems like the critical equivalent of the ill-judged Saatchi Gallery exhibition Champagne Life (13 January-6 March) that recently corralled 14 women artists together like—well, like the kind of creatures one rounds up.
In Hickey’s case there’s the vague-to-vanishing rationale: “The women in this book asked me to write about their work and found me enthusiastic about the prospect.” Then there’s his bizarre assertion that art made by women happens “very far away… across the craquelure of gender gaps”. It’s a book in which feminists, among whose number Hickey counts himself, are described as “adamant Valkyries”, and statements such as “most of my favourite people are women” struggle to compensate for a tone by turns bitter, fawning and avuncular.
None of this ought to surprise. For decades, Hickey, a former art dealer, has been, among assuredly better things, a scourge to what he thinks of as puritanical-political misreadings of art per se. Hickey’s basic bugbear is “the era of identity politics”, which he often asserts or implies is over, but which at other times appears still to plague his every dealing with the art world.
At some occluded level, Hickey has a point. The academic language of “issues” and “agency” often reveals an attitude of moral stricture and aesthetic rectitude grimly at odds with the countercultural outlook of the period (1960s, 1970s) when Hickey came of intellectual age. But he consistently overstates the antagonism between art and the academy, and tries to counter decades of feminist action and ideas with what he no doubt imagines is a kind of hip, mocking chivalry. It’s unattractive, for sure, but it’s also a distraction from the virtues of Hickey’s writing, which are real and several.
Consider this devious turn of thought, from an essay on Lynda Benglis, which is worth quoting at length: “I should note here that contrary to urban myth, male artists have always been welcoming to female artists—except for artists like Lynda Benglis, Hannah Wilke, Bridget Riley and Joan Mitchell whose effortless talent and erotic charisma scared the hell out of everybody, women included. In these cases, the gender insults were never about gender. They were always about sex and talent, in combination, as an unfair advantage.”
Is that meant to be a joke? Or does Hickey believe, in all sorry seriousness, that disparaging an artist’s work because you happen to find her presence charged with “erotic charisma”—let’s marvel for a moment at the prim euphemism of that phrase—is not an out-and-out misogynist move?
25 Women is punctuated, dispiritingly, by many such moments. But the book is also, despite its title and its clunky conceit, simply another collection of Hickey’s critical essays—Air Guitar (1997) remains the best such volume. As such it can’t help also reminding us that he is a writer of real insight, wit and style.
The best essay here is a piece about Riley that pays keen attention to her work’s pleasurable element of “not-knowing”, and then expands to mount a boisterously suasive argument against the way so much art today depends on research, secondhand knowledge, the constellating of representations and reference points. Riley, by contrast, “doesn’t relish the role of schoolmarm”, and so for Hickey points the way towards a renewed art of sensation.
There are excellent reflections too on Roni Horn: “She is irrevocably there—a fragile system unto itself”. And on Barbara Bloom, of whose work Hickey writes: “one must tussle playfully with it (as wary children might tussle in Emily Dickinson’s sitting room)”.
And there are the usual (for Hickey) reminiscences: “Back in the day, we hung out at Max’s Kansas City bouncing between Bob Smithson’s table and Andy’s.” It’s pleasant enough to be told such stories. And more important to be reminded, in the face of literal-minded and historicist academic criticism, that “most artists make art to distinguish their vision from the zeitgeist and the norms of its milieu”.
At such moments it’s possible to believe the blurb on the book’s jacket. Hickey, we’re told, brings gender into the discussion “only when it seems warranted by the art itself”. But then he calls Benglis “a haughty southern bitch”, and one wonders again what exactly 25 Women is trying to prove.
Brian Dillon is UK editor of Cabinet magazine, and teaches critical writing at the Royal College of Art. His latest book is The Great Explosion (Penguin, 2015).
25 Women: Essays on Their Art
Dave Hickey
University of Chicago Press, 192 pp, $29