Guys, may Ι have your attention please? Thank you. So. Anyone who is serious about music criticism (art criticism, film criticism etc.) should read "Air Guitar", a book of essays by Dave Hickey. I've taken the liberty of copy/pasting one of Hickey's essays from this book here, because my mind has just been blown. BUY. THIS. BOOK.
ROMANCING THE LOOKY-LOOS
It is a cloudy spring night in
the mid nineteen seventies. Waylon Jennings and I are sitting in the shotgun
seats at the front of his bus, slouched down with our heels up on the chrome
rail, watching the oncoming highway between the toes of our boots. We are
leaving Atlanta after a tumultuous concert, about two weeks into Waylon's
breakout concert tour. I am along to write a piece for a magazine about
Waylon's ongoing transformation into a pop star – although, at this point in
the tour, Waylon himself is somewhat less than sanguine about his rising
status. Not that he's doing anything to deter it. He's just not particularly
enjoying it.
"They think you just get
up there and sing your songs," he is saying, addressing the highway.
"They think it's just a one-way deal, but it's not like that at all.
Because you start out playing for people who are just like you. That's the only
place you can. You play for people who come from where you come from. They seek
you out in little clubs because they understand what you're doing, so you feel
like you're doing it for them. And if you go wrong in these clubs, you know it
immediately. And maybe you want to go
wrong. That's your option, but you know it when you do it. Then one day, you're
not playing for people like you anymore. You look out there, like I did
tonight, and realize that you're playing for people who want to be like you, and you can't trust these people. Because to
them, whatever you do, that's you, and that's cool. Which would be okay except! – even though all these people
want to be like you, you don't know who you are anymore, because it was the
people in those little clubs that gave you that understanding in the first
place. God knows where they are
tonight. Sitting at home, probably. Pissed off at me. Listening to Willie
Nelson records."
"So what do you do?"
I ask.
Waylon shrugs and grins.
"Right now, hoss," he says, "it's completely out of my hands.
I'm looking at those people out there, but I don't know what I'm seeing. And
they're watching me, too. But they don't know what they're looking at. My best
guess is that they'll keep on loving me till they start hating me, or their
Waylon duds wear out. Because they already hate me a little, just because I'm
me and they're them. That's why they always go on about how talented you are. Because they hate you.
Because if they had this talent, they
would be you. The fact that you've worked like a dog, lived like a horse thief,
and broke your mama's heart to do whatever you do, that don't mean
diddly-squat. To them, it's talent.
Supposedly, you got it, and, supposedly, they don't. So eventually you're bound
to disappoint them.
"My real people, they get
jealous because their girlfriend thinks I'm cute and try to kick
my butt. They get envious because singing pays better than roofing and try to
kick my butt. But, basically, they understand that I do this job for them – that I'm up on stage with my
Telecaster, sweatin' in the lights, coughing in the smoke, and trying to hear
the monitor – that they're sitting out there all cool and comfortable with a
bottle of beer and a bowl of peanuts. So when this all blows up, I'll just go
back and do that, find out if I'm still me."
*
A month or so later, I find
myself standing at the bar in CBGB'S on the Bowery with Lester Bangs and David
Johansen. We're listening to Tuff Darts, who are playing their official
"teen anthem":
What this world needs is a lot more girls!
What this world needs is a lot less boys!
What this world needs is a lot more NOISE!
(Noise ensues.)
When the noise subsides,
Johansen tilts his head and nods theatrically toward the door. Lester and I
turn to watch as a limousine load of uptown trendies file slowly into the back
of the club, settling their coats on their shoulders and waving smoke away from
their nostrils with frantic little gestures.
"Who dat?" Lester
says.
"The beginning of the
end," says David Jo, "Spectators."
*
My dad called them
"looky-loos." He would come home from playing in some bar or
listening to someone else play, and Mom would ask, "How was the
crowd?" If those in attendance were not up to his standards, he would say
"looky-loos." Or sometimes he would just mutter "civilians,"
which meant the same thing. We all knew what he meant: Civilians were
nonparticipants, people who did not live the life – people with no real passion
for what was going on. They were just looking. They paid their dollar at the
door, but they contributed nothing to the occasion – afforded no confirmation
or denial that you could work with or around or against.
With spectators, as Waylon put
it, it's a one-way deal, and in the world I grew up in, the whole idea was not
to be one of them, and to avoid, insofar as possible, being spectated by any of
them, because it was demeaning. You just didn't do it, and you used the word
"spectator" as a term of derision – not as bad as
"folksinger," of course, but still a serious insult. Even so, it
wasn't something we discussed or even thought about, since the possibility of
any of us spectating or being spectated was fairly remote. It is, however,
something worth thinking about today, since, with the professionalization of
the art world, and the dissolution of the underground cultures that once fed
into it, the distinction between spectators and participants is dissolving as
well.
This distinction is critical
to the practice of art in a democracy, however, because spectators invariably
align themselves with authority. They have neither the time nor the inclination
to make decisions. They just love the winning side – the side with the chic
building, the gaudy doctorates, and the star-studded cast. They seek out
spectacles whose value is confirmed by the normative blessing of institutions
and corporations. In these venues, they derive sanctioned pleasure or virtue
from an accredited source, and this makes them feel secure, more a part of
things. Participants, on the other hand, do not like this feeling. They lose
interest at the moment of accreditation, always assuming there is something
better out there, something brighter and more desirable, something more in tune
with their own agendas. And they may be wrong, of course. The truth may indeed
reside in the vision of full professors and corporate moguls, but true participants
persist in not believing this. They continue looking.
Thus, while spectators must be
lured, participants just appear, looking for that new thing – the thing they
always wanted to see – or the old thing that might be seen anew – and having
seen it, they seek to invest that thing with new value. They do this simply by showing up; they do it with their body
language and casual conversation, with their written commentary, if they are so
inclined, and their disposable income, if it falls to hand. Because
participants, unlike spectators, do not covertly hate the things they desire.
Participants want their views to prevail, so they lobby for the embodiment of
what they lack.
The impact of these
participatory investments is tangible across the whole range of cultural
production. It is more demonstrable, however, in "live arts" like
music, theater, and art than in industrial arts like publishing, film, and
recording. Because in the "live arts," participatory investment, as
it accumulates, increases the monetary value of the product. You increase the
value of an artwork just by buying it, if you are a participant. Thus, you will
probably pay more for the next work by that artist you buy. You do the same if
you recruit all your friends to go listen to a band in a bar. If all your
friends show up and have a good time, you will almost certainly pay more at the
door the next time the band plays. But that's the idea: to increase the social
value of the things you love, and the extra bucks are a small price to pay.
They are next to nothing, really, compared to the value of forming a new,
eccentric community, or compared to the pleasure of having one's views prevail.
One of the things I feel best
about in my life is the tiny part I played in convincing the Artist & Repertoire
people at Warner Brothers Records to sign George Clinton and
Parliament-Funkadelic to their label. I mean, all that fun and funk, borne upon
the Mothership, zooming out across the republic – and even though I only
contributed to the talk around the office, it makes me happy just to know that
I participated. This sort of pleasure, however, is totally alien to the
mind-set of spectatorship. The butterfly effects of cultural eccentricity are
of no interest to spectators; they either consume, or they critique. They are
all right with the way things are, or they know exactly what's wrong with it (incest wishes, capitalism, both,
etcetera).
Beyond this hegemony of corporate
and institutional consensus, however, beyond the purview of uncannily lifelike
blockbusters like Jurassic Park and
the Whitney Biennial, everything that grows in the domain of culture, that
acquires constituencies and enters the realm of public esteem, does so through
the accumulation of participatory investment by people who show up. No painting
is ever sold nor essay written nor band booked nor exhibition scheduled that is
not the consequence of previous social interaction, of gossip, body language,
fashion dish, and telephone chatter – nothing transpires that does not float
upon the ephemeral substrata of "word of mouth" – on the validation
of schmooze. Everyone who
participates knows this, and knows, as well, that it doesn't cost a dime. You
just show up, behave as you wish, say what you will, and live with the
fleeting, often unexpected consequences of your behavior. At this bedrock
level, the process through which works of art are socialized looks less like a
conspiracy than a slumber party.
The whole process, however,
presumes the existence of artists who are comfortable with this tiny, local,
social activity, who are at ease with the gradual, lateral acquisition of
constituencies and understand that the process can take place anywhere and, if successful, command
attention everywhere. The musical vogue of Prince and his entourage, of The
Allman Brothers Band and their compatriots, and of Seattle grunge testify to
the efficacy of this process. It only requires artists who would rather
socialize their work among their peers, horizontally, at the risk of Daddy's ire, than
institutionalize it, vertically, in hopes of Daddy's largesse. These, I fear,
are fewer and farther between.
To cite the case at hand: I was
visiting a group of young artists in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago. They
were obviously bright, ambitious people who were doing interesting work.
Unfortunately, they could hardly speak
– could not even converse like human beings – for sputtering their anger and
outrage at the "fucking Los Angeles
Times," which had refused to provide advance coverage for their
forthcoming "totally bitching underground rave – performance event."
And, silly moi, my first thought was
"Why would you want it in the Los
Angeles Times?" In my vernacular, "underground" meant just
that, and "rave-performance event" meant dope, nudity, and loud
noises. Demanding publicity from the Times
for such an event seemed about one step up from asking your mom to bring her
friends from the garden club.
But I didn't say this. (Nor
did I quote Waylon and suggest, "I don't think Hank done it this
way.") I said, "Hey! It's a rave. It's supposed to be fun. Invite
your friends and word will get around." They just looked at me, kept on
looking, until one of them said, "But all of our friends are artists. We
want real people." Thus I entered a brave new world, and all I could think
was, "What have we done?!"
Because there I was, face to face with a generation of well-educated and
expensively trained young artists whose extended tenure in art schools appended
to the art world had totally divorced them from any social reality beyond it.
The friends they drank beer with after Sophomore Lit, the people they dated in high
school, the guys they played soccer with, were but fading memories, lost to
them now out in the hazy world of bourgeois America. Now, they were artists, in
the art world, and their art- world job was to make art. And my art-world job,
they implied, was romancing the looky-Ioos on their behalf, now that the Los Angeles Times had screwed them over.
And maybe that is my job these
days. Maybe it's just old fashioned of me to think that young artists should
bring their own stuff with them into the art world, and bring their own
friends, as well, simply because democratic institutions (even frivolous ones
like the art world) respond to constituencies of people, not objects. That's
why I still endorse Peter Schjeldahl's advice on how to become an artist:
"You move to a city. You hang out in bars. You form a gang, turn it into a
scene, and turn that into a movement." Then, I would suggest, when your
movement hits the museum, abandon it. Your demure emblem now adorns the smooth
state – resides in the domain of normative expression, its status greatly
magnified and its rich social contextuality effectively sterilized. Whatever
happy contingencies fluttered around it disperse, as it departs society and
enters "the culture," where it must necessarily mean less, but to a
lot more people. It's spectator-food, now, scholar-fodder, so you may safely
stick a fork in it, tell yourself you've won, and go to your room.
In recent decades, however,
changes in American institutional life have made this scenario exponentially
more difficult to pursue. First, Richard Nixon's expansion of the National
Endowment for the Arts in the nineteen seventies has, over the years, effectively
transformed the institutional art world into a government-regulated industry
dedicated to maintaining a strict consensus of virtue. Second, the extended
adolescence imposed on art students by lengthy tenures in graduate schools has
effectively isolated them from the peers among whom they might discover their
true, new constituencies. Third, the massive consequences of Frampton Comes Alive in the record
industry and Star Wars in the movie
industry have instituted a reign of consensus in the world of commercial
entertainment, as well – a quest for a consensus of desire, dedicated to
producing "blockbusters" that please everyone, every time.
So, young artists find
themselves confronted with two smooth juggernauts, one dedicated to a regulated
consensus of virtue, the other dedicated to a calculated consensus of desire,
neither dedicated to the more elusive and redeeming consensus of virtue and desire. Nor is there any reason to
suspect that this will change, beyond my wishing that it would – and what do I
know? Maybe young artists like the
art world the way it is. Maybe they are willing to undergo extensive
indoctrination in order to adapt to it. And if they do adapt, well maybe the
art world will truck in looky- loos for their performances. I don't think so,
but it could happen. If it does, the idea of art as a social practice may be
declared officially dead, along with the idea that the practice of art in a
democracy, under optimal conditions, is a game played by voluntary participants
within the textures of the larger world – a game without rules, coaches,
referees, or, God help us, spectators.
Without that liberating ideal,
we will be left with a ritualized cultural exchange in which artists and
objects, selected by professionals, submit themselves to the vagaries of
casual, public spectatorship in officially sanctioned venues. We will divide
the world into "artists" who have been trained in special schools,
"spectators" who will admire the consequences of this training, and
salaried "support workers" who will select the product and deliver it
to market. In the popular arts, these spectators will support the artist by
buying a ticket, or a CD, or a paperback. In the "fine arts," spectators
will buy tickets too, but the ticket will not be construed as support for the
artist, but as support for "the arts," which is to say, as a
contribution to the salaries of the support workers who facilitate our public
spectatorship. With the suppression of wicked commerce, then, fine artists will
be required to support themselves otherwise than by their work, and the
practice will be restricted to those who can.
This world would be fine, too,
and possible, if art were nothing more than the production of sanctioned
professionals, but it is more – and
less, as well. It is a mode of social discourse, a participatory republic, an accumulation of
small, fragile, social occasions that provide the binding agent of fugitive
communities. It is made in small places and flourishes in environments only slightly less
intimate. So, even if your art ends up in a museum – even if your
"underground rave-performance event" ends up in the Los Angeles Times – even if your band
ends up playing coliseums – you may be assured that what is being glorified in
public splendor is just the residue, a mere simulacrum from which disinterested
spectators may infer the experience of participants. This is why those works of
art that enter the public domain without participatory constituencies are instantly
recognizable as pale impostors, as institutional furniture purporting to
represent constituencies that have yet to materialize. Waylon put it best that
night on the bus: "When I play a little club," he said, "I'm
playing songs for people I know. Up there in the lights in front of a stadium
crowd, I'm just playin' Waylon for strangers."
