Dave Hickey - Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy

UNBREAK MY HEART, AN OVERTURE

T wo nights ago, I was talking with some local artists about things that used to be cool and werent anymorethings that we missed. These artists were mostly kids, so they missed some really stupid stuff, I thought, like Adam Ant and giant shoulder-pads in womens clothes. I told them that I missed standing alonethe whole idea that standing alone was an okay thing to do in a democracy. Like High Noon, I explained, and one of them said, Oh, you could do that today... (pause for effect)... But first youd have to form a Stand-Alone Support Group! Everyone laughed at this, and I did too, because she was probably right, but I didnt laugh that hard, because, at the time, I was proofing this book, which constitutes my own last, tiny fling at standing alone. Its hardly High Noon, I know, but these essays do represent an honest effort to communicate the idiosyncrasy of my own quotidian cultural experience in the United States in the second half of the twentieth centuryto recount some of that experience and, whenever possible, account for it.

The stories that this book tells populate the deep background of everything I have ever written, but I am telling them now because too often in the past I have spoken their lessons in the shorthand of authority. I spent my childhood, for instance, in the cacophonous, postwar milieu that gave birth to bebopto Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. It was my fathers world, and I remember it today with the brightness of a childs vision. Its stresses and permissions are manifest in things that I have seen with my eyes and felt in my body, so I know, in a physical sense, what virtuosity and improvisation meant in that moment, as a style and a lifestyle, how necessary they seemed. Too many times, however, alluding to these complexities, I have simply written Jackson Pollock, and let it go at that. On too many other occasions, rather than trying to evoke the sense of queasy dread that has accompanied my every encounter with the diffuse network of proprietary surveillance that permeates this society, I have simply written the diffuse network of proprietary surveillance, etcetera, footnoted Foucault, and moved along.

This book is an apology for that sort of authoritarian behavior, because, in truth, I have never taken anything printed in a book to heart that was not somehow confirmed in my ordinary experienceand that did not, to some extent, reform and redeem that experience. Nor have I had any experience of high art that was not somehow confirmed in my experience of ordinary cultureand that did not, to some extent, reform and redeem that. So I have tried to reinstate the connective tissues here, and, in the process, have written an odd sort of memoira memoir without tearswithout despair or exaltationa memoir purged of those time-stopping exclamation points that punctuate all our lives.

So there are no Mozart Requiems here, nor masterpieces by Velzquez, no mind-bending sexual encounters or life-confirming acts of friendship, no bloody curtains or puking withdrawals, no heartbreaks, gunshots, humiliations, or bodies hanging in the bedroom. This is just the ordinary stuffthe ongoing texture of the drift, where, it has always seemed to me, things must be okay, or the rest will certainly kill you; and if I have any real qualification for the job that I have undertaken, it is that I have always been okay with everyday life and beguiled by the tininess of itand beguiled as well by the tininess and intimacy of artistic endeavorsby The Bird with his horn and Velzquez with his tiny brushand by the magical way these endeavors seem to proliferate.

When I was a kid, books and paintings and music were all around me, all the time, but never in the guise of culture. They were remarkable domestic accouterments that I encountered nowhere else. They were not to be found in the homes of my friends, and I can assure you that my family played no part in any larger cultural community. We played no part in anything, except America. We were just out there in the middle of it, on the edges of it, and on the move. So cut apart were we, in fact, that I can remember being amazed that whatever city we landed in, my folks could always find these little bookstores and record shops, art galleries and jazz clubs that no one else knew about. I thought of them as secret places where you could go and meet other people who were part of this secret thing.