The Actual Haptic Tactile Fractal World: An Interview with Dave Hickey

In advance of Glasstire TV’s September 18 premiere of Breaking the Code, the recent award-winning documentary film on Fort Worth artist Vernon Fisher, Glasstire is featuring a series of extended interviews from the making of the film. 

Winner of “Best Historical Film” at the 2023 Dallas International Film Festival, Breaking the Code introduces Vernon Fisher to a new generation while also giving the many who already know his work an intimate look at his life and art. An online screening will be hosted by Brooklyn’s Franklin Furnace at 5:00 p.m. CT on Wednesday, September 18, to celebrate the Glasstire TV premiere. The Franklin Furnace online screening will be followed by a virtual discussion and Q&A featuring former Under Secretary for Art at the Smithsonian Institution Ned Rifkin, Franklin Furnace Director Harley Spiller, Glasstire Publisher Brandon Zech, and filmmaker Michael Flanagan. Breaking the Code will be available to stream online via Glasstire TV following the Franklin Furnace Loft screening. The film will also screen in person at the Greater Denton Arts Council at 6:00 p.m. CT on Thursday, September 26.

This interview with Dave Hickey took place at the Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe in April 2021, just six months before the acclaimed art critic’s death. Topics discussed include the “rough and tumble” New York City of the 1960s, Hickey’s philosophy on “bad art,” and Fisher’s storied career as an educator during which he taught numerous artists who have gone on to successful careers of their own, including Xiaoze Xie, Jeff Elrod, and Baseera Khan. A new book, Feint of Heart: Art Writing 1982-2002, will be published by David Zwirner Books on September 10, featuring Hickey’s essays on artists, including Vernon Fisher, Terry Allen, Luis Jiménez, Bridget Riley, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol, among several others. 

 

Michael Flanagan (MF): When did you develop an interest in writing about visual art? 

Dave Hickey (DH): When I was in graduate school in the 60s, I was going to New York every summer — living there and hanging out in galleries. I was a big supporter of pop and minimalist art and I was interested in what it might have to do with writing.

It was very rough and tumble. There were a lot of people who presumed they knew everything and I was among them. We hung out at Max’s Kansas City mostly and other places like that. It was popsters and minimalists and then leftover abstract expressionist painters. I learned a lot from Paula Cooper, Leo Castelli, and all those people, and I acquired enough intel to start my gallery [A Clean, Well-Lighted Place] in Texas.

MF: You wrote a 1989 essay on Vernon Fisher titled “The Code of the West.” What was your relationship with Vernon like? 

DH: Vernon and I are crazy in completely different ways. He’s really bound up in family relationships. I did not live the sort of life Vernon lives, to be blunt — play golf and go to the Luby’s — that kind of thing.

I had a lot of irregular friends and we all did drugs and were all kinds of rough. Vernon was a very different person than the sort of people I hung out with. When he was a kid, he went and sold Bibles, you know? He’s sort of tied into a level of Southern culture that I grew up in, but I’m not tied to it. 

His real problematic relationship, I would say, is with the actual haptic tactile fractal world, of which a lot of art is made. Vernon and Fredricka Hunter were probably the only two people I considered to be sort of intellectual equals, and so we got along in that term. 

MF: You are known for being vocal with your criticisms of art education. However, you’ve specifically referenced Vernon Fisher as one of the few artists who you feel have managed to succeed at simultaneously teaching and being an artist.    

DH: My experience with artists who had teaching jobs was not good. They would not be available when you needed them because they were finishing their five-year plan at school.

If you get Grandma Moses in your class, you’re going to have to teach Grandma Moses. You’re not going to make her into John Baldessari or something, you know? Your approach to the discourse is a lot more generalized when you teach.

If you’re expecting Vernon to be like everybody else, he’s not. I always thought the only thing that really marked Vernon as an academic was all those goddamn blackboards, which I love. I think they’re wonderful.

Vernon is interested in art and he will look at it and tell you what he thinks, and that’s good if you’re a student. Vernon is fortunate in that he has managed to have good students, but their work doesn’t look like his. And I think that’s positive. The hardest thing about teaching is that you can’t teach them how to do what you do. You have to teach them other stuff.

MF: What do you make of the contemporary art world? 

DH: 98 percent of what we see is bad art. 98 percent of what we talk about is bad art. But when it really comes down to it, a lot of what we learn about art, we learn from bad art. We learn what not to do. You learn which compliments work and which don’t. We learn all sorts of things. We learn not to paint pictures of ancient Indians with really wrinkled faces and we learn not to paint clowns. So to occasionally have some good art kind of justifies our quest. I think we’re all better for having artists like Vernon that work like that — the sort of first rate professional American art type of stuff. 

MF: What do you see when you reflect on your history in North Texas? 

DH: I remember in the early 80s we were going to an opening at Laura [Carpenter’s] gallery. It was me, Terry Allen, Vernon, and Bruce Nauman, all standing around in the center of the room. We sort of looked like an intramural ball team that had been invited to the opening. At that time, I began to think that maybe we were a generation of some sort. I think we belong to a generation who went into the art world because nobody cared what we did. But we were real competent — we could have become corporate executives. We could have all done a lot of things very well, but we just sort of decided to do art. And I think that raised the level of the kind of art that was made in our territory during that time.