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Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (Distributed Art Publishers, 1997) Dave Hickey, who among other things has been a freelance writer, rock musician, and editor of Art in America, published Air Guitar back in 1997, but to this day it remains sui generis in the field of cultural studies—-wide-ranging and intensely personal, speculative and grounded in experience. In the section called "Unbreak My Heart, An Overture" (titles are telling here), Hickey describes the book as his "own last, tiny fling at standing alone." Though mostly collected from essays in Art in America, Air Guitar is no mere clip-job; the pieces come together nicely in structural and thematic ways. Tired of using a kind of cultural shorthand, Hickey writes in an "honest effort to communicate the idiosyncrasy of my own quotidian cultural experience in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century—to recount some of that experience and, whenever possible, account for it." The pieces themselves—-mostly short bursts or odes—-are what Hickey calls "speculative writing," something akin to fables, explorations of his own experience with stated conclusions. He also, in the book's eponymous essay, makes out his writing as "the written equivalent of air guitar—-flurries of silent, sympathetic gestures with nothing at their heart but the memory of the music." But don't let the rhetoric fool you. Air Guitar is no aimless journey through Hickey's tastes—-he builds an argument here for a version of democracy that goes far beyond politics and deep into art, culture, and everyday experience. The key to the argument is participation; in an essay called "Romancing the Looky-Loos," Hickey spells out the struggle between spectator and participant in the realm of the arts, and says that the same dynamic permeates the entire culture. Things that are worth creating—-art, music, but also politics—-are worth participating in, because non-participation is akin to ceding control. Though the book is best when it stays closest to Hickey's heart (his enthusiasms are contagious), it remains satisfyingly engaged throughout, and is a must-read for all interested in the swirling mass of contemporary culture. MORE: A review of Air Guitar from the Boston Phoenix Sarah Vowell on Air Guitar A conversation between Hickey and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe on the state of contemporary painting from March 2000 Christgau in Rolling Stone on Hickey Zingmagazine Interview with Hickey |
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