Q&A with Dave Hickey

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Dave Hickey, curator of SITE Santa Fe's Fourth International Biennial, Beau Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitanism, has published essays and criticism in Rolling Stone, Art in America, Artforum, Interview, and Harper's, as well as several books, which include Air Guitar and Invisible Dragon: four Essays on Beauty. He is noted for reintroducing the notion of beauty into art-world discourse.

Antonio López: What was your initial reaction when SITE Santa Fe approached you to curate the biennial?

Dave Hickey: Well, my initial reaction was that they were probably crazy. The biennial business over the space of thirty years has evolved into an interlocking international bureaucracy of people involved in doing biennials, and I don't really have anything to do with it. When I thought about it, I thought that this actually gave me a good bit of freedom. There are some problems with the practice as it has evolved that I thought could be cured relatively simply

AL: Is it one of those things where you immediately thought, yeah, that's something I want to do, or did you have to think about it for a while and decide if it could fit into your schedule?

Hickey: Well, it was a change of pace. I'd been writing all along, and I thought it would be something different. It was a matter of moving from the consumer side of the art world, which critics are on, to the supply side. And this involves changing a lot of your attitudes; because, if you're a critic, you're trying to have organized responses, if you're a curator you're trying to create an occasion for other people to do that. So it's really the opposite. Intellectual organization is a lot less important than physical organization for a curator, so I try to resist coming to conclusions as a curator, because conclusions are really the province of the beholder. I am trying not to be a critic, more a person who just likes art. And I do, you know.

Obviously critical issues present themselves., and I am probably dealing with the issues at a level of abstraction that nobody would be interested in, but it will manifest itself in a concrete show. As I said in my curatorial statement, one of the problems with biennials is that they tend to privilege geographical diversity and ethnic diversity at the price of stylistic diversity, and age diversity. You tend to have a group of people of many races and from many places working in the same style, all of whom are about the same age. I was going to try to make it a little more complicated than that, to get artists working in different styles and artists from different generations. That's the simple cure for part of what I thought was wrong with biennials. I think the focus on the artist of the moment, who is the most famous among the biennial people, is a little obsessive.

AL:What was the process of deciding which artists you wanted to use?

Hickey: I decided, first, that since I don't do a lot of shows and I don't intend to do any more shows like this, that I would just start off with a group of older artists who had been important, talismanic, for me over the course of my whole career. So I started off with Edward Ruscha, Ken Price, Ellsworth Kelly, Bridget Riley, and Kenneth Anger--these are all mature artists about whom I've thought for a long time. I thought if I started there, and selected a coherent show with these people in it that the show would look okay, then I would be okay. You know, these are the people I care about.

Probably the decision that came before that was to hire a group of architects and designers to work with me. Since this was not going to be a show with a simple intellectual thesis, it was relatively important that it be visually coherent and interesting. I thought if I worried about keeping the show physically well designed, it would provide occasions for a little more intellectual contingency. That was my plan. I recruited these guys from Graft Design, an architectural firm of young Germans who have offices in L.A. and Berlin. I worked with a number of them when they were in school, and I like them. I thought they would be good and they have turned out to be so.

Then the next thing I did was to recruit a group of artists--I thought of Beau Monde and the idea of a cosmopolitan art that is more about the confluence of cultures than about cultures set apart, isolated. So I wanted to have a good-looking space that had certain aspects of the Beau Monde, of high style. I wanted to have a nice facade, a nice entryway with a long vista, and I wanted you to be able to go up stairs into a petit salon, so I recruited Jim Isermann to design a facade, Jennifer Steinkamp to design an entryway and Alexis Smith to create a petit salon.

So I had a pretty complex beginning. There were a couple of artists I was interested in for reasons that were related to the site, to this part of the country. I was interested in Big Chief Allison "Tootie" Montana and Darryl "Mutt Mutt" Montana who design Indian costumes for New Orleans Mardi Gras. They're great costumes, and I thought the idea of bringing a black Creole practice that appropriates aspects of Native American and Meso-American costuming, into a place with a lot of Latinos and Native Americans might be interesting-- very cosmopolitan, anyway. I also recruited a young Los Angeles artist named Gajin Fujita to design a logo he could tag on the wall of the Site building. Gajin grew up as a tagger in South Central (LA). I thought bringing in a young Japanese artist who is a very famous tagger into a Hispanic place where there is a lot of tagging and lowrider culture would be fun. Santa Fe, as a day to day culture, has a lot in common with the parts of South Central in which Gajin grew up so I think it will be a good match. These were some of my primary decisions, and I kind of spun off from there.

AL: When a person enters this site, will it be like entering a parallel reality or fantasy of some kind? I have the feeling it's going to have a science fiction-type atmosphere.

Hickey: It will look different (laughter). Museum spaces are generalized spaces, and I just want to try to make this one a singular space for six months--one that has specific architectural features and specific routs and passages. I wanted to make it into a specific piece of architecture that was designed to enhance the art, and that would accommodate itself to the art, maybe make the art look better. We'll see.

AL: Have your ideas evolved from your initial thoughts?

Hickey: They have refined. For instance, beginning with the idea of a diversity of styles has been an interesting way of thinking about things, and as a consequence, the show is beginning to look less like a piece of criticism than a personal essay about how styles relate to one another, across the country and across generations. So it's a little less about culture and a little more about style, and a little bit less about art at the interface of identity, and more about art at the interface of design, because cultural overlap, as it expresses itself in art, always requires a design solution. If you have somebody, like Gajin who wants to integrate Japanese Edo painting conventions with Chicano tagging technology, the problem of getting them together is a design problem. So a lot of the artists in this show work at that edge--at the edge between art and design rather than at the edge between art and local culture.

AL: You said something in your curatorial statement about having different milieus, but they overlap. Is that what you're talking about?

Hickey: I'd like the space to have destinations in it. The idea is to make each piece a kind of destination, at which you arrive, then go from there to somewhere else. I didn't want to do a mall where you just pass by things. I would like people to see things in relatively controlled circumstances. But I don't have any agenda beyond that. I don't really know what the space will feel like . You always have to wait and see. And so we'll wait and see.

AL: Are you commissioning new works or do you have existing works that you're already dealing with?

Hickey: Both. I'm commissioning some work to be done specifically for this space. We are putting these artists into the picture, giving them the total idea, and presuming they will accommodate themselves to it. I'm also personally selecting objects, paintings and images. I'm trying to be a curator rather than a patron. In other words, I'm not just hiring a bunch of people to come down here and do anything they want . I'm trying to make a relatively coherent show. If it fails it will be my responsibility, not theirs. That's my aspiration, anyway.

AL: You made the comment that you didn't want to impose off-site installations on the city. Can you elaborate?

Hickey: Well, I think that, outside of major metropolitan centers, people are not really comfortable with the way contemporary art violates our expectations, and I don't see any particular reason why they should be. In Santa Fe, for instance, there are a lot of people who don't like the excitement of art, who like the place because it's always the same. I don't see an particular reason to impose my aesthetics or values on them as they go about their day-to-day lives. That's not my job. Art is not a required course. I'll make a nice art place and, if they want to come, there'll be art where you can see it and that will be okay.

When you put art in communities, you either do something that totally integrates itself into the community, in which case it disappears, or you do something that makes everybody mad, in which case it's no fun. There's no real middle distance with this kind of work, especially in America where people are not predisposed to care about visual culture. That's why we live in an ugly, boring country, but that's okay. Some people do care about art and we make spaces for those people. I'm interested in sharing my pleasure with people who care. I'm not particularly interested in proselytizing art. I'm a lover not a preacher, so it's not an important issue for me.

AL: That relates to a question I have about your statement in which expound the difference between meaning and seeing. You want to create a pleasurable visual experience for people.

Hickey: Well, all the works in Beau Monde will have some meaningful relationship to other works in the show. Everything doesn't relate to everything else, but everything relates to something. There are intellectual, historical, and visual analogies going on in the show, but my job is not to insist upon them and create meaning, rather to create the conditions from which the viewer can create meaning. In other words, I'm not a teacher here. I'm really trying to create a situation where people can have fun figuring things out for themselves, and deciding whether they will like it. It's their job.

AL: We talked about the title and the logo. For the most part it seems like you're breaking down the barriers between "high" and "low" art.

Hickey: Oh, of course. I asked Gajin Fujita to design the logo because Beau Monde is a term often used to characterize a part of French elite culture., and I wanted the logo to say that we're talking about the Beau Monde in a broader, more democratic way .

AL: By default you're critiquing the concept of a biennial, although that may not be your goal.

Hickey: Right. I am critiquing the concept of the biennial as a trade show for curators, as a place where curators come to see things they can put in their museums next year. That trade show function is important, but it's not something that I want to do. I'm not interested in promoting artists' careers in the public sector; that's not my job. In general, I care less about critiquing the biennial structure than in adapting the biennial structure into something that lends itself to my talents. And my talents tend to be pretty hands-on, along the lines of: I see it, I like it, I move it there, I move it another quarter inch, and then I paint the wall blue, whatever. I do a great deal of theoretical writing, but that really derives from extant exhibitions and extant works of art. You can't theorize with nothing to theorize about. If the show doesn't exist--no theory. Once the show exists, I'll give you the theory. I'm trying to create the circumstances out of which theory might arise, not theory itself.

AL: In making this presentation, I get the impression that you align yourself more with the viewer than the art world.

Hickey: Well, this is a show for the people who see it. The art world is not really my audience. The art world is my warehouse. I mean, that's where I go to get the art that I put in this show. And if the art world wants to come, that's fine with me, but I am more interested in winning than in being successful, and there's a real difference, in my view. When you win, you get it the way you want it, Now whether what you want is successful, whether people like it, is another question. That's beyond my control. It is within my control to get it the way I want it, then we can see if they like it.

AL: Do you have any sense of schizophrenia from going from art critic to curator?

Hickey: It's probably harder to go from being an art critic to being a professor because professors explain and art critics don't. Professors are kind and generous and art critics aren't. That's a harder change than from a critic to a curator. Curating is the supply side and critic is the consumer side. They're very different practices, but I've done a lot of shows. I started out as an art dealer and I love to arrange things in space. I'm old enough to remember when that mattered. I'm still going to move it a quarter of an inch if I think it needs to be moved.

AL: When I looked at the catalogue for the Ultralounge show you curated, it seemed like a very inviting space.

Hickey: This should be a congenial space, too. I mean, it's not supposed to be ugly. You're supposed to have a good time. This will be a lot more refined, modernist space than Ultralounge, more white and bright. But the Ultralounge shows were done in white and bright environments so we tried to make a dark space. Here we're in the center of dim spaces and dirt worship, so this will probably be a brighter and whiter space just to distinguish itself .

AL: Does being in Las Vegas, NV inspire any ideas for the show?

Hickey: Las Vegas has great public spaces. And it has spaces that are designed not to make you feel bad. It has big buildings that are designed not to make you feel small. There are a great many design solutions in Las Vegas, you know, deriving from the history of twentieth century architecture that would be useful, but I don't think this will be a Las Vegas space by any stretch of the imagination. You do learn things in Las Vegas, however. You learn what spaces make you feel bad and what spaces make you feel good.

AL: Vegas has a sense of a spectacle. Each place has a theme, and it's there to entertain. In what respects would this biennial be similar or different?

Hickey: Art exhibitions are for serious enjoyment not casual entertainment, but if you don't enjoy them, I don't see why you would come. They're not supposed to hurt. They're supposed to be inviting. They're supposed to be interesting and exciting. This will not be as theatrical as a Vegas space, but good theater is the very business of democratic culture. This is a culture in which we act out what we believe, so all American art has aspects of the theatrical. Our job here, really, is to try to coordinate the works chosen. When you design a show in a space, it's like having a big pile of slate, and trying to whittle it down into a jigsaw puzzle.

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