Dave Hickey is a West Coast kind of guy. Not that he doesn't like New York, and not that he didn't do very well there during his years editing Art in America magazine and as director of the Reese Palley Gallery. But his chain-smoking habit, his broad, down-home features, his emphatically laid-back bearing, relaxed drawl and his cowboy boots place him somewhere else entirely, somewhere a lot like Texas, which is in fact where he comes from.
His spiritual home, though, is California (where his family moved when he was nine or 10 years old), as is apparent from the distant, beatific look that comes over his face when he talks about living and working there. But he likes Nevada, where he is currently based, as professor of art criticism and theory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas - "Basically, I coach people," he says.
Far from being the haven for flakes and weirdos that you might expect, "Las Vegas is a very self-centring place. Because if you go there, you know what you want. The students are very independent, very focused. In my 10 years there so far, I've never had one with a personal problem, which is good because my counselling skills are not a particularly strong point".
Hickey is an engaging, combative commentator with trenchant views on contemporary art and culture (when the subject of video art comes up he shakes his head and pronounces: "I figure I've paid my dues. I've decided I've looked at more than enough bad video art to last me a lifetime and I'm just not going to look at any more. I'm just not going to do it").
These views are spelt out in two spirited books of essays, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy. Peter Schjeldahl termed him "a romantic individualist and a philosophical pragmatist", who argues for the commonality of art, high and low, and suggests that commerce has proved to be "art's least irksome practical arena". A Clean Well-Lighted Place, the gallery he launched in Austin, Texas, has an almost mythical status in contemporary art history. He has also written fiction, which he describes as intoxicatingly liberating compared with composing criticism.
He was in Dublin recently to deliver a lecture at the RHA, at the invitation of the Critical Voices project. Titled Local Aesthetics and Cosmopolitan Art, the lecture was flagged as being "about the place of painting in the pantheon of media existing today". In the event, and to the surprise of many of those who had turned up to hear his views on precisely that topic, he hardly alluded to the subject at all, and then only in a tangential way. But by the end of his wide-ranging talk, few people were complaining, for he is a provocative, lively, hugely likeable performer.
If his talk had a dominant theme, it related to Beau Monde, the fourth Santa Fe Biennial exhibition, of which he is curator, which runs in Santa Fe until January 6th. But along the way he sketched out a theory of cultural forms based substantially on two ideas: economic pragmatism and the sublimation of conflict. He argued that since the early Renaissance, artistic innovation has consistently, though not exclusively, been driven by practical considerations, among which the marketplace features prominently.
He also suggested that rivalry and antagonism in the social context was repeatedly translated into forms of symbolic aesthetic display, citing the example of gangs becoming immersed in the inventive, labour-intensive business of street carnival. The latter, incidentally, has a bearing on his conviction that the same processes and considerations apply to high, low and middle culture - he is against the rigid hierarchies of institutional culture.
When he took on Beau Monde, he decided to throw away the biennial rule book. There is nothing more conformist than the institutionalised non-conformism of the international art world. Crudely put, the unstated curatorial rules for international exhibitions are that, under the guise of marking a major shift in zeitgeist (a key term), you assemble exactly the same kind of artists and the same kind of work - and in an awful lot of cases literally the very same artists and the very same works - that everyone else assembles. Everyone is happy and reassured, and a general air of self-congratulation prevails.
"It took me about 10 minutes to put my show together," Hickey recalls. What he did was map it out entirely on the basis of personal preference - that is, preference in the sense of the accumulated instinct and judgment of many years. "But then I thought I was expected to be eccentric, I thought that's why they'd asked me."
He applied himself to the venue, a nondescript beer warehouse on the outskirts of Santa Fe, and transformed it, in a very West Coast vein (though Palladio was also a guiding light), with the help of a group of enthusiastic architecture students.
Besides Bridget Riley, Ellsworth Kelly, Jessica Stockholder and other established luminaries, he included work by people virtually unknown in the wider circles of the art world - certainly not the artists likely to turn up in the latest zeitgeist survey. It was a simple plan, but unprecedented in the world of what he terms "Kunsthalle Culture".
You'd wonder why other curators wouldn't have a go, and the reason is largely the sniffy response his show drew from several Kunsthalle types. Nobody wants to find themselves outside the loop. "There was a funny kind of response from some people within the art world which boiled down to this: they'd look at Ellsworth Kelly or whatever and say, oh yeah, you just went and got some good art and exhibited it, that's easy - we do this with bad art, that's hard. I just thought that the poor people in Santa Fe shouldn't have to come and look at a pile of tyres and feel educated into contemplating the death of industrial civilisation or whatever. I thought they should have something beautiful to enjoy."
He is quite positive about the Irish art scene. "Some of your art institutional people here are incredibly lifelike," he says, flatteringly. "I mean, after this I'm going to London to deliver a lecture at the Tate, and that's a bit like going for chemotherapy."
In relation to the trajectory of his talk, he explains it in this way: "I used to read out a text I'd written, but I found I'd go too fast and felt I didn't know who I was talking to, because I wasn't actually looking at them. If I haven't got a text I can look at the audience and see how I'm doing. I can respond. It got to the stage where I'd have bits of text from which I'd digress - now it's all digression. But for me talk is what it's all about. By the time I write something down it's already old."
On the subject of old, he finds he has attained elderly status in the art world. "When you get to be an old person, people expect you to deliver normative opinions. You're supposed to have formulated this normative, considered, central position. They regard you as a kind of pundit and call you for a comment on this or that. When they do it to me I don't think they realise that they're getting some pretty weird stuff. I'm not a mainstream sort of person."
Never mainstream, but definitely a good one to have around.
