THE INVISIBLE DRAGON: ESSAYS ON BEAUTY (revised and expanded edition) by Dave Hickey (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press), 2009, 123 pp.
Fellow fans of art critic Dave Hickey should be alerted to the fact that an extensively upgraded edition of his 1993 book The Invisible Dragon has recently appeared that seems to be almost twice as long as its predecessor, with a new introduction and an additional essay, “American Beauty,” that’s considerably longer (over 50 pages) than any of the four essays in the first edition. Even if you find the new introduction, written entirely in the third person, a mite off-putting, the new essay reaffirms Hickey as a major critical voice and terrific prose stylist. I’m not sufficiently well-versed in art history to be able to judge it confidently on those terms, but the erudition on display is pretty daunting, to say the least.
I discovered Hickey thanks to film scholar Dudley Andrew through Hickey’s extraordinary 1997 collection Air Guitar (see below) a radically populist and semiautobiographical look at pop culture that remains a particular favorite–although I subsequently bought Hickey’s two collections of short stories, the 1989 Prior Convictions and the 1999 Stardumb, that I’m still intending to read. Read more
Peter Watkins’s 1999 made-for-TV film about the revolutionary Paris Commune formed in 1871 offers a stunning lesson in understanding the past in relation to the present. Using contemporary talk-show and TV-news reporting techniques, Watkins shot the 345-minute film in only 13 days in an abandoned Paris factory. His cast consisted of 220 Parisians and illegal aliens from North Africa, most of whom had no acting experience, and he got them to do their own research on the Paris Commune and to collaborate in the construction of their characters and dialogue (in late scenes these actors, still in costume, discuss the relevance of the Commune to their own lives and contemporary issues). In some ways this work is more fascinating as an idea than in its execution. But it’s full of exciting moments and very effectively shot, in black and white and with extended mobile takes. In French with subtitles. (JR) Read more
My exposure to Stan Brakhage’s massive oeuvre has been somewhat limited, but these four works made in 1998 are among the most exciting and ravishing I’ve seen, rivaling even Scenes From Under Childhood (1970). Aptly described by J. Hoberman of the Village Voice as scratch-and-stain films, these mainly nonphotographic works are, among other things, a visual analogue to Abstract Expressionism. Reel 1 (22 min.) registers as visual music in its development of motifs and its use of rests to divide the work into discrete sections-a music that pulses, throbs, and sometimes winks on and off like a strobe light. Reel 2 (15 min.) credits Sam Bush as the visual musician and Brakhage as the composer; more staccato, dramatic, and richly orchestrated than the first reel, it occasionally recalls early Stravinsky in its fierce rhythms. Reels 3 (15 min.) and 4 (20 min.) are my favorites: the former uses bursts of photography (water, sky, birds, forest, sand, a nude child, merry-go-round horses), and the latter often suggests animation, with a black field disrupted by tantalizing bursts and smears of color. Also on the program are two Brakhage works I haven’t seenCoupling (1999, 5 min.) and Night Mulch & Very (2001, 7 min.). Read more
