Far From Respectable: The Art of David Hickey - A Book Review by Pete Warzel

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Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art

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Review by Pete Warzel 

Somewhere near Santa Fe lives a man who in the 1990s set the art world spinning, with joy or disdain, depending upon which side of the working divide you were on.

The divide was in makers and doers in the democracy of art and beauty v. the arbiters of art, the tastemakers, the “therapeutic institution” that told you what was worth looking at or listening to or reading at night. Dave Hickey should have been on the institutional side of the division having entered the world of art criticism and academia. He was not. He had arrived via start-up art galleries and managing an established one in NYC (from which he resigned when asked to present an exhibition of Yoko Ono’s artwork), writing songs in Nashville, drugs, sex, rock and roll, and doing a stint as executive editor of Art in America magazine. Then Dave Hickey wrote The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty (1993), and his world and that of art criticism and the official determination of worthiness changed. For the better, I would think.

The dialogue had begun and Hickey was either a genius (he did receive a MacArthur “genius grant” in 2001) or the really bad boy in a room full of tweeds. He said in an interview in BOMB Magazine, April 1995, “…I am an art critic, which is the single unfundable, ungrantable, unendowable endeavor that is even vaguely connected with the arts. And justifiably so, in my case, since I am not with the program.”

You get the picture.

Enter Daniel Oppenheimer an excellent writer and admitted Hickey fanboy. He presents Hickey’s critical work as born in fear “… that legitimacy and legibility are the enemies  of freedom and forgiveness. So he writes to protect the places where he found refuge from the people from and in whom he perceives judgment.” Maybe. But there is no argument that Hickey’s take no prisoners’ criticism changed the conversation, perhaps the status quo.

Dave Hickey was born in Fort Worth, Texas, 1940. His father was a dedicated, amateur jazz musician, taking Dave to impromptu gigs that opened up musical and artistic worlds for the boy. The family was mobile and Dave became a surfer, a writer, eventually a gallery owner in Austin before moving to NYC and entering an entirely different realm of art, exposure to the rock stars of painting, music and literature, and a life that was not afraid to take risks or fail. He had received a BA from Texas Christian University and an MA from the University of Texas and gave up on his doctoral dissertation before opening the Austin gallery named “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”, which is typical Dickey humor since his abandoned dissertation was about “the hidden syntactic patterns in Ernest Hemingway’s fiction.”

He was writing art and music criticism for the national magazines and during a panel discussion in the late 1980s launched the idea that he would explore in depth in The Invisible Dragon, and later in Air Guitar. The theme was a democratization of art and a return to “beauty”, not precisely defined, but “the beautiful…is a form of rhetoric….The more mastery an artist has of the rhetoric of the beautiful, the more effectively he can rewire how our brains process and perceive visual sense data. It is an awesome power.” The beauty in art – painting, music, writing, can bring people together over the object or art that they love. The institutions only propound virtue, making learned judgments in doing so, and are oblivious to the individualized, multi-faceted nature of the beautiful.

“Beauty” as democratized in The Invisible Dragon would secure him a tenured position in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where the city and its cultural nuances informed his written work going forward. Writing about his associates at UNLV he observed, “I suspect that my unhappy colleagues are appalled by the fact that Vegas presents them with a flat-line social hierarchy – that having ascended from ‘food” to ‘cocktail’ in Las Vegas, there is hardly anywhere else to go (except perhaps, up to ‘magician’)…because the rich are not special in Las Vegas, because money here is just money…. Membership at the University Club will not get you comped at Caesars, unless you play baccarat.” (from Air Guitar)

In 2010 he and his wife, Libby Lumpkin, curator, art historian, and newly appointed professor of art history at UNM, moved to Albuquerque and then Santa Fe. Hickey is now in poor health, eighty years old, mostly unable to travel. However, he did return to Las Vegas in 2017 to give several lectures at UNLV, and witnessed the massacre at the Mandalay Bay Hotel. 

Although Oppenheimer does not quote Hickey about life in Santa Fe, he certainly gives hints, if we accept he has “learned” the critic well enough to speak for him, in a very Hickey-like tone – Santa Fe is “…a brief squiggle of kitsch along his Silk Road…. “ In an article written for Harvard Design Magazine in 2001 that I found, Hickey addresses his then adopted hometown, Las Vegas, Nevada, and his future place of exile, Santa Fe, New Mexico, as “dialectical utopias” because “…the cities do speak to one another – although neither one of them listens.” Hickey knows what we all know, but makes no qualms about airing his opinions, perhaps not knowing then, or more likely, not caring, that he would come to live here one day. But perhaps he had an inkling, as he also curated the acclaimed SITE Santa Fe biennial in 2001. In his curatorial statement for that exhibition, now twenty years ago, Hickey stated “I know how to look and I remember what I see.” What he saw in Santa Fe at the time (in the Harvard Design Magazine piece) was an “invented” community, a “choice”, a “dream within the dream.”  That “…attempts to embody and evoke the eternal West.”

I think that kind of observation makes the dialogue, for us, interesting, even if we are not quite listening. The parallel universes of Las Vegas and Santa Fe could only be a Hickey construct. They are each visions of the American West, two very different embodiments of the “beautiful”, and so, individual statements about the country itself. I wonder what he thinks now, after living here for a good spell.

Daniel Oppenheimer has written a succinct gem of critical biography about a writer/critic who had the insight to take on the defects of his own chosen profession, empower artists, and speak truth when the world was seemingly ready to listen. Bravo to them both. Dave Hickey might be “far from respectable” as the title implies, but a brilliant voice to listen to, and take heed. This biography just might lead you back to read Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon, or Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, to learn what the intellectual commotion was really all about.

Far From Respectable: The Art of David Hickey
University of Texas Press
Hardcover, 141pages
$24.95 (Order the book at top of this page page) 

SAR and the Pandemic: Life on the Screen

The White sisters’ home at El Delirio, now the administration building at the School for Advanced Research. Photo by Katrina Lasko, #3095, Courtesy of the School for Advanced Research

We present here a second in a series look at what our collaborative organizations were faced with during the COVID lockdown. The campus of the School for Advanced Research was added to our Register of Historic Properties Worthy of Preservation during the health crisis. It is designated on the Register as El Delirio, the historic name given the former estate of the White Sisters. Michael Brown, President of SAR, writes about the changes in his organization’s approach forced by the health crisis, and the time taken to make improvements to the buildings and property at the campus, during the isolation. — Pete Warzel 

SAR and the Pandemic: Life on the Screen
By Michael F. Brown, President, School for Advanced Research

As many HSFF readers will know, the School for Advanced Research has steadily moved over its 114-year history from specialization in New World archaeology to a mission that encompasses public education, scholarship in anthropology and related disciplines, support for research and creativity in the Indigenous arts of the Southwest, and stewardship of our historic campus, recently recognized by the HSFF as “worthy of preservation.”

This broad palette of activities makes SAR’s elevator pitch suitable for a ride to a skyscraper’s penthouse. Yet it proved to be an asset when much of the United States went into lock-down in March 2020. Several key elements of SAR’s programs had to be suspended—most notably, our member field trips, public lectures, and tours of the Indian Arts Research Center. Happily, we were able to support our on-campus resident scholars and Native American artist fellows, although their programs were obliged to shift online. Prior to 2020, we had begun to live-stream many of our public lectures and artist talks. In the face of the state’s stay-at-home order, SAR staff members made a quick pivot to online-only events. 

Lest I make this shift sound easy, remember that initially we were limited by our home equipment, as were our speakers and audience members. High-quality webcams and microphones were scarce for months. Even when we solved these technical challenges, Santa Fe’s broadband often buckled under the weight of thousands of simultaneous Zoom sessions and streamed entertainment.

To our astonishment and delight, however, our audiences began to grow, reaching all fifty states and nineteen countries to date. Since March 2020, over three thousand individuals previously unknown to us have participated in more than sixty events, along with hundreds of longtime SAR members. In short, the pandemic forced us to interrupt the face-to-face relationship with our local members in favor of online communication with a broader and more diverse global audience.

We also took advantage of our public closing to complete long-overdue campus improvements: roof and masonry repairs, new handrails on our walkways, and fresh plaster on nearly every building and wall. 

What’s next? We’re easing back into our offices and planning for a full public opening by late summer. The main challenge going forward will be to maintain our ongoing commitment to local members, whom we sorely miss, without losing a new national and international audience interested in SAR’s lectures and classes. One way or another—on-screen or in-person at our Garcia Street campus—we invite you to join us in the emerging post-pandemic world.

Sunmount Sanatorium - A History and Case for Preservation

Recent publicity, including an article in last Friday’s Pasatiempo, has accompanied a sale of the historic Sunmount Sanatorium property off of Camino del Monte Sol. Now known as the Immaculate Heart of Mary Retreat Center, the property is being pursued by two potential buyers with divergent uses proposed.

Given the potential re-utilization of the property we thought it necessary to here emphasize the historic importance of the property, its residents, and its architecture, in the hope that whoever buyer surfaces, the historic fabric of the built environment will take precedence in their plans.

Below, Nancy Owen Lewis, Board Director at HSFF and an expert on the history of the property through her extensive research for her book Chasing the Cure in New Mexico: Tuberculosis and the Quest for Health, gives us a short history of the importance of this place.  — Pete Warzel

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Patients at Sunmount Sanatorium "chase the cure" on the breezeway of this Spanish Pueblo revival-style building constructed in 1914 by Rapp & Rapp. (Photos is from the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives, John Gaw Meem Photograph Collection, image no. 23523).

The Immaculate Heart of Mary Retreat and Conference Center, currently on the market by the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, contains the former Sunmount Sanatorium, which operated from 1906-1937. More specifically, the sale includes the Santa Maria building, which was constructed in 1920. Although not part of the sale, the building next door, now a Carmelite monastery, was built in 1914. TB sanatoriums were once a major industry in NM, with 70 in operation during the course of its history. TB was the major cause of death and before the discovery of streptomycin in the 1940s, there was no known cure, but a high and dry climate was considered healing.

Not only is Sunmount the most intact historic sanatorium in New Mexico, complete with sleeping porches, a dining room, and living room little changed from the original, it is one of the earliest examples of Pueblo Revival style architecture in New Mexico. Dr. Frank Mera, director, advertised it as “The Sanatorium Different,” it attracted numerous artists, writers, and other luminaries, who would change the cultural landscape of Santa Fe. They included

1)    Writers: Alice Corbin Henderson (poet); Janet Lewis, Yvor Winters
2)    Lynn Riggs, Oklahoma playwright, who wrote “Green Grow the Lilacs” while at Sunmount (it became the basis of the musical “Oklahoma.”)
3)    Artists Arthur Musgrave and Datus Myers
4)     Silversmith Frank Patania
5)    Dorothy McKibbin (gatekeeper Manhattan project)
6)    Katherine Stinson (aviator)
7)    John Gaw Meem.  Fascinated by the Franciscan missions he saw on sanatorium field trips, he decided to give up engineering and become an architect.  Using a cottage at Sunmount as his first studio, he would change the face of New Mexico architecture.

Sunmount Salon
Fresh air, rest, nourishing food, and maintaining a positive attitude were the cornerstone of treatment. To foster the latter, Sunmount sponsored lectures by archaeologist Sylvanus Morley; poetry readings by Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, and Witter Bynner; and concerts.  Others would be invited to attend. This mingling of “artistically-minded patients, local residents and visiting writers became known as the “Sunmount Salon.”  During the 1920s, Sunmount, in many respects, became the cultural hub of Santa Fe.

Recommendation:  That this historic building, as described above, and its surrounding landscape be preserved.

Written by Nancy Owen Lewis

A Book Review -- John P. Slough: The Forgotten Civil War General

John P. Slough The Forgotten Civil War General - Richard Miller

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Reviewed by Pete Warzel

On April 29, 2021 Richard Miller presented a Zoom Salon El Zaguán talk to the members and general participants of the Historic Santa Fe Foundation. The subject was John P. Slough and his unlikely victory at the battle of Glorieta Pass, New Mexico, during the early days of the American Civil War. The presentation was narrowly focused on his role as commander of the First Colorado Volunteers, marched south from Denver to defend New Mexico against the insurgent Confederate troops from Texas. Miller’s lecture was excellent, and intriguing.

The basis of the talk was Mr. Miller’s new book. John P. Slough: The Forgotten Civil War General is recently published (available in the HSFF gift shop), and although the hook here is the Civil War and perhaps for us, Glorieta, the research and writing is so much more. This is a fascinating look at regional economic and social history of the mid-west during the early 19th century. It truly is history writing at its best – an individual biography placed within the greater cultural context of geography and time, and significant social disorder. The societal turmoil and accompanying political interaction is eerily familiar to us today.

Slough began his business and political career in Cincinnati, Ohio, a booming city on the edge of the fault line where pro and anti-slavery factions, as well as the political parties, became violent. Remember, at this time the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln, and so Free-Staters. The Democrats then, leaned to slavery and the new Kansas Territory became the battleground for not simple political warfare, but vicious physical clashes on the ground and in the statehouse. Slough was expelled from his seat in the Ohio legislature for striking a fellow representative over a personal (read political) slight. He moved to Kansas Territory in an opportunistic act to create an expansive legal business in land speculation created with the expansion west. This was the America of unlimited opportunity for aggressive individuals. It also was the America of social and political division. John Brown and his men murdered pro-slavery sympathizers in Kansas.

Kansas business leaders went to Denver in 1858 to ride the gold boom and the growth of the city named after James W. Denver, then current Kansas territorial governor. Slough followed in 1861 having previously invested in Denver real estate from afar. It was a tough frontier town, not the sophisticated home he left in Leavenworth, Kansas. “Outside the hastily built homes and shops, mules, hogs, and dogs wandered Denver’s streets in great numbers and provided sport for drunken sharpshooters.” (I am tempted here to say not much has changed in 160 years but it has). With Kansas achieving statehood, the Colorado Territory was created and government administration became imperative upon Lincoln’s election and the threat of war, to keep the territory within the Union. Colorado Territory was akin to Kansas – a hotbed of emigrants from neighboring states, south and nouth, pro and anti-slavery. William Gilpin, the territory’s first governor feared insurrection and Slough stepped in as Colonel of the 1st Colorado Volunteer Infantry, having no military background in his resumé. The volunteers were miners from the Rocky Mountains and his third in command was John Chivington, to become infamous as the commander at the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864.

I recommend viewing the recorded Salon presentation by Richard Miller on the HSFF website, regarding the Battle of Glorieta Pass, and the mis-steps of its inexperienced commander. https://www.historicsantafe.org/545-hsff-blog/2021/4/30/richard-miller-on-col-john-slough

He resigned his post and headed east to join the war proper in Virginia, to Harper’s Ferry, now as a brigadier general, and then as military Governor of Alexandria, Virginia, a major location for defeated Union forces as well as Black refugees fleeing enslavement in northern Virginia. His position afforded him access to the major players of Lincoln’s administration and the war effort.

When the war ended Slough was to make a new decision on where to start on another career to add to lawyer, politician, military commander and governor. In 1866 he became the chief justice of the New Mexico Territorial Supreme Court.

Upon visiting his former battlefield at Glorieta he was appalled at the cemetery for his fallen soldiers, and urged the Legislature to fund improvements and add “plainly inscribed monuments”. What he got was a $1500 appropriation for a monument in the city – the Soldier’s Monument. Erected in the center of Santa Fe Plaza in 1868 Slough never got to see it, as he was shot and killed in the Exchange Hotel, Santa Fe, in December 1867. As we all know, he could not see the monument today were he able.

Miller writes of the “American narrative” that “those willing to move across the continent…had a greater opportunity to gain economic and social status than the less venturesome stuck in their settled lives back east.” This was the “American land of opportunity” that John P. Slough sought, succeeded and failed, succeeded again. Yet in the end, Miller states, Slough’s life is a “story of great opportunity and failed ambition.” Richard Miller tells that story extremely well.

John P. Slough: The Forgotten Civil War General by Richard L. Miller, University of New Mexico Press, Hardcover, 304 pages.

Rehabilitating A National Historic Landmark: The Story of the National Park Service’s Old Santa Fe Trail Building

SALON EL ZAGUAN with Charles Vickrey and Flynn Larson, National Park Service

Rehabilitating A National Historic Landmark:
The Story of the National Park Service’s Old Santa Fe Trail Building

ABOUT THE SALON TALK
The Old Santa Fe Trail Building is a New Deal Era adobe building constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Constructed of 280,000 adobe bricks, the National Park Service Regional Headquarters adapts local building tradition to the Spanish Pueblo Revival style which was popularized in the 1930s in northern New Mexico and adopted by building NPS architect Cecil Doty. The building is unique in its expression of organic forms with sculptural massing and locally inspired textures and pigment that blend into the landscape. The Spanish Colonial style is adopted throughout the interior in decorative elements with CCC-crafted wood furnishings, and light fixtures to connect local forms with daily NPS functions. Some changes throughout the twentieth century, however, negatively impacted the building causing several technical issues. In 2018, the National Historic Landmark underwent a rehabilitation project to solve these issues, addressing architectural elements throughout to allow the building to function as originally intended. The project required the team to adapt to the unique needs of an adobe building, reversing years of water damage to protect the original adobe bricks. In this presentation, we will share the Old Santa Fe Trail Building’s journey from construction to rehabilitation, exploring its history and revealing its transformation from 1936 to today.

Find more information on the renovations in the Santa Fe New Mexican articles:
Park Service at work on iconic Santa Fe building, Paul Weideman, Jan. 12, 2019
Depression-era adobe office building to undergo renovations, Tripp Stelnicki, April 15, 2017

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Flynn Larson is a Masters in historic preservation student at Goucher College and is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is an SCA-Americorps intern with the National Park Service’s Intermountain Historic Preservation Services program working with historic structures throughout Regions 6, 7, and 8 of the National Park System. She is focused on the preservation of historic structures and landscapes throughout America’s national parks. She is also a member of the Historic Districts Review Board in Santa Fe.

Charles Vickrey started his career with the National Park Service (NPS) in February 1991 as a Drafter for the Design and Engineering Division for the Southwest Regional Office in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He served in temporary positions with the NPS in subsequent years, until receiving his degree in Architecture in 1997 from the University of New Mexico. In 1998, Charles restarted his NPS career serving as a Project Inspector on the construction of the Northwest New Mexico Visitor Center and Multi-agency Center in Grants, New Mexico for El Malpais National Monument. A year later, he joined the Intermountain Regional Office (formerly the Southwest Regional Office) of the NPS, based at the Old Santa Fe Trial Building. In early 2000, Charles served in a term position for the Regional Contracting Office in Santa Fe. In 2002 he moved from contracting to the Design and Engineering Division as an Architect. In 2018 Charles assumed the role as senior Architect for the Santa Fe Office.

Charles has spent much of his career working out of the Old Santa Fe Trail Building, with only brief absences to work in other parks such as Big Bend National Park, Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site, Hubble Trading Post National Historic Site and Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument. Charles has worked on small and large architectural projects from Arkansas to Montana for the National Park Service for over 30 years.

El Rancho de las Golondrinas and the Pandemic: Learning to Pivot and Finding New Strength

As the world begins to wake up from a fifteen-month nightmare, and Santa Fe begins to fill with visitors again, we wanted to take a look at organizations we like to collaborate with, to see what projects and progress was made by them during the disorientation of lock down. I asked Dan Goodman, Museum Director of El Rancho de las Golondrinas, to give us insight into what went on at this living history museum when visitors were not allowed. Dan and las Golondrinas’ Development Director Jackie Camborde, wrote this fine piece in response. Thanks to both for their good work in La Cienega and in these words. — Pete Warzel

Find out more about their upcoming activities on their website.

El Rancho de las Golondrinas and the Pandemic: Learning to Pivot and Finding New Strength
Jackie Camborde and Daniel Goodman, El Rancho de las Golondrinas

There is really no way to fully describe 2020. Never in any of our lifetimes have we had such a strange, isolated and distant year. El Rancho de las Golondrinas was closed from June to September, and all our usual festival weekends and other special events were cancelled. The throng of locals and tourists that usually arrive all summer long were unable to visit the museum. No field trips or classrooms visited last year. Our volunteers were sidelined from their passions of teaching and demonstrating the ways of the past. It almost seemed like an impossible time to keep going…but we found our way.

Cultural institutions by their very nature have an obligation to serve their community.  We knew that if we could mobilize hundreds of volunteers for Harvest festival, surely we could mobilize them for the situation at hand.  Our volunteers got to work making masks for essential workers. Our staff, Board, volunteers and neighbors came together for a cleanup of Los Pinos Road, something that we have now made an annual event. We donated almost a ton of clothing and household goods via a community fund drive. We worked together with Youthworks, the Food Depot and Santa Fe County to distribute free grab and go meals and kids’ hands-on history kits in our parking lot every week. At last count we had distributed over 24,000 prepared meals and food packages from our parking lot. We grew produce based on the needs of the Food Depot and have donated thousands of pounds of fresh vegetables to them for those in need. Why so much activity and outreach during a pandemic? Because like everyone else we have a passion for this community, this land, and New Mexico.

This was also a good opportunity for the Museum to tackle some important projects, especially when it comes to Historic Preservation. Our operations crew got caught up with maintenance of our historic buildings. We made repairs to our acequias and take care of invasive species around our many ponds and wetlands. We built out the educational material on our website and expanded our volunteer resource material including information they shared with guests about the historic objects on display in our buildings. Is there more work to do?  Of course!  With 500 acres, 34 historic buildings, educational programs, animals and artifacts to manage and maintain, there is never a shortage of work!  But we are happy to be the stewards of this significant cultural property.

One program we developed to keep Las Golondrinas in people’s minds and hearts is the Las Golondrinas Live Sessions. This series of lectures, demonstrations and projects is being shown live on our Facebook page and can be viewed on our YouTube Channel at any time. Some of the topics covered in the sessions include lectures on New Mexico history and adobe preservation; demonstrations of weaving, bread making and fire building; a tour of the Molino Grande and how-to projects such as tin stamping and other traditional crafts. The Live Sessions are more than demonstrations, they are a repository of historic lifeways in New Mexico!

As we prepare to open on June 2nd for the 2021 season, we know that the most important thing we can do is keep our visitors safe. We have retrofitted our admissions booths with Plexiglass barriers, installed refillable water stations and incorporated a very rigorous cleaning schedule into our daily activities. All of our employees have taken the state Covid online training and Las Golondrinas is listed as a Covid-safe Institution.

One big change this year will be our festival season. We have canceled our June and July events, and are hopeful that our first event will be the Santa Fe Wine Festival on August 14 and 15.  We will be requiring all guests at festivals to make reservations to attend, including our members, who can always attend for free. Members will get a 24-hour priority on reservations for all festivals – a great reason to join us this year!

While the pandemic derailed our usual operations, many good things came out of this time. For one thing, we kept all our fulltime staff employed and working, something we are very proud of as an institution.  We learned that our employees can make the most of a difficult situation. We learned that we can be a bigger force for good in our La Cienega community. We know that we can find ways to reach our members, visitors and friends, even if they can’t visit the museum. None of us ever want to go through another year like 2020, but we feel lucky to know that above all else, Las Golondrinas will continue to survive and thrive.

Jackie Camborde, Director of Development
Daniel Goodman, Museum Director
El Rancho de las Golondrinas Living History Museum
https://golondrinas.org/