The “Dragon” chapbook emerged as an intellectually ambitious statement of the critic’s working philosophy. A deadline for Dave was an excellent excuse to procrastinate, only to rev up to hyper-speed at (or after) the last minute and then, in editorial consultation, to hone the essay’s music. The fit between Hickey as writer and Kornblau as editor at Art Issues proved to be ideal - which is not to say easy. Sure, I said - and there’s this guy in Texas you should publish. When I got back to L.A., coincidence happened: Gary Kornblau, whom I knew in passing from his occasional front-desk duty at Margo Leavin Gallery in West Hollywood, asked if he could bounce an idea off me for a magazine from art-rich, criticism-poor Southern California. (He replaced speed’s high-wattage push with a white-knuckle cocktail of nonstop nicotine and caffeine.) The Texas panel remains hazy to me - was it Houston? Dallas? - but the boisterous showmanship of his riveting insight was clearly part of Dave’s reemergence from self-imposed isolation. Since the late 1960s, he’d run A Clean Well-Lighted Place, a short-lived but legendary Austin art gallery moved to New York and been director at Soho’s pioneering Reese Palley Gallery become executive editor of Art in America, where he also wrote done a stint writing and promoting music in Nashville written for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice (“He’s as good as it gets, starting with his prose,” in the words of estimable Voice rock critic Robert Christgau) and, somewhere along the way, burned out on amphetamines and gone back home to live with Mom in Fort Worth to clean out. Invited to speak on a panel in Texas, I accepted only because Hickey was scheduled as a local panelist.īy then I was filling in the back story. Half a dozen years passed after reading the Ruscha essay before I met him.
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But if the tale needed to convey the bewildered bemusement of youthful dislocation, plus the sonic engine of a silly rat-a-tat given by a hard-c repetition to move things along, so be it. Hickey could be explaining the soft sensuality and exotic drift of his childhood move as a kid from Texas (he was born in Fort Worth), transported with family for a year to the beach in Los Angeles, and interject into his writing the wonder of a landscape dotted with “coco palms.” Those are tropical trees, of course, not imports found at the Southern California seashore. No wonder he could illuminate the work of Ruscha - an artist of painted language, overheard. If art was to be seen, then writing, like a song, was to be heard. He had learned to love painting from his otherwise distant mom, Helen, a businesswoman and amateur artist, and he inhaled the intricacies of music from his jazz-musician dad, David, a car salesman who tragically died by his own hand when Hickey was 11. But, with all due respect, he found the iconoclastic concision of Waylon Jennings’ outlaw lyrics and the post-doo-wop drive of George Clinton and the Parliament-Funkadelic collective more effective than the hothouse theory flourishing in academic journals. He was conversant with arcane philosophical treatises (his abandoned 1967 PhD dissertation in linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin involved critiques of Jacques Derrida and French structuralism). “ Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy” (1997), a collection of 23 columns gathered from the publisher’s monthly magazine, applied the dragon’s fearsome breath to culture both high and pop. “The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty” (1993), a slim, soft-cover chapbook, shook up an art world allergic to taking seriously the b-word, even though “beautiful” was a common exclamation in response to exhibitions of the most seemingly resistant conceptual art. Two books published by Art Issues Press in Los Angeles stand at the top of his writing heap. (A sister, Sarah Henderson, predeceased him.) He is survived by his wife, Libby Lumpkin, a feminist art historian and professor at the University of New Mexico, and a younger brother, Michael, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. 12 at home in Santa Fe, N.M., succumbing three weeks shy of his 83rd birthday after a long and difficult struggle with heart disease. Lots of smart people write smart things about art but nobody was a better writer than Dave. And he wrote about art, which is how I got to know him in the 1980s.
Sometimes he wrote about music - country and rock ’n’ roll - and sometimes he wrote the songs themselves. He wrote short stories, fiction and journalism - essays about Liberace, the mechanics of zone defense on the playing field and what made loud, brash, vulgar Las Vegas America’s most American city.
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