Thursday, June 13, 2024

'He Is the Andy Warhol of Art'

Guy Davenport was our Johnny Appleseed of culture. He was an academic who published in Harper’s and the Journal of the American Institute of Architects; Life magazine and Art News; National Review and Inquiry. He sowed allusions without regard for pretentious pieties. He loved P.G. Wodehouse, Kipling, O. Henry -- and Finnegans Wake -- and was neither a snob nor a virtue-signaling populist. Here’s an anecdote from Davenport’s “On Reading” (The Hunter Gracchus, 1997), set in a St. Louis restaurant: 

 “Over white beans with chopped onions, veal cutlet with a savory dressing, and eventually a fruit cobbler and coffee, I read [Spinoza’s] De Ethica in its Everyman edition, Draftech pen at the ready to underline passages I might want to refind easily later. Soul and mind were being fed together. I have not eaten alone in a restaurant in many years, but I see others doing it and envy them.”

 

For Davenport, books and the rest of life were un-self-consciously integrated. Reading him gave me permission to follow my own tastes, not to be cowed by fashion or critics, to trust my sensibilities. I first encountered his essays, reviews and stories in the mid- to late-seventies, in The Hudson Review, and I’ve found a review in that journal I hadn’t seen before: “ Post-Modern and After” in the Spring 1978 issue. Davenport looks at eleven works of academic criticism, all hovering around that still-fashionable label among the university set, post-modernism. I’ve always thought it was like Silly Putty: tasteless, malleable and, well, silly. Davenport opens by making fun of the fraudulent “minimalist artist” Carl Andre. It’s worth quoting at length:

 

“Just last week I learned from the Grapevine that we are soon to have a novel from Carl Andre, who gave up requiring an accent aigu for his surname years ago. Andre was most recently in the news for distributing boulders in a Hartford park and calling the arrangement sculpture, an event that pierced the triple tungsten of The New Yorker’s fastidious exclusiveness and the Connecticut treasury to the tune of eighty-seven thousand dollars. Before that, he shook up the British with a line of bricks along the floor of the Tate: another sculpture, unnervingly called Lever. He is a poet, a novelist, and, before his career in the fine arts, a line-brakeman on the Pennsylvania Railroad. He is the Andy Warhol of art.”

 

That last line is priceless. Andre gets no avant-garde nihil obstat from Davenport, who dismisses the idea of progress in the arts:

 

“[T]he arts themselves became problematical by sharing the idea of progress, or, more accurately, trying to share the idea of progress. It is purest illusion that the arts can participate in a technological evolution, or that their history moves from primitive to civilized, like the kettle growing up to be a steam locomotive. And yet we persist in criticizing, measuring, weighing works of art in terms of modernity, advancement, obsolescence.”

 

Three cheers for honest, enlightened philistinism.

1 comment:

  1. I wonder whether Davenport borrowed the "x of y" formula from Stravinksy, perhaps by way of Marvin Mudrick. Stravinsky said that Wagner was the Puccini of music, which Mudrick quoted and adapted to say that Hemingway was the Mailer of literature. I find that I read this in On Culture and Literatur, "Mailer and Styron: Postscript 1970".

    ReplyDelete