Say hello to Rodney

Peter Wollen

The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience by Celeste Olalquiaga
Bloomsbury, 321 pp, £20.00, November 1999, ISBN 0 7475 4535 9

The hero of Celeste Olalquiaga’s book is a hermit crab encased in a glass globe which she has chosen to christen ‘Rodney’. She first encountered Rodney, as she recounts, in a San Francisco bed and breakfast, a Victorian mansion in which every room had been named after a supposed turn-of-the-century guest – Isadora Duncan, Enrico Caruso, Luisa Tetrazzini – and decorated in an appropriate style. She climbed laboriously up to a small ‘chamber’ – it was the Jack London room – in one of the mansion’s towers where, among a plethora of nautical bric-à-brac, she found, on the bedside table, her crustacean muse. Rodney, of course, was long dead inside the mollusc shell that served as his hermitage, but encased in his glass sphere by the Iminac Company of Lake Jackson, Texas, he’d been preserved against decay. In effect, he had become – simultaneously – mummy, exhibit and bibelot, a quintessentially kitsch object which entranced its discoverer, fond admirer and future theorist. Rodney provoked in her reveries of an underwater world full of sunken treasure and forgotten shipwrecks. ‘Unwilling to let go of the reverie,’ she writes, ‘I press my face against the transparent bubble that holds him, hoping this gesture will bring him a little closer for a few more seconds. But I have returned from my musing and the spell is broken.’

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Vol. 22 No. 4 · 17 February 2000 » Peter Wollen » Say hello to Rodney (print version)
pages 3-7 | 5210 words

Letters

From Freeman B. Crouch III

Rodney, the hermit crab who illustrates Peter Wollen's piece on kitsch (LRB, 17 February), appears to be a fine specimen of a Nature Gem. I grew up in Lake Jackson, Texas, a 'science town' which houses companies such as Dow Chemical. One of these companies, now defunct, was Iminac – short for 'Imagination in Action' – which produced a series called Nature Gems in the early 1970s. They contained all sorts of flora and fauna, including orchids, sea critters, tarantulas, and the head of a rattlesnake poised to strike. They were, I recall, very expensive and made in rather small numbers. My father, a plant manager, had one on the credenza in his office. (I believe it was also a crab.) Its rather plain geometric appearance and lush hardwood base matched the office's carefully maintained tone of 1960s corporate Modernism. Indeed, this was the intended setting for Nature Gems. They all had the severe lines and plain, polished hardwood base that can be seen in the picture of Rodney. The technically interesting thing about them was the gel-like gunk inside which was chemically inert, transparent and had the same index of refraction as glass. If Celeste Olalquiaga had tapped Rodney's dome, she might have noticed him shiver. I do not contest her characterisation of Rodney as kitsch, but he might crab about this reduction in social class and claim that he should be counted among the élite objects of a cool, austere Modernism.

Freeman B. Crouch III
Marble Falls, Texas

From Dave Hickey

In the midst of his review of Celeste Olalquiaga's book The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of Kitsch Experience (LRB, 17 February), Peter Wollen takes a sneering detour through my life and work that is so wilfully misguided that I would like to call attention to its infelicity. Wollen is perfectly welcome to his opinion of what he thinks I said, of course, and my actual views are readily available in print, so I do not wish to labour this point. The ad hominem snottiness of his tone is troubling, however, since I neither know anyone named Wollen nor recognise the critic with my name whom he takes to task. Wollen's 'Dave Hickey', it would seem, is at once the putative inheritor of Clement Greenberg's mantle (huh!) and a capitalist kitschmeister guilty by association with such bad characters as Liberace, Norman Rockwell, Jeff Koons and somebody named Thomas Kinkade, a commercial artist whom Wollen proposes as one of my 'heroes'. He isn't.

As to my other colleagues in this kitsch conspiracy: yes, I have written about Liberace with affection and respect and speculated on the consequences of his endeavour. No, I have never proposed him to be anything other than the shrewd entertainer that he was. Yes, I have written about Norman Rockwell with affection and respect as a gifted and knowledgeable narrative picture-maker with an enormous and sustained public vogue. I have even gone so far as to suggest that hanging one of Rockwell's pictures in a museum gallery with the work of Edward Hopper, Thomas Hart Benton and other American artists of that period would pose no great threat to the Republic. As to Jeff Koons and Clement Greenberg, I have mentioned each of their names exactly once in thirty years of writing, on the same page of Air Guitar, citing them both as public figures whom we invest with imaginary power in order to make our attacking them seem more daring and courageous. In this tiny, limited sense, at least, I seem to have momentarily inherited Clem's mantle, if not the picture over it.

Dave Hickey
Las Vegas, Nevada

From Peter Wollen

I'm sorry – I didn't mean to imply, in my piece on kitsch, that Dave Hickey was Clement Greenberg's heir, as his letter presumes (30 March). In fact, it was Michael Fried whom I thought of as the heir and consequently I was struck by the paradox of Hickey subsequently making use of Fried's work to inflate the reputation of Greenberg's particular bête noire, Norman Rockwell. On further reflection, I am happy to agree that if Hickey feels that the Greenberg cap fits, he might as well wear it. After all, he is America's leading art critic today, deservedly so, even if we don't agree about Rockwell or the market. The point that I wanted to make about Koons and Kinkade was that Dave Hickey's faith in the market as regulator of value in the art world was flawed, even from his point of view, because it could just as well favour artists like Koons or Kinkade, whose work he doesn't praise, as it could a Norman Rockwell whose work he champions.

Peter Wollen
Los Angeles