25 Women

Starred review from October 5, 2015
Throughout these trenchant essays on female artists, Hickey (Air Guitar) is characteristically incisive, challenging, and weird; he’s just as likely to cite a Rolling Stones concert or Lou Reed lyric as the theory of Gilles Deleuze or Jacques Derrida. Hickey turns his incisive lens to the careers of various female visual and performing artists in this bustling essay collection. The range of names represented here is considerable (including some the reader may never have heard of, such as painters Sharon Ellis and Michelle Fierro), and regardless of reputation, Hickey always deploys the same lively rigor. He describes the late Elizabeth Murray as “the absolute mistress of high physical comedy... like Keith Haring with a domestic life and a Ph.D.” On Bridget Riley, he explains how her “fatally misconstrued” works of op art (using optical illusions) “compromise our current penchant for reading art rather than experiencing it.” There are other taut, complex essays on Vija Celmins, Roni Horn, Anne Hamilton, and Joan Mitchell (“In the last ten years, nothing has gotten better but mobile phones and Joan Mitchell’s paintings”). The introduction, titled “A Ladies’ Man”, in which Hickey explains how ”most of my favorite people are women,” emerges as a surprisingly powerful piece of memoir.

December 1, 2015
Idiosyncratic assessments of contemporary women painters, sculptors, and installation and performance artists by an enfant terrible of art criticism. Hickey (Pirates and Farmers: Essays on Taste, 2013, etc.), now 74, has been a thorn in the side of art criticism for years. In "A Ladies' Man," the introduction to this admirable collection, he admits loving women, his most favorite people. The essays have no agenda or art politics and little feminism: "There is a lot of euphony, death, vogue, fanciful narrative, and fugitive nuance." The author often talks about the art by talking about something else, "lest writing shatter the art like a fragile leaf in clumsy hands." All of the artists are alive and working except Sarah Charlesworth and Joan Mitchell, one of Hickey's favorites. Her abstracts, like "classical epigrams...intertwine the light and dark, the petulance and grandeur." Rowdy and fearless, she "got into the same car everyone else did," but she "drove it in the opposite direction, back toward the hard, Godless specifics of living." Hickey's writing is clever, straightforward, and honest. Literary quotes abound. He draws on Gilles Deleuze's concept of "plasticity" to describe the "bounded experimentation" of Bridget Riley's paintings, which destabilize the "entire zone between the beholder and the work." Readers will no doubt discover artists they aren't familiar with, such as Fiona Banner and her 2010 installation piece Harrier, in which the British plane hangs from the ceiling like a captured bird. Lynda Benglis' vertical wax landscapes seemingly ooze out of a wall, and Michelle Fierro's set pieces, "mandarin grunge," create "Zen gardens out of painting's refuse." Vanessa Beecroft's performance pieces, like vb45, deploy the "rhetoric of painting in the space of sculpture," positioning women, often nude, in various poses for hours at a time. Hickey has piquant, insightful things to say about all of these artists. Some readers will find cause for disagreement, but these fun-to-read essays delight, intrigue, and, most of all, educate.

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November 1, 2015
Hickey has sizzle. A MacArthur fellow and a former executive editor of Art in America and academic, he rattles cages and yanks chains as an art writer of voracious attentiveness, free-spirited intelligence, invigorating wit, vinegary candor, and a gift for literary constructions of provoking finesse. He was inspired to revisit and revamp his essays about 25 women artists and their work as a tribute to his friend, the late curator and New Museum founder Marcia Tucker. Hickey balances incisive, funny, idiosyncratic biographical observations with all-senses-firing immersions in the art under discussion, racing off on tangents and nailing down arresting perceptions about what we expect from art and what we receive. He revels in the turbulent depths of painters as varied as Joan Mitchell, Vija Celmins, Bridget Riley, Elizabeth Murray, and Hung Liu. Hickey offers a rebel-cry appreciation for Lynda Benglis and an intricate response to Alexis Smith's collages and guides us through the intellectual puzzles posed by Sarah Charlesworth's photographs, Ann Williams' installations, and Teresita Fernandez's sculptures. The artists are significant and intriguing, Hickey's criticism exceptionally dynamic and enlightening.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)