Hockney drawing in Yorkshire
I was interested to see that
the Guardian review of the Hockney exhibition at the Tate gave him a 3 out of 5
score. Besides being annoyed by the crass stupidity of scoring art exhibitions
as if they were some sort of X Factor experience, I was surprised to see that
the reviewer didn’t spend more time unpicking what his legacy was. Art is a
long-lived phenomenon and artists on the whole are very aware of this. They
spend a lot of time looking at what was done in the past. I’m very aware that I
still spend more time looking at art made before I was born than art made since
that time. Not that I avoid contemporary art, I haven’t missed a Venice
Biennale for well over 10 years and continue to seek out new shows, but every
time I go to London I visit the National Gallery and the British Museum and
when visiting any European city I always make sure I go and see the work housed
in the local museum.
Technology changes but
people don’t. Some problems remain constant; but they can drop in and out of
fashion. Throughout Hockney’s career he has questioned the nature of picture
making. At times working in one style or another in order to assimilate or
simply get to grips with certain approaches to dealing with space or how the
surface of an image can be depicted. At others trying to set up experiments in
order to open out both the future possibilities of representation and to
further understand its historical foundations. His long interest in photography
and optical devices is an essential part of his work, not a sort of add on
hobby as some critics seem to feel it is.
However, one aspect of picture making continues to come back to haunt
him and that I believe is that ‘moment of Cubism’ as described by John Berger
is his essay of the same name. Berger
wrote his essay in 1967, Hockney was already established as an artist, and I
had already decided that I was going to be an artist. This was 50 years ago and
Berger’s essay was written just over 50 years after the high point of Cubism, a 100 years ago now. In 1967 I
already knew that Cezanne had opened out new territories of perceptual
experience to explore and I was both familiar with Hockney’s work and what seemed
at the time, the far more radical work of Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg. I was trying them all out, expressionism,
surrealism, abstract expressionism, abstraction, pop art, neo dada, etc. etc.;
often working from tiny black and white images found in battered art magazines
brought in by my very knowledgeable art teacher who had recently been a St
Martin’s graduate.
Berger wrote that cubism was
still the most significant art movement of the 20th century. He
implied that no one had really understood its implications, including its main
protagonists Picasso and Braque.
Five years on from 1967 and Hockney and I would be found inhabiting the same time and space,
Hockney delivering an artist’s talk and myself sat in the audience as a 22 year
old art student at Newport College of Art in South Wales. Hockney talked about
his drawings and at one point joked that he had put a plant pot into the bottom
of a figure drawing simply to hide the fact that he couldn’t draw feet. At the
time his laconic delivery didn’t impress me, I think he was still finding
his ‘voice’ in terms of how to speak about his work. I was also by then heavily
into conceptualism and so viewed his work with a certain diffidence if not
distain. Even so, I was interested in what he had to say about constructing
images and in particular his awareness of pictorial space as a cultural issue.
From his ‘Boys together clinging’, whereby he manages to people the gestural
space of abstract expressionism, via the oblique perspective/Egyptian space of
‘The second marriage’ to his games with the picture plane in ‘Play within a
play’; he had set out quite early on in his career to ask questions as to how
we both construct space on a two dimensional surface and experience it.
For long time periods I
wouldn’t think about him, but every now and again he would pop up in the media and
I could see that he had this long standing issue with perception and how to
recreate it. As I got older and less and less worried about what should be done
as art, I began to find his questions more interesting than his answers.
However I also think that by carrying on questioning what painting can achieve
in relation to the recreation of an experience, he has kept the issue alive,
and this is what I think his great legacy is.
He has kept Berger’s assertion
that the ‘moment of cubism’ is yet to be fully realised alive. In particular as
new technologies advance, and virtual reality becomes more and more
commonplace, the problem of simply recreating experience seems to be a more and
more difficult and perhaps ‘revolutionary’ question. As screen technologies
come to dominate visual communication, they become seen as a ‘reality’ in
themselves, several contemporary philosophers questioning whether or not there
is any reality outside of our mediated experiences. Therefore the simple act of
using drawing to question how we see appears on the one hand almost childish
and yet on the other hand it suggests that because of its straightforward
simplicity and directness, drawing can work like a mathematical
equation. If you get it right you can solve one of the
mysteries of the universe.
The way that a drawing can
collect all its marks into what could be seen as a simultaneity and present a
time based experience to the viewer in that moment of simultaneity, is
suggestive of an experience that reflects on and can recreate how experience is
experienced. This conundrum is one I believe helps us to continue to see
drawing as a fundamental tool in the questioning of our existence and which I
believe continues to make it worthwhile putting pen and pencil to paper. Hockney,
should be celebrated as someone who has kept these questions alive and I shall try to open out the tricky question about time and image making in the next post.
Hockney: Ken the Printer
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