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David Hockney |
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You Make the Picture |
David Hockney: You Make the Picture,
Paintings and Prints 1982-1995
is at Manchester City Art Galleries, Princess Street, Manchester to February 2nd 1997.
tel 0161 236 5244
fax 0161236 5244
Note! The gallery has played no role in the construction of these pages.
This exhibition contains 74 works by David Hockney: photo-collages, lithographs, oil
paintings, fax prints, drawings, xerographs (that is, prints made with an office
copying machine), gouaches and a print made with a digital inkjet printer connected
to a computer. They have been selected not to offer a retrospective view of the artist's
career, but to focus on key themes which have preoccupied Hockney since 1982. Here
are a few themes - not necessarily central to the exhibition - to think about.
Flatness
Sitting in the Zen Garden at the Ryoanji Temple Kyoto Feb. 19 1983
is a relatively conventional image despite its format. Hockney photographed the scene from a fixed position,
using the camera to record the vertical and horizontal motion of his head. The garden
branches out in a V shape from the corner where Hockney sat, the black tiles emphasising the way space recedes. It is clear that this work - like the majority of
images produced in the west since the Renaissance - has been conceptualised as the
projection of something which lies 'behind' or 'beyond' the surface. It posits an
imaginary space which the codes of perspective, as it were, catch hold of an pull into focus,
enabling a window to open on to an alternative world. The work suggests that we should
imaginatively 'leave', or ignore, the space we occupy in order to imaginatively explore, or 'enter', a pictorial space.
A decisive break with this mode of thinking is posited in Sitting in the Zen Garden at the Ryoanji Temple Kyoto Feb. 21st 1983
. To produce this collage, Hockney walked along the border of the garden. Every couple
of steps he would stop, face the garden and take a series of photographs extending
from the border in the foreground to the yellow wall in the distance. To underline
his movement, Hockney included a row of shots along the bottom that detail his feet advancing
forward, one step at a time. At the top of the picture, the plane of the garden lies
almost perpendicular to the surface of the collage. In the lower register, by contrast, the garden appears tipped up, lying parallel to the picture plane. The work
not only limits the illusion of depth but also articulates the surface of the work
as a substantial object in its own right.
Hockney limits the illusion of space in subsequent works and also intensifies our
awareness of the literal surface of the work. This is particularly marked in Pearblossom Hwy., 11-18th April 1986 no.2
. Although the space depicted is immense - compare it with figure 8 in the catalogue,
a conventional representation - little distance is shown to exist between the viewer
and the objects represented: he or she can even read the small print on the litter
and road signs! Hockney has commented, 'the results are quite powerful, I think, in
the sense that you're deeply aware of the flat surface but at the same time you start
making a space in your head. And yet the space is not the illusionistic kind where
you feel, "Oh, I could walk into that"... No, here you don't feel you need to walk into
it because you're already in it. I see it as a panoramic assault on Renaissance one-point
perspective'.
Many works of the mid- to late-eighties demonstrate Hockney's concern to see how his
emphasis upon flatness - that is, the literal surface of the work - would translate
into the media of printing and painting.
Philosophical issues
'I may seem to be passionately concerned with the "hows" of representation, how you
actually represent rather than "what" or "why'". But to me this is inevitable. The
"how" has a great effect on what we see. To say that "what we see" is more important
than "how we see it" is to think that "how" has been settled and fixed. When you realise
this is not the case, you realise that "how" often effects "what" we see.'
Hockney's rejection of illusionistic space, of Renaissance one-point perspective,
was part of a 'philosophical' investigation into the means, the 'hows', of representation.
One way of conceiving of naturalism (upon which the majority of images in the west
are dependent) is to see it as the bringing together of mimesis
- the desire to make visual images with a high degree of resemblance between the
visual sign and that which a given society agrees to call 'real' - with the conventions
of perspective
, in which the image as a whole is required to render objects and their spatial relations
in two dimensions. In the mimetic-perspectival tradition, representation is understood
as a process involving a perceptual
correspondence in which the image is presumed to match, with various degrees of success,
a 'raw' reality directly disclosed to the artist. The fallacy of this tradition -
and of Gombrich's Story of Art
- is that direct access to the real world outside systems of representation is not
possible. Representations do not reflect a reality 'out there'; rather, they make
reference to one that has already been interpreted and conceptualised. What the mimetic-perspectival tradition suppresses is the social
character of the image, its reality as sign
. Another way of putting this is to say that one cannot dissociate the meanings, the
reality, produced by a representational system from the 'language' of that system.
This is one of the primary lessons of semiotics - the science of signs. There are
an increasing number of books which purport to offer an introduction to the semiotics
of the visual image for teenagers: see, for example, Michael Carter's Framing Art
, Hale and Iremonger, 1990.
During the mid-eighties, the fallacies of the mimetic-perspectival tradition were
explored by Hockney in public lectures. See, for example, 'On Photography' and 'Wider
Perspectives Are Needed Now', both are available from the reading table in the gallery.
Emphasising the surface of the work is one way of emphasising the material reality
of the work, of the visual sign. One is required to 'read' Hockney's images rather
than loose one's sense with a conventional image as one enters, in imagination at
least, the illusionistic space of the picture.
Time and the physical self
Another characteristic of the mimetic-perspectival system of which Hockney was gradually
to become fully conscious is that the illusion of depth it creates requires a fixed
viewing position: the body of both artist and viewer is, ideally, reduced to a single point. The act of viewing involves the removal of the dimensions of time and space
- that is, the disappearance of the body. (Hockney investigated these issues in his
double portraits of the mid-sixties to early-seventies: for a detailed, but non-technical discussion see chapter four of David Hockney: Paintings
, Melia and Luckhardt, 1994, Prestel.)
One feature of the prints made with an office copying machine that fascinated Hockney
was their ability to depict the physical contact between his hand (with brush) and
the paper surface. As the artist commented, 'the photocopier prints from paper to
paper. For the artist there are great advantages here. First, printing from paper to paper
means that the original marks can be made on the same kind of paper one prints on.
This seemed to me to remove a layer. For instance a wash in a lithograph is made
by dipping a brush in touche and laying it on a zinc plate, a stone, or mylar. Now the way
a brush behaves on these surfaces is different from the soft absorbent surface of
paper, the way the wash dries is different - on paper its is through absorption and
evaporation, on the hard surfaces it is evaporation only, so the marks printed on paper
from paper seemed more direct... Then I got really interest. I thought, "This is
getting subtle." I realised it's more direct; the brush is felt more'.
This was of interest to him precisely because he had come to realise that the western
tradition of representation depends on disavowing not only temporality but also the
bodies of the artist and spectator as integral parts of the image. In subsequent
works - Montcalm Interior at Seven o'clock
and the 'Ocean Paintings', for example - Hockney tends not to layer the paint marks
so that the activity of painting is made visible. Such works enable the spectator
to tacitly recognise a natural affinity between the bodily actions implied by the
appearance of the work and actions our own bodies could perform. That is, the evidence of
Hockney's hand moving connects the work to our own body. Here, the spectator's eye
has become a bodily
- and not simply an optical - organ.
The corporeality of the human body is something which Hockney did not, or could not,
address in his work. It is this absence which, despite his devotion to the human
figure over the past forty years, has prevented him from incorporating into his own
depictions of the figure the enormous repertoire of actions and poses found in the work
of Picasso. Extending Path
suggests a way forward for, as the artist observed,'I chose the large scale because
I realised I wanted to draw with the whole body. What you are seeing there is a body
sweeping in space. If you think of the marks I am making, I am not drawing with the
wrists or elbow but the entire body'.
Expression
For much of the eighties and nineties Hockney was concerned to continue and extend
his interest in the decorative, that is, in the work of Henri Matisse. A kind of
psychological content is achieved in many works by means of strong colour, emphatic
rhythms and simplified forms. This is clearly evident in the 'Home Made Prints' (executed
on an office copying machine) and his paintings of the nineties - the 'V. N. Paintings',
for instance. Despite their relative 'abstractness', many 'V. N. Paintings' contain
references to landscape, particularly in the foreground. The 'rods', for example, can
be traced back to his 1978-80 depictions of the Hollywood Hills (see Nichols Canyon
, not in exhibition). However, it would not be sufficient merely to find half-hidden
landscapes (or seascapes). The spatial organisation in many paintings actually denies
the kind of simple figure-ground relationship which a straightforwardly figurative
reading supposes. (This is clearly the case if one looks at the actual paintings rather
than a reproduction.) One of the legacies of modern art is that to ask what a work
of art expresses is not simply to ask about what it depicts but also to talk about
its effect on the viewer - the position or identity that the painting constructs for the
imaginary spectator. The 'V. N. Paintings' contain enough sense of space and depth
to provoke in us the need to establish our bearings, and it is from this need, and
in the course of our attempts to satisfy it, that we can discover their expressive content.
Not all forms of content are, as Hockney himself has acknowledged, consciously introduced.
Arguably, the spectator is better employed in exploring what it is that these paintings make us feel, and in trying to see how it is that they make us feel it,
than in puzzling at what it is that they picture and at how it is that that picturing
is done. 'In these paintings I think the viewer is moving in them, so to put a figure
there did not seem right. In fact, depicted images or object-like things are included
only to give a sense of scale; without those, the pictures would be something different.
You may not be sure what those little things are, but they give an illusion and a
scale so that the eye roams about, roams and mentally makes a space.'