DAVID HOCKNEY, 1971
There is an intriguing denial in the autobiographical work "David Hockney by David Hockney: My Early Years": "The whole idea of conceptualism in art hasn't interested me much at all; there's been very little influence from it on my work."(1) Hockney then jumps straight into what one can read as an alternative to this - as if there were an alternative to history - in the very next line: "But for the kind of person I am, the influence of people around me is unavoidable. Painters often use their family as models, as a subject round them... Like when I met Peter Schlesinger and he became a subject in paintings almost straight away." He then goes on to describe a painting of Schlesinger made in 1967, "The Room, Tarzana", apparently the first in which Hockney tries to model the figure in three dimensions: "...this is the first time I'm taking any notice of shadows and light. After that it begins to get stronger in the pictures... And it all became a more and more traditional way of painting a picture. I think it was this, in a way, that led later on to almost excessive naturalism. And I found moving away from that harder than moving away from anything else."
"David Hockney by David Hockney" though written
in 1976 positions this clear dismissal of conceptual art at 1967,
the classic date of its inception, and this dismissal is bound,
in almost the same breath, notwithstanding a mention of his friends
as a bridge in-between, to a stepping-away from his previous
pop-like paintings towards more traditional representation. I'm
suggesting that his reaction to concept art is a retreat to the
archaic. David Hockney was already famous before "the whole
idea of conceptualism", and he perhaps was too established
to have been involved with the so-called dematerialisation of
the art object and related movements. So he missed the boat.
But it did effect his production: by the early 70s one can consider
his work to be a defensive reaction to all that. We also see
an immediate move to the portrait and personal subject matter
which may be seen as a parallel development.
The well-known style of "Photorealism," Richard Estes
for example, did of course emerge concurrently with conceptual
art and perform the role of a bizarre reactionary side effect.
Hockney's painting never became as photographic as this fairly
simple genre, being softer and more conflicted, yet he did get
seduced by something close to it, and this ended up coinciding
with an extreme personal crisis.(2) "The Room,
Tarzana" is not to be taken too seriously, it is first and
foremost a picture of a nice round bum. It is also a painting
about love, to commit, and to represent the intensity of a love
and put other things aside.
Before this point, his mid-60s work is pretty interesting. It
exhibits a lack of destination and a weightlessness. Specifically,
objects floating on white, flat geometric motifs, blank frames
around the image, some silly jokes about cubism and art history.
Figurative bits are there, but in a non-space, "Portrait
Surrounded by Artistic Devices", 1965. The more old-fashioned
Kitaj-like elements and other references are let off the hook
because there is no organising principle here, each element of
décor is overdetermining the whole. Ideas tumble around
and disrupt: "Different Kinds of Water Pouring Into a Swimming
Pool, Santa Monica 1965". And all is held in suspension
by the fantasy of an openly happily gay life in an imaginary
LA. But the work heads in a slightly more rigid direction toward
the end of the 60s. From 1965 to 1970 a tighter, photographic
style starts to emerge. At first, this just makes these hedonistic
poolscapes sparkle more brightly. Despite being representational,
1967 paintings such as "A Bigger Splash" and "The
Lawn Sprinkler" have white borders and/or coloured frames
and are rendered in flat design-like acrylic. Around this time
Hockney also got interested in the notion of the "Picture
within a Picture", derived from the theatrical conceit of
the "Play within a Play", hence one can see these works
as paintings of paintings with no moment of intention or even
genesis. Their lightness is serious and they do not immerse you
in the past, all is kept open through confidence, rivalry with
other artists, and most of all by very uncompromised sexual politics.
To clarify what was then happening, back to the laconic drone of "David Hockney by David Hockney: My Early Years": "I'd first visited Vichy in, I think, 1968 It's a very pretty town with a park in the middle, a kind of formal garden, and they use this false perspective of trees to make it look longer than it really is. And I thought, it's marvellous, the whole thing is like a sculpture. I could see it as a sculpture then. I'd come into contact with Gilbert and George before this. I was in one of their first sculptures, "The Meal", in a house in Bromley; they simply cooked a meal and the audience sat and watched us eat it... So in 1970 I could look at a group of trees and say, because they'd been planted and arranged in some way, it's like sculpture, because of what one or two other people had done in sculpture. Ten years before you wouldn't have thought like that." This painting, "Le parc des sources, Vichy", 1970 is painstakingly photographic. It is more traditional-looking than anything to date, yet it is the only work I am aware of which Hockney admits is derived from quasi-conceptual art. This admission does seem to contradict what he has just said about not being influenced by "conceptualism," which is significant here, if not bad in itself. If the trees are already a conceptual sculpture then why spend four months reproducing them - as reified version of the "Painting within a Painting," this being a possible title for the work - with a perfectly-rendered Peter Schlesinger and fashion designer Ossie Clark sitting in front? Like with the correctly-lit bum of "The Room, Tarzana", Hockney represents something and does not let the painting represent itself as a painting anymore. In the end also the subject matter gets too heavily flagged, as belaboured illustration.
"Mr. & Mrs. Clark and Percy", 1970/71 is Hockney's most famous work in the UK and permanently on view at Tate Britain. It is an icon of bourgeois recovery. He never recovered anyway. A catastrophic denial of all that was opening up in advanced art, an "X" between the State, the personal, the market, the bourgeois public, the photographic, fame, the selling of 60s counterculture, the biographical and old masterdom. An "X" which, once enacted, could not be struggled against. It literally represents a perfect marriage. Though with Ossie Clark's bisexuality such an active subtext, let's say it is a painting of a gay marriage translated for a heterosexual audience. For Hockney and Clark, an impossible home life was being manically defended (Hockney was living with Schlesinger), carved out of what was, previously, perhaps, a more optimistic gay collectivity. For this purpose a genre so user-, tradition- and media-friendly one could say that in terms of ideology it is here the speaking subject - namely photo(-)realism - becomes a barrier erected, by mistake, between him and his highest hopes, through a hubristic trust in the permanence of (personal and social) relations. This style put him in chains, in a contract between David Hockney and the UK Sunday Times Magazine-reading population. That's the risk of being the anti-elitist, anti-artworld working class hero. Your wish comes true and you turn from ever-popular to being a populist for life with all the attendant negative implications: the reduced ability to articulate critique and being on call to satiate regressive desires.
And as this painting was being made Hockney's relationship was
falling apart. Then Peter Schlesinger was off. A massive loss
of confidence. Trying to keep it going nevertheless. Not having
the blind spot that was getting you there. Now you see it. Left
by your boyfriend and art history simultaneously, just when the
world was opening up in front of you. The shift towards full
on photo-realism felt like an advance - freedom from what he
now perceived as the childishness of his own avant-gardism
- but in fact was a retreat for Hockney and an advance for Capital.
I do not want to make the story with Peter Schlesinger into a
primary one: there are at least two strands here, the private
and the sociological, and they circle round each other in a gladiatorial
embrace. There isn't one explanation for what happened at this
time, but how one deceives oneself about love is at least a powerfully
concentrated metaphor for how one misrepresents the social to
oneself. Representation for Hockney by then meant representing
people, but one person in particular. And once that person has
gone there is pure kitsch: disconcerting as with "Rubber
Ring", 1971, a flat zero, illusionless, out of scale and
time, or the sheer cliché of "Two Deckchairs, Calvi",
1972. Like cheery beach prints sold ready-framed, art sold on
the railings of Green Park on a Sunday; David Hockney, new king
of the amateurs, whose monomaniac obsession, so enthusiastically
entered into, now intolerably banal.
I remember looking at "Portrait of An Artist (Pool With Two Figures)" as a child and imagining I was that guy looking into the water, how cool. The level of distancing in this photo-realism produces instant transference beyond the reaches of the art industry, and at a cost. Painted twice over, finished in the next Spring of 1972, this picture was carefully planned with one figure distorted in an aspirational swimming pool set in a kind of Tuscan LA and despite everything still incorporating a nonchalant Schlesinger, better looking than ever, who was photographed in a London park at the eleventh hour. Those snapshots, loosely assembled together and sometimes now presented as a collage ("Peter Schlesinger, London 1972") prefigure Hockney's 80s photo collages in an odd time-slip: love as its own re-unrepresentability as future afterlife. Jack Hazan was allowed to film the second painting process in exchange for lending Hockney some daylight lamps to work at night. But when Hazan's film "A Bigger Splash" came out in 1974 Hockney was shattered. Of course the subject matter had become the split-up and not the art.
This painting codifies and kills everything that was lived. It
is Hollywood, ahistorical, not-art. In order to conquer nascent
institutional critique and the death of painting Hockney embraced
photo-realism, but this swiftly returned the work to an example
of poor quality poster art, or even a kind of conceptual art
by default.
"I came back to England only to find a heaviness so great I decided I wasn't going to stay." Hockney moved to Paris in 1973 just when the city has finally and definitively died as a centre of the avant-garde and was being reborn as a corporate fashion seedbed. One of the last realist paintings "Contre-jour in the French Style - Against the Day dans le style Français", 1974 is essentially "Mr. And Mrs. Clark", but now as formal exercise. Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell, divorced the same year, are gone. The one still playfully unrealistic element of the 1971 picture - its room would have to be much darker to correctly value the light streaming through the window, the "contre-jour" - is here pedantically, if elegantly, corrected, with a roller blind. We are in a pointillist Louvre, adrift on a sea of broken teleology. Hockney is alone, confused and a bit scared. Tradition seems to be the only place to turn, but it is visibly a dead end. A realistic pencil drawing of Andy Warhol (1974) only dramatises how much street cred has now been lost. Warhol is there because he is on tour, in Paris, nothing better to do. Hockney is now the local beret-wearing artist and it's best to humour him.
What maintains the secret bond between romantic love and (anti-)conceptualist
photo-realism? They are bound together by the heavy use of friends,
this being the other element along with the increased realism
mentioned in his memoir "The Early Years", just
after the disavowal of "conceptualism." And repeats
elsewhere: "I'll make some drawings of my friends; I'll
make them slowly, accurately, have them sit down and pose for
hours, and so on. I tend to do that at times when I feel a little
lost, searching around." Portraits are moments of rescue
and recovery. They cover up the void-like reality. Some friends,
initially Schlesinger stand-ins, come along, to reassure with
their characterful performance and anecdotal reality. They bring
some non-art with them. The highly-polished pencil drawings of
Celia Birtwell and others in the early/mid-70s speak a sexy humanist
language but they feel like a demonstration that the artist knows
how to draw properly, usually an indicator that something is
a bit wrong. And though the portraits got looser and wilder,
the idea of painting your friends becomes a permanent and mega-domesticising
constant for Hockney from then on. Unlike with photo-realism,
this continued; perhaps at first as habit or survival mechanism.
To depict particular subjectivities and faces conveyed by the
magic of the human hand is tantamount to crime. The contradictions
of the wider social antagonisms of those who are drawn (in) is
refracted, or stolen, through category error. It's as if they
were dressed up as Tudor kings. Not to say that drawing and painting
cannot communicate something or that humans don't have unique
characteristics. But this is all inflected in a loaded way, in
the context of a massively overdetermined cultural form based
around how to express the inner light of the soul, "to catch
a likeness" in that overused and grubbily English phrase.
"Hand, Eye, Heart" was the title of a recent show at
LA Louver Gallery. In Hockney's later portraits this unique touch
encapsulates the impersonal hidden agenda of dominant ideology.
He uses the incidental as grist for the mill of personal narrative,
like a novelist. Other people step in with a fullness we ourselves
seem to lack: "...it makes life easier for all of us to
conceptualize our friends and neighbors (and enemies) as intentional
systems."(3) The notion of a portrait of a subject
can be linked to the equally archaic notion of subjecthood in
relation to the State, and the hence to a National Portrait Gallery,
venue for Hockney's 2006 show "Portraits".
On his return from Paris in 1975 Hockney is done with what he
now calls "realism" and starts his investigations into
perspective, then opera sets and other more prosaic, though not
unappealing digressions, becoming a mad inventor, an autodidactic
Yorkshireman. From this moment on whatever he does it feels like
he is trying to tell you something. This new work, starting with
his deliberately incorrect perspective painting "Kerby (After
Hogarth). Useful Knowledge", 1975, is characterised by claims
to privileged knowledge which for an artist smack of desperation.
This "knowledge" is primarily focused on trying to
dismantle one-point perspective, through Picasso-like cubism,
jokes and games with space like seeing a journey through time
in pictorial terms, as well as art "theory": the second
autobiography "That's the Way I See It", 1999 and his
scientific work about optics "Secret Knowledge"
published in 2001. In this theory the form of his address
itself is outmoded; "ideas" are presented in an unreconstructed
way as if they had true substance, then hidden behind crazy colours.
Conveniently, it is also a plea for the ongoing use-value of
painting; it has not been replaced by photography. Hockney always
said that he went too far with realism, but he goes a lot further
wrong with his over-compensation in the other direction. This
involves much more than a misguided stylistic decision: from
the late 70s onwards the work can be seen to have a completely
bogus starting point: mere opinion.
We can see all this stubborn bluster as an unconscious eruption of conscience about his loss of nerve, inner collapse and exit from the avant-garde. Yet it is easy to spot because so prosaic: if something is wrong with the life it shows in the work, in the last instance. But some mid-70s pictures like "Model With Unfinished Self-Portrait", 1977, do linger over a mourning for the 60s, but also a mourning for political demands; here a realistic painting of lover Gregory Evans has Hockney himself portrayed not as person but as part of a decorative painting in the background. The past and current relationships are legible and the tone is not unthoughtful. Perhaps missing another person can split into mourning for the more radical thinking that was collectively produced, a more productive mourning, or bifurcation, and not just for the person that happened to be the default recipient of the projections thrown up from collective desire. The whole story about the split with Schlesinger has been repeatedly used by Hockney to develop an added mythos. It has become almost as well known as the paintings. The autobiographical narrative of friendship become a more far-reaching insurance policy and a smokescreen for the real break: from producing in an inherent tension with the culture industry, instead making "challenging" art whose "challenge" precisely overlays and conceals the fact that it functions only for the mainstream debate of national newspapers and emerging celebrity culture.
Despite the fact that it is fundamentally on the wrong track,
there are many things about the later work that do fascinate
me. There is also a freedom in the 80s and 90s, a mad, devil-may
care attitude: joke abstractionism for example the nearly good
"The Very New Paintings" from 1992. The early
80s work looks fashionable right now. Some of the paintings and
photos seem to define that era in terms of colour, artifice of
represented situations, exploded space, light. There is a link
to Memphis designs and postmodern architecture, kids in London
2007 with red plastic imitation Rayban type sun glasses and boat
shoes. "Self-Portrait", 1984-2005, a painting made
of separate canvases of little bits of Hockney's body... stripeyshirt
slacker electroclashcubism. The first paintings of Yorkshire
that Hockney made in the late 90s are mindbogglingly strange.
All the later works are anyhow interesting because as examples
of earnest kitsch they carry a mute indexical trace of what they
have abandoned, which could be called the continuation of conceptual
art by other means, without any agency.
What is just traditional or unwittingly cynical in all this later work, and what could be more interesting post-conceptual development? Is there a non-conceptual art practice in there which is potentially more politically correct than those of conceptual art's own grandchildren? To put it in a more abstract way, presuming there is no "Picture within a Picture" as historical levelling anymore, is there now a Picture hiding "behind" the Painting?(4) And if so, is this Picture of a residual or emergent character? Usually it is something scarily traditional, unfortunately. But in other cases, and in some of the most recent work, the old Hockney is trying to get out, waving, signalling madly...
I don't know, but perhaps the ridiculous-seeming early 80s experiments
with "cubist" photography could be peeled back to present
an emergent Picture. These works use many separate Polaroids
or snapshots collaged together to make one image, as in "The
Scrabble Game, New Year's Day 1983". Hockney's mother and
friends are playing Scrabble.(5) A family scene? Yet
something else comes through. Fragments of a family-like scene
which has not been assembled correctly: stuck in gristle, time
in a photo, layers in a photo, spare time, layers of years, unable
to get out of year layer prison, the board game as grid, Scrabble
as group therapy, scrabble, scramble cut up your past, embarrass
your mum, cut up your childhood, ignore perspective, see round
corners, enjoy pain, revel in distortion and artifice... a productive
misunderstanding of psychoanalysis? In the photo collage "Mother
I, Yorkshire Moors, August 1983" Hockney attempts to see
all angles of his mother's face at the same time, which performs
an obscene breakdown of portraiture and Oedipal norms. "The
Desk, July 1st, 1984", is a playful look at the space of
where a live/work environment meets. The insane project of trying
to derealise the central illusion of photography is, despite
the incredulity which at first greeted this work, perhaps to
be taken seriously. It could be way to start on a path towards
decapitalising photography. Photography without an image would
be the final result - a camera obscura - as a political project,
and not how Hockney later instrumentalised it. The photo collage
work acknowledges the historical impossibility of making a representation,
especially of a person, unlike all of Hockney's other
production since the 60s. The limitations of the photo are recognised,
taken on and fucked around with in a naïve yet still engaged
fashion. Photos of bits of groups of people, shattered, merging
into interiors and objects, reassembled at the collage stage,
which doesn't work. The result is ugly, and this is a truer statement
of the state of affairs than the nice story a portrait paints.
There is a breaking-toward what is aleatory and materialist in
the ideal photographic. The non-traditional emerges out of the
traditional, to produce something more modern than modern. A
persistent post-modern? A moment where Hockney gets justified
revenge on not just the style but on the content of conceptual
art's blind spot, Cartesian rationality.
Is there a link between Hockney's breakdown in 1971 and his deconstruction
of photography? Are the many attempts made to reject or conquer
photographic representation ultimately driven by the fact that
his decision to paint photo-realistically is associated with
significant personal pain? Is it simple-minded to regard this
as an attempt to repress the past by explaining it? The split
with Peter Schlesinger lead to a manic overkill of reactions,
even including insisting on thematising the trauma, but the fact
that a wider shift in art's function was interwoven with this
process at its inception, yet this undeniable shift was publicly
repudiated, made the insufficiency of such reaction inevitable.
As a kind of pop star Hockney did not have the humility to break
things down to experimental artist metalanguage level again,
yet he concealed that failure behind a huge mask of pseudo-experimentalism.
In any case, the politics of piecing back together a life or
working network following subjective disaster without the usual
retrenchment is surely a legitimate area of research. The process
of trying and failing to reassemble a broken life's work, using
broken pieces of representation, is successfully explored in
a meta-autobiographical way in the photo collages. Some paintings
try this but remain stilted; Hockney hardly painted anything
between 1980 and 1984, and the kind of communication inherent
to the photo works is better suited to the literalist tendency
of his work post-Paris. It starts to flow here, decoupled from
tradition and formally linked back to the fashion and media environments
outside the studio.
Merlin Carpenter
Notes
(1). All Hockney quotes apart from one are taken from
"David Hockney by David Hockney: My Early Years",
Thames & Hudson, London 1976. Pages 123, 124, 202, 250. "I'll
make some drawings of my friends..." is from "Hockney's
Pictures", Thames & Hudson, London 2004, page 218.
(2). I'm not quite sure what to call Hockney's softer
version of Photorealism so I have mostly settled for "photo-realism".
(3). The quote about friends as intentional systems
is from Joseph LeDoux, "Synaptic Self", London: Macmillan,
2002, p.230; as quoted by Slavoj Zizek in "The Parallax
View", MIT Press, 2006, p. 238.
(4). The idea of a "Painting behind the Painting"
could be compared to Carl Andre's bricks being derived via metaphor
from the Alfred Stieglitz "Equivalents" photo series
of clouds - i.e. there is something traditional lurking behind
many radical-seeming art works.
(5). Ann Upton and David Graves are the other Scrabble
players.