Three years ago I went to the Royal Academy to see Anish Kapoor's gun firing brightly coloured red wax at the gallery wall. Last weekend I was back, with the whole family, for another contemporary art spectacle, David Hockney's A Bigger Picture. This new exhibition was inspired by the success of his Bigger Trees Near Warter (40ft by 15ft) at the 2007 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (see Richard Dorment's Telegraph review: 'Hockney shows that biggest is best.') My expectations were relatively low, based on what I had seen in 2007, when Tate Britain showed some of Hockney's East Yorkshire landscapes along with his selection of Turner paintings. But overall I enjoyed the exhibition, having stopped worrying about the quality of individual works and begun to view it more as a set of huge installations documenting a kind of postmodern performance of painting en plein air. For Hockney this now involves iPad sketches, blown up here to about sixty times their original size, and whilst it's true that as Laura Cumming says, they 'appear inert and dehumanised', perhaps that's partly the point. They depict The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven) and comprise a 52-part work, wallpapering the gallery in a bright computer-screen colours. According to the RA there is 'a deliberate sense of theatricality ... the viewer is placed centre-stage with the drama of the approaching spring played out on all sides.' It is the kind of theatricality that was criticised in the sixties by advocates of Modernism like Michael Fried, but, like John Opie a century and a half earlier, they were swimming against the tide.
Rosalind Krauss, in her essay 'Grids' (1979), argued that grids 'declare the modernity of modern art'; they are 'what art looks like when it turns its back on nature.' In the grids that make up Hockney's landscapes he reintroduces a stylised version of nature, patterns and bright colours that reference artists from the early days of Modernism (Van Gogh, Vuillard, Vlaminck). In her review, Laura Cumming complains of 'a neutralising tidiness. It isn't just those regular blocks into which the big works are split for ease of construction; it isn't even the superlatively concise draughtsmanship that underpins every image. It is a kind of graphic fastidiousness – nothing too out of place or too wild – bordering on neatness. Can Yorkshire be like that these days?' Not according to The Telegraph: 'there are calls for the area to be cleaned up before it becomes a major tourist trail.One visitor said: "A tourist trap was mentioned but hopefully not in its present state. We travelled the whole length of Woldgate recently and the whole route was an eyesore. "The woods and copses were more like tips – strewn with abandoned household items. The hedgerows were littered with plastic and paper. It's fly-tipping on an almost industrial scale."'
There has already been a huge amount written about the exhibition online, but I've noticed that some reviewers omit to mention the room devoted to Hockney's versions of a landscape by Claude, The Sermon on the Mount (c. 1656). These come as a bit of a surprise, hung between all those images of the arrival of spring in Woldgate and a darkened seating area where you can experience the Yorkshire Wolds through two grids of video screens, showing footage taken from the bonnet of Hockney's jeep. Charles Darwent in The Independent could 'see why Hockney would be fascinated by Claude Lorrain, who, like him, invented a light that was more real than real. But his computer-cleaned takes on Claude's Sermon on the Mount are just appalling: it is as well that the dead cannot sue.' Brian Sewell in The Evening Standard complained that 'Hockney is not another Turner expressing, in high seriousness, his debt to the old master' and described Hockney's engagement with The Sermon on the Mount as 'a sickening impertinence, contemptible.' I would agree that he doesn't seem very reverential: you can't help thinking that Hockney's figures (elongated like Claude's) are climbing the Mount in order to dive into the swimming pool coloured sea beyond. In an article for The Economist Karen Wright recounts her meetings with David Hockney over the last few years and recalls being shown his vast painting after Claude as a work-in-progress. 'It fills the entire wall, about 15ft high and 40ft wide, and the colours are eye-popping: there are fields of jacaranda purple in the background, and the sea has been lightened to a soft, milky, opalescent blue. ... As we leave the “Sermon” behind, he says, “I have named it ‘The Bigger Message’,” and he laughs uproariously.'
"having stopped worrying about the quality of individual works and begun to view it more as a set of huge installations documenting a kind of postmodern performance of painting en plein air"
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely spot on, Plinius.
We are being PR'd into submission by an overwhelming emphasis on process. There seem to be a dozen documentaries and interviews out there, all telling the same story. In the same words, too ("Eye, hand, and heart..." Yes, yes, thank you David, we've heard that one already).
I like his story though, and it seems well-illustrated.
Mike
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ReplyDeleteThanks. Only just realising you can't edit these comments after posting them - I was attempting to correct a spelling error. What I was trying to say was this:
ReplyDeleteIt's an exhibition full of interesting talking points. I didn't mention Hockney's hawthorn blossoms, for example, which some critics have found more interesting than his views of paths and roads through trees: surreal and slightly sinister in their outlandish scale (Ian Jack wrote a whole article about them on Friday). I make some observations in my post on the question of scale and it's obviously something Hockney is interested in. His iPad sketches were designed to be enlarged so he 'identified all the adjustments of colour and form - and most importantly, of mark - required to allow for the change of scale and medium'. I noted on my way out that The Royal Academy has also found it possible to reproduce his landscapes at different scales on a wide range of merchandise...
Going to exhibitions that show recent work by older artists, I'm often struck by how the scale of their work has increased and this doesn't always seem to be for the best - for me, Howard Hodgkin's abstract memories seem suited to a more intimate scale, for example. Sometimes the message has expanded along with the medium - Hamish Fulton's recent billboard scale has been used to signal more political points ('Chinese Economy / Tibetan Justice...'). But Fulton also makes large works on more modest subjects, like a six day walk in southern England (modest for Fulton - this would seem quite epic to some of us). In the case of Hockney too, you get to see the sublime and the intimate: the monumental valley of Yosemite and a Yorkshire hawthorn hedge painted on a grand scale. Are there artists of their generation that have reduced the scale of their work instead? I see that Michael Heizer is still "moving around huge chunks of California, but it would be a rather pleasant surprise to learn instead that he's been concentrating in recent years on some kind of intimate rockery.
OK, just to clarify, as I've now been asked whose comment I deleted. It was my own first attempt at the comment above. In trying to edit it I managed to delete it. I then put it in again but I can see that it's still not quite what I intended and has lost the link to the Ian Jack article, which you can read here. Anyway, the key thing I've learned is not to attempt to add a quick comment with external links to this blog whilst being distracted by an insistent five year old!
ReplyDelete"Are there artists of their generation that have reduced the scale of their work instead?"
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting question. I can't think of any,though I only really follow photographers. Thomas Joshua Cooper was once known as the "small and dark prints" photographer, but in recent years his work has got much larger. Ditto Jem Southam. The trend definitely seems towards gigantism.
It may be the galleries who demand this -- perhaps the thinking is that "size = serious". Or perhaps it's a case of "because we can", now that large-scale digital printers enable enormous enlargements from large-format negatives that would previously have been contact-printed.
I admire Hockney's productivity and commitment to the creative life. His urge to provoke and his desire never to stand still, whilst remaining recognisably the same artist (the Hockney "line" is inimitable) are deeply admirable, too.
Mike