Noticing xliv - David Hockney, artist

Jenny Odell, in chapter 4 ("Exercises in Attention") of How to Do Nothing (see my book report from yesterday), outlines David Hockney's (b. 1937) artistic trajectory in terms of "depict[ing] 'the experience of looking as it transpires across time.'" By way of illustration, she cites Gregory in the Pool (1982), one of his first experiments in assembling multiple Polaroid photographs taken in one place but over time.

She comments that in this early work he was "trying to use a camera to undo the very essence of how we traditionally understand photography, which is a static framing of certain elements in an instant of time. Hockney was after the phenomenology of seeing:

From that first day, [Hockney said,] I was exhilarated . . . I realized that this sort of picture came closer to how we actually see, which is to say, not all at once but rather in discrete, separate glimpses, which we then build up into our continuous experience of the world. . . . There are a hundred separate looks across time from which I synthesize my living impressions of you. And this is wonderful."

It's a sort of cubist approach, and an immediate one, exploring the relationship between representation and perception.

Soon he abandoned the grid, in works such as The Scrabble Game and the well-known Pearblossom Highway, 11th–18th April 1986, which he once called "a panoramic assault on Renaissance one-point perspective":

These works, as Odell puts it, "force us to notice our own 'construction' of every scene that we perceive as living beings in a living world. In other words, the piece is a collage not so much because Hockney had an aesthetic fondness for collage, but because something like collage is at the heart of the unstable and highly personal process of perception."

More recently—starting in 2012—Hockney experimented with moving pictures, mounting "twelve cameras to the side of a car and driving slowly down different country roads in Yorkshire near where he grew up. . . . Because the field of view and zoom level of each camera is intentionally misaligned, the effect is like that of a kaleidoscopic, almost hallucinatory Google Street View. . . . But in these video pieces, Hockney augments his usual disjointed technique with the video's ant-like pace—one more 'trick' to get you to look more closely." The resulting assemblage was Seven Yorkshire Landscape Videos, a few of which are available on YouTube—not the greatest quality, and certainly not at all like being able to view them in person, over time, but here's one that gives an idea of the work (filmed at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco in 2014—a show I wish I'd seen):

And this link (courtesy of the David Hockney Foundation) gives a longer view of just one of the videos. It's mesmerizing. Someday, somewhere, I'd love to see these works in person.

Recently, at our local art museum, we saw some of Hockney's iPad drawings of Yosemite. They were lovely in their own way, but compared to the work cited above, rather static. Still: it's always a pleasure to see some Hockney. Here are a few of those: