1. For a sly parodic counterargument to Hockney’s contention that an ordinary photograph can’t be viewed for more than thirty seconds, see Veronica Geng’s Annotations piece in the November 1984 Harper’s, “How Long Before You Black Out? Staring Down Photography Theory,” in which Ms. Geng stares down an initially quite ordinary-looking snapshot, finding deeper and deeper layers of oddness and peculiarity during a long and increasingly bemused (albeit odd) absorption.
As for Hockney’s specific observation about the inability to look at even erotic photography for longer than thirty seconds—how even those images quickly lose their sense of liveliness and lived reality (the observation that he suggests launched him out into this whole field of inquiry in the first place)—I find myself wondering about the counterexample of bondage photography. Bear with me here. For isn’t it precisely the model’s being forced to stand still (immobile, bridling against the restraints) that gives such images a sense of duration, of passing time, of lived reality, greater than that of other erotic imagery—the constrained subject’s rhyming, as it were, with the constraints imposed on the viewer’s gaze by the limitations of the photographic medium. We and she (he?) are yoked in an analogically parallel straitjacket.
Something similar might be said, if you will allow me one further vaulting association, about the wondrous effect of Vermeer’s paintings. People often comment on how uncannily still Vermeer’s paintings seem, which at one level, of course, is ridiculous: of course they are still; they are paintings! But there’s something to the observation, for time and again Vermeer chooses to portray his women at moments when they themselves are forced momentarily to stand still (as they test the balance of these scales, or pour from that jug of milk, or assess this strand of pearls held against the neck, or pause, drop-jawed, to read that letter). We, coming upon them, are stopped in our tracks by their stoppage; we become hushed voyeurs, and time passes: life transpires. Duration unfurls. Oddly enough, it is precisely because we sense time passing that we think of the women as still (consider, by contrast, Napoleon astride a rearing horse in one of David’s portraits, which we would never think of as still in this way). If anything, Vermeer is anticipating the movies. Look again at the milkmaid in the painting where nothing is moving except the milk, which you could swear is actually flowing. One has to experience the passage of time to experience the sensation of stillness. And Vermeer allows that.
Returning, finally, to Hockney’s initial insight, about the inability to look on conventional erotic photographs for more than thirty seconds. Again, consider by contrast (which is to say in support of his theory) the conventional raincoat exhibitionist. The whole point of his activity is that he a›icts his victim with a quick peek and then covers himself up again—the sudden inappropriate revelation shocks us, whereas a longer exposure would simply devolve into ridiculousness. But note the language here: what is he doing? In keeping with the photographic roots of his vocation, we say he is exposing himself; we say he is flashing.
2. John Berger has written with exceptional clarity and insight about many of these same issues, notably in a 1981 essay entitled “Drawn to the Moment,” in which he starts out by describing some drawings he’d recently made of his dead father and then goes on to consider some of the differences between drawing and photography. “In the nineteenth century,” he writes, “when social time became unilinear, vectorial, and regularly exchangeable, the instant became the maximum which could be grasped or preserved. The plate camera and the pocket watch, the reflex camera and the wristwatch are twin inventions. A drawing or a painting presupposes another view of time. . . .
“A photograph is evidence of an encounter between event and photographer. A drawing slowly questions an event’s appearance and in doing so reminds us that appearances are always a construction with a history. We use photographs by taking them with us in our lives, our arguments, our memories: it is we who move them. Whereas a drawing or a painting forces us to stop and enter its time. A photograph is static because it has stopped time. A drawing or painting is static because it encompasses time. . . .
“To draw is to look, examining the structure of appearances. A drawing of a tree shows not a tree but a tree being looked at. Whereas the sight of a tree is registered almost instantaneously, the examination of the sight of a tree (a tree being looked at) not only takes minutes or hours instead of a fraction of a second; it also involves, derives from, and refers back to much previous experience of looking. Within the instant of the sight of the tree is established a life experience. This is how the act of drawing refuses the process of disappearances and proposes the simultaneity of a multitude of moments” (Berger, Selected Essays, ed. Geoff Dyer [New York: Pantheon, 2001], pp. 419–24).
3. The English-language catalogue to the show is David Hockney: Photographs (London: Petersburg Press, 1982).
4. The choice of imagery for this first Polaroid collage was by no means random. Hockney was effecting a photographic replication of his then-most-recent oil painting, a triptych conceived in London well over a year earlier. At that time, Hockney, a bit depressed by the grim, gray London winter, decided to contrive a free-form remembrance of his California home—free-form in that he was working from memory (no photographs) and ostentatiously playing with color (transposing the bright, cheerful hues from his most recent work in stage designs). After he returned to California, he decided to recast the plain white walls of the house in the playful colors he’d invented for his London triptych. He even had the red brick windwall around the pool painted a brighter red! So that now, as he was snapping his Polaroids, he was contriving a photographic remembrance of a painting he’d made a year earlier that had helped to transform the house it was recalling into the house Hockney was now photographing.
5. David Hockney that morning was not the first person to take the artistic possibilities of the Polaroid camera seriously. His most famous precursor, perhaps, was Lucas Samaras, who confined himself, however, to working within individual Polaroid tiles, experimenting with the magical transformative capacities of the chemical pigments as they developed. At any rate, the Polaroid Corporation was for many years able to sustain an entire magazine devoted to the exposition and dissemination of new artistic work in the medium.
As it happened, a few photographers working at roughly the same time as Hockney were also experimenting with collagist deployments of Polaroid squares. (Hockney, who as a painter is not particularly current with contemporary photographic practice, became aware of these particular parallel projects only after his own Polaroids began being exhibited, in the summer of 1982.) In Belgium, for instance, a young artist named Stefan de Jaéger was fashioning figure studies in rectangular Polaroid grids, although in his versions the elongated figures seemed to float in empty space. (A plurality of the squares in his grids were made up of purplish white blank wall, a backdrop without incident.) The American Joyce Niemanas, meanwhile, was making lushly detailed studies, only she wasn’t using a grid format. In her collages, the squares overlap one another at vertiginous angles, and a large part of the compositional delight comes from the jutting and jagging of white borderlines across the image, which in turn get integrated by the matching of lines and contours fairly exactly from frame to frame (as in the Hockney “joiners”). There was even an album jacket for a recording by the Talking Heads, produced in 1978 and conceived by David Byrne, which featured a grid of over five hundred Polaroids, but here again the image beyond the grid, if somewhat attenuated, was largely integrated.
Around the time of the first exhibition of the Hockney Polaroids, Henry Geldzahler com- mented, “Other artists have used Polaroid in a similar way, but other artists used the pencil before Ingres, and only Ingres found out how to make a certain kind of line” (as it happens, a particularly prescient example, as we shall see in the “Looking Glass” chapter of this book). It wasn’t, however, just the highly personal line that distinguished Hockney’s Polaroid collages from those of his colleagues; it was also the ambition—which, as we shall presently see, had to do with the exploration of cubist perception—that was distinctive to Hockney’s efforts.
(Incidentally, none of these Polaroid collagists was the first to experiment with extended photographic composites. For a detailed survey of the history of prior efforts, see the exhibition catalogue Target III: In Sequence: Photo Sequences from the Target Collection of American Photography, ed. Ann Wilkes Tucker [Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982].)
6. As with all the collages in his series, Hockney shot that interior without a flash. Indeed, he feels that the frequent resort to flash devices is yet another way in which conventional photography falsifies reality, providing viewers with scenes they would never glimpse in their ordinary experience (e.g., the uniformly bleached contrasts, the stark projected shadows). Hockney prides himself on his ability to keep his camera steady no matter how long the exposure, and he insists that “if it’s bright enough to see it, it’s bright enough to photograph it.”
7. Memory and vision. Hockney has often noted in interviews the importance to his work of his frequent reading of Marcel Proust. Indeed, volumes from The Remembrance of Things Past often show up in his paintings, lying on laps or tables. While he was working on these photo collages Hockney was also reading the philosopher Henri Bergson (an important source author for Proust), as well as Proust’s Binoculars, Roger Shattuck’s study of memory, time, and recognition in The Remembrance of Things Past. Several passages from that book seem particularly resonant in a consideration of Hockney’s photocollage work. For example, at one point Shattuck delineates “three basic ways of seeing the world—or of recreating it.” The first is the cinematographic principle, which “employs a sequence of separately insignificant differences to produce the effect of motion or animation in objects seen” (Muybridge). The second is the montage principle, which “employs a succession of large contrasts to reproduce the disparity and contradiction that interrupt the continuity of experience” (Sergey Eisenstein). The third is in some ways the richest, and its development is one of Proust’s greatest achievements: “The stereoscopic principle abandons the portrayal of motion in order to establish a form of arrest which resists time. It selects a few images or impressions su‹ciently different from one another not to give the effect of continuous motion, and su‹ciently related to be linked in a discernible pattern. This stereoscopic principle allows our binocular (or multiocular) vision of mind to hold contradictory aspects of things in the steady perspective of recognition, of belief in time.” These comments, which refer to Proust’s narrative technique, also suggest certain aspects of Hockney’s drawing style, both in the Polaroid collages and, even more, in his later photocollage work (Shattuck, Proust’s Binoculars [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983], pp. 50–51).
8. See Christopher Knight’s lovely exposition of this theme in his article in Aperture, no. 89 (1982), 34: “The charms of these spectacular ‘drawings’ is precisely their expansiveness, their nonexclusionary quality. The isolating eye of the camera segments the views, but the reassembled grid juxtaposes things of starkly different natures: the hard geometry of shelves abuts the softness of narrow chin and full lips. The grid is a rational structure for an exercise in intoxicating sensuality. The drab and insignificant become the singular and radiant.”
9. Viewing cubist pictures, Hockney recently told me, is “very di‹cult, but tremendously rewarding. I mean, no cubist painting jumps off the wall at you—you have to go to it. There was recently a remarkable Essential Cubism retrospective at the Tate, curated by Douglas Cooper, and I spent hours and hours there during my last trip to London. That show forced you to slow down. If you just glanced quickly, you didn’t see anything. But when you did slow down, the paintings just grew and grew: your eyes darted in and out, forward and back, just like in the real world. At times you almost forgot you were looking at pictures on a wall! Coming out of those galleries, it just happened that I was confronted with my own painting of Ossie and Celia and, next to it, a Francis Bacon triptych. The cubist paintings had been mainly still lifes, and here these ones of Bacon’s and mine were fairly dramatic paintings of people. You’d have thought they would have stood up. But on the contrary, following the intensity of the experience of the cubist studies, these two paintings, based as they were on a pretty standard one-point perspective, seemed strangely distant, flat, and one-dimensional.”
10. Excerpts from Hockney’s lecture, “Major Paintings of the Sixties,” are quoted from the tape transcript, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (January 1983).
11. “Poetic history,” the literary critic Harold Bloom has written, “is . . . indistinguishable from poetic influence, since strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves.” Many of the insights in Harold Bloom’s books on poetics, especially his Map of Misreading and The Anxiety of Influence, might well be brought to bear in considering Hockney’s relationship to Picasso. Clearly theirs is no simple father-son relationship: of course, no father-son relationship is ever simple, but theirs is even more complex than usual. Here we have a son who has chosen his father, who has claimed his father. He has declared Picasso the father of his inspiration, but at the same time he has to a certain extent distorted Picasso’s meaning—or, at any rate, emphasized particular aspects of the master’s legacy while ignoring others—precisely so as “to clear an imaginative space” for himself. This is not the place to analyze those distortions in detail. I would suggest that it is pointless to quibble that Hockney is misinterpreting Picasso, however, since in this passion “misinterpretation” and creation are simultaneous surges. For an important study of the Picasso-Hockney relationship, see the catalogue by Esther de Vécsey, David Hockney: Sources and Experiments (Houston: Sewall Art Gallery, Rice University, 1982).
One might also note, incidentally, how, if anyone is the true father of Hockney’s vocation, it is not Picasso but Matisse (who has the same love of color and, like Hockney, consecrates lounging bourgeois pleasure), but Hockney hardly ever talks about him.
12. Dr. Oliver Sacks, the British neurologist working in New York, once published a remarkable book entitled Awakenings, in which he presents the case histories of several patients suffering from a post-encephalytic Parkinsonian condition so extreme that at one point he describes their situation as “an ontological emergency.” One of the myriad symptoms with which these patients must occasionally contend is what Sacks calls “kinematic vision,” the tendency to experience the ordinary world as if in a series of stills. “Sometimes,” Sacks explains in describing the case of Hester Y., “these stills form a flickering vision, like a movie which is running too slow. Mrs. Y. and other patients who have experienced kinematic vision have occasionally told me of an extraordinary (and seemingly impossible) phenomenon which may occur during such periods, viz., the displacement of a still either backwards or forwards, so that a given ‘moment’ may occur too soon or too late. Thus, on one occasion when Hester was being visited by her brother, she happened to be having kinematic vision at about three or four frames per second, i.e., a rate so slow that there was a clearly perceptible difference between each frame. While watching her brother lighting his pipe, she was greatly startled by witnessing the following sequence: first, the striking of the match; second, her brother’s hand holding the lighted match, having ‘jumped’ a few inches from the matchbox; third, the match flaring up in the bowl of the pipe; and fourth, fifth, and sixth, etc., the ‘intermediate’ stages by which her brother’s hand, holding the match, jerkily approached the pipe to be lit. Thus—incredibly—Hester saw the pipe actually being lit several frames too soon; she saw ‘the future’ so to speak, somewhat before she was due to see it. . . . If we accept Hester’s word in the matter (and if we do not listen to our patients we will never learn anything), we are compelled to make a novel hypothesis (or several such) about the perception of time and the nature of ‘moments.’ The simplest of these, I think, is to take ‘moments’ as ontological events (i.e., as our world-moments’) and to assume that we ‘take in’ several at a time (as a moving whale continually swallows a swarm of shrimps), or that we keep a small hoard of them ‘in stock’ at any given time, and in either case feed them into some internal projector, where they become activated or ‘real’ one at a time in their proper sequence. Normally, this proceeds correctly and easily; but in certain conditions, it would seem, our ontological moments may be fed to us in the wrong order, so that moments which are chronologically ‘past’ or ‘future’ get ectopically displaced and presented to us as utterly convincing (but inappropriate) ‘nows’” (New York: Vintage Press, 2nd ed., 1976), pp. 142–43; (New York: Dutton Obelisk, 3rd ed., 1993), pp. 102–3.
13. Aperture, no. 89 (1982), 34. Interestingly, while I see these words of his as applying equally well to the new photocollages, Christopher Knight himself faults the newer pieces for not being more like the Polaroids. In a review in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner (July 13, 1983), Knight argued that “what’s missing from the new pictorial representations is the wholly abstract structure that made the Polaroids so potent. In the place of the grid, the artist seems to have opted for a random visual scan of the scene: It is intensely focused in certain areas, abruptly halted in others, or it arbitrarily trails off in still others. Random scanning is indeed the way we see the world. One doesn’t see in sequential and orderly units, but the grid format of the Polaroids provided the essential counterweight: It served to abolish any sense of hierarchy within the pictorial representations.” Ironically it is precisely Hockney’s success at rendering his newest studies in perception more lifelike that in Knight’s view has begun to mitigate their impact as art.
14. William Carlos Williams, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (New York: New Directions, 1962), p. 7.
15. In such comments as these Hockney appears either ignorant of or momentarily oblivious to the rich tradition of cubist-inspired avant-garde cinema—works by such artists as Man Ray, Fernand Léger, the early Luis Buñuel, René Clair, and more recently Stan Brakhage and Michael Snow—artists obsessed with many of the same issues as Hockney. In earlier comments in this text, Hockney seemed likewise to downplay the achievement of such cubist-inspired photographers as Stieglitz, Paul Outerbridge, or Harry Callahan. But here again we see how Hockney, like most artists, clears an open space for his own creative work by momentarily occluding prior tradition. Critics and academic historians can rush in to cite influences and antecedents—but such people are usually incapable of creating art themselves. (Too much knowledge of a certain kind can crowd out the possibility of independent creation—or at any rate, that knowledge must be suspended as creativity begins.) Hockney’s account of the history of cubism is interesting not so much because of its technical accuracy in every detail as because it affords a vantage on his own creative process (how cubism- for-Hockney made Hockney’s photocollages possible); and even when Hockney’s account fails to be 100 percent accurate vis-à-vis the history of prior achievements, his insights into the stakes involved in cubism and the drama of everyday human perception are remarkably suggestive.
1. Hockney read the following passages from Pierre Daix, Le Cubismo de Picasso (Neuchâtel, Switzerland: Ides et Calendes, 1979), p. 184. The translation is from “Vogue par David Hockney,” Vogue (Paris), December 1985–January 1986, 256:
This transformation in painting should be related not to ephemeral fashions and short-lived schools, but to the long duration of changes in cognitive methods and mental attitudes. Perspective has lasted for some five hundred years. Cubism is the chance name given to the first emergence of a different art, or rather to the concretization of difference which suddenly became perceptible. . . .
It is only now, in the last quarter of the twentieth century that we discover that Cubism was not only a revolution in pictorial space, but a revolution in our understanding of pictorial space. This was in all probability linked to the fact that physics was simultaneously destroying our three-dimensional space-time perception. Our discoveries in this field are only just beginning.
2. Here is the passage from which Hockney quotes (David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980], pp. x–xi):
It is clear that in reflecting on and pondering the nature of the movement, both in thought and in the object of thought, one comes inevitably to the question of wholeness and totality. The notion that the one who thinks (the Ego) is at least in principle completely separate from and independent of the reality that he thinks about is, of course, firmly embedded in our entire tradition. (This notion is clearly almost universally accepted in the West, but in the East there is a general tendency to deny it verbally and philosophically while at the same time such an approach pervades most of life and daily practice as much as it does in the West.) General experience . . . along with a great deal of modern scientific knowledge . . . suggests] very strongly that such a division cannot be maintained consistently. . . .
Clearly, this brings us to consider our overall worldview, which includes our general notions concerning the nature of reality, along with those concerning the total order of the universe, i.e., cosmology. To meet the challenge before us, our notions of cosmology and of the general nature of reality must have room in them to permit a consistent account of consciousness. Vice versa, our notions of consciousness must have room in them to understand what it means for its content to be “reality as a whole.”
The widespread and pervasive distinctions between people (race, nation, family, profession, etc.) which are now preventing mankind from working together for the common good, and indeed, even for survival, have one of the key factors of their origin in a kind of thought that treats things as inherently divided, disconnected, and “broken up” into yet smaller constituent parts. Each part is considered to be essentially independent and self-existent.
When man thinks of himself in this way, he will inevitably tend to defend the needs of his own “Ego” against those of others; or, if he identifies with a group of people of the same kind, he will defend this group in a similar way. He cannot seriously think of mankind as the basic reality, whose claims come first. Even if he does try to consider the needs of mankind he tends to regard humanity as separate from nature, and so on. What I am proposing here is that man’s general way of thinking of the totality, i.e., his general worldview, is crucial for the overall order of the human mind itself. If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.
3. The text of Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr.’s book The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1975), pp. 164–65, from which Hockney read, went as follows:
It should not be overlooked that almost coincidental with the appearance and acceptance of linear perspective came Gutenberg’s invention of movable type. Together these two ideas, the one visual, the other literary, provided perhaps the most outstanding scientific achievement of the fifteenth century: the revolution in mass communication. Linear perspective pictures, by virtue of the power of the printing press, came to cover a wider range of subjects and to reach a larger audience than any other representational medium or convention in the entire history of art. It is fair to say that without this conjunction of perspective and printing in the Renaissance, the whole subsequent development of modern science and technology would have been unthinkable. . . .
So far as science is concerned can there be any question that the special geniuses of Leonardo da Vinci, Columbus, and Copernicus were given a very special catalysis at this time by the new communications revolution of linear perspective? Indeed, without linear perspective, would Western man have been able to visualize and then construct the complex machinery which has so effectively moved him out of the Newtonian paradigm into the new era of Einsteinian outer space—and outer time? Space capsules built for zero gravity, astronomical equipment for demarcating so-called black holes, atom smashers which prove the existence of anti-matter—these are the end products of the discovered vanishing point.
Or are they? Surely in some future century, when artists are among those journeying throughout the universe, they will be encountering and endeavoring to depict experiences impossible to understand, let alone render, by the application of a suddenly obsolete linear perspective. It, too, will become “naive,” as they discover new dimensions of visual perception in the eternal, never ultimate, quest to show truth through the art of making pictures.
4. From George Rowley, The Principles of Chinese Painting (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947), p. 61:
Chinese painting is an art of time as well as space. This was implied in the arrangement of the group by movement motif through intervals; in the extended relationship of groups, movement in time became the most memorable characteristic of Chinese design. . . . These early principles were later transformed and enriched until they reached their fulfillment in the supreme creation of Chinese genius—the landscape scroll. A scroll painting must be experienced in time like music or literature. Our attention is carried along laterally from right to left, being restricted at any one moment to a short passage which can be conveniently perused. This situation entirely alters the choice of design principles.... In the European tradition, the interest in measurable space destroyed the “continuous method” of temporal sequence used in the Middle Ages and led to the fifteenth century invention of the fixed space of scientific perspective. When the Chinese were faced with the same problem of spatial depth in the T’ang period, they reworked the early principles of time and suggested a space through which one might wander and a space which implied more space beyond the picture frame. We restricted space to a single vista as though seen through an open door; they suggested unlimited space of nature as though they had stepped through that open door and had known the sudden breathtaking experience of space extending in every direction and infinitely into the sky. Again, east and west look at nature through different glasses; one tries to explain and conquer nature through science, and the other wants to keep alive the eternal mystery which can only be suggested. Each seeks truth in its own way, and each has its strengths and weaknesses. The science of perspective achieved the illusion of depth and gave continuity and measurability to the spatial unit; however, perspective put the experience of space into a strait jacket in which it was seen from a single fixed point of view and was limited to a bounded quantity of space. The control of space might give measure to an interior figure scene but it was certainly harmful to landscape painting.
5. Hockney presently made a film of his Chinese scroll discoveries, with the director Philip Haas, entitled A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China, or Surface Is Illusion but So Is Depth, which remains available on DVD from Milestone Films.
1. Notwithstanding Hockney’s protestations (and my great-grandmother’s spectacularly vivid response), Tristan is a silly story, or anyway a peculiarly charged one—“Peculiar piece” being one of the first things Jonathan Miller said to me when I called to chat with him about his Tristan experience. Florid, fraught, wildly overwrought: susceptible to all manner of feverish associations across its capacious, deceptively static three and a half hours—for starters, to the highly peculiar particulars of its own psycho-biographical origins, which in turn wend directly back to the composer’s edgy anxieties about his own ambiguous origins.
Richard Wagner’s father, Friederich, died a bare half year after the boy’s birth, a victim of the typhus epidemic that engulfed their native Leipzig in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Battle of Nations in 1813. The thing is, within only nine months of that, Richard’s widowed mother married the dead father’s closest friend and protégé, a young actor named Ludwig Geyer (for the first fifteen years of his life, Richard even went by the last name Geyer), under circumstances suspicious enough to eventually give young Richard cause to wonder whether the actor hadn’t in fact been his own actual father all along. (This last surmise in turn was to become highly fraught, both for Wagner and for his subsequent Nazi enthusiasts, because Geyer may or may not have been part-Jewish.)
At any rate, throughout the rest of his turbulent life, Wagner seemed drawn into repeated reenactments of that inappropriate primal configuration, endlessly falling himself for the wives of his most steadfast patrons and ensnaring them in the most fetid, steamy, and overblown relations. Which, in turn, of course, stripped to its barest essentials, is what Tristan itself is all about: the inappropriate passion that flares up between a king’s betrothed and his most loyal duty-bound knight. Wagner, incidentally, began writing the libretto while he and his own wife were the houseguests of a passionately devoted patron, a Zurich silk merchant with whose twenty-eight-year-old bride he presently struck up a feverish (though perhaps never quite consummated) affair.
Soon after completing the libretto, Wagner gave an intimate reading in the presence of only five listeners: his own wife, Minna; the silk merchant and his young wife; and his single most fervently supportive musical champion, the great conductor Hans van Bülow and his new bride, Cosima (the illegitimate daughter, as it happened, of the composer Franz Liszt). The occasion was so drenched in overwrought emotions that the silk merchant’s bride went into a weeping fit during Wagner’s reading of the final scenes and almost fainted. Who knows how the nineteen-year-old Cosima responded. Su‹ce it to say that within a few years, as Von Bülow embarked upon the long and arduous labor of mounting the premier production of the completed opera, Wagner himself (having long since tossed aside the silk merchant’s pathetic wife) launched into a highly public affair with Cosima right under Von Bülow’s nose.
Wagner even sired a child with Cosima, a baby girl, delivered as Von Bülow himself was engaged in the first day of the opera’s orchestral rehearsals, whom they quickly named Isolde! (“Paging Ken Russell,” a tiny voice constantly seems to squawk inside one’s head as one meanders through any of the myriad of Wagner biographies; “paging Ken Russell: your services are urgently required on page 243.”)
Several years after Isolde’s birth, Richard and Cosima abandoned their respective spouses and were married—with Cosima eventually going on to preside over the master’s festival shrine at Bayreuth right up until her own death, at age ninety-two, in 1930.
So that, at any rate, if, like me, part of you tries each fresh time to steel yourself against the sinuous blandishments of Wagner’s music (you’re not going to fall for such blatant, hyper-romantic manipulations, not this time, not yet again); and if each fresh time you fall for them nevertheless (for how can you not? the music is absolutely ravishing); if once again Wagner has his imperious way with you, leaving you (in the thrilling wake of Isolde’s excruciating Liebestod and the orchestra’s subsequent exalted final chord) an utterly spent, exalted dishrag of your former self, such that you find yourself muttering, amid your neighbors’ thunderous applause, “The bastard, the god-damned bastard! How does he do that?”—the point is: precisely, you will have hit the nail on the head. For in at least one of its aspects, Tristan is in its essence an opera about the condition of bastardy and the bastard’s desperately anxious lunge for legitimacy. With that final chord, Tristan and Isolde at last achieve in death the transfigured unification that had so eluded them in life: they live on, having indeed become the One they fervently aspired to be. And the One they’ve become (in psycho-autobiographical terms) is none other than Wagner himself, who, as the possible bastard progeny of precisely such a union, has ended up rendering the epic of his own procreation.
Or, anyway, that’s one reading of the opera’s unnerving power. There are others. For starters that it is just great, great music.
1. Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New York: Random House, 1994), p. 52.
2. Maybe even, not to put too fine a point on things, as a version of his sick friend Jonathan’s head (compare Fig. 32, p. 99).
1. On a visit to the library, I subsequently came upon an article in a 1982 issue of the Art Bulletin, the premier American academic art historical quarterly, in which a fellow named David Carleton, focusing on this very painting of Van Eyck’s, The Arnolfini Marriage, had suggested that its curious “elliptical optics” could be accounted for by the painter’s deployment, in some unknown manner, of the convex mirror there on the wall in the back; the guy had been roundly ridiculed in subsequent articles in follow-up issues of the Bulletin— after all, how could a convex mirror have been of any use whatsoever? It occurred to me in retrospect how in that article Carleton had been something like Tycho Brahe, the great Danish sixteenth-century astronomer, who’d almost figured it all out: he’d determined that all the planets revolved around the sun, which in turn revolved around the earth. Close, so close, but no cigar.
2. Or perhaps the painter-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel rendering Basquiat (1996).
1. For more on “Art and Optic,” the December 2001 NYU/NYIH conference, see http://www.nyu.edu/fas/institute/nyih/public/archive.html.
As for the ongoing Falco-Stork controversy, both gentlemen have posted detailed Web sites summarizing their positions and providing profuse bibliographies. Falco’s is at http://www .optics.arizona.edu/ssd/FAQ.html, and Stork’s at http://www.diatrope.com/stork/FAQs.html.
Stork’s “Optics and Realism in Renaissance Art” appeared in the December 2004 Scientific American. Hockney himself responded with a letter to the editor in the magazine’s April 2005 issue.
2. Hockney’s studio recently released a DVD featuring the complete contents of Fifteen Sketchbooks: 2002–2003: London, Iceland, Norway, Los Angeles.
3. Here again Hockney advances this notion of his that in China, because artists did not use camera/lens projections they never depicted shadows, or never, at any rate, deep chiaroscuro shading. (I once heard him even go so far as to suggest that in ordinary life we ourselves don’t notice shadows, which is to say we watch someone moving along, and they may walk from sunlight into shade and back into sunlight, but we don’t register the change as such unless, precisely, we are looking through a lens, at which point the shift makes all the difference in the world.) This idea of Hockney’s seems paradoxically at odds with Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s short and much beloved treatise on ancient and traditional Japanese aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows (1933), wherein, for example, the great novelist notes:
Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into it forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway. The “mysterious Orient” of which Westerners speak probably refers to the uncanny silence of these dark places. And even we as children would feel an inexpressible chill as we peered into the depths of an alcove to which the sunlight had never penetrated. Where lies the key to this mystery? Ultimately it is the magic of shadows. Were the shadows to be banished from its corners, the alcove would in that instant revert to mere void.
This was the genius of our ancestors, that by cutting off the light from this empty space they imparted to the world of shadows that formed there a quality of mystery and depth superior to that of any wall painting or ornament. The technique seems simple, but was by no means so simply achieved. We can imagine with little di‹culty what extraordinary pains were taken with each invisible detail—the placement of the window in the shelving recess, the depth of the crossbeam, the height of the threshold. But for me the most exquisite touch is the pale white flow of the shoji in the study bay; I need only pause before it and I forget the passage of time.
(Trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker
[Stony Creek, Conn.: Leete’s Island Books, 1977], pp. 20–21)
On the other hand, the paradox may only be apparent, for Tanizaki is writing of the Oriental lifeworld itself as it were, whereas Hockney is talking about how that world came to be depicted. Indeed, it may even be the preternaturally heightened sensitivity to shadows in the actual world (with their “quality of mystery and depth superior to that of any wall painting or ornament”) that allowed Japanese artists, anyway, to leave such shadows out of their imagery. (Viewers could be relied upon to read them into the image in any case, much as a love scene in a filmed romance can be all the more vividly evoked for being stylishly occluded and, as we say, “left to the imagination.”)
4. Aye: don’t get Hockney going on smoking! Or, hell, there’s no point: he’s going to get himself going in any case. For the past several years, perhaps the only thing that has exercised his rhetorical passions more than optics is the (as he sees it) relentless persecution of smokers, the progressive constriction of their innate civil rights, the run-amok prerogatives of the nanny state, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Most visitors to his home become so inured to the ongoing rant that they hardly notice it anymore. But occasionally … I am thinking of a time recently when I’d brought my then-nineteen-year-old daughter along with me on a visit to Bridlington, and while await- ing the arrival of dinner at a nearby restaurant, David was once again getting all revved up on his second-favorite stalking horse, railing that the treatment of smokers in Blairite England was getting as bad as Stalinist . . . at which point my daughter suddenly interjected, “But David, that’s ridiculous! What are you talking about?” All the rest of us around the table were momentarily stunned: not just that someone was having the temerity to challenge David but that someone was having the perseverance to actually listen to what he was saying in this regard and to respond in kind. (David for his part appeared—or rather, maybe, fashioned himself to appear—not to hear.)
Perhaps, though, these antismoking rants of David’s shouldn’t be taken all that seriously: they are like conceptual screen savers, the sound David’s mind makes in idle while it gathers up energy for its next more serious intellectual onslaught.
5. Compare a similar moment, or at any rate a similar sudden passion, in Robert Irwin’s career, from near the outset of Chapter 22 of my Seeing Is Forgetting, the companion volume to this book (regarding Irwin’s preparations for his work on the Getty Garden):
As things developed, it turned out to be the latter of these two passions that had set us on this particular wild-goose, or maybe I should say wild-grass, chase, for after about an hour’s drive Irwin eased the Cadillac off the road and onto a dusty embankment so that we could gaze upon precisely that—a tuft of wild grass. “Amazing, isn’t it?” Bob marveled, and it was, though I’d otherwise never have given it a glance. He proceeded to tell me how he had had his eye on that particular tuft for almost a year now—auditioning it, as it were, in different lights, across different seasons. “Some grasses,” he explained, “you can come upon them in high season, when they’re really on their game, and they’re just humming. But you go back a couple of months later and they’re simply gone. Or else they’ve fallen apart completely—a real mess. But then there are others, like this one, that even when they’re down, the dry seedpods are still beautiful. The stalks can get this haunting, graceful, quite striking quality.” He got out of the car, crouched in front of the dried tuft, ruffled its stalk spray, palmed its feathery plumes. “Yup,” he said, smiling, as he climbed back into the car and negotiated a happy U-turn. The tuft seemed to have passed muster—it, along with more than a thousand other plant types that, Irwin now explained, he’d been subjecting to similarly rigorous seasonal inspections over the past several years as he ever so gradually, ever so painstakingly, pulled together the horticultural components of his garden palette.
1. This would prove one of Hockney’s few recent citations of Van Gogh, amid a veritable raft of invocations of Constable and, to a lesser extent, Turner—this, perhaps, being another instance of that anxiety of influence I inferred earlier with regard to how Hockney keeps talking about Picasso when Matisse, whom he barely mentions, might seem a more proximate antecedent.
2. Velázquez is of course playing with some of these same paradoxes in Las Meninas by rendering himself craning out for a moment from behind the huge canvas he is painting— the very one, he may cheekily imply, that we are looking at. (On second thought, however, that surely can’t be right: maybe, rather, he is portraying himself portraying the king and queen whose reflection we make out in the distant mirror behind him, but in that case, why then the huge canvas? For that matter, at that scale, could he, painting away like that, hope even to reach much higher than their knees?)
3. “Painting,” Constable once wrote his friend John Fisher, “is another word for feeling.”
4. I was indeed reminded of a little painting of David’s from those days when he’d kept a Malibu beach house: the churning blue ocean taking up the entire backdrop, with a dainty little porcelain tea set resting demure on a glass tabletop in the foreground, snug indoors behind a thick plate glass window.
Meanwhile, Hockney’s response, somehow quintessentially English, reminded me as well of a few paragraphs from Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau, where the author anatomizes the first interactions, in the straits off what would become British Columbia, between the age-old natives and arriving white colonists:
Two worldviews were in collision; and the poverty of white accounts of these canoe journeys reflects the colonialists’ blindness to the native sea. They didn’t get it—couldn’t grasp the fact that for Indians the water was a place, and a great bulk of the surrounding land mere undifferentiated space.
The whites had entered a looking-glass world, where their own most basic terms were reversed. Their whole focus was directed toward the land: its natural harbors, its timber, its likely spots for settlement and agriculture. They traveled everywhere equipped with mental chain-saws and at a glance could strip a hill of its covering forest (as Vancouver does again and again, in his Voyage) and see there a future of hedges, fields, houses, churches. They viewed the sea as a medium of access to the all-important land.
Substitute “sea” for “land” and vice versa in that paragraph, and one is very close to the world that emerges from Indian stories, where the forest is the realm of danger, darkness, exile, solitude, and self-extinction, while the sea and its beaches represent safety, light, home, society, and the continuation of life.
(Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings
(New York: Pantheon 1999), p. 103)
5. “You see with memory.” I am not unaware how this postulate of David’s would seem to run diametrically counter to Robert Irwin’s entire aesthetic, summed up as it is in my bi- ography’s title Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. Which is to say that to truly see something, one need forget everything about it, right down to its very name.
On the other hand, with the passing years, Irwin’s own thinking has likewise become more supple in this regard. See, for example, our extended conversation about trees and other plants in our collaborative book, Robert Irwin Getty Garden.
6. Viz., Søren Kierkegaard, in his guise as the aesthete “A,” Either/Or, vol. 1, trans. David Swenson and Lillian Swenson (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Doubleday, 1959), pp. 287–88:
My own dissent from the ordinary view is su‹ciently expressed in the use I make of the word “rotation.” This word might seem to conceal an ambiguity, and if I wished to use it so as to find room in it for the ordinary method, I should have to define it as a change of field. But the farmer does not use the word in this sense. I shall, however, adopt this meaning for a moment, in order to speak of the rotation which depends on change in its boundless infinity, its extensive dimension, so to speak.
This is the vulgar and inartistic method, and needs to be supported by illusion. One tires of living in the country, and moves to the city; one tires of one’s native land, and travels abroad; one tires of Europe, and goes to America, and so on; finally one indulges in sentimental hope of endless journeyings from star to star. Or the movement is different but still extensive. One tires of porcelain dishes and eats on silver; one tires of silver and turns to gold; one burns half of Rome to get an idea of the burning of Troy. But this method defeats itself; it is plain endlessness. And what did Nero gain by it? Antonine was wiser; he says: “It is in your power to review your life, to look at things you saw before, from another point of view.”
My own method does not consist in a change of field, but rather resembles the true rotation method in changing the crop and the mode of cultivation. . . . Here we have at once the principle of limitation, the only saving principle in the world. The more you limit yourself, the more fertile you become in invention.
How telling, in turn, that Hockney himself becomes aware of this truth precisely by observing the changing seasons across the farmers’ fields of his native Yorkshire.
7. Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Viking, 2003), p. 11.
8. For those who might rather pursue a more psychologically tinged interpretation of Hockney’s Le Parc des sources, compare it instead with some of Courbet’s “source” paintings, such as La Source de la Loue or Le Puits noir and then of course all the way back to the source of all source paintings, The Origin of the World— another instance, among other things, of symmetrically flanked recession to a vanishing point. See Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 209–16.
9. Forcing Hockney’s point a bit, one might well wonder to what extent the perpendicular axis of the crucifixion (and its replication in all sorts of ways throughout medieval Europe, in church architecture, for example) might have prepared the ground for the arrival of perspectival vision with Masaccio and his contemporaries. A similar question haunts the generation of Descartes’s axial geometry two hundred years later, and with it the near vanishing point of the Cartesian cogito, that other great progenitor of modern technological disembodiment.
10. Robert Irwin could hardly have parsed things better: You are the figure. And with this insight, it seems to me, Hockney’s and Irwin’s seemingly divergent projects converge about as closely as one can possibly imagine—whether or not the two are talking to each other.