At one level the reader is invited to read this book as he or she would any other— which is to say, in this instance, as the chronicle of coming on twenty-five years of conversations between its author and the artist David Hockney.
But actually, there’s a second book tucked into the pages that follow, or anyway another way of reading them, and perhaps the best way to get at that second text is to recount how the whole project began in the first place.
Back in 1982, I published my first book, a midlife portrait of the California Light and Space artist Robert Irwin, entitled Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, a title that paradoxically, in this instance, said it all. Which is to say that the book surveyed all the things that Robert Irwin, sequentially over a period of about two decades (1958–1978), had had to bracket out of his practice—figure, image, line (which is to say associations of any kind), focus, any made or permanent object, signature, and presently even exhibition itself—before he was able to arrive at what he came to comprehend as the true subject of art: the sheer wonder of perception itself or, as he sometimes parsed matters, “all the marvels inherent in our perceiving ourselves perceiving.”
Shortly after that book’s publication I got a call from another artist famously associated with California, David Hockney, a painter I’d never met but one whose work I naturally knew well. He invited me up to the Hollywood Hills home into which he’d recently moved, and, after cordially offering me tea and making me feel quite at ease, he began by telling me he’d recently finished reading my book about Irwin, and though he disagreed with almost every single thing in it, still, he couldn’t get it out of his head, such that he thought it might be a good idea to discuss the thing with me.
“I’ve never met Irwin,” he noted, “though I’ve of course been quite aware of his work, as what artist, especially here in L.A., wouldn’t be?” Already then, Irwin was
regarded as one of the most significant artists and thinkers on artistic practice anywhere in the country, at least among fellow artists (though his reputation was considerably less well established among the public at large); within a few months he would become the first visual artist to be awarded one of the MacArthur Foundation’s so-called genius awards. “I mean,” Hockney continued, “I’ve observed his progress, though at times that was by no means easy, and for the longest time I felt that his position on the photographing of his work”—a flat prohibition, as it happens (which is one of the principal reasons he was so much less well known among the public at large)—“was pretty preposterous, and somewhat fetishistic.” Irwin for his part accounted for that absolutist injunction by arguing that a photograph could capture everything that the work was not about (which is to say its image) and nothing that it was about (which is to say its presence), so why bother?
Hockney paused and took a drag on a cigarette before going on to confound me entirely: “The thing is,” he now said, “with time I’ve come to see that Irwin was right about that ban on photographing his work; I wish I’d imposed a similar ban regarding my own from the outset.” (This from an artist whose work was more photographed and more ubiquitously visible in the world than that of just about anybody else, with the possible exception of Andy Warhol!) “I mean, no one can come upon one of my paintings in a museum, say, and simply see it; instead they see the poster in their college dorm or the dentist’s o‹ce or the jacket on the book they are reading, all sorts of second-rate mediations getting in the way of experiencing the work as if from scratch.”
Our conversation went on from there, and gradually Hockney proceeded to lay out the profound divergence from Irwin he nevertheless felt, which essentially came down to a radical disagreement over the true significance of the cubist achievement and how one ought to be required to proceed as an artist if one were going to take that achievement seriously.
For Irwin, cubism represents the culmination of a five-hundred-year-long process of flattening, as it were, in the subject deemed worthy of artistic attention (from Christ, to this king, to this burgher, to his maid, to her red shawl, to the color red, to the process of seeing the color red); and if one were to take seriously its greatest accomplishment—which is to say the so-called marriage of figure and ground— one couldn’t very well go on making paintings, which would necessarily have to read as figures to the wall’s ground, thereby undermining the whole point of the artistic project.
Hockney emphatically disagreed with this assessment, and as he insisted to me a few weeks later (for in the meantime he’d invited me to start visiting more regularly so that I might compose a text for a planned coffee-table book surveying the Cameraworks series on which he’d only just embarked), “No! Cubism was precisely about saving the possibility of figuration, this ages-old need of human beings, going all the way back to Lascaux, and saving that possibility at the moment of its greatest crisis, what with the onslaught of photography with all its false claims to be able to accomplish such figuration better and more objectively. It was about asserting all the things photography couldn’t capture: time, multiple vantages, and the sense of lived and living experience.”
He went on to acknowledge that ever-greater degrees of abstraction constituted one possible path out of cubism. But he for one was sure that Picasso and Braque, from early on, would have realized that such a path would only lead into a dead end or, as he put it, “an empty room.” That last comment seemed a direct dig at Irwin (who for his part disagreed completely—I know, because he subsequently told me so, characterizing Picasso and Braque’s failure to pursue such a path as a failure of nerve), and in a sense that entire first Hockney essay of mine could be read as a refutation of the earlier Irwin book. Just as the essay I subsequently wrote for the 1993 Irwin retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles would come to stand quite consciously as, among other things, a refutation of my intervening Hockney writings.
Indeed, for some twenty-five years now, whenever I have written about one or the other of these two giants of contemporary art (arguably the two most significant artists to come out of the late twentieth-century California art milieu), the other one has called to tell me, “Wrong, wrong, wrong.” The two have never met or conversed in person (straddling that Southern California scene like Schoenberg and Stravinsky before them, each seemingly oblivious of the other’s existence though in fact deeply seized by the work); instead they have been carrying on this quite vivid argument for over two decades, through me, as it were.
Such that the reader is invited to explore this book in a second way, as a companion (or counterpoint) to the new edition of my Irwin biography, coming out roughly simultaneously, which will in turn include over twenty-five years of my parallel conversations with him.
And the truly odd thing about all this is that the longer this metaconversation goes on, and the more at odds the two artists continue to imagine themselves (“Oh, naah,” Irwin averred when he happened to reach me on my cell phone a few months back just as I was about to go onstage to address a museum auditorium full of visitors to Hockney’s touring portrait show in Boston. “No, no, I don’t disdain him at all, you’ve got me all wrong, I think he’s an excellent practitioner”—an evaluation he delivered with truly withering hauteur), the more it seems to me (the mere conduit, sounding board, tuning fork) that at a deeper level, the two of them have in fact been engaged in an exploration, an activity of “pure inquiry,” as Irwin would parse the task at hand, that is entirely convergent and indeed now virtually congruent.