A few years back David Hockney presented the art world with a startling idea. That was that Western painting and its tradition of naturalism was tied to the use, proliferation and development of lenses. I attended the conference here in NYC, stood in line to view the camera obscura demonstrations, watched the BBC documentary and listened to the heated debate that followed. For me it was a sensational weekend of discovery and it confirmed some of my thoughts about today's abstract painting and painting in general.
Postmodernism at that moment was at its apex with a new group of figurative painters splashed across the pages of the glossy mags and shown in the premier galleries. Nearly all of them were working from photobased resources - more often than not computer derived. Some had decided to consolidate the billboard space of Early POMO and collage images in continuous space - some decided to reassert the material qualities of the paint itself. Slick professional technique was hot, hot, hot and for the most part painting looked very much like handmade photographs. Others opted for a kind of academic naturalism based on standard painting practices and photographic distortions. Jeff Koons, Luc Tuymans, Jenny Saville, Damien Loeb, John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, and Damien Hirst among many others have all adopted this computer-derived photography for their resources. POMO once again was raiding the grab bag of history and re-presenting old ideas for a new generation of collectors. It would take a moment of clarity by an artist - who for years had been following a traditional style - to open a new door.Hockney's radical thesis was that lenses had shaped vision in the west. Seeing from the single vantage point of the lens had pushed the limits of the WAY that we see. As Martin Kemp writes in his essay "Master Class in Cheating" we can..."acknowledge that Hockney's bigger picture brings home to us how the mainstream of western image-making after the invention of photography went not so much into the specialised practice of "art" but into photography itself, into film and television, and now into all the forms of graphic realism produced by computers." Most artists working during our time are aping the look, the finish or the space of photography. Richter blurs and smudges the image to ape the printing process, Close digitizes the form with grided abstraction, and Rosenquist - who created the principles behind the coding of photoshop - continues to collage. Even in abstraction this practice is everywhere – with such artists as Ritchie, Mehertu and Marcaccio - we find the proliferation of digitization and the spatial constructs realized through electronic programming. With electronic culture we were now at a point of losing the "eyeball" or the subjective vision. Hockney’s findings begin an argument for a different kind of painterly expression in this digital age.
Aside from the historically radical perspective of lens based vision at the beginning of the Renaissance - Hockney opens the door to exploring how we might push our vision beyond the similar overlaying of imagery and collage based bulletin boards that predominate abstraction without falling back on Postmodernist strategies of Material or Lens based space. Hockney implies that we can manipulate the image beyond the programming and he lays out a simple pathway through the Northern European Renaissance. Hockney’s idea is that space in Northern Europe was thought as additive – that lens based reproductions would be added together – a kind of collage of reality that existed in ONE space. He calls this a wonky space and I am fond of the term. Wonky describes how we see with two eyes. We catch glimpses of things in panorama, in periphery – things are not isolated – but involved in the sweep of both eyes. So to make a bigger space Hockney says we add space in a physical way creating various vanishing points, various times, and various images. He insists that in this way we are close up to everything. The implication is that we are involved, we are not outside the space looking in, but we are a part of the space. It is similar to Stella’s idea of the kind of space that we need today. Hockney’s idea is not found in the discussion of lens space or the physicality of material but in the breakdown of how we actually use our eyes - how we concentrate on things in differing intensities – how we engage with our vision and use it as a way to understand existence. He states that Modernism broke with the lens in order to find a more real and engaged space. He wants the vision of the eyewitness – where 3 people seeing the same thing all come to different conclusions. It is also the vision of touch - how does space or form feel when experienced through the eyes? You can see this in movie love scenes where the camera closes in and breaks over forms, where light reveals, where shadows imply. The camera cannot relay touch the way vision can – you are always at a remove limited to a single viewpoint – a single moment. Hockney wants a direct involvement in the physical space from the vantage of our binocular vision – we are in depth, through time, from many vantage points. An exciting thought that can be used in making NEW abstract images!
End Part 3…
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