With a geographer’s interest in place and space there is a natural relationship with how artists have viewed and then represented real and imagined worlds.
A visit to Tate Britain so see a marvellous sixty-year retrospective of David Hockney’s work puts this in many different perspectives. Hockney’s creative arc includes a modernist rejection of the abstract in art and a complex dismissal of photography while adopting new digital technologies.
“I do not think the world looks like photographs. I think it looks more glorious than that.”
This quote is in the context of the massive paintings of The Wolds. It also relates to the four-walled, multi-screen “Four Seasons” recording a short section of a rural road near Bridlington, Yorkshire. It is truly immersive and absorbing and said to be a response to decades of living in seasonless California.
And that takes us back to the Los Angeles pool images followed by the naturalism shown in portraits of his close friends. These capture a social environment quite different from most people’s 1960s yet it’s one we recognise as influencing the physical and behavioural style that followed.
Lastly, the room of large screens showing Hockney’s skilled use of the digital technologies provided by the iPhone and iPad display his life time interests in ‘capturing the beauty of the everyday’. The creative process of building up the on-screen images is fascinating – and daunting if you think tech means anyone could do it.
Again that creative difference harks back to his earlier assemblages of Polaroid images from the 1980s which are said to be influenced by Picasso’s cubism. The little Tate Britain guidebook has this to say…
“For Hockney, the single-point perepsective of photography could not communicate the experience of looking and living in the world. He described conventional photography as akin to ‘looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed Cyclops – for a split second‘. In contrast, he sought to create a photography that could accommodate different viewpoints as well as time and movement.”
Thus we have a good challenge to geography in our efforts in (re-)presenting place.
Hockney also talks a good game and there is a programme on BBC4 worth catching.
Tate website:
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/david-hockney
I wrote about the 2012 Hockney exhibition at The Royal Academy on my old blogger site here.