I've never quite ever known what to make of Mr David Hockney's art. And unless as a foreigner you inhabit at least some bits of America for a little while, the true bathos will probably always be illusory to you. Most Americans I fear are blinded from birth to this. As a disclaimer I admit buying not the Mount Fuji postcard (#1 in The Met Museum's shop card sales) but the little cardboard gift bag that has travelled with me place to place intact since 1987/8. I unearthed it from a London box only this summer and felt the same happy/sad saudade melancholy as when it was on my various walls once upon a time ago. The painting is owned by the Met and is a good starting point for figuring out what attracts me to Hockney's work (and not really the later paintings).
Another thought occurred to me: I wish David had believed he was the Hockney Alice Neel. He's a wonderful drawer and there's a room in this retrospective devoted. By that I mean the figure. Having OD'd on Munch last week what becomes so clear is just how much a stage set is Hockney's greatest work. The use of paint in later years just doesn't work for me. I admire it, it is fun like opening a pop up children's book: but it doesn't move me. The room of his double portraits is magnificent. There's both Pirandello and Brecht. Humans still in search of the play they will never find: the flatness of the paint (and yet it is not really if you look closely) equal actors on the canvas.
And there is a similarity to Munch here in that Hockney doesn't impose an artistic scenario. Munch discovers what's there through the paint. Hockney as if it was always there (as it indeed is and was). As if the colors were 'received' by him. Channeled. His drawings are exactly that without comment. His figurative painting almost becomes religious. Figures both human and non. Water, sprinklers, buildings and of course the flower and Mount Fuji. The final room shows his digital iPad drawings and it seems that THAT is what Hockney was trying to do all those later years through all the Los Angeles crazy canyon color races, the photo montages. Something that was instantaneous, energized, capturable and yet what? Gone? Erasable as LA will one day alas be? There is love there and of course in the later English paintings.
This is the 50th anniversary of Modern Art being born/hung at the Met Museum. And many will say yeah but that job was/is done by many other institutions. Well: yes and no. Should The Met have taken over the Breuer? Criticisms are valid. Yet it is the juxtapositioning of Modern Art and the vast 'olde things' Met holdings. I wandered back exiting the corridors a bit tired and spotted WW1 art-loads of amazing stuff and charcoal Marsden Hartley drawings of Prussian insignia. The photography gallery caught my eye and William Wegman/Tony Oursler. Now should the Met being doing this either? I totally think YES. It is what made the Jeff Koon's show at Frankfurt's Liebieghaus so important. All these dinosaur antiquites etc: why should I be interested? Just because they are 'old'? Old and showcased doesn't necessarily mean they are ART! The art world doesn't exist because of critics/ collectors and institutions, it exists because of the people. And there's the rub: do the people realize what they are seeing in Hockney's figural paintings? Themselves one removed?
If institutions could create an ivory tower and get away with it I am damn sure they would. Alas (for them), they need attendances/ticket sales/merchandise. They need public interaction. I wish I had the Michelangelo show all to a few this lunchtime instead of bumping shoulders (I am privileged in that I could have had a quieter viewing). Christmas Eve morning may be the time to go;) I have seen the Sistine Chapel and heard the mermaids singing. The Met's ceiling replica and the show's curatorship is why The Met should exist. They aren't great on the mermaids but then really: who ever was;(
Humans are inevitably all are born a bit elitist. Truth or dare? It's the unerring task of institutions such as The Met Museum to allow a broadening of the mind. A realization that you don't have to 'one up' your neighbor. Or kill off the competition. That plurally of mind is what may just save this planet from extinction. You don't always have yourself to blame either. It is not your fault. But your mind is always yours if you allow it to be so. Even with the 'Strange Days' internet.
[this post may get a little tweaked or not….it is written in one sitting…]
