My notebook for this blog-book has, under today's date, just one possible entry:
1937: David Hockney, English artist
and my natural inclination during the years after I made that note was to ignore it, to leave him out, because.... pop art... like pop music and pop television drama, the place where the talentless go because they desperately want to be artists, musicians, actors, but sadly they don't have the what-it-takes to get beyond the superficiality and produce something that might be of genuine cultural merit. The difference between, say, Ken Follett and William Golding, both writing books about "the building of a cathedral in mediaeval England", but "Pillars of the Earth" as a soap-opera depicting the dull lives of the East Enders of Kingsbridge's Coronation Street, "The Spire" as an allegorical fable to explore the rites and rituals and symbolisms underlying Christianity: same blurb, but one won the five millions sales in a year award, and the other the Nobel Prize for Literature.
But then my diary for February 10 2017 reported "Large crowds at Tate B for the Hockney, which opened yesterday - and these despite the snow. I didn’t go, but will." And did, two weeks of letting the crowds thin later. Expecting to do the entire visit in about fifteen minutes, so as to be able to say I had done so. But like my expectations about the thinning crowds, I was proven very, very wrong. And spent the best part of an hour in the coffee bar afterwards, trying to put my responses into some kind of lucidity. They came out like this:
First thoughts on Hockney, having finally braved the vast crowds and gone in, to some parts anyway, because the exhibition is vast, too much to take in at one go, and some of the rooms so crowded we all kept turning into each other’s impeded view and ruined the aesthetic mood by doing so. Not the best way to look at what, I think, is Art to be reckoned with; and will be, when his time comes for re-evaluation. As someone who has only ever known the name, and seen those swimming-pool pieces that feel like a Californian response to American Gothic, I was impressed by the very high level of technical skill, in human faces especially (he can do hands!), but even more by the casual attitude he seems to have to that accomplishment, using it when verisimiltude is the goal, not bothering if something else is occupying his priorities - the use of vivid colour especially, in which he is decidedly un-English (DHL the only other obvious exception), or when deliberate distortion à la Francis Bacon explores light and movement and the texture of the physical form, and verisimilitude would actually be an obstacle, a stasis. There is, I think, much less intensity of colour in the early pictures, so I wonder if he too came under the influence of New Mexico and Nevada - the Grand Canyon pieces are especially "fecund" and "passional", as DHL would have put it. I also admire the inclusion of so many so very obviously failed experiments, whole phases of his life as it would seem, when he dared to try something he had never tried before, imitating someone else perhaps, or just exploring an idea, a form, a method, a perspective, but then rejected it and went back, or differently forward, anyway to somewhere else, but taking what he has learned with him, so that it manures the next phase, and insisting on its inclusion in his "oeuvre", because this is the spittle from the jihad, these are the blood-stains in the sand after wrestling with the angelic Muse at Penu-El. That moment when she grabs the hollow of your thigh and wrenches it out of joint is just as worthy of commemoration as the one in which she agrees to stalemate and pronounces the blessing (my apologies, also, to Sylvia Plath: the former is the blood-flow, the latter the healing scar: we are both correct). The four multi-screen woodland scenes, called Four Seasons, are quite splendid, even if they are rather GCSE Art Group Project. If I was disappointed by anything it was the i-Phone paintings, which simply use the machine as a canvas but don’t even try to exploit the potentials of the technology - or maybe he’s only just getting started in this enterprise.
March 14: Went back to the Hockney, where the crowds are just as plentiful. Decided to keep on walking until I saw something of serious quality, and then give it fastidious attention, rather than trying to take in everything, as I did last time, from an exhibition that is simply far too generous in its scale. It took me five full rooms before I stopped, which was rather disappointing, and there were several more along the way that I also skipped; though I think the crowds were not matching well with my blood-pressure either, and this was a factor in my moving on on several occasions. But those I stayed in were definitely worth staying in, and even going back a third time: and that says something, surely.
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