This is a book of conversations with the artist, discussions
that have lasted a decade, increasingly long and wide-ranging. The subject was
usually pictures – that is, man-made images of the world.
Page 6
Their [Turner, Constable, Lorrain] challenges are Hockney’s
to: how can one translate a visual experience such as a sunrise – a fleeting
event involving expanses of space, volumes of air, water vapour and varying
qualities of natural light – into a picture? How do you compress all that into
some flat coloured shapes on an iPhone or anything else?
A picture, any picture, if you consider it for a moment,
depends on several remarkable procedures. It stops time, or if it is a moving
picture, it edits and alters time. Space is flattened. The subjective
psychological reactions and knowledge of both the person who made it and the
one who looks at it are crucial to the way it is understood.
Page 8
…that of course is exactly what pictures are, but they
fascinate us and help us understand and enjoy what we see.
Something similar is true of Hockney’s own central obsession.
His abiding preoccupation is what the world looks like, and how human beings
represent it: people and pictures.
DH I suppose
essentially I am saying we are not sure what the world looks like. An awful lot
of people think we do, but we don’t.
DH A lot of
people think they know what the world looks like because they’ve seen it on
television. But if you are deeply fascinated by what the world really looks
like, you are forced to be very interested in any way of making a picture that
you come across.
Page 10-11
J-P was driving, and I’d say ‘Stop’, and then draw different kinds of grass. I filled the sketchbook in an hour and a half. After that, I saw it all more clearly. After I’d drawn the grasses, I started seeing them. Whereas if you’d just photographed them, you wouldn’t be looking as intently as you do when you are drawing, so it wouldn’t affect you that much.
Page 32
He [Hockney] believes that [mark making] is an aspect of being human. ‘The urge to draw must have been quite deep in us, because children love to do it – being bold with crayon. Sometimes I watch them and I think I must have been like that. Most people lose it, but some of us keep it.’
Page 34
If the methods by which he [Hockney] makes drawings are sometimes cutting-edge, what he is doing is primordial. Drawing, making a mark on a wall or a clay pot: these are activities that humans have been doing for tens of thousands of years.
Page 36
The oldest surviving pictures are to be found in the caves of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc in the south of France. According to radio-carbon dating, these marks were made up to 36,000 years ago. There has been some dispute about the precise age of these images, but at any rate they can be taken as evidence that the urge to make pictures – and presumably to look at them – goes back a long way (especially if you consider that these paintings are simply the first to survive; others, it is fair to assume, were made before and didn’t happen to last). The Dutch Johan Huizinga once wrote a book called Homo Ludens or Man the Player (1938) in which he argued that play was fundamental to human culture. Surely, it would be equally possible to claim that pictures were basic to human life. Not homo sapiens, perhaps, but homo pictor: the human being as picture-maker.
Page 40
He [Hockney] also made photographs and drawings for another marvellous picture, My Parents and Myself, which he eventually abandoned. From that time on, his work has been concerned with finding ways of depicting the world that escape the trap of naturalism. Another way of putting this would be that he has searched for ways of depicting the world that are different from the way a camera lens sees it.
David Hockney: Most people feel that the world looks like a photograph. I’ve always assumed that the photograph is nearly right, but that little bit by which it misses makes it miss by a mile. This is what I grope at.
DH: I was just drawing at that point [early 70s]. there was something wrong with what I was doing – I’ve called it ‘obsessive naturalism’ – but then I didn’t know what it was. Photography was causing it; I’d started to take photographs at that point. I wanted to get out. I found that was a trap, and said so. I wanted to stop it.
DH: I suppose I’m interested in images, and photography is how most people see the world – even its colours (although photography can’t do colours very well). So I’ve observed photography for a long time and participated in it myself – but at the same time I’ve been thinking about what is wrong with it.
Page 50
DH: But his [Gombrich] phrase, ‘The Conquest of Reality’, which is a chapter heading in The Story of Art, was slightly naïve. That’s insinuating that the European painters conquered the way we look at the world – and that’s all there is to it. But I think it’s precisely the way we look at the world that’s the problem. I believe photography and the camera have deeply affected us. But I think photography has also done us damage.
Martin Gayford: What do you mean?
DH: it’s made us all see in a rather boring similar way. In 2002, I went to see ‘Matisse/Picasso’ at Tate Modern with Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and John Golding [the curator] at eight o’clock one morning, just us. And it was stunning, a terrific show. When we came out, I noticed there were four big photographs hanging on the wall – recent acquisitions by the Tate. Lucien and Frank just walked past them. I walked up to them because they don’t read across the room that well, looked at them and I thought, ‘Fuck me, Picasso and Matisse made the world look incredibly exiting; photography makes it all look very, very dull. Yet we’re moving back to all the stuff that modernism moved away from.’ We live in an age when vast numbers of images are made that do not claim to be art. They claim something much more dubious. They claim to be reality.
Page 52
MG: But why don’t photographs represent the truth?
DH: we think that the photograph is the ultimate reality, but it isn’t because the camera sees geometrically. We don’t. We see partly geometrically but also psychologically. If I glance at the picture of Brahms on the wall over there, the moment I do he becomes larger than the door. So measuring the world in a geometrical way is not that true.
MG: You mean subjectively and psychologically?
Yes, when I’m looking at your face now, its rather big in my vision because I’m concentrating on you and not on other things. But if I just move for a moment to look over there, your face becomes small. Isn’t that what is happening? If you look at Egyptian pictures, the Pharaoh is three times bigger than anybody else. The archaeologist measures the length of the Pharaoh’s mummy and concludes that he wasn’t any larger than the average citizen. But actually he was bigger – in the minds of Egyptians. The Egyptian pictures are truthful in some way, but not geometrically.
Page 52-53
MG: What about what most people call ‘perspective’ – that is, linear perspective, which is supposed to have been invented by Filippo Brunelleschi in early fifteenth-century Florence?
DH: Linear perspective is a law of optics, so he couldn’t have invented it. Boyle didn’t invent Boyle’s law. He was describing something that was there. A scientific law isn’t invented; it’s discovered.
MG: But for you, is it a scientific law not a law of art?
DH: I have said that perhaps the big mistakes of the West were the introduction of the external vanishing point and the internal combustion engine.
MG: What’s the matter with it?
DH: It pushes you away. When I went to the Jacob van Ruisdael exhibition at the Royal Academy some years ago, I thought, ‘My God, your not in the landscape at all. It’s all over there’.
Page 58
MG: you mean the viewer is automatically outside a picture constructed with a single-point perspective? Its made from a fixed point, and so similarly you, the spectator, are fixed?
DH: Very, very fixed.
MG: So there’s no such thing as ‘correct’ perspective.
DH: No there isn’t. Of course there isn’t.
Page 61
DH: …I had learned of the Chinese attitude to painting. They say you need three things for paintings: the hand, the eye, and the heart. Two won’t do. A good eye and heart is not enough; neither is a good hand and eye. I thought that was very, very good.
Page 62
Talking about Bigger Trees Near Warter or / ou Peinture sur le motif pour le Nouvel Age Post-Photographique, 2007 – Its MASSIVE.
DH: it’s not an illusory thing. It’s not a painting that makes you think, ‘I want to step into it.’ Your mind already is in it. The picture engulfs you. That’s how I hope people will experience it. It is an enormous painting. there are not many paintings this big.
….I had in my head a kind of anti-photographic thing, but also Chinese painting, late Picasso – meaning the marks are all visible and boldly made with the arm.
DH: You have to look and ask questions like that about what you are seeing all the time. Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer, and clearer still. The image is passing through you in a physiological way, into your brain, into your memory – where it stays – it’s transmitted by your hands.
DH: …Pictures influence pictures, but pictures also make us see things that we might not otherwise see.
Page 85
MG: …In the newest batch of paintings, instead of painting what was in front of him, Hockney was painting something he had seen some time before [Felled Trees on Woldgate. 2008]. In other words, he was relying on drawing and memory. But memory, of course, is a factor in all human perception – and certainly all painting.
DH: We see with memory. My memory is different from yours, so if we are both standing in the same place we’re not quite seeing the same thing. Different individuals have different memories, therefore other elements are playing a part. Whether you have been in a place before will affect you, and how well you know it. There’s no objective vision – ever.
There’s a story about the French philosopher Henri Bergson. He was sitting in a café opposite Rouen Cathedral, and he said that the only way you can see the cathedral properly from here is to get up, walk right round it, and then come back here. I like that. The point is that you would then have a memory that you were looking at it.
Page 102
DH: After painting for all those years [Monet], he would have systems in his head. I assume he went with a question, and found the answer. If you don’t have a question in mind, there’s far too much to look at.
As these conversation continued, I began to grasp the point of Hockney’s insistence on the word ‘layers’. A painter is not simply adding more and more paint to a canvas or piece of paper; fresh thoughts and observations are going on, each adjusting the one that came before.
Perhaps this links to Gell’s theory of the ‘extended mind’ in relation to the oeuvre of the artist (He uses Duchamp as an example).
….I understood Hockney’s objection to the photograph, which contains by its nature a mere instant of time, and a single point of view.
Page 115
D.H.: ….there is no single way to join them. If you make a decision about something like that, isn’t that exactly what you are doing when you are drawing? It seems to me it is. So collage itself is a form of drawing. I always thought it was a great, profound invention of the twentieth century.
Page 116
DH: I don’t see it that way at all. I was very struck when one of the Turner Prize winners some years ago, Jeremy Deller, remarked that ‘Artists don’t paint these days, just as we don’t go to work on a horse’. I blew that up and pinned it on my studio wall. I thought, he obviously thinks photography has supplanted painting. A lot of people think that. But I know it can’t do that. It’s not possible. I thought that remark was naïve: not understanding what photography was. I don’t see it that way at all. Photography is just a blip in a longer history. Now its coming to an end. We are moving out of what photography was and back to painting.
Page 118
DH: Photoshop is intended to polish photographs, and the consequence is those dreary magazines where everybody looks the same. Have you ever seen Hello or OK? This is what’s happened to photography. Everything is now evened out, polished. Whats mad about them is that if there are six pictures of six people, they’ve all got the same expression. If somebody looks at it in twenty years time, will they know who all these people are? I don’t know even know. It will tell them something about our shallow age.
Page 119
DH:….The digits have altered everything. Nowadays, I don’t think you need believe any kind of photograph from any source. There is a certain sort of language to photography – but you can fake it with computers. Most so-called digital art is hand-denying, and not that interesting anyway.
Page 120
DH: the history of art is all very comfortable until the invention of photography; but then it becomes rather uncomfortable because nobody knows what the photography really is. As a result, we then don’t include it as part of the pictorial history. But it can’t be isolated from it.
DH: Vincent would not pose for photographs. There are photographs of every other artist from that period, meaning they were prepared to pose for a photographer. But Van Gogh wouldn’t; he didn’t have a high opinion of photography. I assume he didn’t think the world looked like that. I agree with him about that, but most people don’t. They believe the photograph catches reality. It’s catching a bit of it, but not that much of it. That’s what Van Gogh knew. Van Gogh’s – and Cezanne’s – is a more human vision of the world, to my mind. When Cezanne referred to Bouguereau as just dishonest, he must have meant that we just don’t see that way. We see more like Cezanne’s way, doubting the position of objects.
Page 122
DH: My argument is that there is a pictorial crisis in a way, but it’s in photography and film. That’s the twist. It’s not about painting. Painting will always be there, although its difficult for it to thrive if you don’t teach it very much.
Page 125
DH: How do you look? You look at pictures. The evidence is pictures, not texts. Or rather, pictures are texts – and they’ll tell you a lot.
Good support for practice-based research
Page 130
DH: A photograph sees it all at once, in one click of the lens from a single point of view, but we don’t. And it’s the fact that it takes us time to see it that makes the space.
Page 143
DH: ….I just do it by instinct [paint space]. I don’t think there is a formula. It’s something that can’t be measured, because it’s in the head. The eye is part of the mind.
MG: If the eye is part of the mind, that implies that the space you see is partly inside the head of the artist.
DH: I’ve always been fascinated by pictorial space, because you can just invent it and make it work. That’s what terrific artists do – Picasso certainly could.
Page 144
DH: Most people think time is the big mystery, don’t they? But you can’t have time without space. There’s a marvellous Wagnerian line, in Parsifal: ‘Time and space are one’. That’s from 1882, before Einstein. It’s inconceivable to us to imagine that space might end, isn’t it? What’s there if there’s no space? And when you are looking at the furthest spaces in the universe, you are looking back in time. Your brain begins to burst when you try to think about it seriously; you could make yourself a bit mad.
Page 145
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