Page 49 - Studio International - January 1968

visual clichés. The tendency among figurative of the former. For most painters, that is to say, the with integrity, simultaneously in the painting.
painters now is to take their images at second hand, success of a painting depends upon the realization The subject-matter for one painting in the
already reduced in photographs and advertise- of a truth simultaneously in the formal life of the Kasmin exhibition is taken almost straight from a
ments or formalized as handy conceptions for the painting and in the wider context of the painter's Macey's advertisement. The photograph shows a
mass market. A house in California is represented total experience. This is particularly true in the case clean, almost clinical bedroom with open French
by a 'Californian-house' image which will be of a painter like Hockney whose subject matter is windows, a green table and a large bed with a
recognized instantly by all who have not been modern life investigated in terms of human green cover. Hockney has transferred this scene
there. Plate glass, palm trees, swimming-pool. environment and human relationship. on to a large format, retaining, in the slightly less
Hockney comes across, at times, as the English The provincial boy image of himself must be one anonymous medium of acrylic paint on canvas, the
provincial boy with eyes as wide as television for which Hockney feels some affection but he is, middle-class universality of the advertisement. On
screens. He looks at the world through our admass in fact, through the evidence of his own work, the bed in the painting, however, lies a young man,
conception of it, apparently accepting at face quite cool enough to understand the potency of drawn from life, flat on his stomach, wearing only
value the McLuhanism that the medium is the this persona and stand back from it with a certain a vest, with his arms stretched out along his sides.
message. Only apparently. If there were no more wry detachment. It is this detachment—the isola- The modelled figure is formally and conceptually
to the paintings than this they would be facile tion of the prodigy grown up—that gives his recent at odds with his environment. The painting is
indeed. I don't think that it has ever been enough work its bite. There is, in his excursions into the called Tarzana after a Los Angeles suburb, and the
for any but the most naive of pop painters merely American dream, an element of alienation. The room preserves a suburban anonymity altogether
to accept and transmit. The medium may be the glamour is there all right, but the paint surface, to at odds with the very particular emotion expressed
message but it is not necessarily the truth. The which our attention is continually returned by through the figure. The real situation disturbs the
stylish solution of complex problems of visual formal tricks in the framing or perspective, is as unreal situation. The involvement, by contrast,
interpretation is no substitute for the solution of flat as a pancake. The scene is set up—and Hockney emphasises the alienation.
those problems posed by the need accurately and obviously enjoys the staging—only to be let down, Some of Hockney's earlier paintings expressed feel-
honestly to interpret emotional experience. Ideally again and again, as the truth of the real situation ings of discomfort and dislocation in a more
the solution of the latter is implicit in the solution asserts itself for the painter and, he is a painter extrovert form. In works like Two friends of 1963
the fragmented figures danced their way across
his canvases as if uncaring whether or not we took
pity on their situation, but somehow sure that we
would. The Rake's Progress suite of etchings, for all
its precocious insights into the dehumanizing
processes of socialized life, was kept accessible, by
the gayness of the graphic technique, at an ulti-
mately lighthearted level. But just occasionally
Hockney has made paintings of a really painful
nature. In one of these, dated 1962, two embryonic
figures are locked in mutual fellatio, their giant
mouths opened to disclose carnivorous teeth. Their
sexual organs are replaced by toothpaste tubes
carrying a well-known brand name. The humour
provides only the flimsiest of veils for the desperate
situation implied, whether we read it as allegory
or not, by the nightmare treatment of the subject.
For formal reasons alone this is a bad painting,
but it is also quite untypical, and it would be most
unjust to reproduce it. In the recent works emotion
is conveyed more subtly, by means which do not
disturb so violently the blandness of the painting
surface. This has been made easier for Hockney
by a significant change, made some three years ago,
from oil to acrylic paint. What Hockney has
succceeded in doing, during the last few years, is to
express his perceptions through an ironic im-
balance. The deadpan naivety and humour of his
technique is constantly undermined by the serious-
ness of the content. The techniques, and the poses
they imply, are the means by which he preserves
his detachment. Hence all the apparently whim-
sical investigations of different categories of picture
or of treatment: the Picture of a still life, the Four
different kinds of water, the paintings of frames and
of glass investigate the nature of our involvement
in the areas of interpretation between subject and
picture. What Hockney is exposing is the Games
Theory of art, an analogy for the games people
play in private or social relationships, and the con-
ventions they observe to preserve distance and
prevent contact. The best of Hockney's paintings
Tarzana 1967
acrylic on canvas express the deprivations inherent in this distancing
96 x 96 in. process, or alternatively celebrate the truth and the