Hockney on Art: Conversations with Paul Joyce
Little Brown, £15
DAVID HOCKNEY, one of Britain’s best known living artists, is respected as much for his outspoken views – such as his theories on the development and understanding of perspective – as for his paintings and drawings. Open about his (homo)sexuality, Hockney is a committed humanist and often outspoken on topical issues.
Recently he was in the public spotlight for his highly vocal and trenchant views on the smoking ban and what he sees as a severe infringement of civil rights by the imposition of a blanket ban on smoking in public buildings. Almost as a point of protest, he is regularly photographed with a cigarette in his hand.
Pornography is another topic on which he holds forthright views; he was vociferous in expressing his deeply felt opposition to Mary Whitehouse and the Festival of Light and all it represented in terms of oppressive and narrow opinions. In Hockney on Art he touches on the subject of pornography but less from a sense of the individual’s right to choose and more as an academic discussion on the way it is depicted. This is very much the tone of the book.
It consists of a series of interviews between Hockney and Paul Joyce conducted over several years. Illustrations of examples of Hockney’s own work as well as images by other artists and photographers mentioned in the text serve as useful points of reference. These include, for example, Picasso’s chilling image Massacre in Korea based on a real life atrocity during the Korean war when a group of soldiers shot a group of naked women and children. Although he had never been to Korea, Picasso’s moving and clearly deeply-felt painting is none the less powerful for that.
The humanist concerns that run through both Hockney’s life and work are also touched on, as are the enduring influence of Rembrandt, the tragi-comedy of Laurel and Hardy (his father’s favourite comics), the impossibility of quantum physics and the sheer monumental scale of the Grand Canyon.
With a tenacity worthy of Sherlock Holmes, Hockney has needled away at the way artists since the Renaissance have developed ways of representing three dimensions on paper or canvas, which he discusses at length. Far from talking about genius, Hockney debunks concepts of romanticism in favour of a variety of practical apparatus that helped make the artist’s tasks simpler. And while he never goes so far as to say everyone can be an artist, he rather implies it.
With autobiography playing such a central part of his art – his early paintings and drawings of lovers and friends are among his strongest and most effective work – it would have been good to have heard more about this, particularly as the AIDS epidemic and the death of close friends has impacted so powerfully on his own work. But this is vintage Hockney – loquacious, insightful, informed, provocative and occasionally pompous – what more can we reasonably ask of any artist?
Emmanuel Cooper
