True to life - twenty five years of conversations with David Hockney- Lawrence Weschler
This book is well witten and very entertaining. David Hockney has never been one of my favorite artists. I rarely had the opportunity of seeing his paintings in real and in books his paintings, with their bright colors and simple subject matter, seemed too charming and decorative. But as I've grown tired of equalizing suffering with depth, my interest in Hockney has increased. This book did help me to solve some questions about Hockneys style, but in a rather indirect way. Weschler is not very critical in his conversations with Hockney. Hockney talks mostly about translating our experience of viewing the world to the canvas. Fragmenting a picture, either in a cubist way or by making collages of photographs keeps him busy for years, until his famous theory about the use of optical devices in art after 1400 takes up most of his time. ''True to life'' is therefore a proper title for the book. Weschler is critical of this 'optical' approach in his introduction in the book, but not so much in his conversations with Hockney. While reading I got the feeling that to understand Hockney we should not believe him, but watch him. The interviews, including Weschlers descriptions of Hockneys behaviour, make this possible. Hockney wears socks in two different colors. We see that he is a energetic personality who needs something to stimulate him. But it is his tendency to depict rather than to create that seems his own frustration. His work is at his best when he notices effects, isolates them and turns them into a reality in paint. In those cases the paintings don't point to the experience, they directly create the experience. Colors, a splash frozen in a photograph, distortions when you look through water, the effect is the main subject and the narrative is reduced to a minimum, as if meaning is only decorative, or supportive. The present experience is what really counts. Hockney has in fact an obvious talent for the modernist approach, this research in pure forms and colors. But in stead of developing this talent for creating, he continues to persue this impossible task of recreating. Recreating in this sense is also more important for him than expression. Weschler follows him, but he also seems to be a bit bored by the Hockneys limited focus and tries to go further, by oncovering psychological en emotional layers in the pictures. After all, their detailed and realistic content invites one to do that. Hockney does not deny these layers, but seems not so much interested in them or pretends not to be. In the end we can't be sure if Hockney is indeed a somewhat superficial painter or if Weschler is a somewhat superficial interviewer.