Close your eyes and imagine any work by the artist David Hockney. You’re probably thinking of his pink-hued paintings of swimming pools nestled in the Hollywood Hills. Or maybe the image of a flat mid-century modern home framed by lush green mountains or the high contrast, blue-and-white ripples snaking through bodies of water or even hot, golden sand. Perhaps you’re making sense of his strange, multi-point perspective, which shows a diving board’s shadow plunging into the deep end while the world tilts upwards to show concrete patio paths that cut through a manicured lawn.
When I think of Hockney, however, my mind goes toward consumer technology. I think of the most accessible gizmos from whatever era in which he was working: fax machines, Xerox copiers, Polaroid cameras and, most recently, the iPad drawings that have dominated his output for the past decade. Even his innovative embrace of lithography, an invention that dates back to 1796, feels like a technologically boundary-pushing art form. Without these machines, Hockney wouldn’t have had the capacity to churn out thousands of artworks over his career, helping him become a fixture in just about every institution’s modern art collection.
More than 200 of these mass-produced prints are featured in “Perspective Should Be Reversed: Prints by David Hockney from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation,” which has traveled from Honolulu to the Palm Springs Art Museum. The show makes a credible case for reclassifying Hockney from a painter to a printmaker. Not one canvas is covered in acrylic. Instead, the show’s rooms are filled with ink, printer paper, digital prints and photographs.
It’s hard to pinpoint just when Hockney began experimenting with technology, but his earliest Polaroid collages date back to the early 1980s. Instead of being limited by the frame, Hockney discovered “joiners,” a technique that expands the canvas through the art of collage. He would snap hundreds of photos to produce panoramas or portraits to create images with an animated, cinematic effect. In Mother, Los Angeles, December 1982, the images tilt from the ceiling’s exposed wooden beams down to his mother posing in a chair, then glide over the carpet and into Hockney’s shoes. The edges of the images often overlap and repeat like a Cubist painting, and light and color shift from one photo to another as the aperture adjusts to the subtle change in light. Pearblossom Highway (1986), one of my favorites from California’s Antelope Valley, uses 700 polaroids to depict lonely state highway route 138, with scrawny Yucca trees flanking a two-lane road and discarded beer bottles and cans duplicated in the dirt.
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Hockney’s experiments with photography and collage continue to the present day. He calls these “photographic drawings” and incorporates himself and his friends into Lynchian skewed rooms with impossible dimensions. He uses Photoshop to achieve uncanny compositions in which people, paintings and furniture are digitally composed into one space. Because Hockney minimizes each object’s light and shadows, the photos lose their depth and throw off our innate understanding of how figure-ground relationships work. We lose our sense of the horizon with no understanding of how we’d stand upright in these fictional places.
Perspective Should Be Reversed (2014), from which the retrospective takes its name, shows a set of middle-aged men sitting at a red trapezoidal table—sheared from a rectangle into this extreme shape with Photoshop’s transform tool—while others, surrounded by empty dining room chairs, point or lean towards Hockney’s paintings of a similar subject. A beige curtain hangs on the left side of the room, its hem blurred and glitched from the smudge tool. Digitally added onto the table is a mise en scène of fruit, potted plants and books. One cover stands out: “Picasso and Truth” by T.J. Clark. Hockney’s using technology and Cubist influence to build a composition more real than anything he could ever paint.
In addition to exploring the limits of photography, Hockney looked toward machines that could broaden his drawing practice. In the 1980s, he began working with fax machines, photocopies and laser printers, which had finally become affordable in-home office tools. In 1986, he purchased multiple copy machines and began the “Home Made Prints” series. Just as he understood how lithographs could create dynamic images by layering multiple inks, he would run images through one-color copiers multiple times, swapping ink cartridges any time he wanted to shift colors. The halftone-like textures, rough and pixelated due to the nascent technology being able to read the nuanced color transitions in gradients, allowed him to achieve new textures. One such copy, Man Reading Stendhal, July 1986, incorporates spotty patches of black, red, blue and green ink. The high-contrast patterns within the abstracted figure look like security patterns found in envelopes.
Hockney figured out a way to adapt the joiner technique from his photo collages with his prints. When he participated in the 1989 São Paulo Biennial, instead of shipping artworks, he faxed them. One work, Hotel by the Sea (1989), was broken up into sixteen black and white facsimile pages, and each of the 8.5 x 11-inch pieces of paper combined into one unified drawing that was 35 x 56 inches.
Knowing about Hockney’s affinity for mechanical production makes it possible to appreciate his iPad drawings more. Though some find the digital work unremarkable—“what does the new medium mean to Hockney, aside from allowing him to draw in bed?” Brian Allen once quipped in The Art Newspaper—it’s clear the artist is searching for the medium’s limits. He loses the imperfections offered by the copy machines but in pieces like The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven) 30 March. (2011), we see the ways he’s playing with the software’s pointillist mark-making, the algorithm’s jitter and a brush’s smooth, consistent opacity.
The iPad drawings are most impactful seen up close, but that’s also how his older technological works had to be read. Hockney has never been one to be appreciated from afar. He collaborates with machines, and each adds their own personality to the composition.
“Perspective Should Be Reversed” is at the Palm Springs Art Museum through March 31.
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