On Saturday, Hockney himself put up a much more attractive fight. The occasion, “Art and Optics: A Conference Around a Theory,” hosted by the Law School, seemed to draw New Yorkers in droves. Hundreds of people were waiting in line all around the block. A sardonic friend of mine suggested there were several reasons for this extravagant interest: Egalitarian New Worlders would like to witness those old European genius ‘masters’ brought down a notch or two by having it explained how they were just tricksters; paradoxically, this would make their works more accessible since Americans just love the idea that creativity is finally but a ‘do-it-yourself’ paint-by-numbers activity that can be mastered if only you knew the techniques; even the sophisticated city dwellers cannot resist being awed by snake oil salesmen — this naivete, too, is part of the American dream bolstered by a pioneer spirit; and any diversion that arouses passionate polemics would be a welcome relief from the post September 11 depression syndrome. In fact, my (American) friend smiled, you could say this is another expression of “America strikes back!”
Hockney, his shoulders bent so that it looks as if he’s developing a late hump (he did say that all of this had started with a hunch), and apparently totally deaf, introduced a BBC film made on the subject. The film, frenetically applauded, was a marvel of humor and insight. Some sadness too. In it he was shown walking through the masterpieces of smoke and mirrors left us by Van Eyck, Caravaggio, Lotto, Velazquez, Vermeer, Chardin, Ingres and others. Apparently he has more than a thousand ‘cases,’ reproductions of artworks qualifying for examination, pinned to his studio wall. His curiosity was first aroused by the strong light on the faces of patrons sitting for their portraits in studios, light only found outside under the sun or close to a fierce window. Then the film showed him attempting to reproduce the methods and means ostensibly used by the ancients. This involved dressing up desirable young men in Medieval apparel and draping bunches of grapes over their curly heads. One of them had distinctly rosy, tumescent lips. You could envision the juices. A lot of this was, perhaps inadvertently, very funny. It could be done, sure, but the procedure was cumbersome and the results inferior. Some gems were brought to our attention, like a Dutch drinking scene with all the revelers left-handed, including the monkey at the bottom of the frame. But all in all, he seemed to negatively disprove his theories: his own work, done by simple eyeballing, trusting the well-worn working relationship between eye and hand, was far better and much more ‘life-like’ than all this complicated maneuvers necessitating apparatuses. I could not help but think what a great artist he is, and how typical with this unlikely, cranky obsession!
In the ensuing commentary on the film, he did elucidate a few points. For example, according to a London curator (Hockney says) one can indeed see on a Caravaggio painting how he made initial markings from an upside down projected image, then turned the canvas right way up to continue painting. On the other hand, after watching Hockney laboriously trying to reproduce the procedure he thought Van Eyck used to paint the very intricate chandelier dangling from the ceiling in the Arnolfini portrait, I was left wondering why Van Eyck did not then do the same in order to make the wedding couple more ‘realistic.’ They are waif-like and willowy, very distinctly not life-like! And how (a questioner wanted to know) did Michelangelo succeed in giving such an intense appearance of realness to the hands of his Piëta sculpture? In other words, was the perception and depiction of what is ‘real’ really dependent on lenses?
Panel discussions were to follow, pitting intellectual luminaries of the likes of Svetlana Alpers and Keith Christiansen and Jonathan Crary and James Elkins and Susan Sontag and Martin Kemp against one another. Fur and spittle were certainly going to fly. But I’d had my fill. Besides, I had far better nourishment in mind — a meal and some wine in a restaurant on Thompson Street with friends, including a fine painter from down under now working at Yale.
Over wine we thought about how man has since the beginning tried to imitate or reconstruct the ‘real’ (why? to appropriate the power of the image and the creative act, or to deny it its potency?), about how this activity was kept secret in dark caves, exactly the way movies are still projected in dark rooms — and does this not mean that man must go inside himself in order to see the light, and too, that he knows obscurely he has to ‘reproduce’ but also ‘invent’ an image which, exactly, should not be an exact replica of the model? Then the conversation turned to the similarities between painting and writing, at least in approach. There is painting in writing and a lot of writing in painting. Both present us with human constructs about the nature of reality. More precisely, they make us aware of the nature of seeing — that is, the mystery, the wobbles and approximations and limitations and interpretations — and alert us to the fumbling mounting of consciousness by words. (With hose-clad legs sticking out comically below the black cloth.)
Florence saw the ‘invention’ of perspective in representation, with apparently converging lines and diminishing sizes as observed and operated from a single-point position. Bruges and Ghent developed the Flemish approach, where successive ‘squares’ of a painting would receive the same intensity of attention to closeness and to detail, creating the effect of a collage, ‘flattening’ the surface. The same differences between closeness and distance can be observed in writing; it is defined by one’s interpretation of or need for verisimilitude. Is seeing and rendering life a process of parsing and discarding, separating the important from the ‘supporting’ and the drivel — or is it a dissolution, a way of entering the rhythms of creation?
‘Voice’ has to do with point of view. If you wish to maintain a certain distance and an objective, authorial authority, you’d want the omniscient voice, or at least the singular awareness, which relates to the fixed point of perception from where everything is put in perspective. In foregrounding that which you consider to be important, you’d inevitably ‘distort’ or ‘blur’ the rest, the surroundings. What is out of focus in painting would correspond, in writing, to that which needs to be kept in mind but is not momentarily present in the line of telling. In writing we refer to this as providing ‘setting’ and sketching ‘secondary characters.’ To maintain the illusion of life-likeness — nothing exists in isolation — you have to make the setting believable and, to a certain extent, alive, without it becoming intrusive. In a painting the looker will graze his eye over the surface, taking in both the essential and the ‘background’ and putting each in its place instinctively; in writing this relates to rendering the description of the ‘background’ vivacious enough for it to be kept in mind (or memory) for long enough to still be operative. The living memory of the text must be kept immediate. As writer you have to develop and establish the bird’s-eye view while still recognizing and accommodating the fact that the reader will read sequentially. How do you keep that which is out of sight as alive as aftertaste or as an echo? Writers have, of course, developed various techniques for doing so — mainly by creating resonance through patterns, flashbacks and metaphors. The time / totality of conception in painting and writing may be the same, but the reader will be handicapped by the obligatory linearity in apprehending the text. Can it be different? Can it not be argued that, so as to hook the reader, a story should have thrust and not just be thrashing about?