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February 27, 2007
I'd mentioned this David Hockney painting in an earlier post As it is seen as an iconic and groundbreaking painting by the National Gallery of Australia. I was suprised, and puzzled, to see it stuck away above some escalators, rather than given pride of place.
David Hockney, A Bigger Grand Canyon, 1998
A Bigger Grand Canyon is a series of 60 paintings of the Grand Canyon in the Arizona desert, that are combined to produce one enormous picture that gestures back to Picasso. It was bought by the National Gallery of Australia for $4.6 million. Hockney is still a working artist. It is the intensity of colour and the blocks of colour that is the immediate impact of A Bigger Grand Canyon, and its the colour which creates the structure and the shape.
The NGA evaluates the painting in terms of the limitations of photography and the ways of looking at landscape.
Hockney, suprisingly, has strong views on photography, as he thinks it is a dying medium because it has gone digital. Though he worked in photography during his photo-collages of the 1980s Hockney now says that photography is inherently inferior to painting as an art form. First the camera sees geometrically. We don't. So paintingg and drawing express the human point of view. Secondly, perspective is built into the photograph and therein lies its limits. The Grand Canyon was deemed to be unphotographable, meaning that its real subject is space and photography can't show you that.
Yet the composition of arrayed smaller canvases emphasize the optical mechanics based on photography, and this underlays the Grand Canyon mural-picture in the form of draft collage assemblies. What we have is a different kind of perspective--a reworking of the cubist one.
Hockney's painting also lets the subjective experience of places and things unfold within a visual space that makes the observer an active party. His organisation of this space involves the observer very directly in the experience of phenomena related to concepts such as tangibility and incomprehensibility, as well as to their psychological parallels: intimacy and distance.
Putting this together we can say that, in contrast to a lot of traditional depictions of the canyon from fixed or singe point of view or perspective with their illusionistic or atmospheric depth, Hockney's flattened panorama enables us to have an impression of being there, of being in the landscape, engaging with it. We are in the landscape rather than looking at through a window or frame. The subject, who has disappeared from view, appears only as viewer, becoming aware of space and time and how they are closely related.
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mmm, perhaps I was being too hostile when I viewed this work, or maybe I was responding to the whole curatorial position at the nga...
or maybe its just that, in agreement with your original comment regarding this picture, I would have preferred to be standing in front of a wonderful Emily Kngwarrye, or even Spider Kalbybdibi
http://www.shortstgallery.com.au/artist.php?id=549
or many others.
(I have spoken to the director here...she seems to have the health and interests of her artists as a priority)
I was aware of the photographic/perspective investigation Hockney has made here, I just have never felt particularly engaged by this piece, whereas there is so much worthy and engaging indigenous painting which articulate a vital aspects of our landscape and culture.