This weekend marks the conclusion of the magnificent David Hockney retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum, and also the journey of that show, both geographically and conceptually, through markedly distinct iterations in its originating venue, Tate Britain, and the Pompidou Center. But while its various outings placed greater or lesser emphasis on photography, drawing, multimedia works, stage works, portraiture, Etc., the overall characterization of Hockney as a tireless explorer was consistent. Less space was made available to the show in New York than in London or Paris, but that made no dent in the power of this presentation: it was, indeed, a small price to pay (for him and for us) for the honor of his sharing a roof with Rodin and Michelangelo, and by extension, Munch. In fact, the pleasure of seeing his stunning double portraits hang almost cheek by jowl in an almost domestic-feeling gallery accentuated appreciation of a series that occupied the intellectual heart of the Met exhibition. These and the legendary swimming pools and the sumptuous late explorations of Hollywood and Yorkshire landscapes were stepping stones on a journey through a multifaceted oeuvre that flowed more effortlessly, it might be argued, than Hockney’s peripatetic career itself. And yet it is telling to the notion of journey that the most memorable and (in my experience) remarked upon moments in this show were at its outset and conclusion: The charismatic exuberance of his “primitive,” graffiti-like student works (so much larger than one had ever imagined from reproductions) and the mesmerizing animated iPad paintings that ensured a crowded and lingering exit. Equally daring, in their varyingly experimental, critical, personal ways, these works revel in curiosity about living in the world and seeing it.

David Hockney, Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 27, 2018 to February 25, 2018

The post Featured item from THE LIST: David Hockney at the Met appeared first on artcritical.

The post Studio Visit (in a Garden): Oona Zlamany calls on David Hockney in London appeared first on artcritical.

We don’t talk much about “art” when I see Jeremy Davis. We end up goofing around or talking about songs, movies, just about anything else. Sitting down with him in his Portland studio, I learned more about his philosophy and process than I ever would have otherwise. Davis has most recently shown his art at the Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center at Oregon State University, with permanent installations of his work there, as well as The Studio Museum in Harlem’s “Speaking of People: Ebony, Jet and Contemporary Art.” During this studio visit, Davis and I got to talking about his most recent paintings and a few of his affinities found on Tumblr.

I walked in to see a massive painting he’d been working on. The painting brings together imagery inspired by the cover of We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite; an Oregon State University student protest; portraits of John Coltrane, Max Roach, and Charles Mingus; a quotation from Ralph Abernathy; and a large black gestural stroke on an abstract background of yellow and orange hues. At eight-by-six feet, this commissioned piece goes along with 25 smaller portraits of black leaders for the Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center at OSU.

PAUL MAZIAR: What are you working on?

JEREMY OKAI DAVIS: These 25 portraits lining the wall and this painting that’s been kind of morphing over the past few weeks. I’m trying to keep things loose.

I was talking to a friend who was here earlier and was telling him I want to do a really gestural black stroke across the painting. It’s funny because I’m kind of over-thinking it, when the idea of gestural is to just do it. I think I need to be in the right mindset to be that free and loose. It’s kind of intimidating. Usually it happens if I’m working on something else. If I’m doing something, I’ll look over there and think, Now, it’s time.

Do you think that gesture has anything to do with the sounds you hear from the Roach album? It has a lot of moments…

Punchy moments. Maybe that’s what it’s gonna take. Like when Abbey Lincoln screams. Maybe it takes getting invested in those tracks to make me do something crazy. Like a moment. The painting is called Predicting a Movement.

You’re waiting for the moment to make that brush stroke… you want to get around doing it a certain way.

I want to make an actual gesture. It’s difficult, though. I want it to be gestural, but to tell yourself to be loose and free, you’re putting yourself in this box. And for me that mark is such an important part of the piece. I want it to be free, but it’s a big part of the piece so it has to be right, strange.

Where are these images from?

The OSU archive. In 1969, the Black Student Union had staged a walk-out, when Fred Milton, an OSU football player, was asked to shave his beard; he didn’t want to, and the coach threatened to kick him off the team. They did a lot of things like this, but this image is one I was really drawn to. The image of union and movement.

Is that what accounts for the drips and splatters in your figurative paintings?

I think so. For me the drips and that kind of thing make it feel more like a painting. When you get in close and tight on them, taking little squares out to look at, they’re a bunch of little abstract paintings. That’s how I come at it, instead of smoothing out everything.

When I go to galleries and museums, I enjoy myself more when I move around the paintings, seeing how the work shifts. The richness and buildup of the paint are super important to me. I get disappointed sometimes when I see something online that I really love, and I go to see the piece in person at an art show — and it’s exactly like it was on the Internet! Like a flat jpeg with a smooth surface, etc. — no improvisation. I think you hope for a new experience.

There’s this other element to your paintings that, to me, is shared with jazz, experimental music and poetry — where you return to it and see something new. Like you’ve never encountered it before.

I’m just now starting to get into jazz and investigating it, listening to Money Jungle (1963) a bunch; I’m getting so much out of it. Every listen feels different, depending on your mood. That’s the amazing thing about jazz: it’s timeless and location-less.

I see a lot of movement in Predicting a Movement. Has this album been a recent influence?

I don’t think one song in particular, but yeah, jazz in general has been.

I was going to bring up affinities. Your Tumblr has a lot of good stuff on it. Some of it seems to have a timelessness about it. Do you think much about tradition or trends?

No. I don’t think about that at all. Well, I do. I think about them and try to avoid them.

You’ve got a lot of powerful imagery here. How about the museum guard photograph, where the man is standing there looking at a painting?

That was a film shot at the Portland Art Museum. My friend Nate and I were just walking around and we saw him standing there looking at that painting for a really long time. It’s a really great painting: just the sea, that’s all it is. It’s one of those things you can just get totally lost in; the water starts moving if you look at it long enough.

Imagine how many times he’s seen that painting!

Maybe he does that every day; maybe getting lost in that painting is his break.

Vince Staples’ Señorita (2015) video is amazing. At the end where he opens up his coat and it’s just a black hole. That part is insane!

That is a crazy video. I’m super inspired by a lot of what’s happening in hip hop right now. There was a long period of time where musicians weren’t considering their audience, and the music videos weren’t considerate of the audience either. It seems like right now, more than the last 15-20 years, the artists are really thinking of the audience and this video is just another example of that.

Everything in that piece, considering the cultural climate right now, is really important. I think I posted two in a row, that one and Close Your Eyes and Count to Fuck (2014) by Run the Jewels. They share similarities. The Vince Staples video is like a zoo, basically, where people are just watching the chaos, like all the news reports right now. And with the Run The Jewels song, with Zach de la Rocha, the scenario is a young black man and a middle-aged cop. They’re just wrestling, moving through the streets; it’s a choreographed fight. They end up in a house pouring milk all over each other and end up totally exhausted at the end. It’s supposed to show a dance that cultures have been having for years and years and how we’re trained to fight, trained to be at odds.

It seems like you’ve always had cultural references in your paintings.

Definitely. Whether it’s just pop culture, celebrity news, or the real news that people want to pay attention to. I pay attention to it all. It makes its way into my work, always. But it’s never in your face. I’ve always tried to make sure my paintings aren’t grandstanding. I want people to see it, think about it, go home and let it stick. They hear a news report or they’re listening to jazz and might think of this painting. I just want these little moments in time with my paintings to kind of bubble up.

What’s the idea behind the series of smaller portraits?

I wanted to find inspiring African-Americans from history. Pictures of them, not as kids, but young, before they were legendary. The reason being is that I wanted them to be relatable to the kids who’ll see them. To show possibility: they were bright-eyed kids just like you. So it’s these and then the Lonnie B. Harris portrait with the rest alongside him.

What’s next?

My mom’s from Liberia and I am just now realizing I don’t know a lot about her. I want to do a body of work that’ll be an investigation of Liberia and her in some way, relating to the disconnect that I have from my mom and Africa. A charting of my education of where she came from in my paintings. I have images in my head of what it’ll be, but I’m not sure yet.

I’ve always tried to temper my excitement, but it’s hard for me to think about this work being at OSU for all time and not get stoked. This stuff is going to be permanently installed. As an artist, that’s kind of my goal, to inspire for all time. I look at someone like David Hockney, and a lot of these artists, the pieces they made in the ‘60s and ‘70s. I still call back those for inspiration. To think that the possibility is out there that some kid in 2070 might stumble into the Cultural Center and see my paintings and decide to be a painter, is pretty amazing. I think that’s the kind of the goal for me. It keeps the ball rolling, you know?

Are all children artists?

I think so. Everybody has a creative side. I think everybody can exercise that if they choose to. Some people don’t have the desire to exercise it, they have other things that are important to them, which is fine.

It takes a certain person to let it take over. It’s a fun thing to do, but to let art take over your life is kind of scary. To let it be the thing that you do can be kind of frightening. I think everybody isn’t a genius, but everyone has the capacity to be a genius at their chosen vocation.

The post Politics on the Canvas, Online, Now: A Studio Visit with Jeremy Okai Davis appeared first on artcritical.

October 10, 2015 to January 10, 2016
1219 SW Park Avenue (at SW Madison Street)
Portland, OR, 503 226 2811

“Cézanne’s was not a canvas, it was a landscape.”
-Frantz Jourdain

I recently went to the Portland Art Museum to look at “Seeing Nature,” a survey of “landscape masterworks” from the Paul Allen Family Collection. Passing through the Paradise: Fallen Fruit imbroglio at Portland Art Museum’s entrance makes this exhibition an even more pleasurable destination. The former’s tormented, though enjoyable, curatorial bent is a commentary on modern culture and our inheritance of its public spaces, through various paintings and sculptures of PAM’s permanent collection spanning several eras, abutted sans-info or contextual sequencing. Less the mélange than a remix, though extremely understated, sculptures are clustered on a plinth at center gallery, while paintings hang in crushes along the walls. A good thing about this concept is that it takes canonized works and forces the viewer to answer for themselves the question, “Why is this major?” It’s a contemporary idea not short on tradition. That it’s jumbled up isn’t a reproach, it’s the point of the piece — to raise questions by making a work of art out of past works. But “Seeing Nature”’s M.O. is something much simpler though still nuanced, and visiting both exhibitions makes for two different museum experiences. One way of presenting a collection isn’t more valuable than the other, but what happened during my visit made certain institutional implements seem worthy of their subsisting charms.

The Paul Allen Family collection, some of whose 39 works are seen here in public for the first time, is composed of quite a few French Impressionist works and an impressive, wide array of other works from the last 500 years. The exhibition’s supreme appeal seems to be its intention to give the sensory experience of landscape. However old-hat this may seem to be, it works. The show’s sequencing is uncomplicated, with ample wall space between works, allowing space for longer looking. Three large galleries hold the paintings with central seating in each for tired feet, long visits, Instagramming, etc., and the the walls are affixed with artworks in unexpected and titillating curations.

The first room features the glorified French works including five by Monet, as well as Paul Signac’s Morning Calm, Concarneau, Opus 219 (Larghetto) (1891) with a musical connection in Pointillist fragmentation, like musical notes coming together to form a number. Signac’s fragments, like other of the experimentally adventuresome paintings in this show, fully allow the viewer to put the optical illusion of sailboats off the coast of Brittany together retinally and with their imagination. Seeing Gustav Klimt’s experimental 1903 oil painting of a birch forest at Attersee, Birch Forest, I can’t help but laugh, picturing Klimt painting among the birches, holding up his opera glasses to distort and augment the sights. The close-up view of birches juxtaposed with spacial illusion of the rest of the forest is dizzying and totally pleasurable.

Still, the same question can be asked: Why are these paintings famous and why should I care? My favorite of the show, Henri Le Sidaner’s Serenade at Venice (1907), immediately sent me into a state of reverie and welled my eyes, which also happened when I saw Degas’ Café Singer (1879) in Chicago. What causes such a reaction? Light (paint) forming the impression of life (the singer’s red lips, the sun, or in Le Sidaner’s case, low nocturnal flameglow). Le Sidaner, “delicious rhapsodist of night,” replicates the feeling of gloaming at night by way of painted paper lanterns, the luxury of sightseeing, and music made possible by subtle chiaroscuro (without Baroque melodrama) in his 1905 painting of gondoliers on a Venetian lagoon.

One of the other two rooms is full of Modernist favorites like O’Keefe, Ruscha, Richter, Hockney, Magritte, and Ernst, many of which are stretches when it comes to landscape, raising the question: what is a landscape? Take for instance Ed Ruscha’s Premium Oil (1965), a painting that brings the landscape to its viewer in its absence. What Ruscha presents here is a large silhouetted building, with the landscape a mere suggestion left to the viewer’s imagination. One would be remiss to not mention David Hockney’s massive panoramic stunner in oil, The Grand Canyon (1998), a veritable contemporary Fauve take on the natural monument. It’s by turns flat, illusionistic, cartoony, and naturalistic.

The third room features the older of the paintings, with artworks that document a return to classical themes, myths, and architecture. Jan Brueghel the Younger’s 1625 series, “The Five Senses,” involves the landscape combined with portraiture and still life, while Venice occupies the canvases of Turner, Canaletto, Manet, and Moran.

Returning to the first room to leave, I happened on Joan Kirsch, an art historian and docent giving a public tour. Knowing her wide frame of reference and clear, entertaining eloquence, I couldn’t miss the chance to listen in. Joan’s one of a kind who’s been around a while. She once told me that she used to rollerskate to the Met and then roll around the galleries looking at all the art. She and her group were at Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire (1888-90). I learned things that contextualized an already thrilling painting in ways that maybe wouldn’t happen without the mediated viewing of the guided tour. In Cézanne, this kind of viewing is absolutely helpful.

Knowing that Cézanne has probably influenced every painter since his death doesn’t lessen his works’ challenging aspects. In this and the hundreds of Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings Cézanne made, the natural landscape looks unnatural, larger than life, not at all like it does in situ. Cézanne’s structured, strange brush strokes (owing their slant to his left-handedness) reflect the painter’s emotional baggage, to paraphrase Joan. He painted his interpretation — what he wanted you to see, not what’s necessarily there. All this led to a conversation about why so much of the work in this exhibition was satisfying, and why we call this kind of work “great.” Cézanne (one of the first experimental painters of the Modern era), like so many of the artists in this exhibition, only wanted to give you part of the picture and so he left the rest for the viewer to discern or keep wondering about. “When you’re in a forest,” Joan explained, “you don’t even need to see the whole tiger. If you see his tail, you run.”

“Seeing Nature” will also travel to The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the New Orleans Museum of Art, and will conclude at the Seattle Art Museum in 2017.

The post 500 Years of Earth: A Survey of Landscapes at the Portland Art Museum appeared first on artcritical.

October 2014: Ken Johnson, Joan Waltemath and Marjorie Welish joined moderator David Cohen to discuss exhibitions of Jenny Holzer at Cheim & Read, Peter Fend at Essex Street, David Hockney at Pace Gallery and John Walker at Alexandre Gallery.  The panel took place at the National Academy Museum.  Video by Anna Shukeylo.  Recording Engineer: Isaac Derfel.

The post October 2014: Ken Johnson, Joan Waltemath and Marjorie Welish with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

The post October 2014: The Review Panel Turns 10 appeared first on artcritical.

October 26, 2013 to January 20, 2014
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

David Hockney’s “A Bigger Exhibition” is expansive and multifaceted, driven by Hockney’s unflagging curiosity about picture-making and his relentless rhythm of production.  Organized by the de Young Museum in cooperation with his personal curator, Gregory Evans, it follows up on the artist’s European show, “A Bigger Picture”, and features over 250 works in new and old media, many of large scale, completed since 2002.

Like Claude Monet, Hockney works in series; his paintings address time and optical truth, and they expand into large-scale decorations. Like Monet, he ignores the constraints of monocular perspective, and, just as Monet grew more ambitious over the turn of the past century, so Hockney aims to redefine painting for the digital age. Central to the show is his gallery of four nine-channel videos of Woldgate Woods near his home in Britain (2010-11) – a contemporary Orangerie, where viewers can follow, virtually, the road depicted in many of his paintings. A triumph of technology based in Renaissance optics is here displaced onto thirty-six different “eyes”, allowing the woods to unfold in different seasons in spectacular arrays of moving images. Viewers are forced to enact the multiple scans that make up our stable image of the visual field, much in the way Monet forced them to combine the retinal stimuli that supply its color.

Hockney questions not just the fixation of Western art on the single vanishing point but the look of “reality” it engenders. His “Great Wall”, a project from 2002 reconstructed in the exhibition, juxtaposes color reproductions of European portraits from 1300 to 1900, tracking the emergence of lens-based vision. Documenting painters’ experiments with the concave mirror and camera lucida, Hockney demonstrates the extent of its influence on painting and, he argues, on contemporary mass culture. In his own paintings here, he continues to move away from the photographic finish of his early portraits. Marks and gestures predominate, enlarged and stylized, the legacy of van Gogh, who sought to wrest a personal vision from direct encounters with his subjects.

Hockney likewise bases his work on direct observation, from pocket-size sketchbooks to the large, composite canvases completed on special easels outdoors. They call to mind the more restrained but intensely rendered panoramas of his countryman, Rackstraw Downes, who explores the curvature of the perceptual field with a photographic level of detail, but eschews the camera and technology in general. Hockney, on the other hand, relishes his enlistment of the iPhone and iPad in subverting the Western version of reality. His digital drawings extend the urbane informality and witty observations of his sketchbooks into uncharted electronic territory, where they can be animated and enlarged. Displayed on screens, they’re magically luminous, their dematerialized calligraphy sometimes dancing disconnected from the image, sometimes reinforcing it with emphatic highlights and shadows. Animated, they reveal their successive transformations; the process of revision is open-ended, and the “true” look of the world is always subject to reinterpretation.

Hockney refers to these works as drawings, perhaps to acknowledge their provisional status, yet they also involve their own sensibility, a tension between intimacy and detachment. There’s something similar in Chuck Close’s use of the photograph as a tool in his portraits, employing the gridded image to structure his expressionistic mark making and keep it detached from the sitter. The iPhone portraits bring Hockney closer to his subjects, eliminating the respectful social distance he maintains in his paintings, and they encourage freer mark making, yet when presented on screens or in high-resolution prints, these exploratory marks, the fluid strokes and linear scribbles that can lend them surprising density, remain in the virtual realm. Similar marks in the paintings are more physically immediate, even if they become increasingly stylized in his larger landscapes.

Hockney presents two suites of iPad landscapes enlarged into multi-panel compositions, where they assume a different character, like Alex Katz’s enlargements of his sketches into sharply focused images that celebrate their own artifice. One series of “tree tunnels”, related to the multi-channel video, documents the everyday beauty of nature, but their high-keyed colors, reflective mud puddles and stylized splashes of raindrops seem imported from Japanese animation. In the second series, images of Yosemite veiled in clouds allude to Chinese landscape paintings, and the enlarged gestural marks bring wondrous intimacy to the sublime vistas of the valley. Like both Monet and van Gogh, Hockney finds in Asian art, with its calligraphy, free use of perspective and flat areas of color, a means to liberate painting from Renaissance conventions.

Well before these digital experiments, an exceptional expansion was underway in Hockney’s landscape paintings. Beginning with his return to Yorkshire in 2004, his gestural marks become more urgent and also more differentiated as he tackles roadside vegetation and the close-up articulation of trees. There’s an increasing stylization to the large paintings, as though in groping for the look of the landscape he’s drawing on his experience in set design.  Tree tunnels, compositions with groves of trees in reverse perspective, and fantastical spring blossoms are increasingly regimented, clumped together, with differentiated colors for branches and leaves, and dots and hatches for ground cover and bark.

The largest work in the show, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (Twenty Eleven), Version 3, further isolates and stylizes the marks representing different sorts of leaves and flowers. Like the backdrop for a ballet, it also recalls the Symbolist landscapes of Maurice Bernard, as well as Japanese screens and William Morris’s wallpaper designs. Hockney aims for visual immersion through sheer scale, but its flattened shapes still keep us at a distance and don’t engage us as fully in virtual experience as the high-resolution videos.

In terms of immersion, it’s difficult for the hand to compete with electronic media. Technology is enormously seductive, and the receding landscapes of Hockney’s videos generate effects reminiscent of video games; could viewers be offered their own controllers? For all its ambition, Hockney’s exploration of electronic media remains at a relatively basic level, open to the everyday viewer – as opposed, for example, to Peter Campus’s slow-motion renderings of changing, pixillated colors in what amount to digitized neo-Impressionist paintings, or to Bill Viola’s rendering of Pontormo’s “Visitation”.

Engaging the audience is Hockney’s subject in A Bigger Message (2010), a thirty-panel reinterpretation of Claude Lorrain’s “Sermon on the Mount” (1656). Implicit is Hockney’s own sense of mission, his call for “wider vantages”. Everything centers on Christ on the distant crest, around which multitudes assemble for access to the “message”. His progressive re-workings of this painting recall Picasso’s riffs on earlier masterpieces. There’s even a cubist version, but Hockney doesn’t press it very far; he’s more about expansion than about compressing multiple views into a single image. With increasing exaggeration in color, the later versions take the painting in his own post-photographic direction. The scene becomes a stage set, a psychedelic media event, with a vermillion mount, and whimsical fortifications arising in the middle distance. If in Claude’s era, oil painting served to make visions of distant times and supernatural events convincingly real, here painting is absorbed into a larger spectacle.

Coming of age in the heyday of Warhol and popular visual culture, Hockney inhabits a media-saturated world and assumes a populist stance: if there’s no truthful image, just multiple views, our world image must evolve through broad cultural participation. As poet Charles Olson observed, “polis is eyes”.  Rethinking photography opens a field for individual play, and Hockney makes a case for painting, liberated from monocular vision, to assume an important role. Like Dziga Vertov, who created a Cubist cinema in the 1920s, Hockney proposes that we also use technology in a radical democratization of image making. The Jugglers (2012), an eighteen-screen projection near the end of the show, provides a model of playful and inventive social exchange, with its ongoing interplay of random displacements and boundary crossings. Hockney’s appeal, arising from his appreciation of nature’s attractions and his empathy with friends and society, is ultimately sustained through this empowerment of his audience.

The post David Hockney: A Bigger Vision appeared first on artcritical.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/201601466″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Leslie Camhi, Barry Schwabsky, and Katy Siegel joined David Cohen to review exhibitions of Tracey Emin, Sterling Ruby, David Hockney and Sharon Horvath.

The post November 2009: Leslie Camhi, Barry Schwabsky, and Katy Siegel with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.