ARTS & AMUSEMENTS
Complete with Frame
By MARIO AMAYA
ONCE upon a time—about four years ago— when English art was still considered provin- cial and unfashionable abroad, it was quite easy to look at a young artist in a London gallery without worrying too much who he was; one only wondered what he was about.
But now that London art is sweeping the inter- national market, and the new generation of British sculptors and painters is being touted on both sides of the Atlantic with all the tough determination of the hard sell, the work of art often seems to get lost behind the personality puff and one finds oneself translating what one sees on the walls into what one knows about the artist himself.
David Hockney, whose new, pictures are currently on view at a badly hung exhibition in the Kasmin Gallery, is certainly caught in the ad-mass publicity machine which must do him some' disservice when his admirers become more aware of his 'Champagne Ice'-hair and gold lame jacket than the paintings he produces. It all makes for a sort of Dandyism, with art being used to project a sense of self-style, not so much dependent on the work, as on who is producing it. But this is nothing new, after all. Marcel Duchamp—the Dada of them all—predicted what was to come when he declared: 'the artist him- self must be the masterpiece.'
Despite the Time magazine colour spreads and the glossy features, Hockney still comes across as a true artist, with or without Bollinger hair. In fact he is one of the best draughtsmen of his generation and perhaps one of the most original English painters of the 'sixties. Moreover, his new exhibition, although somewhat uneven, proves he is not only brilliant at producing highly personal descriptions of literary subject-matter. This time he has put his shrewd Bradford wit to work on a series of pictures with their own ornately drawn frames that send up the whole ludicrous situation in the art world today, in which we seem more interested in well-mounted movements than in the paintings themselves. In turning from his usual game of satirising oddities of human behaviour in a Mod world, to the more specialised business of making fun of his own profession, he might be accused of an in-group joke—for the trade, as it were. But the fact is that nowadays artists have become so involved with answering each other's styles that to the average viewer looking 'at their paintings must often seem like eavesdropping on a dialogue in edgy-peggy. The inbred cross- references inherent in all this painting about painting has reached such depths of self-conscious concern, that perhaps it was time somebody painted a painting about the painting of a painting. Titles of Hockney's 'Pictures with Frames,' such as More Realistic Still Life, Less Realistic ,SWILLile, Picture of a Pointless Abstract Drawing Framed Under Glass, give us a good idea of what he is about. On the whole, this is literary painting with a sardonic twist that depends on our relating the title references to the imagery. Usually Hockney's puns, visual or literary, are not in themselves very funny. Yet, as with the Marx Brothers or the Beatles, bad jokes become clever and witty because it is Hockney who is telling them in his own artless way. In this collection there is a deliberate effort to be 'ugly' and faux naïf, and the whimsical,. pottery-gnomish attitudes are expressed with de- tached, wry, ironic humour. Nevertheless he constantly keeps us guessing as to how much is a pose, how much is accidental and how much planned. In one of the paintings on show called Rocky Mountains with Tired Indians, there is an almost child-like summary of stripy hills and cream-puff clouds behind 'Indians' that look as if they came out of a cigar store, rather than off a reservation. However, the playful scene is suddenly thrown into jarring reality with the introduction of a steel tubular office chair in the foreground. Hockney says the Indians are 'tired' because he wanted to introduce the chair for decorative reasons. In fact, he has an affection for what he calls the ridiculous, and juxtaposes illogical things to create an ambiguous story line that is meant to puzzle us. For all his literary concern, he still manages to remain involved with pure abstract form and colour, even if it turns up as water in a Hollywood swimming pool, or in the curious caterpillar shape of a Li-Lo.
If anyone, including Hockney himself, still doubts that he is part of Pop, the present exhibi- tion convinces me that although his approach is painterly and individual, he is basically concerned with the ad-mass re-use of already rendered things, not from nature or reality, but from magazine reproductions and colour photos of nature and reality. This is clear in the punning of pictures of pictures, particularly the Pointless abstract drawing framed under glass, where the drawn reflection of the glass itself as it might be seen in a photograph of a picture under glass, becomes almost part of the abstraction beneath. This, to my mind is pure Pop, enhanced by its being a print which exaggerates its mass-repro- duced quality.
Hockney's two and half years on America's West Coast and his frequent trips to New York may have influenced his subject-matter, but he still sticks to that best of all British exports, a sort of professional amateurism that sells itself by being charming, carefree and fun-loving.
Such exports travel only one way and when English artists try to import an American art attitude, it usually falls flat, as it does in Patrick Hughes's paintings at the Hanover Gallery. It would appear that Hughes has tried to approxi- mate in 'cool,' impersonal painting certain post- Dada ideas in common currency in New York. Take his rulers, for instance: surely the root of these is Duchamp's Trois Stoppages Etalon done in New York during the First World War, picked up by Jasper Johns in his. Device and perhaps used to best Super-Realist advantage by Robert Morris who cast it 'in metal with all the measure- ments just slightly off—what Philip Johnson called `a real nightmare work of art.'
Hughes places his thirteen-inch foot-rule on the side of a rectangular box drawn in an even line of black paint on a perfectly plain white enamelled surface, or on one straight horizontal line across the picture plane. So what? It doesn't startle, amuse or intrigue us. His Magritte idea of a 'painting' made out of brick wallpaper, with the shape of a house cut out in the centre through which we see a papered blue sky, is more interesting in a predictable way; and the steady
line of ladies' shoes advancing across another white enamelled board has its own style, but it hardly brings to our minds any new awareness of the objects under investigation. That this sort of close scrutiny of the commonplace is best left to American Pop-ists, can be seen at. Robert Fraser's Gallery, where Claes Oldenberg's draw- ing of a Plan for Outlet Wall Socket and Light Plug (both front and side view) is so lovingly studied that he might be having an affair with the London Electricity Board.
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