The artist David Hockney is 80 next year. This winter Taschen is publishing a Sumo career book of thousands of pages on Hockney and there will, as usual, be pictures at exhibitions all over the world. As phenomena like postmodernism have all but died Hockney’s more conventional but deeply disturbing self-styled post-photographic art goes on and on. In September 2011 an exhibition celebrating postmodernism as an era in art and design opened at the V and A museum in London, running until January 2012. Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990 celebrated a supposed twenty year era of postmodernism in design, art and architecture which has eventually, it seems, officially, belatedly, ended, though critics, audiences and reviewers of the exhibition were seemingly unsure about the actual periodisation of the ‘end’ date of the era as the late 1980s, or even if there was ever a postmodern era in the first place. Across the world in Toronto, Canada, Tara and I were working as Professors in one of the region’s universities, University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT). Just off the CBD, at the city’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) on Bloor Street West, spectacularly redesigned a few years ago by architect Daniel Libeskind as a stunning crystalline structure, a quite different exhibition of pictures was taking place. Libeskind has had to shrug off criticism of similarities between the ROM and his newest design, the Dresden Museum of Military History since the giant steel and glass wedge that extends from the front of the late nineteenth century neo-classical military museum in Dresden bears more than a passing resemblance to the glass and steel crystals with which Libeskind controversially adorned the ROM in Toronto in the 2000s. Toronto’s reoriented museum space was nonetheless a perfect post-space for some particular pictures at an exhibition. It was a ‘museum of art and nature’ according to Libeskind himself and was a wonderful platform for David Hockney’s ground breaking Fresh Flowers which Tara and I went to and watched with awe and shock. Frankly, if Hockney’s iPod and iPad etchings have the potential to be pregnant with a lasting and sustainable art movement, the Libeskind building was an exemplary platform, clashing the old and new as never before. That art movement, ‘post-photography’ as Hockney himself has described it, is a complex mix of the old and new. The ‘age of the post-photographique’ is upon us if we are to believe Hockney, beguiling us with his Yorkshire French. Hockney entitled his 2007 piece for the Royal Academy of Arts, Bigger Trees Near Water or/ou Peinture en Plein pour l’age Post-Photographique. The ROM exhibition of Fresh Flowers: Drawings on the iPhone and iPad not only showcased a new medium, and message, it could even herald a new era as postmodernism eventually fades into the London fog. It was certainly the first exhibition emailed to museums around the world! David Hockney has given a very personal history of the move to ‘post-photography’ in the ROM exhibition, something which originated when he returned to live for a while at the time in the family home in Bridlington (or as he calls it ‘Brid’) in east Yorkshire after decades in the USA to which he has now returned. He argued, in the ROM catalogue originally ‘sent from his iPad’, that he ‘was aware immediately’ when he ‘started drawing on the iPhone that it was a new medium – and not only a new medium, but also a very new way to distribute pictures’. Further, Hockney insisted:‘I have always been an advocate of drawing. The teaching of drawing, I always thought, was the teaching of looking – very good for everybody! I joked about it – who would have thought the telephone could bring back drawing? One quickly realises that it is a luminous medium and very good for luminous subjects. I began to draw the sunrise seen from my bed on the east coast of England. The iPhone was by my bed; it contained everything you needed; no mess; so you didn’t even have to clean up. I wouldn’t have drawn the sunrise with just a pencil and a piece of paper. It was the luminosity of the screen that connected me to it.’ For Hockney, significant questions arose from this method – for drawings which he subsequently emailed to friends, were they reproductions and how could he publicly exhibit them?. He said at the time ‘they are exactly the same as I had on my phone: it was just a digital file that I had sent them so in theory they were identical, at least to the naked eye. They would differ slightly, I reasoned, only because each surface of an iPhone is a physical thing and therefore each one would have tiny differences on its physical surface. So how would one see them collectively? You could download them onto the computer but then they are a different size. It was this problem that prompted this exhibition. An interesting challenge worth a try: how do we exhibit them? The iPhone in the hand is one thing, it’s quite another on the wall. A bit too small then, so you would have to be very close to see them. As the number of them grew we devised a triptych slide show that we projected onto a screen’. For the Fresh Flowers exhibition catalogue, Hockney recalled that:‘with the iPhone I often drew with my thumb. I could hold it in my right hand and my thumb could reach every corner of the screen as it was small and the fulcrum of the thumb is within the thumb. I learned to type with my thumb as well, holding my phone in my right hand. I could then have a cigarette in my left hand to help me concentrate. I was one of the first to get an iPad simply because it was bigger and i assumed the drawings could be more complicated. I suggested to friends that they get one and I would send them drawings. There was a new thing on the iPad. You could play the drawing back with the press of a button. I had never seen myself draw before, this also seemed fascinating to everybody I showed them to. The only thing seen like this before was Picasso drawing on glass for a film.’
The thousands of pages of the forthcoming Taschen Hockney giant scale doorstopper book this winter will set a lot of this reflexive Hockney thinking of a few years ago into contemporary context. But the post-photographic is definitely with us now.
