'David Hockney: Bigger & Closer' - a review

David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not

smaller & further away)

David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (a review)

Welcome

This is an account of a visit to the Lightroom, to see the David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) show.

I went with no more in mind than to produce a short review for a friend who, being on the other side of the world beyond the closing date of 4 June, would not get to see it for himself.

Words and photography

by David Guest

For more of David Guest’s work, visit www.townsof2halves. co.uk

The ‘short review’ grew, but it remains a personal view and the opinions expressed are my own. As are the photographs, but perhaps Hockney should take most of the credit for them.

Where

The Lightroom is advertised as eight minutes’ walk from Kings Cross. You go left out of the railway station, left again at York Way and head off towards what used to be the backside of the Caledonian Road.

That would once have been a discouraging prospect. It’s also a brisk eight minutes. But when you get to the eastern extension of the Grand Union Canal it becomes clear that the No-Man’s-Land you remember has turned into Disneyland while your back was turned.

On your right, the rippling frontage of the Guardian’s headquarters looks like something Gaudi might have done had glass been the only material available to him. On your left, dispiriting industrial wasteland has given way to Regeneration. Lewis Cubitt Square, home of the Lightroom, lies towards the top-left of this Cultural Quarter. Lewis Cubitt, by the way, was the architect who designed Kings Cross.

WhenI went on Tuesday, 7 March 2023. It was a cold day and the forecast was for rain.

As is often the case in the postlockdown world, you don’t simply turn up and pay on the door. The exhibition is a kind of son et lumière on a continuous loop. You buy a ticket and enter at a specific time – 1.30pm in my case.

The full show lasts 50mins but they don’t chuck you out after 50mins. In fact as far as I could see, once you’re inside you could stay there all day if you chose.

How Much

The ticket cost £25. To put that into some kind of perspective:

l It’s not far off what you would have paid to watch Oldham Athletic beat Woking 1-0 in the National League that evening, in serious discomfort as the temperature in Lancashire plunged towards -3°C

l It’s about 17 times what you’d pay to see the pride of Vietnam’s artwork in the National Fine Arts Museum in Hanoi

l It’s only a little over three times as much as the price of a 175ml glass of white wine in the bar of the Lightroom.

But the true perspective, I think, this being David Hockney we’re talking about, is that £25 would buy you only 40 cigarettes in 2023.

Granted, 40 cigarettes would provide about 4hrs of pure smoking pleasure, rather than the cheerlessly smoke-free 50mins of the exhibition. And at the end of the exhibition you’re still 50mins closer to death than you had been at the start. But how much closer to the end might 40 cigarettes bring you? No. This exhibition is time and money well spent.

If

an arts venue could easily make the world slightly more beautiful, why wouldn’t it? Left, the Lightroom e-ticket; right, a small collection from the

elsewhere

... and let the show begin

Hockney’s stained glass window in Westminster Abbey

Reception

It was snowing gently when I arrived at the Lightroom. The bar staff, excitable young folk, were thrilled by the snow.

A first point in the place’s favour, then: demonstrative staff. Helpful, too. When I ordered a glass of wine the young woman behind the bar asked me, in effect, whether I’d be drinking in or taking away. Puzzled, I indicated the snow at the window and said: “In, I think, please.”

She said: “No, I meant here in the bar or do you want to take it downstairs with you?” Downstairs was the entrance to the auditorium. Oh joy! A gallery that will help you to get drunk while improving your mind. I opted for the 175ml drink that could go wherever I did.

Behind the bar, a box of Yorkshire Tea decaf tea-bags was prominently displayed. I asked whether that was in honour of the Bradford-born artist? No, she replied, with a hint of disdain; Hockney would hardly drink decaf, surely?

Transfer

The bar contributes to a form of trompe l’oeil practised by the designer of the Lightroom. It is all you see of the place at ground level.

To move into the auditorium, you go downstairs and follow long, ill-lit and generally disorientating corridors around what feels like at least two sides of a square and possibly more. It will be apparent that I was already on the way to a state of increased suggestibility. The noise – the soundtrack to the show – increases and resolves itself as you emerge into a holding area, a viewing gallery at the back of the exhibition room.

The Lightroom, then, is a vast cubic space perhaps 25 x 40yds and three or four storeys

high. Images are projected on to all four sides and the floor. Visitors can take in the show from one of three different vantage points:

l The floor, to be able to see all four sides

l The lower gallery, for three sides and the floor

l The upper gallery, ditto, but much higher.

A second notably helpful steward pointed the upper gallery out to me – I might not have been aware of it otherwise. I went out through a pair of swing doors and up several flights of stairs through what felt like the bowels of the building. This was a service staircase of the kind you find in posh hotels when you push an emergency exit door. In posh hotels, they don’t expect anyone to do that – even on the first floor, to get down to the ground. Here, perhaps there remains some decorating to be done. At the top, more swing doors opened on to a viewing platform not far off ceiling level. It was a dramatic prospect.

Delivery

The show is, as noted, essentially a son et lumière presentation. The son varies: David Hockney’s voice provides the commentary, supplemented for no obvious reason by a slender line of surtitles in English at the top of the front wall; music accompanies many of the sequences.

The lumière is quite spectacular. Hockney’s work is projected on to the walls for our admiration, with occasional digressions to explain a point of technique or art history. His output in many different contexts and media are organised, curated and in some cases very cleverly animated to make various points that the commentary draws our attention to.

The show has six sections. Unfortunately I

From the lower viewing platform, a ramp descends to floor level. Here are randomly dispersed pouffes and, in the triangles of two corners, short rows of low padded benches.

The upper viewing platform

wasn’t making notes. I recall a tutorial on perspective and sections on his stage career, Los Angeles, and photography, but I’m not sure where the dividing lines lay.

Photography

I’ll start here because this is where I was paying most attention.

The section started off unpromisingly: Hockney’s remarks seemed questionable and/or low on insight. For example, he said something about a person with a camera not really looking at the object. And a photograph represents a moment in time. A painter, by contrast, has to look at every blade of grass; and time passes.

However... the chapter moved into what he had done with a camera, especially the collage/composite works that in some cases feature hundreds

of photographs. Tragically, my own photography seems to have failed us at this point. I’m sorry not to have Pearblossom Highway in particular – the Lightroom presentation works best, I think, with an image that projects forward from the floor into a vanishing point somewhere up the front wall. The Tristan & Isolde pictures (eg left) make that point well. Happily not everybody is as inept as me: https://www.instagram.com/p/CpdnO8FLXgs/ will take you to it.

I’m not sure what the message was here. A digital camera is a lazy shortcut except in the hands of a skilled and ingenious artist? Sometimes Hockney comes across as... how to say this?... a bit Yorkshire for my tastes. Also (and I may be picking the odd nit here) why would a painter look at every blade of grass if he’s only going to make a couple of marks in darker or lighter green, here and there, on a plain green background, to give an impression?

Swimming pools

That came into my head again when we came to Los Angeles and swimming pools. Hockney talked about taking a different approach to painting water over a period of years. And yes, the sequence of projections demonstrates his skill and versatility as a technician as well as an evolution in the way he perceives the subject.

By the last picture in the sequence, however, he appears to have lost all interest in painting the reflection of light from a fluid surface. Well, it’s one of the most famous pictures of the latter part of

the 20th century, and what would I know? I just don’t think very highly of it and I thought, here, that it undermined his argument.

This was one of a number of points at which I missed the company of the friend for whom I was reviewing the show. Apart from anything else, he knows what he’s talking about in areas where I, in effect, end up saying nothing more sophisticated than: “I know what I like.”

Theatre

The commentary made the point that his work for the stage is probably the least well-known section of Hockney’s output. Quite so. I could count the number of times I’ve gone to see The Magic Flute, Turandot, The Rake’s Progress and others on the fingers of one hand.

This was where the Lightroom really shone, so to speak. The images moved. Figures paraded across the screen with announcement cards, like girls indicating the next round at a boxing match; dark sinister bipeds danced in Ravel’s garden; the shadows of mysterious winged creatures swooped across the floor.

Whether the Wagner Drive belonged in this chapter, I can’t quite recall. Either way, the sequence in which Hockney drives an open-topped car along a Californian mountain road, to crashing Wagnerian accompaniment, seemed like padding to me. Cyclists will be familiar with Strava, an app on which people replay every tedious parasang of their rides from cameras mounted on their helmets. Pedestrians will be equally familiar with drivers who broadcast loud music from their flashy cars. As with the digital camera, the lesson here seemed to be ambiguous: most people produce noise, but some can turn it into art.

Los Angeles

If I remember correctly, Hockney’s commentary said that one of the things that appealed to him about Los Angeles was that nobody had painted it properly before. Perhaps it was neglected because, according to the great Raymond Chandler, it was “a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup”.

And the rest

As mentioned, I thought the show was particularly effective when the front wall served to project the image forward, making it seem to be an extension of the floor. The foredeck of the vessel on page 8 is a good example. Here are a few others.

The top one, I believe, is another image from the Tristan and Isolde sequence. Once again, notes would have helped. In my defence, the light was unreliable and the pace with which one image succeeded another was never less than brisk.

The second is The Potted Palm, described (in the original) as a photographic drawing printed on paper.

Third one down is Viewers Looking at a Ready-made Skull and Mirrors, described (again) as a photographic drawing, this time printed on four sheets of paper.

At the bottom is Looking at Flowers Framed. The images of flowers were built up gradually on the wall until the picture was complete. Later on, another sequence demonstrated this in a different way with Hockney using a tablet to compose a painting: his rendering of leaves on a tree seemed pointillist.

On reflection

The exhibition is wonderful entertainment – light entertainment, you might say. Technically it’s brilliant: still, moving or dissolving images are projected seamlessly on to five surfaces (four plane and one broken) with no distortion or interruption. The commentary matches the images, never falling behind or racing ahead.

There are points at which you might quibble with the content of the commentary. Hockney makes philosophical observations about space, time and illusion that are open to argument. But he is unfailingly fascinating on the subject of his art and, often, on the production of it.

Can it be regarded as anything more than an entertainment? The publicity says it will “enable us to view the world through Hockney’s eyes”. Which is kind of what art does, wouldn’t you say? But an art-lover would surely want a more contemplative, relaxed look at individual pieces, to view them from different angles and distances, to consider them in relation to other works by the same artist but also perhaps by contemporaries. There’s none of that at the Lightroom. The images are whisked past you at a considerable rate; on a couple of occasions, I was fractionally slow with my camera and ended up with a picture of one image dissolving into another.

It’s hard, though, to imagine a more enjoyable way to review Hockney’s portfolio from a period of more than 60 years. Although the Lightroom doesn’t use the expression ‘immersive experience’, the critics do, freely. They also include the Hockney show in a list of 10 or a dozen similarly immersive experiences on offer in London this year – it’s clearly an increasingly popular medium. Other artists featured include Van Gogh, Klimt, Dali and Frida Kahlo. There are, apparently, nine suitable venues in the capital.

“On a couple of occasions, I was fractionally slow with my camera and ended up with a picture of one image dissolving into another”

They are described variously as ‘awesome’ and ‘cool’. That makes me suspicious. I like the idea of art inspiring awe, but that isn’t what they mean. It sounds instead as if they’re trying to appeal to a new generation of supporters in the way that the atrocious Hundred does on the cricket field.

That leads me to wonder whether some confidence trick is being played. Perhaps ‘immersive’ art experiences are just another way of promoting sales of merchandise, in this case bags, books and prints. Or, if the cricket analogy has any merit, perhaps they will inspire more people to visit art galleries?

Well, there was no hard sell at the Lightroom. The route to the exit passed a perfunctory stand of bits and pieces of Hockney-related material, but it could not have been mistaken for a gift shop. As for the attendees, from what I saw of the bar beforehand and the auditorium itself, the demographic was principally white, middleaged to elderly. It was midday-ish on a weekday, so that’s not unexpected. On the other hand, you’d expect the same in an art gallery, wouldn’t you?

Places like the Lightroom may simply be trying to establish a new kind of venue offering the shared communal experience that people are apparently so hungry for in the post-lockdown era. To associate that with a new type of ‘experience’ will presumably help their cause.

The show is undeniably artful. In a similar, detached way, the Abba avatars are no doubt clever and entertaining; but that doesn’t make it an Abba concert. In effect it’s a tribute band playing ‘Best of’ hits behind an unusually sophisticated lights show. The Hockney show has a similar relationship to engagement with art.

The expression ‘immersive experience’ must be the product of a marketing department and

Sadly, I must leave most of the pictures on this last couple of spreads unexplained by captions. I have no idea what some of them are, and although I recall that the one below had something to do with Ravel that doesn’t really make us any the wiser, does it?

Above might be the Grand Canyon, which I seem to remember being mentioned. Sigh...

it has the same hollow ring as ‘rail replacement service’. ‘Immersive’ cannot be intended literally; and you might sit still in a darkened room for 50 minutes and consider it an experience. On the other hand, if you sat still in a darkened room with your brain stimulated by psychoactive sub-

stances, you might have something like an immersive experience. It’s pointless, of course, to speculate on what kind of experience you might have if you applied chemical stimuli to your enjoyment of bright ever-changing lights and words and music.

The production all felt a little soulless to me. Once this show is assembled, it can run forever, anywhere with a suitable space. The works of David Hockney, by contrast, may only be in one place at any one time. Therefore, such shows lack a certain authenticity. I think repetition diminishes impact – as with an exhibition of Californian output I saw at the Design Museum, where the tape playing Mario Savio’s famous speech grabbed my attention because it was the first time I’d actually heard it delivered, but by the fourth or fifth rotation of the loop it disappeared into the background noise. Does the potential for repetition also diminish impact?

Hockney embraces different technologies and is keen to see what he can do with them. I doubt he worries unduly about soul and authenticity in relation to this project. But I find the length of the Lightroom show suspicious. It’s less than an hour, I’d say, because the TikTok generation counts in seconds. n

Postscript

When I came out of the auditorium and exited through the bar, it was thronging with people. Nobody was being allowed into the show. The explanation soon became obvious. Outside, in the rain, an ambulance had just pulled up. One of the visitors had been taken ill. I made my way back to Kings Cross in a reflective frame of mind.