Lawrence Weschler‘s essay on David Hockney’s cell phone paintings is another Weschler classic. Weschler is his own tour guide to what interests him, with none of the seen-it-all cynicism that can affect even the best art critics. Like Calvin Tomkins before him, his writing charts the process of absorbing a subject and clarifying it into revelation.
Hockney’s return to painting includes a fresh and unsalable application:
Over the past six months, Hockney has fashioned literally hundreds, probably over a thousand, such images, often sending out four or five a day to a group of about a dozen friends, and not really caring what happens to them after that. (He assumes the friends pass them along through the digital ether.) These are, mind you, not second-generation digital copies of images that exist in some other medium: their digital expression constitutes the sole (albeit multiple) original of the image.
The thing is, if you are using your pointer or other fingers, you actually have to be working from your elbow. Only the thumb has the opposable joint which allows you to move over the screen with maximum speed and agility, and the screen is exactly the right size, you can easily reach every corner with your thumb.
And, Hockney on the joys of the phone itself:
It’s always there in my pocket, there’s no thrashing about, scrambling for the right color. One can set to work immediately, there’s this wonderful impromptu quality, this freshness, to the activity; and when it’s over, best of all, there’s no mess, no clean-up. You just turn off the machine. Or, even better, you hit Send, and your little cohort of friends around the world gets to experience a similar immediacy. There’s something, finally, very intimate about the whole process.
How many artists are doing this, creating originals that cannot be sold as such? In Seattle, there’s Patrick Holderfield, who seems to be taking a break from making anything else.
Thanks for sharing the work.
I couldn’t agree more with David. I sometimes find myself as lost in one of these works as I do in any other drawing.
This is a prelude to what’s next for me.