1.02.2011

Painting It Like It Is

Hockney's work normalized gay desire and love by drawing and painting beautiful, healthy male nudes without fetishizing or over sexualizing. They are not pornographic and shocking - they are sentimental and emotional. He depicted his friends and lovers and so his nudes were less a political or social statement but more a familiar and personal subject matter.

He thus took the private and made it public. When looking at his work I can sense a narrative and imagine Hockney, the model, their relationship and all the emotional melodrama of ups and downs that they lived. This makes his nudes especially interesting to me because they are real people. The aspect of sincerity comes back and they are not only standing naked posing for Hockney. They and the artist himself are naked in the respect that they are letting the viewer into their world. In the painting Portrait of an Artist Hockney paints Peter Schlesinger, a former student and lover. The painting is very much about Hockney's sentiments and feelings for Peter. Their relationship had recently ended but Hockney still chose to use Peter as the standing figure in the paining though preferred not to interact with Peter for almost 2 years in order to get over him (Livingstone 1996).


Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures), 1972

Peter Schelinger, London, 1972

Gregory Swimming, Los Angeles, March 31st 1982


Hockney often relied on photography as an aid to his painting, capturing detail and allowing him to prepare and work faster with the quick drying acrylic. Eventually Hockney used photography to deal with the notion of representation and the photographs became the final work. This documentary use of photography reinforces the idea that the depicted is heavily based in the real world of the artist. 


Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool, 1966

Photograph taken for painting Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool, 1966

Some of Hockney's other favorite models with whom he had developed relationships were Ian Falconer and Gregory Evans. 


Peter, Alberdo la Flora, Rome, 1967

Gregory Leaning Nude, 1975

Gregory With gym Socks, 1976

Ian Washing his Hair, London, Jan 1983

David Hockney & Ian Falconer

Ian Falconer & David Hockney, Los Angeles, 1982


Livingstone, Marco, David Hockney, Thames and Hudson Ltd, London, 1996.
Mahon, Alyce, Eroticism & Art, Oxford University Press Inc., New York, 2005.


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Stuff to watch:


A Bigger Splash, directed by Jack Hazan, 1973

12.30.2010

Saying It Like It Is

Sincerity is seductive. I feel like one can tell when someone is relating occurrences they have an emotional connection with, be it a visual expression or a written one. 

There is an importance in being honest with oneself. There are many reasons why this is generally a good thing, but I would like to point out the role of honesty and the inclination to bare all that is personal in ones art making process. In my mind, this is less a process of self expression and more a process of self documentation. In the words of William Burroughs: "There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing […]. I am a recording instrument […] I do not presume to impose a 'story' 'plot' continuity.' […] Insofar [sic] I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function […] I am not an entertainer […] (Telly, 1976).

The notion of nakedness is not only an aesthetic standard for the Beats (of which Burroughs was part) - the writer's commitment to irrevocably bare all thought and imagination in their work - but also a symbolic public and private stance. Thus Allen Ginsberg and his life partner and also poet Peter Orlovsky disrobed at poetry readings, William Burroughs did not disguise the demonic aspects of his drug addiction and his homosexuality in Naked Lunch and John Kerouac desired to be a medieval Tibetan scholar-monk Milarepa who lived naked in caves (Telly, 1976). Nakedness signified rebirth, the recovery of identity. The idea of the self is the Beat focal point. The complete self revelation and assertion of personal identity is a beginning in the process of connecting with larger forces in the universe or the surrounding world (Telly, 1976). The Beats would often use intoxication as a means to achieve a state of openness that enabled them to share their most private thoughts with one another and then communicate them in writing.

Peter Orlovsky & Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg & Peter Orlovsky, 1955

The Beat movement was a crystallization of a sweeping discontent with American "virtues" of progress and power (Telly, 1976). But as writers, the Beats would seak out to experience life in order to write about it. They each documented, in their own creative style, the state of political, social and cultural values of the post World War II era through accounts of their own lives.

Kerouac's novel On The Road drew from his personal experience while traveling and his characters were based on real people in his life. Dean Moriarty was thus a portrait of Neal Cassady a close friend of both Kerouac and Ginsberg (at a time Ginsberg and Cassady shared more then a friendship though Cassady remained faithful to his many female lovers). He was a character that fused desperation and glee, as the "ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being" to borrow Kerouac's description (Telly, 1976). He was very much in touch with his impulsive nature and was on a continuous search for physical pleasure. This in the eyes of the Beats was a representation of the raw nakedness they were after.

Neal Cassady & Jack Kerouac, San Francisco, 1949

Similarly, Herbert Huncke, a Time Square hustler and drug user appeared in the works of all three writers as Herman in Burrough's Junkie, as Elmo Hassel in On The Road and as Huck in Ginsberg's Vision of Cody. He became a Beat Mephisto who in the words of Ginsberg taken from Howl:

walked all night with shoes full of blood on the
snowbanks waiting for a door in the East River to
open to a room full of steamboat and opium

Herbert Hunckle, 1953

Telly, John, Naked Angels: the Lives & Literature of the Beat Generation, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1976.


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Stuff to watch:

Howl, directed by Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman, 2010


Naked Lunch, directed by David Cronenberg, 1991


What Happened to Kerouac?, directed by Richard Lerner, Lewis MacAdams, 1986

12.25.2010

Art Makes Me Horny


You get engrossed in browsing through photographs, drawings and paintings to find yourself some short time later with a raging erection. Sure, the style is always figurative. Sure, the reason for your engrossment in the first place is a primal attraction to the subject matter and the suggestive nature of the work. And of course, there is a running theme of nudity, sexuality and youth. Yet I wonder is this a common reaction to walking through an exhibition or flipping through the work of say Hockney? 

I would love to say that it is the aesthetics of the work that I admire but I would be lying, which is precisely what I want to avoid doing here. I am turned on plain and simple. Its visual qualities however, make the seduction more potent. They enable me to become infatuated with the piece. I want to retreat to a private corner and relieve myself. I want to reach out and touch the work. Touch the subject of the work. Be in it. Be its creator. I want to appropriate the depicted moment and think of it as my own memory. I then think of the artist and imagine them living it. This makes me both frustrated and more erect.

The Room Tarzana, 1967