David Hockney's Secret Knowledge – The Hockney Dilemma and the Painted Picture

 Excerpt from the essay titled, Rough Trade

Mark Stone and Head Clausnitzer

September 2006

 [The use of optics, the lens in painting] had become so dominant that its image was now the model for all painting. Until at least the invention of photography, its naturalistic look would be the goal of art, and the principal criterion by which pictures were to be judged.  David Hockney, (2001)

 It is Rough Trade's contention that an issue affecting our visual perceptions is at hand that is of core importance to abstract painting. However, in order to deal with this issue in its proper terms, we must leave the specific discussion of abstraction here for a moment, to concentrate instead on how this issue affects all painting. The issue is a problem that weighs on our every pictorial concern because it has to do with what we bring to a picture as a viewer in some intrinsic ways. Yet, having said this, it must also translate as a functional problem for painters as well. Simply put, viewers of painting and makers of painting alike are subject to the same influences within our culture.

We must look to the influence of the overarching presence of photography in our society for the root of this crisis of perception in pictorial matters as these pertain to painting. As a result of this influence, we seem to have lost much of our ability to comprehend many of the satisfying qualities that are possible in a painted picture. Indeed, we ask, as a culture have we stopped desiring these qualities altogether? Have we lost our capacity to intellectually participate or to psychically entertain the cognitive specialties of painted pictures?  We see these problems as being of paramount importance to any discussion of painting and perception. Thus, we call for serious investigations into the nature of the internal mechanisms by which we comprehend painting and the influence of photography on these internal mechanisms.

 David Hockney clearly showed in his book and lecture series Secret Knowledge (2001) that, as early as the 15th century, lens usage as a graphic help to painting had begun to spread throughout Europe. Looking through a lens and rendering onto paper or canvas what was observed through it brought about a visual revolution in painting, an upheaval in pictorial matters. The effects of this way of working have now become second nature in our creative life. Back then the achievement of a radically heightened degree of realistic illusion available on the picture plane was viewed with amazement.  It was as though artists had found a way to work perfectly in terms of line and rendering without the toil of working up preliminary drawings.  After the finely observed lens-based realities brought forth by van Eyck, or later, Caravaggio (and many others as well), no one could go back to what had been before. In part, the reasons for the success of this new way of working lay in the fact that portraiture was painting back then, and everyone wanted a good likeness. As a result, the "eye-ballers," as Hockney calls the artists that did not employ the lens, realized a pressing need to be much more precise in their graphic practices from then on.

 In many more cases than might be supposed, we find our modern pictorial concerns and problems largely resolved through the functional aspect of the lens, as well. Essentially, this means through the use of a camera. Artists may project images or copy from photographs or use computers to create dead-accurate transferences of imagery to the picture plane. Abstract artists as well often use the same mediating tools in their working processes to create patterns or meta-images (abstract objects) on a computer. These are then transferred to the painting surface.  Indeed, through the advent of software the electronic age has hyper-accelerated our lens-based pictorial culture. Hockney says, “We thought we saw the 20^th Century on the news, [in] film, and elsewhere, better than any previous century, although we could say we didn't see it all the camera did."

 Hockney’s conclusions formed through investigations into the use of optics in the painting of the past suggests that by the time photography appeared something final occurred in the way we perceive pictorial matters, especially in painting. Photography's success was total. However, along with the great delight for the new medium, a delight that is with us still as proved by the manifest proliferation of this medium in our culture, we gave up something that has largely gone unnoticed. By idealizing the qualities of photography— its striking truth to the observed, its singular window-like point of view, and its smooth acting quality of surface—we have unconsciously lost much of our ability to participate in painting. We have lost our capacity to realize the intrinsically humanist realities brought to us in communication with painting. As a consequence, painters have been single minded in getting their pictures to look correct, or more to the point for us today, to have them appear photographic. This is not to say that modern painters are necessarily seeking the hyperrealism available to photography, rather, Hockney's investigations understood in another way suggest that rendered paintings tend to be painted within a visual program that is mimetic of the attributes of photography that we have outlined above.

 One thing Hockney observed is that the lens of the camera stands at a rigid viewpoint that tends to position all things in the resultant photograph in relationship to the point where the photographer stands. This is basically single-point perspective. This relative positioning of the imagery seen in a photograph, all imagery functioning equally, has become an expected fact in our photographically aligned perceptions. This is a drawback for painting because painting is capable of much more in these terms. A painter is able to give us as many points of view or points of perspective as he or she may fit into their pictorial objectives. As viewers, the limits of our perceptions deny us any real participation in a painting that offers more than one point of perspective because we just are not able to get past our feeling that the picture is not really successful. Unfortunately, this feeling infects painters, too.

 Added to this unfortunate fact is that this problem of a single viewpoint tends to flatten out the images in a photograph. This is because all things hold equal place with their neighbors. The imagery sits there as if floating on the surface offering little to recommend our involvement, and if we were to inspect this floating imagery, we would be unable to single out any one thing as having more visual importance. One real effect of this might be found to be akin to the visual perceptions of life-long deep forest dwellers.  Studies have shown that when these forest dwellers come to the forest's edge and have their first visual encounter with distances farther than just a few meters, they at first perceive what they see in the distance as if it had focal parity with the trees behind them. In other words, they believe the things they see in the outer world are mere suspensions on the forest wall. Finally, it is also the case that the smooth and inactive surface of a photograph does not allow for literal depth. This tamped-down overall-ness in photography, and in any imagery that functions like photography, can never transmit an experience of depth in the ways that are available to painting.

 Clearly our abilities to participate in abstract pictorial realities, and especially painted realities, are determined by our internalization of the pictorial qualities that form at the focal point of the camera lens. This seems to have become a permanent state of being in our consciousness and this situation is not getting better. The fact to face is that a photograph functions as a thing seen as opposed to one experienced and this underachieving in pictorial matters is what we have come to regard as pictorial success. Photography's pervasive influence is everywhere in our society, and as Rough Trade, we point to the implications of David Hockney's investigations into the use of optics in drawing and painting, and his conclusion that we have an "optical art, not a visual art." His work suggests to us that photography now holds such a place of prominence in our culture that its visual properties have become a guiding expectation in our pictorial perceptions and especially our assessments of what painting is and does. Thus, we have dubbed the above concerns the Hockney Dilemma.