A Bigger Fresh: News From David Hockney

Via Art Press

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I just read these following lines from David Hockney (73 this year, and for which technologies always had an influence in his paintings --photography, photocopy, fax--), in Art Press n° 372:

"(...). You can understand what's happening today much better if you see history the way I do. For 500 years the Church controlled society by reigning over images. With the advent of the mass media, it gradually lost its power, and media magnates circulated whatever images they want, and Hollywood has extended its empire around the world. Now images are undergoing another upheaval, marking the decline of newspaper and television. People have moved onto this [gesturing at his iPad]. The monopoly on the distribution of images has been shattered. Now I can circulate whatever I want for free. This new era also signals the changing nature of photography."

"In my book Secret Knowledge, I demonstrated that photography existed long before chemical development on paper. Art historians may dispute it but I don't mind: this is the result of observation by a painter, an insider's view. Why did Caravaggio invent Hollywood lighting? Because he used a whole system of lenses, concave mirror and a camera obscura to project faces and real objects onto the canvas. Vermeer, Van Eyck, Canaletto, Chardin and Ingres used these methods. The invention of the camera in 1837 was just a way to fix the projection on paper. That lasted 160 years and now it's over. Now it's the era of digital photography, manipulating images, and the come back of manual dexterity. The idea that photography is the most striking illustration of reality is outdated. In this country, possessing or looking at certain kind of photos will land you in jail. I ask you: how can anyone tell whether or not these photos have anything to do with reality? Has this point been discussed? No. Has it been talked about in the art world? No. People think the world is like photography, but the camera gives us an optical projection of the world. It sees the world in a spectacular way, whereas we perceive it psychologically.

No matter how good a photo may be, it doesn't haunt you the way a painting can. A good painting embraces ambiguities that can never be untangled; that's why it's so fascinating. (...) Painting will always be superior to photography in one respect: time, that juxtaposition of moments which is what makes a great painting so deep, rich and ambiguous. It has been said that the surface is all that matters. But that is to cancel what can be called the magic of art. The magic is the indeterminate part. I think the only way to renew art is to go back to nature. Nature is unlimited; it's foolish to say that we've seen it all."

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Personal comment:

Can we still speak about "nature" (I mean, a place where there's no wifi, no telecom networks and no communication --probably in the deep oceans, in foreign and/or inaccessible landscapes or high in the moutains --but even the Himalayas got wifi recently, Swiss mountains are all covered by Swisscom networks...--; do we have to speak about "manual dexterity" or "sotware dexterity"?
Nonetheless, this is a quite interesting quote from Mr. Hockney!