In America
and Europe the book has been widely covered in the press - twice
in the New Yorker, which has a circulation of around 1,000,000,
and several more times in The New York Times (e.g., December 4,
2001). David Hockney himself has appeared on television a number
of times, and made a film with the BBC (so far shown only in Europe).
By far the largest event connected with the book was a conference
at New York University, called "Art and Optics." It was a who's
who of American and European art historians, and was also attended
by artists (Chuck Close, Philip Pearlstein) and scientists. I gave
a talk at the conference's final session, on a panel with Richard
Wollheim, Michael Fried, Svetlana Alpers, and Rosalind Krauss. Lines
went halfway around the block in Washington Square. There were ninety
seats in the auditorium set aside just for journalists, and a second
room with a CCTY feed, for part of the overflow crowd. The first
day Susan Sontag spotted Leo Steinberg standing in the long queue,
and got him a ticket - otherwise he would have been turned away
with hundreds of others. People like Anthony Grafton and Martin
Kemp were relegated to non-speaking roles as introducers.
Of all the
speakers, audience members, and journalists, the only person who
said that he wasn't interested (or "concerned") about the book was
Jonathan Crary; that was because, he said, the narrowly optical
definition of illusion and representation made Hockney's claims
an unimportant, and undertheorized, portion of a much larger problem.
The ingredients of illusion, he reminded the audience, are often
contextual and non-optical; and he cited Géricault's many textual
sources for the Raft of the Medusa.
But for everyone
else, the issue seemed absolutely fraught: cathected, as Freud would
have said. Hockney "bothered" some people (Sontag's word), and he
certainly annoyed, mesmerized, and fascinated others. The conference
was energetic, and the audience rapt, from start to finish. There
are, in my count, three reasons for all the fuss - but before I
list them, I need to recount the claim itself. Hockney and Charles
Falco, his physicist collaborator, claim that three optical instruments
aided painters: the camera lucida, the camera obscura, and the concave
mirror. The three claims vary widely in plausibility and in application.
Briefly: it is extremely likely that Ingres used a camera lucida
(the Ingres specialist Gary Tinterow said as much, and Hockney's
visual evidence is persuasive), but less sure that any other major
nineteenth-century artist did. It is absolutely proven that Vermeer
used a camera obscura. Philip Steadman has written a book on the
subject, virtually proving that at least six of Vermeer's canvases
represent an actual room with mathematical precision. But how widely
were camera obscuras used outside of veduta painting, Reynolds,
and Vermeer? Falco presented new evidence at the conference that
lenses of some sort were used in the Mérode Altarpiece and other
paintings, so the question is open. The third hypothesis, the concave
mirror, is the least likely. It is Falco's idea, not Hockney's.
It's implausible for at least five reasons: (1) no concave mirrors
silvered on the inside survive; (2) no written records mention the
dark booth that would have had to house the mirror and artist, even
though such a booth would have been absolutely remarkable for any
witness; (3) the calculated radii of the mirrors might have posed
problems for glassblowers; (4) the depth of field of the image is
minuscule, necessitating planar objects and also much refocusing.
That's the thesis, in brief. Needless to say there are several hundred
thousand words more to say on the subject.
But now I want
to turn to five reasons why Hockney's subject stirred up so much
interest. They are:
1. Trivially,
there's the avalanche of publicity that the book and conference
received. People were primed by the media, and by Lawrence Weschler's
skillfully written and enthusiastic pieces in the New Yorker.
2. The event
pitted art history against popular understanding. From the beginning,
Weschler has chided art history for not being open to Hockney's
discoveries. Art historians, he has said, think that great artists
have superlative skill and therefore no need for optical aids. The
discipline has been painted as reactionary in every single newspaper
report I have seen. One New York Times article, which ran just before
the conference, said that perhaps, if the skeptics prevail, Hockney's
discoveries will be seen "in the receding perspective of art history"
(New York Times, November 29, 1002, E4). It is no wonder, given
that demonization - which was also softened, I should say, by a
great deal of levity and many disclaimers - that Svetlana Alpers
ended the conference by grabbing a microphone and saying, in a loud
and exasperated tone, like a mother berating a ridiculous child,
that she loved painting, and she wished people would start to talk
about it just a little bit.
3. The event
also pitted science against art. During the conference, Falco twice
chided art historians for being inadequately educated. If they had
better training in optics, he said (using Powerpoint to underline
his claim), then the discoveries he and Hockney made would have
been made long ago. Several journalists, who I will not name here,
could not follow Falco's optical proofs and demonstrations, even
though they involve only rudimentary geometrical optics. (Falco
was held in a certain disrespectful awe, because he is an expert
on quantum optics, of which geometrical optics is a simpleminded
progenitor.) Non-scientists I talked to admitted Falco's claims,
but said, openly or in effect, that they were not interested in
them. That amused Falco, who pointed out how illogical it is to
say, in response to a scientific proof about the use of optics in
a given painting, "Yes, all right, but I have another theory." "There
is no 'other theory,'" Falco said: "A proof is a proof." In short
I did not see any substantial progress over C.P. Snow's standoff
between science and the arts.
4. Most important,
the conference played to the anxieties that many people feel when
they go into museums and galleries. I'll divide this into two paragraphs:
anxiety about the Old Masters, and about contemporary art. Old Master
painting is a mystery to millions of people, an arcane world guarded
by a priesthood of professors and curators. How satisfying it would
be if next time they visited a museum, they could say to their friends,
"Look, here's the spot where the Master of Flémalle had to refocus
his lens." How satisfying finally to know something definitive about
the Old Master paintings: it would demystify the artists, wrest
them from their academic priesthood, make them accessible. Needless
to say a number of art historians at the conference (James Marrow,
Walter Liedtke) resisted Hockney's argument just for that reason:
because Hockney says nothing about the paintings' larger meanings,
his book could (rather, it will be) used as a Baedecker for a new
generation.
5. The final
reason is also the one that prompted me to write this review: Hockney's
book also holds the promise of explaining modernism, postmodernism,
and contemporary art. It does that by implication, the same as it
does for Old Master painting. Hockney nowhere says that his discoveries
explain the Old Masters, but he implies as much on every page. Modernism
has almost no role in the book - Warhol is presented as an artist
who traced projected images - but the implication is all the stronger
for it. People who are confounded and frustrated by modernism and
postmodernism may well take the book as evidence that the non-optical
and anti-optical tendencies of the last hundred years can be safely
ignored. After all, Hockney ignores them, and has for most of his
career. The book may serve as a kind of license to such people,
saying in effect: If you don't understand conceptual art, minimalism,
abstraction, and the rest, don't worry, because modernism was an
ephemeral episode and old-fashioned opticality is still with us.
What a depressing moral, what an abysmal model for future scholarship
and art.
As for my own
talk at the conference, and the hundreds of detailed arguments I
have omitted from this report: many are already online at
www.artandoptics.com.
James
Elkins
is
Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago; his recent book, Pictures and Tears,
explores our emotional responses - or lack of them - to works of
visual art.
