Artist Hockney Discusses Involving Self With Art

Los Angeles artist David Hockney told a crowd of several hundred in the Carpenter Center last night that the way to involve a viewer with a picture is to transcend the limitations of a single view point.

Art with only one viewpoint emphasizes the distance between the the viewer and the work, the English-born, mixed-medium artist said in his slide lecture. "Such a traditional perspective takes us away. It is a representation of the world as though we weren't there," Hockney said.

This Western point of view "sees through an open door. It is committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer," Hockney said.

Comparing his art to Chinese scrolls, Hockney said that he takes a more typically Eastern approach. "I want to create a feeling of movement, of closeness. I want the viewer to feel as if he is inside the picture's space," he said.

In order to achieve this closeness, Hockney did pastiche still-lifes of many photographs taken of the same scene but from different angles. In some of these montages he includes images of his own feet.

Hockney also discussed the connection between religion and the development of perspective in the Italian Renaissance.

"Crucifixion, as an act, has no action in it," he said. "The execution is passive. Perspective has the effect of fixing objects in space as solid; the lack of movement is what kills."

"If one takes the vanishing point as infinity, and infinity as God, then the viewer who remains outside the picture, has no connection with God," he added.

Hockney said that Cubism is an attempt to make the viewer's eye move as if the scene itself were actually moving. Cubist painting achieves this, Hockney said, because it is disjointed; the whole scene cannot be taken in at once but instead forces a spectator to participate in the representation.

In conjunction with the artist's visit, the Carpenter Center will show the exhibition, "David Hockney: New Prints," today through March 2.