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THROUGH THE
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Presently, Falco invited Hockney to come out and visit him at his Tucson lab, and I decided to join them. On a sweltering, crystal-clear May afternoon, Falco picked us up in his arrest-me red BMW and squired us over to his air-conditioned lab on the top floor of the university’s ten-story Optical Sciences building (on the way, he pointed out that the pristine air quality and the atmosphere’s desert stillness accounted for the fact that there were more working telescopes within fifty miles of the town than anywhere else on earth). Once at the lab, it turned out that we were all required to don head-to-toe pillow-white ghostbuster outfits, complete with shower-caps and booties, and then to subject ourselves to an invigorating air-shower before breaching the inner sanctum. (Falco explained that some of the experimental chambers within were required to maintain vacuums ten-thousand times more pure than even that found in outer space.) We looked preposterous but endearing, I suppose: some while later a faxed photo of the touring group began circulating amongst us, to which somebody had affixed the hand-scrawled motto: "FIFTEENTH CENTURY ART HISTORY: IT’S A TOUGH JOB, BUT SOMEBODY’S GOT TO DO IT." Inside, multi-million-dollar contraptions assured the perfect gyroscopic stillness of platforms upon which yet further multi-million dollar contraptions assured the yet more perfect stillness of various further million-dollar electron-scanning supermicroscopes. (Suddenly I could see where Falco might have gotten that idea about Van Eyck inadvertently jiggling the Cardinal Albergati epidiascope.) "I always tell my students," Falco explained, "that there are two ways you can be better than everybody else. The first is to be smarter: not that easy, there are a lot of smart people. The second is to have better equipment." "Same as Van Eyck," Hockney deadpanned, without missing a beat. Falco had an assistant zero in with one of the video-monitors hooked up to the microscope. "Let’s see," he said, "as you can see, that’s an array of eleven cobalt atoms lined up one beside the next." It was incredible: one could actually count them. "I think artists and scientists have more in common with each other," Falco now hazarded, "than either do with the historians of their respective dis-ciplines. For one thing," he continued, "scientists tend to be deeply visual, that’s how they think, whereas I’m surprised to say that many of the art historians I’ve been talking with lately don’t seem to be visual at all." Hockney concurred absolutely–this, after all, being one of his favorite stalking-horses (he tends to retain as straw-man a stereotype of his art historical interlocutors as many of them do of his evolving and increasingly nuanced evolving theory). "They just don’t get it," he said. "They go on and on as if the artists of that time would have been too unsophisticated or too ashamed to have been using optical devices, whereas on the contrary, these weren’t stupid people, they were keen to make pictures! They weren’t art historians, for god’s sake." He went on to note how Kemp had com-mented to him how for the painters of that era, who after all hadn’t yet divided off from scientists–we are speaking of a time before that artificial division–far from being a matter of shame, proficiency with optical devices would have been a matter of pride among them: they’d have been ravenous to deploy any new aid. "And anyway," Hockney went on, "why is it that mathematical perspective is deemed acceptable as such an aid, but a cam-era obscura is somehow suspect? I’m sure that wasn’t the case for them." Falco noted how he’d been astonished at the relative scientific illiteracy he was encountering not just among the average folks to whom he was endeavoring to explain their optical discoveries, but among the tenured humanities professors as well. "It’s not just that their eyes glaze over at the slightest whiff of an equation"–Hockney and I eyed each other sheepishly–"they don’t even seem to understand the rudiments of scientific discourse. I was laying out our Lotto discoveries for one of the art history profs around here the other day, and he ended up saying, ‘Well, that’s your theory, I just happen to have a different one.’ This isn’t a theory, I veritably shouted at him, it’s a proof! It’s established fact. He just shook his head at me, condescendingly. It was incredible." The sheer exasperation of it all made us all hungry, so we decided to head out to get a bite to eat. On the way out, I noticed a framed photo of Falco astride a veritable beast of a gleaming, souped-up motorcycle in the very middle of his lab.
"How did you manage to--" I began. "Long story," he said, "long story." "What’s their alternative theory?" Hockney now asked, as Falco drove us over to the restaurant: he was still fuming. "That one day all over Europe painters simply started receiving postcards saying, ‘Hey guys, the Renaissance has started. Time to ramp up your drawing technique!’" The conversation segued into a consideration of specific painters. Falco had been studying Peter Christus, a Netherlandish painter from the generation following Van Eyck. "Historians credit him with being the first guy up there to transcend the so-called primitivist look and attain a one-point perspective, but I think they’ve got it wrong. I think he was just incompetent at moving the lens around." We pulled into the restaurant parking lot–brief blast of furnace-hot air between two air-conditioned enclaves–and once inside, after we’d ordered, Hockney pulled out a sheaf of photocopied reproductions he wanted to go over with Falco. The first was a Van Dyke, a 1626 portrait of a seated Genovese matron with her son standing beside her: quite beautiful, quite convincing, until you gave it a second look.
"I mean," Hockney asked Falco, "if she were to stand up, how tall would she have to be?" Falco, who seldom allows such challenges to pass as merely rhetorical, whipped out a pen and pocket ruler began to make napkin calculations: "At least fifteen feet," he surmised, at length. "Mothers weren’t giants in those days," Hockney asked, "were they?" He then pulled out another image of Chardin’s, the "Silver Tureen" from the Met, a still life with a cat to one side, a couple pears off to the other.
"Wonderful painting," he averred, right from the outset. "Incredible surfaces, truly exquisite rendering. But the pears are as big as the cat, which seems a bit strange–unless, of course, as with the Van Dyke mother and son, they were painted separately, off separate projections." He pointed out that Chardin was another of those artists from whom precious few study-drawings or under-drawings exist; and he was notoriously secretive about his techniques. "The marvelous thing, though," he continued, "is the way the viewer’s eye compensates, the viewer’s mind actively corrects so that it doesn’t seem strange, partly because we too take the pictures in through a series of details which we then configure into a seamless whole, and partly because we know this is a cat and that a pear, this a mother and that a son, we know their relative sizes, and we adjust for them accordingly. Our minds do that, the perceiving mind being perhaps the greatest wonder of all." Hockney pulled out another, if possible still more lovely, Chardin, the sublime "Girl Returning from Market" of 1738.
"She’s another tall one," he noted, and Falco whipped out his pen and pocket ruler again, along with a pocket ruler. Following a few quick measurements and calculations, he concurred that, "If the space between her pupils were the standard two and a half inches, then she’d have had to be approximately, let’s see, six foot eleven–she’d have had a hard time making it through that door jamb." Hockney noted that he and Graves had already ascertained that the composition featured at least two distinctly different vanishing points (the back wall rectangular stones and the chest drawers receded to separate foci), consonant with at least two different projections, one for her lower body and a separate one for her upper half. "But look here," Hockney went on. "Where’s her elbow? If you look at the picture from below, running up her exposed forearm, it’s at one place. Whereas if you follow her shoulder down, it’s somewhere entirely different. It’s as if her arm has an extra middle bone. This is clearly bothering Chardin as well, because in two other versions of the same painting, he’s still monkeying around with the elbow passage, trying to get it right." Falco grabbed back the image and proceeded to hold it flat, extending the page straight out level from his squinting eye. "I’m looking at the door jamb. Yeah, you can see it, you can see the jog, at least one, there might be another. Here," he said, his finger on the spot as he brought the image back onto the table, "and maybe here as well. That’s what we scientists call ‘sighting along the data.’ You do that sometimes when you’ve got a chart with a splatter of data points; you hold it up from the side and see if you can’t make out a pattern that wouldn’t otherwise be discernible." "The point, though," Hockney went on, "is precisely that unless we focus on the disjunction, we don’t see it. And who focuses on elbows? The lower arm seems fine, the upper as well, our mind makes the necessary elisions, and the painting as a whole feels seamless. Perfect." Back at his campus office, later that afternoon, Falco pulled out a sheaf of his own, the working draft of a piece on their discoveries which he was coauth-oring with Hockney and which they would soon be submitting for publication to the Optics and Photonics News, the prestigious monthly of the Optical Society of America, with subscribers in fifty countries (though likely not a single art historian among them). The two reviewed a few outstanding is-sues, after which Falco drove us back to the airport for the flight back to L.A. The next morning, before heading back to New York myself, I went up to visit Hockney at his studio. For the first part of the visit we were joined by a distant neighbor of his, the sleight-of-hand artist and antiquarian historian of magic, Ricky Jay. After Hockney demonstrated the mirror shed for him, Jay pointed out how forgers often preferred to work upside-down. It made for a more accurate, less mind-filtered copying process. "Here," he said, grabbing my notepad, penciling a line down its length, and then handing the pad to Hockney: "Go ahead, sign your name underneath the line." Hockney did so and handed the pad back to Jay, who turned it upside down and, after theatrically flourishing his pencil hand a few times theatrically, proceeded to dash off an uncannily precise simulation of Hockney’s signature backwards on the other side of the line.
"Of course, I’d never dream of deploying such a skill to illicit purpose," he assured us, whereupon he took his leave. The Wall, meanwhile, had wrapped itself clean around the studio, 1750 now continuing all the way around past the invention of photography up through about 1900, which kissed up against the 1300 corner of the far wall. "Awkwardness," Hockney was saying, wheeling around, "the disappearance of awkwardness, the invention of chemical photography, and the return of awkwardness. The preoptical," he wheeled once more, "the age of the optical, and then the post-optical, which is to say the modern. And look here." He led me over to the corner where the two ends of the procession abutted. On the one wall he’d posited, as endpoint, Van Gogh’s portrait of Trabuc (1889); next to it, on the other, was a Byzantine mosaic icon of Christ from about 1150.
If anything, the overlapping effect was even more uncanny than that of Ricky Jay’s paired signatures. The photocopying machine had been pushed over to the side, and the center of the studio was once again teeming with Hockney’s own painting efforts, and in particular a remarkable canvas portraying the view immediately outside the studio: the tree-covered path leading back down to the house. But this was no mere photo-optical approximation. On the contrary, the image, thrillingly precise, somehow was managing to convey not only what was directly before the viewer but what was wrapping up above and below and to the side; it even seemed to be beginning to include what was behind.
This was no window, cut out and cut off: this was a world in the process of being entered, a space fully inhabited, enfolding, and receiving: a sort of concave phenomenological bulge. I’d never seen anything quite like it. Next to it, leaning against another easel, was a similar view of the patio outside his London studio. "I wanted to paint that vista from memory," Hockney explained, "without the use of any photographic aids, only as I was able to reconstrue it in my mind’s eye. And next month, when I get back to London, I’m going to attempt a similar series of views from my breakfast table here, gazing out toward the patch of valley in the distance. Again as a further way of evading the optical bias." No more lenses, he seemed to be saying. Or rather, maybe, a different sort of lens: his very being reconfigured as a time lens. •• A couple months later,. when I happened to be passing through London on other business, I paid a call on Hockney in his Pembroke studio and the L.A. vistas were indeed on his easels. (The July issue of Optics and Photonics News was likewise on his table, the Arnolfini Wedding splashed across its cover.) As it happened, Hockney’s staging of Stravinsky’s "Rake’s Progress" was going to be receiving its twenty-fifth anniversary performance the next afternoon down in Glyndebourne, and Hockney invited me along. Such celebratory productions are increasingly bittersweet affairs for Hockney. (I’d been to a similar tenth anniversary staging of his "Tristan" out in Los Angeles a few years ago.) For a couple of decades there, such opera commissions had constituted some of Hockney’s principal creative outlets: a space for exploring his rapidly evolving concepts regarding space, color, line and vantage on a grand scale. But over the past decade, he’s been going progressively deaf, so much so that he can no longer really hear the music. (There’s no question but that the progressive diminution in his aural capacity–after all, the space-defining capacity par excellence–has forced him to become ever more reliant on and sensitive to the spatial aspects of vision; he is having to use his eyes to do what his ears once did. In this sense, he’s a sort of inverse Beethoven, and this circumstance in turn has surely been driving much of his current research.) (In addition, he’s not beyond using his encroaching deafness to maximal tactical effect. If he doesn’t want to entertain objections to or hesitations regarding his theories, he simply doesn’t hear them as he plows obliviously on ahead. The deafness may account, at least in part, for a seeming narrowing of his universe –seldom have such proliferating manifold perspectives been pursued with such monomaniacal passion–but it also allows for a sometimes awe-inspiring intensity of focus as well, so it’s a mixed bag.) At any rate, the "Rake’s Progress" the next day was as crisp and fresh as ever–a true evergreen staged in a setting of lulling pastoral ease (the grazing sheep on the meadows surrounding the manor bunched and drifting like earthbound clouds)–but the thing that most astonished me was how already, way back then, Hockney had been conceiving of the opera’s Bedlam scenes. Virtually every other conception of an insane asylum I’d ever encountered (from the Bell Jar through Cuckoo’s Nest, from Hogarth through Sweeney Todd) envisioned the madhouse as just that: mad. A tumultuous, roiling chaos. But for Hockney–and remember, this was twenty-five years ago, long before his various photocollage investigations or the more recent spate of theorizing–Bedlam was already a hell of receding one-point perspective, each inmate slotted into his tapering little foreshortening cell in the perfect vise of a cyclops gaze.
Already back in 1975, this had been the prospect from which Hockney had clearly been endeavoring to escape. Back in London the next day, as if in blithe and tonic compensation, Hockney was recalling for me the trip he and Graves had taken to Bruges a few weeks earlier: the paintings, even more lustrous than their most vivid reproductions; the light filtered through the leaded casement windows (pattern-gridded windows that almost enforced a multiple-vantaged way of looking); the wood-beamed interiors within which he and Graves had undertaken their own pocket mirror experiments. But the most enthralling experience of all, he went on, had been their sidetrip to neighboring Ghent to experience Van Eyck’s magnum opus, the Altarpiece, in person. "No amount of viewing of reproductions can prepare you for the experience," he assured me. "For one thing there were the colors: colors you never encounter in nature, and can’t even reproduce on the page, but which we’ve been continually encountering in our own projections. I mean, I recognized that green. And then, there’s the sheer scale. The central panel, with its marvelous ‘Adoration of the Lamb,’ is almost twenty feet long and over twelve feet high–nothing like the miniature fold-outs you get in most monographs." He nevertheless reached for one and showed me.
"The point is that such renditions necessarily betray the Altarpiece’s essential conceptual genius–the literally hundreds of separate detailed vantages–by homogenizing everything to a single one-point perspective shot. I’ve been talking with the people over at the BBC"–he’d agreed to host a series of documentaries on his new theories, to be aired this October in conjunction with the publication of a book laying out his argument, early galleys of which he’d also been showing me–"and I was telling them, there will simply be no way that they will be able to engage the entire expanse of the Adoration within a single shot. They replied that that was all right, they’d just sweep across the panel in a series of slow panning takes, to which I replied, ‘In other words, you’ll be doing exactly what he did: hundreds of individual vantages, one after the next, bringing every detail up close. "Now, I may have been sensitized to this in advance," he went on, "because in a way, and again without in any way wanting to compare the quality of the final products, Van Eyck built up his ‘Adoration’ exactly the way I built up my ‘Pearblossom Highway’"–one of the last and perhaps the most ambitious of his photocollage tableaus.
Hockney pulled out a catalog of his own work and turned to a reproduction of the piece. "Again, of course, reproductions distort a fundamental aspect of the work," he said, "but you can get an idea." The convergence was indeed startling–almost comically so: Compositionally, the center ditch and fountain pole of the "Adoration" echoed the median divider of "Pearblossom"–or, I guess, vice versa; the red platform of the former was mirrored in the Stop sign of the latter; and so forth. "The point is," Hockney explained, "it took me two days out there at that intersection in the desert to photograph all of those details; I had to climb on a ladder, for example, to get the head-on shots of the Stop sign, and for that matter to get the proper down-gazing vantages of the foreground asphalt. Those beer cans to the side, I had to get right up close to them and then photograph them from an angle which subsequently would meld with all the surrounding shots I was taking. And all of that is what accounts for the sense of immediacy, of closeness, of being right there, that you get with the final collage–especially if you compare it with a standard single snap of the same scene.
"And I’m convinced Van Eyck was doing something remarkably similar, pulling in close for each face in the crowd, for each clump of trees, for each flower, and then feathering all of those vanishing points one atop the next. After which, for all his trouble, he gets dismissed as ‘primitive’!"
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