Hockney’s technique of collaging together a “mosaic” of dozens of Polaroid snapshots into a single work. Each photo would be taken from a slightly different angle, so that, once they were joined together, the aggregate would offer multiple overlapping views of a given subject. The result could be described as the photographic equivalent of Cubism in painting. I assume these photographic aggregates were what prompted Hockney to explore another aspect of visual representation: the technique of Renaissance perspective, which gives the illusion of spatial distance by constructing an image around a single vanishing point. Reversing or subverting the foundational rules of perspective has consistently preoccupied Hockney in his later phase. One work in this catalog includes the written phrase “Perspective Should Be Reversed,” and to the extent that such a reversal is possible, the image does so, moving the vanishing point into the foreground rather than the background of the picture. Other works use multiple vanishing points in the background, forming a kind of Cinemascope presentation of a landscape or an interior space. It’s as though a camera has panned in a left-toright semicircle to achieve the final still image. Hockney’s concern with perspectival experiments might seem pedantic or unduly technical, less engaging than his representation of human subjects, but I see them as conscious or semiconscious expressions of his sexual orientation. In this framework, they qualify as manifestations of the LGBT initiative to deconstruct inflexible rules about what is natural and normal in favor of transformative reversals and an antinomian pluralism. Putting aside all technical or sociological aspects of Hockney’s work, we can enjoy his pictures simply as brilliant and inventive visual experiences—surprising excursions into a realm of color, fruitful allusion, and kinetic design. This catalog includes portraits in a number sufficient to remind us that, in addition to his technical investigations, Hockney was always concerned with the human subject negotiating familial affection, friendship, physical pleasure, and conjugal love. March–April 2025 35 David Hockny. An Image of Gregory, 1984. She was the first to see me on the floor thrashing with a wildness she could not imagine was in my blood. Her blood. That same year she started teaching Frankenstein to her college freshmen. The danger of creating danger. A monster who was its own geography of broken parts stitched together but unable to connect, a helter-skelter folly of odds and ends, borderlines no map had known, sewn by a solitary parent who gave up on it too soon. Only I understood why she wept and felt the pain of something she kept unsaid as, sitting with her head bent, alone in her room, she faithfully went back to the book each year, like a pilgrim bound for Lourdes. At her memorial service, many of her former students from different falls and distant springs came up to me and shared a singular memory, wondering what it was that, when she read about the thrashing creature aloud, made her gentle voice tremor like a fault line that was suddenly exposed almost breaking apart but not. MARK EVANCHIMSKY The Danger of Creating Danger
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