One hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not! (What is this that frees me so in storms? What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?) O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man! O savage and tender achings! (I bequeath them to you my children, I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.) O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me in defiance of the world! O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine! O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of...
Wednesday, 29 December 2010
St. Paul the Hermit, 1640, oil on canvas, 143 x 143 cmPaul of Thebes, the first Christian hermit, lived in a cave in the Egyptian desert for much of his life, almost 100 years. Here he is old, weary from a life lived in seclusion and frugality. He seems in conversation with a skull. He gestures towards himself - hand touching hand touching chest - contemplating mortality with a complex ardour. Muscles sagging and a deep furrowed brow, his...
Monday, 27 December 2010
Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1971, acrylic on canvas, 214 x 305 cmThe California sun illuminates the swimming pool. An anonymous figure swims beneath the cool water. Peter Schlesinger, fully clothed, stares into the pool. A 19 year-old art student when Hockney met and fell for him, Schlesinger soon moved in with the artist and became his favourite model, appearing in many of his famous pool scenes. Seen as inherently homoerotic...
Looking at Pictures on a Screen, 1977, oil on canvas, 188 x 188 cmThe act of spectatorship itself as the subject of an artwork is a major revolution of 20th century art and a primary tenant of Post-Modernism. In Hockney's Looking at Pictures on a Screen the artist's friend Henry Geldzahler stands in profile before photographic reproductions of paintings tacked to a screen. The flat surface of the picture plane is referenced (or even in this...
Saturday, 25 December 2010
Couple Holding Daguerreotype, c. 1850, daguerreotypeThere are three subjects in this highly reflexive image: a man, a woman, and a photograph. From the couple's solemn expressions - one looking away, the other confidently apprehending the lens, fist clenched - it would appear the family in their precious daguerreotype (they clearly value this image, holding it tenderly on a pedestal; far more than today we would value a material image) it seems the...
Thursday, 23 December 2010
Untitled, from the series 'Pornographie', 2002A twisted family portrait or a bizarre, neutered porno? It appears an awkward couples dinner party gone haywire. Private fantasy as a perversion of social convention.While employing the established language of filmed sex the scene evokes the absent, the subjects' faces hidden just as their sexual organs are. Explanation is withheld also. Clinically cold and bland, the environment is stifling to even...
Wednesday, 22 December 2010
Step Touch Stone, 2009, granite A solid, dignified, upright sculpture, sitting among skyscrapers, suggesting momentum - simultaneously upward and downward - Step Touch Stone is an efficiently minimalist work alluding to a raft of complex ideas and paradoxes.Consisting of twin inverted staircases standing in St. Patrick's Square next to the Catholic Cathedral the work is successfully spiritual in its associations while remaining open, interpretable...
Tuesday, 21 December 2010
The House I Once Called Home, 2003The raw material of photography is light and time. Each photograph then, although appearing solid, contains the ephemeral. This is a fundamental paradox of the medium and the key reason for its inherent ambiguity.Duane Michals in his series The House I Once Called Home combines an exploration of the ephemerality of photography with that of place, returning to his childhood home to recreate family photographs, eerily...
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