dayoutlast is a record of my direct engagement with mostly contemporary art, mostly Los Angelean.

As this blog has evolved since its 2010 inception, so has my perspective. What I once perceived as central within the investigation was what was central, literally, within the photographic frame that I shared here. While still an important consideration, such thinking has also given way to more peripheral considerations, ones also accompanied occasionally by text (written manifestation of thought) and the oscillations between them. What's missing here are larger unknowns surrounding issues of presentation and representation; the amount of time and space it actually takes to accomplish such first-hand observations; and the quandaries between documentation and interpretation.

Despite my attempt to communicate here with image and text what is essential in some respect about the artwork, neither representation should ever be considered a substitution for the primary viewing experience. Of course, occasionally there are exceptions.

Most of the time, these posts are merely remnants---residual fragments---from my last day out.

Saturday, September 19, 2015

David Hockney "Painting and Photography" @ LA Louver


Perspective Should Be Reversed, 2014
Photographic drawing printed on paper, mounted on Dibond
44 1/8 x 70 7/8 x 2 1/2 inches






Sparer Chairs, 2014
Photographic drawing printed on paper, mounted in Dibond
44 x 70 7/8 x 2 1/2






































Multiplicity. Art historical referents. Perspective should be perversed. Flatness. Synthesis of photo and painting. Self-referential. Likenesses and double-takes. Pictures in pictures. Pictorial space sutures space of presentation. Cards (chance). Scrabble (language; ordering of letters). Portraiture. Scenes of everyday life stripped to the essentials of the activity. Leisure games. Painting portraits as leisure games. Art=game. Approaching movement, motion, and next step late in ones career.

At some point in the viewing process of these works, I stopped tracking titles of individual works and began to enjoy the complexity between painting, photography, and my own complicity taking photographs myself, while looking, while others were looking (naked eye/camera as well), and it all seemed a wonderful dissolution as it reflected on Hockney's career, one primarily of portraiture as it relates to technologies past and present.  The message just might be that art can be seriously fun. To wit, the following two photos captured two different moments within the viewing context of the exhibition.



In this last image, I wish I could have captured this group of three males earlier when I had the chance. From their resemblances and interactions throughout the show, I surmised that they were more than likely three-generations along the same line. Somehow their presence struck me within the context of the show, not just for personal reasons, but more importantly, as these David Hockney painting/photo works delineate and reflect similar themes regarding generation, iteration, and repositioning (all subsuming concepts of passing time). Somehow this integration of art and life seemed particularly poignant.  Though I missed the chance to make my point clear with a photograph, there was still great amusement while four dudes descended this staircase.

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