The Crossword Puzzle
Perhaps it’s only an artist that could take the medium of photography and create something suspended in space and time. David Hockney turned one visual art into Cubism to all intents and purposes, initially eschewing the camera as being too clumsy and simplistic in the way that the shutter captures one small moment in time.
Not that there’s anything wrong with this – certainly the Impressionists loved the idea of the fleeting moment, and indeed there are many events that would have been lost forever were a camera not at hand to save it forever.
And it’s this idea that impressed me the most about Hockney’s ‘joiners’; watching his friends, the Friedmans do battle over a crossword puzzle tells a story, not only of the activity, but has a cinematic quality as you watch the play of expressions and body language.
Hockey stated that the drawback of photography was that you might be looking at an event lasting 1/125ths of a second, but viewing joiners, you might be watching 5 or 50 of these, lengthening your experience.
As a result, you get drawn in to the work, your eye meanders as your brain takes in each frame and the resulting process of evaluating and piecing the images together lets you pick up the story of the event. And not just from one angle, but many, which also lends the effect of walking into the scene. So you get to experience changes in both time and space when you look into these works.
If a picture tells a thousand words, Hockey’s joiners will spin you a whole story.
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