The Non-presence of People in David Hockney's Paintings of ...

THE NON-PRESENCE OF PEOPLE IN DAVID HOCKNEY'S PAINTINGS
Fig. 2: David Hockney, A Lawn Sprinkler, 1967. Acrylic on canvas, 122x122,
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. J. G. Studholme, London.
‘I used borders around an image a lot, from about 1964 to 1967. This wasn’t
just a framing device. It started off as a formal device… it seemed to me that if
I cut that picture off there, it became more conventional, and I was a little
frightened of that then’. 3 Both works comprise a flat square with white borders
that emphasize the flatness of the canvas itself - the two-dimensionality that is
so indispensable to modern painting, as it is to Polaroid photography.
The white strip can be related to the space between two borders, the way
that Samuel Weber describes the symbolic structure of psychic anxiety itself:
‘Anxiety is perhaps what one feels when the world reveals itself to be caught
up in the space between two frames: a doubled frame, or one that is split’. 4
This in-between space, a third space, is the place where things are not connected;
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