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

THE NON-PRESENCE OF PEOPLE IN DAVID HOCKNEY'S PAINTINGS
Derrida in The truth on painting, in the section that deals with Kant: ‘You have
to know what intrinsically concerns the value “beauty” and what remains
external to your immanent sense of beauty. This requirement presupposes a
discourse on the limit between the inside and outside of the art object, here a
discourse on the frame’. 9 These ornaments, continues Derrida, work for Kant
as inner and outer borders. They act as supplements - they are outside, but
they are not the things that are outside, because they are the borders. However,
the supplement has a potential for greater importance than the work itself,
since without it one would not know where the creation begins and ends, or
even the fact that one is standing in front of a creation.
In addition to the problem of the absence of depth in the picture, discussed
above, the disappearance of the body is another question that arises from those
paintings. Both the water and the glass act as screens that conceal the human
body: the bodies of the collectors in A Lawn Sprinkler, and the body of the diver
in A Bigger Splash. In the former, the glass window is simultaneously transparent
- it is possible to see the armchair and other furniture inside the house, and
opaque-mirroring the outside view.
Rosalind Krauss notes that a grid [in our case the bars over the windows]
conveys one of the basic laws of knowledge - separation of the perceptual screen
from that of the “real” world. 10 The window, she continues, is experienced as
simultaneously transparent and opaque. As a transparent vehicle, it is that
which admits light - or spirit - into the initial darkness of the room. But if glass
transmits, it also reflects. And so the window is experienced as a mirror -
something that freezes and locks the self into the space of its own reduplicated
being; the bars of the window - the grid - are what help us to see, to focus.
Lefebvre continues this line of thought when he speaks of a ‘double
illusion’, 11 each side of which refers back to the other, reinforces the other, and
hides behind the other. The two aspects are the illusion of transparency on the
one hand and the illusion of opacity, or “realistic” illusion, on the other. In the
illusion of transparency, he claims, space appears as luminous, as intelligible,
as giving free rein for action. The realistic illusion is closer to (naturalistic and
mechanistic) materialism. Rather than being mutually antagonistic, each illusion
embodies and nourishes the other. The oscillation between the two, and the
resulting flickering effect, are thus just as important as either of the illusions
considered in isolation.
Krauss’ argument discussed above relates also to the idea of public and
private space: the 20 th century has been witness to the building of such private
homes as “Prairie House” (1900), designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and
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