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HOCKNEY’S ‘TOTEM’ 12 TOTEMIC David Hockney’s painting of the Woldgate Woods, “Winter Timber,” showing the stump that was later cut down and painted with obscenities by vandals, below. The Associated Press photo hometown, further inland, of Bradford. Among the deliriously colorful oils, watercolors and iPad drawings were all manner of sketchbooks, and pencil and charcoal drawings − the same scenes returned to again and again, at different times of day across different seasons in different media. One series of these last in particular stood out for many people: a sequence of charcoal drawings documenting the thinning out of a particularly beloved stretch of woodland, the sort of clearing activity taken up every few years by the local foresters to ensure the continued health of the forest. One couldn’t help but glean a deep sense of mortality across the images that poured forth across Hockney’s witness, however − especially when one kept in mind the terrible swath among his own cohort that AIDS Hockney had himself asked the foresters to spare the stump, which he now took to referring to as the ‘Totem.’ has scythed over the preceding decades. And even more moving, in this context, was the stalwart survival of one particular tall stump, which Hockney had himself asked the foresters to spare, and which he now took to referring to as the “Totem” and began portraying again and again, across all manner of other media, in the months that followed, a sort of stand-in, one couldn’t help but feel, for his own weathered self. In the months after the Royal Academy show, increasing numbers of tourists began trekking out to the two- or threesquare miles outside Bridlington that some people thought of as a sort of “Hockney National Park,” so immediately recognizable were that swerve of road, this specific hedgerow, that fold of wold, this forest path, and of course, that Totem. One day toward the end of November, Hockney was felled by a minor stroke and ended up spending the first night of his 75-year life in a hospital for observation. During that night, as it happens, vandals attacked the Totem, slathering it with pink graffiti, the words “cunt,” caricatures of a cock-and-balls, some of the imagery arguably homophobic in nature. When David returned home from the hospital (his linguistic abilities temporarily somewhat slurred, though his artistic ones were completely unscathed), his studio assistants were afraid to tell him of the vandal- FALL 2015
ism. But when he finally heard about it, he was surprisingly unfazed, noting that the coming winter’s storms would no doubt wash away the damage. A few weeks later, he traveled down to London for a minor follow-up operation, and that night the vandals returned − it is assumed there were at least two, given the mayhem they wrought − and completely chopped down the already-defaced stump. This time, returning to Bridlington and getting told of the attack, Hockney was completely devastated. He couldn’t get over the sheer gratuitous meanness of the act. “The meanness of it all,” he kept muttering. He retreated to his bedroom for two days of grimly defeated desolation, after which he roused himself and asked his crew to drive him out to the scene, where over the next several days, he recorded a suite of five gorgeously devastated charcoal drawings as a kind of commemorative tribute. Getting wind of the attack, the editors of The Guardian, one of Britain’s premier newspapers, contacted Hockney for comment. He told them of the drawings and agreed to let them run a selection, which they proceeded to do, on page 1, above the fold. News that stays new … n Into the forest I suppose trees have been back on my mind these recent days though because of a terrific little way-out-of-the-way show I happened upon this past spring, indeed one of the most memorable I saw all year (this being the time of year when we’re supposed to start toting up such nominations, after all). It was a student show, or rather it was the product of a graduate exhibition-practices curatorship seminar at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and was lodged in the university’s Gallery 400. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at the enterprise’s quality, given the fact that even though the curatorial process had been exceptionally collaborative (as the catalog detailed), it had been led on an adjunct basis by Rhoda Rosen, one of the most dynamic and creative curators around. The UIC exhibition was entitled “Encounters at the Edge of the Forest,” and set out to survey the work of a range of contemporary artists who’ve recently been taking up trees as their subjects. But not trees as conventionally portrayed − that is, as pastoral emblems of nature unsullied by man − rather trees as they have in fact become: contested foci for nationalist assertion and state formation. As Rosen explained in her catalog essay: Modern scientific forest management, first established during the 18th century, functioned to connect all aspects of colonial power. Although its origins lie in Germany, it is no coincidence that Dietrich Brandis, whose name is synonymous with the birth of forestry, worked for a decade for the British colonial administration in India where, as Dan Handel shows, the widespread implications of forest management for the colonial agenda were first played out. As Lord Dalhousie’s superintendent of teak forests in the Pegu region of east Burma and, later, as his first inspector-general of forests, Brandis was directly implicated in Dalhousie’s project to modernize India in order to bring it more efficiently under British control. Further, he was implicated in Dalhousie’s expansion of the area of British rule through the largest-scale colonial land grab to date and to his endeavor to centralize communications in order to facilitate the military and economic exploitation of India’s natural resources. Rosen goes on to note that the British brought similar politico-forestry zeal to their administration of Palestine, zeal which continued into the Israeli period (think about the millions of incongruously Northern European pine saplings which were brought in, often to cover over evidence of once-vibrant-though-now-evicted Arab villages, and the generations-old indigenous olive groves which ironically were often being eradicated in the process). The show’s name derived from the title of a novella by the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua, Facing the Forest, in which a failed Hebrew scholar, unable to find meaning in his studies, assumes the position of a watchman in a remote forest Learn more about the exhibit at gallery400.uic. edu/exhibitions. 13
Page 1 and 2: LAWRENCE WESCHLER Tree nuptials, st
Page 3 and 4: g a l l e r y VOHN GALLERY serves a
Page 5 and 6: INFECTIOUS MUSEUMUCUS From the Foun
Page 7 and 8: Contributors • David Adler | Mr.
Page 9 and 10: By Lawrence Weschler Tales of contr
Page 11: LAWRENCE WESCHLER, right, speaks du
Page 15 and 16: foot of Table Mountain (talk about
Page 17 and 18: IMAGINE growing up in a culture of
Page 19 and 20: tion? Absolutely nothing. Now, 13 y
Page 21 and 22: Scene IN KEEPING WITH my commitment
Page 23 and 24: Art, a Higher Hat My quest for the
Page 25 and 26: As the silk plush 9 covering decaye
Page 27 and 28: The Associated Press Despite or bec
Page 29 and 30: Although it has no comics collectio
Page 31 and 32: Sunset semiotics These abstracted,
Page 33 and 34: semiotic fault lines in hybrid text
Page 35 and 36: will summarize succinctly the infor
Page 37 and 38: collaborators, many of them his stu
Page 39 and 40: younger brother when he failed to f
Page 41 and 42: BABY GRAND The author, as a toddler
Page 43 and 44: perceived dualism, light and dark,
Page 45 and 46: GOING NORMATIVE Creating a statisti
Page 47 and 48: ONE YEAR IN THE LIFE OF A Non-conce
Page 49 and 50: cold and miserable. But I clench my
Page 51 and 52: starved and exhausted. Ms. Cunst to
Page 53 and 54: and not come back. “Why wouldn’
Page 55 and 56: Poem On angels and ladders Rome, pi
Page 57 and 58: L’Uomo Vogue: The writings of Kar
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Page 61 and 62: AIR OF IMPORTANCE ARTETYPES By Anon
Page 63:
Closer Untitled By Nick Wadley 63 S
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