David Hockeny: Bigger and Closer (Not Smaller and Further Away)

My single biggest musical regret is that I never saw David Bowie live. I had the chance and all. I was living in California in 2004 when Bowie’s A Reality Tour rolled round. A friend had tickets to the show in Berkeley and offered me one. I don’t remember why, but idiot that I was I turned it down. A chance to see Bowie doing what amounted to a greatest hits set, and I apparently had something better to do that evening. More than twenty years later, I’m still kicking myself, especially since it turned out to be his last tour. But perhaps, if I’d known then what I know now, I needn’t have worried.

The Thin White Duke, it turns out, is going back on tour. Or footage of him is. In October, news broke that Brett Morgen, director of the 2022 film Moonage Daydream, has been working with Bowie’s estate to adapt a shelved concert film from his 1978 tour into an immersive arena show. Stage, which opens in Berlin next February, promises multiple screens, concert lighting, and high-end stereo sound. I missed my chance to be in the same room with Bowie. Soon I’ll be able to pay to be surrounded by digitised images of him. Baudrillard must be laughing in his grave.

The announcement arrived as I was gathering my thoughts about David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away), the immersive exhibition now at Carriageworks. Here, too, an artist I cherish (his photographic collages and Polaroid assemblages having caught my eye as a much younger man) has become an environment to enter, his work enlarged and projected around the room, accompanied by his recorded voice and a specially commissioned score by Nico Muhly. The title makes its case in advance. Bigger pictures bring us closer to Hockney. I went because I love his work. I left unconvinced by the proposition.

It’s worth considering the language used to promote the exhibition: “experience” is the favoured term, which shifts the emphasis from the viewable works onto the shoulders of the viewer. An exhibition has the potential to make an argument about an artist; an experience, in contrast, promises us something to feel, enter, and participate in. These possibilities can coexist, of course. But the distinction matters when the guarantee of an encounter with art becomes the basis for a product whose effects have, for the most part, been arranged well in advance.

At Carriageworks, moreover, the shift from exhibitions to experiences has implications that extend beyond the choice of words. In late 2023, a financially driven restructure made an associate curator and an exhibitions manager redundant. The arrival of a touring immersive attraction raises a question about priorities: what happens when presenting ready-made cultural experiences becomes a more attractive proposition than resourcing and sustaining the expertise needed to develop and deliver exhibitions?

Bigger & Closer, which originally opened in 2023, emerged from three years of collaboration between Hockey and the designers at 59 Productions, now known as 59 Studio. Together with the London Theatre Company, the creative enterprise established Lightroom, a purpose-built venue for immersive cultural experiences located in London’s King’s Cross. In the Bigger & Closer programme, show director and 59 Productions co-founder Mark Grimmer traces Lightroom’s origins back to a frustration with the short lifespan of the company’s work. He describes how months of intensive preparation for an exhibition or an installation might culminate in only a handful of public presentations. A permanent home would give his company’s projection-based work a longer lifespan and provide it with a space to experiment with immersive experiences, bringing its theatre-making into direct contact with what Grimmer considers “a new medium.”

Truth be told, I’m not really sure how “new” any of this actually is. For one thing, people have been surrounding themselves with images for centuries, from painted caves to churches lit by stained glass (as the show itself seems to acknowledge). Then there are the phantasmagoria shows of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a closer historical and technological precedent perhaps, in which magic lanterns conjured up ghouls and spectral apparitions for paying audiences. Significantly, accounts of these displays caught the eye of no less a critic than Walter Benjamin, who would later borrow the term to describe the seductive spectacles of commodity culture. Writing about nineteenth-century world exhibitions in The Arcades Project, he presciently observed: “They open a phantasmagoria, which a person enters in order to be distracted.” The promise of losing oneself in a world of images, Benjamin reminds us, has long had its commercial uses.

The appetite for experience also has a history within the art world itself. Caroline A. Jones makes precisely this point in The Global Work of Art, tracing as she does the connections between nineteenth-century world’s fairs and the experiential forms of contemporary biennials. Her account leaves room for encounters that, crucially, have the capacity to challenge their audiences. An emphasis on experience need not mean that art has surrendered to entertainment. The question is what kind of experience is being offered, and what it asks of us.

Grimmer, for his part, prefers to place emphasis on the format’s creative possibilities. “When thinking about potential subject matter,” he notes, “we soon realised that the prospect of working with living artists – musicians, choreographers, filmmakers, painters – to create new, collaborative work was the real hook.” As Grimmer tells it, David Hockney was the obvious choice for Lightroom’s inaugural installation. So they sent him an email. It proposed “an artist-led project” that would combine digital technology with theatrical scale to offer a fresh look at his work and “redefine the relationship between viewer and artwork.” Knowing Hockney’s fascination with perspective, the team suggested that its digital tools could help him explore “the way that people look at art and the world around them.”

Hockney replied in the affirmative, and work on the artist’s Lightroom collaboration began, though the pandemic would disrupt its progress. It is easy to see why the proposal would appeal to him. After all, he had spent much of his career testing what technologies might offer an artist, putting cameras, fax machines, personal computers, digital video, and, later, iPads to often trailblazing work in his experiments with picture-making. A room equipped with wraparound digital projectors offered another set of tools to try out. And Hockney’s involvement matters here. His enthusiasm for the project complicates any attempt to simply dismiss it as an estate-driven cash grab in the mould of the Van Gogh and Dalí experiences that have proliferated in recent years. He helped shape the production and made new work for it. Whatever its merits and shortcomings, they have to be considered in light of his participation.

The production is a fifty-minute survey, arranged thematically rather than chronologically, that moves through some of the most familiar territory in Hockney’s vast body of work. There are the swimming pools and winding roads of Los Angeles, his designs for opera, the monumental expanses of the Grand Canyon and the more intimate, though no less absorbing, landscapes of Normandy and Yorkshire. The technological twist is that the pictures move, animated across the walls around us. Hockney’s disembodied voice accompanies the images, though the narration was itself assembled from a variety of different sources. Drawing on hundreds of existing interviews, Grimmer combined archival audio with recordings of his conversations with the artist to create what he calls “a kind of collage narration.” Given Hockney’s well-documented interest in collage, the approach has a certain aptness.

In a sense, all this movement captures something of Hockney’s restless curiosity, his steadfast refusal to settle into familiar ways of making pictures. There is a real playfulness to the shifting images, too, in keeping with his fascination with perspective and the possibilities of seeing things differently. But the pace leaves little time to look. Before we can dwell on a given image, it gives way to another, our attention directed by the production’s sequencing rather than our own curiosity. The sequencing also shapes the story being told, and that story tends towards hagiography. The restless experimenter becomes a reassuring guide to his achievement, each change of medium in a story of creative discovery.

At the same time, the more pointed aspects of certain of Hockney’s works are ignored altogether. There is no mention, for instance, of the overt homoeroticism of the 1960s painting or the social circumstances in which they were made. Californian light and colour take precedence over the history of sexual desire and visibility that gives these pictures much of their force. The material qualities of the works, their surfaces and particular dimensions, likewise disappear into the continually shifting projections. To an extent, conventional galleries allow us to linger or even return, should we wish; here, we are bound by the show’s predetermined pace. Fifty minutes could hardly do justice to the scale of Hockney’s achievement, though that limitation comes with the format. The problem is that the survey’s momentum makes it harder to attend closely to the work itself.

Don’t get me wrong. A blockbuster exhibition can leave little room for contemplation either. I still remember the crush at Hockney’s monumentally successful A Bigger Picture exhibition at the Royal Academy back in 2012. But there remains a concrete difference between moving among pictures and having reproductions move around you. In Hockney’s photographic collages, the eye can move between fragments and piece together their competing perspectives. Here, the production does much of that moving for us. The invitation to see differently risks becoming an instruction about where to look next.

That problem was compounded by what was happening in Carriageworks’ Bay 17. At the session I attended, late on a Saturday afternoon, people spent a good deal of time taking pictures of other people. Parents photographed their children against the animated projections; the children, perfectly conscious of the cameras, posed and performed. Hockey’s pictures supplied the scenery. Benjamin’s account of entering a phantasmagoria to be distracted came to mind again. The smartphones were being put to depressingly familiar use. An artist’s experiments with new devices had become the backdrop to a thoroughly conventional photographic ritual.

I confess that all this left me a little bit unsure about my own youthful enthusiasm for Hockney’s technology inquisitiveness. To be clear, I still find his experiments with photography absorbing. But perhaps I had too readily treated his willingness to take up a device as evidence of innovation in itself. A new tool guarantees very little; what matters is the use to which it is put. Hockey’s involvement in this project makes it harder to blame the format alone. He helped fashion a production that uses new technology to reinforce familiar habits of looking and taking photographs.

In her programme essay, the art historian and curator Jane Munro makes the point that “Hockney wants to bring us closer so as to help us see. Few people know how to look, Hockney tells us, at least with any degree of intensity, a skill increasingly endangered in an age of rapid scrolling and swiping.” A noble intention, and I have no quarrel with the sentiment. Yet the production’s succession of enlarged, animated images seems remarkably compatible with the habits Munro describes. It promises an education in sustained attention while continually supplying the next thing to look at.

For Benjamin, the problem of modern experience concerned what could be absorbed and carried forward in a world increasingly organised around shocks and passing impressions. A room full of spectacular images does not necessarily give us much to take away, beyond proof that we were there. Bigger & Closer promises to bring us into Hockney’s way of seeing, yet it repeatedly returns us to familiar habits of viewing and recording. The pictures get bigger. Whether we get any closer is another matter.