David Hockney
After looking into David Samuel Stern I was interested to push this research further and look into David Hockney’s photomontages.
David Hockney was born 9th July 1937 and is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. He began his art career in the 1960’s. He is considered to be one of the most successful and recognised artists of our time and has redefined the medium of painting during six decades of creation. Known for stylistic versatility, he brought a whole new creative dimension into contemporary art. Hockney is associated with the pop art movement of the 1960s and was actually an important contributor to it. He is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century and in New York, Hockney befriended Andy Warhol.
Hockney began his investigation into cubism in 1982 and also pictorial space experimenting with photographic collages. I find this artist interesting because of his experimentation with depictions of time, motion and the position of the viewer. He combined dozens of successive Polaroid photographs, taken from varying angles, to create a complete image, or what he described as ‘joiners’. He explores space and time and his interest in how we turn a 3 dimensional world into a 2 dimensional image. I wanted to create something similar with mixed faces manipulated in photoshop. Instead of using Polaroid pictures, I wanted to use digital images and instead of taking it from varying angles I wanted to take it from the same angle but of different faces. I wanted to create one image, combining many images of different genders and combining them into one person. So there are differences into why both myself and Hockney wanted to use this process of creating images; Hockney wanted to explore time and space and I wanted to explore genders, both of us using a similar tool for exploration.
In this image of the elderly gentleman, Hockney has created an image where by you can see many different elements to the picture, by taking individual pictures of the areas, and joining them up. You can hone in to one area at a time and really see if for what it is. He has put many different images of the hands in so it really focuses on the gestures, mood and feeling from the subject. They are the most important feature, it’s like the artist is trying to portray how important this gentleman‘s hands are, and indeed have been, throughout his life. If you look carefully they portray his knowledge, his peace, his frailty. I think the artist may have done that on purpose. You can see from the two images of the curve in the chair at the bottom that he has seen many days sat in that chair, I feel that Hockney has really captured so much more than just an old guy in a chair, he’s captured and emphasised his personality, his life and his home by using joiners.
In my mash up image, i have captured the personality, femininity and masculinity of each person. There is actually a lot of femininity in this image, although at first glance it looks like a male, there is many features that are feminine when you look closer and you know where each section has come from and where it began. In doing this I have challenged perception of the stereotypes.
The Dadaists
Dada was an art movement formed during the First World War in Zurich in negative reaction to the horrors the war. Its output was wildly diverse, ranging from performance art to poetry, photography, sculpture, painting, and collage. Dada artists felt the war called into question every aspect of a society capable of starting and then prolonging it – including its art. Their aim was to destroy traditional values in art and to create a new art to replace the old. Dada was the first conceptual art movement where the focus of the artists was not on crafting aesthetically pleasing objects but on making works that often upended middle class sensibilities and that generated difficult questions about society, the role of the artist, and the purpose of art. I felt researching this tied in nicely with my theme of gender as it is such a difficult subject to broach in today’s society.
In addition to being anti-war, dada was also anti-middle class and had political likings with the radical left.
The founder of dada was a writer and poet, Hugo Ball and in 1916 he started a satirical night-club in Zurich called the Cabaret Voltaire. This night club was described by Ball in his own words in one of his diary entries : “Everyone has been seized by an indefinable intoxication. The small cabaret is about to come apart at the seams and is going to be a playground for crazy emotions.” After this a magazine which, wrote Ball, ‘will bear the name ”Dada”. Dada, Dada, Dada, Dada.’ This was the first of many dada publications. Dada then became an international movement and eventually formed the basis of surrealism in Paris after the war.
Hannah Höch
One Dadaist that I found that related heavily to my theme of gender was named Hannah Höch. Höch was born in 1889 in Gotha in central Germany. In 1912, she moved to Berlin to attend the School of Applied Arts. She studied glass working and book arts design. After the war was over, in 1915, Höch met Hausmann, who introduced her to his circle of Dada artists and became her lover.
Höch was known for her intelligently analytical political collages and photomontage works. Hannah appropriated and rearranged images and text from the mass media to critique the failings of the Weimar German Government and drew inspiration from the collage work of Picasso and Dadaist companion Kurt Schwitters. She has her own similarly dynamic and layered style of which I love.
Höch focused her work on gender issues and is recognized as a pioneering feminist artist for her works such as ‘The beautiful girl’ - 1920, which was an evocative visual reaction to the birth of the industrial advertising and ideals of beauty. In this piece, a woman doesn’t have a head and instead, a light bulb. A car tire and a lever box her in on either side. There are multiple BMW logos behind her and a hand holding a circular pocket watch emerges from behind a pouf of hair. Corporations and new technologies, apparently, have overtaken the subject’s individuality, while the clock suggests how time and labor were being used and changed in new ways.
Höch had a bob haircut and an androgynous look and found freedom in her self-presentation, art practice, and personal life. She explored gender identities and norms, which relates to my theme by pairing breasts with a tusked mask or high- heeled legs with a stone masculine torso. I feel this is exactly the kind of thing I would like to represent with my theme and mixing genders up to challenge the norms of society.
To take inspiration from the works of Hannah Höch and the Dadaists I would love to progress my work further by using bits of collage and adding them to my photoshopped manipulations onto a canvas. I would also incorporate inspiration from Frank Stellar's collages and bring them more into 3D rather than 2D to bring them to life a bit, ripping parts of my images apart, curving them, weaving them and using mark making and collaged magazine.
The Art of Gender Fluidity: 9 Works That Show How Sexual Identity Has Evolved Over Art History
A big deal: Challenging gender bias with playing cards
~ https://www.internationalwomensday.com/Activity/12587/A-big-deal-Challenging-gender-bias-with-playing-cards
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