Politics of Translation: Translation of Cultures
Tuesday 23 May 2017
6:30 pm at Reid Hall in the Grande Salle (Paris School of Arts and Culture)
David Hockney: transatlantic artist
Presented by Martin Hammer
Professor of History and Philosophy of Art at the University of Kent
With the major Hockney show coinciding with his 80th birthday about to arrive at the Pompidou, having attracted huge visitor numbers in London, this is a good moment to offer fresh thinking about what made his early art so distinctive, but also what concerns and attitudes he may have shared with his 1960s contemporaries. This talk will focus in particular on a comparative discussion of the work of Hockney and Ed Ruscha, born within a few months of one another, friends and fellow Los Angeles residents, who have both tended to be categorised as Pop Artists, and now number amongst the most famous painters on the planet. What, then, can we learn about well-known Hockneys such as Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style (1961) and A Bigger Splash (1967) from juxtaposing them with Ruscha’s current production as painter and maker of photobooks?