Gallery visit: David Hockney at PSAM
Take my hand and let's go on a little tour of the exhibition together
Minutes before noon on a Thursday, the front steps of the Palm Springs Art Museum were packed with clusters of people waiting for opening. I noticed that most of them were of retirement age. I had just dropped off my two friends at the airport after a week together in Joshua Tree and already missed them but also excited to explore on my own. As a lone visitor, I slipped to the front of the crowd and purchased my tickets on my phone. I hadn’t expected it to be so busy and I had less than two hours before I needed to be back at the airport for my flight.
I was there to experience two exhibitions. First, the museum presented David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed featuring more than 200 works that highlight the artist’s non-traditional points of view over his six-decade career. The second was Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945-1990. Specifically I wanted to see a James Turrell piece.
I first started paying attention to David Hockney after reading Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by the British art critic Olivia Laing a few years ago. Not long after, I was visiting London when his immersive exhibition Bigger & Closer was on view at a space in Kings Cross. Surrounded by his artwork, which was projected on the gallery’s four big walls and narrated by his soothing English accent, I became enamored with him. His art is both childlike and complex, though I suppose they are one and the same. He doesn’t shy away from vibrant colors and silly shapes, and some of his pieces are cartoon-like. What I love most about his work is the joy and love that is so evident in every piece, from the portrait of his mother to the sketches of his lovers. Art is love, and like art, love isn’t perfect. It’s no wonder I almost wept in PSAM.
Some quotes from around the exhibition:
“Friends…that’s really the only thread running through my life.”
“Whatever your medium is you have to respond to it. You usually follow it; don’t go against it.”
“Now that we have the photography that mechanically records exactly what the world appears to be like, painting does not have to bother with this. So, there is no need for topographical painting anymore; painting can be about itself. But painting has always been about itself. This is what lead us to believe that there were two separate things—abstraction and representation—and that they were different.”
With less than an hour to spare, I twirled my way through the other galleries looking for James Turrell’s piece. I had to ask two museum guards where I could find it because I kept getting lost. Tucked away in a dark room, there it was glowing back at me. I had a moment alone in that room to be mesmerized.
“In Afrum (White), a modified projector casts a rectangle of white light onto the corner of the otherwise darkened gallery, creating the illusion of a floating three-dimensional cute. The crisply defined area of light changes in appearance depending on how viewers move in the space. Through his precise manipulation of light within specific spatial environments, James Turrell creates opportunities for viewers to engage with nuanced processes of perceptual experience.”
Some of my other favorite finds at PSAM included the Andy Warhol Brillo Box Dress (1964), a banner crocheted out of cassette tape that says The Best That You Can Do (by Nicola Vruwink), a Jean Arp bronze sculpture, and a stack of gigantic yellow plates.
After cruising through the gift shop and buying an exhibition poster, my time there was up, though I could’ve spent many more hours with Hockney. I brushed my tears away, stuffed my poster tube in my backpack’s water bottle pocket, and headed back to the airport to catch my flight home.
