Time Recomposed of Shards

By ROBERT HUGHES

Time and its offspring, movement, have fascinated some modern artists. Sculptors can build it straight into their work -- the last half of the 20th century is full of wind-, gravity- or motor-powered contraptions that range from the balletic (Alexander Calder) to the Rube Goldbergian (Jean Tinguely) -- but a painter has to deal with a still, flat surface. On it, there are two possibilities. The first is to try to render the movement of the object itself, as the futurists did with their racing cars, or the cartoonist does with his speed lines. Mostly this results in illustrations, straightforward or disguised. The second, and by far more subtle, is to suggest the movement of the artist's eye as it scans and scrutinizes, to put together (as in cubism) the scene and the process of seeing it. This is antiphotographic, opposed to the convention of the single, fixed view. In theory at least, cubism built time into painting.

But how to put it into photography? A painter's job, perhaps; or so it seemed to the English painter and stage designer David Hockney, 50 of whose photocollages are on view (through Nov. 9) at New York City's International Center of Photography. In a phrase as memorable for its injustice as its vividness, he once remarked that "photography is all right if you don't mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops -- for a split second." But between 1981 and 1983 Hockney scarcely touched a paintbrush; irked by painter's block, he turned to photography to shake it loose, first with a Polaroid SX-70 and then with various popular automatic 35- mm cameras. He would take a motif -- a friend smoking and talking, people around a table, a swimmer in the blue light-dappled water of his Los Angeles pool, an allee of chestnut trees or a green spindly iron chair with pigeons in ) the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris -- and shoot away: click-zip, left-right, up- down, frame after frame, more like a hen pecking than a formal photographer composing, an accumulation of nervous little details, splinters and shards. He would deal out the images, dozens or hundreds of them, on the studio floor and begin assembling. "There are a hundred separate looks across time," Hockney claimed in Cameraworks, a 1984 book on his photocollages, "from which I synthesize my living impression of you."

Thus "lived time," not the frozen time of orthodox photography, inserts itself into the collages, set forth in the stutter of impressions they present to the eye. Like most artists who have made a distinct invention, he tends to overplay the significance of his own and goes on about it as though it were a veritable Rosetta stone, with whose help all representation can be rescued from monocular falsehood, so that the world is ultimately to be made new in the form of one big Hockney. But there is no doubt about the match between this technique and his deeper impulses of style. He has always been a fine painter of sociability, and the traditional genre of the conversazione fits his photocollage methods like a glove. The camera scans a Scrabble game at home or a lunch in the dining room of the British embassy in Tokyo and comes up with an anthology of posture, expression and gesture, the mild pink faces relaxing across the shining mahogany, the languid or staccato movements of the hands, as solid as a Joshua Reynolds. By putting the viewer in the driver's seat, as it were, and inducing one's eye to re-experience in some measure the movements of his own, Hockney reinforces the sense of intimacy that has always been one of the charms of his art.

He also manages to salt the work with innumerable clues and footnotes concerning past art that he admires. The distant reflection of the artist in a studio mirror gently prompts a memory of the courtier in the doorway at the end of the long room in Velasquez's Las Meninas. When Hockney includes his own hands (or feet, in their unmatched socks) in the foreground of the image, he cites Matisse: the artist drawing the artist drawing. And when he reworks the look of his main model, cubist collage, the results can rise well beyond parody and homage -- as in The Desk, July 1st 1984, with its lettered packages and books playing their role against patches of thoroughly Picassoan blue, and the faceted, warm browns of furniture and floorboards that produce a $ parallel to the fake wood grain in cubism.

In any case, intimacy is not the whole story. Hockney's responses to American landscape are broad and enthusiastic. In his painted work, these tend to be muted by irony or else lose their focus in conventional panoramas. But his photocollage method seems perfect for them, and the biggest work in this show, Pearblossom Hwy., 11-18th April 1986, sets them forth at full stretch. It is a scene both banal and grand: an intersection on the highway from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, the yellow highway line plunging out to meet the horizon under a great arch of pale blue sky, dry low brush and gray clay dust on either side, the foreground a clutter of desultory trash, beer cans, markers, a vivid yellow road sign. It is neither ugly nor beautiful, but Hockney has given it real intensity as an image. Partly this is due to the "texture" of the photographs, which, at this scale, work like brush marks. The sky, shingled with hundreds of prints of blue (it must have been a strange sight for passing cars: the stocky, owl-like Limey tourist with the moon glasses pointing his camera at the sky and clicking away), is rich in a quite painterly way, while the copious, overlapping details from which the ground, highway and signs are recomposed seem to flicker in and out of focus, compelling attention by breaking the illusions one expects in photography. Such works are so much more ambitious, intricate and convincing than the general run of Hockney's recent paintings -- banal pastiches of Picasso, mostly -- that one's pleasure in looking at them is tinged with relief.