Art and Optics: Toward an Evaluation of David Hockneyís New Theories Regarding Opticality in Western Painting of the Past 600 Years
December 1 & 2, 2001
Art and Optics: Toward an Evaluation of
David Hockneyís New Theories Regarding Opticality in Western Painting
of the Past 600 Years
 A Public Conference
sponsored by the New York Institute for the Humanities
Saturday and Sunday,
Tischman Auditorium; NYU Law School
This two-day conference will present a
public discussion of a startling new theory being advanced by world
renowned artist David Hockney, working in collaboration with University
of Arizona physicist Charles Falco, to the effect that, as far back as
the 1420s, Master Painters in the High Tradition were deploying optical
devices to render lifelike images of people and their surroundings. The
conference will bring together Hockney, Falco, and their principal
supporters and skeptics among art and science historians, critics,
scientists and painters for the first full public airing of their
views.
Most art historians believe the majority of
European painters since the Italian Renaissance deployed elaborate
systems of mathematical perspective to achieve their effects. Over the
past several years, however, Hockney and Falco have been arguing that,
on the contrary, most artists in the High Tradition, going all the way
back to Bruges in the 1420s, were deploying a variety of optical
devices (ranging from concave mirrors through lenses and cameras
obscura and lucida). In effect they suggest that painters (from Van
Eyck through Caravaggio, Lotto, Velazquez, Vermeer, Chardin, Ingres,
etc.) were using precursors of photographic cameras for centuries
before the invention of chemical fixatives in 1839; and that it was
only with the spread of such chemical fixatives that European painters,
suddenly disenchanted with the "optical look," began to undertake the
critique of photography implicit in impressionism, expressionism and
cubism and the rest of the modernist tradition.
Needless to say, these claims (up till now
mainly advanced in peer-reviewed scientific journals) are highly
controversial: if true, they would have far-reaching ramifications upon
our understanding of art. Public awareness of this new interpretation
will become even more widespread with the publication this fall of
Hockneyís exposition of his thesis, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (Viking, November 2001).
Four weeks following that publication, the
New York Institute for the Humanities will be convening its two-day
conference. Hockney and Falco will kick off the conference on Saturday
morning with the American premiere screening of Hockneyís recent BBC
documentary on the theory. Over the next two days, five panels,
featuring over twenty five contributors--including Richard Wolheim,
Susan Sontag, Svetlana Alpers, Martin Kemp, Michael Fried, Chuck Close,
Philip Pearlstein, John Walsh, Linda Nochlin and Rosalind Krauss--will
evaluate various aspects of the theory. There will also be a display
area in the neighboring Greenberg Lounge in which Hockney and others
will be demonstrating several of the alleged optical techniques.
The Conference, sponsored in part by the
Sloan and Norton Family Foundations, will be open to the public and
free; attendance in the 400-seat hall will be on a first-come/first-in
basis; for overflow crowds, the proceedings will be being piped live
into the neighboring Greenberg Lounge. Accredited press representative
can obtain passes for the entire conference or portions thereof by
contacting John Beckman at the New York University Press Office at
998-6848.
The Conference will have a website - artandoptics.com - which
should launch by the first week in November. In the meantime, questions
may be addressed to Erika Kawalek at the Institute: 212-998-2100.
|
