This week I watched Melvyn Bragg’s Sky Arts programme on the life and work of David Hockney. Hockney’s 86 now - Bragg’s not far behind that, there were 170 years worth of experience on screen together as they talked in Hockney’s studio near the village of Beuvron-en-Auge. These last few years Hockney’s been living and working in Normandy, where the skies are open, the light intense, the colours rich and vivid, and he’s been painting what he sees each day and what he experiences through the seasons of the year - mostly the fields and trees around him.
His work is
filled with a kind of luminous joy and a lightness of being that the landscape
is evoking in him. ‘Yorkshire it ain’t’, as he ruefully acknowledged. This late
stage of his work floats free of history, of politics, of environmental threats
to the nature he paints - and just celebrates what is there, illuminates what
is present in the natural world in the here and now. It has a simple and
timeless quality. And he’s made hundreds of paintings there, including a 90
metre wall of a painting of springtime that has to be walked along to be seen
and experienced. It’s art on a heroic scale, in the spirit of Monet, but
entirely his own, it’s where his idiosyncratic evolution as an artist has taken
him.
And when
Melvyn Bragg asked him at the end of the interview: “what are the public
responding to in your work, do you think?” he paused. “I don't know” he said
slowly - either with diffidence or feigned diffidence, hard to tell with a
showman like Hockney - “I don’t know…but I like to think it might be…space”.
“Space?” prompted Bragg, trying to coax out a bit more. “Yes, the depiction of
space. These paintings all have space in them” - which sounded at first like a
bit of a cliché; but then he continued (and I’d had this thought so I was taken
aback when he went on): “My sister said she thought space was God - which I
thought was an interesting notion”.
In the
Talmud one of the names the rabbis gave to God was ‘Makom’ - space.
Moving away from the Biblical and gendered picture of God as a personality that
rewards and punishes, the rabbis of a later generation were developing a
non-anthropomorphic understanding of God as an energy that animates the
universe, that is the space of the universe, that God is what is present in
each place, in each space, in the here and now - not an actor in the story but
a dynamic within life itself. Divinity not as personality but as potentiality.
Back to
Hockney. Because he then developed this idea in a significant and quite
poignant way. “I mean”, he said, “I'm going to have no space soon. I'm going to die…somewhere in the next five
years or so…and that will end my experience of space - and time”. He smiled. “I
think about this a bit - but then I stop, because it might drive me mad” and
then with a wry smile he reached out beside him: “I'll just have a cigarette”.
And he lit up.
Space. We
exist in space. And then we don’t. Many people say that if they do have any
sense of the divine, or the numinous, or a sense of awe, it is connected with
certain spaces and places linked to nature: parks, gardens, seas, open skies,
rainbows, stars at night, deserts, wilderness, sunsets, spaces where we
experience our lives in a different perspective perhaps, see our smallness,
feel our transience, in the presence of places, spaces, that open us up to
something bigger than ourselves - they might be fleeting moments but they link
us to the timeless. “These paintings all have space in them” - we respond to
space.
Where do we
find space? Do our religious services offer us space? Do we have space for our
selves? Where do we have inner space, space to be with our inner nature, the
wonder of our particular being in the world, as unique, as distinctive as every
tree that Hockney paints? “They are all different, trees, aren’t they?” he
said. “Like people”. We need space, but it can be hard to find: our world is
very cluttered, so much external stuff demanding our attention every day, every
minute of every hour. The tyranny of the smartphone, of social media, of
everyday life crammed with demands. You know how it is. Where is the space,
outside us, inside us? We yearn for it - is this what people see when they look
at Hockney’s late work : the space we crave? The blessing of space. A moment of
godliness here and now. Makom. Space is God. God is space.
So far so
good. We could leave it there. But I think there’s something missing. What
about the randomness of the world?
Because the space of the world gets filled with stuff that isn’t a
blessing, that seems far from godly. Even nature is double-sided. We can stand
in awe at the side of a waterfall or a Scottish loch, or on a seashore, but
sometimes the power of nature is awful not awesome: tides can
turn into tsunamis, the sun can wither the harvests, cause forests to burst
into flames, rivers can flood, destroying land and people alike, avalanches and
earthquakes can extinguish us in a moment. Nature is ruthless, amoral and we
romanticise it at our peril. And this is even before we address our role in the
destructiveness of climate change. These are the curses we live with.
The section
of the Torah we read this week in synagogues addresses this double reality:
Deuteronomy 28. It sets side by side what it calls blessings and curses. The
promise of abundance and health and wellbeing if God’s commandments are
followed; and the threat of disaster and hardships if they are not - the shadow
side of life, the tragic darkness of what can unfold.
The latter
50 verses of the chapter show us images of the land blighted, of heat and
drought and the death of animals and nature, images of disease and devastation,
exile and death, madness, abuse, cannibalism, despair, helpless suffering,
populations powerless to resist degradation, persecution, occupation. It’s a
piece of extraordinary and terrifying apocalyptic literature, a brilliant and
stunning piece of narrative art - Cormac McCarthy eat your heart out - but it’s
unbearable to read. Yet we see it starkly unfolding in the daily news. I don’t
share the Biblical view that this is God’s punishment for not following the set
commandments. But the Torah does suggest that there are consequences we have to
face collectively for failures to live ethically: consequences for individuals,
for societies, for the planet.
So, as much
as Hockney has to offer us, this divine space we need, and images to
contemplate and enjoy, perhaps we need another contemporary artist to fill out
the picture, an artist who speaks (to my mind incomparably) of consequences,
who speaks not of the timeless wonders of nature, but the vicissitudes of
history and the fraught impact of the 20th century on our psyches.
His work is also awesome in scale, and if you are drawn to it, it’s not because
it offers space for dreaming but because it offers a mirror in which we can see
who we are in all our confusion and helplessness and moral darkness.
I am
speaking of the great German artist Anselm Kiefer whose sculptural and painted
work is filled with the detritus of civilisation, abandoned shopping trolleys,
lead books devoid of writing, axe heads, giant wilting sunflowers, scorched
earth, human hair and ash mixed into his canvases, scenes of devastated forests
and deserted landscapes, broken branches, fragments of glass, weapons of war,
skeletal outlines of people, ghosts haunting the present.
His work
over the decades has been rooted in the apocalypse of German history - but he’s
wrestled it into a body of work (also on a heroic scale) that speaks to
universal themes: of loss and devastation and hubris and human destructiveness.
He’s the antithesis of Hockney’s ahistorical evocation of the simple goodness
and joyfulness of life around him.
And yet, in
his latest exhibition - and you can still see it online though its just
finished at the White Cube in Bermondsey https://www.whitecube.com/gallery-exhibitions/anselm-kiefer-finnegans-wake - his last room (after you walk
through the wreckage of consumerism and the shadows and failures of modernity,
arranged with artful randomness) is a room
containing shimmering works of nature - rivers, woods, fields, golden
light, a dense profusion of colour, giant canvases completely different from
Hockney - the antithesis of Hockney - but also inducing in the viewer a sense
of space, of timelessness, of something that we can appreciate and celebrate
and feel blessed by. Life goes on, triumphantly. With us, or without us.
Kiefer’s
work will never have the popular appeal of Hockney. But just as the Torah’s
vision contains the juxtaposition of blessings and curses, each set of images
recognisable, truthful, necessary, in order to invoke the messy, contradictory
complexity of life, so we in our own lives are fortunate to be able to be
inspired and taught by two such different artists. They each give us space - to
think, to breathe, to reflect on life’s meaning, life’s preciousness, and our
place within it.
[based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, September 2nd 2023]
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