Opera has a champion in David Hockney – just at its moment of need. While London’s opera houses fight for their existence against a hostile arts council, Hockney gives a demonstration of how democratic an art form it is by driving through California with Wagner blaring out, each bend in the mountain road timed to the music’s unfurling sublimity. And you feel as if you are in the open-top car with him, as a film of this joyous stunt is projected on to the deep, wide walls and floor of the Lightroom in London, with sound embracing you like the waters of a Hockney pool.
Opera is not only prominent in this new audiovisual venue’s attempt to give a living artist the “immersive” digital treatment previously meted out to such dead heroes as Van Gogh and Kahlo, but a metaphor of what Hockney might be hoping it achieves. For this patient painter of faces and places is also, we’re reminded, a lover of sensory spectacle with a deeply Romantic side. One of the best sections of the show revisits the chromatically brilliant, wittily postmodernist opera and ballet designs he painted in the 1970s and 80s. Animated figures on his painted sets for Wagner’s Tristan overture make this bit feel like Hockney’s tribute to Disney’s Fantasia – a humorous touch of knowing kitsch.
Unfortunately the kitsch is not just a twinkle but an overwhelming crescendo. This hour-long “immersion” in gigantic projections makes less impact than a brief glance at an actual original work of art by Hockney in a gallery. At his best he is a great painter but there is not a single real work by him here to catch your memory and hold on to your soul. Without real art, this entertainment goes the same way as all the other immersive exhibitions of art icons: into the weightless, passionless dustbin of forgetting.
What is this, exactly? It’s not an exhibition, nor does it have the searching honesty of a great cinema or television documentary. For the commentary is all Hockney, without any challenging or probing voices to complicate the story. He likes his work to be discussed in terms of the paradoxes of perspective, the differences between camera and human eye – and not a lot of biographical nonsense about his personal life.
So we begin with giant projections of his paintings of Los Angeles swimming pools, but as your eyes alight on the young men in them, including the massively enlarged naked bum in Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool, Hockney’s voiceover is banging on about how to paint water. What about the sex, Mr Hockney? What happened to that utopia?
Too quickly, the swimming pools give way to the landscapes of Hockney’s current home in rural Normandy, coming into being before your eyes as he pats and drags trees and clouds into dappled puffy being on an iPad screen. It’s impressive how well his electronic greens inflate from the little device to giant projections. Hockney’s quiet nature studies, which make no pretence to be cool, translate surprisingly well to this pop-concert scale.
But his theories on art are a bit dry for a lightshow. Suddenly we get a lecture on why Renaissance perspective was a dead end. If this is supposed to be accessible fun for everyone, ranting about Brunelleschi’s misunderstanding of optics is surely off target. Yet the quarrel with perspective leads eventually to an eye-opening encounter with Hockney’s experiments with cubistic photography.
He is sceptical of the camera’s rule over our eyes yet it’s a sad fact that, in this kind of spectacle, photography and film clips have more reality than drawings and paintings. So Hockney in his innocence has lent his fame here to a dumb contemporary fad that doesn’t – and cannot – capture the beauty of his art. It’s ultimately like seeing a great artist through the wrong end of a telescope – smaller and further away.
• At Lightroom, London, from 22 February to 4 June
