Seeing and listening, occipital and temporal. The ways in which visual artists and musicians unite would take books to untangle, not a few provisional paragraphs. That said: last week the pianist Yuja Wang returned to the Lightroom, King’s Cross in London to perform seven one-hour-long recitals surrounded by David Hockney’s art, projected and many times enlarged all around the hangar-like cube space. (She played there last year, but reviews were not permitted.) Music has been a subject for artists since antiquity. Many painters are musicians, some musicians painters. As last Friday was his 150th birthday, let’s single out Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), serious painter, even more serious composer. The Wang-Hockney collaboration is a different endeavour: a virtuoso musician and a visual artist existing alongside each other, one discrete practice informing the other.
Hockney is, probably not too strong a word, obsessed with music but does not make it or, except in his arresting stage designs, paint it. Wang is not the first to “play to” art. The composer-pianist Philip Glass, one of whose études Wang included at the Lightroom, started out playing in art galleries, mainly because no one wanted his music elsewhere. He continued the habit long after achieving success, performing in New York and Paris inside installations by his friend, the sculptor Richard Serra. The difference is that Serra’s work, colossal, inscrutable, is preoccupied with mass and form. You can imagine his weighty monuments forming a brilliant acoustic backdrop for Glass’s musical energy.
