TRUE TO LIFE
Twenty-five Years of Conversations with David Hockney
By Lawrence Weschler
University of California Press, 272 pages, $29.95
*
SEEING IS FORGETTING THE NAME OF THE THING ONE SEES
Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin (Expanded Edition)
By Lawrence Weschler
University of California Press, 310 pages, $29.95
***
It's time to add another entry to the Human List of Poles and Dichotomies (where there are Hate and Love, Love and Lust, Light and Darkness, Doubt and Faith): Research and Performance. In Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, Lawrence Weschler's extended essay on the work of Californian, post-abstract expressionist artist Robert Irwin, Weschler quotes him on the difference between what an artist is doing when creating something with a question in mind, and creating something with an image in mind: "In my own career, my growing commitment to [asking] questions has in fact led to something of a dearth in the area of performance. I get to an idea, I perform on it for a certain period of time, and then I'm done ... so on a performance level, it's true, I've left a slightly shaky record."
First published in 1982, Weschler's Seeing filled in the record, particularly necessary in the case of Irwin, not only because of his lack of interest in performance, but because he forbade any photo documentation of the work that did result, arguing that photographs were good at capturing an art work's image, but not its presence. Weschler's book, then, served to disseminate Irwin's work and process, and did it so successfully that The New York Times credited the original with having "convinced more young people to become artists than the Velvet Underground has created rockers."
This year, the book is being reissued with 10 further years of conversations with Irwin, alongside a companion volume: True To Life, featuring 25 years of conversations with David Hockney, one of the foremost painters in the late 20th century, based alternately in England and Los Angeles.
These books are companions at root. Hockney, after reading Seeing back in the 1980s, wrote to Weschler and told him that he had gone through the book with great fascination, but disagreed with almost everything Irwin said, and wanted to speak with Weschler personally. This was the beginning of their association, and so on it went: Weschler talking to Irwin, Weschler talking to Hockney, back and forth, publishing essays on both of them, fielding their responses to one another's words.
"They'd been fighting with each other for 20 years through me," Weschler writes. "They were very much like Schoenberg and Stravinsky, who were living here at the same time and never talked to each other."
Weschler, who is one of the pre-eminent non-fiction writers in the United States, has published a dozen books and essay collections, served as a staff writer at The New Yorker for 20 years and is the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities. As a young man, he was editor of UCLA's Oral History Program, where he discovered Irwin on tape and immediately contacted the artist. The two started taking lunchtime strolls, recorder clutched in Weschler's hand.
The books are essentially long essays, structured chronologically, in which Weschler transcribes the artists' words at length. They feel like monologues, but only because Weschler's hand is so light. The pieces are accompanied by subtle stage-setting, thoughtful art-historical connections and seamless descriptions of the artists' work and lives.
