As thematic exclamation points for this exhibition, the Grand Canyon paintings work well. The possibilities of the American landscape for asking anti-romantic questions of its social representation have attracted David Hockney since the 1960s. This is the land of the negative subject, the subject who has largely disappeared from view and appears only as viewer. Only occasionally, through enigmatic references to Indians, do these Western landscapes acquire a politics of conflict, dispossession and possession. Even the Indians are symbolic shorthand, another form of invisibility.
Nobody is at home here.
This sense of an immanent and imminent human presence is not limited to Hockney s American landscape paintings, for it also appears in his paintings of the Yorkshire countryside with heavily contoured pastures and such signs of agricultural modernization as giant hay rolls and distant reapers. The formative human hand in landscape repeatedly makes itself known through Hockney s eyes. Roads repeatedly shape Hockney s landscapes, a human development that penetrates the landscape deeply but ultimately cannot overwhelm a resistant geography. Humanity is never over-welcome in Hockney s road landscapes. The population may present behind the house curtains, but remain invisible.