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Talking to Hockney, you are struck by a kind of heroic optimism in that endeavour, one that goes defiantly against the grain of his innate scepticism. As friends and interviewers over the years will attest, he can get bogged down in particular irritations – the long-standing one is the smoking ban, against which he is a stubborn and passionate objector – but even while he is in the curmudgeonly depths of these obsessions, a smile dances around his mouth and eyes. It's that, as much as anything, that always makes his career feel like the best kind of lark. . . .
That thought, of course, sets him off in one of his intermittent rants against anti-smokers, punctuated by drags on his cigarette. "The cause of death is birth, and on your way there you might want to enjoy things…"
Can he recall his first drag?
"I was probably eight or nine. But I've smoked pretty regularly for 55 years. I don't see a reason to stop now. It's all gone dull, I think, Britain. We are being taken over by medico-fascists who want us all to live in germ-free clinics…"
Some of this anger seems to have a psychological root. He was, he says, watching a documentary the other evening in which four anti-smokers "were lined up to tell us they were saving lives, and I said to my sister: 'Don't they remind you of someone?' She said: 'Kenneth' straightaway – my father."
Hockney's dad was, among other things, a great anti-smoker, though all his five children smoked like chimneys.
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After a successful by invitation only private showing, a photography exhibit featuring the work of Benton Henry will open to the public this week.
On Friday June 26th at 5:00 pm at the Latta Art Center, Black Creek Arts Council and the Latta Revitalization Commission will be sponsoring an opening reception for Tobacco Barns of the Pee Dee.
The exhibit, featuring photographs by Latta’s Benton Henry, will remain on display through the end of August. Admission to the opening is free.
Burning issue: Hockney’s iPhone artwork
When David Hockney read Austin Mitchell's whinge in The Oldie about how MPs are being unfairly treated as lepers, he scribbled back an ironic blast in response on the Government's "new instructions" to smokers and the stubborn temptations of a cigarette.
Here is an extract from his letter to the Grimsby MP.
Dear Austin
I read your piece in the Oldie and I was a bit sympathetic. The thing is Austin, that people can be very ungrateful about some things, and after all they don't always know about your work to clean up things, clear the air so to speak.
I know you voted to get rid of all the smokers from pubs. I don't know for sure how it's working as I don't go out too much now . . .
I keep thinking what it was like before your good work. Think of it: people sitting at the front in a nightclub with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and was it Sammy Davis Jr? All, believe it or not, smoking while they were actually singing ... They even had the cheek to sing about smoke getting in the eyes.
What must it have been like? Thank goodness we won't have that again. It must have been torture for some, and not knowing 30 years later that that cough had its source in a song many years before. . . .
I sometimes ponder your plans with the smokers. The trouble for me is the moment I ponder, the weed comes up ... You can get carried away by that kind of thing, the drifting smoke wandering in all directions, the lovely shapes interlocked; you sometimes don't see the reality, which I know can be too harsh.
And then it starts, and the real live humans get involved, with both scheduled and unscheduled contributions. The concept in all its purity immediately collapses. Of course Antony Gormley's One and Other had let itself for almost anything. Nobody could really complain when, through smart timing and inattention from security staff, the launch was convincingly hijacked.
It looked like somebody was doing some quick last minute repairs. How easily the man got himself helped up by a mate, via the safety net, onto to the plinth, to stand there, iron faced, with his placade promoting its strange cause - to ban actors from smoking - while the Mayor of London and the artist himself made their opening speeches, trying to sound as if they didn't really mind about this piece of improvisation. . . .
The cherry-picker approaches with the first one, a smiling woman in her thirties. Invited to "do the gentlemanly thing", the iron faced man concedes, gets onto the lift and iis taken down. The woman takes her place, and we see her business at once. She's doing it for charity. She stands with balloons and a lollipop sign
When Antony Gormley first announced his plans to enlist members of the public to stand on top of Trafalgar Square's empty fourth plinth and do exactly as they wished for an hour, he anticipated "a certain degree of anarchy". . . .
As Boris Johnson, the major of London, Gormley and scores of spectators waited for the clock to strike nine, a spidery figure was seen scaling the heights with a banner tucked under his arm.
Minutes later, he had made it on top of the plinth and unfurled his anti-smoking banner which read: “Save the Children. Ban Tobacco and Actors Smoking”.
Stuart Holmes, a seasoned protestor who usually stood on a soap box outside the High Courts had become the first member of the public – even unofficially – to use the plinth as his very own giant soapbox.
By the time Ms Wardell was due for her ‘first turn’, many were more interested in him than in her. Johnson commended the man for gaining his fifteen Warholian minutes of fame.
“I want to thank the organisers and thank this man for ascending the plinth as brilliantly as he has...What is fame? Is it a lottery or is it self-selected as this chap’s demonstation? This is one of the questions the fourth plinth asks us to meditate on,” he said.
Antony Gormley told Telegraph TV that the anti-smoking protestor who jumped on to the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square was the perfect start to his "living sculpture" art work.
An anti-smoking campaigner has hijacked the "living sculpture" launch on Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth - but was praised by the project's creator Antony Gormley. Skip related content
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Uninvited guest at unveiling of Gormley's ... Play video . . .
Mr Gormley appeared relaxed about the incident, describing Mr Holmes as "an excellent warm-up act if the whole thing is about freedom of speech".
The sculptor said: "He chose his moment very well and I take my hat off to him."
Mr Holmes, one of the most dedicated anti-smoking campaigners of the past quarter of a century, said he usually protests outside London's High Court.
An anti-smoking demonstrator stormed the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square yesterday at the launch of an art project involving thousands of people.
Stuart Holmes, from Withington, Manchester, clambered on to the platform to rail against tobacco minutes before the One & Other project was officially opened.
His banner read: "Save the children. Ban tobacco and actors smoking." He was swiftly removed, allowing the first official "living sculptures" to each enjoy an hour of fame.
If you got a chance to visit an antiques store in China, snuff bottles may be one item of interest to you. They were used by the Chinese people during the Qing Dynasty to store powdered tobacco. It soon became an object of beauty and a way to represent social status. What arouses the most interest are the pictures painted from the inside. The delightful and varied scenes only cover an area of an inch or two and are painted using a brush inserted into the neck of the bottle. Undoubtedly, this requires an extremely skilful and steady hand. On today's show, we'll meet one of the top contemporary artists able to paint inside bottles. His name is Wang Xisan.
In Virginia, fresh-faced, environmentally minded schoolchildren gather biological samples and test water quality in rivers and waterways, part of the Izaak Walton League's Save Our Streams initiative. In Chicago, amid Tai Chi classes and body massages, families with young children enjoy performance art and teenagers flock to an all-night "rave," all part of the Museum of Contemporary Art's Summer Solstice weekend. In Minnesota hundreds of children with HIV or AIDS come together each year at Camp Heartland, where they can "escape the isolation and misunderstanding they so often face because of this illness." And all of these kids can thank the caring people at Philip Morris.
It might raise eyebrows that children and youth engage in otherwise worthwhile activities while carrying brochures and leaflets bearing the Philip Morris logo, but these and scores of other programs--ranging from battered women's shelters to disaster relief programs to scholarships for African-American students at black colleges--are important parts of an aggressive public relations campaign by the world's largest maker of cigarettes. During 1999 Philip Morris spent more than $60 million on things like hunger relief, domestic violence programs, and support of the fine arts, including some of the nation's leading museums and dance companies. Though the company has used its tobacco profits to support charitable and educational works for decades, what's new now is that its $60-million corporate giving program is suddenly being dwarfed by a $100-million-a-year image-rebuilding campaign launched last fall, which spotlights the company's goodwill efforts. Leading the way are Philip Morris-sponsored television commercials touting the firm's good deeds, under the slogan: "Working to make a difference. The people of Philip Morris." In the ads, actors play ordinary Americans engaged in volunteer teaching and assisting victims of floods. . . .
They've lavishly funded political allies, ranging from conservative think tanks like the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Washington Legal Foundation, and the Progress & Freedom Foundation to liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union. They've sponsored sports events, from airy Virginia Slims tennis tournaments to gritty NASCAR races. . . .
"They're buying silence," says Douglas. "For years, the health community, in its effort to combat tobacco, has sought the buy-in of many affected communities and has had great difficulty enlisting their support." Citing Philip Morris contributions over the years to groups like the NAACP, the Urban League, the National Organization for Women, the National Council of La Raza, and many others, Douglas says, "Many of them were either silent or provided testimony to Congress opposing tobacco-control legislation."
Further, Philip Morris's charitable giving is skewed significantly toward groups that represent parts of the population specifically targeted by cigarette marketers, especially women and minorities. . . .
In 1999, for instance, Philip Morris provided major support to the Dance Theater of Harlem and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater as well as to the United Negro College Fund, the American Indian College Fund, and the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund. . . .
For decades the company has provided substantial support to leading institutions like New York's Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. . . .
Over the years, the company has funneled millions of dollars to icons of the New York cultural establishment, including the Lincoln Center--which in the 1980s handed out cigarettes in bags of favors to patrons--the Joffrey Ballet, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the American Ballet Theater, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, among others. . . .
That's not to say that there's no controversy over the company's donations. Case in point: Philip Morris's support for battered women's shelters, lately one of its highest-profile campaigns. Together with the National Network to End Domestic Violence, Philip Morris created a program called Doors of Hope. . . .
That worries Rita Smith, executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, another major player in the movement. Last year the coalition's board of directors voted not to participate in Philip Morris's domestic violence program. . . .
Tom Metzger, spokesman for the National AIDS Fund, uses that argument to defend his organization's partnership with Philip Morris in a program called Positive Helpings, which provides nourishing food to people with AIDS. Citing the fact that Philip Morris's Kraft subsidiary produces foods, Metzger says, "Nothing's more benign than Jell-O. When you look at any multinational, you will find critics of something they produce." . . .
And despite the long odds, it's not impossible that Philip Morris's campaign could succeed in restoring a modicum of acceptance for the company--or at least help it survive until the industry can secure a stronger market position in Russia, China, and the developing countries.
All this is the familiarly messy, philosophical heart of photography, and it’s also the subject of a show that just closed here, itself a mess. “Controversies: A Legal and Ethical History of Photography” was organized by Christian Pirker and Daniel Girardin, a lawyer and a curator from Switzerland, where the exhibition originated. Louvre-length, two-hour lines daily snaked out the door of the Bibliothèque Nationale here until the end of last month. (The show moves on to South America.) Inside, scrums of visitors clustered before 80 or so pictures, more or less famous troublemakers, spanning the era of the daguerreotype through Abu Ghraib. . . .
A mess, as I said. But willy-nilly, some big questions arose. The biggest, as Mr. Girardin ventured by telephone the other day, was, “What is possible to show in a photograph?” He elaborated: “What does society accept or refuse? Why are some pictures shown over and over, and then they suddenly become unacceptable?”
In that case he was alluding to a portrait by Boris Lipnitzki from 1946, not a remarkable photograph but a curious case. Jean-Paul Sartre leans over the footlights at the Théâtre Antoine, pinching the remains of a smoldering cigarette between his fingers. This is the picture that in 2005 the Bibliothèque Nationale doctored for the cover of a catalog for a Sartre exhibition. The library expunged the cigarette. Nearly a decade earlier French postal authorities, as part of a national anti-smoking campaign, issued a stamp based on a famous snapshot by Gisèle Freund of André Malraux, tousled, perennial cigarette between lips. Authorities guillotined the cigarette.
That rightly burned French critics who decried — this was the French equivalent of freedom fries, you might say — what they called American-style political correctness, notwithstanding that the history of photography is rife with subterfuges concocted in the name of some greater social good, American and otherwise.
But when the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson invited a reporter to visit him there the other day, he wrote, "See you at the abyss." And what anyone who stops by his work space at the palazzo will find, now or over the next six months, is a farcically romantic idea of what the end of the world might look like, at least for an artist: Mr. Kjartansson, standing at an easel day after day, relentlessly painting the portrait of a man who poses before him in a black Speedo, cigarette and beer in hand.
As time passes, the canvases Mr. Kjartansson makes -- he plans to complete one a day -- will mount up around him, as will the empty bottles and butt-filled ashtrays, all of it a monument to artistic ruin. . . .
Last year in a performance that could be seen as a warm-up for Venice, he assumed all the clichéd trappings of a plein-air painter, sitting on a hillside in upstate New York with an easel, smoking cigars and reading “Lolita” while he worked. . . .
"I think, secretly, it's what every artist wants to do, just to sit and paint and smoke and think," he said.
On Tuesday afternoon Mr. Bjornsson was doing most of the smoking, a steady stream of Benson & Hedges
From a musical based on the story of a shipwreck survivor in Newfoundland to a new Canadian opera, and from a morality play acted on horse-drawn wagons in British Columbia to an innovative Montreal photography festival, the Imperial Tobacco Canada Foundation is delighted to announce the winners of its two inaugural arts donations programs, New Creation in the Arts and the Arts Achievement Award.
The prestigious Arts Achievement Award winner is LE MOIS DE LA PHOTO À MONTRÉAL, an international biennale of contemporary photography mounted in multiple Montreal public spaces, galleries and artist-run centres. This month long celebration includes educational and curatorial programming, keynote lectures and exhibitions. LE MOIS DE LA PHOTO À MONTRÉAL attracts visitors and artists from around the world and garners international attention.
“LE MOIS DE LA PHOTO À MONTRÉAL is an extraordinary achievement which reaches sustained excellence at all levels, especially in its strong creative focus and outstanding curatorial skills,” said Benjamin Kemball, president and CEO of Imperial Tobacco Canada and chair of the board of the Imperial Tobacco Canada Foundation. . . .
The ten winners of the New Creation in the Arts are:
One afternoon last month, as a crew began to install his current shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Mr. Oldenburg seemed to be making good on that promise. Still lean and vigorous at 80, he had been in the galleries all afternoon, consulting on placement and eagerly offering to research installation methods in his personal archives. But he also displayed a strikingly nonegocentric attitude toward some of his most renowned work.
Take the room full of soft sculptures from the 1960s, like "Giant Fagends" (1967), an eight-foot-wide Formica ashtray stuffed with canvas-covered cigarette butts
Hockney has pounded the streets in favour of fox-hunting, and hit the airwaves to criticise the health fascists trying to ban smoking, informing listeners to the Today programme that Labour MP Julie Morgan was "absolutely dreary" and announcing: "I think you are too bossy, chum!"
He has also taken libertarian positions against Europe and Iraq, and is resolutely sceptical about New Labour. He once compared Tony Blair to a school prefect, and described Gordon Brown in print as "a dreary atheistic Calvinistic prig, who I'm sure will never be elected in England".
The outbursts - always witty, often speaking to a silent majority - reflect Hockney's lifelong attraction to the spotlight. However, they have perhaps overshadowed an important recent development: since returning to the UK a few years ago, he has been producing some of the best work of his career. . . .
An inveterate smoker, he has become a champion of individual freedoms, campaigning vigorously against smoking bans. In recent years has returned to his live in his native Yorkshire.
He says: "I hate Gordon Brown. I really do hate him. I'm going to be made a criminal because I smoke. They're taking away our liberties and there's no one saying a thing."