art + inspiration

Hockney's Highway

Hey folks—this week, I share a remembrance of David Hockney’s iconic Polaroid collage, Pearblossom Highway, a work of art that changed me. Enjoy!

In the late 1980s I was living in Los Angeles, doing the scrappy art life the way one could back then. Rents were still cheap enough that you could get by with a retail job. I was an aspiring actor, working at Samuel French Bookshop in Hollywood, selling books on screenplays and monologue collections to other aspiring actors.

I rented a bungalow in North Hollywood, built in the 1920s, as worker housing for folks who picked oranges. The cluster of six bungalows sat at the corner of a lot that would have been orchards in previous decades but by the time I landed there was packed with apartment buildings, a few leftover California ranches, a Christian Science church up the block.

At the corner was a car repair shop, and the noise from the lot, mixed with the cumbia and Tejana music the workers played, made the area feel lively. Around the corner was a great sushi place, where I learned to not only eat, but to enjoy sushi. And in the alleyway across the street from my place was the back entrance to a neighborhood gay bar. I spent a lot of time in there, and a lot of money on booze, and a lot of hours on the dance floor, screaming whenever Like a Prayer came on, and begging the DJ to play it again as soon as it was over.

I was learning how to be a city dweller, after growing up in a small town in the Mojave Desert, and I was discovering that great Southern California metropolis of valleys and hills and movie stars and tamales and freeways and graffiti and the Beverly Center.

I didn’t know it then, but I was also being formed by a postmodern sensibility: the cheap up against the pricey, the shiny against the dusty, the high, the low, the fast and slow. All of it co-mingling in that city I still consider my hometown.

CW in North Hollywood, ca. 1988

My friend Andy figures in this tale. We knew each other from Lancaster, where I grew up, located in the Antelope Valley, an hour an twenty minutes outside of LA. He and I had worked together at B. Dalton Booksellers. Andy was a truly cultured gay boy: he devoured magazines and books, movies and plays, fashion and music. He had an appetite I admired but couldn’t quite match. But I was learning.

One day, while visiting me in my bungalow, Andy told me LACMA was planning a David Hockney restrospective.

I knew Hockney’s work—his swimming pools were already iconic, his Polaroid collages had come out not long before. And, he was gay, and painted his boyfriends and lovers, and did dual portraits of his friends, like Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy.

Andy and I made a date to see the show.

It’s one of the few museum shows I remember clearly rather than in the impressionistic manner of most art shows—and most life events—I recall.

First off, the place was packed. Hockney clearly got the city, and its particular charms. Locals loved him for that. And he captured the city in his colors and shapes and hatch marks. And, in Polaroids.

I had been wandering through the galleries, taking it all in, swooning and sighing. Then, turning the corner to find the massive Polaroid collage titled Pearblossom Highway, I stopped. I can’t tell you the dimensions but I can tell you it felt like it took up the entire gallery wall.

Pearblossom Hwy., 11 - 18th April 1986, #2. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Thousands of Polaroids – OK, maybe hundreds? – make the image of an asphalt road stretching before the viewer, with STOP AHEAD stenciled on the surface. The desert reaches right up to a roadside littered with tossed garbage–-beer bottles, aluminum cans. There’s the green triangular sign reading 138, which is the route number for Pearblossom Highway. Nearly half the image is taken up with the blue sky overhead, depicted in hundreds of pale blue snaps. At center is the stop sign, and on both sides: Joshua Trees.

Joshua Trees are such a special type of fauna, native to the Mojave desert, and much abused. They get mowed down regularly to make way for tract homes. My mother belonged to a club dedicated to saving the Joshuas, and here they were in this gay Englishman’s depiction.

Hockney saw the desert, the grime of it, the beauty of it. And he understood that despite LA’s glamor and size and position on the world stage, it was part of that strange land. It’s as if that Polaroid collage was an x-ray of the city he called home. The city I now called home.

I had driven Pearblossom Highway for years–-first with my family when we would stop for dried fruit and produce at Charley Browns, then with friends when we would drive anywhere to feel like we weren’t trapped in that God- forsaken place, then later on my own when I would drive the back way from East LA.

In other words, it was a place I knew, and a place that somehow knew me. And so standing there looking at that massive collage, I guess it felt like Hockney knew me, too, that he got me.

Something shifted in me that day - did I feel it then? Do we ever really know when we are shifting and becoming more ourselves, bigger, more united, more complete versions of the humans we are?

Hopefully we get it at some point, if we are lucky to live long enough that we begin to feel integrated, stitched together over years of people and events, moments of looking and seeing and being seen.

Thank you, David, for your light and your generosity, and your courage. You were an essential part of my becoming.