Hockney’s Chinese-scroll way of seeing is open, excessive, directionless, and viewer-completed.

Evidence

Hockney once called Pearblossom Highway “a panoramic assault on Renaissance one-point perspective.” One-point perspective was worth assaulting because, as the opposite of something like cubism, it was associated with a way of seeing that Hockney didn’t like. In a 2015 lecture at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Hockney showed a Chinese scroll painting as an example of a way of seeing he was more interested in. The scroll was so long that what he showed was actually a tracking shot, a journey across a multifarious scene that is less an image than a collection of small moments: people lining up to enter a temple, people crossing a river in a small boat, people conversing under a tree. Behind them, the land recedes, but to no particular point. The scroll’s narrative is excessive, open, and without direction. It recalls the text from a tourist plaque in Zion Canyon that forms the center of one of Hockney’s sprawling photo collages. The plaque reads: YOU MAKE THE PICTURE. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 361

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the contrast between one-point perspective’s single fixed viewpoint and the open, directionless, viewer-completed way of seeing Odell endorses.
• ADDENDUM: The YOU MAKE THE PICTURE open-attention aesthetic parallels how Odell elsewhere treats attention as an active world-constituting faculty rather than passive reception.