Cottage Capers [1]: David Hockney's 'Fuck' Series from 1961
"Waited for the No. 19 bus in Sloane Square. Got off at Piccadilly. Went to the Holloway Road. Went to the Gent’s lavatory. Nothing much in there. A man of about thirty. Then another man came in, in his twenties." - Joe Orton [2]
Still an RCA student in 1961, Hockney embarked on a small series of drawings and paintings he called the ‘Fuck Series’. This would appear to be the calculated action of someone seeing how far he could push the boundaries of what was acceptable. It is perhaps useful here to remember that the word fuck was not the ubiquitous word it has become. The first use of the word on British television came not until four years after the Hockney pictures, on November 13, 1965, on the satirical show BBC-3.[3] There would be some later veiled references to the word fuck in the work of his fellow students at the RCA - most notably in Pauline Boty’s painting, ‘5-4-3-2-1’ (1963), which has a laughing self portrait and the truncated phrase ‘oh for a fu(…)’ painted in a box in the middle right. But Boty erred on the side of caution and forbore to write the complete 'F' word. And, in any event, it is highly likely that Boty would have already seen that very same abbreviated phrase in Hockney’s painting from two years earlier, ‘The Most Beautiful Boy in the World’ (1961), where it can clearly be discerned amongst other scraps of graffiti-based text and other ruder stuff. Hockney’s usage of the actual, uncensored word, at the very beginning of the 1960’s, therefore, has to be seen as provocative, even foolhardy – the action of a young man defiantly standing up to be counted.
In ‘Fuck (Cunt)’ (1961) we see another
self portrait. Shunted to the right of the page, which adds to the secretive
nature of the work, the figure of the young artist stands in what is
undoubtedly a toilet cubicle, surrounded by graffiti. It could well be Earl’s
Court tube station – it is on public record that Hockney used this particular
toilet as a source of graffiti for other paintings and he was living in Earl’s
Court during the early 1960’s. The circular shape in the background, in front
of the figure, is reminiscent of the London Underground signage. Superimposed
over the figure is what may be a doorway, perhaps of the cubicle itself. Behind
and in front of the figure’s head floats the broken phrase: ‘A Happy […] to All
Our Readers’, which was a once common graffiti joke referring to newspaper
editors’ Christmas or New Year wishes to the public. Above his head is a phrase
that begins, ‘my brother is [obscured by a blob of ink] 17’. And above that is
the hastily scrawled legend ‘fuck you[?] cunt’, which gives the work its title.
To take this direct, obscene graffiti and transcribe it into an artwork was a
brazen act in itself, but the truly bold element of the work is disguised and
only emerges after longer scrutiny, once we have followed the form of the
figure to the bottom of the paper. Below the dark shirt or jacket that the
figure wears, two spindly limbs trail down. These could be arms, but as they are
disproportionately long, they more resemble legs. If read as such, they give
the drawing a frank sexual frisson. Given Hockney’s skill as a
draughtsman, even at this early point in his career, it seems inconceivable
that he was not aware of the ambiguity of anatomy. The left ‘leg’ is slightly
raised, so we can see that it ends in rudimentary toes, indicating that the
figure is naked from the waist down. In between the legs we can now
see the figure’s unmistakable testicles and erect penis, drawn with the same brevity as the graffiti. And just in front of this, Hockney has drawn a lower case ‘w’, which also reiterates the shape of the testicles. Just to the rear of this, is more text which is difficult to decipher. Dotted over the entire image are blobs and splashes of fallen ink and a cluster of the artist’s fingerprints break the lower left corner, bringing a personalised bodily sense to the enterprise, in keeping with the implied ejaculatory experience. There is also, of course, a visual suggestion of the less-than-pristine walls of the cubicle itself.
The toilet graffiti theme is taken into another drawing, ‘Fuck (My Brother)’ from the same year, 1961. Hockney seems to have been taken with a particular phrase, gleaned from the walls of Earls Court tube station toilet: ‘my brother is only 17’. This teasing, opening non sequiteur, with its incestuous intimation, appears in at least three works from 1961 – ‘The Third Love Painting’, where it appears in its entirety in the middle right edge, ‘Fuck (My Brother)’ and ‘Fuck (Cunt)’, where it appears in the slightly truncated form mentioned above.
David Hockney, Fuck (My Brother), 1961 crayon, 50.8 X 40.6 cm.
This drawing is one of the most purely expressionistic of the works of this period. It is a crayon drawing which has been ‘drawn’ back into by an energetically applied eraser. The resulting effect is a kind of pleasing brutality and consequently the work appears to be the angriest of all the pieces under discussion. The word ‘fuck’ has been swiped back from the surface by an eraser, thus appearing in ghostly negative against the coloured ground. The phrase which completes the work’s title is almost indecipherable in the exact centre of the drawing. It has been scrawled rapidly and without care – in the manner of much actual graffiti. Beneath this, along the bottom of the work, more eraser swipes have been made, giving the space an odd, gauzy, Baconesque feel. Such is Hockney’s disregard for the niceties of presentation in this work that he allows the granules of rubbed off crayon to remain adhered to the surface of the paper. As in the previous drawing, there is an ejaculatory painterliness, achieved here by the application of a moistened hand or rag smeared across the centre. Entering in from the bottom mid-left edge and almost invisible amongst the stripes of erased crayon, is Hockney’s trademark of this period - a blunt-ended phallus.
[1] In Britain, public toilets used as gay beats are known as cottages.
[2] The Orton Diaries, ed. John Lahr, p 203, Da Capo Press, 1996.
[3] In Hollywood, one of the first films to use the word fuck was 20th Century Fox's M.A.S.H, directed by the late Robert Altman in 1970.
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