[re]curated_ Richard Hamilton - The Artist's Eye (1978) _ National Gallery

In 1978, Richard Hamilton was the second artist to be invited to curate The Artist's Eye, a series of experimental exhibitions which invited artists to curate their own show, selecting artworks from the collection of the National Gallery and including a work that they had made themselves. With virtual technology we're able to recreate the show and tell you more about Richard Hamilton's Artist's Eye. My name is Daniel Herrmann. I'm the Ardalan Curator of Modern and Contemporary Projects here at the National Gallery. Please join me for Richard Hamilton's Artist's Eye. In The Artist's Eye, Richard Hamilton didn't just hang artworks. He radicalized the exhibition as a medium in itself. He introduced everyday household items and used white muslin to bring down the ceiling of the gallery in a way that really had us look differently at the artworks. I'm joined by researchers Kevin Loteri and Isaac Nugent who will help me uncover the ideas and questions behind this influential exhibition. I was drawn to The Artist's Eye because of just how strange and unique that space is that Hamilton created. A very clinical, almost severe space where you have old paintings by Bosch, by Rembrandt, and on the other hand you have a television set. It's a gallery of course but it's also a domestic living room, maybe a waiting room, maybe even an artist's studio. After all there is an easel with a blank canvas and Hamilton talked about these various objects, the chairs, the easel, as props. During the 1970s and 80s attitudes towards contemporary art were hardening. The emergence of conceptual art had split the public and also the art world. So this exhibition series was an attempt by the National Gallery to contribute to that debate. Choosing Richard Hamilton to participate in Artist's Eye was a bold choice by the National Gallery. He was one of the most iconoclastic and experimental artists of his generation. Hamilton's Artist's Eye was a hugely successful exhibition for the National Gallery. By the end of its two-month run the exhibition had nearly 150,000 visitors, which is an extraordinary number for a one-room exhibition. This exhibition wasn't just something to look at, it was something to enter. As visitors would walk into the exhibition they would encounter everyday objects. They would encounter a Vasili chair by Marcel Breuer. They would also encounter a live television set that played Wimbledon right there in the hallowed halls of the National Gallery. They would encounter an ironing board. They would see a rush woven chair. One striking object in the exhibition was a mirror. Hamilton had included it for motive reasons. A lot of our paintings actually have mirrors in them. But it also meant that he was giving a lot of agency to the viewers themselves. The act of viewing, the act of spectating and reflecting became a central theme of the exhibition itself. In the course of our research we actually also found out that this mirror formerly belonged to Sir Philip Hendy, one of the earlier directors of the National Gallery. To recreate the original installation of Hamilton's exhibition, we relied on photographs taken at the time, correspondence between the artists and curators and reviews of the show. The exhibition was held in the Special Exhibition Room, a gallery space that was built in 1975 specially for hosting temporary exhibitions. Using old floor plans and installation photographs, we were able to reconstruct the original layout of the exhibition. I think a key to the exhibition is the inclusion of Hamilton's own painting, My Maryland. He writes very humbly that the painting was alien enough for it to be situated next to the great works that he had long admired. My Maryland is based on a contact sheet of photographs taken in one of Marilyn Monroe's last photo shoots before her untimely death. And it also shows the marks that Monroe made on the contact sheet itself. She would often review her contact sheets and mark them as good, bad, no, etc. Hamilton in his own painting, My Maryland, preserved all of these marks, joining them, and this is important, with his own painterly gestures, to make an interface, I should say, between the marks of the painter, the marks of the model and cinema goddess, and potentially the imagined marks of the spectator herself, who might project them onto the empty blank canvas standing alongside them. This is an artist known probably most famously for being one of the inventors of what we call pop art today, but his career is much more varied than that. Hamilton also designed the exhibition poster. He incorporated Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait, a really popular painting at National Gallery's collection, and a painting of an easel. The exhibition also included an easel with a blank canvas on it. Jan van Eyck's technical mastery and arcane symbolism really appeal to Hamilton. One thing that I was really drawn to in Hamilton's writing around the artist's eye was the way he talked about the great technical skills of artists like van Eyck. He talks about them as being so grand, so proficient, that experiencing their work, one experiences a kind of epiphany, he calls it a crystallization of thought, that allows one to join in the thinking or the thought process of the artist him or herself. And I find in the artist's eye an artist who is trying to see whether the spectator can make contact with the mind, mind's eye as it were, of the artist on view. Hamilton recalled visiting the National Gallery in the 1930s and 1940s. He had been a student at the Royal Academy Schools and every year he was required to produce a copy of a painting in the National Gallery or a series of sketches. Hamilton wasn't a very good student at the Royal Academy. In fact, he was expelled in the mid-1940s for not benefiting from the instruction that the Royal Academy provided. However, the experience of copying National Gallery paintings stuck with him. One of the things that we can really see in the exhibition is how Richard Hamilton's interest in exhibition design, his experience with copying the works at the National Gallery, and his fascination with challenging the hierarchies of images come together in one single exhibition. One of the things that Hamilton included was actually not the original but a reproduction of van Gogh's sunflowers. He placed them right above a rush woven chair, which in itself was a link to the chair that van Gogh had painted and that is in the collection of the National Gallery. He really challenged the idea of what is real and what we make real, maybe even like this chair, which we see here, of course, only in virtual reality. So Richard Hamilton, like his great hero Marcel Duchamp, was an artist who knew how to program mystery and enigma into his work, and the artist's eye is no exception. Take, for example, the strange obelisk or sliced column at the opening of the space. It could be a reference to the great painting by Saint-Rodin that's included in the exhibition, or it could be, in one of my theories, a recreation of one of the great optical instruments that Albrecht Dürer and others invented to paint and to draw naturalistically. But whatever it is, it will likely remain an open question for us. Richard Hamilton really loved breaking down hierarchies and even liked being a bit subversive. Here we have Rembrandt's self-portrait at 63, a very revered painting of exquisite quality. Hamilton seems to encourage us not just to revere a painting, but we're also encouraged to think about it as a functioning object, put right next to a functioning ironing board. Hamilton said that every object he chose for his exhibition was chose for a specific reason. He wasn't always clear about what that reason was. He left a lot up to the viewer to decide for themselves. Many of the ideas that Richard Hamilton raises about the relationship between art and popular culture are still important today. So I came to Richard Hamilton's work initially writing a book on a group of thinkers, artists, and curators known today as the Independent Group. In that context, Hamilton was central, was crucial in formulating an approach to art and images in general that refused to create hierarchies between them, that instead saw all images as part of a continuum. And I think we see that ethos extended in the artist's eye. The work of Richard Hamilton is very much about looking. The act of looking. The process of looking. The hierarchies of looking. And the entire spectatorial regime that allows us, as visitors, as beholders, to decide what we really want to look at. And in order to make that even a bit more critical, Hamilton introduces the most important device of popular culture of his time into his exhibition, a television set. In this case, showing us live footage from Wimbledon 1978, which, spoiler alert, Björn Borg won. Richard Hamilton gives us a choice. What do we want to look at? What is important in image production and image consumption? In the end, it's up for us to decide. In the course of looking back at the Artist's Eye series of exhibitions, we've been fortunate enough to work with some of the most astute researchers and look at some of the most interesting artists of the past 50 years. Each of those artists approached their exhibitions in a very different way. Some made expert use of a plethora of paintings that the National Gallery has to offer, creating beautiful, eclectic hang-off pieces, like a string of pearls on the wall. Others explored the histories and stories of these paintings in ways that usually art historians often do, allowing for expert storytelling and addressing aspects of the history of art that had not been told so far. And yet others, like Richard Hamilton, used the exhibition as a medium itself. This notion of display and exhibition as a medium in itself, the idea of the exhibition as symbolic form, is what makes Richard Hamilton's Artist's Eye from 1978 so important and still resonates so strongly with audiences and artists today. By creating an entire space of different meanings, Hamilton opens up these paintings and allows the visitor to encounter them on different levels, constantly giving us permission to address the paintings on our own terms, with our own questions and with our own ideas. And in this way, they really become timeless.