Contributing Artists

Arthur Kolat and Ange Wong

Exhibition Statement as Preserved in the SUGS/SITE Archives:

Stunt Road scruitinizes one of David Hockney’s most enigmatic work, the Wagner Drives, and provides visitors with the rare opportunity to engage with it. The Wagner Drives are soundtracked car rides led by Hockney himself, which he has been performing or friends and acquaintences for the last twenty-five years. The two original frives were developed in Malibu, California in the early 1990s, and were followed eventually by a thrid iteration in the San Gabriel Mountains. Stunt Road presents the documents and materials from Arthur Kolat (MA 2016) and Ange Wong’s (MA 2016) performances of the Wagner Drives in the summer of 2015. Details of their routes and playlists were based on interview that Kolat conducted with Hockney himself. Because of the Wagner Drives lack of documentation and the fact that Hockney no longer performs in malibu, the research material on display in Stunt Road constitutes the most comprehensive means available of studying this intriguing practice. The original drives took place in the coastal mountains of Malibu and were set to Wagnerian soundtrack. Hockney has a longstanding appreciation for the music of Richard Wagner: he saw Wagner’s 800-minte epic, Der Ring des Nibelungen, twice at the Bayreuth Festival Theatre in the 1970s and designed the stage sets for a Los Angeles production of Tristan und Isolde in the 1980s. By setting Wagner;s music in th mountains of Southern California, Hockney fuses Romantic wandering through nature, opera production, and performative art practice. Kolat and Wong’s are the first reperformances of the drives, an effort that has generated videos of the reperformance, photos of the landscape, maps of the routes, and playlists of the music. With these artifacts, Stunt Road opens a window onto what is arguably Hockney’s least known and least knowable artwork. Living in Malibu in the early nineties, Hockney would leave home not long before sunset, drive along the Pacific Coast Highway and into the mountains, matching specifically chosen passages of music – mostly Wagner – to the changing scenery along a determined route. The advent of CD-changer technology in the automobile had enabled him to fully control the musical selections, collage them together, and layer their emotional information onto the visual and kinetic experience of driving through a landscape. For their reperformances, Kolat and Wong spent a week in Los Angeles learning the directions and rehearsing the timings of the Malibu Wagner Drive. Their goal was to study the experimental drives through first-hand experience and investigate the drives’ significance as a moment in modernism and postmodernism. Through the exhibition of their research efforts, Kolat and Wong offer ther versions of the Wagner Drives, cast light on the questions that the drives pose, and document an elusive performance.