Soz Hoz! David Hockney’s Bigger Christmas Trees fail to make a splash

The nation’s affable art OAP, David Hockney, has produced a pair of animated Christmas trees for the nation’s favourite private development, Battersea Power Station. Bigger Christmas Trees was designed by Hockney using an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil and lights up the building’s 100m-tall riverside chimneys with a pair of projected sparkling purple and green Christmas trees. The 10-minute looping animation is screening between 17:00 – 22:30, every day, until Christmas Day. “Battersea Power Station is such a beautiful building,” he said in a statement to the press, “I wanted to decorate it in a way that I hoped would bring joy and hope to Londoners.” Well, the artwork is certainly bringing joy to the press department of Apple Inc., whose new UK headquarters is based in Battersea Power Station. Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said, “It is a privilege for us that he chooses iPad for his work, and to create this beautiful Christmas gift for the people of London.”

In recent years, Hockney has moved from being a serious artist to becoming the go-to designer for spectacular branding exercises. It all started in 2017, when he designed a one-off masthead for the UK tabloid the Sun, using an iPad. In December 2020, he made a digital drawing for the cover of The New Yorker. The next year, he redesigned the Piccadilly Circus roundel for TFL. Early this year, he opened an immersive video experience, Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away), at Lightroom London.

Artists need to put food on the table, and there’s nothing wrong with experimenting with technology, but we can’t shake the feeling that he’s iPhoning it in. It’s hard to believe that this is the same artist who made such emotionally piercing works as A Rake’s Progress (1961-3), a semi-autobiographical series following a young artist finding his way and his sexuality in 1960s New York. And the California pool paintings, A Bigger Splash (1967) and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972). Even his early experiments with the latest tech were more inventive, such as his 1982 Polaroid photo collage, Billy + Audrey Wilder, Los Angeles, April 1982.

Bigger doesn’t mean better. However, if you are looking for monumental, low-effort – and seasonal – art to make a bigger splash or plug your private development, then why not go for something really provocative? In 2014, the American artist, and inveterate jokester, Paul McCarthy installed a large rubber ‘Christmas tree’ in Paris’ Place Vendôme as part of the city’s FIAC art fair. However, some viewers commented that its ambiguous appearance resembled a supersize sex toy. On the day of the installation, McCarthy was physically attacked by an outraged viewer. Two days later, the artwork was destroyed when the power cable to its air pump and the guy lines holding it in-place were cut. The art fair’s director, Jennifer Flay, said she had received complaints that McCarthy’s work was hijacking “the sacred symbol of the Christmas tree.”

Looking back to Hockney, Bigger Christmas Trees isn’t that innovative, beautiful, or even funny. And, sadly, knowing that they’re just an oversized advert for the most valuable company on Earth doesn’t exactly scream festive spirit.