Embedded Files
David Hockney and Arthur Kolat after a Wagner Drive in the San Gabriel Mountains on January 14, 2015
Hello! My name is Arthur Kolat and I have a special relationship with David Hockney's Wagner Drives. I studied them when I was an art history student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and eventually wrote my master's thesis about them. As part of that project I interviewed Hockney, went on a drive with him, documented his routes and playlists, and reperformed his Santa Monica Mountain drives. As a supplement to my written master's thesis I presented an exhibition, called Stunt Road, of materials related to the Wagner Drives.
A brief introduction: The artist David Hockney began designing opera in the 1970s; by 1987 he was working on a production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde for the LA Opera. One method he had for contemplating the music was to listen to it as he drove around the scenic Santa Monica Mountains near his Malibu beach house. Around 1990 he had a ten disc (CD) changer installed in the trunk of his convertible Mercedes which allowed him to develop the Wagner Drives, car trips along the winding roads of the Santa Monica Mountains at sunset, set to a playlist of Wagner's music. One of the most interesting questions the drives ask is how the music relates to the landscape. In what ways does it align or match? In what ways does the music provide a sountrack and what ways does the landscape provide a scene? However you characterize it, Hockney's pairing of music and landscape works as both an expanded operatic mise-en-scène and a piece of performance art. It ties Wagner's worlds of music and drama to the Pacific landscape and car culture of Southern California.
Hockney eventually sold his Malibu beach house and developed a Wagner Drive in the San Gabriel Mountains, closer to his Hollywood home. In 2012 he filmed what I call the San Gabriel Mountain Drive. The video appeared in the 2013-2014 exhibition A Bigger Picture at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. If I'm not mistaken, this marked the first time that Hockney had documented and exhibited the Wagner Drives as an artwork. I saw the exhibition in San Francisco and then, as luck would have it, I ran into Lawrence Weschler in the fall of 2014 at the Expo Art Fair in Chicago. Ren is a longtime friend of Hockney's and has written extensively about him, including an early account of a Wagner Drive. Ren went out of his way to put me in touch with David and I remained friendly with the artist for the last twelve years of his life.
In 2018 the music critic Alex Ross got in touch with me — he was working on a book called Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music which was published in 2020. After publication Ross wrote to me with the idea of performing a Wagner Drive in order to write about it in his column for the New Yorker magazine. That article was published — A Road Trip with Hockney and Wagner — in January 2021. With that, an amazing transformation had occurred: the Wagner Drives went from an artwork that was only ever performed by the artist himself to one which anyone could perform. I had performed it, and now, using my documentation as a score, Alex Ross had too. After the New Yorker piece I heard from many people who expressed interest in performing their own Wagner Drives. I encourage people who are interested to do so. True to the artwork's operatic nature, Hockney encouraged me to interpret the blocking mysef as I staged revival performances of his original drives. He told me to line up passages of music with stretches of road by practicing with different speeds, views, inflection points, and so on. However the specific stretches of road align with the music, the overall timing of the drives is crepuscular. They start just before sunset, which creates beautiful deep shadows along the mountain ranges and a stunning climax as the music crescendoes and the sun sinks below the horizon of the Pacific Ocean.
This website collects online some of my Wagner Drives artifacts and materials. Thank you for your interest. Please be in touch with any questions or comments.
Arthur Kolat
August 2026
Los Angeles, CA
arthurkolat@gmail.com
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