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| Self-portrait by David Salle, 1994. |
It’s Monday. It was raining pails before in NYC. Now it’s sunny. This back and forth weather has made my throat a sieve. I’m groggy from enduring the past few weeks. My body is healing. I feel better but at a lower charge than my usual high wattage self. So much to share, I’ve done so much over sharing in some ways, but yeah, not enough stamina to go into it all now. Maybe never. I believe in secrets.
Instead of deep,
dumb thoughts I will share the beginning of Janet Malcolm’s art-famous-y
profile piece on David Salle from 1994. It’s called Forty-one False Starts and it is reveals/shows/bends the
subject/topic/self of Salle forty-one times. It’s a clever device and should be
able to do more but still, it’s a fun read. (Link
to full article)
Salle. Male artists.
A certain generation. A certain time in New York. In the Art World.
What/How/Has anything even changed?
Enjoy.
Janet Malcolm
July 11, 1994
Forty-one False Starts
How does the
painter David Salle know when to stop? How does the author know where to start?
It’s all a question of process.
1
There are
places in New York where the city’s anarchic, unaccommodating spirit, its
fundamental, irrepressible aimlessness and heedlessness have found especially
firm footholds. Certain transfers between subway lines, passageways of almost
transcendent sordidness; certain sites of torn-down buildings where parking
lots have silently sprung up like fungi; certain intersections created by
illogical confluences of streets—these express with particular force the city’s
penchant for the provisional and its resistance to permanence, order, closure.
To get to the painter David Salle’s studio, walking west on White Street, you
have to traverse one of these disquieting intersections—that of White and
Church Streets and an interloping Sixth Avenue—which has created an
unpleasantly wide expanse of street to cross, interrupted by a wedge-shaped
island on which a commercial plant nursery has taken up forlorn and edgy
residence, surrounding itself with a high wire fence and keeping truculently
irregular hours. Other businesses that have arisen around the intersection—the
seamy Baby Doll Lounge, with its sign offering “Go-Go Girls”; the elegant
Ristorante Arquá; the nameless grocery and Lotto center; the dour Kinney
parking lot—have a similar atmosphere of insularity and transience. Nothing
connects with anything else, and everything looks as if it might disappear
overnight. The corner feels like a no man’s land and—if one happens to be
thinking about David Salle—looks like one of his paintings.
Salle’s studio,
on the second floor of a five-story loft building, is a long room lit with
bright, cold overhead light. It is not a beautiful studio. Like the streets
outside, it gives no quarter to the visitor in search of the picturesque. It
doesn’t even have a chair for the visitor to sit in, unless you count a
backless, half-broken metal swivel chair Salle will offer with a murmur of
inattentive apology. Upstairs, in his living quarters, it is another story. But
down here everything has to do with work and with being alone.
A disorderly
profusion of printed pictorial matter covers the surfaces of tables in the
middle of the room: art books, art journals, catalogues, brochures mingle with
loose illustrations, photographs, odd pictures ripped from magazines. Scanning
these complicated surfaces, the visitor feels something of the sense of rebuff
he feels when looking at Salle’s paintings, a sense that this is all somehow
none of one’s business. Here lie the sources of Salle’s postmodern art of
“borrowed” or “quoted” images—the reproductions of famous old and modern
paintings, the advertisements, the comics, the photographs of nude or
half-undressed women, the fabric and furniture designs that he copies and puts
into his paintings—but one’s impulse, as when coming into a room of Salle’s
paintings, is to politely look away. Salle’s hermeticism, the private, almost
secretive nature of his interests and tastes and intentions, is a signature of
his work. Glancing at the papers he has made no effort to conceal gives one the
odd feeling of having broken into a locked desk drawer.
On the walls of
the studio are five or six canvases, on which Salle works simultaneously. In
the winter of 1992, when I began visiting him in his studio, he was completing
a group of paintings for a show in Paris in April. The paintings had a dense,
turgid character. Silk-screen excerpts from Indian architectural ornament,
chair designs, and photographic images of a woman wrapped in cloth were
overlaid with drawings of some of the forms in Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped
Bare by Her Bachelors, Even,” rendered in slashing, ungainly brushstrokes,
together with images of coils of rope, pieces of fruit, and eyes. Salle’s
earlier work had been marked by a kind of spaciousness, sometimes an emptiness,
such as Surrealist works are prone to. But here everything was condensed,
impacted, mired. The paintings were like an ugly mood. Salle himself, a slight,
handsome man with shoulder-length dark hair, which he wears severely tied back,
like a matador, was feeling bloody-minded. He was going to be forty the
following September. He had broken up with his girlfriend, the choreographer
and dancer Karole Armitage. His moment was passing. Younger painters were
receiving attention. He was being passed over. But he was also being attacked.
He was not looking forward to the Paris show. He hated Paris, with its “heavily
subsidized aestheticism.” He disliked his French dealer. . . .
2
In a 1991
interview with the screenwriter Becky Johnston, during a discussion of what
Johnston impatiently called “this whole Neo-Expressionist Zeitgeist
Postmodernist Whatever-you-want-to-call-it Movement” and its habit of
“constantly looking backward and reworking or recontextualizing art history,”
the painter David Salle said, with disarming frankness, “You mustn’t
underestimate the extent to which all this was a process of educating
ourselves. Our generation was pathetically educated, just pathetic beyond
imagination. I was better educated than many. Julian”—the painter Julian
Schnabel—“was totally uneducated. But I wasn’t much better, frankly. We had to
educate ourselves in a hundred different ways. Because if you had been hanging
around the Conceptual artists all you learned about was the Frankfurt School.
It was as if nothing existed before or after. So part of it was the pledge of
self-education—you know, going to Venice, looking at great paintings, looking
at great architecture, looking at great furniture—and having very early the
opportunity to kind of buy stuff. That’s a form of self-education. It’s not
just about acquisition. It was a tremendous explosion of information and
knowledge.”
To kind of
buy stuff. What
is the difference between buying stuff and kind of buying it? Is “kind of
buying” buying with a bad conscience, buying with the ghost of the Frankfurt
School grimly looking over your shoulder and smiting its forehead as it sees
the money actually leave your hand? This ghost, or some relative of it, has
hung over all the artists who, like Salle, made an enormous amount of money in
the eighties, when they were still in their twenties or barely into their
thirties. In the common perception, there is something unseemly about young
people getting rich. Getting rich is supposed to be the reward for hard work,
preferably arriving when you are too old to enjoy it. And the spectacle of
young millionaires who made their bundle not from business or crime but from
avant-garde art is particularly offensive. The avant-garde is supposed to be
the conscience of the culture, not its id.
3
All during my
encounter with the artist David Salle—he and I met for interviews in his
studio, on White Street, over a period of two years—I was acutely conscious of
his money. Even when I got to know him and like him, I couldn’t dispel the disapproving,
lefty, puritanical feeling that would somehow be triggered each time we met,
whether it was by the sight of the assistant sitting at a sort of hair-salon
receptionist’s station outside the studio door; or by the expensive furniture
of a fifties corporate style in the upstairs loft, where he lives; or by the
mineral water he would bring out during our talks and pour into white paper
cups, which promptly lost their takeout-counter humbleness and assumed the
hauteur of the objects in the Design Collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
Salle was one of
the fortunate art stars of the eighties—young men and women plucked from
semi-poverty and transformed into millionaires by genies disguised as art
dealers. The idea of a rich avant-garde has never sat well with members of my
generation. Serious artists, as we know them or like to think of them, are
people who get by but do not have a lot of money. They live with second or
third wives or husbands and with children from the various marriages, and they
go to Cape Cod in the summer. Their apartments are filled with faded Persian
carpets and cat-clawed sofas and beautiful and odd objects bought before anyone
else saw their beauty. Salle’s loft was designed by an architect. Everything in
it is sleek, cold, expensive, unused. A slight sense of quotation mark hovers
in the air, but it is very slight—it may not even be there—and it doesn’t
dispel the atmosphere of dead-serious connoisseurship by which the room is
dominated.
4
During one of my
visits to the studio of the artist David Salle, he told me that he never
revises. Every brushstroke is irrevocable. He doesn’t correct or repaint, ever.
He works under the dire conditions of performance. Everything counts, nothing
may be taken back, everything must always go relentlessly forward, and a
mistake may be fatal. One day, he showed me a sort of murdered painting. He had
worked on it a little too long, taken a misstep, killed it.
5
The artist David
Salle and I are sitting at a round table in my apartment. He is a slight,
handsome man of thirty-nine, with dark shoulder-length hair, worn tightly
sleeked back and bound with a rubber band, accentuating his appearance of
quickness and lightness, of being sort of streamlined. He wears elegant,
beautifully polished shoes and speaks in a low, cultivated voice. His accent
has no trace of the Midwest, where he grew up, the son of second-generation
Russian Jewish parents. It has no affectation, either. He is agreeable, ironic,
a little detached. “I can’t remember what we talked about last time,” he says.
“I have no memory. I remember making the usual artist’s complaints about
critics, and then saying, ‘Well, that’s terribly boring, we don’t want to be
stuck talking about that’—and then talking about that. I had a kind of bad feeling
about it afterward. I felt inadequate.”
6
The artist David
Salle and I met for the first time in the fall of 1991. A few months earlier,
we had spoken on the telephone about a mystifying proposal of his: that I write
the text for a book of reproductions of his paintings, to be published by
Rizzoli. When I told him that there must be some mistake, that I was not an art
historian or an art critic, and had but the smallest acquaintance with his
work, he said no, there wasn’t a mistake. He was deliberately looking for
someone outside the art world, for an “interesting writer,” who would write an
unconventional text. As he talked, I found myself reluctant to say no to him
then and there, even though I knew I would eventually have to refuse. Something
about the man made me say I would think about it. He then said that to acquaint
me with his work and with himself he would send some relevant writings. A few
days later, a stylish package arrived, preceded by a telephone call from an
assistant at Salle’s studio to arrange the details of delivery. It contained
three or four exhibition catalogues, several critical articles, and various
published interviews, together with a long interview that was still in
typescript but was bound in a hard black cover. It was by the screenwriter
Becky Johnston, who, I later learned, was an “interesting writer” Salle had
previously approached to do the Rizzoli book. She had done the interview in
preparation for the text but had never written it.
7
David Salle’s
art has an appearance of mysterious, almost preternatural originality, and yet
nothing in it is new; everything has had a previous life elsewhere—in master
paintings, advertising art, comics, photographs. Other artists have played the
game of appropriation or quotation that Salle plays—Duchamp, Schwitters, Ernst,
Picabia, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Johns—but none with such reckless inventiveness.
Salle’s canvases are like bad parodies of the Freudian unconscious. They are
full of images that don’t belong together: a woman taking off her clothes, the
Spanish Armada, a kitschy fabric design, an eye.
8
David Salle is
recognized as the leading American postmodernist painter. He is the most
authoritative exemplar of the movement, which has made a kind of mockery of art
history, treating the canon of world art as if it were a gigantic, dog-eared
catalogue crammed with tempting buys and equipped with a helpful
twenty-four-hour-a-day 800 number. Salle’s selections from the catalogue have a
brilliant perversity. Nothing has an obvious connection to anything else, and
everything glints with irony and a sort of icy melancholy. His jarring
juxtapositions of incongruous images and styles point up with special sharpness
the paradox on which this art of appropriated matter is poised: its mysterious,
almost preternatural appearance of originality. After one looks at
a painting by Salle, works of normal signature-style art—paintings done in a
single style with an intelligible thematic—begin to seem pale and meagre, kind
of played out. Paintings like Salle’s—the unabashed products of, if not
vandalism, a sort of cold-eyed consumerism—are entirely free of any “anxiety of
influence.” For all their borrowings, they seem unprecedented, like a new drug
or a new crime. They are rootless, fatherless and motherless.
9
The artist David
Salle has given so many interviews, has been the subject of so many articles,
has become so widely inscribed as an emblematic figure of the eighties art
world that it is no longer possible to do a portrait of him simply from life.
The heavy shadow of prior encounters with journalists and critics falls over
each fresh encounter. Every writer has come too late, no writer escapes the
sense of Bloomian belatedness that the figure of Salle evokes. One cannot
behave as if one had just met him, and Salle himself behaves like the curator
of a sort of museum of himself, helpfully guiding visitors through the
exhibition rooms and steering them toward the relevant literature. At the
Gagosian Gallery, on Madison Avenue, where he exhibits, there is a
two-and-a-half-foot-long file drawer devoted exclusively to published writings
about Salle’s art and person.
My own encounter
with Salle was most heavily shadowed by the interviews he had given two
writers, Peter Schjeldahl and Becky Johnston. Reading their dialogues with him
was like listening to conversations between brilliant characters in a hastily
written but inspired play of advanced ideas and intense, slightly mysterious
relationships.
10
The spectre of
wrongdoing hovers more luridly over visual art than over literature or music.
The forger, the pornographer, and the fraud are stock figures in the allegory
that constitutes the popular conception of the art world as a place of exciting
evil and cunning. The artist David Salle has the distinction of being
associated with all three crimes. His paintings are filled with “borrowed”
images (twice he has settled out of court with irked owners); often contain
drawings of naked or half-undressed women standing or lying in indecent, if not
especially arousing, positions; and have an appearance of messy disjunction
that could be dismissed (and has been dismissed by Hilton Kramer, Robert
Hughes, and Arthur Danto) as ineptitude palming itself off as advanced art.
Most critics, however, have without hesitation accepted Salle’s work as
advanced art, and some of them—Peter Schjeldahl, Sanford Schwartz, Michael
Brenson, Robert Rosenblum, and Lisa Liebmann, for example—have celebrated its
transgressive quality and placed his paintings among the works that most authoritatively
express our time and are apt to become its permanent monuments.
