DAVID SALLE’S EXEMPLARY PERVERSITY

DAVID SALLE’S EXEMPLARY PERVERSITY JOHN A. WALKER (COPYRIGHT 2009) As a matter of fact, artifice was considered by Des Esseintes to be the distinctive mark of human genius - Nature, he used to say, has had her day. J-K. Huysmans, A Rebours David Salle, The Burning Bush 1982, Oil and acrylic on canvas H92 x w118 in. Private Collection. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- David Salle is an American painter (b. 1952 Oklahoma) whose work is crucial for contemporary consciousness because it raises problems common to many artists and intellectuals. Today, the painter - as has been pointed out - is caught between the tradition of modernism (itself in crisis) on the one hand, and the challenge of the mass media (whose visual images dominate our culture) on the other. (1) Are there any special functions left for painting which have not already been usurped by photography; film and video? If so, what kind of representations should the painter produce? The painter is also caught between a commitment to values which transcend those of the marketplace (which therefore prefigure a more just society) and financial dependence upon a profit-seeking dealer/gallery/collector system controlled by the wealthy for their own benefit. Does the commodity nature of art under capitalism completely negate any critical content the work may have? To avoid serving the purposes of the ruling strata must the dissident artist work outside the established system for marketing and disseminating contemporary art? If so, then the possibility of intervening politically in this realm is excluded. These are the kind of contradictions and dilemmas which form the background to Salle's paintings. In recent years, critical discourse in the United States (e.g. the writings of Thomas Lawson in Real Life and Artforum), has advocated that artists should make use of culturally prestigious art forms such as painting for critical purposes (subverting painting from within rather than from without), and that they should engage directly with mass media imagery (but without celebrating consumer, society in the way that so much Pop Art did) in order to undermine dominant ideology and to perform work upon pictorial representation, and that they should display their work in private and public galleries. The obvious danger attending this strategy is recuperation, assimilation of criticism, and complicity by the artist in the very structures of power he/she seeks to subvert. Next to Schnabel, Salle is the leading new artist in the Mary Boone/Leo Castelli stable. Doris Saatchi has characterised the difference between the two artists as follows: ‘If Schnabel is the bull, then Salle is the fox.’ (2) Source material Modern city dwellers are subjected to a relentless, ever-increasing deluge of images. The millions and millions of images which have already been produced by the mass-media constitute an enormous image-bank which the 1iving artist can hardly avoid. In a sense, mass media imagery has replaced direct perception of reality, or at least all perception in the urban, industrialized world is now mediated by the representations, stereotypes and fictions of the mass-media. Like the Pop artists before him, Salle browses amongst this second-hand reality. However, he has stated that he is not especially interested in popular culture: the whole gamut of visual culture - high and low, fine art and mass culture - serves as his quarry. In this respect his attitude accords with those post-modern commentators who argue that the old, hierarchical cultural divisions are breaking down. (3) Our relationship to media images is a compound of attraction and repulsion. They please us, subject us to their domination, create an addiction, and, then leave us dissatisfied. Each of us internalises a slightly different set of images and films. Inside they meld with our unique experiences and memories. Individual subjectivities vary but they also overlap. In Salle's case images are not merely internalised but objectified (his work is situated at the interface of the private and social realms). Thus the mix of public and private is externalised. Viewers can estimate the extent to which they share Salle's experience. During the mid 1970s, Salle worked for a time as a picture researcher for a New York firm publishing cheap men's magazines and women's romance magazines. 500 images acquired from this source served as an archive upon which he drew for two years. He also made extensive use of an illustration collection belonging to the New York Public Library. It is clear from the format and composition of Salle's paintings that a major influence has been the graphic layouts typical of illustrated books and magazines. Films, with their superimpositions and montage juxtapositions, are another obvious influence. Salle himself has remarked that film is a much more common 'language' and cultural experience than vanguard painting. In addition to popular culture material, Salle employs fine arts sources, for example, Daumier and Reginald Marsh. His tonal nude figures may be from life, or from 'How to draw' manuals. From the number of outline images of modern furniture in Salle's paintings it appears that books on modern design are also a source of imagery. Generally speaking, it is not the most famous images which appeal to Salle but the most nondescript. Many seem salvaged from outdated sources. In a sense Salle is an archaeologist retrieving the despised and forgotten images of yesterday's consumer society. It is clear that the images and image fragments which Salle uses have been chosen from a huge corpus. A filtering process has taken place. One can only speculate about the criteria for acceptance: certain types of sentimental, romantic, erotic, comic and kitsch images appeal to Salle's taste. Selection, or de-contextualisation, is followed by combination, or re-contextualisation. Frequently, the final combination of images seems perverse. For example, in the painting enigmatically entitled 'The Burning Bush' (1982) one finds the head and shoulders of a pensive woman, a pattern of circles, a full frontal nude female leaning backwards, a rear view of a naked woman bending over, two first world war German(?) soldiers looting clocks, and finally an area of roughly smeared paint, all floating on a red-coloured ground. Unlike Warhol and Rauschenberg, Salle does not employ photo-mechanical means to transpose image to canvas. His images are always transformed by being drawn with a loaded brush (Salle's brush drawing has the half-unconscious quality of doodling). In other words, 'paraphrase' is involved rather than 'quotation'. To reconstitute photographic images by means of manual, craft skills appears anachronistic to those who think the art painting is dead. However, it should be pointed out that the mass media still find drawing and painting highly useful, especially during the early stages of filmmaking, and in illustration and advertising. Paintings, pictures or drawings? Salle produces paintings but they exhibit an awareness of the problematic condition of this particular art form. Paradoxically, though made with canvas and paint, they owe more to the art of drawing than to the art of painting. Traditionally, drawing was the basis of all arts, their theory. Salle's emphasis on drawing marks a welcome return of the intellectual dimension of painting. Making paintings and making pictures were once synonymous activities. However, during the epoch of Modernism and photography they parted company. In the 1970s in Britain and the United States a renewed interest in the mechanics of pictorial rhetoric occurred amongst artists previously associated with Conceptual art; Salle's work is one consequence of that interest: it is painting post~Conceptual art, and post-the-age-of· mechanical reproduction. Grounds One of the most intriguing aspects of Salle's work is the evenly coloured grounds upon which his images are inscribed. These grounds are almost never totally obliterated by the painted image; consequently the illusionistic space of Renaissance pictures is refused. Salle's works resemble not so much other paintings as sheets of tinted paper covered by randomly scattered sketches. In Chinese painting blank grounds signify the absolute void, eternity, while the artists' marks signify the temporal, transience. A comparable mystic quality was evident in the saturated colour fields of the Abstract Expressionists Newman and Rothko. Salle's grounds eschew cosmic significance: they are as inert as the screen of a switched-off TV set, though they can, perhaps, be read as metaphors for the modernist's rejection of the past, and or the opaque surface, of the unconscious upon which dream images appear. The colours of Salle's grounds are also intriguing, again perverse. He prefers offbeat mixtures of hues, elusive shades of colour - either dark or light in tone - that are difficult to name. For the most part Salle does not adulterate his picture surfaces with the kind of bizarre foreign materials Schnabel delights in (though one recent canvas has seven wooden cubes drilled with holes attached to it). Superimposition A key characteristic of Salle's art is the use of superimposed and overlapping images. (Art historical precedents include pre-historic cave painting and the work of Picabia.) Before one image can assert its priority it is interrupted by another with the result that the represented nature of imagery is constantly stressed. Superimposition produces discontinuities of spatial depth (the viewer has to switch attention from 'near' to 'far' images), time, size, and orientation (some images are upside-down). All of Salle's images are distinct but because they overlap, or are contiguous they seem linked in some way. This type of shotgun connection does not, however, produce a coherent narrative but rather a series of loose associations reminiscent of those found in day and night dreams. Sometimes the presence of a pensive figure suggests that the image-cluster represents the thoughts, feelings and memories of a depicted character rather than those of the artist. The extent of Salle's personal emotional involvement in the content of his paintings is always in doubt. Certainly, he manipulates images in a cold blooded, calculated manner. One critic has described his method as 'linguistic': (4) it is possible to play with language, to re-arrange the words of a sentence into different orders to generate new meanings without those meanings being intended by the arranger. Montage A favourite compositional device of Salle's is the diptych. This format enables two images to be juxtaposed to produce the famous 'third effect' of montage. However, Salle is. not interested in the kind of direct messages favoured by political photo-monteurs. The meaning of his image clusters is much more complex and ambiguous. Salle not only juxtaposes images but also different representational styles: a tonal, academic, life-study style, next to a graffito-style outline of a figure, next to the paint smears of a psychotic artist. Similarly, figuration and abstraction are played off against one another. Again, the constructed, represented nature of the paintings is foregrounded. A good deal of aesthetic pleasure is to be derived from this kind of intertexuality. Although Salle's images are hand drawn in paint, their style of execution is cool and deadpan. Expressionism is not what Salle's art is about. Interpretation Salle's paintings are difficult to interpret. Like sophisticated crossword puzzles, they challenge the viewer to decode their iconography. By posing riddles they delay perception and thereby prolong optical pleasure. According to Freud, pictures in dreams are substitutes for thoughts. Salle's paintings are similarly conceptual: if one could translate his image clusters back into thoughts. one could grasp their meanings. However, Freud also pointed out the limits of interpretation: ‘the dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought’. (5) The search for meaning in Salle's paintings seems to lead, inexorably, to an infinite regress. Are they, therefore, a pointless game - a way of killing time? This view seems to be confirmed by the relatively unimportant nature of Salle's imagery. In terms of content it does not deal with the major issues and problems of contemporary society (though it should be acknowledged that one woman critic has interpreted Salle's female figures as, symbolic of the other in our culture). I suggest that the pursuit of meaning in Salle's paintings is a blind. The real significance of his work is not to be located in his imagery because, despite their iconographic variety, his paintings all say one thing: the principal social function of painting and drawing in the age of mass-media is to slow down the rapid rate of consumption of images, and to exhibit the codes and conventions of pictorial representation as a corrective to the transparency and immediacy of mass-media imagery. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- References (1) H. Foster, 'Between modernism and the media', Art in America 70 (6) Summer1982, pp. 131-7. Foster describes Salle's work as "a 'dead' painting that saps conviction In painting, a painting that undermines its own claim to truth or representative status". He also comments: Salle "has an (uneasy) appeal for many Intellectuals, he gives them pictures of their own alienation". (2) D. Saatchi, 'Artists and heroes', Artscribe, (311) October 1982, pp. 16-19. (3) See the editorials of ZG magazine. (4) Carter Ratcliff, 'Interview with David Salle', Interview magazine February. 1982, pp. 64-66. (5) S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 672. See also: Peter Schjeldahl, 'David Salle's objects of disaffection', The Village Voice, 23 March 1982; Carter Ratcliff, ‘An attack on painting', Saturday Review, January 1982; David Salle, 'The paintings are dead' Cover, 1 (1) May 1979; Peter Schjeldahl, 'David Salle interview', LAIGA Journal, September-October 1981; Jeanne Siegel, 'David Salle: interpretation of image', Arts magazine, 55 (8) April 1981, pp 94~5. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This article first appeared in the Australian journal Tension (1) July-August 1983, pp. 14-17. John A. Walker is a painter and art historian. He is the author of many books and articles on contemporary art and mass media. He is also an editorial advisor for the website: "http://www.artdesigncafe.com">www.artdesigncafe.com</a>