Photo of David Salle by Robert Wright (2016)
I.
I'm guessing many UK readers of a certain age will remember the 1982 Fun Boy Three hit (ft. Bananarama) 'It Aint What You Do (It's the Way That You Do It)' [a] - and this essentially sums up one of David Salle's main arguments about painting: never mind the content, concern yourself with the question of style:
"Subject matter - the what - can of course be a big deal. It's also easy to talk about. But more to the heart of the work, the thing that reveals its nature and quality, is the how, the specific inflection and touch that go into its making." [b]
I obviously wouldn't use the same language as Mr Salle, but, basically, I agree that if you wish "to take a work's psychic temperature, look at its surface energy" [15]. For as Nietzsche says, the trick is to stop courageously at the skin and learn how to adore appearance; to become like those ancient Greeks who delighted in forms and colours and who were superficial out of profundity [c].
Art is the stylish representation of form; non-sentimental, ferociously intelligent; and full of a certain immediacy that "leaves one with a feeling of reality refreshed" [21].
II.
What makes a picture?
For D. H. Lawence, it has something to do with purity of spirit and allowing the picture to come "clean out of instinct, intuition, and sheer physical action" [d].
I'm not sure, but I suspect Salle would agree with this, though he also mentions the importance of pictorial staging and "how forcefully a painting evokes the strangeness of the visual world" [23] [e].
Salle further says that it helps if the artist can draw with real confidence; with the arm, not just the wrist. Though that's not something that Lawrence worried about too much and he sneers at those early critics of Cézanne who believed being able to draw a cat accurately enough so it looks like a cat is the most crucial aspect of making pictures [f].
III.
I like Salle's contention that: "A spirit of childish refusal runs through the center of the avant-garde impulse [...] No I won't use color; I won't make beautiful things; I won't entertain." [30]
Such negativity, when freed from resentment, becomes a kind of active and affirmative nihilism, and will always have a good deal of appeal not to those who subscribe to a utopian vision, as Salle suggests, but - on the contrary - to those who reject such idealism and realise that we are not locked into an established narrative, possessing as we do not only the power to say No, but the option of neutral indifference (thereby baffling the paradigm) [g].
IV.
"For where there is imagery, a story - implicit or explicit - is not far behind." [44]
That sounds like an idea worth discussing - and doubtless it is one that has, in fact, already been discussed at great length. For Salle, it simply means that art can be representational without having to apologise and not only point to things in the world but include personal elements too.
The romantic in me would tend to agree; but the classical aspect of my nature makes me slightly wary of where this leads us; a touch of human warmth is one thing, but I do not want art that it is Allzumenschliches ...
V.
Salle contrasts talent and imagination: "Imagination fuels talent and funnels into it, but on its own lacks body" [57]. Talent is the ability to actually do something; it's not merely the possession of knowledge.
I suppose it's good if an artist has both - as well as the ability to combine them - although, if I had to choose, then I'd sooner have imagination than talent which, today, thanks to Simon Cowell, is today "easily confused with [...] a desire for attention" [57].
For Salle, Dana Schutz is an artist who has both - as well as a slightly perverse sense of humour. I'm not going to argue with that, but would just point out that she's not the first artist to paint people sneezing, yawning, or vomiting.
For example, back in 1928 D. H. Lawrence produced an interesting watercolour entitled Yawning (although, admittedly, the central male and female figures appear to be stretching rather than yawning); the same year that he also produced Dandelions which showed a man pissing [h].
Both works illustrate how the body is always looking to exert itself and escape the overcoding of the organism and how simple acts, such as yawning, might be conceived as expressive of the intensive forces of bodily sensation.
Whether there is as much fancy (to use Salle's word) in Lawrence's work as Schutz's, I suspect not.
VI.
Just as there still some idiots insisting punk's not dead, so there are those who pretend that pop art is just as vital now as it was back in the Swinging Sixties (a time that most weren't even there to witness).
Salle is not afraid to disillusion such people; "those days aren't here anymore [...] and all the record auction prices paid in the world aren't going to bring them back" [71].
Pop, like punk, is over and it's images must be erased because no longer true for us today. The liberation that it promised has come to be seen for what it is; "an emptying-out process of jumped-up consumer stimulation that left you with very little in the way of tangible values" [68].
Worse:
"By the '70s pop art started to look like an embrace of this new consumer-driven social order; it felt a touch corrupt and compromised, and integrated a little too easily into the middle-high strata of public taste." [68]
(This seems to be a pop - no pun intended - at Warhol, rather than at Salle's much admired pal Roy Lichtenstein.)
VII.
I have to confess: most of the contemporary artists that Salle refers to are not names with which I'm familiar: Alex Katz, Amy Sillman, Christopher Wool, Robert Gober, et al. Indeed, one of the pleasures of reading this book is learning about previously unknown figures and discovering their works.
Of course, there are a few names I do recognise: Jeff Koons, for example; an artist I've discussed (and often defended) in several posts on Torpedo the Ark over the years [i]. And so I was particularly interested to see what he says about the man who has "done more than anyone else to make middle-class American happiness a legitimate subject, as well as the guiding aesthetic principle of his art" [75].
Salle has known Koons since 1979 and clearly admired him from the off:
"You could sense the hidden depths: his deep love for and identifcation with art, high art, which is, I think, the source of much that is good in his work. It's the reason he is better than those who would try to be like him. Art is everything to Koons; he has internalised its essence [...] and his art is a combination of all the great things he has ever seen." [75]
Putting aside the fact that art has no essence, that's a rather lovely thing to say (I wish my friends were as generous in their praise).
For Salle, major artists are often "a combination of unlikely pairings" [76] and Koons's art "represents the conflation of the readymade with the dream of surrealism" [76]; which is a clever way of saying that Koons has more in common with Duchamp and Dalí than he does with Warhol (despite what most critics think) [j].
And yet, Salle says Koons is perhaps unique among artists of his acquaintance for rarely speaking about his art in a technical manner; "he uses a civic - rather than an aesthetics or even a critical - language [...] it's all about what it does for the people who look at it" [79].
Koons wants his audience to feel good about themselves; giving them something they can not only identify with but be proud of. Usually, that would be enough to make me hate any artist, but, for some reason, I've always liked him. Perhaps it's because he also "makes the thingyness of modern life, that is, the way we bond and identify with products-as-images, coherent; he takes the iconic or mythic and makes it local" [82-83].
Some people might dismiss this as only a minor achievment, but for me, it's an act of magic or alchemy, which Salle labels the poetry of transference.
Like Salle, I also spent time in Bilbao and, as a floraphile, I was equally delighted to see Koons's Puppy standing in front of the Guggenheim: "I was so grateful for its being there; it was such a gift. I never tired of seeing it; I was just happy it existed." [83]
Jeff Koons: Puppy
(1992)
Stainless steel, soil, and flowering plants
(1240 x 1240 x 820 cm)
Notes
[a] Written by jazz musicians Sy Oliver and Trummy Young back in the day, it was first recorded in 1939 with Ella Fitzgerald on vocals and backed by Chick Webb and his orchestra: click here.
The Fun Boy Three version with Bananarama was released as a single in January 1982 on Chrysalis Records and reached number 4 in the UK charts. It also appeared on FB3's eponymous debut album released in March of '82. Given a ska/new wave interpretation, it's catchy - if a bit irritating after a while (as most catchy songs are): click here to play.
[b] David Salle, How to See (W. W. Norton, 2018), p. 15. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the post.
[c] Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1887), Preface, 4.
[d] D. H. Lawrence, 'Making Pictures', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 228.
[e] I very much like this idea; later, when discussing the work of the German artist Sigmar Polke, Salle speaks of the "deep pleasure that comes with seeing the familiar [- such as a pair of socks -] as something irrationally strange" [38].
[f] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles ... p. 205.
[g] For a post on the importance of saying No, click here. For a post in gentle praise of the Neutral, click here.
[h] See D. H. Lawrence's Paintings, ed. with an Introduction by Keith Sagar (Chaucer Press, 2003), pp. 155 and 81. Yawning was one of the pictures seized in the police raid at the Warren Gallery in July 1929.
[i] See for example the post entitled 'In Defence of Jeff Koons's Easyfun-Ethereal' (16 Feb 2022): click here. Readers who want to read other posts about Koons, or which refer to his work, should go to labels and click on his name (alternatively, they can just click here).
[j] That's not to deny the importance and influence of Warhol and Koons is, says Salle, the only artist of his generation to be unfazed by Warhol's legacy and to have "the steely determination [...] to take life on Andy's terms" [78].
To read part 2 of this post, click here.
To read part 3 of this post, click here.
And for an earlier post in which I discuss the Introduction to David Salle's How to See (2016), click here.
