Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art with David Salle (Part 2)

 

Standing in front of David Salle's Vamp (2025) 

Oil, acrylic, Flashe and charcoal on archival UV print on linen (78 x 120 in) 

Photo by Maria Thanassa taken at Thaddaeus Ropac (London)

 

 

I.

 

Body art encompasses a wide range of works by a variety of artists, including Vito Acconci, whom Salle identifies as one of those artists who, certainly in his early years, wished to know everything and "scrutinized the very foundation of their responses" [102].

 

In theory, I should probably approve; but in practice I'm not a fan of corporeal expression and exploration. In part, this might be put down to a certain prudishness on my part.

 

Leaving that to one side, however, I'm also concerned that in their attempt to externalise libidinal forces and flows and to open up the secret places of the body, artists can end up exchanging "intense interiority" [a] for mere representation; becoming, as D. H. Lawrence says, masturbators in paint who rob the body not only of its beauty, but also of its "natural demonishness" [b], thereby rendering the flesh banal.      

 

Thus, unlike Salle, I don't find Acconci's obsession with his penis, for example - whether it's tied with a piece of string or dressed up in dolls' clothes - either amusing or radically transgressive: just flaccid. 

 

 

II.

 

In the late 1960s and early '70s it was believed that "anything can be art/ art can be anything" [107]. 

 

I think we know better now: know, for example, that kicking a freshly plucked chicken around before depositing the "grit-encrusted bird" [107] in a dumpster outside a branch of KFC, is certainly one way to make a statement about animal cruelty, factory faming, fast food, etc., but it doesn't necessarily qualify as an artwork (even if you document the process and give a nod to surrealism).

 

III.

 

This paragraph in a section on Julian Schnabel, caught my eye:

 

"Strange as it may seem now, words like 'subjectivity' and 'sensibility' were deemed uncool in the art world of the mid- to late '70s; the artist was seen as a kind of philosophical worker, visual arts division, who took pains to leave few fingerprints. During that period, it was considered heresy for an artist to insist on the primacy of his or her subjectivity." [124]

 

Salle continues in a manner that makes clear where his sympathies lie:

 

"This began to change when Julian, along with other artists of a similar age, emerged at the end of the decade and sounded a big Bronx cheer for the pieties and anemia of a generation drifting out to sea on a leaky raft of conceptual precepts." [124]

 

The thing is, whilst I'm perfectly happy for Schnabel to take a hammer to his mum's best china - and whilst I dislike the militant asceticism of those who refuse to allow even a touch of the personal to enter into their art - I still remain troubled by words drawn from the vocabulary of Romanticism.

  

 

IV.

 

"Painting is one of the few things in life for which youth holds no advantage." [129] 

 

I wonder if that's true: I seem to remember that a few years ago someone or other worked out that modern painters produced their greatest works in their early 40s; so not young, exactly, but not as old as Salle was (64) when he made this claim [c].

 

Still, I'm happy to concede that the "diminutions wrought by aging" can be (to some extent) "offset among painters by fearlessness, finely honed technique, and heightened resolve" [129]. 

And there are certainly many artists I can think of whose late work is still as vital (and as full of wonder) as that produced when they were young; Matisse was 83 when he created his famous cut-out The Snail (1953), a small reproductive print of which is above the desk at which I'm writing this post.   

 

And let's not forget that true monster of stamina - Picasso - whose final years were characterised by artistic freedom and a frenzied level of production; between 1968 and his death in the spring of 1973 (aged 91) he painted more than a hundred canvases and made an even larger number of engravings. 

 

It takes a long time to become young, as he once put it. 

 

 

V. 

 

Salle offers an intriguing perspective on the British-American artist Malcolm Morley (the man who gave the world superrealism):

 

"He doesn't paint life per se. Rather, he crafts scenes assembled from models, mostly of his own making, and the paintings that result from this convoluted process are like a loopy costume party: everyone is masked; true identities are withheld." [131]

 

This alone makes me want to take a look at his work; even at the risk that "looking at Morley can give you the sensation of being trapped in a painterly hall of mirrors" [131]. 

 

And this pretty much seals the deal: "Morley is mercurial and restless, experimental, literary, theoretical, and perverse" [135]. I must check him out, because such figures - unconventional to the core - are few and far between.

   

 

VI.

 

Sooner or later, the question concerning technology - and of art in the age of social media - was bound to raise its head:

 

"History bestows on every generation of artists a set of cultural imperatives that will be used to take its measure. [...] If the problem facing artists thirty years ago was how to stand in relation to popular ulture whilse retaining some sense of art's autonomy, artists coming to maturity in the age of social media [...] must express a point of view about the Internet and its ubiquity." [143]

 

Of course, as Salle acknowledges, artists have always had to engage with and adapt to new technologies; from innovations in paint to the invention of the camera. And, for the most part, they have "embraced the possibilities of new mediums, as well as changes in art's distribution that followed" [143].

 

No one, says Salle, wants to be "the guy standing  on the corner in 1910, shouting 'Get a horse!' at a passing motorcar" [143] [d], and thus young artists today "must confront, and figure out their relationship to, the endless flood and immateriality of digital imagery" [144].  

 

And the Swiss artist Urs Fischer is doing just that; he is, says Salle, "an interesting example of transition fluency" [144] - i.e., one who embraces technology whilst still retaining a relationship to pre-digital art history and practice; one who is "comfortably at home in the digital age" [146] whilst somehow managing to stand apart from it.

 

As with Malcolm Morley, Salles description of Fischer makes me keen to know more: 

 

"His expansive personality combines aspects of the engineer, camp counselor, social director, homespun philosopher, outsider artist, social critic, and activist provocateur. He is clearly ambitious vis-à-vis art history and carries himself with the swagger of someone [...] simultaneously irreverent and deeply serious [...]" [144]  

 

It might be objected that this is simply stringing together a number of attributes and doesn't actually tell us what matters about his work. But those who read on will find that Salle does in fact make it clear why we should value Fischers work, much of having been built on the digital detritus that social media produces every day:

 

"As a grown-up child of the digital age, he uses the computer as a primary drawing tool, and, like today's youth, what he sees of the world is what's pictured on the Web [...] But to the Web's undifferentiated sea of images, Fischer brings a kind of attention that is dense and purposeful; what he selects feels thought-out. What he's seeking is the hidden codes of similarity and difference that lie underneath the semipublic modes of depiction in contemporary Internet culture [...] Fischer's gleeful way of using images [...] starts to expand in the mind like a paper flower when it hits the water." [146]

 

In sum: "Fischer is the embodiment of Manny Farber's 'termite artist'" [148]; exposing foundations; believing in the ruins, making cash from chaos. 

 

And yet, Salle's initial doubts about Fischer resurface: his work can seem superficial (in a non-Greek manner); "just so much cultural detritus" [150] after all ...  

 

 

Urs Fischer: Horse/Bed (2013) 

Milled aluminum, galvanized steel, screws, bolts, two-component resin 

(218 x 263 x 111 cm.)

Photo by Stefan Altenburger

 

 

Notes

 

[a] David Salle, How to See (W. W. Norton, 2018), p. 101. All future page references to this work will be given directly in the text.   

 

[b] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 196. 

      Writing in this essay, Lawrence argues that the history of the modern era is founded upon the crucifixion of the body and the triumph of mental consciousness and that art, "humbly and honestly served the vile deed" [203]. The only modern painter he respects is Cézanne, who, he says, refused to masturbate in paint. And that is the secret of his greatness in an age when "the mind prostitutes the sensitive responsive body, and just forces the reactions" [209]. 

      It might be noted, finally that Acconci is best known for his (supposedly) ultra-radical early performance art, including Seedbed (15-29 January, 1972), in which he lay beneath a wooden floor built in the Sonnabend Gallery (NYC) and masturbated eight hours a day while murmuring his thoughts and fantasies into a microphone.   

 

[c] It was the Dutch economist Philip Hans Franses who worked this out after examining data on 221 famous painters who lived between 1800 and 2004. Of course, by greatest works, he meant their most valuable in financial terms (i.e., the works that have had the highest sales price). 

      See P. H. Franses, 'When Do Painters Make Their Best Work?', in Creativity Research Journal, Vol. 25, Issue, 4 (2013), pp. 457-462. 

 

[d] I don't know if Salle is thinking here of the British artist Robert Bevan (1865-1925), but, despite the transition from horse-drawn carriages to motorised vehicles picking up speed as cars gained in popularity by 1910, the latter was more than happy to be this guy standing on the corner vocally resisting progress. A keen horseman, Bevan continued to depict horses in his artwork and to bemoan the decline (and eventual demise) of the horse-drawn cab trade.

      Whilst Salle seems to think it absurd to reject technological advances - he has recently started using AI in his own work - he admits to reserving a degree of fondness "for artists who, curmudgeonlike, turn their backs on the latest advances" [143]. 

      As for what Bevan would make of Urs Fischer's Horse/Bed (2013) - pictured above - is anybody's guess.  

 

To read part one of this post, click here. 

 

To read part three of this post, click here.

 

To read notes on David Salle's Introduction to How to See (2016), click here. 

 

Joan Miró: Monumental Printmaking by An Artist Assassin

Joan Miró: Gargantua (1977) 

Etching and aquatint with carborundum on Arches wove paper 

159.5 x 120 cm

shaperomodern.com

 

 'I try to apply colours like words that shape poems, 

like notes that shape music.' - JM

 

 

I. 

 

I have to admit, I've never been a big fan of Joan Miró - even after all that time living in Barcelona, just down the road from the Parc de Joan Miró, where his magnificent 22-metre high sculpture Dona i Ocell (1983) proudly stands [1].  

 

However, when I heard that there was an exhibition of thirteen large prints by this Catalan artist at Shapero Modern (94, Bond St., London, W1), I knew I wanted to go take a look ... 

 

Because even though Miró is not one of my favourite artists, I do admire the fact that his work is so difficult to classify - some might even describe it as genre-defying - as he moves in a unique space opened up in between Surrealism, Expressionism, and Fauvism. 

 

I also love the fact that in numerous interviews Miró expressed contempt for conventional techniques, declaring himself to be un assassí who wished to eliminate the clichéd visual elements that typically characterise bourgeois painting.

 

So - to the gallery! 

 

 

II.

 

Obviously, I was there to look and not to buy: the lovely print above, signed in white crayon and numbered by the artist (25/50), is £85,000 and that's a bit more than I can afford, unfortunately, and even the more reasonably priced works are still more than I would seriously consider splashing out on. 

 

However, I like to imagine that even a pauper such as myself can appreciate and be touched by art; even if unable to purchase the works. 

 

And, to be honest, I'd rather just briefly glimpse a picture in passing than own it and feel compelled to stare at it in an attempt to get my money's worth of aesthetic pleasure; or attempt to incorporate the picture as an essential part of some fancy interior design; or live in the secret hope that it might one day be sold for at least twice the price paid for it (if not an extraordinary amount more).

 

There are, says D. H. Lawrence, very few people who "wouldn't love to have a perfectly fascinating work" hanging in their home, so that they could "go on looking at it" [2] - well, I'm one of this tiny minority: I love art, but have no desire for property (I even prefer a blank wall, despite Lawence suggesting this is merely a form of snobbism). 

 

 

III. 

 

Although Picasso pipped him by a year, Miró was 90 when he died in 1983 and that's a good age by any reckoning; six years older than Matisse when he passed away and two years older than Renoir. And the fact that he was still producing new work until the very end probably qualifies him as a monster of stamina. 

     

According to the exhibition's press release, in the final decade of his life, Miró "devoted himself primarily to the art of printmaking, producing some of the most dynamic and ground-breaking prints of his time" [3]. 

 

And we should be grateful for this; for all thirteen works here are fabulous and demonstrate that he was not only still experimenting in his later years, but had an "exceptional command of printmaking techniques" [4]. 

 

I was particularly fond of La Femme Arborescent (1974) and Le Rat des Sables (1975), but there wasn't one that didn't delight; mostly due to their vibrant colours, but also to their compositional power and the fact that Miró has the astonishing ability "to transform physical movement into a visual language, blending abstraction with subtle figurative suggestion to convey the pure vitality of dance" [5].  

 

 

IV. 

 

The exhibition is on until 4 May: I would encourage readers who view this post before that date and who may find themselves wandering round Mayfair at some point, to visit and enjoy (even if they can't afford to buy a print). 

 

For even a few moments spent in the presence of these paintings will, I promise, make happy [6].    

 

   

Notes

 

[1] I have explained my fondness for this work in a post published on 16 Feb 2013: click here. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pictures on the Wall', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 257. Note that Lawrence concedes, however, that most pictures, like flowers, quickly die and lose their freshness and should thence be immediately thrown away or burnt. 

 

[3-5] Press release / Overview: Joan Miró: Monumental Printmaking (6 Mar - 4 May 2025) at Shapero Modern, London, W1 - click here to read on the gallery website.    

 

[6] That's not something I can promise of the portraits on paper by Egon Schiele, currently shown at the nearby Omer Tiroche Gallery (21, Conduit St., London, W1), but these too are well worth seeing: click here for a post inspired by this exhibition. 

Reflections on the Snail

Henri Matisse: L'Escargot (1953) 
Gouache on paper, cut and pasted on paper 
mounted on canvas

The Little Greek hates snails, because they eat her plants. But I like them ...

Perhaps it's because I grew up watching The Magic Roundabout and had a particular fondness for Brian. But it's also because, like other molluscs, they seem to me to be fascinating creatures, gastropodding about in the dampness of the garden and leaving a silvery slipstream of mucus in their wake, an ephemeral trail that points the way for the beaks of birds that love to eat them. 

The fact that snails have little tentacles on their head, a primitive little brain, and possess both male and female sex organs (i.e., are hermaphrodites), also inclines me to view them favourably; they are both alien and perverse when considered from a human perspective. 

I particularly like the tiny baby snails, newly hatched, with a small and delicate shell already in place to conceal their nakedness. They are very pretty and very sweet. Francis Ponge speaks of their immaculate clamminess. The fact that people can kill them with poison pellets without any qualms is astonishing and profoundly upsetting to me. 

To her credit, the Little Greek only tries to dissuade the snails from eating her plants by using (mostly ineffective) organic solutions, such as coffee granules and bits of broken eggshell sprinkled around. Alternatively, she sometimes rounds 'em up and relocates the snails to the local woods - though this enforced transportation of snails also makes me a little uneasy, as it's all-too-easy to imagine little yellow stars painted on their backs.   

Not that this prevents me from eating them, prepared with a garlic and parsley butter when in France, or cooked in a spicy sauce when in Spain ... 

Note: the Francis Ponge poem to which I refer and from which I quote is 'Snails', trans. by Joshua Corey and Jean-Luc Garneau, Poetry, (July/August, 2016). Click here to read in full on the Poetry Foundation website.  

Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence

I. Voir Vence et Mourir

There are not many places in the world I would like to visit, but the small medieval market town of Vence, on the French Riviera, is one of them.

For one thing, Lawrence died in Vence (2 March 1930) and having been to the town in which he was born, Eastwood, I'd like to complete the pilgrimage as it were (fully aware of the fact that his body no longer lies in the local cemetery, having been exhumed, cremated and shipped over to the United States at Frieda's bidding in 1935).

My primary reason for wanting to go to Vence, however, is to see a place of Catholic worship designed and decorated by an artist whom Lawrence loathed: the Chapelle du Rosaire was built between 1949 and 1951 under the direction of Henri Matisse, who regarded it as his masterpiece.


II. Going to the Chapel

From what I've read and seen, the chapel is not particularly striking from the outside; white walls, a rooftop decorated with a blue-and-white zigzag pattern and an elaborate metal cross. The interior, however, is both a very beautiful religious space and a great modern art space; doubly sacred, if you will.

The altar is made of warm brown stone and was chosen for its resemblance to the colour of bread and the Eucharist. Matisse also designed the bronze crucifix on the altar, the candle holders in bronze, and the small tabernacle. Behind the altar is a large image of Saint Dominic.

For the walls, Matisse designed three murals. Aged 77 when he began work on the chapel, Matisse was in such poor health that he could only work from a wheelchair using a long stick with a brush strapped to his arm. The images he drew on paper were then transferred to the ceramic tiles by skilled craftsmen.

On the side wall there are abstract images of flowers and of the Madonna and Child, all created in simple black outlines. On the back wall are the traditional scenes known as the Stations of the Cross, depicting the gruesome last days of Christ. Whereas these fourteen scenes are usually depicted individually, Matisse cleverly incorported them into a single composition.

As much as I admire his minimalist wall designs, what I really love are the three sets of stained-glass windows, upon which Matisse spent a great deal of time. The windows make use of just three colours: an intense yellow for the sun; a vibrant green for vegetation; and a Virgin blue for the sea and sky. The colour from the windows floods the chapel's all-white interior and, via a play of nothing more than lines and light, Matisse miraculously opens what is a very limited space on to infinity.


III. In the Footsteps of Sylvia Plath

For me, Matisse's chapel possesses what Lawrence would have termed a fourth dimensional quality and one can't help wondering what the latter would have made of it had he lived to see it: would he still dismiss Matisse as a clever trickster who masturbated in paint and produced works full of nothing more than willed ambition and the impotent glories of virtuosity ...?

Whilst we can only guess Lawrence's critical response, we can know for sure what the American poet Sylvia Plath thought of Matisse's Chapel, as she recorded details of her visit to it (along with then lover Richard Sassoon) on 6 January 1956 in her journal. She also sent a postcard to her mother the following day from Nice, in which she wrote:

"Yesterday was about the most lovely of my life … How can I describe the beauty of the country? Everything is so small, close, exquisite and fertile. Terraced gardens on steep slopes of rich red earth, orange and lemon trees, olive orchards, tiny pink and peach houses. To Vence - small, on a sun-warmed hill, uncommercial, slow, peaceful. Walked to Matisse cathedral - small, pure, clean-cut. White, with blue tile roof sparkling in the sun - I just knelt in the heart of the sun and the colors of sky, sea, and sun, in the pure white heart of the Chapel."

It sounds so lovely: one can only hope Vence hasn't been ruined in the intervening 60 years by commercial and residential development, tourism, immigration, etc. like many of the other towns in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region.


See: The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol 1: 1940-1956, ed. Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, (Faber and Faber, 2017).

Cut it Out - Reflections on Blue Nudes and Racial Fetishism in the Work of Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse: Nu bleu IV (1952)

The Blue Nudes are a series of painted female figure cut-outs stuck to paper and then mounted on canvas, completed by Henri Matisse in 1952. They are - no matter what fanatic Lawrentians may think - very lovely works and have added poignancy when one recalls that they were produced very late in his life when Matisse was not in the best of health, having undergone surgery for abdominal cancer ten years earlier. 

Conventional painting and sculpture having become too physically demanding, Matisse turned in his final decade to a new medium and, with the help of his assistants, began creating artworks that defy genre, being neither paintings nor sculptures as such, but incorporating elements of both these disciplines. 

Initially, the cut-outs were fairly modest in size and ambition, but eventually included large pieces of great complexity and if, at first, Matisse thought of them as subsidiary to his earlier work, by 1946 he had started to appreciate the possibilities inherent to the technique and to realise the new freedom working with scissors rather than brushes allowed him: An artist, he declared, must never be a prisoner of any style, of the past, or of himself ... 

Blue Nude IV - shown above - took the elderly artist two weeks of cutting and arranging (and an entire sketchbook of preliminary studies) before it eventually satisfied him. The slightly awkward and uncomfortable looking pose of the figure was obviously one for which Matisse had a penchant, as it's similar to a number of nudes completed earlier in his career and can be traced back to Le bonheur de vivre (1905-06), one of the great masterpieces of modernism completed in his so-called Fauve period. 

Mention must also be made of Nu bleu: Souvenir de Biskra, painted shortly afterwards: 

This work scandalised the French public when first exhibited in 1907 and continued to provoke controversy six years later at the Armory Show in the United States, where it was burned in effigy - not least because of concerns about the racial origins of the female figure. 

There's an obvious and much discussed primitivism and Orientalism in Matisse's work; African sculpture fascinated and inspired him as much as it did Picasso and other European artists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Disillusioned with Western culture and searching for new values and new ways of seeing the world, Matisse and his contemporaries attempted to merge the highly stylized treatment of the human figure found in African sculptures with painting styles derived from the post-Impressionist works of Cézanne and Gauguin. The resulting pictorial flatness and vivid use of colour helped to define early modernism. 

Whilst these artists probably knew very little, if anything, of the history or meaning of the African sculptures they encountered - and probably didn't care all that much - they nevertheless recognized the magical and powerful aspects and adapted these to their own efforts to move beyond the naturalism that had defined Western art since the Renaissance.

Ultimately, one might suggest that the blueness in the works shown here signifies seductive Otherness and functions as a disguised form of blackness, revealing the fact that Matisse (like many white men) has something of a secret BGF ...