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 Acconi'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.
