The David Salle ”mid-career retrospective” that has just come to the Museum of Contemporary Art is a dispiriting illustration of the impatience of the `80s.
Nothing in the exhibition shows lasting value. The work was created as a response to empty times and its creator is celebrated for mirroring them.
Like a rock star or an actor in a hit TV series, Salle is having his hour in the sun. The only point lay in getting there. And he got there at age 34.
Few American museums can afford to ignore that. Activity in the marketplace nowadays determines almost everything. So curators rush to mount timely shows; and, without question, there is a rush, as there has to be. Next year collectors will be on to something else.
Here we are, then, with a ”retrospective” that covers only seven years without even the pretense of celebrating a distinguished past. As exhibition organizer Janet Kardon writes: ”It is one of Salle`s major achievements that he has conceived an art . . . that restores to us the presentness of our experience.”
How did he manage this feat?
Well, after a time in the early 1970s as a conceptual artist, Salle returned to painting and hit upon the idea of juxtaposing images of different graphic styles. He did not invent such material. In fact, he has said, ”I took images because it was easier than making them up.”
The sources of the pictures were advertising, television, movies, pornographic magazines and the work of other artists. The method was to project and trace them onto one or more canvas panels. Superimposition became the hallmark.
Salle denies that he adopted this mannerism from late paintings of Francis Picabia (1879-1953) or contemporary ones by Sigmar Polke. Still, such precedents existed.
Salle also denies that his work is concerned either with pop culture or the strategy of appropriation, which are the chief claims made by supporters. Instead, he has maintained: ”I was very interested in works where you had trouble figuring out what the intention of the artist was-what it was that he was actually showing you, and what you had to make up to account for it.” Now, on the face of it, this is both a lunatic motive and an alibi for incoherence. (Salle`s interviewer, Peter Schjeldahl-in the new book published by Avedon/Vintage-responded, ”Can`t imagine anyone in his right mind wanting to do that.”)
But the manuever rings especially true in our period, and it has much to do with hollow shocks and seeming enticements. This is, of course, owing to irony, which (as Salle knows) gives the ”ability to select without selecting.”
In other words, the artist can say-and at the same time unsay-whatever he wants, thanks to the ironic pose he has adopted. So Salle`s juxtapositions and superimpositions cannot go wrong, as they allow every sort of interpretation on the part of the viewer. This is, in the parlance of the `80s, having it all.
Comparisons between Salle`s own statements and those of admirers instantly show how he has managed to profit. He talks of using superimposition to prolong viewing time; they praise the work for being fast. He says he wants to transmit something specific; they submit that there is only discursiveness. And so it goes, fortifying the artist to the degree that he can decry all that has been written about him even as he presents a bibliography that numbers 17 pages.
Everything is equal to him. And that is the problem. No single image in a Salle painting has more value than any other. So why not include objects a la Robert Rauschenberg, as well? They will further complicate the rebus.
In paintings of the last two years there are abstract cutouts, chair parts, dowels, lamps and tables in addition to block lettering and the usual welter of images. These works cannot help but be more animated than older ones, but as to meaning, that is still something else.
One`s persistence in searching for meaning is perhaps old-fashioned, a throwback to the time when figurative artists created a world that engaged them in every particular. But in this, and only this, lies painting`s capacity for renewal.
Salle reflects a world that he has not created and shows no intention of believing. The world he inhabits is, instead, a collection of attitudes and poses. That they are for him the ”right” attitudes is proven by how they at once cause winking approval and shock.
In this, he is like Robert Morris, a prime candidate for opportunist of the decade. Morris` recent works show an interest in the Holocaust-that is, the Holocaust as an idea, but only as an idea that can achieve certain effects in his paintings.
Salle has the same relation to his soft-porn images. There is no sign that he cares about the degradation of their sexual politics. The images work insofar as they are loaded and thus capable of prompting some viewers to analysis while outraging others. That is all there is to it.
In talking about the films of arch-stylist Douglas Sirk, Salle has mentioned Sirk`s ”use of light and shadow and composition to give meaning to certain elements of the drama.” But such usages, he concludes, were often overlooked, and the same he thinks has happened in the case of his own paintings.
Here he may be right, though not for a flattering reason. The ”poetry”
he envisions is not communicated either by his painting or drawing; they are too inept, literally dumb. Life has been drained out of his photo images. And there is more power in the line of the most elementary instructional manuals. Large scale and the junk that Salle hangs on each canvas account for most of the works` impact. Color is generally monochromatic, acid and flat. Personality is revealed mainly through arrangement and distance.
Then, too, it is easy to imagine the same ploys being carried out in any other two-dimensional medium; little would be lost. While Salle`s
conceptualism may be thin, it still holds more than his painting-which is why painting once was so easy for him to give up.
He has said he gave it up ”almost immediately as soon as something more utopian and less frustrating came along.” And that is of interest. By
”utopian” one assumes he meant in relation to his own betterment, for publicly, at least, Salle shows no interest in anything else.
His confidence-without bounds or basis-should be appalling. But, today, we are accustomed to such displays, equally from bourgeois society and Julian Schnabel.
Schnabel is a loudmouth from Brooklyn, by way of Texas. Salle is something more. The accent he speaks with in the MCA`s videotape certainly is not from Oklahoma, where he was born, or from Kansas, where he grew up. It sounds like pure yuppie affectation, which in terms of his painting, may explain a lot.
”David Salle,” organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, completes its five-city tour in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art through Jan. 10.
