I am not sure how old Salle is but I think it is great if he is using photo shop if he is older. Why should it be for the young guys alone? I love that my 90 year old Grandma sends me email. Staying with the times makes us less alone.
There was a painting with smurfs in it that I remember liking from this show.
Oh, oh no. Lord have mercy. I don't like this at all. Is this guy a famous artist? You'll find I don't usually know of all that many painters like the rest of you, although I do know some. To me this work is just awful, and while the sex people are adults (and having sex), it still looks kinda like a Henry Darger rip-off to me, especailly the coloring of of the background. The main swirly shit is the worst part of all, and what's that coming in on a slant from the lower right? Does that represent a double helix or something? Or is it a frosty pine tree? The airplane is like, I don't know... I can't believe I've written so much about this ugly thing already. Seems like the artist was trying to impress too many art critics at once.
80s painters..who held up? I still like some early Donald Batchelor, but by now hes kinda just putting out product. When I was a kid he was my fav contemporary painter. I was never crazy about Fischl but I still give him his props for being capable. So much Schnabel looks like a huge mistake. my mind stutters when I hear somebody likes the plate paintings. Salle, his stuff always looked so squeezed out of a theory, even if a few had resonance. I think the Koons from the past few years are completely predictable and unoriginal. Peter Halley is better at putting out magazines...
By the way, if Salle's hotness fell off (which it did in terms of popular opinion I guess) , these were still going for like 20k at least, right?
The devils triangle allways captured my imagination. People like Von Daniken wrote some nice books about how the Nazca lines were actually landing pads for UFO's and the pyramids were built using extraterrestrial technology.
Well here we have an opening - a dialating colon if you will, but it could also be a mouth, with an attendant voice. Butternut swirl. The pornographic wallpaper in the background a part of the macro-micro holographic postmodern fold.
Salle creates a wormhole or intestinal tract, into the future present. Not unlike Erik Parker or any of the other colon painters.
THe topography may be different, but the simularity is in the emphasis on ordering information, the rhizome surrounds the sleeping McGuffin's cottage.
What stream of interstellar spew will excape this singularity?
I got really, really excited when I discovered David Salle in, oh, 1989 or so, when I was still a callow girl. After assiduously aping him for a semester I discovered, surprise, that his 'high concepts' and dramatic visuals were easy to copy, absurdly shallow, and utterly non-resonant over time. And lo, in 2006, this 'painting' is utterly pathetic, as all you astute persons have noted above.
i love the eighties? I thought your comments were worth taking seriously, so I clicked on your profile. I discovered, to my dismay, that someone is hiding behind an anonymous, cute little pen name. Unlike myself, who is dramatically, foolishly vulnerable to anyone who cares to take a pot shot at my photograph or my personal life.
i agree (as usual) with the 80's AND i think there is something deeply psychology intriguing with the megastars approch to these "photoshoped" "paintings".
This painting looks to me like the psychedelic epiphany of an otherwise pacific middle aged man. It's like a scene in some to-be-made movie where the family man in Wellfleet, Mass, gets slipped peyote in his stuffed Quahog and suddenly his succinct summer world of beach towels, Cape Air plane rides and frolicking family members gets twisted into some sort of proletarian bad trip. He stares and stares at the golden spiral of the shell, while the world around him devolves into base elements and fleeting visions.
This piece is battling with cinema for effect, and tussling with postmodern concepts of digital process and found-art self consciously. The palate is full of kitsch bubblegum colors, and the scene constructed is a distant manner with over dramatic figures and $10 Photoshop filters. I think DS should get a little more credit than to think that he is doing this without intent.
Here, I think, DS is using plastic emptiness to illustrate the hopeless nature of the everyman's modern spirituality. This is a moment constructed out of the painterly equivalent of cardboard cutouts and movie set backdrops, so any injected spirituality reads like the empty hope that (maybe) it is. There is no mystic element to this work, rather cheap special effects. I think he is siding with an existential view of painting - which looks very at odds against most of the more idealistic contemporary expressionistic / naive works that we see today. I think Salle's commentary on the fallacy of the "mystic" hope of painting, perhaps set forth by his roots in a more skeptical and banal period of art.
Interesting... when I first moved to New York about 2 years ago, I lived in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. One day I was walking around and saw someone unloading paintings out of this amazing looking modern building stuck in oddly among the brownstones and small businesses on Hansen Place. This painting, with the plane in the corner, looked a lot like one of the ones that was being carried out into a waiting truck.
Having wondered about that building before, I asked a guy looking on if it was a gallery. "No this is my studio", he said. As it turns out, I'm just realizing, that was David Salle.
Thats pretty cool wod. Reminds me - just the other day some asshole told me to keep moving because the entrance had to be clear. Evidently they were shooting a movie or something. SOme dude is getting a hot dog and there are all thse extras dressed like regular people only they all have sodas and hot dogs and stuff.
My friend said hey, that's Chris Rock.
I was all "It cant be, Chris Rock is an eight foot tall bug eyed madman.
Ever read Scheldal's poetry? Ever listen to Schnabel's album?
I really don't understand why everyone is trashing this painting. Other than subjective and fashion-goggled knocks like "the paint is too flat" or "looks too much like Photoshop"... what’s wrong with this painting? Is it illegal to repaint pop images (unless you are Darger) or realism (unless you are Minter) or candy colors (unless you are Schutz)? If you do all three of these things at once, and still remain apart from Jeff Koons, is that OK? Personally, I don't see why not.
To me, this painting seems edgy and well painted and looks to be saying something interesting. What more do we want from a painting? No, it doesn't look entirely of the moment, but it still comments upon current culture effectively. To me, in a way, its minutely dated appearance is a great weapon of intrinsic perspective and increases its power. I think, in 10 or twenty years, looking back at this painting along side a lot of the other work that is going on right now, this one might stand up pretty darn well. It is icier, less giving, and in a way that might be more "true", or a least an interesting counterpoint by a veteran artist to the touchy-feely, hippie dippy vogue.
Would we like this painting better if the artist was relatively unknown? Even with acute public knowledge of the artist's career, I feel these works can stand as new and interesting. I feel like Salle is re-examining his previous work under an updated spotlight, and not without some self degradation and obvious confusion about what he had been doing in the past. I think that makes for a very interesting body of mid to late-career work.
BB, how did you know? I am going to have to be more careful about career overlap.
Carol, your site is fabulous. Y'all, just because Carol never heard of David Salle doesn't mean she's been wasting her time. Her work is witty, original, fun and gorgeous.
Graphic designer: Mira Schor (Rochelle Feinstein etc.....) How can someone who makes bad paintings with a scrap of lame text know anything about painting???People don't have to write books like Opera or the Undoing of Women. You can write your own damn opera. Write a better opera. Maybe include something in the libretto that isn't about Martha motherfucking Stewart. Call it Wet if you'd like to. Stop acting like a bunch of second rate Salieris and develop a little bloodlust. Cindy Sherman is one of the only artists who came out of the 80's not looking like a dinosaur. If you really like sitting around the campfire of Western Civilization groveling on your knees in your matching gyrrl scout uniforms don't expect me to come toast marshmallows with you.
Blueballz please look up Maslowe's heirarchy of needs. Groveling slave mentality isn't on it. I rarely make negative comments about individual artists but Mira Schor is weak. I've heard this critique of Salle's work before and it's tired.
I vote Bluebalz, Exu, and Averywhitelabels off the island.
Kelli I really like that painting at Armory. And maybe you are to smart for your own good, but not to smart for ours. That was really unfair of Bluebalz Kelli never even says anything negative about artist. I have just gone and reviewed past post.
Closeup on I am on the fence about you
BB, I like but seems more angry.
Zip, I can not always follow but that is my fault. You seem always fair.
No where man, a zip apprentice maybe.
Prof. mouth I love you even though you are angry. It is only when needed.
Look, Salle's work from the 80's (at times) was much better than this. His images were rougher overall but they had some kind of snap or punch to them. This painting is awful. The imagesare lame and the color scheme is terrible. I think he is a great painter and if you are talking technique he is very solid. But stylistically the paintings are getting weaker. Maybe this is a transitional period and the paintings on the other side will be memorable.
I've heard the critique of art as master narrative used to dismiss artists like Ashley Bickerton, Salle, Matthew Barney and Vanessa Beecroft who are a thousand times better than Mira Schor. Bickerton subverts it to comment on colonialism and vanity and Beecroft uses it in a more reverential way. We live in a brutal class system not a utopia (feminist, Marxist or otherwise) and master narrative is both impicit in painting and a structure painting attacks. Salle fits into a long tradition of collage as political art. The fact that his work is irritating and disjunctive is part of the point. If you could own the work of any of these artists tell me Schor is what any of you would pick. Glenn Ligon is a far more abrasive and less glib artist using text. And if you have no attraction or attraction/repulsion to master narrative painting is not the medium you should be working in. Just write books.
Brambles the truck from Rent-a-Center pulled up and my ovaries were repossesed months ago. People were making this same argument about Salle in the 80's and it intrigues me. Fischl's work was more voyueristic but the argument was made less often. Why? I think he fits into a tradition of collage which included Schwitters,Hoch and Rosenquist. So I'm throwing out a question. Is he part of that tradition and is this type of collage political, abrasive or just random.
Kelli -- This is interesting.... Is pomo a tradition rather than a bygone moment in history? I think its possible, considering Roman politics and Indian art. Both collages. Borrowers of culture... but agents of refinement at same time (um, of course romans refined politics, not art)
Tension in the 80's? Who'd have thunk! All I remember was smooth Jazz and Hall & Oates... and aspiring graphic designers like robert longo... Besides, Kippenberger was doing all the tension -- only we didn't know it back then.
you know, a lot of people come on here whining about how harsh the comments are...I agree to a point, but in some ways its actually refreshing--as an opposition to the overwhelming trend of art critcism in the last 15 years to simply blanket a show in descriptive phrases or just reiterate what can be seen. I can count on my hand the number of times I've seen an artreview with any balls in relation to opinion, strong personal views, etc. In that sense, the critical gripes on here can be refreshing..though I do agree that taking it to personal shit is going a little too far and what not
P mouth says- If you can't follow Zipthwung, it's actually NOT your fault.
"Actually" - How about "simply"? Or better, "certainly"? I don't know what the term for that sort of qualifier is, but lets discuss it, shall we?
1) Zipthwung is a hyper-pretentious douchebag
I prefer "meta-pretentious" but if you must then why not just "extremely pretentious?" Innacurate though that may be. Uneccessary hyper-bole, dude. Simply pretentious.
...who jacks off to every Alfred Jarry reference he can muster.
Fuck that dude. Fuck him. And what the fuck are you talking about? Examples?
Most Feminist theory sucks, near as I can tell. By turns humorless, shrill (what did I do to you?), or worse, pedantic (what did I do to you?)
Any quotes on how unqualified quoting of sexism is in itself sexist?
Something about reification and then I'd tie that into how irony is allways serious about something. And language is never original since everyone has to use the same words except when someone invents one like gnarley, which means the same as awesome, which, although not precise, could be explained by analogy to anyone but an unfeeling robot.
In regards to Salle, any attack on his gender politics (what is he saying, really? Clearly nothing) is clearly an affront to his intelligence, such as it is. And is it? And further - should painters be smart or can I go ahead and keep huffing away brain cells with my buddies? I long to be just one of the crowd. Sweet oblivion. I like ribs, too.
And pastiche - Too bad Schwitters is mostly BandW - maybe if someone colorized it for me like Salle, I could look at it more. Still, I'm a fan. But film has a bigger influence on me than painting as far as pastiche goes. I like to look at paintings about 1 frame every four seconds, on a loop.
funny painting has more of an influence on my video then film...
"In the 1970s he attended the newly established California Institute of the Arts, where he began applying film techniques, such as montage and split screen, to painting."
Also see David Salle - "Search and Destroy," His feature film, his scupture and set design.
schwitters (not really b&w--check out elderfields book) didnt really do much of the sort of imagistic collage that Salle is doing. I would compare Schwitters ore to Jin. Schwitters took the detritus he picked up on the street and made compositions as beautiful as in a renaissance painting. Just to point out that he could, and to elevate the garbage by making it aesthetic. Good work for his time. Jin has reloaded the garbage theme--referencing all the junk our culture has to offer. And he's not composing, so much as just throwing it all together and expressing the overload.
Salle is doing an imagistic collage, more like Hannah Hoch or Rosenquist, or many others.
I do have a hard time reading Salle's meaning because I think he is deliberately being canny about it. But he is definately on sexual subject matter. I guess my read is that he's sick of his desire but it wont go away. And he knows if it goes, he's dead. Subject of many artworks.
This painting reminds me of a Bob Dylan song--what doesn't:
Every day is the same thing out the door Feel further away then ever before Some things in life, it gets too late to learn Well, I'm lost somewhere I must have made a few bad turns
I see people in the park forgetting their troubles and woes They're drinking and dancing, wearing bright colored clothes All the young men with their young women looking so good Well, I'd trade places with any of them In a minute, if I could
Prof. Mouth thanks for saying I suck. Averywhite may have stood up for you. Although I am surprised you use that as criteria for liking someone but Avery hates everything for no reason you seem to have reason.
"Search and Destroy," - enjoyed that - saw and "Swimming WIth Sharks" - and "To Die For" around the same time or its all in my mind - in any case - Swiss Family Robinson and Fantasia are formative experiences for me. Go DIsney! Great foam rocks - I'm sure you can make a connection, meaningfull or not.
Yeah Schwitters uses colors, I knew someone would call me on that. But still, print technology has changed and the palette with it. Lots of that old collage looks brown when it used to look whit and stuff...fade, fade away.
I went to the post office to get some stamps--he asked me "Flag or Disney?" Yes, that's the choice isnt it? I didnt say that, I just thought it. I said: "Disney".
I dont really like narratives. They seem manipulative. On the other hand, I like them when they let me know that they know they are being manipulative. Then we can all relax and have fun. Like the Madonna vid on Erins blog.
:) i can't wait to go see her. and i like salle. i don't know y... maybe it just reminds me of school where it felt safe and like there was a world with 'right' and 'wrong'
so on a postive note - anyone if you were invited to 'pitch' a VOD download section to a network - with a Fine Art spin, what kind of things would you include?
This painting has had more comments than anything else shown here. That the majority of these comments are negative and strongly so likely means this work really has something going for it (the consensus is usually dead wrong). I'd bet that in 10 or 20 years people are more likely to be still talking about this work (and other Salle work) than anything else that's been posted here.
Wasn't painting "over" till Salle, Schnabel and Fischl "rediscovered" it in the late 70s and 80's. Most of the stuff shown here would IMHO owe these guys quite a debt - even if they are old(er) white males.
Great site even if a lot of the comments are a bit ego-centric and sophomoric.
What? Artists are self-absorbed? When did this happen? Thank God everyone else in the world isn't. As far as "sophmoric" comment I think judging everyone here as beneath is going to alienate you. So play nice. I don't think everyone is commenting on this painting cause it's evocative or revolutionary. People are trying to understand why Salle, with such a rich history of painting, would paint something so annoyingly goofy and ugly. I saw his other works online, not in person sadly, but I wouldn't trek down the streets to see these "vortex" paintings. They just seem like things I've seen before. He is a mid to late career artist. I expected something more interesting than photoshop swirls on a people doing-it wallpaper background. I don't think these are horrible. I retract the 'garbage' comment I made earlier. That was harsh. These paintings don't do anything for me. They are a stylistic cacophony, surreal and candy-coated car crash and that's why we are looking and talking about it.
A victim of his influence on other people. It looks familiar and old because other people are indebted to it and improved it with computer programs. I've been defending him because I think he's historically important. I have more 80's love for David Wojnarowicz and ugly sincerity.
correct me if i am wrong but isn't most Art that proves to be 'evocative or revolutionary' over time considered 'goofy and ugly' at its time of conception?
I think Mathew Barney and Paul Macarthy both make work that is impossible to penetrate intellectually. Barney focuses on hybrids of mythological figures. He takes something traditional and screws it up. McCarthy takes innocent pop figures and perverts them and takes them on walk through the dark side of mortality. These paintings are just as complex as the former artists. They are complex collages of seemingly random imagery that renders them inconclusive. The only unifying web is the style in which they are painted. They are like dreams that cannot be interpreted. Dreams are more innocent than imagery created during consciousness.
"so likely means this work really has something going for it"
I know a lot of people (students mostly) started painting in the style of but I think thats because the art magazines were full of the stuff...but then why were the art magazines full of the stuff? Because it was the best stuff out there.
His only fault with this painting is that he over-thought it. Every element references each other so heavy-handedly so that nothing remains subtle. No slippage. Not even deliberately. All signage... we get what sells.. the piercing, cum-laden coital signage.
As opposed to the piercing cum-laden sign. Which is what his project in the early dayz seemed to propose.
Self-assuredness is a gift. God giveth, God taketh away.... ....
Hardly. I found this painting really easy to interperate. Its is composed almost entirely of digestable symbols, and thus its really easy to create a story from it. Almost every other painting on this page right now is a lot tougher to interperate, in the narrative sense, than this one - either because they give you too little (Bruno, Hesidence, Coates) or they give you a lot of one thing (Snead, Glantzman).
Hardly. I found this painting really easy to interperate. Its is composed almost entirely of digestable symbols, and thus its really easy to create a story from it
If it's so easy why not take the time to interpret than to just say it's easy to interpret..? For me I don't want to break it down because I can't find it interesting enough to do so.
60 comments:
this panders to the moment--if the moment is 1995. i guess this guy has lost it for sure
I heard someone refer to these as the anus series, and they were not joking
there is something going on here, -put these beside a recent Rosenquist and Koons...
I don't mind the collage aspect but that's about it.
This is a garbage painting from an over-rated painter.
1996 called, it wants it's painting trend back.
I am not sure how old Salle is but I think it is great if he is using photo shop if he is older. Why should it be for the young guys alone? I love that my 90 year old Grandma sends me email. Staying with the times makes us less alone.
There was a painting with smurfs in it that I remember liking from this show.
Oh, oh no. Lord have mercy. I don't like this at all. Is this guy a famous artist? You'll find I don't usually know of all that many painters like the rest of you, although I do know some. To me this work is just awful, and while the sex people are adults (and having sex), it still looks kinda like a Henry Darger rip-off to me, especailly the coloring of of the background. The main swirly shit is the worst part of all, and what's that coming in on a slant from the lower right? Does that represent a double helix or something? Or is it a frosty pine tree? The airplane is like, I don't know... I can't believe I've written so much about this ugly thing already. Seems like the artist was trying to impress too many art critics at once.
i see, so he's AHEAD of the bad taste curve. Interesting. I'm not hip to the irony of the twirl filter yet. Give me a month or 2.
I have liked his work in the past.
80s painters..who held up?
I still like some early Donald Batchelor, but by now hes kinda just putting out product. When I was a kid he was my fav contemporary painter.
I was never crazy about Fischl but I still give him his props for being capable.
So much Schnabel looks like a huge mistake. my mind stutters when I hear somebody likes the plate paintings. Salle, his stuff always looked so squeezed out of a theory, even if a few had resonance.
I think the Koons from the past few years are completely predictable and unoriginal.
Peter Halley is better at putting out magazines...
By the way, if Salle's hotness fell off (which it did in terms of popular opinion I guess) , these were still going for like 20k at least, right?
The devils triangle allways captured my imagination. People like Von Daniken wrote some nice books about how the Nazca lines were actually landing pads for UFO's and the pyramids were built using extraterrestrial technology.
Well here we have an opening - a dialating colon if you will, but it could also be a mouth, with an attendant voice. Butternut swirl. The pornographic wallpaper in the background a part of the macro-micro holographic postmodern fold.
Salle creates a wormhole or intestinal tract, into the future present. Not unlike Erik Parker or any of the other colon painters.
THe topography may be different, but the simularity is in the emphasis on ordering information, the rhizome surrounds the sleeping McGuffin's cottage.
What stream of interstellar spew will excape this singularity?
Run children.
Run.
Oh, Dave. Pained aversion of eyes.
I got really, really excited when I discovered David Salle in, oh, 1989 or so, when I was still a callow girl. After assiduously aping him for a semester I discovered, surprise, that his 'high concepts' and dramatic visuals were easy to copy, absurdly shallow, and utterly non-resonant over time. And lo, in 2006, this 'painting' is utterly pathetic, as all you astute persons have noted above.
Such a tragedy.
i love the eighties? I thought your comments were worth taking seriously, so I clicked on your profile. I discovered, to my dismay, that someone is hiding behind an anonymous, cute little pen name. Unlike myself, who is dramatically, foolishly vulnerable to anyone who cares to take a pot shot at my photograph or my personal life.
Such a tragedy.
well i hope your nakedness isn't much worse than this salle painting.
i like serena's blog.
i agree (as usual) with the 80's AND i think there is something deeply psychology intriguing with the megastars approch to these "photoshoped" "paintings".
This painting looks to me like the psychedelic epiphany of an otherwise pacific middle aged man. It's like a scene in some to-be-made movie where the family man in Wellfleet, Mass, gets slipped peyote in his stuffed Quahog and suddenly his succinct summer world of beach towels, Cape Air plane rides and frolicking family members gets twisted into some sort of proletarian bad trip. He stares and stares at the golden spiral of the shell, while the world around him devolves into base elements and fleeting visions.
This piece is battling with cinema for effect, and tussling with postmodern concepts of digital process and found-art self consciously. The palate is full of kitsch bubblegum colors, and the scene constructed is a distant manner with over dramatic figures and $10 Photoshop filters. I think DS should get a little more credit than to think that he is doing this without intent.
Here, I think, DS is using plastic emptiness to illustrate the hopeless nature of the everyman's modern spirituality. This is a moment constructed out of the painterly equivalent of cardboard cutouts and movie set backdrops, so any injected spirituality reads like the empty hope that (maybe) it is. There is no mystic element to this work, rather cheap special effects. I think he is siding with an existential view of painting - which looks very at odds against most of the more idealistic contemporary expressionistic / naive works that we see today. I think Salle's commentary on the fallacy of the "mystic" hope of painting, perhaps set forth by his roots in a more skeptical and banal period of art.
Interesting... when I first moved to New York about 2 years ago, I lived in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. One day I was walking around and saw someone unloading paintings out of this amazing looking modern building stuck in oddly among the brownstones and small businesses on Hansen Place. This painting, with the plane in the corner, looked a lot like one of the ones that was being carried out into a waiting truck.
Having wondered about that building before, I asked a guy looking on if it was a gallery. "No this is my studio", he said. As it turns out, I'm just realizing, that was David Salle.
Article on Salle's Studio Move to Ft. Greene
"So many ways we think about painting now wouldn't exist if it wasn't for his work."
Let me count them....
Did he invent overlapping spatial planes? Outlines over solids? Multiple vanishing points?
Did I get that from him...or photoshop...or the Greeks or cave painting?
Putting images next to each other - did I get that from Rosenquist...or cartoons or the Greeks?
Maybe someone can explain succinctly what part of the current cultural lanscape he was the progenitor for.
I want to thank him personally for his contribution.
Anyone ever hear David Salles very modern album "Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud?" Its as good as Scheldahl's early poetry.
Not saying I'm better, just saying hope I die before I go to Margeritaville like Ashley Bikerton.
man i like ashley bickerton. He survived the 80s. Under the Volcano. You have to beat the devil.
DS isnt giving us enough.
Thats pretty cool wod. Reminds me - just the other day some asshole told me to keep moving because the entrance had to be clear. Evidently they were shooting a movie or something. SOme dude is getting a hot dog and there are all thse extras dressed like regular people only they all have sodas and hot dogs and stuff.
My friend said hey, that's Chris Rock.
I was all "It cant be, Chris Rock is an eight foot tall bug eyed madman.
Ever read Scheldal's poetry? Ever listen to Schnabel's album?
Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud.
I bought it for a dollar.
Gnarley dude. Gnarley.
Wow, look at that. I made a mistake.
no one mentions how sexist his paintings often are
hes a dirty old man, like woody
there i mentioned it...twice
god lighten up people on the DL, boys will be boys - besides i think it is more "women as icon"
naaahhh. its just an old guy that cant make fun of himself. in a way thats funny for us all. beat the devil, e.
jin meyerson rocks this.
I really don't understand why everyone is trashing this painting. Other than subjective and fashion-goggled knocks like "the paint is too flat" or "looks too much like Photoshop"... what’s wrong with this painting? Is it illegal to repaint pop images (unless you are Darger) or realism (unless you are Minter) or candy colors (unless you are Schutz)? If you do all three of these things at once, and still remain apart from Jeff Koons, is that OK? Personally, I don't see why not.
To me, this painting seems edgy and well painted and looks to be saying something interesting. What more do we want from a painting? No, it doesn't look entirely of the moment, but it still comments upon current culture effectively. To me, in a way, its minutely dated appearance is a great weapon of intrinsic perspective and increases its power. I think, in 10 or twenty years, looking back at this painting along side a lot of the other work that is going on right now, this one might stand up pretty darn well. It is icier, less giving, and in a way that might be more "true", or a least an interesting counterpoint by a veteran artist to the touchy-feely, hippie dippy vogue.
Would we like this painting better if the artist was relatively unknown?
Even with acute public knowledge of the artist's career, I feel these works can stand as new and interesting. I feel like Salle is re-examining his previous work under an updated spotlight, and not without some self degradation and obvious confusion about what he had been doing in the past. I think that makes for a very interesting body of mid to late-career work.
BB, how did you know? I am going to have to be more careful about career overlap.
Carol, your site is fabulous. Y'all, just because Carol never heard of David Salle doesn't mean she's been wasting her time. Her work is witty, original, fun and gorgeous.
Graphic designer: Mira Schor (Rochelle Feinstein etc.....) How can someone who makes bad paintings with a scrap of lame text know anything about painting???People don't have to write books like Opera or the Undoing of Women. You can write your own damn opera. Write a better opera. Maybe include something in the libretto that isn't about Martha motherfucking Stewart. Call it Wet if you'd like to. Stop acting like a bunch of second rate Salieris and develop a little bloodlust. Cindy Sherman is one of the only artists who came out of the 80's not looking like a dinosaur. If you really like sitting around the campfire of Western Civilization groveling on your knees in your matching gyrrl scout uniforms don't expect me to come toast marshmallows with you.
do your self a favor - google David Salle maybe add pastiche... this is from the "vortex" paintings
http://www.freenyc.net/archives/images/dp_110205-thumb.jpg
scale matters.
Blueballz please look up Maslowe's heirarchy of needs. Groveling slave mentality isn't on it. I rarely make negative comments about individual artists but Mira Schor is weak. I've heard this critique of Salle's work before and it's tired.
I vote Bluebalz, Exu, and Averywhitelabels off the island.
Kelli I really like that painting at Armory.
And maybe you are to smart for your own good, but not to smart for ours. That was really unfair of Bluebalz Kelli never even says anything negative about artist.
I have just gone and reviewed past post.
Closeup on I am on the fence about you
BB, I like but seems more angry.
Zip, I can not always follow but that is my fault. You seem always fair.
No where man, a zip apprentice maybe.
Prof. mouth I love you even though you are angry. It is only when needed.
JD thoughtful
Carol I am also watching you closely.
I am forming alliances here.
Look, Salle's work from the 80's (at times) was much better than this. His images were rougher overall but they had some kind of snap or punch to them. This painting is awful. The imagesare lame and the color scheme is terrible. I think he is a great painter and if you are talking technique he is very solid. But stylistically the paintings are getting weaker. Maybe this is a transitional period and the paintings on the other side will be memorable.
I've heard the critique of art as master narrative used to dismiss artists like Ashley Bickerton, Salle, Matthew Barney and Vanessa Beecroft who are a thousand times better than Mira Schor. Bickerton subverts it to comment on colonialism and vanity and Beecroft uses it in a more reverential way. We live in a brutal class system not a utopia (feminist, Marxist or otherwise) and master narrative is both impicit in painting and a structure painting attacks. Salle fits into a long tradition of collage as political art. The fact that his work is irritating and disjunctive is part of the point. If you could own the work of any of these artists tell me Schor is what any of you would pick. Glenn Ligon is a far more abrasive and less glib artist using text. And if you have no attraction or attraction/repulsion to master narrative painting is not the medium you should be working in. Just write books.
SurvivorNYC, maybenot.
"fair use" puts a twist on collage 2006
Brambles the truck from Rent-a-Center pulled up and my ovaries were repossesed months ago. People were making this same argument about Salle in the 80's and it intrigues me. Fischl's work was more voyueristic but the argument was made less often. Why? I think he fits into a tradition of collage which included Schwitters,Hoch and Rosenquist. So I'm throwing out a question. Is he part of that tradition and is this type of collage political, abrasive or just random.
Kelli -- This is interesting.... Is pomo a tradition rather than a bygone moment in history? I think its possible, considering Roman politics and Indian art. Both collages. Borrowers of culture... but agents of refinement at same time (um, of course romans refined politics, not art)
Tension in the 80's? Who'd have thunk!
All I remember was smooth Jazz and Hall & Oates...
and aspiring graphic designers like robert longo...
Besides, Kippenberger was doing all the tension --
only we didn't know it back then.
good point on fig and salle, mouth.
@designer-its the 21st century, who gives a shit if the peppers are sexist or not
the thread on militant art bitch about ben-tor was interesting related to this subject
you know, a lot of people come on here whining about how harsh the comments are...I agree to a point, but in some ways its actually refreshing--as an opposition to the overwhelming trend of art critcism in the last 15 years to simply blanket a show in descriptive phrases or just reiterate what can be seen. I can count on my hand the number of times I've seen an artreview with any balls in relation to opinion, strong personal views, etc. In that sense, the critical gripes on here can be refreshing..though I do agree that taking it to personal shit is going a little too far and what not
Im just saying I've seen plenty of positive stuff as well..the Condo post for instance
P mouth says-
If you can't follow Zipthwung, it's actually NOT your fault.
"Actually" - How about "simply"? Or better, "certainly"? I don't know what the term for that sort of qualifier is, but lets discuss it, shall we?
1) Zipthwung is a hyper-pretentious douchebag
I prefer "meta-pretentious" but if you must then why not just "extremely pretentious?" Innacurate though that may be.
Uneccessary hyper-bole, dude.
Simply pretentious.
...who jacks off to every Alfred Jarry reference he can muster.
Fuck that dude.
Fuck him.
And what the fuck are you talking about? Examples?
Most Feminist theory sucks, near as I can tell. By turns humorless, shrill (what did I do to you?), or worse, pedantic (what did I do to you?)
Any quotes on how unqualified quoting of sexism is in itself sexist?
Something about reification and then I'd tie that into how irony is allways serious about something.
And language is never original since everyone has to use the same words except when someone invents one like gnarley, which means the same as awesome, which, although not precise, could be explained by analogy to anyone but an unfeeling robot.
In regards to Salle, any attack on his gender politics (what is he saying, really? Clearly nothing) is clearly an affront to his intelligence, such as it is. And is it? And further - should painters be smart or can I go ahead and keep huffing away brain cells with my buddies? I long to be just one of the crowd. Sweet oblivion. I like ribs, too.
And pastiche - Too bad Schwitters is mostly BandW - maybe if someone colorized it for me like Salle, I could look at it more. Still, I'm a fan. But film has a bigger influence on me than painting as far as pastiche goes. I like to look at paintings about 1 frame every four seconds, on a loop.
Get offa my nerves and into my mind.
funny painting has more of an influence on my video then film...
"In the 1970s he attended the newly established California Institute of the Arts, where he began applying film techniques, such as montage and split screen, to painting."
Also see David Salle - "Search and Destroy," His feature film,
his scupture and set design.
circle of life.
schwitters (not really b&w--check out elderfields book) didnt really do much of the sort of imagistic collage that Salle is doing. I would compare Schwitters ore to Jin. Schwitters took the detritus he picked up on the street and made compositions as beautiful as in a renaissance painting. Just to point out that he could, and to elevate the garbage by making it aesthetic. Good work for his time. Jin has reloaded the garbage theme--referencing all the junk our culture has to offer. And he's not composing, so much as just throwing it all together and expressing the overload.
Salle is doing an imagistic collage, more like Hannah Hoch or Rosenquist, or many others.
I do have a hard time reading Salle's meaning because I think he is deliberately being canny about it. But he is definately on sexual subject matter. I guess my read is that he's sick of his desire but it wont go away. And he knows if it goes, he's dead. Subject of many artworks.
This painting reminds me of a Bob Dylan song--what doesn't:
Every day is the same thing out the door
Feel further away then ever before
Some things in life, it gets too late to learn
Well, I'm lost somewhere
I must have made a few bad turns
I see people in the park forgetting their troubles and woes
They're drinking and dancing, wearing bright colored clothes
All the young men with their young women looking so good
Well, I'd trade places with any of them
In a minute, if I could
Prof. Mouth thanks for saying I suck. Averywhite may have stood up for you. Although I am surprised you use that as criteria for liking someone but Avery hates everything for no reason you seem to have reason.
"Search and Destroy," - enjoyed that - saw and "Swimming WIth Sharks" - and "To Die For" around the same time or its all in my mind - in any case - Swiss Family Robinson and Fantasia are formative experiences for me. Go DIsney! Great foam rocks - I'm sure you can make a connection, meaningfull or not.
Yeah Schwitters uses colors, I knew someone would call me on that. But still, print technology has changed and the palette with it. Lots of that old collage looks brown when it used to look whit and stuff...fade, fade away.
I went to the post office to get some stamps--he asked me "Flag or Disney?" Yes, that's the choice isnt it? I didnt say that, I just thought it. I said: "Disney".
I dont really like narratives. They seem manipulative. On the other hand, I like them when they let me know that they know they are being manipulative. Then we can all relax and have fun. Like the Madonna vid on Erins blog.
:) i can't wait to go see her. and i like salle. i don't know y... maybe it just reminds me of school where it felt safe and like there was a world with 'right' and 'wrong'
so on a postive note - anyone if you were invited to 'pitch' a VOD download section to a network - with a Fine Art spin, what kind of things would you include?
This painting has had more comments than anything else shown here. That the majority of these comments are negative and strongly so likely means this work really has something going for it (the consensus is usually dead wrong). I'd bet that in 10 or 20 years people are more likely to be still talking about this work (and other Salle work) than anything else that's been posted here.
Wasn't painting "over" till Salle, Schnabel and Fischl "rediscovered" it in the late 70s and 80's. Most of the stuff shown here would IMHO owe these guys quite a debt - even if they are old(er) white males.
Great site even if a lot of the comments are a bit ego-centric and
sophomoric.
What? Artists are self-absorbed? When did this happen?
Thank God everyone else in the world isn't. As far as "sophmoric" comment I think judging everyone here as beneath is going to alienate you. So play nice.
I don't think everyone is commenting on this painting cause it's evocative or revolutionary. People are trying to understand why Salle, with such a rich history of painting, would paint something so annoyingly goofy and ugly. I saw his other works online, not in person sadly, but I wouldn't trek down the streets to see these "vortex" paintings. They just seem like things I've seen before. He is a mid to late career artist. I expected something more interesting than photoshop swirls on a people doing-it wallpaper background. I don't think these are horrible. I retract the 'garbage' comment I made earlier. That was harsh. These paintings don't do anything for me. They are a stylistic cacophony, surreal and candy-coated car crash and that's why we are looking and talking about it.
A victim of his influence on other people. It looks familiar and old because other people are indebted to it and improved it with computer programs. I've been defending him because I think he's historically important. I have more 80's love for David Wojnarowicz and ugly sincerity.
correct me if i am wrong but isn't most Art that proves to be 'evocative or revolutionary' over time considered 'goofy and ugly' at its time of conception?
hinde site is always 20-20
I think Mathew Barney and Paul Macarthy both make work that is impossible to penetrate intellectually. Barney focuses on hybrids of mythological figures. He takes something traditional and screws it up. McCarthy takes innocent pop figures and perverts them and takes them on walk through the dark side of mortality. These paintings are just as complex as the former artists. They are complex collages of seemingly random imagery that renders them inconclusive. The only unifying web is the style in which they are painted. They are like dreams that cannot be interpreted. Dreams are more innocent than imagery created during consciousness.
I'm ready for the next painting! and I'm feeling great today because I just quit my crappy office job!
"so likely means this work really has something going for it"
I know a lot of people (students mostly) started painting in the style of but I think thats because the art magazines were full of the stuff...but then why were the art magazines full of the stuff?
Because it was the best stuff out there.
Why was it the best stuff out there?
It just was.
No one really read the art magazines.
Did they?
His only fault with this painting is that he over-thought it. Every element references each other so heavy-handedly so that nothing remains subtle. No slippage. Not even deliberately. All signage... we get what sells.. the piercing, cum-laden coital signage.
As opposed to the piercing cum-laden sign.
Which is what his project in the early dayz seemed to propose.
Self-assuredness is a gift.
God giveth, God taketh away....
....
They are like dreams that cannot be interpreted.
Hardly. I found this painting really easy to interperate. Its is composed almost entirely of digestable symbols, and thus its really easy to create a story from it. Almost every other painting on this page right now is a lot tougher to interperate, in the narrative sense, than this one - either because they give you too little (Bruno, Hesidence, Coates) or they give you a lot of one thing (Snead, Glantzman).
Hardly. I found this painting really easy to interperate. Its is composed almost entirely of digestable symbols, and thus its really easy to create a story from it
If it's so easy why not take the time to interpret than to just say it's easy to interpret..? For me I don't want to break it down because I can't find it interesting enough to do so.
If it's so easy why not take the time to interpret than to just say it's easy to interpret..?
I did... its in my first post on this topic. Probably around #20.
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