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David Salle talks to Robert Rosenblum - '80s Then - Interview
ArtForum, March, 2003
ROBERT ROSENBLUM: We should of course begin with the '80s. But I'm interested in what happened to you before the curtain went up.
DAVID SALLE: I came to New York in 1975 after CalArts. I floundered around for a few years, happily. I loved being in New York.
RR: Your signature style is always so clear in the work we know that it's hard to imagine what led up to it. What was it like before 1980?
DS: I had a show at Artists Space, in its original location on Wooster Street, in 1976, when Helene Winer was the director. The pieces were sort of protopaintings, on very large backdrop paper. They were tone poems: a word like CAMUS, an abstract paint element, and some drawn or photographic images mixed in--not all that different in spirit from what I found myself doing later, but different in appearance.
I did a couple of installation shows in Holland a bit later. One piece I'm still happy with, at least in memory, as no record of it exists: a large photograph of a race car on one wall, a photograph of an African tribal dancer on the opposite wall, and a row of lightbulbs on the floor that flashed in a random sequence after a piece of music was played. I've forgotten what the music was; very atmospheric, theatrical, and obscure. I was after a kind of temporal sequence that was supposed to produce a hypnotic rhythm. I still have a very kinesthetic way of reading pictures.
The pieces using theatrical time and space were leading up to a way of working with images in painting. I felt very free to make radical juxtapositions in these staged installation events. I was trying to get that energy into a painting. The first paintings were very modest. The overlapping imagery took hold in 1979, when I had my first show of paintings, in Larry Gagosian's loft on West Broadway. The overlaps were a response to a feeling in the moment. It came all at once while painting--from direct observation, not from art history.
RR: What were the strongest currents in the art world then that you had to either absorb or conquer?
DS: There wasn't then what I imagine had been the case in the '50s, when you would have had de Kooning and everyone had to place themselves in relation to that icon. In retrospect the '70s were a winding down or a vaporizing of a strain of formalism that the New York School had fallen into. Everybody was waiting for Minimalism to die. I wanted to be a painter and had always identified with the great New York School painters--even though I wasn't held by abstraction. When I came to New York there weren't any left.
The most interesting things were happening in performance, installation, and theater. It was as though art had been emptied out by formalism and we had to go back to the well and see what could be put back in. Godard was bigger than Warhol. One of the most influential and, I thought, terrific artists of that period was Vito Acconci. He was trying to find a voice that could contain all the contradictions, all the cultural influences and desires of life at that moment. He was putting everything into his work then. The artist as porous membrane through which everything passes but to which some highly refined residue sticks--the problem was to give that a concrete visual form. That is, of course, still the problem.
RR: What group of artists did you feel connected to? Were you more connected to the Pictures artists or the neo-expresslonists? What about Julian Schnabel?
DS: I was unconvinced by the Pictures rhetoric. I felt and still feel that Minimalism offered nothing to build on, and I was repelled by its authoritarianism. When you're young, you long to be accepted by a group, but by and large artists are not joiners. It seemed that the Pictures group was defined in terms of what it could not do, whereas Julian made a stand for doing whatever the hell he felt like, which is probably a healthier attitude.
RR: Your taste seems to be for art that was traditionally disliked by right-thinking modernists. Your first painting that made me aware of this was one that included Yasuo Kuniyoshi's Self-Portrait as a Golf Player [1927], a picture that I had remembered from my childhood visits to the Museum of Modern Art and that had been taken off the walls a long time ago. And then I realized that so much of your work was a conscious rejection of the great MOMA tradition, a fresh effort to look at things from the early twentieth century that had been long neglected, like Walt Kuhn's paintings.
DS: The midwestern town I grew up in had a small museum with a nice little collection of American painting. So the work I came to know firsthand was that of Kuniyoshi and Hartley, Kuhn and Arthur Dove, Sheeler, O'Keeffe, the whole Stieglitz group. I was always attracted to this, for lack of a better term, minority taste. Official art--Minimal art, Conceptual art, and what came to be MOMA art--struck me as being overdetermined. It was so clear how you were supposed to feel that for me it precluded the possibility of actually feeling. By contrast when you came across a film by Samuel Fuller, in which cowboys were talking in a kind of existential hipster comic-book lingo and the cutting had all the gravity of Eisenstein, you didn't know what the hell to think--whether you were supposed to take it seriously or whether it was a joke, or both at the same time. It just naturally appealed to me. I was for an art that wasn't so overdetermined, that had more of life's contradictions.
