David Salle talks to Robert Rosenblum - '80s Then - Interview

RR: Some of your backdrops, I remember, were single images, like just a dog. These looked like your work but were very different in that the paintings always have more than one thing going on.

DS: Right. But everything inside the proscenium was the stage picture. The backdrop, the single image, was one component. I had the ability in the stage work to make use of duration, of specific viewing time, and of music. In part, the images were a response to the music. In a painting, you have to do it all by yourself.

RR: Do you look at pictures with an eye for what you can cut out and use? Like great quotations?

DS: I just find that certain things move me to action. It's like someone responding to a landscape. Sometimes you go looking for an image the way a writer goes to the thesaurus or the poet to the rhyming dictionary. Sometimes when I see an image I want to liberate the form that is locked up inside it.

RR: Courbet is the artist who comes up most often in connection with your female nudes, works that have so often offended people for their political Incorrectness. Is he the artist you first tuned in to for representations of naked women?

DS: My feeling for Courbet comes from seeing the big "machine" paintings, which, along with Gericault, rhymed with the big feeling and the heroic scale of New York School painting. That had always been the compass point. What I wanted to do was to make a painting with that kind of energy, scale, and allover composition, but using images. In a sense that's what the giant Courbet and Gericault machine paintings do.

RR: By now I think every discussion of your work has included the notorious Courbet beaver shot, The Origin of the World. The painting became a cornerstone for new histories of nineteenth-century art, but is that a picture you knew?

DS: I can't remember where I first saw it--but I didn't know the picture early on.

RR: What about the many angry feminist responses to your work?

DS: I think it is a predictable "shoot the messenger" type of misreading. I don't think my work endorses male dominance in any way. To quote Angela Carter's great book The Sadeian Woman, "A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes. His business would be the total demystification of the flesh." Anyway, I'm making paintings, and you objectify in a particular way whatever you paint. That's the nature of it; to paint something is to scrutinize in a way that can sometimes be uncomfortable. You have to work out of your actual moment, not an idealized one.

RR: It's no different from the way people are offended by Renoir's women. There's a long tradition of male artists rendering women, especially naked women, this way. So you're just part of that legacy.

DS: Renoir is an artist I can't stand, but he was of great use to both Magritte and de Chirico, two artists I love. It's interesting how a bad artist can influence a good one, but that's another conversation.

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