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This painting was part of a 1981 exhibition organized by the Albright-Knox
Art Gallery in conjunction with Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center
and CEPA Gallery. Including such artists as Roberto Clemente, Sandro
Chia, Ellen Carey, and Laurie Simmons as well as David Salle, the
exhibition was an exciting look at recent trends in contemporary
art involving the figure, and the first time many of these artists
had been seen in Western New York.
David Salle's treatments of the human figure—particularly
during the 80s—often involved women and sometimes the images
were derived from magazines such as Playboy and Penthouse.
Salle also appropriated scenes from art history, advertising, design,
technical manuals, and popular culture, creating an assemblage of
mixed cultural references. The resulting pastiche is a challenging
viewing experience, inviting viewers to create their own narratives
from the often-confusing juxtapositions. Like many artists of the
80s, Salle selects from the barrage of mass media information and
creates quirky, personal interpretations, reflections which question
and often disturb.
David Salle's work is in most major collections of contemporary
art, including the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney
Museum of American Art, and many other major museum collections.
It has been shown all over the world, often in widely-publicized,
traveling one-person retrospectives.
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CRITICAL EXCERPTS
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Susan Krane, Figures, Forms, Expression, Albright/CEPA/Hallwalls
catalog, 1981
"David Salle's paintings are concerned with the way in which we
perceive such images [mass media photographic] and with the nature
of their meaning. Salle often appropriates the imagery of his paintings
from the media; some are from newspapers and magazines, others are
created to appear so. His figures, excised from context and rendered
with detachment, seem recognizably 'normal,' and yet barren and
anonymous, they bear little relation to human reality. They are,
in Salle's words, 'dead images.'...Typically, Salle juxtaposes and
overlays large, shadowy black and white drawings of nude women,
figure studies executed in ways that are typical of academic art
and small outlined drawings of banal objects such as hats or chairs.
All depend not on techniques of painting but on the conventions
of drawing and illustration...These images float, as if existing
in varyingly distanced layers of meaning and time...points of reference
and recognition that vaguely indicate but to not explicate the meaning
of their relationship. In keeping with current literary theory,
they are structuralist paintings, about the reading of images, styles
and meanings...The eloquent pessimism of these paintings is inevitable..."
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Interview with Peter Schjeldahl, Art Talk: the 80s, ed. Jeanne
Siegel, Da Capo Press, 1988
from intro (Siegel): "although he appropriates images, Salle
is removed from Postmodernism "Deconstructors." As he points out,
in his work an image is not a criticism or a response. He locates
his own sources. At the beginning, there was a good deal of critical
reservation centering on questionable draftsmanship. Around 1984,
new imagery of women in explicitly erotic poses appeared in salle's
paintings, which drew fresh criticism from the feminists, who found
it degrading...By 1985, when he was given a retrospective at the
Whitney Museum, even the most obdurate critics had softened."
From interview text: "The situation when I went to California
in the early 70's was clearly intellectual opposition to painting.
It was a time of putting everything to a severe critique...even
when I was a kid in the Midwest making figurative paintings...I
always knew I wanted the work to reflect more what I would have
then called a state of mind....I remember wondering almost out loud,
how do artists get thought into work?...I think "literary" is the
battlefield of this generation...I think there's an unconscious
literary love in the generational sensibility which never finds
its expression because the generation itself is not literary...It's
interesting to think about things being "disgusting" but using them
anyway, and not having them be neutralized by art. One hopes they're
not aestheticized, that they just spread a wider net of implication
on everything; the viewer, the context, the object. ..memory...Its
just the continual manipulation of the surface of recognition...A
work of art becomes a different kind of model for human interaction...Now
this is a vague rambling, but I think we're getting to a point in
the culture where the notion that something happened that wasn't
supposed to happen—the notion of humor or the absurd, the unexpected,
the irrational—that these notions of how to see one's life, and
how to be involved with one's life, conjoin to make a sensibility
which is more accepting than the sensibility of previous generations.
I'm thinking of art which functions as an accidental trigger rather
than a logical one. And that probably does have to do with certain
things everyone has pointed out, like media glut. Like ho, ho, maybe
we really are morally bankrupt. And maybe it's fun.
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