David Salle
David Salle is an American painter, printmaker, photographer, and stage designer. Salle was born in Norman, Oklahoma, and lives and works in East Hampton, New York. He earned a BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California, where he studied with John Baldessari. Salle’s work first came to public attention in New York in the early 1980s.
Biography
David Salle was born to Russian Jewish parents on September 28, 1952, in Norman, Oklahoma, but grew up in Wichita, Kansas. He developed an interest in art at a very young age, spending his childhood and teenage years in art classes provided by a local art organization. At the age of eight or nine, he began taking life-drawing classes at the Wichita Art Association. During high school, he attended outside art classes three days a week.After graduating from high school, Salle attended the California Institute of the Arts. There he trained and studied under John Baldessari, whom he credits for showing him a path to his artistry. Salle earned his BFA in three years, then received his MFA in two.
After graduating, Salle relocated to New York, where he worked with Vito Acconci. During this time, he established a working partnership with Mary Boone, a renowned gallery owner, and still works with her to this day.
Around the same time, Salle was hired by the American Ballet Theatre to design set and costumes. His work with dancer and choreographer Karole Armitage made the ballet a success, and Salle and Armitage fell in love. They eventually broke up, but continued to work together as friends.
In 1995, Salle made his Hollywood directorial debut with Search and Destroy , starring Christopher Walken and Griffin Dunne and produced by Martin Scorsese. The film met with mixed reactions. Salle now lives in East Hampton, New York.
Art
Salle's paintings and prints comprise what appear to be randomly juxtaposed and multilayered images, or images placed on top of one other with deliberately illogical techniques, in which he combines original and appropriated imagery. Imagery he uses includes items from popular culture, such as Donald Duck, and pieces from art history, such as parts from a Caravaggio painting. At a 2005 lecture, Salle said:Salle has worked with different media and processes. Many of his works consist of juxtaposed images, where he takes abstraction and the human figure. He manipulates images by combining a variety of different styles, recognizable imagery, and textures. Exhibitions of his work have taken place at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Castello di Rivoli, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the Kestnergesellschaft Museum in Hannover, Germany. Salle's work was also featured in The Pictures Generation, an exhibition curated by Douglas Eklund at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His work was shown among a number of other contemporary artists including Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Nancy Dwyer, Robert Longo, Thomas Lawson, Charles Clough and Michael Zwack.
Salle's process typically starts with photographs he takes for reference, such as hired models. This was both groundbreaking and controversial at the time, primarily because the combination of these two art forms was not common practice. During this period, painters and photographers were often debating which form had more merit, or whether they had merit at all. Though his collection of photographs is considered art itself, Salle has said he would paint his final images because it took images from the real world and placed them in the world and context of painting. About his photographs as an artistic method, he has said:
According to Salle, his intention was to eliminate any narrative from his work, though one might attempt to decipher a story from the imagery. His decision-making process begins with one image he is attracted to, to which he continues to add pieces from specific images he acquired until the painting feels complete. Though Salle's works do not contain a narrative, they do not lack meaning or relation. He has said that his choices of image are far from random, and that the pieces he chooses are cross-referenced with one another in complex ways. He believes this to be his form of originality in pieces that he appropriates.
Salle has also done set and costume design and directed films. In 1986 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for theater design, and directed the feature film Search and Destroy. He is a longtime collaborator with the choreographer Karole Armitage, designing sets and costumes for her ballets.
Written works
Salle is also a prolific writer on art. His essays and reviews have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, The Paris Review, Interview, and numerous exhibition catalogs and anthologies. He was a regular contributor to Town & Country magazine. His collection of critical essays, How to See, was published by W. W. Norton in 2016. Salle worked closely with fellow contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, and John Baldessari in creating this collection. According to Dwight Garner:Salle's writing is much like his artistic style, witty and intriguing. He believes the jargon associated with art history can and should be simplified so that those who are interested but lack fine art schooling can still learn about and appreciate art.
Criticism and praise
Though Salle insists that his works are not a random assortment of images layered onto one another, critics were difficult to convince. Some common critiques are that his paintings are incoherent and the images he chooses arbitrary and unrelated to one another. The art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto wrote that Salle's paintings convey a "sense of purposiveness with no specific purpose." Critic Robert Storr was fascinated by the work's "graphic double-exposure" and "kaleidoscopic effect," as well as its infinite meanings and interpretations.Another point of contention was Salle's use of pornographic images of women, which some critics found a form of voyeurism or downright provocation, particularly to the feminist movement. Mira Schor, a feminist artist and writer, wrote that his portrayals of women seem "to be a continuation of a male conversation which is centuries old, to which women are irrelevant except as depersonalized projections of man's fears and fantasies." Salle, as well as many critics, says that the images, though sexually explicit, are not "particularly erotic" because they are faded and blurred, distancing them from reality.
Salle has said: