Forty-One False Starts Page 4

  Salle propped up my collages and regarded them closely. At last he said, “There’s nothing that says your collages aren’t art. They’re art if you declare them to be so.”

  “Yes, that’s the Duchamp dictum. But I don’t declare them to be so. Don’t you remember the distinction you drew between collages made by amateurs and collages made by artists?”

  “I was speaking generally,” Salle said.

  I realized that he was being delicate, that he didn’t want to voice his true opinion of my collages. I assured him that I hadn’t brought the collages to be praised, that I had no investment in them, that I had brought them only in order to engage him in a discussion. “Please say anything that occurs to you.”

  “Stuff occurs to me, but I don’t want to say it. I might sound mean-spirited.”

  Eventually Salle conquered enough of his reluctance to make a few mild criticisms of the composition of my collages, and to say that his own collages were composed along simple principles that any art school freshman would recognize. Looking back on the incident, I see that Salle had also seen what any first-year student of psychology would have seen—that for all my protests to the contrary, I had brought them to be praised. Every amateur harbors the fantasy that his work is only waiting to be discovered; a second fantasy—that the established contemporary artists must (also) be frauds—is a necessary corollary.

  31

  I once visited the artist David Salle in his studio, on White Street, when he was making preparatory collages for a series of paintings based on consumer products, and he told me that he had noticed himself being obsessively drawn to two images: watches and shoes. They had seemed meaningful to him—he had been cutting pictures of watches and shoes out of newspapers and magazines—but he didn’t know why. The meaning of the watches remained obscure, he said, but a few days earlier he had cracked the code of shoes. “The shoe as presented in the selling position isn’t the thing. The thing is underneath the shoe. It’s the idea of being stepped on.” Salle’s sense of himself as being stepped on—by people who are jealous of him, by people who feel superior to him, by people who don’t like his sexual politics, by people who find his work too much trouble to decipher—has become a signature of his public persona.

  32

  There is a kind of man who is always touchingly and irritatingly mentioning his wife—touchingly because one is moved by the depth of his affection, and irritatingly because one feels put down by the paragon who inspires it. During the two years I interviewed the artist David Salle, he was always mentioning the dancer and choreographer Karole Armitage, with whom he had lived for seven years. Although Salle and Armitage had separated a few months before our talks began, he would speak about her as if he were still under her spell. They had met in 1983 and had become a famous couple. She had been a lead dancer in the Merce Cunningham company and had then formed her own avant-garde company. Her choreography was a kind of version in dance of what Salle was doing in painting: an unsettling yoking of incongruous elements. (The fusion of classical ballet with punk rock music was Armitage’s initial postmodernist gesture.) That Salle should become her collaborator—painting sets and designing costumes for her ballets—seemed almost inevitable. The first product of the Armitage-Salle collaboration was a ballet called The Mollino Room, performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in May 1986, which had been commissioned by American Ballet Theater and in which Baryshnikov himself danced. In an article entitled “The Punk Princess and the Postmodern Prince,” published in Art in America, Jill Johnston wonderfully wrote of the premiere, “It attracted a capacity audience of art world luminaries and suburban bankers or whoever they were in their tuxedos and jewels and wild satisfied looks of feeling they were at just the right place that opening evening in Manhattan.” As events proved, however, the bankers were in the wrong place. The ballet got terrible reviews, as did Armitage’s subsequent ballets The Tarnished Angels and The Elizabethan Phrasing of the Late Albert Ayler, both staged at the Brooklyn Academy in 1987. “Little talent, much pretension. Any other comment might seem superfluous,” the Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff wrote of Armitage on the latter occasion.

  “The dance world is controlled by one person, Anna Kisselgoff,” Salle told me bitterly. “She controls it internationally as well as locally. A good review from Anna will get you a season in France, and a bad review will cancel it. Karole was literally run out of town by Anna. She can’t work in New York anymore.” Armitage now lives and works in Los Angeles and abroad.

  Salle and Armitage have remained close friends; they talk frequently on the telephone and meet whenever she comes to New York. Salle speaks of her with a kind of reverence for the rigor and extremity of her avant-gardism. She and her dancers represent to him the purest form of artistic impudence and intransigence. “During the seven years I was with Karole, I lived a different life from that of any artists I know,” he told me. “I lived her life. She would probably tell you she lived mine. At any rate, during those years I was more involved with her work than with my own. Her work was about being on the edge, performed by people who enjoyed being on the edge, for an audience who wanted to be on the edge. Her life was much more urgent and alive and crisis oriented. The performing arts are like that. When I was with Karole, artists seemed boring to me—staid and self-satisfied. Solid, like rocks in a stream. Very few people had her inquisitiveness and restlessness, her need for stimulation in the deepest sense. When I was with Karole, artists seemed almost bovine to me, domestic, house oriented, safe.”

  Salle and I were talking in his sleek, cold, obsessively ordered loft on White Street, furnished with 1950s corporate-style sofas and chairs, and I asked him if Armitage had helped furnish the place.

  “No,” he said. “I wasn’t with her when I bought the loft. She moved in a few years later. I came to see this place through her eyes. Through her eyes it was intimidating and alienating. There was no place for her in it.”

  “Was there an area that she took possession of, that became her own domain?”

  “No, not really. Because there was no way to divide it. She had a desk—sort of where that painting is. There was a country house in upstate New York. I bought it because she liked it. It was an old house, and she had a romantic feeling about it. But we never had time to go there.”

  33

  In a long interview with the artist David Salle by the screenwriter Becky Johnston, there is a passage about the painting tradition of the female nude in Western art and about Salle’s sense of himself as not belonging to that tradition. “It would be interesting,” Johnston says, “to try to point out what is different about your nude women from the parade of nude women which has gone by.”

  “Well, we both agree there’s a difference,” Salle says. “It feels like a complete break.”

  “Absolutely. But I want to know what you think that break is.”

  Salle struggles to answer and gives up. “I’m not getting anywhere. I know it’s different, but I don’t know why. I don’t know how to express it in words. What do you think?”

  Johnston says shrewdly, “I think the difference between the nude woman in your paintings and those in others is that she’s not a woman. She’s a representative of something else. She’s a stand-in for your view. I don’t think that’s true of most of the women in art. And I don’t think it’s a sexual obsession with women which motivates your use of the nude, as it does, say, Picasso’s. It’s much deeper, more personal and subjective. That’s my opinion.”

  Salle doesn’t protest, and Johnston goes on to ask him, “If you had to describe it—and I know this is asking you to generalize, but feel free to do so widely—what’s ‘feminine’ to you?”

  Salle stops to consider. “I have the feeling that if I were to start talking about what I think is feminine, I would list all the qualities I can think of.”

  34

  David Salle is a slight, handsome man of forty-one who wears his dark shoulder-length hair pulled back and bound with
a rubber band, though sometimes he will absently pull on the rubber band and let the hair fall around his thin, not always cleanly shaven face. In 1992 and 1993, I would visit him at his studio, and we would talk about his work and life. I did not find what he said about his work interesting (I have never found anything any artist has said about his work interesting), but when he talked about his life—especially about his life as an unsettling presence in the art world and his chronic feeling of being misunderstood—that was something else. Then his words took on the specificity, vividness, and force that had drained out of them when he talked about art. But even so, I felt dissatisfied with the portrait of the artist that was emerging for me—it seemed too static—and one day I said to him, “I keep thinking there should be some action.”

  “Action?”

  “Yes. Something should happen. There has been some action—I’ve been to your studio and to your loft and to your drawing show and to the dinner afterward—but I want more.”

  “We’ll think of something,” Salle said.

  “What if I watched you paint?”

  “We could try it, though I think it would be pretty boring, like being around a film set. A lot of waiting around.” Salle then recalled artists he had seen on TV as a child, who painted and talked to the audience. “My friend Eric Fischl tells me there’s a whole raft of them on TV now—wildly entertaining, creepy guys who paint and talk a blue streak. Fischl is an expert on TV painters. He says there’s a guy on TV who is the fastest painter in the world. It’s a funny thing to think about. Painting, like theater, is about illusion, and I think it might be shocking to you to see how undramatic the process is through which the illusions are created.”

  “We could go to a museum together.”

  Salle said he had already done that with a journalist—Gerald Marzorati for an article in ARTnews. “We went to the Met. I was badly hungover, and it only magnified the pathetic limitations of what I had to say about other art. We were looking at these Rembrandts, and I didn’t have anything to say about them. It came down to ‘They sure are good.’ ”

  I never watched Salle paint (his talk about the TV artists somehow took care of that), but I did go to a museum with him once—to the Met, to see the Lucian Freud show. I had had a rather cumbersome journalistic idea. Robert Hughes, who had written scathingly about Salle, had called Freud “the best realist painter alive,” and I imagined doing a set piece in which Salle would make acidic comments on a favorite of Hughes’s as a sort of indirect revenge. I called up Salle and put the idea to him. Salle said he’d be glad to go to the Freud show, but couldn’t oblige me with my set piece, since he didn’t hate Freud’s work—he admired it and had even “quoted” from it in his own work. At the show, Salle moved through the rooms very quickly. He could tell at a glance what he wanted to look at and what he didn’t, and mostly he didn’t. He strode past paintings, only occasionally pausing to stand before one. He lingered appreciatively before a small nude owned by a film actor—“Ah, the Steve Martin,” he said when he spotted it—and a large painting of Freud’s family and friends in his studio, flanked by a studio sink and a massive scented geranium with many dead leaves. What Salle said about the paintings that captured his interest was technical in character; he spoke of strategies of composition and of the depositing of paint on canvas. Of the well-known painting of Freud’s mother lying down, Salle said, “It has the same palette as Whistler’s Mother—a ravishing palette.” In the last rooms of the show, where the provocative large paintings of the overweight performance artist Leigh Bowery were hanging, Salle permitted himself a negative comment. “That’s completely unremarkable,” he said of Naked Man, Back View, a huge painting of a seated, naked Bowery. He added, “Freud is adored for being ‘bad’—by the same people who hate my work because I’m ‘bad.’”

  I recalled a conversation I’d once had with Salle about Francis Bacon. Salle had been speaking about his own work, about his images of women—“They’re all kind of dire, they have a dire cast,” he said—and I had asked him, speaking of dire, whether Bacon had been an influence. “You’re not the first person to ask me that,” Salle said. “Several people have observed that to me. Bacon is actually not an artist I’m interested in, but lately I’ve been thinking about him a lot in attempting to defend myself against certain criticisms. If you turned these criticisms around and leveled them against Bacon, it would be absurd. And it’s purely because his work is homosexual and mine is heterosexual. The same attitudes transposed are incorrect.”

  “Why are dire images done by a homosexual more correct than those done by a heterosexual?”

  “Because in art politics, to be homosexual is, a priori, more correct than to be heterosexual. Because to be an artist is to be an outsider, and to be a gay artist is to be a double outsider. That’s the correct condition. If you’re a straight artist, it’s not clear that your outsiderness is legitimate. I know this is totally absurd. But the fact is that in our culture it does fall primarily to gays and blacks to make something interesting. Almost everything from straight white culture is less interesting, and has been for a long time.”

  35

  After the opening of a show of David Salle’s drawings at the uptown Gagosian Gallery in March 1992, a celebratory dinner was held at a suavely elegant restaurant in the East Seventies, and as the evening proceeded I was struck by the charm and gaiety of the occasion. The ritual celebrations of artistic achievement—the book parties, the opening-night parties, the artists’ dinners—give outward form to, and briefly make real, the writer’s or performer’s or painter’s fantasy that he is living in a world that wishes him well and wants to reward him for his work. For a few hours, the person who has recently emerged from the “horrible pit,” as Salle once called it, of his creative struggles is lulled into forgetting that the world is indifferent to him and intent only on its own pleasures. Occasionally the world is pleased to applaud and reward an artist, but more often than not it will carelessly pass him by. And what the world gives, it delights in taking away: the applauded and rewarded artist does not remain so; the world likes to reverse itself. What gives the book party or the opening-night party or the artist’s dinner its peculiar feverish glitter is the lightly buried consciousness of the probable bad fate that awaits the artist’s offering.

  Since shows of painters’ drawings are considered relatively minor affairs, the dinner was a small one (for about twenty people) and had a more relaxed and less complicated atmosphere than a full-scale show would have elicited. The restaurant was a very expensive and a very good one; we ordered carefully and ate seriously. Salle, who was wearing a kind of sailor’s blouse, sat quietly and calmly and watchfully, like a boy at a birthday party. I retain an image of Sabine Rewald, a curator at the Metropolitan, who looks like a Vermeer, lifting a spoonful of pink sorbet to her mouth and smiling happily. My table partners—Robert Pincus-Witten, an art critic and emeritus professor of art history who is now a director at Gagosian, and Raymond Foye, another director, who also publishes tiny books of exotica, such as the poems of Francis Picabia—were masters of the art of intimate, complicit table talk. Our host, Larry Gagosian, was absent. He was out of town; the opening was evidently not important enough for him to fly in for.

  Two years later, the opening, at the Gagosian downtown gallery, of a Salle show of eight large Early Product Paintings based on images in 1950s advertising, was something else again. This was a high-stakes show—each painting was priced at around a hundred thousand dollars—and an entire restaurant had been hired for the artist’s dinner. Things were no longer simple. Things were very complicated. The restaurant, filled with artists, writers, performers, filmmakers, collectors, critics, gallery owners, hangers-on, hummed with a sense of intrigue and with the threat of something not coming off. Gagosian, a tall, dark-skinned, gray-haired man in his late forties, with a deadpan manner, walked through the room casting looks here and there, like Rick in Casablanca checking the house. Pincus-Witten and Foye, again on d
uty, skimmed about on anxious, obscure errands. Salle (playing the Paul Henreid role?) wore a dark jacket over a tieless white shirt and jeans, and was only slightly more reserved, detached, and watchful than usual. I left before the Vichy police came. The image I retain from the occasion, like Sabine Rewald’s pink sorbet from the previous one (though it comes from the opening proper), is the sight of a tall, thin man in a gray suit who stood in the center of the gallery and stood out from everyone else because of the aura of distinction that surrounded him. He had a face with clever, European features, but it was his bearing that was so remarkable. He carried himself like a nobleman; you expected to look down and see a pair of greyhounds at his feet. Throughout the opening he had his arm around a young black man with an elaborate tribal hairdo. He was the painter Francesco Clemente, another of Gagosian’s hundred-thousand-dollars-a-picture artists, and another of the painters who came to prominence during the 1980s. Unlike Salle, however, he had not seen his star fall.

  During a series of talks I had with Salle over a two-year period, he was always careful to say nothing bad about fellow painters—even his comments on Julian Schnabel, with whom he had had a public falling-out, were restrained. But I gathered from a few things he let drop about Clemente’s charmed life in art that it was a bitter reminder of everything his own wasn’t. “What I’ve been circling around trying to find a way to ask,” Salle once told me, “is the simple question: How is it that some people are basically taken seriously and other are basically not taken seriously?” In spite of the money he makes from his art, in spite of the praise sometimes bordering on reverence he has received from advanced critics (Peter Schjeldahl, Sanford Schwartz, Lisa Liebmann, Robert Rosenblum, Michael Brenson, for example), Salle feels that admission into the highest rank of contemporary painting has been denied him, that he will always be placed among the second-stringers, that he will never be considered one of the big sluggers.