Forty-One False Starts Page 5

  36

  The artist David Salle, in a 1990 catalog of his prints called the Canfield Hatfield series (A. J. Liebling wrote about Hatfield in The Honest Rainmaker), wrote,

  Professor Canfield Hatfield was a supposedly real-life character who figured prominently in racetrack operations and betting schemes of all types in this country in the first part of the twentieth century. Among the Professor’s many activities to promote belief in a higher system of control over seemingly random events were his exploits as a paid maker of rain for drought-stricken communities in the West—a high-wager kind of job and by extension a useful metaphor for the relationship between risk, hope, and fraud that enter into any art-making or rain-making situation.

  37

  The lax genre of personality journalism would not seem to be the most congenial medium for a man of David Salle’s sharp, odd mind and cool, irritable temperament. And yet this forty-one-year-old painter has possibly given more interviews than any other contemporary artist. Although the published results have, more often than not, disappointed him, they have not deterred him from further fraternization with the press; when I was interviewing him, in 1992 and 1993, he would regularly mention other interviews he was giving. One of them—an interview with Eileen Daspin, of the magazine W—turned out badly. Salle lost his subject’s wager that the interviewer’s sympathetic stance wasn’t a complete sham, and had to endure the vexation of reading a piece about himself that shimmered with hostility and turned his words against him. “It can’t be easy being David Salle in the 1990’s,” Daspin wrote in the October 1993 issue. “He is definitely out. Like fern bars and quiche. A condition that’s a little hard to take after having been one of the genius artist boy wonders of the Eighties.” This was the style and tone of the article. Salle himself sounded petulant and egotistical. (“I was completely ignored by the same people at the beginning of my career who then celebrated me and who are now happy to ignore me.”)

  A month or so later, Salle told me of his feelings about the article. “I read it very, very quickly, in disgust, and threw the magazine in the trash. I had been ambushed. I should have known better. I have no one to blame but myself. She gave off plenty of signals that should have raised alarms. It led to my saying interesting things—except I said them to the wrong person.”

  “It interests me that you always take responsibility for the interview—that if you don’t like it, you blame yourself rather than the interviewer.”

  “Oh, I can blame her,” Salle said. “I didn’t do it single-handed. She did it. She kept saying ‘What does it feel like to be a has-been? Don’t you feel bad being put in the position of a has-been?’ and I kept saying—with a misguided sense of pedagogical mission—‘Well, you have to understand that this has a context and a history and a trajectory.’ I was talking about the tyranny of the left. But it came out with her saying merely how angry and unhappy I was about being a has-been. All the pains I took to explain the context had gone for nothing.”

  “She made you sound like a very aggressive and unpleasant person.”

  “Maybe I am. I was trying out the thesis that the art world lionizes bullies. In any case, I’m reaching the point where I’m resigned to being misinterpreted. Instead of seeing this as a bad fate that befell me through no fault of my own, I now see it as a natural state of affairs for an artist. I almost don’t see how it can be otherwise.”

  “Then why do you give all these interviews?”

  Salle thought for a moment. “It’s a lazy person’s form of writing. It’s like writing without having to write. It’s a form in which one can make something, and I like to make things.”

  I remembered something Salle had once made that had failed, like theW interview, and that he had destroyed in disgust, as he had destroyed his copy of the magazine. It was a painting of two ballet dancers.

  38

  The artist David Salle—as if speaking of another person—once talked to me about his impatience. “I have a way of making people feel that they don’t have my attention, that I have lost interest and turned away. People I’m close to have complained about it.”

  “And then?”

  “I get even more impatient.”

  “Is it that your thoughts wander?”

  “I start thinking that my life is going to be over soon. It’s that simple. I don’t have that much time left. I felt this way when I was twenty.”

  Salle had recently turned forty. He had noticed—without drawing the almost too obvious inference—that he was cutting images of watches out of newspapers and magazines. One day, after arriving a little late for an appointment with me, he apologized and then told me that he used to be obsessively punctual. “I had to train myself not to arrive exactly on the dot. It was absurd and unseemly to be so punctual. It was particularly unseemly for an artist to be so punctual.”

  I asked Salle what his punctuality had been about.

  “I think it had to do with focusing so much on people’s expectations of me. But it was also because I myself hate to wait. For all my, I’m sure, bottomless inconsiderateness of other people, I’m always empathizing with the other person. I empathize with the torturer. I find it very easy to empathize with Robert Hughes when he writes of his aversion to my work. I feel I know exactly what he’s thinking and why. It’s a kind of arrogance, I know, but I feel sorry for him. He doesn’t know any better. I had to learn to be late and I had to learn to be cruel, to exude hostility. But it’s not really my nature. I do it badly because it’s not who I am.”

  39

  Toward the end of a long series of interviews with the artist David Salle, I received this letter from him:

  After the many hours of trying to step outside of myself in order to talk about who or what I am, I feel that the only thing that really matters in art and in life is to go against the tidal wave of literalism and literal-mindedness—to insist on and live the life of the imagination. A painting has to be the experience, instead of pointing to it. I want to have and to give access to feeling. That is the riskiest and only important way to connect art to the world—to make it alive. Everything else is just current events.

  Most of our conversations, I think, were about how this idea has a special frequency which is easily drowned out by the din of the moment. That is, we talked, or I talked, mostly about its being “drowned out.” But the important thing is not really the “underdogness” of it—but just the feeling itself.

  40

  To write about the painter David Salle is to be forced into a kind of parody of his melancholy art of fragments, quotations, absences—an art that refuses to be any one thing or to find any one thing more interesting, beautiful, or sobering than another.

  41

  One day, toward the end of a conversation I was having with the painter David Salle in his studio, on White Street, he looked at me and said, “Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever thought that your real life hasn’t begun yet?”

  “I think I know what you mean.”

  “You know—soon. Soon you’ll start your real life.”

  DEPTH OF FIELD

  2011

  Last April, the German photographer Thomas Struth went to Windsor Castle and took a picture of the Queen of England and the Duke of Edinburgh for the National Portrait Gallery in London. This is not the kind of photography Struth usually does. He is one of today’s most advanced and acclaimed art photographers, whose monumental color photographs hang in museums throughout the world, and whose interests do not extend to taking inoffensive pictures of famous people. But when he got the call from the National Portrait Gallery in January, he found himself saying yes. The occasion was an exhibition of paintings and photographs of Elizabeth II done in the sixty years of her reign, which the Diamond Jubilee of 2012 will celebrate. Struth’s photograph would be the final portrait in the exhibition.

  “When the National Portrait Gallery called and said that in their eyes I was the best person to do the portrait, I was quite shocked,” Struth
told me. “My immediate reaction was ‘What can I possibly do that’s not only affirmative but would include a message from me? Would I be able to say something new about people like this?’ ”

  Struth and I were eating lunch in a Berlin hotel restaurant; it was a month after the sitting, and I had come to Germany to interview him and watch him at work. He is a tall, bearded man of fifty-six, with large pale eyes and an exceptionally likable persona. He radiates decency and straightforwardness. He is kind and calm and modest. He is the kid in the class everyone wants to sit next to.

  Struth went on to tell me of his elaborate preparations for the portrait of Elizabeth and Philip. He studied old photographs and found most of them wanting. He saw the technical mistakes, “what should not happen”—notably their distracting backgrounds. He visited Buckingham Palace and decided it was too cluttered. When the gilded green, red, and white drawing rooms at Windsor Castle were offered, he selected the green room (the white room was “too tired” and the red room “too much”) and spent a day there making test shots. “While I was there, I said, ‘I want to see the dresser’—the woman who is in charge of the Queen’s wardrobe. Because the second thing I noticed when I looked at the past photographs of the Queen was that many of the dresses she wears are very unfortunate. She has quite big boobs, and she often wears something that goes up to the neck, and then there is this stretch of fabric under the face that makes it look small.” (I smiled to myself at Struth’s coarse reference to the royal bosom—a rare lapse in his excellent English.) The day before the sitting, Struth continued, “the dresser came in with twenty dresses. She was a very nice woman, and we had an immediate chemistry. I felt that she saw me. Later, she told the Queen that I was okay—that I was a nice guy. I selected the dress, a pale-blue brocade with garlands, a bit shiny, and it matched nicely against the dark green.”

  I asked if the Queen accepted his choice and he said yes. He did not choose the Duke’s costume, except to ask for a white shirt. At the sitting, the Duke wore a dark suit and a blue tie. “He was perfect,” Struth said.

  In further preparation, Struth read a biography of Elizabeth, and “I felt sympathy. They were my parents’ generation. She was exactly my mother’s age, and Philip was born in 1921, two years after my father was born.” He added, “I said okay to the commission for reasons I cannot name, but I thought, I’m going to have sympathy for these people.”

  The paradoxicality of Struth’s association of Elizabeth and Philip with his parents—his mother was in the Hitlerjugend and his father served in the Wehrmacht from 1937 to 1945—could not have been lost on him and was surely implicit in the “reasons I cannot name.” Like many, if not most Germans of his generation, Struth has been haunted by the Nazi past, and speaks of the Holocaust as a major influence on his life and work. “If you want to know what formed me,” he said in our first interview, “this is the big thing: the culture of guilt that I was born into and that surrounded me in my childhood.” He told me that he learned about the Holocaust early in his life, though he doesn’t know exactly when—“I feel as if I always knew about it”—and was tormented by the question of his parents’ complicity. His father liked to tell stories about his bad war. He had fought in France and then in Russia, where he was severely wounded twice, and survived “almost as if by a miracle.” These stories “irritated” the young Thomas. “Whenever my father talked about the war, he told only his personal story. He never said something like ‘Oh, my God, when I came out of it and realized what we had done, I felt so sorry!’ That would have been the natural thing to say. But he never said it. I don’t know what he believed.” Struth went on to speak, in a somewhat amorphous way, of his work as a form of the Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“coming to terms with the past”) by which Germany’s best spirits remain gripped. Will his portrait of the monarch who was on the right side of history (“the last living connection to an episode—the island race standing up to Hitler—that has become the foundation story, almost the creation myth, of modern Britain,” as Jonathan Freedland recently characterized Elizabeth II in The New York Review of Books) bring his project of expiation to a remarkable kind of culmination?

  If so, it will not be visible in the portrait itself. Struth’s work does not reflect the culture of guilt he speaks of. Unlike, for example, the gritty, dread-inducing paintings of Anselm Kiefer, whose thoughts never seem far from Auschwitz, Struth’s photographs evoke nothing bad. They have a lightness of spirit, you could almost say a sunniness, that is not present in the work of the other major practitioners of the new oversize color photography—Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Jeff Wall, Thomas Ruff among them. Struth is the Sunday child of the lot. His huge photographs—city streets, people looking at paintings in museums, industrial landscapes, factories, laboratories, rain forests, and family groups—are as pleasing as his persona; they seem to be an extension of it. Michael Fried, in his tautly argued book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008), pauses to remark, with apparent (uncharacteristic) irrelevance—but evident intuitive understanding of the force of Struth’s radiance—“A striking fact about Struth’s public career is the almost universally enthusiastic response that his work has received.” An early enthusiast, Peter Schjeldahl, wrote in the Swiss art journal Parkett in 1997, “It is time to say that Struth’s pictures regularly take my breath away. I find it hard to look at them steadily for any length of time, so intense is their effect on my emotions.” In the catalog of a 2003 Struth retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Maria Morris Hambourg and Douglas Eklund testified to “a remarkable feeling” they experienced while looking at Struth’s photograph of two women standing before Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris, Street; Rainy Day, “of stepping into one’s own skin again, while alienation from others and from history—the curse of the modern—is dissolved in the image.” Today there is no diminution of the enthusiasm; if anything, it is growing, and sane critics are continuing to lose it under Struth’s mesmerizing spell.

  The morning after the lunch in Berlin, Struth and I drove to a factory outside Dresden, operated by a company called Solar-World, where he would spend the day photographing. He had been there a few weeks earlier to ascertain whether he would find a subject, and he did. We were greeted by an agreeable young woman named Susanne Herrmann, the plant’s public relations manager, who took us to a changing room where we put on white jumpsuits, white plastic hairnets, and white booties over our shoes so that we would bring no contaminating dust particles into the plant. Dan Hirsch, Struth’s new assistant, who had driven in from Düsseldorf with Struth’s equipment—numerous cameras, tripods, and film—had already arrived. (“I desired somebody like this for a long time,” Struth said of Hirsch, a twenty-eight-year-old Israeli, who had written to Struth and to Candida Höfer a few months earlier, offering his services; he had heard back only from Struth, who interviewed him and hired him on the spot. “Everything he said seemed very honest and made sense.”)

  We entered a large room filled with machinery that made a great din and nowhere disclosed the function that its beautiful forms followed. I immediately saw why Struth wanted to photograph here. Everywhere you looked, a fetching ensemble of industrial parts appeared—like a found object—to tempt the eye even as it baffled the mind. While Struth and Hirsch set up a large view camera in front of one of these ready-mades and took preparatory pictures with a digital camera, I was given a tour of the factory by Ulrike Just—another agreeable employee, with the title of quality manager—and learned what all the activity and complexity was about: inert little tiles, about six inches square, called wafers, were being converted into vital solar panels. The wafers were sent from place to place on the floor to undergo endless chemical alterations, washings, and inspections—all done by machinery. The occasional person we came across on the factory floor was tending to a machine, like a nurse. Watching the machines work was amazing: it seemed as if the merest of functions required the most violent exercise of machinery. A certain inspectio
n of the wafers, for example, was done by a machine that fairly jumped up and down with excitement. The single human intervention—a final inspection by specially trained eyes and hands—would one day cease; inevitably, machines that could do this work would be invented.

  Struth was laboring as mightily as the machines to take his pictures. He had covered his head and shoulders with a gray photographer’s cloth, and every shot seemed to cost him great effort. He would emerge from under the cloth looking beaten down and depleted. His assistant did things to assist, but Struth continued to look as if he were undergoing a shattering ordeal. He moved to another place on the factory floor, and the exertions continued. At around two, he reluctantly stopped, and he and Hirsch and I and Susanne Herrmann drove to a restaurant where the founder of Solar-World, Frank Asbeck, was giving us lunch. A long table in a shady courtyard had been set with nine places. The party was filled out by four executives from the factory, dressed in dark suits, who filed in together and talked only to one another. Lunch was delicious, featuring the white asparagus then in season and being served everywhere in Germany. Asbeck, who was fat and exuberant, more Bacchic than Apollonian, told an amusing story about his previous work, something about being fired before he was hired to run a trout farm because he had written an article about the antibiotics that were being secretly given to the trout. The conversation turned to green subjects, and I quoted Michael Pollan’s mantra: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Asbeck laughed and said, “I guess I don’t do the not too much part.” As he spoke, he patted himself fondly, like one of the large, rich men of the past who took pleasure in their fatness.