Forty-One False Starts

by Janet Malcolm

  But now the achievement only seemed to fuel Salle’s bitterness, his sense of himself as “someone who is no longer current,” who is “irrelevant after having been relevant.” He looked away from the painting and said, “The younger artists want to kill you off. They want to get rid of you. You’re in their way. I haven’t been the artist who is on young artists’ minds for a long time. It has been six or seven years since I was the artist who was on young artists’ minds. That’s how fast it moves. The artists young artists have on their minds are people I’ve barely heard of. I’m sure there are young artists who think I’m dead.” I laughed, and he joined me. Then, his bitterness returning, Salle said, “I feel like I’ve just gotten started, marshaled my forces, done the research, and learned enough about painting do something interesting. What I do used to matter to others—for reasons that may not have had anything to do with its merit. But now, when I feel I have something to say, no one wants to hear it. There has always been antagonism to my work, but the sense of irritation and annoyance has stepped up. ‘What, you’re still around?’ ”

  20

  In an interview with the screenwriter Becky Johnston, in 1991, the artist David Salle, during a discussion of his childhood, in Wichita, Kansas, gave this answer to a question about his mother:

  You know, I don’t really remember her very well. I just remember that she had a lovely gray skirt and a pink blouse with French cuffs and she had her monogram embroidered on the skirt in pink thread. She worked in the dress store [where Salle’s father worked as a buyer, window dresser, and advertising-layout man]—she was a saleswoman on the floor—and she dressed very chicly. I remember her then—which was when I was about six—and then I remember her ten or fifteen years later, when she worked at night as a cashier in the accounting department of the J.C. Penney store, and she was completely and utterly changed: she wore brown or beige double-knit pants suits. And I honestly don’t remember what happened to her in between. I have no images of her in between. In my mind, she just went from being this very chic, very lovely, kind of slightly elevated person, to being this horrible drudge.

  In an interview with me, in 1992, Salle returned to this memory and told me how upset his mother had been when she read a version of it in an essay by Henry Geldzahler, which appeared in the catalog of Salle’s photographs of naked or partly naked women posed in strange positions. “I had been hesitant to send the catalog to my mother because of the imagery,” Salle told me. “It never occurred to me that something in the text, which is innocuous, would upset her. But when she called me up she was in tears.”

  21

  In the introduction to a book-length interview with the artist David Salle, published in 1987 by Random House, the critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl writes, “My first reaction to meeting this twenty-seven-year-old phenom was, I’m afraid, a trifle smug. Simply, he was so transparently, wildly ambitious—even by the standards of his generation, whose common style of impatient self-assurance I had begun to recognize—that I almost laughed at him.”

  22

  When I was interviewing the artist David Salle, an acutely intelligent, reserved, and depressed man, he would tell me about other interviews he was giving, and once, he showed me a transcript of a conversation with Barbaralee Diamonstein (it was to appear in a book of interviews with artists and art-world figures published by Rizzoli) that was marked by a special confrontational quality and an extraordinary air of liveliness. It was as if the interview had provoked the artist out of his usual state of skeptical melancholy and propelled him into a younger, less complex, more manic version of himself.

  There is a passage, for example, in which Diamonstein confronts Salle with a piece of charged personal history. “From what I have read, you worked as a layout man at what was referred to as a porn magazine. Is that true?” Salle says yes. “How much did it affect your sensibility? I think you should address the issue and get rid of it one way or another,” Diamonstein sternly says. Salle, disconcerted, lamely points out that actually he wasn’t a layout man but a pasteup person at the porn magazine. Still floundering, he irrelevantly adds that he and the other young men in the art department were “pretty stoned most of the time.” Diamonstein continues to push Salle on the question of what the experience of working at a men’s magazine called Stag meant to him. “So, did this affect your sensibility by either informing you, giving you a skill? Repelling you, amusing you? Finding it absurd, interesting—how did you react? How did you ever get there in the first place?”

  Salle begins to see a way out of the impasse. “A friend of mine worked there,” he says. “It was just a job on one level, but ‘absurd/ interesting’ describes it pretty well. Nobody there took it very seriously. It wasn’t shameful—people who worked there didn’t tell their families they did something else. At least, I don’t think so. I just remembered there was one guy who worked there because his father worked there—they were both sitting there all day airbrushing tits and ass. Like father, like son, I guess.”

  Diamonstein meets this with an inspiration of her own. “You could have had a job at Good Housekeeping, too,” she points out.

  “Well, I only worked there for about six months,” a momentarily crushed Salle retorts. Then he finds his tone again: “There has been so much made of it. Even though I had no money, I quit as soon as I could. You know, this assumption of causality assigned to the artist’s life like plot points in a play is really nutty. Do people think I learned about tits and ass working on Stag magazine? Do I seem that pathetic?”

  23

  In an essay published in The Village Voice in 1982, the critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote of his initial reaction to the work of David Salle, who was to become “my personal favorite among current younger artists”:

  When I first encountered Salle’s work, two or three years ago, its vertiginous mix of blatancy (“storytelling” pictures) and elusiveness (the “story” was impossible to figure out) made me a little sick. I was also rattled by the frequent use of pornographically posed female nudes. It now seems to me hardly conceivable that in his determined excavation of the culture’s most charged pictorial matter, Salle would not have availed himself of these ritualized vehicles of male fantasy. But it made me so nervous that I rather comically felt a surge of relief when in last year’s show Salle presented a male nude. What may have been even more shocking was Salle’s cavalierly offhand exploitation of classically modernist pictorial devices, those sacred signs. He was using them like cheap tools, without even the upside-down respect accorded by satirical irony (as in Lichtenstein). I itched to dislike this stuff.

  Then it started to get me. It was like a welling, congested, sentimental weepiness without an object, as emotions triggered by images of, say, a depressed-looking girl smoking in bed and some unspecific tragedy in a crowded street sought cathartic resolution in vain. It was an abstracted sensation of dislocation, yearning, and loss that started resonating with my sense of what both art and life are like here in the late twentieth century. Suddenly Salle’s harsh artifice seemed heroic, an earnest of authenticity—without ceasing to seem perverse, against the grain.

  24

  One day, the artist David Salle and I talked about Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser.

  “I’m a third of the way through it,” I said, “and at first I was excited by it, but now I’m a little bored. I may not finish it.”

  “It’s so beautiful and pessimistic,” Salle said.

  “Yes, but it doesn’t hold your interest the way a nineteenth-century novel does. I’m never bored when I’m reading George Eliot or Tolstoy.”

  “I am,” Salle said.

  I looked at him with surprise. “And you’re not bored when you’re reading Bernhard?”

  “I’m bored by plot,” Salle said. “I’m bored when it’s all written out, when there isn’t any shorthand.”

  25

  In the fall of 1991, I attended a book party for the writer Harold Brodkey given by the painter David Salle in hi
s loft, in Tribeca. The first thing I saw on walking into the room was Brodkey and Norman Mailer in conversation. As I approached, I heard them jovially talking about the horrible reviews each had just received, like bad boys comparing their poor marks. The party took place early in my acquaintance with Salle, and this fragment of conversation was a sort of overture to talks I had with him about his own sense of himself as a bad boy of art and about his inability to stop picking at the sore of his own bad reviews. He is an artist who believes in the autonomy of art, who sees the universe of art as an alternative to the universe of life, and who despises art that has a social agenda. But he is also someone who is drawn to the world of popular criticism, to the bazaar where paintings and books and performances are crudely and carelessly rated, like horses or slaves, and who wants to be one of the Chosen even as he disdains the choosers; in other words, he is like everybody else. Only the most pathologically pure-hearted writers, artists, and performers are indifferent to how their work is received and judged. But some hang more attentively than others on the words of the judges. During my talks with Salle, he kept returning to the subject of his reception, like an unhappy moth helplessly singeing itself on a lightbulb. “I don’t know why I keep talking about this,” he would say. “This isn’t what is on my mind. I don’t care that much. I spend a disproportionate amount of time complaining to you about how I am perceived. Every time we finish one of these talks, I have a pang of regret. I feel that all I do is complain about how badly I’m treated, and this is so much not what I want to be talking about. But for some reason I keep talking about it.”

  26

  David Salle is one of the best-received and best-rewarded artists who came to prominence in the 1980s, but he is not one of the happiest. He is a tense, discontented man, with a highly developed sense of irony.

  27

  In several of David Salle’s paintings, a mysterious dark-haired woman appears, raising a half-filled glass to her lips. Her eyes are closed, and she holds the glass in both hands with such gravity and absorption that one can only think she is taking poison or drinking a love potion. She is rendered in stark black and white and wears a period costume—a dress with a sort of Renaissance aspect. The woman disturbs and excites us, the way people in dreams do whom we know we know but can never quite identify. David Salle himself has some of the enigmatic vividness of the drinking woman. After many interviews with him, I feel that I only almost know him, and that what I write about him will have the vague, vaporous quality that our most indelible dreams take on when we put them into words.

  28

  One of the leitmotifs of a series of conversations I had in 1992 and 1993 with the painter David Salle was his unhappiness over the current reception of his work. “I don’t think anyone has written a whole essay saying my work is passé,” he said. “It’s more a line here and there. It’s part of the general phenomenon called eighties bashing. The critics who have been negative all along, like Robert Hughes and Hilton Kramer, have simply stepped up their negativity. The virulence of the negativity has grown enormously in the past couple of years. The reviews by Hughes and Kramer of my ’91 show were weirdly, personally insulting. The two of them were always negative, but now it was as if they smelled blood and were moving in for the kill.”

  I told Salle I would like to read those reviews, and a few days later his assistant sent them to me. Salle had not exaggerated. Hughes and Kramer seemed beside themselves with dislike and derision; their reviews had an almost hysterical edge. “The exhibition of new paintings by David Salle at the Gagosian Gallery . . . has one tiny merit,” Hughes wrote in Time on April 29, 1991. “It reminds you how lousy and overpromoted so much ‘hot’ ‘innovative’ American art in the 1980’s was. If Julian Schnabel is Exhibit A in our national wax museum of recent duds, David Salle is certainly Exhibit B.” He went on:

  Yet is there a duller or more formula-ridden artist in America than Salle in 1991 as he approaches the Big Four-Oh? . . . Drawing, as anyone who has seen a few Salles knows, is not what the artist does. He never learned how to do it, and probably never will. He is incapable of making an interesting mark . . . Thus his pictures enable critics to kvetch soulfully about the dissociation of signs and meanings, and to praise what all good little deconstructors would call their “refusal of authoritarian closure,” meaning, roughly, that they don’t mean anything in particular. It’s as though those who bet on him can’t bear to face the possibility that his work was vacuous to begin with . . . The Gagosian Gallery . . . has even hired a guard to stand at the entrance to the room in which Salle’s six new paintings are displayed, presumably in case some collector from the bottom of the waiting list is seized by the impulse to grab one of those tallowy objects from the wall and make a run for it. Ten minutes into the show, your heart goes out to that guard. Eight hours a day, five days a week, of this!

  Kramer had wrung his hands in The New York Observer of April 15:

  About some art exhibitions nowadays, we hardly know whether to laugh or cry. Their pretensions, not to mention the atmosphere of piety surrounding them, are undeniably laughable. Yet their artistic realization is at once so barren and so smug—and offers so few of the satisfactions we look to art to bring us—that the sense of comedy they elicit turns, almost before we know it, to feelings of grief and depression . . .

  Consider the David Salle exhibition that is currently occupying the lush precincts of the Gagosian Gallery . . .

  In the 80’s, a taste for the raunchy and outrageous functioned in the fashionable art world very much the way junk bonds functioned in the financial markets, and it was no accident that the artists who produced art of this sort often found their most enthusiastic patrons among the collectors who were the principal beneficiaries of such junk-bond enterprises. These collectors often knew very little about the art that had been created in the past—in the days, that is, before they made their first fortunes. For such collectors, art history began the day they first walked into Leo Castelli’s or Mary Boone’s. In that world, the Old Masters were Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, and artists like David Salle who had been nominated to succeed were guaranteed a sensational success.

  The hostility and snobbery of both Hughes and Kramer toward the collectors of Salle’s work is worthy of note. This kind of insult of the consumer has no equivalent in book or theater or movie reviewing. That is probably because the book/play/film reviewer has some fellow feeling with the buyers of books and theater and film tickets, whereas the art reviewer usually has no idea what it is like to buy a costly painting or sculpture. He is, per financial force, a mere spectator in the tulipomaniacal drama of the contemporary art market, and he tends to regard the small group of people rich enough to be players as if they were an alien species, quite impervious to his abuse. As for the collectors, they repay the critics for their insults by ignoring their judgments: they go right on buying—or, at any rate, they don’t immediately stop buying—the work of artists who get bad reviews. Eventually the critical consensus (the judgments of museum curators form a part of it) is reflected in the market, and in time collectors bow to its will, but at the moment they were not bowing to Hughes’s and Kramer’s opinions and were continuing to trade in Salles. Salle smarted under the attacks but continued to make money.

  29

  I once asked the artist David Salle if he had read an article in The New Republic by Jed Perl (who also frequently writes for Hilton Kramer’s The New Criterion) about how the wrong artists are celebrated and how the really good artists are obscure. The article was entitled “The Art Nobody Knows,” with the subhead “Where Is the Best American Art to Be Found? Not in the So-called Art World.” It articulated the antagonism of an older generation toward the art stars of the eighties, and complained of the neglect suffered by a group of serious artists, who had been quietly working and, over the years, “making the incremental developments that are what art is all about.” The world of these artists, Perl said, was “the real art world,” as opposed to the wo
rld of Salle and Schnabel and Cindy Sherman. Perl held up two artists—the sculptor Barbara Goodstein and the painter Stanley Lewis, whose work “is rarely seen by anybody beyond a small circle of admirers”—as examples of the neglected “real artist.” “What happens to an artist whose development receives so little public recognition?” he asked. “Can artists keep on doing their damnedest when the wide world doesn’t give a damn?”

  Salle said that he had not read the article and that it sounded interesting. “I have always wanted to know what Jed Perl likes,” he said. “Maybe he’s right. Maybe these are the good artists.” He asked me to send him the article, and I did so. The next time we met, he greeted me with it in his hand and an amused look on his face. “What a pity they illustrated it,” he said. “Without the illustrations, you might think Perl was onto something. But when you see the work you just have to laugh. It’s so small.”

  30

  I used to visit the artist David Salle in his studio and try to learn the secret of art from him. What was he doing in his enigmatic, allusive, aggressive art? What does any artist do when he produces an artwork? What are the properties and qualities of authentic art, as opposed to ersatz art? Salle is a contemplative and well-spoken man, and he talked easily and fluently about his work and about art in general, but everything he said only seemed to restate my question. One day, he made a comment on the difference between collages done by amateurs and collages done by artists, which caused my ears to prick up. It occurred to me that a negative example—an example of something that wasn’t art—could perhaps be instructive. Accordingly, on my next visit with Salle I took with me three collages I had once made for my own pleasure. At the time, Salle was himself making collages, in preparation for a series of paintings featuring images of consumer products of the fifties. He was going to copy his collages in oil paint on large canvases, but they already looked like works of art. “Why are your collages art and mine not?” I asked him.