The Antidote to Pretentious Art? Just Look, Don’t Think | David Salle

The Antidote to Pretentious Art? Just Look, Don’t Think

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After a trip to the art gallery, people normally find themselves exhausted. Extracting the meaning from 100+ artworks over several hours is a tough task for your mind; you’re neural resources are depleted, and the nearest place to recover is the museum café that sells cups of tea and sponge cake that cost almost as much the admission.

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DAVID SALLE :

Born in 1952 in Norman, Oklahoma, David Salle grew up in Wichita, Kansas. In 1970, he began his studies at the newly founded California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, where he worked with John Baldessari. Creating abstract paintings, installations, and video and conceptual pieces, Salle earned a BFA in 1973 and an MFA in 1975, both from CalArts.

After school, Salle moved to New York, where he supported himself by working for artists, including Vito Acconci; teaching art classes; and cooking in restaurants. He also did paste-up in the art department of a soft-core pornography magazine. When the publisher folded, Salle saved a group of stock photographs depicting nudes, sporting events, airplane crashes, and such, which he later used as source material for his paintings.

Salle has mentioned the influence of filmmakers Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Preston Sturges on his thinking beginning in the mid-1970s. Cinematic devices—from close-ups and zooms to panning, montage, and splicing—have indeed been recognized in his work.

Salle’s work for the stage began in 1981, when he was asked to design the set and costumes for Birth of the Poet, a play by Kathy Acker under the direction of Richard Foreman. He has designed sets and costumes for numerous works by Karole Armitage—an avant-garde choreographer and dancer with whom he lived for seven years—beginning with their 1985 collaboration on The Mollino Room, performed by Mikhail Baryshnikov and the American Ballet Theatre. He also directed the commercial film Search and Destroy(1995), which was produced by Martin Scorsese and features Ethan Hawke, Dennis Hopper, and Christopher Walken.

Solo shows of Salle’s art have been organized by the Museum am Ostwall Dortmund (1986–87), Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (1986–88), Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1999), and Waddington Galleries in London (2003), among others. He has participated in major international expositions including Documenta 7 (1982), Venice Biennale (1982 and 1993), Whitney Biennial (1983, 1985, and 1991), Paris Biennale (1985), and Carnegie International (1985). The artist lives and works in New York City and Sagaponack, New York.

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TRANSCRIPT:

David Salle: Not all art necessarily makes an appeal to the visual senses, but let's say that most of it does. So it might seem unnecessary or unnecessarily elementary to say so, but sometimes it's worth reminding ourselves that art is something meant to be seen primarily, that the appeal that art makes to our intellect and emotions, our attention, is achieved through visual stimuli and that's a different animal than other things, than writing or music. The eyes are capable of incredibly subtle perceptual distinctions that happen at an unconscious level. So the act of looking consciously is the really partly a matter of paying attention to what it is we notice when we really look at something.

Another way of putting it is to think about drawing, if you've ever taken a drawing class or you've ever even read a book about how drawing is taught, the first most elementary lesson is usually a demonstration of the difference between what you see in front of you and what you think you see. The first attempts at drawing something from life, from perception, invariably involve distorting what's actually in front of you because the brain intercedes with the eye and gives false information.

For example, we know that the head has two eyes a nose and a mouth so we will draw it that way even if in fact we don't see both eyes equally or we don't see - depending upon our point of view we'll see a partial representation of what the brain thinks of as reality. So this is a long way around of saying that the way to approach the visual world is to take in the information and let it work on your cortex without, well it's impossible to say without but while trying to stay neutral in terms of what we think we know because part of the confusion surrounding con...

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