Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: How to See
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 9/28/1952
WEBSITE: http://www.davidsallestudio.net/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/david_salle.htm * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Salle
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.:
n 85803052
LCCN Permalink:
https://lccn.loc.gov/n85803052
HEADING:
Salle, David, 1952-
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PERSONAL
Born September 28, 1952 in Norman, Oklahoma.
EDUCATION:California Institute of the Arts, B.F.A., M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Painter, printmaker, costume designer, set designer, writer; director of the movie Search and Destroy, 1995.
AWARDS:Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for theater design, 1986.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, Town & Country, and the Paris Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Born on September 28, 1952 in Norman, Oklahoma, David Salle is a painter, printmaker, stage designer, and prolific writer on art. His art style is postmodern, and he is known for creating paintings and prints with juxtaposed images and images placed on top of one another. Salle appeared on the New York art scene in the early 1980s, and his work has been shown in galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and Amsterdam, as well as in Italy and Spain. As a writer about art, he has published articles in Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, and the Paris Review. He has also been a regular contributor to Town & Country. Active in set design, Salle received a Guggenheim Fellowship for theater design in 1986. Salle also directed the feature film, Search and Destroy, in 1995, which starred Griffin Dunne and Christopher Walken.
In 2016, Salle published How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art, a collection of previously published essays from magazines and other sources in which he explains how art works, how it creates emotional feelings, how it challenges viewers to think, and how we can truly view art to understand its meaning. In thirty-three short essays, he consults with friends and contemporaries like Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, Roy Lichtenstein, and Alex Katz to assess contemporary art. The essays train an eye on some of the most influential artists of the twentieth century and discuss specific paintings and what makes art interesting or compelling. The book also includes a section devoted to classroom exercises and lectures.
Kenneth Koch explained Salle’s love of art in a review of How to See for the New York Times: “His quarry is aesthetic bliss. He stalks it through museums and galleries on both coasts as if he were David Attenborough tracking a curious swan.” A writer in Kirkus Reviews said of the book: “There’s no jargon here, just accessible, witty, smartly informative short takes about works Salle enjoys.… Salle is the perfect art tour guide: literate, thoroughly entertaining, and insightful.” In Publishers Weekly, a reviewer commented: “Salle’s personal familiarity with the artists he discusses lends a special sort of credibility to his critical assessments.”
Reflecting on the book’s title, Glen Roven mused in the LA Review of Books: “Did Salle show (or teach?) me how to see? Or was it merely his interpretation of the work that was a value unto itself?… It was his lessons on seeing that transformed this book into a literary work of art.” National Book Review contributor Simone Grace Seol praised the book, stating: “Salle’s voice is brisk yet intimate, as though he is sitting across from you and on his second espresso. He walks us through a thorough and personable history of contemporary art, warm with humor and anecdotes of artists he’s known firsthand.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
ProtoView, December 2016, review of How to See.
Publishers Weekly, August 1, 2016, review of How to See, p. 56.
ONLINE
David Salle Home Page, http://www.davidsallestudio.net/, (May 1, 2017), author profile.
Kirkus Reviews, https://www.kirkusreviews.com (May 24, 2016), review of How to See.
LA Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org (January 12, 2017), Glen Roven, review of How to See.
National Book Review, http://www.thenationalbookreview.com/ (2016), Simone Grace Seol, review of How to See.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com (October 18, 2016), Kenneth Koch, review of How to See.
Paris Review Online, https://www.theparisreview.org/ (September 19, 2016), Lorin Stein, “The Quotable David Salle.”
PBS News Hour Online, http://www.pbs.org/newshour (December 13, 2016), Jeffrey Brown, “One Painter on Why Understanding Art Is as Simple as Looking,” interview with David Salle.
Saatchi Gallery Web site, http://www.saatchigallery.com (May 20, 2017), profile of David Salle.
DAVID SALLE'S BIOGRAPHY
Born in 1952, Norman, Oklahoma,
Lives and works in New York, New York
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2013
David Salle / Francis Picabia, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris.
2012
Tapestries/ Battles/ Allegories, Lever House Art Collection, New York.
Ariel and Other Spirits, Galerie MET, New York.
2011
David Salle Recent Paintings, Gallery, London.
David Salle Recent Paintings, Mary Boone Gallery, New York.
David Salle, Maureen Paley, London.
2009
Héritage du Pop Art, Beaux Arts, Hanover.
2008
David Salle, Paintings and Drawings, Studio d'Arte Raffaelli - Palazzo Wolkenstein, Trento.
David Salle, Galleri Faurschou, Copenhagen.
2007
David Salle, Galleria Cardi, Milan.
David Salle : 1,2,3,4, Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO.
Bearding The Lion In His Den, Deitch Projects, 76 Grand Street, New York, NY.
David Salle, New Works, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg.
2005
Mary Boone Gallery, NYC, NY.
2004
David Salle: Split Worlds. The Montage Principle, Stella Art Gallery, Moscow, Russia.
2003
Mary Boone Gallery, NYC, NY.
Waddington Galleries, London, England.
Emilio Mazzoli Galleria d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy.
2001
Gagosian Gallery, NYC, NY.
Jablonka Galerie, Koln, Germany.
2000
Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico.
1999
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain.
1997
Galeria Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid, Spain.
1995
Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich, Switzerland.
1994
Mary Boone Gallery, NYC, NY.
1993
Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California.
1992
Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, France.
1990
Mario Diacono Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts.
1989
Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen Munchen, Munich, West Germany.
The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Waddington Gallery, London, England.
1988
Mary Boone Gallery, NYC, NY.
The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas.
Fundacion Caja de Pensiones, Madrid, Spain.
1987
Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, NY.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California.
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois.
Mary Boone Gallery, NYC, NY.
Spiral/Wacoal Art Center, Tokyo, Japan.
1986
Leo Castelli Gallery, NYC, NY.
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts.
1985
Mary Boone Gallery, NYC, NY.
1984
Leo Castelli Gallery, NYC, NY.
1983
Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Mary Boone Gallery, NYC, NY.
1982
Mary Boone Gallery, NYC, NY.
Leo Castelli Gallery, NYC, NY.
1981
Mary Boone Gallery, NYC, NY.
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2012
Spring Fever, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York.
David Salle and Karole Armitage in Conversation with Helen Molesworth, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago.
2011
Songs for Sale: Michael Bevilacqua, Robert Rauschenberg & David Salle, Faurschou, Beiging.
2008
UBS Openings: Paintings from the 1980s - Tate Modern, London.
Pasións Privadas, Visións Públicas - MARCO Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo, Vigo.
HERE and NOW. PART II - Regina Gallery, Moscow.
2007
Selection 2007 - Proje4L/Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul.
100 Jahre Kunsthalle Mannheim - Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim.
Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary Art - The American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY.
Not For Sale - P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island.
Lights, Camera, Action: Artists´ Films for the Cinema - Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
2006
NEW ACQUISITIONS - Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zürich.
Songs for Sale - Deitch Projects - 76 Grand Street, New York, NY.
Eretica - - Civica Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Palermo, Palermo (closed).
Aspects of Humanity - CCAS - Center for Contemporary Art Sacramento, Sacramento, CA.
Somnambulist/Fabulist - The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, NY.
Black & Blue - Robert Miller Gallery, New York, NY.
Chairs - Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zürich.
Full House - Gesichter einer Sammlung - Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim.
2005
Flashback - Revisiting the Art of the Eighties - Museum für Gegenwartskunst - Emanuel Hoffmann-Stiftung, Basel.
STRANIERI - Galleria Francocancelliere, Messina.
Closing Down - Bortolami, New York, NY.
BIG BANG - Centre Pompidou - Musée National d´Art Moderne, Paris.
Collettiva - Galleria Alessandro Bagnai, Florence.
Colecoes VI - 17 Foros - 18 Artistas - Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo.
Skin - Galleria Daniele Ugolini, Florence.
Contemporary Voices: Works from The UBS Art Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC, NY.
2004
Flowers, Mary Boone Gallery, NYC, NY.
Flowers Observed, Flowers Transformed, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
North Fork/South Fork: East End Art Now/Part II, Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York.
The Charged Image, Joseloff Gallery, University of Hartford, West Hartford, Connecticut.
What's Modern?, Gagosian Gallery, NYC, NY.
2001
Mythic Proportions: Painting in the 1980s, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Florida.
2000
Around 1984: A Look at Art in the Eighties, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York.
1999
The American Century: Art & Culture, 1900-2000 Part 2, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, NY.
1998
Young Americans 2, Saatchi Gallery, London, England.
1996
Thinking Print: From Books to Billboards, 1980-1995, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC, NY.
The Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C..
1993
Four American Artists, Ho-Am Museum, Kyunggi-Do, South Korea.
Operto, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy.
1991
Mito y Magia en America: Los Ochenta, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico.
Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, NY.
1989
Bilderstreit, Rheinhalle, Koln, West Germany.
1987
Avant Garde in the Eighties, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California.
L'epoque, la mode, la morale, la passion, Centre Georges, Pompidou, Paris, France.
1986
Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
Ooghoogte, 50 jaar later, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
Europe/America, Ludwig Museum, Koln, West Germany.
Prospect 86, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, West Germany.
1985
Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, NY.
XIII Biennale de Paris, Grand Halle du Parc de la Villette, Paris, France.
Carnegie International, Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
1984
An International Survey of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC, NY.
The Human Condition: SFMMA Biennial III, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California.
1983
Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, NY.
New York Now, Kunstverein fur die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Dusseldorf, West Germany.
Tendencias en Nueva York, Crystal Palace, Madrid, Spain.
Sao Paulo Biennale, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
New Art, The Tate Gallery, London, England.
1982
Documenta 7, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, West Germany.
La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy.
Zeitgeist, Berlin, West Germany.
1981
Westkunst: Heute, Museum der Stadt Koln, Koln, West Germany.
David Salle (born 1952) is an American painter, printmaker, and stage designer who helped define postmodern sensibility. Salle was born in Norman, Oklahoma. He earned a BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California where he studied with John Baldessari.[1] Salle’s work first came to public attention in New York in the early 1980s.
Contents [hide]
1 Work
2 Other work
3 Personal life
4 Collections
5 See also
6 References
7 External links
Work[edit]
His paintings and prints comprise what appear to be randomly juxtaposed images, or images placed on top of one other with deliberately ham-fisted techniques. At a 2005 lecture, Salle stated:
When I came to New York in the 70s, it was common not to expect to be able to live from your art. I had very little idea about galleries or the business side of the art world. It all seemed pretty distant. When people started paying attention to my work, it seemed so unlikely that somehow it wasn't so remarkable. I made my work for a small audience of friends, other artists mostly, and that has not really changed. At the same time, having shows is a way of seeing if the work resonates with anyone else. Having that response, something coming back to you from the way the work is received in the world, can be important for your development as an artist. But you have to take it with healthy skepticism... I still spend most days in my studio, alone, and whatever happens flows from that.[2]
Major exhibitions of his work have taken place at the Whitney Museum of American Art[3] in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Castello di Rivoli (Torino, Italy), and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. In March 2009 a group of fifteen paintings were shown at the Kestnergesellschaft Museum in Hannover, Germany. That same year Salle's work was also featured in an exhibition titled The Pictures Generation curated by Douglas Eklund at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York [1], in which his work was shown amongst a number of his contemporaries including Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Nancy Dwyer [2], Robert Longo, Thomas Lawson, Charles Clough and Michael Zwack.
Other work[edit]
David Salle also turned his hand to set and costume design, and to directing mainstream cinema. In 1986, Salle received a Guggenheim Fellowship for theater design, and in 1995 he directed the feature film, Search and Destroy, starring Griffin Dunne and Christopher Walken [3]. He is a longtime collaborator with the choreographer Karole Armitage as he designs sets and costumes for many of her ballets.[4]
He is also a prolific writer on art. His essays and reviews have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, The Paris Review, Interview, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs and anthologies. He was a regular contributor for Town & Country Magazine. His collection of critical essays, How to See, was published by W.W. Norton in 2016.
Personal life[edit]
He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Collections[edit]
Salle's work can be found in the permanent collections of numerous art museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, among others.
See also[edit]
List of artists from Brooklyn
References[edit]
Jump up ^ Smith, Roberta, "Tweaking Tradition, Even in Its Temple", review of John Baldessari show, The New York Times, October 21, 2010 (October 22, 2010 p. C21 NY ed.). Retrieved 2010-10-22.
Jump up ^ Voices of Experience: David Salle, ART + AUCTION, September 2005, retrieved 2008-04-17
Jump up ^ Smith, Roberta, "How David Salle Mixes High Art and Trash", review of David Salle mid-career retrospective, The New York Times, January 23, 1987. Retrieved 2011-1-16.
Jump up ^ http://www.armitagegonedance.org/support/art-for-sale/david-salle
External links[edit]
David Salle Studio Website
David Salle on Facebook
David Salle in the National Gallery of Australia's Kenneth Tyler Collection
David Salle at Skarstedt Gallery
David Salle at the Guggenheim Museum
David Salle in the "Pictures Generation," the Metropolitan Museum of Art
David Salle at Mary Boone Gallery
David Salle at Lehmann Maupin Gallery
David Salle at The Saatchi Gallery
David Salle at Baldwin Gallery
David Salle at Gerhardsen Gerner, Berlin/Oslo
David Salle collaborates with Armitage Gone! Dance
Emily Nathan interviews David Salle on Artnet
Jerry Saltz on Artnet
Salle directed Search and Destroy
David Salle Writings
David Salle interviews John Baldessari for Interview Magazine
David Salle and John Baldessari Paris Review
Additional information on David Salle including artworks, text panels, articles and full biography
Selected Critical Texts
Powers, Bill in conversation with Salle, David. David Salle: Late Product Paintings, The Silver Paintings, Skarstedt New York. 2015.
Millet, Catherine. David Salle / Francis Picabia. Paris; Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 2013
Katz, Vincent. David Salle. Seoul, Korea; Leeahn Gallery, 2013
Mileaf, Janine (& conversation with Hal Foster) David Salle: Ghost Paintings. Chicago; The Arts Club of Chicago, 2013
Nesbit, Molly. "Limbo." David Salle. Monterrey, Mexico: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo. 2000. 47-62.
Hopps, Walter. "Introduction." David Salle. Monterrey, Mexico: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo. 2000.
Liebmann, Lisa. "David Salle." Ed. David Whitney. New York: Rizzoli, 1994.
Cortez, Diego. "A Clean Shirt: A Grammar of Advertising in David Salle's Early Product Paintings." David Salle: Early Product Paintings. New York: Gagosian Gallery, 1994. 5-12.
Diacono, Mario. "David Salle." Boston: Mario Diacono Gallery, 1990. 5-19
Schulz-Hoffman, Carla. "David Salle: The Triumph of Artificiality, the Shock of the Commonplace." David Salle. Munich: Staatagalerie Moderner Kunst. 1989. 40-45
Power, Kevin. "David Salle Seeing It My Way." David Salle. Munich: Staatagalerie Moderner Kunst. 1989. 18-37.
Tuten, Frederic. "David Salle On Native Grounds." David Salle. New York: Mary Boone Michael Werner Gallery. 1988
Kardon, Janet. "The Old The New And The Different." David Salle. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. 1986. 8-20.
Phillips, Lisa. "His Equivocal Touch in the Vicinity of History." David Salle. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. 1986. 22-31.
Ratcliff, Carter. "David Salle and the New York School." Rotterdam: Museum Boymans-van Beuningen. 1983. 25-38.
Beeren, W.A.L. "David Salle: My View." Rotterdam: Museum Boymans-van Beuningen. 1983. 17-22.
Selected Press
Schjeldahl, Peter, The Joy of Eighties Art, The New Yorker, 6 February, 2017.
Cline, Emma, David Salle, Interview Magazine, November 2016.
Heirston, Kim, Making Painting, AS IF Magazine, 2016, Issue No. 9. pp. 96-121.
Swanson, Carl, 253 Minutes with David Salle: The Tribeca Painter turned Hamptons Writer, New York Magazine, 5-18 September, 2016: 14-15.
Short, Stephen, David Salle Creates Art to Amuse and Bemuse, #legend Magazine, 1 September, 2016.
Bradley, Joe, Art: David Salle, Interview Magazine, May 2015.
Mills, Katelynn, "This is how it’s done”: David Salle Curates Recent Painting, Artcritical, April 8 2016.
Anspon, Catherine, David Salle Comes to the Dallas Contemporary: Interview with a Painter, Paper City Magazine, March 13 2015.
Smith, Roberta. David Salle Paintings Deliver…, The New York Times, June 18, 2015.
Braithwaite, Hunter, David Salle in Conversation…, The Brooklyn Rail, May 2015.
Bradley, Joe, David Salle, Interview, May 2015.
Sieff, Gemma. "Studio 360." Town and Country. December 2013 pp 206-211
Small, Rachel. "David Salle in Ghost Colors" Interview, November 2013
Ratcliff, Carter, "Mood Shifter" Art in America, May 2013 pp. 77-80
Ellis, Patricia. "David Salle." Spike Art Quarterly. Issue 28, 2011: 125-126.
Smith, Roberta. "David Salle Some Pictures from the 80's." The New York Times Friday June, 4, 2010.
Schjeldahl, Peter. "Alien Emotions, Pictures art revisited." The New Yorker May 4, 2009: 74-75.
Rosenblum, Robert. "80's Then David Salle Talks to Robert Rosenblum." Artforum March 2003: 74-75, 264- 265.
Solomon, Deborah. "An Art Star's Comeback? Those Aren't His Words." The New York Times January 5, 2003.
Tuten, Frederic. "David Salle: At the Edges." Art In America September 1997: 78-83.
Maslin, Janet. "A Man With Troubles and a Low Integrity Quotient." The New York Times Friday April 28, 1995: C16.
Tuten, Frederic. "Interview." Interview Magazine March 1995: 106-109.
Drolet, Owen. "Spotlight: David Salle." Flash Art, 1994: 103.
Schjeldahl, Peter. "Here and Gone." Village Voice 1994: 37.
Malcom, Janet. "Forty-One False Starts." The New Yorker July 11, 1994: 50-68.
Adams, Brooks. "Lee Friedlander and David Salle: Truth or Dare?" Art in America Jan. 1992: 67-69.
The Quotable David Salle
By Lorin Stein September 19, 2016 ARTS & CULTURE
Dana Schutz, Frank as a Proboscis Monkey, cropped, 2002, 36" x 32".
DANA SCHUTZ, FRANK AS A PROBOSCIS MONKEY (DETAIL), 2002, 36″ X 32″.
Recently, thanks to heavy wait times at the twenty-four-hour Genius Bar on Fifth Avenue, I found myself killing an evening at the Plaza with nothing to read but the galleys of a book of art criticism, How to See, by the painter David Salle. It turned out to be perfect company—witty, chatty, intimate, sharp. And slightly exotic (at least for this reader): you rarely see novelists write so knowingly, on a serious first-name basis, about each other’s work. Soon I was dog-earing and drawing lines in the margins next to favorite passages, as for example:
On recent paintings by Alex Katz:
Some of the color has the elegance and unexpectedness of Italian fashion design: teal blue with brown, black with blue and cream. You want to look at, wear, and eat them all at the same time.
On Dana Schutz:
She’s especially adept at handling a range of greens that aren’t found in nature but are often used to describe it, and she has a no-nonsense, unfussy way of building images that used to be called plasticity. The scale of her brushstrokes is almost always right—the marks suit what they describe, and gesture is most often harnessed to the painting’s internal architecture, not just surface decoration.
On Roy Lichtenstein:
It may look as though a painting, especially one as tidy as Roy’s, is the result of a set of decisions, but those decisions are in fact made at the end of a brush.
On Jeffrey Koons:
If abstract painting expresses the idea “You are what you do,” and pop art expresses the idea “You are what you like,” then Koons’s art says, “You are what other people like.”
On John Baldessari:
At least three generations of artists have had themselves photographed doing dumb stuff in banal settings. This is largely John’s fault. What the aesthetic embedded in John’s work accomplished was to give the everyday-Joe artist a way to embrace and lavish a little love on the everyday-Joe visual culture that is all around us, especially if one is stuck in the provinces and doesn’t really have access to the ethos or the rationale of a more highbrow style.
On Jack Goldstein’s films:
It’s like walking through dried leaves on a chilly fall day—you keep your hands in your pockets, kicking leaves into the gutter, all the while hoping someone will see and feel sorry for you. The self-consciousness of the act doesn’t necessarily diminish its poetry.
On André Derain:
Continuity is the dialogue a painter carries on with himself in the guise of his precursors. It’s what stays left after the novelty burns down.
On Francis Picabia (“c’est moi”):
When Picabia turned his hand to realism—basically a system in which volumetric form is defined by contrasts of light and shadow—he kept his penchant for outlining as a kind of graphic stimulation, and the mash-up of volume plus outline gives the paintings of the ’30s and ’40s a brazen, provocative feeling … The work is so undefended—it was exhilarating.
On Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate:
It’s a giant baby toy, something that would be suspended over a crib, like a silver teething ring (from Tiffany’s!) or baby’s rattle. People have compared it to a UFO, but that doesn’t strike me as right—it’s from before there were UFOs. Baby doesn’t know about UFOs yet—baby just wants to grab shiny bean.
On CalArts in the ’70s:
One guy asked for $3000—a lot of money at the time—so that he could take a television and a generation up to a remote mountaintop, where he planned to watch reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies, and then blast the TV screen with a twelve-gauge shotgun. We gave him $300 with the suggestion that he check into the worst fleabag hotel in downtown Los Angeles, and shoot out the television screen in his room with a BB gun. Sometimes less is more.
On boredom:
Boredom is what happens when the truth about something can’t be told.
David Salle’s paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Art Museum, Tate Modern, the National Galerie Berlin, and many others. He lives in New York City. How to See will be released by W. W. Norton in October.
David Salle is the leading American postmodernist painter, the shaping spirit of a movement which provocatively took the entire history of art as its raw material as well as subject matter. His works are mysteriously original, yet everything they contain has had a life elsewhere: in paintings, in advertising, in comics, in photographs, yet somehow the result is all art. To coincide with his new book – How to See: Looking, Talking and Thinking about Art– Salle will walk us through the museum without walls that is his world. The only things we need to bring are our intuition, curiosity and capacity to feel. He will show us ‘how to see’ with an artist’s eye, and what can be learnt by asking the right questions of a work: ‘What does it love, from what does it suffer, where does its heart lie?’
‘If John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is a classic of art criticism, David Salle’s How to See is the artist’s reply, a brilliant series of reflections on how artists think when they make their work. The ‘how’ of art has never been better explored.’ – Salman Rushdie
david-salle_bookcover_how-to-see
David Salle
David Salle
David Salle helped define the post-modern sensibility by combining figuration with an extremely varied pictorial language. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at museums and galleries worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; MoMA Vienna; Menil Collection, Houston; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Castello di Rivoli; and the Guggenheim, Bilbao. His paintings are in the collections of many major museums, both here and abroad.
Although known primarily as a painter, Salle's work grows out of a long-standing involvement with performance. Over the last 25 years he has worked extensively with choreographer Karole Armitage, creating sets and costumes for many of her ballets and operas. Their collaborations have been staged at venues throughout Europe and America, including The Metropolitan Opera House; The Paris Opera; Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Opera Deutsche, Berlin. In 1995, Salle directed the feature film Search and Destroy, starring Griffin Dunne and Christopher Walken. Salle is also a prolific writer on art. His essays and reviews have appeared in Artforum, Town and Country Magazine, Modern Painters, and The Paris Review, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs and anthologies. His collected How to See: Looking, Talking and Thinking about art was recently published by W.W. Norton
Venue
Conway Hall
25 Red Lion Square
London WC1R 4RL
United Kingdom
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One painter on why understanding art is as simple as looking
December 13, 2016 at 6:20 PM EDT
What do we see when we look at art? Many of us aren't sure what we're supposed to absorb. For artist David Salle, reading a painting should be natural, not intimidating. He believes that museum-goers should enjoy the act of looking and appreciate how art is made. He sits down with Jeffrey Brown to discuss his new book, “How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art.”
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JUDY WOODRUFF: Now: freeing yourself to appreciate art in all its forms and colors. That’s the focus of our latest addition to the “NewsHour” Bookshelf.
And for that, we go to Jeffrey Brown.
JEFFREY BROWN: What do we see when we look at art? Something that gives us pleasure or moves us not at all. Many of us perhaps aren’t sure what it is we’re supposed to be taking in or trying to understand.
The painter David Salle wants us to trust ourselves more in looking, but also to consider how something is made, as well as what it is. His new book is titled “How to See.”
DAVID SALLE, Author, “How to See”: I think it enhances one’s enjoyment, if you can put yourself a little bit into the place of the maker, imagine how it was made, imagine what’s involved in making it.
JEFFREY BROWN: Because it is a thing that was made, right?
DAVID SALLE: Art is something someone made. It’s a product of human endeavor.
As such, it’s not that different from having a conversation with someone. The painter is telling us something. Just, how do they — what’s their syntax? What’s their inflection?
JEFFREY BROWN: Which, in painterly terms, means what brush you use, what…
DAVID SALLE: It can be. Can be how wide the brush is, or how skinny the rectangle is, or if it’s even a painting at all, if it has any marks on it at all.
JEFFREY BROWN: Salle himself has been a prominent artist since the 1980s, known for his large-scale collage-style paintings that incorporate disparate images from a variety of sources.
Some newer ones hung in his Brooklyn studio, where we talked recently. One way to look at a painting is to notice those images, here a car, a watermelon, a cigarette pack, and more. But how you make these connections is what most interests Salle.
DAVID SALLE: What this painting does, and most paintings do, is gives you a path for your eye to move around.
The painting actually tells your eye, go here, now go here, now go here, go here. So all you have to do is look at it, give it a few seconds, and your eye will start to move through the painting.
JEFFREY BROWN: In his book of essays, Salle offers an artist’s view of other artists, Georg Baselitz, Dana Schutz, John Baldessari, and many others, and the decisions they made, the paths they chose, the reasons a painting works or doesn’t, as with a favorite and friend of his, Alex Katz.
DAVID SALLE: Big brush or small brush? I mean, in Alex’s case, a really big brush, a really big brush moved with some velocity, using his whole arm, across a pretty big surface, ending in a very fine point, doing that in a way which seems both premeditated and also free and spontaneous.
That’s what you see. And then your brain translates that into Maine Woods. Oh, I like that place. I want to go back there.
But what enables you to have that sensation is the physical act of painting.
JEFFREY BROWN: You talk about the artist Christopher Wool. So, that’s an abstract painting. I don’t quite know what I’m looking at in that sense, or at least it’s not recognizable.
DAVID SALLE: Right. So, in the example of Christopher Wool, the not quite knowing what you’re looking at is part of the experience.
His paintings are made with such a complicated, impacted and self-referential set of gestures, marks and mechanical representations of gestures and marks and their interaction. It’s very hard to tease them apart.
JEFFREY BROWN: That’s what you mean by “the how” in a case like that, all those kinds of decisions?
DAVID SALLE: Yes. Yes.
“The how” is also the scale, the size, the color. The — all of the physical characteristics of the thing are “the how.”
JEFFREY BROWN: And then one more example would be Malcolm Morley, right, in…
DAVID SALLE: Right.
So, Malcolm paints — typically paints paintings of models, thousands of densely packed brush strokes made with a very small brush, intensely concentrated over small areas of the canvas, one after the other. So, this agitated, densely packed surface is “the how,” which becomes the what.
JEFFREY BROWN: You’re a painter, so you go look at these things and say, oh, how did he do this, how did she do that?
Do I have to know “the how”? Do I have to know how it was done?
DAVID SALLE: I don’t think you have to know anything, really.
But I think if you look for more than 10 seconds, you will start to — without being told anything, you will start to notice those things. You will notice. If you go to a concert, you will notice, is it loud? Is the music fast? Is it predominately strings or brass?
There are things we can all register, whether we are musicians or not. Painting’s no different. Taking pleasure in projecting oneself into the painting is the act of looking. That’s what looking is.
JEFFREY BROWN: You write at one point, it’s a mistake to ask a work of art to be all things to all people.
What can we ask of a work of art? What should we ask of it?
DAVID SALLE: I think a good painting or a good work of art does many things it wants, I mean, maybe 15 or 20 or 100.
One of the things a painting does is to make the room look better. It improves the wall that it’s on.
JEFFREY BROWN: Yes, nothing wrong with that.
DAVID SALLE: Which is much harder than it looks. And that’s a good thing.
And if one engages with a painting on that level, that’s fine, that’s great. After some time, familiarity, the other things that a painting does, the other layers, they just start to make themselves felt.
People are still making paintings. People are still enjoying paintings, looking at paintings. Paintings still have something to tell us.
There’s a way of being in the world that painting brings to us, that painters bring to the task that we absorb and are able to be in dialogue with. That’s something that’s part of us.
JEFFREY BROWN: From Brooklyn, New York, I’m Jeffrey Brown for the “PBS NewsHour.”
JUDY WOODRUFF: It’s wonderful to hear what an artist thinks art is, for a change.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Yes. Yes, because we always wonder, what was the painter thinking?
JUDY WOODRUFF: Exactly.
4/12/17, 3)57 PM
Print Marked Items
How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art
ProtoView.
(Dec. 2016): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 Ringgold, Inc. http://www.protoview.com/protoview
Full Text:
9780393248135
How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art David Salle
W.W. Norton
2016
270 pages
$29.95
Hardcover
N6490
Salle, a painter and writer, provides his previously published essays from magazines and other publications to explore how contemporary art works from the perspective of artists, through those like Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, Roy Lichtenstein, Amy Sillman, Christopher Wool, Sigmar Polke, Robert Gober, Albert Oehlen, Dana Schutz, Wade Guyton, Rosemarie Trockel, Vito Acconci, Karole Armitage, Marsden Hartley, Philip Guston, Clyfford Still, Urs Fischer, Jack Goldstein, Mike Kelley, Frank Stella, Thomas Houseago, Frederic Tuten, Andre Derain, and Alex Katz. He connects what artists do to the experiences of all people and considers what makes a work of art function, what makes it good or interesting, and its meaning. The book includes a section on classroom exercises and lectures, published for the first time. ([umlaut] Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR)
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"How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art." ProtoView, Dec. 2016. PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472425338&it=r&asid=2d9db5b05f4021cf7e6e5eead2ed3ea0. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
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How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art
Publishers Weekly.
263.31 (Aug. 1, 2016): p56. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art
David Salle. Norton, $27.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-393-24813-5
In these wide-ranging essays, painter Salle's stated goal is to write about art "in the language that artists use when they talk among themselves." Rather than a manifesto about art or a practical guide, he presents a collection of 33 short essays on artists and topics as different as John Baldessari's 2014 Movie Script series and the evolving sensibility of Dadaist Francis Picabia's paintings. Many of the artists Salle covers are his friends, and he writes about Alex Katz and Jeff Koons the way a collaborator shares his notes with other artists. He explains the career arc of painter Christopher Wool and the themes of Robert Gober's sculptures with precision and acuity. His writing is full of memorable lines, such as "Most painting is a conversation between continuity and novelty." Salle's personal familiarity with the artists he discusses lends a special sort of credibility to his critical assessments. By closely examining specific paintings and exhibitions that are meaningful to him, Salle shows readers what makes a particular work of art tick and what makes it interesting. Along the way, he reveals the origins of his own artistic inclinations and his beliefs about talent and imagination. Sharp insights and an affable tone make this collection equivalent to a hearty discussion with a mentor--recommended for anyone interested in visual arts. 30 color illus. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art." Publishers Weekly, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 56+. PowerSearch,
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Review: David Salle’s ‘How to See,’ a Painter’s Guide to Looking at and Discussing Art
Books of The Times
By DWIGHT GARNER OCT. 18, 2016
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David Salle Credit Robert Wright for The New York Times
“So many poets have the courage to look into the abyss,” Kenneth Koch wrote in an appreciation of the French poet and diplomat Saint-John Perse, “but Perse had the courage to look into happiness.”
The painter David Salle, in his new book “How to See: Looking, Talking and Thinking About Art,” goes bravely in search of happiness, too. His quarry is aesthetic bliss. He stalks it through museums and galleries on both coasts as if he were David Attenborough tracking a curious swan.
Mr. Salle’s mission in “How to See” is to seize art back from the sort of critics who treat each painting “as a position paper, with the artist cast as a kind of philosopher manqué.” Mr. Salle is more interested in talking about nuts and bolts, about what makes contemporary paintings tick.
“Theory abounds, but concrete visual perception is at a low ebb,” he maintains. “In my view, intentionality is not just overrated; it puts the cart so far out in front that the horse, sensing futility, gives up and lies down in the street.” Nobody ever loved a painting, he says, for its ideas.
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Mr. Salle gets no points for originality of insight. About every art form there are those who’ve memorably argued for shaking off critical yokes. (“Read at whim! Read at whim!” the poet Randall Jarrell used to thunder.) The committed gallerygoer long ago learned to sift through competing opinions and seek delight where he or she could find it.
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Credit Patricia Wall/The New York Times
But “How to See” is lovely to read, mostly, because Mr. Salle can actually write. In the mid-1970s, when he first arrived in Manhattan, he sold art criticism to various publications to pay the rent. He has good feelers and a sensitive, sunny style.
He sends you racing to the internet to look up the work of painters he speaks so engagingly about. You will use Google because the small art reproductions in this book are in black and white; they’re murky and unsatisfying.
About the painter Dana Schutz, for example, he declares, “Schutz is our pre-eminent painter of cluelessness.” He’s speaking about how she catches the “physical awkwardness, social infantilism and self-regard” of certain men.
He slowly builds a case for her work, noting among other things her singular subject matter. “Paintings of people sneezing, yawning, being poked in the eye, shaving their pubic hair, or vomiting — as far as I know, none of these has been the subject of a painting before.”
Mr. Salle also happens to be enormously, and unpredictably, literate. He’s as likely to quote the humor writer Veronica Geng as the choreographer George Balanchine, and as likely to drop a reference to “The Sopranos” as to the French filmmaker Claude Chabrol. He’s a witty writer who appreciates the wit of others.
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His range of reading takes you places other art writers have not. Speaking about today’s young fiction writers, for example, he notes how “the parodists, inventors, miniaturists, and tinkerers are now coming into prominence, taking over from the arid metafictionists.”
He neatly pivots to link this observation to contemporary art: “Writers like George Saunders, Ben Marcus, Sam Lipsyte, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and Chris Kraus have clear parallels with painters Charline Von Heyl, Mary Weatherford, Joe Bradley, Chris Martin, Richard Aldrich, et al. Painting and advanced writing are now closer in spirit than at any other time in living memory.”
That’s as useful a critical observation as I have read this year.
Many of the essays in “How to See” appeared originally in Town & Country, Artforum, The Paris Review and other publications. Mr. Salle is open about how he frequently writes about his friends and collaborators. There are often tidbits like this one, about the artist Urs Fischer’s studio, which, “should you be lucky enough to drop in at the right time, produces daily a delicious organic lunch served family-style.”
That Mr. Salle is intimate with his friends’ work allows him to make us more intimate with it. At other times you wish for a bit more bite in his observations, bite he is rarely willing to deliver about his companions. You wish he were more in touch with his inner troglodyte.
This book has other small defects. He goes to the well too often for references to the same things. The movie critic Manny Farber’s notion of “termite art” is cited, for example, in four separate essays.
He doesn’t often argue out his opinions, and once in a while his critical discourse veers close to meaninglessness. When he speaks of how the sculptor Vito Acconci wishes to “interrogate the broader culture” in his work — as hoary an art-criticism cliché as exists — you may begin to interrogate your GPS device for a road out of here.
But he grounds that same essay not just in canny observations about Mr. Acconci’s work but in a story about how, as a student in 1974, he helped Mr. Acconci make a video.
For the video, Mr. Acconci tied a string around his penis. About his own participation, Mr. Salle writes, “I would yank the string on cue, giving the impression that the penis was a kind of Beckettian character in an absurdist drama; it would jerk itself upright to deliver a line or two before collapsing back again just out of frame.”
About Mr. Acconci’s talking member, he says, “It had a lot of grievances to air.”
Mr. Salle’s writing in “How to See” puts me in mind of Frank O’Hara’s poems. It’s serious but never solemn, alert to pleasure, a boulevardier’s crisp stroll through the visual world.
Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner
How to See
Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art
By David Salle
Illustrated. 270 pages. W. W. Norton. $29.95.
HOW TO SEE
Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art
by David Salle
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KIRKUS REVIEW
Seeing art through a painter’s eyes.
Salle is something of a Renaissance man. Known primarily as a painter, he has also done photography and set design, directed a film, and written essays. These concise pieces, many previously published in publications like Town & Country and Artforum, discuss mainly contemporary works of art, including film and ballet. It’s art criticism, but it’s also a breath of fresh air. There’s no jargon here, just accessible, witty, smartly informative short takes about works Salle enjoys. When looking at art, he writes, “take a work’s temperature, look at its surface energy.” He asks: “What makes a work of art tick, what makes it good?” Surprising, quirky comparisons abound. The 15th-century painter Piero Della Francesca is the “Elia Kazan of staging.” Alex Katz’s paintings are recognizable even when falling out of a plane at 30,000 feet. Thomas Houseago’s sculptures remind Salle of a scene in The Sopranos. Throughout, the author is honest and opinionated. When he first saw Roy Lichtenstein’s Reflections series, he was baffled. Frank Stella’s early works are “expansive, confident, and new as to be almost overwhelming.” In the later work, we see a “great champion of the ring, a little wobbly of knee, finally hit the canvas.” Of Oscar Murillo’s paintings, Salle writes, “there is no way to bring them to life, because they never lived in the first place.” Three essays are about John Baldessari, one of Salle’s college professors, who spent his career putting words and pictures together, “testing their stickiness and elasticity, using one to unravel, or to gather up, the other.” The German painter Albert Oehlen is a “terrific painter who flirts with disaster and gets away with it.” Jeff Koons makes the “thingyness of modern life…coherent.” His massive Flower Puppy, writes the author, is the “single greatest work of public sculpture made after Rodin that I’ve seen.”
Salle is the perfect art tour guide: literate, thoroughly entertaining, and insightful.
How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art by David Salle
W. W. Norton, 288 pages
By Simone Grace Seol
When it comes to contemporary art, much is made of paintings that look like a child fell into a bucket of paint and crawled across a canvas. Some may feel that the problem of how to see contemporary art ought to be preceded by the question of whether there is something worth seeing at all. David Salle's How to See says emphatically that, yes, there is plenty to see and that you, too, can be left little breathless once you can bring your attention and a willingness to be moved. Salle leads by example, seducing us to the joy and transformative potential of visual literacy.
How to See consists of 33 essays, most of which highlight a work of contemporary art (printed in black and white). The author is a painter-writer who originally contributed the essays appearing in the book to magazines such as Town & Country and exhibition catalogues. In each piece, he presents insights about the artist's craft, riffs on its ideas, and helps the reader to place the work in historical and intellectual context.
As an artist and writer, Salle is sensitive to the unique trepidation that viewers bring to visual art. Few would read a novel and then require a separate manifesto or dissertation from the author to make up their minds about what it means. Yet we too often look to the plaque on a museum wall to tell us what to think about a painting instead of trusting our first, unfiltered impression. Ancillary text cannot redeem or elevate the work itself, Salle insists: no one ever "loved a painting for the ideas it supposedly contains"; no painting is improved by the narrative one spins around it or the intention behind its creation. After all, it is not theoretical appreciation Salle is after, but love.
To get to love, Salle beckons us to take ownership of our reaction to art. He treats artists not as mere idea-pushers but as prophets of what might arguably be called romantic virtues, like "exhilaration" and "ravishment." He wants art to break us open, allowing for the possibility that it may transform the stale narratives of our lives. This almost old-fashioned vision of an aesthetic ideal inspires and challenges at a time when so much seeing has been replaced with theorizing, and too many would rather lecture and inculcate than affect.
Yet Salle sees his task as an author as pragmatic and down-to-earth. He wants to talk about art not as journalists or academics do, but as artists do amongst themselves -- with attention the nuts and bolts of the craft, the naked simplicity of "what works, what doesn't, and why." It turns out, this approach may be the most useful framework for lay viewers who want to enjoy art as well.
Salle's voice is brisk yet intimate, as though he is sitting across from you and on his second espresso. He walks us through a thorough and personable history of contemporary art, warm with humor and anecdotes of artists he's known firsthand. He draws on a broad cultural erudition to make "brilliant gestures of critical free association," as he calls them -- Alex Katz is "more Thoreau than Emerson" in his espousal of independence; the artists exhibiting at a 2014 MoMa survey use images that are "more like the folk melodies in Bartók -- present as understructure, there but not there."
Salle clues us in on things that it may take a painter's pair of eyes to see. He explains how a finished painting is a product of many kinetic and evanescent elements: how clouds shift at the precise time you are painting, how a movement of the shoulder marks a brush stroke in a certain way, and how that becomes permanent only as it dries. A moment later, a slightly different muscular impulse later, we may have ended up with a different painting. Something of lasting importance and magnetizing beauty can come out of the fortuitous overlapping of moving elements. So then, how much more precious and affecting is a visual object in its physicality?
Reading How to See is an exhilarating and cathartic experience. Salle mirrors all of our anxieties and questions about reading art and presents us with an intelligible framework that calls to the line our receptivity to being challenged, moved and transformed. With its earnest consideration of dozens of artists, the book itself is an offering of passion and generosity, and a pulsing invitation to the reader to find the same in the act of seeing.
Art is Mute, but We Want to Talk: On David Salle’s “How to See”
By Glen Roven
7 0 1
JANUARY 12, 2017
EVER SINCE I READ an interview with Stephen Sondheim where he claimed that The Wiz was his favorite musical (really?!), I’ve been skeptical when artists talk about other people’s work. I also take what an artist writes about his or her own work with a grain of salt. The creators of The Death of Klinghoffer claimed over and over (to assuage cries of anti-Semitism) that both the terrorists and terrorized in their opera were portrayed sympathetically. Rubbish! All you had to do was listen to the score to know whose side the creative team was on: the Palestinians had the most beautiful, soaring music, while the music for the Israelis was dull, dark, and frankly boring. I never listen to what artists write or say about themselves. I listen (and look) at the work.
There have been a few exceptions. Philip Glass’s monumental autobiography, Words Without Music, was riveting; rather than tell the audience about his work, he wrote about the times that influenced his music and the teachers that guided him through his musical career and life. I’ve never much cared for Glass, but every time he mentioned a particular piece of music, I ran to my Spotify to listen. His book made me completely change my mind about him, and I had to admit that sometimes an artist can write effectively about his colleagues.
David Salle’s new book, How to See, is also one of those exceptions. He writes about art that he admires with passion and a discerning eye, and he offers wonderful insights into what he as an artist admires in another person’s art. After all, musicians hear music differently from the public; novelists read novels differently from the typical reader; and of course, artists see art differently from their audience — they understand not only what goes into a painting emotionally, but also the technical aspects of making art, not to mention the perils of selling it. All this is described in Salle’s illuminating series of essays.
Perhaps my favorite thing about this book is the lack of “art-speak.” Anyone who has ever read an exhibition catalog or a review in a tony art magazine knows what I mean. Ninety percent of the time, the prose is gobbledygook. For example (from a recent exhibition catalog): “[This exhibition] aims to turn observation into interaction and reimagine the trade show platform as an opportune playground, instead of the curator’s exhibition ideal.” Huh? In How to See, the writing is completely friendly to the layperson, and, judging from the blurbs on the back cover, admired by art cognoscenti. I mean this with the deepest sincerity and respect: Salle describes art with the same joie de vivre as my favorite art critic/historian, Sister Wendy, the nun who wanders around the great museums of the world explaining art to us amateurs. Sister Wendy has been vilified by her fellow art critics. But artists and audiences cherish her.
My enjoyment of the book started with the cover. The words of the title are out of order: to How See, but next to the words are numbers (2. to 1. How. 3. See) which, if followed sequentially, offer the title with word order corrected: How to See. As this book is (mostly) filled with essays about mid-20th-century artists up until today — and this art often demands that the audience actively participate in the work almost as much as the artists themselves — the cover design is a lovely visual pun, making us participate even in the title.
I wonder if the title is also an oblique reference to that art appreciation stalwart, Learning to Look: A Handbook for the Visual Arts, which, in addition to Janson’s History of Art, has been the de rigueur text for art history classes. Although helpful to many, the lifeless, clinical prose of these “classics” pales in comparison to Salle’s unbridled enthusiasm; would that How to See were the first text that art history students be assigned.
Here is Salle describing seeing the famous Jeff Koons sculpture made of flowers:
Koons’s Flower Puppy […] is the single greatest work of public sculpture made after Rodin that I’ve seen. I once spent ten days in Bilbao, Spain, where the second of the litter permanently resides, its flowered tongue delicately dangling out of its mouth in front of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim […] I approached the building on foot each day and experienced a kind of fraternal joy on seeing the puppy — first, just a shape in the distance, then gradually the realization: it’s a dog! — that I’m not sure I had ever felt before. I was so grateful for its being there; it was such a gift. I never tired of seeing it; I just was happy that it existed. What more can an artist do?
I read these words, and I, too, realized that when I am stressed I instinctively head across town (easier than booking a trip to Spain) to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for solace. And now, thanks to Salle, I can articulate my joy: art is a gift.
One has to participate to enjoy this book. The only photographs of the discussed works were low-resolution (black-and-white reproductions at the beginning of each chapter). I am convinced that Salle relished the performance art he was engendering, as he pictured us readers rushing to Google the work described to see it for ourselves after reading Salle’s vibrant visual descriptions.
Here he is describing 88-year-old Alex Katz:
He can paint a swath of landscape — a white pine silhouetted against a late-afternoon sky, its sweeping horizontal branches made with very wide brushstrokes that arch upward to finish in satisfying, meaty points — repeatedly, and come up with different results every time because of the specific physical energy and tempo brought to bear on each iteration.
I don’t think I’ll ever see an Alex Katz work the same, even though, as Salle writes, “you could recognize a Katz if it fell out of an airplane at 30,000 feet.”
Since I’m an enormous Katz fan, Salle was preaching to the choir. I’m less fond of Christopher Wool’s word paintings. Of course, the gift of a truly great critic is to make the reader see the work differently, to understand something that was previously a mystery. “The experience of a Wool painting starts with reading but is more like being read to: as we look, a voice other than one’s own intrudes. Wool’s paintings directly address the viewer: to look is to be harangued; the paintings come with their own megaphone,” (italics mine). Mission accomplished.
Along with illuminating essays on world-famous artists such as Sigmar Polke, Roy Lichtenstein, Jeff Koons, and John Baldessari, Salle also introduced me to artists I had only heard about in passing: Robert Gober (“The work [‘Untitled’] represents a singular moment — one of failure, enervation, defeat, exhaustion — and makes of it something exhilarating”) and Dana Schutz (“Her paintings depict weird, funny characters in scenes cut from whole cloth, and her imaginings are inseparable from the way she renders them in paint. She handles the brush as an extension of herself, and the connection between her arm, shoulder, wrist, and fingers is more convincing than that of any other painter her age”). As I didn’t really know Schutz’s work, it was impossible for me to go on without searching out her images. I enjoyed experiencing the work on my own (although I hate seeing art through reproductions), but I now had my personal guide to show me how to see it.
In addition to contemporary artists, we also get an exuberant essay on perhaps my favorite painter, perhaps the best painter who ever lived (art criticism mine!): Piero della Francesca. It was an interesting reversal of sorts, reading this essay, as I well knew the paintings described, so in effect I was looking backward at a work to rediscover it. Salle’s muscular prose always delivers: “Piero is a monarch because of his style — the insouciance, the sweetness of it, the lilting, floating quality of his figures. Honest solidity of form on one hand and weightless arabesques on the other […] Light and air seem to move through it.”
In all my numerous gallery visits, I don’t think I ever wondered what a critic would think of a particular work. I wasn’t interested. But now, exploring the galleries of Manhattan and Brooklyn, I eagerly await Salle’s thoughts on some of my favorite young painters, such as Nick Farhi, Adam Parker Smith, and Christopher Beckman.
Finishing the book (with a huge smile on my face), I had to once again reflect on the title. Did Salle show (or teach?) me how to see? Or was it merely his interpretation of the work that was a value unto itself? The answer is both, of course, but interpretations of art are a dime a dozen; it was his lessons on seeing that transformed this book into a literary work of art. Here is Salle teaching us how to see an Albert Oehlen: “One thing Oehlen added to the conversations is the veil — drippy, drapey washes and skeins of thin, liquid color. The veils obscure the painting underneath, partly nullify it, but in places allow the boldly, absurdly printed fabrics to poke through and reassert themselves.” He teaches us to see the different levels, explains what the washes are made of, and describes the end results. All in two sentences.
One of the last essays in the book is called “A Talk for the First Day of Class.” I’m not sure whether this is an actual speech Salle gave or the speech he hopes every new art student would/should hear on this imagined first day. Never mind. He said it perfectly: “The problem remains: the art is mute, but we want to talk. How to talk about art in a useful way, in a way that is relevant to both the viewer and the art.” That is what How to See is all about.
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Glen Roven has four Emmys, played Carnegie Hall three times, has two nephews, and had one great love.