David Salle Quotes
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I was in a group show at a museum in Torino, a lot of American artists installed in a floor of this museum. Another floor of the museum houses the most refined collection of arte povera in the world, which is perfectly selected and perfectly installed. I remember being struck by the contrast between the Italian works and the American. I would say the hallmarks of the Italian style are a poetical connection to nature and to materiality, materials, and exquisite taste. On contrast, the American work was essentially a bunch of bad-tempered, complaining kids.
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Being in love is dangerous because you talk yourself into thinking you've never had it so good.
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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. 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.
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I think people have to be given - or take - the permission to say that something is nothing. Just because it's in a museum doesn't mean it's anything.
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I did all the stuff that people do - film, performance, photography, pictures and words, words and pictures. In retrospect, I was trying to find some way to put things - meaning images and forms - together that highlighted some idea of what was underneath the surface of an image, what determined how something was seen.
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The only thing worth doing is what's never been done before.
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Truth is, I didn't know what the hell I was doing when I got out of Cal Arts. I think I wasted a lot of time not being bold enough, or still engaged in the questioning that you get into at school.
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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.
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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.
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I do work hard at trying to find the right expression for something, which might be like finding the right image - choosing not only the right words but down to the right number of lines. I remember being in Maine once at Colby College with Alex Katz. It houses hundreds of his works. There was a painting of just one seagull against a blue sky. I was admiring it and Alex said, "45 brush strokes exactly."
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I think it's what any artist would want: to feel like their work can be taken in on a level of experience beyond the headline or the press release. I don't think any artist wants to be reduced to a press release. We have a whole industry whose function it is to process and present information. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's not the thing.
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I feel like all the American artists are aesthetically not very interesting and mired in a complaining relationship to its own culture, whereas the Italian work, from a different era, is so comfortable with its relationship to nature and to culture.
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What great comedians, great comic writers, great comic actors do is that they just read the headlines with the right eyebrow position and it's funny.
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I've always read, I've always admired writers and was lucky really to meet some extraordinary ones and become friends. Certain times you just like people, and it grows out like a nautilus shell.
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I didn't know anything about conceptual art when I left Kansas. I went to Cal Arts to be a painter, but the exciting stuff was happening elsewhere, so I took a holiday from painting for a few years.
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My focus was always toward imagery of some sort.
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Spend a day talking only in rhyme.
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Since I moved six or seven times the first year I was in New York, I had to be able to roll up the work, and paper would just get destroyed. Once I looked at what I'd done, I realized I had made a painting, sort of by default.
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What most paintings do is give 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.
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There was a review by Fairfield Porter from the 1950s about Mark Rothko, one of the more hallowed names in American art. Porter says something like, "Yeah, Rothko paints rectangles of color. They have mass but no weight." That's not in any way a detraction, but it's a description. And it has nothing to do with the spiritual dimension. The main thing is as an intelligent viewer, to identify just what those things are that it does, that those rectangles do, and then not assume that they do these things over here. I don't know why that's challenging.
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I remember making a videotape in a fancy hair salon in Beverly Hills. The soundtrack in the salon had a whole worldview behind it - I was interested in things like that.
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What if everything in a museum is crap? It's entirely possible; it's not the end of the world.
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Why should it be difficult for someone to claim their personal reaction, especially in this time where we are only too happy to share our personal reactions about everything, no matter how trivial. Maybe the answer is conditioning. This is pure conjecture, but I think people go to museums to participate.
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I started when I was nine. Really, everything I know about color theory, composition, drawing, and painting, I learned when I was a kid.
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Really it becomes a question of architecture. How do you move people through a space and allow them to have an experience? I, probably more than most people, suffer from museum fatigue. I always want to just stay still or sit in a chair and look at one thing, but that's not the experience of the museum.
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I have a terrible confession to make, sort of like those people who say that they've been mispronouncing a word all their life: I've never read Ways of Seeing all the way through. I'm sure I carried it around with me in art school.
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It sounds formulaic now, but at the time, I was interested in the difference between the thing and the representation of the idea of the thing - the space between the two.
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People tend to remember and mentally classify work according to how it looks, sometimes oblivious to the underlying intent.
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There are so many different ways to talk and think about art. We just spoke about when attitude becomes form. But when I was a kid, I had these two art teachers, a couple, who were continuing a line of very classical, atelier art training, and they instilled in me a sensitivity to all the classical verities of line, shape, color, texture, and composition, which is only engaging if you're making two-dimensional objects.
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I feel that the only thing that really matters in art and life is to go against the tidal wave of literalism and literal-mindedness-to insist on and live the life of the imagination.
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