|
Biography
Article
Back to frontpage
|
|
|||
 |
|
 |
|||
| |||||
David SALLE
b. 1952 Norman, Oklahoma, USA
"Nudes in paintings are not the same as nudes in the world. It's their relationship that's interesting...the specificity of the poses in my paintings is much different really than that of the poses one sees in pornography." David Salle is not inviting the audience to voyerism. According to him, female nudes in paintings constitute abstract choreography rather than pornography. Salle bends the naked body to extreme positions while he observes its forms in different spaces and from strange perspectives. The female body becomes an object and forces the viewer to choose from a variety of ways of looking.
Biography
David Salle (b. 1952 Norman, Oklahoma, USA) grew up in a culturally-aware Jewish family in Wichita, Kansas. He was originally a self-taught painter and as a young man at the end of the 1960s he painted mostly abstract paintings. He began to study art in the early 1970s at the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied under John Baldessari. During his studies Salle turned from painting to conceptual art and installations. He returned to painting only in the mid-1970s after moving back to New York City, where he still lives and works. In addition to painting, Salle has designed sets for both drama and dance performances. As a set designer he has worked together with dancer and choreographer Karole Armitage. In 1994 Salle also directed his first film Search and Destroy, based on a play by Howard Korder. In Finland David Salle's paintings were seen in 1988 in Tampere at the exhibition Contemporary American Art organised by the Sara Hildén Art Museum.
Article
Casual piecing together
In the early 1980s, figurative painting regained a central position in the American art world. Until then, all figurative references had been considered as disgracing art and the nature of an artwork had long been a key theme. The dominance of conceptual art was already on the wane when young artists enthusiastically began to tackle figurative subjects. David Salle is a model example of a 1980s post-modern painter whose works show the signs of a new era, such as the recycling of old art history imagery and its combination with advertising images, news photos and cartoons familiar from popular culture. Becoming known as New Expressionism, the recurring themes of this new American trend dealt with history, the sub-conscious, sexuality, and dreams.
Since the end of the 1970s David Salle's paintings have been based on the juxtaposition and parallels between images very different in nature and origin. Fragments selected from the imagery of art history are casually compared with advertisements, news photos, cartoon characters, and photos of nude women and real objects. Salle's method of constructing his paintings could be called intertextual. The images and artworks he has borrowed from possess their own history and meanings which are carried over as quotations in Salle's collages.
Salle regards the images he uses as raw material and combines them freely without paying too much attention to the contents and meanings they already have. However, his paintings take part in a dialogue with all the pictures serving as material for his works. Flaming Wheel of Karma (1988) included in the Kiasma collection is a perfect example of Salle's intertextual way of constructing rich, multi-part collages out of existing material. The naked female torso painted in shades of grey and black is accompanied by pictures of various objects and direct borrowings from works by other artists, such as the paintings of the English artist Francis Bacon and Théodore Géricault from France.
The visual richness of David Salle's works is emphasised by his use of several transparent overlays. In Sexual and Professional Jealousy (1983) Salle superimposed on an image of half-clad women, copied from a photo, a sketch-like, seemingly unfinished outline drawing of a man with a hat, possibly a self-portrait. This figure occurs in many of his paintings from the late 1980s. As a finishing touch he inscribed "Tennyson" on the surface, a reference to the English romantic poet Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892).
The superimposed transparent overlays of text and images allow the audience a view of the figures and objects underneath through the views or shapes painted over them. The artist gives the audience a simultaneous view from different angles. The numerous overlays work like the split-screen effect or montage technique in cinema. There is more to see at one glance with several simultaneously presented images.
What does David Salle want to say with these combinations and parallels? Why has he chosen to combine just these pictures? Seized by the desire to discover the origin of the images used by Salle and the solution of the picture puzzle he has painted, the viewer expects to find a clue in the painting to help him/her understand the intended meaning of the work. However, such a straightforward problem-solving process is not what David Salle wants the viewer to go through in front of his painting. He would prefer to occupy the minds of the audience, to leave them overwhelmed by the frustration they felt when looking at the painting for the first time: "We should not forget the awkwardness of looking at art." The very awkwardness and frustration of the viewer could indeed be regarded as the real theme of Salle's paintings.
The pictures Salle has used in his work have often led to a discussion on the meanings the artist is interpreted to convey through his paintings. Photos of nude or half-clad women in particular have given rise to discussions on the artist's sexists way of treating the female body. These intrusive and peeping photos have been seen as humiliating and disparaging to women. Salle, however, denies encouraging a peeping Tom attitude in front of his paintings. He calls an image "a thing devoid of meaning", claiming the image only seems to mean something, whereas in reality it has no meaning.
In the nude photos used by Salle his interest is mainly focused on the positions of the body, which he wants to take to extremes in his paintings, as it were testing the limits of the human body. He claims his paintings are associated with a kind of abstract choreography rather than pornographic narrative. Salle turns headless, truncated torsos to objects he expects to appeal to the audience only through their forms, not their eroticism. However, the perspective of Salle and his defenders can be considered to be as sexist as the photos he has selected. Looking at a female nude as a shape devoid of meaning may prove very difficult.
Kati Kivinen