David Salle, the writing painter

David Salle's a painter who writes about art, and who's published a book of his writing, How to See (Norton, 2016) that's as good if not better than anything I've read in quite a long time, about art that is. In fact, I admire Salle's writing more than I do his art--he's primarily a painter but also a set designer--and always get new information from it, a way of thinking about visual art that I hadn't thought of before.

His review in The New York Review (February 8, 2018) of the artist Laura Owens midcareer show at the Whitney is full of good writing. He writes of Owens, "she's an art lover, an enthusiast who approaches the problem of what to paint, and how to paint it, with an open, pragmatic mind." And, "Her principle theme may be her own aesthetic malleability."

Writing about Owens, Salle furnishes the living room of late 20thc/early 21stc painting, and more or less shows you who's sitting where and what they're 'wearing.' Owens it seems, is dressed as a super-smart, hyper-talented stay-at-home-mom, a classically trained artist in the Pop tradition, "at ease with the large New York School canvas.' Anything and everything can be contained in an Owens painting: "The fragmentary, the deconstructed, even the deliberately mismatched--that is our reality. We are all collage artists now" Salle writes (my underscore).

Basically, Salle's saying that painters like Owens (Peter Doig comes to mind, the subject of an enthusiastic New Yorker profile a few weeks ago) are taking a much different route from the one taken by Gerhard Richter, say, at the turn of the century. Photography, which fueled the so, so serious-minded painters like Richter and others, doesn't seem to have a place in Owen's work, yet. It's all about old-fashioned painterly pictorial imagery, placed on the canvas in a variety of styles and colors. You can't tell an Owens the way you can tell a Richter or a Tuymans; part of the style is not having a style. "The paint," Salle writes, "is applied with a pleasing paint-by-numbers quality. You can feel the hobby store just around the corner."

The hobby store might be just around Owens corner, but if it is it's filled with digital equipment. Computer assistance, photoshop etc. enable her to manipulate familiar, even stupid cartoon-like figures into mash-ups of visually stunning, or at least interesting, confounding in a fun way, wily and yet almost innocent works of art. Imagine a 7-year old with a Ph.D in art history who studied with John Baldesarri at Cal-Arts.

David Salle's an art booster and extremely well-read. Not only does he know the difference between irony and ambiguity (Owens is ambiguous, in the best sense), he quotes William Empson, author of the classic, Seven Types of Ambiguity. Salle tends to see the good in art; he'd never write, for instance, what the critic Jed Perl wrote of Richter: "Gerhard Richter is a bullshit artist masquerading as an painter." Salle may be a better writer than he is a painter, and he's a good painter.