David Salle ~ A Pastiche ... Sestina, Contemporary Art and Photoshop

Initially my plan was to write about sestinas on this final day of David Salle here at Fifty Two Pieces. Then I came across a post entitled "What is Contemporary Art?" on The Blog of Innocence and knew I had to include that. And since I was making my own pastiche I'm also including Salle's Sailor from a show entitled "Distance from Nowhere" at Kestnergescellschaft in Hannover, Germany ending in June of this year.

Sestina
Earlier this week I wrote about David Salle's Sestina. Salle is known for his appropriating images from elsewhere to include in his work. He also is a reader of literature and poetry so it's not surprising that he would be aware of the sestina, a complex poetic form from the 12th century French court. It has 39 lines, six sextets and one tercet. and uses the format shown below. For those of you who want to try your hand at this form of poetry click here for one of the many web sites that explain the method.

"What is Contemporary Art?" 

That's a question that can generate pages of answers on the internet, in magazines and doctoral theses. Lethe Bashar tackles that question in his article on The Blog of Innocence. Bashar's starting off point was an answer Cory Doctorow had given to that question.

I believe that from the artist’s perspective, today’s art must presuppose copying. If you are making art that you expect people not to copy, then you are not making contemporary art.

It's quite an insightful article discussing this age of re-mix and collage. Bashar ends with this concluding paragraph. He could easily have been writing about Salle's work for the last 25 years.

Contemporary art revels in the spaces in between. In between materials, styles, stories, histories, and techniques. Contemporary art is the art of perpetual discovery, an art without a destination, only entry points and possibilities. And if it is true what Corey Doctorow says about today’s art presupposing copying, then it is only because copying is merely a first step towards something greater and less recognizable.

Salle's Pastel is our piece of the week and is a good example of some of his work in the 80's. Appropriated figures used in his own fashion with other elements and as was often the case multiple panels. Sestina, as was mentioned earlier this week, was painted in 2002 and has a gentler approach to the imaging of the naked female form, perhaps more stylized and generally brighter in theme and appearance. "An exhortation to be happy" to quote Salle.



Sailor

Sailor continues in the theme of appropriation. This time Salle has used Photoshop to manipulate other's images and then added his own in between, his own discovery of new possibilities. He's also affixed a small sailboat on wooden shelf near the image of the partially clothed woman. Painted in 2007 I see is a mellower Salle who is still pushing happiness.

David Salle ~ Sestina

David Salle painted Sestina in 2002. It was first exhibited at the Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea in 2003. Mary Boone was Salle's first gallery, the gallery that helped put him on the map of the art world in the 80's. He jumped galleries in the 90's, choosing Gagosian and then back to Mary Boone when Sestina was shown along with four other of his paintings. Ironically it was in the 90's that Salle, along with many of the other art stars from the 80's, fell from favor. Salle continued to work during those down years, making a movie "Search and Destroy" and designing sets for ballet and the theater.

Comparing Sestina with Pastel, Sestina seems brighter in both color and tone. His later images have less layers and the colors brighter, perhaps even cheerier. Like almost all of Salle's work, Sestina is made up of multiple panels, three instead of the two in Pastel. Check out the two black-eyed Susans and the tulips. Of course there are images of women but compared to his earlier almost pornographic views these women seem sedate, even the reclining nude who seems to be carved of wood.

Like many other artists including Jasper Johns, Salle has made a habit of not answering questions about what his art means. However in one interview for the New York Times in January 2003, he was presented with a question about the meaning of Sestina. Salle responded with "Ask me later. Ask me in an hour." An hour later, he first responded with he couldn't put the answer in one sentence and then proceeded to try to explain it with a Woody Allen vignette. He finally answered with...

"The painting," he said, "is an exhortation to be happy."

He continued, "One of the reasons that still-life painting is inherently compelling is because from the beginning it was a representation of the fleeting nature of existence. The objects in the painting are all that is left behind. But this painting" ? he nodded toward the picture we had been looking at ? "is only nominally a still life. It's a dismantled still life."

"The connection between the women is syntactical," Mr. Salle said, a bit cryptically. "It operates on the deepest level of pictorial syntax."

So there you have an answer as to the meaning of a work of art from an artist who could be thought of as an art Sphinx.

David Salle ~ Pastel

David Salle painted Pastel in 1986. Some would say that his work is figurative and indeed this painting hangs in a gallery of the Portland Art Museum's Center for Modern and Contemporary Art of works from the 1980's when artists had tired of abstract expressionism and minimalism. Salle's paintings take images from the world around him and mix them together in what some say is an assemblage of painting. Others call it Pastiche, "a work or style produced by borrowing fragments, and motifs from various sources, a hodgepodge." This painting is large 84 by 162 inches and done in oil and acrylic.

Scale is an important element of viewing art from a photographic image. Even though I've given the dimensions of Pastel it can be difficult to comprehend its size. To give you a better idea of how large this work actually is I'm including an image of the Portland Art Museum's previous director, John Buchanan, sitting in front of it. The photo of Buchanan was included as part of an article written about him after he accepted his current assignment as the head of San Francisco's Fine Arts Museums in 2006. The question lingers as to why Buchanan picked this painting for the press interview photograph. It could have been the coincidence of one of the few benches in the CMCA was handy or the size of the painting or the images and colors of the painting – something to ponder as you're viewing Pastel either here on the internet or at the Portland Art Museum.