Forty-One False Starts (6 page)

Since shows of painters' drawings are considered relatively minor affairs, the dinner was a small one (for about twenty people) and had a more relaxed and less complicated atmosphere than a full-scale show would have elicited. The restaurant was a very expensive and a very good one; we ordered carefully and ate seriously. Salle, who was wearing a kind of sailor's blouse, sat quietly and calmly and watchfully, like a boy at a birthday party. I retain an image of Sabine Rewald, a curator at the Metropolitan, who looks like a Vermeer, lifting a spoonful of pink sorbet to her mouth and smiling happily. My table partners—Robert Pincus-Witten, an art critic and emeritus professor of art history who is now a director at Gagosian, and Raymond Foye, another director, who also publishes tiny books of exotica, such as the poems of Francis Picabia—were masters of the art of intimate, complicit table talk. Our host, Larry Gagosian, was absent. He was out of town; the opening was evidently not important enough for him to fly in for.

Two years later, the opening, at the Gagosian downtown gallery, of a Salle show of eight large
Early Product Paintings
based on images in 1950s advertising, was something else again. This was a high-stakes show—each painting was priced at around a hundred thousand dollars—and an entire restaurant had been hired for the artist's dinner. Things were no longer simple. Things were very complicated. The restaurant, filled with artists, writers, performers, filmmakers, collectors, critics, gallery owners, hangers-on, hummed with a sense of intrigue and with the threat of something not coming off. Gagosian, a tall, dark-skinned, gray-haired man in his late forties, with a deadpan manner, walked through the room casting looks here and there, like Rick in
Casablanca
checking the house. Pincus-Witten and Foye, again on duty, skimmed about on anxious, obscure errands. Salle (playing the Paul Henreid role?) wore a dark jacket over a tieless white shirt and jeans, and was only slightly more reserved, detached, and watchful than usual. I left before the Vichy police came. The image I retain from the occasion, like Sabine Rewald's pink sorbet from the previous one (though it comes from the opening proper), is the sight of a tall, thin man in a gray suit who stood in the center of the gallery and stood out from everyone else because of the aura of distinction that surrounded him. He had a face with clever, European features, but it was his bearing that was so remarkable. He carried himself like a nobleman; you expected to look down and see a pair of greyhounds at his feet. Throughout the opening he had his arm around a young black man with an elaborate tribal hairdo. He was the painter Francesco Clemente, another of Gagosian's hundred-thousand-dollars-a-picture artists, and another of the painters who came to prominence during the 1980s. Unlike Salle, however, he had not seen his star fall.

During a series of talks I had with Salle over a two-year period, he was always careful to say nothing bad about fellow painters—even his comments on Julian Schnabel, with whom he had had a public falling-out, were restrained. But I gathered from a few things he let drop about Clemente's charmed life in art that it was a bitter reminder of everything his own wasn't. “What I've been circling around trying to find a way to ask,” Salle once told me, “is the simple question: How is it that some people are basically taken seriously and other are basically not taken seriously?” In spite of the money he makes from his art, in spite of the praise sometimes bordering on reverence he has received from advanced critics (Peter Schjeldahl, Sanford Schwartz, Lisa Liebmann, Robert Rosenblum, Michael Brenson, for example), Salle feels that admission into the highest rank of contemporary painting has been denied him, that he will always be placed among the second-stringers, that he will never be considered one of the big sluggers.

36

The artist David Salle, in a 1990 catalog of his prints called the
Canfield Hatfield
series (A. J. Liebling wrote about Hatfield in
The Honest Rainmaker
), wrote,

Professor Canfield Hatfield was a supposedly real-life character who figured prominently in racetrack operations and betting schemes of all types in this country in the first part of the twentieth century. Among the Professor's many activities to promote belief in a higher system of control over seemingly random events were his exploits as a paid maker of rain for drought-stricken communities in the West—a high-wager kind of job and by extension a useful metaphor for the relationship between risk, hope, and fraud that enter into any art-making or rain-making situation.

37

The lax genre of personality journalism would not seem to be the most congenial medium for a man of David Salle's sharp, odd mind and cool, irritable temperament. And yet this forty-one-year-old painter has possibly given more interviews than any other contemporary artist. Although the published results have, more often than not, disappointed him, they have not deterred him from further fraternization with the press; when I was interviewing him, in 1992 and 1993, he would regularly mention other interviews he was giving. One of them—an interview with Eileen Daspin, of the magazine
W
—turned out badly. Salle lost his subject's wager that the interviewer's sympathetic stance wasn't a complete sham, and had to endure the vexation of reading a piece about himself that shimmered with hostility and turned his words against him. “It can't be easy being David Salle in the 1990's,” Daspin wrote in the October 1993 issue. “He is definitely out. Like fern bars and quiche. A condition that's a little hard to take after having been one of the genius artist boy wonders of the Eighties.” This was the style and tone of the article. Salle himself sounded petulant and egotistical. (“I was completely ignored by the same people at the beginning of my career who then celebrated me and who are now happy to ignore me.”)

A month or so later, Salle told me of his feelings about the article. “I read it very, very quickly, in disgust, and threw the magazine in the trash. I had been ambushed. I should have known better. I have no one to blame but myself. She gave off plenty of signals that should have raised alarms. It led to my saying interesting things—except I said them to the wrong person.”

“It interests me that you always take responsibility for the interview—that if you don't like it, you blame yourself rather than the interviewer.”

“Oh, I can blame her,” Salle said. “I didn't do it single-handed. She did it. She kept saying ‘What does it feel like to be a has-been? Don't you feel bad being put in the position of a has-been?' and I kept saying—with a misguided sense of pedagogical mission—‘Well, you have to understand that this has a context and a history and a trajectory.' I was talking about the tyranny of the left. But it came out with her saying merely how angry and unhappy I was about being a has-been. All the pains I took to explain the context had gone for nothing.”

“She made you sound like a very aggressive and unpleasant person.”

“Maybe I am. I was trying out the thesis that the art world lionizes bullies. In any case, I'm reaching the point where I'm resigned to being misinterpreted. Instead of seeing this as a bad fate that befell me through no fault of my own, I now see it as a natural state of affairs for an artist. I almost don't see how it can be otherwise.”

“Then why do you give all these interviews?”

Salle thought for a moment. “It's a lazy person's form of writing. It's like writing without having to write. It's a form in which one can make something, and I like to make things.”

I remembered something Salle had once made that had failed, like the
W
interview, and that he had destroyed in disgust, as he had destroyed his copy of the magazine. It was a painting of two ballet dancers.

38

The artist David Salle—as if speaking of another person—once talked to me about his impatience. “I have a way of making people feel that they don't have my attention, that I have lost interest and turned away. People I'm close to have complained about it.”

“And then?”

“I get even more impatient.”

“Is it that your thoughts wander?”

“I start thinking that my life is going to be over soon. It's that simple. I don't have that much time left. I felt this way when I was twenty.”

Salle had recently turned forty. He had noticed—without drawing the almost too obvious inference—that he was cutting images of watches out of newspapers and magazines. One day, after arriving a little late for an appointment with me, he apologized and then told me that he used to be obsessively punctual. “I had to train myself not to arrive exactly on the dot. It was absurd and unseemly to be so punctual. It was particularly unseemly for an artist to be so punctual.”

I asked Salle what his punctuality had been about.

“I think it had to do with focusing so much on people's expectations of me. But it was also because I myself hate to wait. For all my, I'm sure, bottomless inconsiderateness of other people, I'm always empathizing with the other person. I empathize with the torturer. I find it very easy to empathize with Robert Hughes when he writes of his aversion to my work. I feel I know exactly what he's thinking and why. It's a kind of arrogance, I know, but I feel sorry for him. He doesn't know any better. I had to learn to be late and I had to learn to be cruel, to exude hostility. But it's not really my nature. I do it badly because it's not who I am.”

39

Toward the end of a long series of interviews with the artist David Salle, I received this letter from him:

After the many hours of trying to step outside of myself in order to talk about who or what I am, I feel that the only thing that really matters in art and in life is to go against the tidal wave of literalism and literal-mindedness—to insist on and
live
the life of the imagination. A painting has to be the experience, instead of pointing to it. I want to have and to give
access to feeling
. That is the riskiest and only important way to connect art to the world—to make it alive. Everything else is just current events.

Most of our conversations, I think, were about how this idea has a special frequency which is easily drowned out by the din of the moment. That is, we talked, or I talked, mostly about its being “drowned out.” But the important thing is not really the “underdogness” of it—but just the feeling itself.

40

To write about the painter David Salle is to be forced into a kind of parody of his melancholy art of fragments, quotations, absences—an art that refuses to be any one thing or to find any one thing more interesting, beautiful, or sobering than another.

41

One day, toward the end of a conversation I was having with the painter David Salle in his studio, on White Street, he looked at me and said, “Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever thought that your real life hasn't begun yet?”

“I think I know what you mean.”

“You know—soon. Soon you'll start your real life.”

DEPTH OF FIELD

2011

Last April, the German photographer Thomas Struth went to Windsor Castle and took a picture of the Queen of England and the Duke of Edinburgh for the National Portrait Gallery in London. This is not the kind of photography Struth usually does. He is one of today's most advanced and acclaimed art photographers, whose monumental color photographs hang in museums throughout the world, and whose interests do not extend to taking inoffensive pictures of famous people. But when he got the call from the National Portrait Gallery in January, he found himself saying yes. The occasion was an exhibition of paintings and photographs of Elizabeth II done in the sixty years of her reign, which the Diamond Jubilee of 2012 will celebrate. Struth's photograph would be the final portrait in the exhibition.

“When the National Portrait Gallery called and said that in their eyes I was the best person to do the portrait, I was quite shocked,” Struth told me. “My immediate reaction was ‘What can I possibly do that's not only affirmative but would include a message from me? Would I be able to say something new about people like this?' ”

Struth and I were eating lunch in a Berlin hotel restaurant; it was a month after the sitting, and I had come to Germany to interview him and watch him at work. He is a tall, bearded man of fifty-six, with large pale eyes and an exceptionally likable persona. He radiates decency and straightforwardness. He is kind and calm and modest. He is the kid in the class everyone wants to sit next to.

Struth went on to tell me of his elaborate preparations for the portrait of Elizabeth and Philip. He studied old photographs and found most of them wanting. He saw the technical mistakes, “what should not happen”—notably their distracting backgrounds. He visited Buckingham Palace and decided it was too cluttered. When the gilded green, red, and white drawing rooms at Windsor Castle were offered, he selected the green room (the white room was “too tired” and the red room “too much”) and spent a day there making test shots. “While I was there, I said, ‘I want to see the dresser'—the woman who is in charge of the Queen's wardrobe. Because the second thing I noticed when I looked at the past photographs of the Queen was that many of the dresses she wears are very unfortunate. She has quite big boobs, and she often wears something that goes up to the neck, and then there is this stretch of fabric under the face that makes it look small.” (I smiled to myself at Struth's coarse reference to the royal bosom—a rare lapse in his excellent English.) The day before the sitting, Struth continued, “the dresser came in with twenty dresses. She was a very nice woman, and we had an immediate chemistry. I felt that she saw me. Later, she told the Queen that I was okay—that I was a nice guy. I selected the dress, a pale-blue brocade with garlands, a bit shiny, and it matched nicely against the dark green.”

I asked if the Queen accepted his choice and he said yes. He did not choose the Duke's costume, except to ask for a white shirt. At the sitting, the Duke wore a dark suit and a blue tie. “He was perfect,” Struth said.