David Salle

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David Salle

In the craft or sullen art of DavidSalle, I sense a punk and glowering indifference to criticism so total as to constitute, for me, the chief if not the only critical interest of his oeuvre. It is not so much that the work is bad as that its badness seems willed even where there is no clear sign that the artist could do better if he wished to. The work appears to situate itself beyond good and evil, hence outside the sphere of critical discourse altogether, so that such snarls as Oh yeah? So what? Says who? Who cares? What difference does it make? Fuck off! are all the response I would anticipate to my questions and objections. It would be like engaging in moral disputation with an adolescent. But then an art this resolutely other and opposed acquires the curious strength of its negations. It is not the negation of erasure, as with Minimalism. Minimalism sought to identify and isolate the bare, essential purity of art--what remains after we have stipped away all the accidents of charm, depth, vividness, narrative and feeling--but it meant the essence to be that which underlies all the painting or sculpture the Minimalist regards as irrelevantly ingratiating or even profound. Minimalism belongs to the same history, complies puritanically with the same imperatives, that have always defined art. Salle's negativity is of an altogether different and more ultimate order. It nearest counterpart is the Nothingness discussed by Martin Heidegger in What Is Metaphysics?, a Nothingness that reveals the totality of Being by standing absolutely outside whatever there is. Salle reveals the boundaries of art by deliberately refusing to allow himself to be included within them. Alongside so complete a displacement of everything that has made are meaningful, Salle's …