Curated by David Salle
February 25 to April 16, 2016

20 East 79th Street (at Madison Avenue)
New York, 212 737 2060

550 West 21st Street (at 11th Avenue)
New York, 212 994 5200

One cannot help but feed off the vitality of the paintings in “Nice Weather,” twin group shows at Skarstedt’s Chelsea and Upper East Side locations, curated by David Salle. Taking it all in, I was reminded of Salle’s review of the Museum of Modern Art’s “The Forever Now,” published last year in ArtNews. That show, which was curated by Laura Hoptman, attempted to showcase a cross-section of what painting is today and, in so many words, Salle said, “This is what’s working, these are the things that aren’t’t working.” “Nice Weather” can be read as an extension of that review, saying, “This is how it’s done.” I had the chance to ask Salle if he agrees, to which he replied “I would. But the criterion and the mandate for a gallery show are different from that of a museum. In fact, ‘Nice Weather’ has many artists in common with Hoptman’s show.”

Aside from employing some of the same artists, there are many seemingly responsive comparisons to “The Forever Now,” the first being the title itself, which is borrowed from the name of a book by Frederick Seidel. “Nice Weather” is an instance of both temporal as well as a temporality. It describes something which happens in a given, precise moment. But weather, like time, is also a ubiquitous, constant element. Nice weather is forever and now, and as a title escapes pretension and contradiction by suggesting a natural flow of events.

Reading the materials listed for all the works in “Nice Weather” for the Chelsea location was almost as fun as looking at the pieces. There are all sorts of things, from neon, to soap, glitter, leaf extract, etc. Perhaps the reason why the material application is successful, as opposed to merely eccentric or arbitrary, is because, as Salle explains, “They all work. That is to say, everything is subsumed into a pictorial vision; it’s not novelty for its own sake.” One of the more noticeable examples in the Chelsea show is Chris Martin’s Untitled (2015). He manifests a flashy, casual energy, coupled with a felt experience, which could only result from a long, productive practice. This picture is a fast read. One doesn’t have to spend much time scrutinizing over it, or even necessarily be painting-literate to derive pleasure or understand it. But being familiar with the sensibility applied to the practice painting does offer a layer of meaning that might be otherwise overlooked. The color of Martin’s glitter is a musty, 1970s sort of brown, which fights against its sparkly, garish nature. It sits comfortably on top of a rainbow of blue, yellow, pink, and green. By seamlessly integrating the nasty brown into the Day-Glo wash, Martin seems to splice in a subliminal message of awkwardness or distaste. Carroll Dunham’s piece, Mound (1991-92), hanging at the Uptown location, relates to the immediacy Martin asserts, but is exceedingly more blatant in its distastefulness — and, conversely, offers a secret beauty. Frank Galuszka, in a 1997 essay, described Dunham’s work as “biologic entities [that] have a cruel and sometimes sexual (but never sexy) humor […] Dunham’s paintings are valentines sent between cold sores if not among cancer cells.” And the statement holds true today: one doesn’t have to spend much time gazing into this work to see that it’s gross and weird. But many discrete surprises unfold in this work for those who do.

The reward for close looking, not dissimilar from what happens when one looks closely at another person, is the discovery of autonomy — what it is that really makes an individual special. I believe that contradiction in a painting (not to be confused with ambiguity or confusion) is what ensures such a powerful presence. It’s like the human’s physicality and spiritual or intellectual self — two impossibly disparate conditions that magically fuse into one. The brown in Martin’s sorbet landscape, and the sweetness in Dunham’s toxicity, point to the multifarious nature of their work.

At the Chelsea gallery, looking at Cecily Brown’s Party of Animals (2015–16) requires much harder looking.  The figurative gestures of her abstract, de Kooning-esque scene unfold and take on volume over time — one cannot see the picture in a quick glance. It’s as though a cacophony of flesh and landscape unfolds and disappears at an increasingly intense rate through staring at it. I asked Salle whether some pictures here require more time to understand than others. “I’m not sure I would break it down like that,” he responded, “I think a good painting does both — it coalesces into a visual immediacy and also repays hard looking.” Perhaps this is true, but Nicole Wittenberg’s Kiss paintings (2015) certainly demonstrate how immediate and time-released information can occur simultaneously. Straight away, one can see that the subject of Wittenberg’s paintings is painting. She has a direct, muscular manner of handling paint. The markmaking is juicy and meaty — emphasized by the saturated reds, pinks, and yellows. It’s the hook that grabs the viewer’s attention, but further inspection reveals subtle allusions. Giotto’s The Meeting at the Golden Gate (1303–05) comes to mind: two heads come together as one, featuring two eyes, one nose, and one mouth. It is only through extended consideration that the subject, or subjects are revealed: love, lust, Eros, spontaneity. And the parallels she draws, between erotic desire and painting, are engrossing.

Wittenberg appears to use color to unpack information the way Salle himself has in the curation of artworks. Regarding this idea, Salle commented that “[Color factors into the process] a lot. But color is not something applied on top of a painting — it’s integral. In a group show, color is like a thermostat — you can dial the temperature up or down.” Another element of this show’s curation, I was pleased to notice, was how well-balanced it was with regard to gender. Salle explains, “It wasn’t even a question. A lot of the most interesting painters working now happen to be women. Some of the women painters in the show have been at it a long time. The perceptions might change, but the work was always there.”

When I asked Salle how curating influences his work as an artist, he replied, “I’m not sure, but deeply engaging with anyone’s work — which is really the pleasure of curating in the first place — is going to have some effect. What one does with curating is to make a context, hopefully a place of depth, and also of buoyancy.” And so we have it: all that is needed to enjoy “Nice Weather” is a sense of care and curiosity, and engagement, which will yield both joy and knowledge for those who seek.

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November 8 – December 21, 2013
20 East 79th Street, between Fifth and Madison avenues
New York City, 212.737.2060

Walking into Salle’s Ghost Painting show late last year, one might have expected to see Salle’s multi-layered, lateral dislocations of image and subject played out across the surface.  Instead, one was transfixed by beautiful color, translucence and internal depth. There is also directness, singularity, and an emphasis on centrality in this series from the early 1990s. The tough simplicity of the Ghost Paintings is a clear pivot from Salle’s better-known work.

I immediately thought of a comment the painter and critic Sidney Tillim had made to me twenty years ago. Tillim had stated with certitude that David Salle is an exceptionally fine colorist.  I hadn’t thought of Salle in these terms before, but Sidney’s comment stuck with me.  I have always considered Salle’s main achievement to be his inventive use of inserts and filigrees in energetic compositions.  Initially informed by John Baldessari at Cal Arts in the early seventies, Salle’s probing imagination eventually found common cause with the flurried compositions of Francis Picabia, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist toward the end of that decade. But Salle’s longstanding, unwavering ability to communicate how much he loves the act of painting was a thorny proposition for an artist who ascended with “Pictures Generation.” Salle’s signature trajectory, an imagistic slot-machine surrealism, barrels on, as recently evidenced in New York solo exhibitions at Lever House and Mary Boone gallery in 2012 and 2011 respectively.

So much is captivating here.  Bold simplicity reigns as big fields of color dominate these large paintings. The color schemes range from melancholic to a brightness that is reminiscent of Warhol’s swan song Daimler-Benz car series.  And if you’ve ever wondered what single representation Salle would settle on if he had to downshift from his effusive progression of racing representations, here it is – a photo image staged by Salle himself, of a mysterious shrouded figure, drapery cascading that is timeless and elegiac.  Anonymous yet theatrical, the figure’s absence of identity actually increases its presence. It’s as if Salle is asking, if I cover it over, does it really have less impact? It is an act of negation that begets pictorial possibilities.

The presence of a shrouded figure, eerie and beautiful, carries centuries of history.   When Salle elects not to use color, as in Ghost 12, associations of grisaille painting, haunting fragments of classical sculpture, and the gloomy tonalities of early photography spill forth.  Salle’s drapery configurations bear resemblance to the backdrops in Victorian photos of children, a portrait style in which mothers actually hid under fabric drapery while supporting their toddlers for the camera.  That Salle has titled his series Ghost Paintings underscores the images’ spectral, shape-shifting quality, which also echoes turn-of-the-century interest in spiritualism and supernal apparitions.  And Salle’s softly contoured drapery can also suggest feminine interiority. The florals of Ghost 9 and Ghost 11 recall Fragonard’s young women swathed in pinks, yellows and blues.

Salle’s rolling concavities of cloth and color also recall the paintings of Andrea Del Sarto, as in Ghost 10, for instance, where architectonic drapery reinforces compositional centrality, leading us deeper into the psychic space of the scene.   When Salle amplifies the color, in half of the works on display, his neon combinations revisit the fully mannered color displays of Del Sarto’s younger colleagues, Jacopo Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino.  Both Salle’s Ghost 6 and his Ghost 14, which reveals the tilted face of his female model, have characteristics of the swooning madonnas in Pontormo’s Deposition and Fiorentino’s Lamentation.  When the suggestive folds of drapery are plied to enhance mourning or passion, the sacred and profane often spring from the same source.

Salle’s solitary shrouded figures conjure a compendium of associations.  Ghost 1 seems like a mountain, while Ghost 5 looks like one of Zubaran’s monks or Guston’s Klansmen.  The photo image in Ghost 3, (shrunk and recycled by Salle in Picture Builder one year later), now seems prescient.  With a discernibly forlorn posture and outstretched arms, the figure is now disturbingly familiar in the form of the infamous, harrowing image of a shrouded Iraqi prisoner under torture.

Focusing on one large-scale image per work, Salle taxed the image with successive acts of negation and dissociation.  He cut it, visibly re-stitched it, and inked it.  The image was horizontally trisected on photosensitive linen, and rejoined with two visibly sewn seams.  Here, Salle looked past the variations of the modernist grid relied upon by fellow postmodernists. Instead, he proportioned his images classically, into approximate thirds.  The narrative-driven formats used by Salle’s Picture Generation peers promoted sequential arrangements that mimicked authoritarian modes of instruction and control.  Ideally suited to enshrine critique, ideology, and promote a return to the aesthetics of puritan severity, such formats lacked the flexibility to accommodate Salle’s less orthodox visual interests.  In contrast, Salle’s single image doesn’t settle into a read. However, in a tacit nod to Minimalist iconoclasm, each horizontal section in the Ghost Paintings is identified with a distinct color, giving each painting the look of a tri-colored flag.  But Salle adroitly inks the surfaces with intense hues that increase depth of field, light, and illusion. The effect is not dissimilar to David Reed’s drapery-inspired abstractions of the period.  Employing a breezy imperfect haste, Salle’s occasional traces of wide brushstrokes reveal how the thin translucent veils of color were pushed around. Both the color applications and the photo images have been treated nonchalantly.  Spots, scratches and other photo imperfections appear like eye floaters, baring all against the draped figure. Absorbing these stresses, the shrouded figure gains poetic strength while the Rothko-esque proportions and emphasis on color field allow the viewer to hang back and bask in sensation.

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Toys’R’U.S. (When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth)
Skarstedt Fine Art
1018 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10021
November 19 – December 21, 2005

“The Curiosity Shop” is a small, well constructed house cum store structure with a front porch and windows in the front door (there is no back door), and on the front and side of it. The artist, who made a brief appearance in the gallery with an attractive couple while I was there, was glowing as he told them that the house was constructed by a friend in a backyard in Rhode Island, that it is rainproof, and that it has been bought and will be kept outdoors by the new owner. After lingering for a few moments on the front porch they disappeared into a private backroom. Their muffled laughter resonated throughout the gallery during my visit.

The sign hanging in the front porch has three words on it in descending order: ANTIQUES, CURIOSITIES and COLLECTIBLES. The lighting in the completely sealed off shop is dim and self-consciously atmospheric. The shop is chock full of objects, many of which we can’t make out. The objects are definitely arranged or ordered in loose categories; ceramic animals, flowers, humanoid statuettes and figurines, various types of birds and stuffed animals, books, hats, models or kitschy sculptures of cars/vehicles, different types of lanterns, piles of cigar boxes, rows of tools, stacked cans of paints and varnishes, bottles, stacked and almost completely obscured paintings against the back wall, a pedestal with an assortment of small busts arranged on it, time keeping devices such as clocks and egg timers, and much more.

What are we to make of this busy assortment of stuff? Dion does not try completely to avoid verisimilitude. Anyone familiar with the experience of visiting a rural antique shop will see connections between the real and this natural wood interior. Keys hang near the shop-owners desk like they would in a real shop. There is a desk and chair for the make believe owner to sit at. There is a magnifying light on the desk for the proprietor to examine goods with. The simple interior and exterior design of the shop is meant to suggest a real place. At least this is a model of the real upon which Dion attempts to superimpose metaphysical dimensions.

We learn about the metaphysical dimensions of The Curiosity Shop, those relating to “a reality beyond what is perceptible to the senses,” in the accompanying gallery. In it there are a number of competent but uninspired drawings, leftovers from past installations that are meant to satisfy those seeking to own a Dion, and a few Dadaist sculptures. In one drawing titled The Curiosity Shop there is a book shelf divided into two rows, and the sections in each row are labeled in descending order. The left column reads, Vision, Hearing, Touch, Taste, Smell, and Allegory of Vision, and the right column reads, Air, Earth, Water, Fire, The Underworld, and Realms of the Cosmos.

Dion attempts to connect elements of the real, a highly subjective use of classification “systems” (I use the term loosely because intuition is involved. Intuition plays an important part in the composing process and the selection process that brings these objects together.), and a powerful critique of and haunting display of our complete immersion in the unreal. Dion’s installations are simulating devices, in that they are created in order to examine aspects of human behavior which can never be subject to direct experimentation. Subtle traces of the artist’s conceptual framework are present, but they do not completely dispel the imitative representation on display. We are supposed to look at the groupings of things and wonder if they symbolize some concept or idea and why groupings are juxtaposed.

After looking at the drawing I returned to the shop and got up close to the small windows on the side of the structure and tried to find the shelf in the drawing I looked at. More or less in front of me there was a bookshelf that did not look exactly like the one in the drawing with respect to its size and shape and the number of shelves. On each shelf in one of the two rows of shelves there was a plaster cast of a body part: Mouth/Chin, Ear, Fingers or Hand, Eye, Nose. Surrounding the casts, some of them obscured by a swathe of colored fabric, were objects that relate to a specific sense, magnifying devices, textured bric-a-bracs, and things that produce sounds. We are forced to strain our eyes and imagination when peering into the murky depths of the shop and one wonders what the act of looking for that special something in a real junk shop means. The atmospheric lighting resembles after hours lighting in a real junk shop. Are we searching for a lost life of the senses when we purchase things we don’t really need to improve our quality of life? Is consumer fetishism a poor substitute for bodily satisfactions? When we shop for curios or buy works of art do we really seek out a lost past or a banished metaphysical worldview?

Most shoppers who frequent antique shops think there is some ideal moment in the past when objects were purer because they were handmade not mass produced, and the fact that all tactile sensations are thwarted by the sealed off shop and we must rely on our gaze to examine the objects within the shop, we slowly come to realize that language constitutes reality and we can never have true consummation with things without the mediation of words. This installation proves the Heisenbergian concept that “the very act of observing alters the object being observed.” The antique shop acts as a supplement for a lack of full presence (we can’t touch anything in the shop). We search for something amidst the semi-orderly displays of the antique shop, perhaps for a romanticized past, but we are left with supplements of this past. This installation is an autopsy of nostalgia. Dion re-presents the experience shared by buyer and seller, when they have what Carl Freedman describes as “no relation to…things but that of possession.”

Mark Dion’s second installment in his “Toys ‘R’ U.S.” series, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, on display at Skarstedt Fine Art until December 21, is a blunt and horrifying exploration of our deep attachment to simulations and the way simulations do not replace real things or concepts but are the sole substance of our knowledge of the past and often the present. The collection and display of simulations of dinosaurs or perverted and completely transformed dinosaur-ness in this tableau of a child’s bedroom exudes obsessive energy. There is a desk and chair, a dresser with its drawers open and a television on top of it playing trailers for movies that feature dinosaur special effects (“The Lost World,” “One Million Years, B.C.,” ”The Land Unknown,” “Dinosaurus,” and some installment of the Godzilla saga), a bed, and a night table with a lamp covered with dinosaur decals. Socks, pajamas, underwear, shirts, ties, and shoelaces emblazoned with things we call dinosaurs hang out of the drawers. There are so many dinosaur related products in this installation that I can’t mention all of them, but they can be divided into categories: books, food, dishware and utensils, bathroom items including an antibiotic ointment with a dinosaur on the packaging, clothing, toys, action figures, games, bedding, graphic material such as wallpaper, posters, stamps, decals and stickers, illustrations, and pages from a coloring book. Dion includes a partially filled in page from a child’s coloring book in this installation so that gallerygoers intermittently feel or think they are in an actual bedroom. Of course Dion doesn’t attempt to make the verisimilitude of the installation seamless. The white cube is always present but this obscene amassing of consumer crap would leave less of an impression if everything was behind a glass display. These “dinosaurs” have little to do with real dinosaurs, and Dion emphasizes the fact that our understanding of the world is a product of capitalism. Recognizability trumps knowledge. Therefore, the solace we received throughout our childhood from imaginary forms that signify dinosaurs was preparation for a life of impossible longings and willful ignorance. Signifiers are not what they signify and the signified is always absent.

Dion tells us that a museum’s mission to popularize the sciences is just as insidious as any other deformation of the real perpetrated by Hollywood or Chef Boyardee. Dion once complained about the inaccuracy of many of the brilliant dioramas at the Museum of Natural History. This wasn’t just nitpicking. Science related products such as “Eyewitness Books: Dinosaurs.” or a poster for a new dinosaur exhibit at the Nat. Hist. Museum blend in with the dinosaur fruit snacks, dinosaur keychains, dinosaur calendar, dinosaur underwear and socks, dinosaur pins (“Party ‘til You’re Extinct”), dinosaur gummi candy, dinosaur straws, dinosaur gumball dispenser, dinosaur trading cards, dinosaur baseball caps, dinosaur pillows, dinosaur shaped pasta, et alia.

It is hard not to take Jean Baudrillard’s ideas seriously when standing amidst all of these signifiers. This installation makes us think about the concept of dinosaur. The sparse knowledge most people have about them and the distorted images the word dinosaur conjures up, do not relate to the real but owe their entire existence to consumer processes, the making of useless goods, the generating of desire for these goods, and the marketing of them. The overload accompanying this installation is an integral part of its message. It is easy to imagine installations similar to this one focusing on dogs, or people, or heart shapes, or anything we have completely transformed into banal and ubiquitous symbols. This installation examines cultural processes that distort, repackage and recontextualize the real. The installation shows us a world of consumer friendly signifiers that the individual is immersed in before she/he has a chance to experience the real or at least a coherent pictorial and textual account of the real. How many people really take the time to learn about real dinosaurs and is it even possible to do so?

On a more optimistic note, Dion also points out the malleability of our signifiers or symbols. The general concept of dinosaur is associated with comfort and nourishment (cookies, fudge, bubblegum and bedsheets), playfulness and camaraderie (Barney the purple dinosaur makes a few appearances and plastic and stuffed dinosaurs abound), hygiene and health (adhesive bandages and toothbrushes), fearful amoral monsters (Godzilla and Jurassic Park). Dion shows us how comfortable we have become with this commodity filled hyperreality. These dinosaur signifiers change through time and become more sophisticated formally and on a psychic level. Advances in filmmaking and manufacturing processes allow companies and directors to add detail of form and sophisticated movements to their dinosaurs. They can make them scarier and ickier for adult audiences. For toddlers and preschoolers the dinosaur signifier is scrubbed of all things messy and biological and made soft edged and cute. The unreal, whether it contains viscous and fanged monsters or cuddly and bright colored squeeze toys, has pervaded our lives, our habits and routines, our leisure time and hobbies, our imaginations. We are so accustomed to these distortions that the real has gone missing, and we like it that way.

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