Clik here to view.
David Salle, ‘Torn Poster’, 1991.
During one of my visits to the studio of the artist David Salle, he told me that he never revises. Every brushstroke is irrevocable. He doesn’t correct or repaint, ever. He works under the dire conditions of performance. Everything counts, nothing may be taken back, everything must always go relentlessly forward, and a mistake may be fatal. One day, he showed me a sort of murdered painting. He had worked on it a little too long, taken a misstep, killed it.
—Janet Malcolm
You can note the dual tone of incredulity and envy as Janet Malcolm describes this characteristic of David Salle. And if it wasn’t apparent then, she expresses it overtly later on in the same essay, based on a series of interviews with the artist over a span of about two years. She tells him herself that she finds his productivity, in part a result of his nonediting, astonishing. Salle becomes defensive, thinking perhaps of the many times his work has been regarded as frivolous, hasty. He works hard on his paintings, he says, to which Malcolm adds, ‘If work comes easily, it is suspect.’
And she believes what she says. Her essay isn’t just an essay on David Salle; rather, the artist figures nicely into an exploration of artistic and, in general, human nature. Malcolm titles her essay ‘Forty-One False Starts’ because it is precisely that. Salle, a widely covered and widely discussed figure in the 1980s and early 1990s, may have proven quite difficult for Malcolm to cover in any conventional sense. The quote with which I opened this very article makes up Malcolm’s fourth false start. Here are some others:
The artist David Salle and I are sitting at a round table in my apartment. [false start 5]
The artist David Salle and I met for the first time in the fall of 1991. A few months earlier, we had spoken on the telephone about a mystifying proposal of his: that I write the text for a book of reproductions of his paintings, to be published by Rizzoli. When I told him there must be some mistake, that I was not an art historian or an art critic and had but the smallest acquaintance with his work, he said no, there wasn’t a mistake. [false start 6]
The artist David Salle has given so many interviews, has been the subject of so many articles, has become so widely inscribed as an emblematic figure of the eighties art world that it is no longer possible to do a portrait of him simply from life. [false start 9]
In the winter of 1992, I began a series of interviews with the artist David Salle. They were like sittings for a portrait with a very practiced sitter. [false start 15]
I used to visit the artist David Salle in his studio and try to learn the secret of art from him. What was he doing in his enigmatic, allusive, aggressive art? What does any artist do when he produces an artwork? [false start 30]
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. [false start 37]
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. [false start 40]
It is no great accident that each false start, as they rise in ascendance, rings with more irony, more self-awareness. Given Malcolm’s reputation, it is of course entirely possible that these false starts make up a grand conceit, one that Malcolm conceived from the beginning; it is entirely possible that she wasn’t having a difficult time with the essay at all, that she didn’t arrive at her finished product through these series of accidents.
Possible? Yes. Likely? I’m not so sure. I know how writers generally work, or at least I think I do. Malcolm says it herself: ‘If work comes easily, it is suspect.’ Therefore I strongly assume that ‘Forty-One False Starts’ is exactly that, and furthermore I wonder about the exact moment or series of moments when Malcolm accepted what was happening, when she stopped resisting, recalibrated one last time, and declared to herself, ‘This is what this is going to be.’
One year ago, a friend of mine declared, ‘My New Year’s resolution is to stop making New Year’s resolutions.’ Why make promises you can’t keep? she reasoned. Instead she’d rather concentrate on just becoming a better person, regardless of the time of year and minus all the expectations and pressure. I liked the sentiment and agreed almost immediately, but as a chronic year-round resolution maker, I knew that expectations and pressure are part of what resolutions are. You can overdo it, like you can overdo anything. It is one thing to recognise something in your life that isn’t working and fix it; it is another thing to fix what hasn’t even had the chance to break. Malcolm’s essay illustrates that you can overdo this need for a new beginning, all in an attempt to achieve a sort of perfection, which makes it all the more difficult to move on with any meaning, as though you are stuck in January even though the calendar already reads March or April.
We do things, if not for survival or necessity, for possibility. Or to make ourselves more available to possibilities. Even the most proactive and go-getting among us must realise that many things happen by accident. Whether we take credit for certain outcomes is neither here nor there. But a preoccupation with perfection, an obsession with starting over, and a fear of failure will keep you away from possibilities, good or otherwise.
Artists and writers, despite centering their lives around self-expression, always feel the fear of being misunderstood. During his interviews with Janet Malcolm, David Salle was, ironically, forty-one years old. In his middle age, after achieving stardom in his twenties, Salle had only then decided that the fear of being misunderstood—or, as he attests in his case, being misunderstood full-stop—is a natural state of affairs for an artist. ‘I almost don’t see how it can be otherwise,’ he says. Nonartists fear being misunderstood as well, which is to say that humans in general fear being misunderstood, oftentimes as a result of one’s attempt at perfection, and oftentimes contrary to one’s earnest efforts to escape such possibilities.
‘Salle himself behaves like the curator of a sort of museum of himself,’ Malcolm writes. Later, in false start 39, Malcolm describes a letter that Salle wrote to her, towards the end of their long interview process, which in part reads:
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.
To no surprise, both Malcolm and Salle end up where they start. Salle asks Malcolm, ‘Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever thought that your real life hasn’t begun yet?’ The essay was first published ten years ago; I wonder if Malcolm and Salle still feel that way, occasionally.