David Salle: Straight to It, Then A conversation with the artist

By Sam Needleman

Sanford Schwartz once wrote in The New York Review that when David Salle puts down his brush and picks up his pen to write art criticism, he does so with the same “seemingly out-of-nowhere assurance” with which he arrived on the painting scene in the late 1970s. His crisp but pensive judgments have appeared for nearly a decade in our pages, where he has often written about living, working artists, from the painters Laura Owens, Charline von Heyl, and Alex Katz to the sculptors Rachel Harrison, Charles Ray, and, in this year’s Art Issue, Arlene Shechet.

In his dispatch from the Hudson Valley’s Storm King Art Center, where an exhibition of Shechet’s work was on view last year, Salle writes that her large-scale aluminum-and-steel sculptures, which are painted “the colors of marzipan or Jordan almonds,” use “off-kilter, surprising harmonies of shape, material, texture, and color with aplomb.” Wandering around the great sculpture garden, he bristles against the idea that a given artwork must argue for “one true thing.” Shechet’s complex ensembles prompt him to ask: “What if more than one thing is true?… Why not all these things at once?” For him she achieves, “in the rightness of her combinations, a kind of alchemy of style.”

I e-mailed Salle this week—he was in South Korea for the opening of an exhibition of his work—to ask about the effect of these ensembles, and about his own life and writing.