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- [00:01]
Jana Peel
Now, I would have loved to be in Los angeles in the 1970s. It was a city that was home to an illustrious array of artists, musicians and thinkers like Joan Didion, Joni Mitchell, Francis Ford Coppola, and David Hockney. It was also the new home for the guest I'm about to introduce you to here on Chanel Connects, a podcast all about what's new and what's next in arts and culture. That guest is the painter and polymath David Salle. In 1970, he had arrived in LA from Kansas. He formed part of the inaugural class at CalArts, an art school in Santa Clarita founded by Walt Disney with a faculty that included legends like John Baldessari, Judy Chicago, and Nam June Paik. Since its inception, CalArts has pushed their students to make art without limits, and in the words of director Ravi Rajan, to keep it weird. I'm Jana Peel, president of arts, culture and heritage at Chanel, and during LA Art Week in February, Sally joined me on stage at lacma, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. David was in town for his first LA solo show in nearly 30 years, and together we discussed his relationship to the city, his embrace of AI, and his career as a Renaissance man. Here's our conversation.
- [01:27]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
Live from los angeles, this is chanel connects. Please welcome david salley. David, thank you so much for being here today with us. This is such a pleasure.
- [01:48]
David Salle
My pleasure. Thank you for the introduction.
- [01:50]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
Yana, I would love to pick up where we left off in your studio in Brooklyn. And you told me at the time about when you first arrived here in Los Angeles. And if I may, I'd love to hear about that hero's journey to the inaugural class of Cal Arts. What did you find in Santa Clarita?
- [02:08]
David Salle
You know, it's true. I hadn't been anywhere at that age, only I was 17. I. I hadn't traveled anywhere, hadn't been in actually a real city before. The marvel of walking out of LAX into the warm afternoon with palm trees all around was quite a revelation. What I had expected from the school was a great deal of freedom and also rigor, but I didn't really know. No one knew what to expect. But that all turned out to be true. I felt it was a tremendous sense of trust on the part of the faculty. The assumption was that everyone who was there was already an artist, even if it wasn't really true. That was the fiction was maintained. The flip side of that, there was a tremendous amount of expectation to actually do something. People demanded a lot of themselves. So that Rigor was in the air and the two things combined, freedom and rigor. Well, it's a good combination.
- [03:23]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
I love how we were discussing that. Grades were certainly not part of the practice, but some of the faculty were so extraordinary. I'd love it if you could share with us who was on that campus.
- [03:33]
David Salle
There were so many people there the first year, first couple of years. Paul Brock was the dean of the art school who he's not remembered today for his painting, but he was an incredible raconteur. Incredible. He was referred to as the Golden Throat. Could talk about anything at length. Paul was the dean. Alan Capro would be the assistant associate dean. Then everybody from John, of course, was there. Of course, John Bellisari was there. My painting teacher was a painter named Alan Hacklin, who at the time was very feisty, scrappy New York guy. Then it was home to a big part of the Fluxus movement. Nam June Paik, Allison Knowles. The atmosphere was one of the access to whoever you wanted to meet.
- [04:29]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
And of course you knew how to drive, which was a very essential skill, it seems. What did that mean for you in terms of time spent with Vito Acconci and Germano Chalant? Any interesting conversations or collaborations?
- [04:42]
David Salle
My scholarship was dependent on a certain amount of work and certain number of hours. Work study, job. And that job was to drive people around because I had a car. Not everyone did. It was my job to meet people at the airport and in the case of German Archelot, to drive him for weeks and seemingly endlessly, always in search of the perfect espresso coffee. And I had a lot of fun with Vito. So I was the all around gopher chauffeur for these people.
- [05:25]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
I love the idea. There was also such a strong feminist movement at the time.
- [05:29]
David Salle
The feminist art program started in the second year and there was tremendous awareness of feminism as a cultural force and as an aesthetic redirections. So that, I mean, although men were not invited to participate, it was in the air.
- [05:48]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
It's interesting when I think about that radicality and your respect for Jean Luc Godard and talking about how performance and conceptual art were so much at the forefront. And then I chatted to our mutual friend Rosalie Goldberg, who told me she visited your studio after you had graduated from CalArts and she found the most radical thing she could imagine, which is that you were painting. Did it feel radical at the time?
- [06:13]
David Salle
I have to say it did. There was something, I wouldn't say illicit about it, but there's something slightly transgressional about returning to painting. I Had been a painter before going to CalArts. I went to CalArts as a painter. I spent the first year painting. So it wasn't something that I discovered sort of as a fluke. It was a return to something that was part of my identity. But for sure, in the mid and late 70s there was a. I don't know if it was consensus exactly, but there was an attitude that painting belonged to a historically bounded time frame and that to go forward required some other form, just turned out not to be true, Turned out to be a kind of momentary conceit. But we did have to break through that fourth wall, so to speak.
- [07:04]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
It's so interesting because we were just chatting about the 80s, the 90s, and in that era, in the 80s, things were moving so fast and so it feels like money, attention, careers being taken on so early by a gallery and then having a seminal mid career survey at the youngest age at that time at the Whitney.
- [07:24]
David Salle
Cultural things move at different speeds at different times and they're always related to the larger world, the larger economic forces. What happened in the art world, specifically in the 70s, there had been a terrible recession in the U.S. i think in 74. And the trickle down effect of that was to really freeze the art world, the gallery system, part of the art world, that's not the entire art world. But that New York gallery aspect was terribly locked in place at that moment. There was very little opportunity. The attitude was, oh, you're a young person, oh, that's nice, call us in 10 years. No one cared. And in a way it was brutal. Another way, it was quite generative because you were kind of thrown back on yourself. As always, the shifts were tied to shifts in the general economic picture. In the beginning of the 80s, there was an unleashing of economic forces that meant that people of a certain generation were looking at art again. And that created opportunity for people of my generation. So that was just the luck of timing.
- [08:51]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
And in that moment of Reaganomics, 34, having such a prominent exhibition at the Whitney at such a young age, did the recognition change you?
- [09:01]
David Salle
I don't think so. People say this all the time, but I think there's a certainly element of truth to it. You are who you are. At that point I was 34 or 35. My identity as an artist, although certainly not fixed, at least hopefully not fixed, it wasn't like a reed in the wind. So there was kind of too busy to be that affected by it in that external way.
- [09:30]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
It's like David Foster Wallace, you were in the water.
- [09:32]
David Salle
Also as it was expanding. And even as this attention was gathering force, it still was small compared to today. So the people who one would have looked to for either approval or disapproval, it's a small number of people.
- [09:55]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
One of those people who was a great fan of your work, Hans Lorich, Obrist said, you are a real Renaissance man.
- [10:01]
David Salle
I think what he's talking about is very early on, I was always enamored of contemporary dance, contemporary ballet, even when I was a kid. And there was already in the 50s and 60s, a tradition of painters making sets and costumes for choreographers. So Maurice Cunningham famously collaborated with all the important artists of the day, notably Johnson, Rauschenberg, but not only many others. And Alex Katz had already, by the early 60s, designed numerous ballets for Paul Taylor, some of which I saw when I was growing up. So this was a living tradition within the kind of painting world. It wasn't that big of a leap. So when I met Carol Armitage, the choreographer, when she asked me to do something for a ballet she'd commissioned by Baryshnikov to make for ABT at the Metropolitan Opera, it was on the one hand, very daunting because of the scale of it. On the other hand, it was very much within this tradition that I understood in the art world.
- [11:15]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
It's very Diaghilev in a sense.
- [11:17]
David Salle
In terms of the ballet, I guess you could say it starts there. It starts with Diaghilev and Leon Bakst and the people in that era. But it really was reinvented in the. In the 60s with Merce and then and later with Paul Taylor. I felt about Carol's work some absolute synchronicity with what I was trying to do. The non classical classicism or the classical liberalism of it. The thing about dance or anything that unfolds on a stage, it has the element of time, which is the one aspect that painting doesn't have. Painting has a lot of things, but doesn't have a temporal component. So the ability to create images that unfolded over time on a stage with continually moving components was just very exciting.
- [12:18]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
That's a beautiful segue. When I was just at moma and in their film moment, Christoph was mentioning that film is art with time. This leads me to your collaboration with Scorsese. So, of course, the film Search into Destroy has become such a cult film. Can you tell us what drove you behind the camera?
- [12:34]
David Salle
Yeah, I think Search and Destroy, unlikely enough, became was voted some film society's favorite film in Croatia a number of years ago. But it was seen by a few people in this country. The film was a natural extension of having worked with Carol and worked with dancers and singers on stage. Once you've had that experience of shaping the imagistic meaning of things over time, it was a kind of natural jump to film. I had always been interested in narrative and language. I was always invested in that. So something I wanted to see if I could make something that was imagistically lively, but also told the story and
- [13:24]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
of course, the writing. How to See is such an iconic book. I'm sure everyone in this audience has read it and thumbed it and taken the notes. And Salman Rushdie even said that this was our era's response to John Berger's ways of seeing.
- [13:39]
David Salle
Yes, I believe Salman said that. That was such a wonderful quote. Yeah. The book, hopefully people are still reading it. It's meant to be very approachable and hopefully will provide a model for how to talk about art in a non technical way. Because the conversation around art or the writing around art had become so highly theoretical. It was daunting for people and unnecessarily so.
- [14:11]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
It's such a beautiful collection of essays. And of course you also write for the New York Review of Books. What do you think the state of art criticism is at the moment?
- [14:21]
David Salle
It's challenging, I think, the way art history is taught. Not that I would necessarily know, I've been in school for decades. But from what I can tell, it still has. There's not a tremendous trust of one's own sensations so that things have to be grounded in a theoretical framework to be taken seriously. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but funny starting point that when you start with an external construct, it's harder to access what your real reaction to something is. So we have a certain agreement that surrounds certain works of art. What I was trying to do in that book, what I continue to try to do, and what I encourage other people to do is just ask yourself, was that what I really think about it? I know what I'm supposed to be thinking, but is that what I'm really thinking when I look at that often? The answer is something quite different from what it's supposedly about.
- [15:26]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
I love that we have Ravi Rajan and some colleagues in the audience and they were sitting at CalArts today. Our goal is really to keep it weird, to make sure that we are continuing to bring in thinkers and makers who are contributing to the conversation. I'd love to invoke one of those incredible thinkers. And John Baldessari, of course, was such an important ally and Friend. And I remember in 2010 you published a set of questions that you had asked in the Paris Review, and I wonder if you might indulge me in a quick fire round if I just ask you a couple of favors we can try. All right. What is better for an artist to be loved or feared?
- [16:02]
David Salle
Well, loved, I think.
- [16:08]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
What is the most tenacious misconception about your work?
- [16:12]
David Salle
Oh, about my work? Oh, well, I think it's. This is a long conversation, but I think it's the notion of appropriation, which is one of those. An idea that was useful when it was useful, and then it became encoded in the academic discourse, and now it's such a misdirection of what is actually the case. I would just like that word should be retired.
- [16:44]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
In what way is your work American? And as you think about that, as we look to the Venice Biennale, do you have any sense of nationalism in art at all?
- [16:53]
David Salle
I mean, in the most expansive sense? I think we like to feel like there's nationality plays no role in art. Art transcends nationality. But of course, that's ridiculous, that one is always product of one's culture. Cultures are different. So I do feel American, although it's hard to pinpoint exactly what the hell is so American about what I do, because America is such a big entity, not just as a physical place, but as a concept. Which America are we talking about? Maybe 20 years ago or 50 years ago, certain kind of optimism was American. When you look at a protractor painting by Frank Stella from 1966 or whenever it was, that feels American, that's an embodiment of American optimism. But also, if you look at a Poltec sculpture, it's an embodiment of American pessimism. So which one's American? I don't know. There's an American sense of using the past without being beholden to it, without being overshadowed by it. But I feel like I'm not really the one to answer that question. Someone else can do it.
- [18:10]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
And finally, what's the one thing an artist must never do?
- [18:14]
David Salle
Well, I think the minute you start prescribing something with confidence that this is really correct, of course you're going to be contradicted. You're going to find someone who does exactly that thing. Probably the only thing artists should never do is be boring, Although even that. You can think of lots of boring artworks, but in a good sense.
- [18:43]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
Not going to ask you to expand on that. Rather, we'll turn to 2023 and the explosive article in the New York Times where You told Zachary Small that you had worked with engineers to train AI on artist work, including your own work, the pastorals, to create the new pastorals. And the question I had is whether you could take us to the first image the machine gave you that actually made you think, okay, there's something really interesting here. When was that? And what did you do next?
- [19:14]
David Salle
I was working with a company to develop a game that you could play on your phone that would enable people to experience the thrill of making juxtapositions, like imagistic comparisons and juxtapositions. We never ended up making a game, but in that process of doing that, I was exposed to AI as a capability. And everything that I saw produced in that way, I thought was missing some essential ingredient on a purely visual relationship to visual art. It'd be interesting, arresting, weird, provocative, but nothing felt like art to me. So I really started the whole AI process by trying to figure out what was missing in the recipe. So I started to learn how the thing functioned, how it was made, how it was programmed.
- [20:20]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
And you had a collaborator with you. You had an engineer by your side.
- [20:23]
David Salle
Of course, I wouldn't even know how to turn the machine on without the engineer sitting next to me, nor would I care to know. But with his help, we just tried to diagnose what's missing from this thing. It was very simple. It had been invented and programmed by engineers that have no interest in the visual arts whatsoever, for how would they possibly know what to teach it? When I realized that it simply didn't have the right schooling, we just created a curriculum for it turned out to be a very apt and willing student. Having done that, the next step was to tailor the curriculum in an even more specific way to create something that I might like or I might want to use or work with. That's when we started isolating examples from history of art.
- [21:17]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
Is that where de Chirico Hopper dove started to come in?
- [21:20]
David Salle
Everything to illustrate a certain element. This one for value pattern and that one for edges, that one for compositional rhythm. We started to get results that were interesting and compelling. It just kept going. I kept tailoring it, making a narrower and narrower selection. Then finally, we threw all that away and trained it only on aspects of my own work from the past, elements that I thought would rhyme with the machine's ability to scan and distinguish similarity and difference, which is really what it does.
- [22:03]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
And at the time when we met, you said that for you, AI was just like a palette knife. And of course, great artists have always harnessed technologies yeah, my palette knife is
- [22:13]
David Salle
maybe a little bit glib, but the point is it's a tool. And I do hear the echo, John's voice saying, when video was new, people wondered if it could really be art. And it sounds odd today, but there were people in this early 70s who just thought, this is categorically not art because it's entertainment, it's tele, whatever. And John said, well, it's a tool. You can use it for however you want to. It can be. It's a pencil. You can make something great out of it, make something stupid out of it. That part's up to you. So I do feel like this is a tool and it really depends upon
- [22:51]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
one's intention to finish the cycle. With John Baldessari and AI, I believe there was a moment where he mentioned that if art is meaningful at all, it's in conversation with other artists. You say something, they say something. And who are you in dialogue with right now? Or what are you chasing in your studio that you might not have been 10 years ago?
- [23:12]
David Salle
Yeah, that's a good question. I don't think that what I'm doing now is fundamentally or categorically different from what I've always done. But I do think that as artists, we're always kind of upping the ante. Now I'm trying to bring into alignment a greater array of ideas, forces, images that maybe function at a higher imagistic frequency than things I might have done 10 years ago. I feel like I'm just. I mean, this always sounds so self agrandizing or melodramatic, but it's always a kind of tightrope walk. And I just feel like the tightrope just gets higher and tighter and you keep walking it. The world of art has sort of been kind of villageized now. Villages that don't seem to relate to each other quite so much, which is too bad. But within the painting village, there are a number of people who. Their work looks completely different from mine. There's a shared understanding of what the stakes are. So you ideally are working for those people and look to what they're doing to see if you're on the right track.
- [24:35]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
Well, one of those people we crossed in the new galleries is Michael Govan gave you great praise for the show that he had the pleasure of seeing last night, as I did. And I would love to move to the extreme presentation and the exhibition. It's extraordinary to believe that it's your first solo show in Los Angeles in 30 years. Of course, it opened at Sputhmaggers and that is one of the trifecta of your galleries, I believe, alongside Lehman Mopen and Taddeus Ropach. My Frankenstein is quite a loaded title. Can you tell us more about that?
- [25:08]
David Salle
There is this sense. We talked already. There's a sense that AI is going to wreak havoc on society, which it very well may. I don't really have any thoughts about that. But in the visual arts, the idea that it's going to replace artists or take over the art world or substitute its intention for human intention, I personally find nonsensical. It might happen at some point in the future, but not anytime soon. So the fear around it, to me is very misplaced. The image of Frankenstein, of course, it's actually a misnomer. Frankenstein was the name of the scientist, not the name of the monster. But in the popular imagination, we've sort of transposed the name onto the monster itself.
- [26:03]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
Creator goes too far.
- [26:04]
David Salle
The creator goes too far. But also that, well, we created. Now we've created a monster. Frankenstein, monster. Now it's going to ruin everything. I just don't believe that. So I can use. I can invoke the name in a tongue in cheek, ironic way, clearly meaning the opposite.
- [26:21]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
So there's nothing that you've seen that scares you?
- [26:25]
David Salle
Well, let's put it this way. Bad art scares me.
- [26:28]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
Bad art, boring art.
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David Salle
Yeah, right.
- [26:31]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
Those sound terrifying. Terrifying. Especially being here in these hallowed halls at lacma. And of course, you have so long been in the collections of LACMA and the Broad and Mocha. And I wonder here, 2026, do you think still that institutional recognition continues to be an ultimate ambition for artists?
- [26:53]
David Salle
Well, ultimate ambition. That's a big statement.
- [26:56]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
And ambition, yes.
- [26:57]
David Salle
I think it's important. I think it has always been important, and it continues to be. If you read letters and diaries of artists from the early 20th century or late 20th century, the struggle for institutional acceptance is constant. And so I don't see it changing. Even as our institutions themselves change and our relationship to them changes. The reifying, codification aspect that they have with art is still very important, for better or for worse.
- [27:35]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
How did it feel coming back? It's extraordinary to think 30 years since the solo exhibition, and I believe several since you've actually been in California.
- [27:44]
David Salle
Well, 30 years goes by surprisingly fast
- [27:48]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
if you're not being boring or making bad art.
- [27:51]
David Salle
Clearly, it doesn't seem like so long ago, really, but I know it is. I do think that this actually illustrates a point, that there is something in the nature of making art, even Though so many things around it change, the support system changes, the materials change, the audience changes. There's something about the making of art itself which doesn't change, as you say, the demands on oneself, the kind of mental integration required to do something interesting. I don't think that changes so much. It's different for each individual, of course, but the nature of the endeavor stays constant. So that's my measure of reality.
- [28:39]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
It's so wonderful. And maybe as we near the end of this conversation, this proustan the idea of advice to a young artist and I think you have said in the past, people, patient, be brave, be lucky. After everything we've talked about, I wanted to ask, would you extend that advice
- [28:59]
David Salle
or is that any other advice?
- [29:02]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
Be patient, be brave, be lucky.
- [29:06]
David Salle
There was, I actually wasn't my class, it was after I left, but I think maybe the next or the one after graduating class at CalArts. The commencement speaker was Roy Lichtenstein, who later became a good friend of mine. Roy's commencement address consisted of have all the luck in the world in a way that hasn't changed very much.
- [29:32]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
I guess I'll be cheeky and then ask you as we embark on the Chanel center for Artisan Technology, if you had advice for a facilitator of such an endeavor and if you were reinventing CalArts for 2026, what would you build and what would you ban?
- [29:52]
David Salle
Yeah, it's a really tough question because it, and this was the genius of the school, it didn't ban anything that wasn't violent. So things that were clearly questionable or not going to lead anywhere, they still weren't banned. Everything was encouraged. And I think at times I thought, well, this is. People are really wasting their time. But all that was necessary, that the non banningness of things was necessary. Very daunting for people to be confronted with that much freedom and that little structure. A lot of people were not up to it, but I still think it's the best way.
- [30:43]
Interviewer (possibly Jana Peel or a host)
I hope Ravi Rajan is listening. We have the director in the audience and this is wise words from an extraordinary artist. David, it has been such a pleasure being here in conversation with you here in Los Angeles. It's such a special week. Of course, it's a city that has been through so much this past year that keeps showing us what resilience, community and creativity look like. And above all else, thank you, David Salley.
- [31:08]
David Salle
Thank you, Yana, and thank you for coming. Aria.
- [31:15]
Jana Peel
Thanks again to painter David Salley for joining us for a live edition of Chanel Connect for another thrilling live show about what's new and what's next in arts and culture, listen to our episode with Sarah Z. And Julie Morettu, recorded at the Guggenheim Museum in New York with the two MacArthur geniuses. Until then, stay connected.