Live from LACMA: David Salle and Yana Peel

0:00David Salle: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 Salley. In 1970, he had arrived in L.A. 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 Namjoon Paik.

0:47David Salle: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 Yana 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.

1:26David Salle:Live from Los Angeles, this is Chanel Connects. Please welcome David Salley.

1:44David Salle:David, thank you so much for being here today with us. This is such a pleasure.

1:48Yana Peel:My pleasure. Thank you for the introduction.

1:50David Salle: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 CalArts. What did you find in Santa Clarita?

2:07Yana Peel:You know, it's true. I hadn't been anywhere at that age. I think I was 17. 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 a 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.

3:00Yana Peel: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

3:22David Salle: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

3:33Yana Peel:there were so many people there the first year, first couple of years Paul Brock was at the end of the art school who is not remembered today for his painting, but he was an incredible raconteur. He was referred to as the golden throat. He 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 Belisari was there. My painting teacher was a painter named Alan Hacklin, who at the time was a very feisty, scrappy New York guy. Then was home to a big part of the Fluxus movement, Namjoon Pike, Alison Knowles.

4:22The atmosphere was one of access to whoever you wanted to meet.

4:28David Salle: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 Cellant? Any interesting conversations or collaborations?

4:41Yana Peel:My scholarship was dependent on a certain amount of work, a certain number of hours, a work-study job. And that job was to drive people around. I had a car. Not everyone did. It was my job to meet people at the airport. and in the case of Germain Archulot, to drive him for weeks and seemingly endlessly, always in search of the perfect espresso coffee. I had a lot of fun with Vito. So I was the all-around gopher chauffeur for a lot of these people.

5:25David Salle:I love the idea there was also was such a strong feminist movement at the time?

5:28Yana Peel:The feminist art program started in the second year, and there was tremendous awareness of feminism as a cultural force and as an aesthetic redirection. So that, I mean, although men were not invited to participate, it was in the air.

5:48David Salle: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? I have to say it did. There was something, I wouldn't say illicit about it, but there was something slightly transgressional about returning to painting.

6:21Yana Peel: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. It just turned out not to be true, it turned out to be a kind of momentary conceit, but we did have to break through that fourth wall, so to speak.

7:04David Salle: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.

7:24Yana Peel: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.

8:15Yana Peel:No one cared. And in a way it was brutal. In 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 a lot of timing.

8:50David Salle: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?

9:00Yana Peel:I don't think so. People say this all the time, but I think there's a certain element of truth to it. You are who you are. At that point, I was 34, 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 affected by it in that external way.

9:29David Salle:It's like David Foster Wallace, you're in the water.

9:32Yana Peel:Also, well, even 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.

9:54David Salle:One of those people who was a great fan of your work, Hans-Lerich Obrist, said you are a real Renaissance man.

10:00Yana Peel: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, Merce Cunningham famously collaborated with all the important artists of the day, notably Johnson and 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.

10:51Yana Peel:So when I met Carol Armitage, the choreographer, when she asked me to do something for a ballet she'd commissioned by Bershnikov 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.

11:14David Salle:It's very Diaghilev, in a sense, in terms of the ballet.

11:17Yana Peel:You could say it starts there. It starts with Diaghilev and Leon Baxton, the people in that era. But it really was reinvented in the 60s with Merce 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. So 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.

12:18David Salle: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 and Destroy has become such a cult film. Can you tell us what drove you behind the camera?

12:33Yana Peel: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 invested in that. So it's something I wanted to see if I could make something that was imagistically lively that also told the story.

13:23David Salle:And 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.

13:38Yana Peel:Yeah, I found that Salman said that. That was such a wonderful quote. But 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.

14:10David Salle: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?

14:20Yana Peel: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,

14:34Yana Peel: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 it's a funny starting point. 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?

15:19Yana Peel:And often the answer is something quite different from what it's supposedly about.

15:25David Salle:I love that. We have Ravi Rajan and some colleagues in the audience, and they were saying 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 favourites. We can try. All right. What is better for an artist to be loved or feared?

16:02Yana Peel:Well, loved, I think.

16:08David Salle:What is the most tenacious misconception about your work?