Random

By ROBERT HUGHES

With so many contenders for the title of Most Overrated Young American Artist, it is hard to award the palm. But one of the strongest candidates would certainly be David Salle, who at 34 is having what is called a "mid- career retrospective" of 42 enormous paintings at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. After closing at the Whitney on March 29, the exhibition will travel through next January to museums in Los Angeles, Toronto and Chicago. As a sign of cultural inflation, it would be hard to beat.

This premature event looks like a real retrospective but is not one. It covers the past seven years of Salle's work and is -- to pinch a term from Jean Baudrillard, the French semiotician whose phrases are parroted everywhere in the art world today and recur like pious ejaculations in the exhibition catalog -- a "simulacrum." In days of yore, the aim of a museum retrospective used to be clear. It was to sum up a distinguished career, presenting the evidence of a long life's work. For a major museum to give a 34-year-old artist a retrospective would have seemed absurd, like tossing an egg into the air to admire its grace of flight. Not anymore. The pressures of market hype, acting on curators who do not wish to seem stuffy, have made pseudo events like this common -- even if the brevity of the artist's career fills his curriculum vitae with solemn entries like "1960: Receives from a family friend The Natural Way to Draw, an artist's handbook."

Salle, who was eight that year, seems not quite to have absorbed whatever lessons the text offered. Instead, he was destined to become the painter most identified with the big vogue of the early '80s, "appropriation": the copying and scavenging of images and stylistic packages, or even of whole works, from other art and the mass media. Works like Footmen, 1986, are palimpsests: some grainy silkscreens a la Warhol, a head roughly quoted from a 17th century Spanish painting, a figure leaning over a railroad bridge, a scrawled yellow outline of a girl in hot pants. They suggest narrative but deliver none.

Not even Salle's most devout fans seem able to say what his pictures are about, for all their literary overtones. They are laden with sexual imagery ) -- Salle's work seems to owe a lot to a brief stint he did as a layout man for the porn magazine Stag in the mid-'70s -- but that imagery comes out as congealed, monotonous sleaze. Salle's nudes are mere signs for bimbos, not erotic presences, and their popularity may be linked to the cynicism of their sexual politics.

In general, Salle's work is just a sourer, more hermetic and manually coarser footnote to a long modernist history of montage and quotation that runs from Dada to Pop art -- random citation from the image haze that envelops us, with some T. and A. for signature. Its "relevance" consists only of the accuracy with which it mirrors the inattentiveness of a culture benumbed by television. Its main debts are to James Rosenquist, for the big, juxtaposed image fragments, and to Francis Picabia, for the unassimilated layering of outline images over solid ones in that painter's late, wretchedly bad paintings. But where appropriation is concerned, it is not etiquette to speak of debt.

Salle's is formula art of the most obvious kind. Its peculiar smugness comes from the belief that appropriation is the best, even the only way for art to keep its power in a media-soaked environment. "By embracing the intensity of empty value at the core of mass-media representation," claims Lisa Phillips in her catalog essay, "only then can the perennial challenge be met of finding and constructing significant meaning in the midst of declining values for images and words." This is modish nonsense. What becomes more obvious with each passing year of postmodernism is that art's relation to mass media has become an aesthetic blind alley and that only an enhanced sense of the world's concreteness -- opposing the flimflam of manipulation that gets spun about it -- is likely to redeem the discourse of painting.

Due to the poverty of his formal means, there is no sign of this in Salle. He is a competent layout man, and can push his unrelated images around the picture with a certain finesse. But he can hardly draw at all. His line is slack and weak, "stylish" rather than imbued with style. What he does is trace, drawing lines around images cast on his oversize canvases from a projector. In this way he preserves some of the look of the original, as a taxidermist preserves the look of a cat. But the one is as dead as the other.

In comparing any Salle image with its art source -- his feeble paint-by- numbers rendering of details from Gericault and Ribera, for instance -- one is struck by his inability to put any vitality at all into the relation between the motif and the traces of the hand, to create an interesting shape, or even to model a form convincingly. But there is an out: Salle's graphic ineptitude is praised by his fans as a kind of fallen representation, as though it were a critique of affectlessness. Thus his work is credited with exposing what it merely embodies. This is a no-lose situation, under which the artist is held to be interesting for what he does not say. "Salle's images," remarks the show's curator, Janet Kardon, in the catalog, "often seem directed away from us, as if we were not the right audience." Lovers of serious painting can only agree.