There was a review by Fairfield Porter from the 1950s about Mark Rothko, one of the more hallowed names in American art. Porter says something like, "Yeah, Rothko paints rectangles of color. They have mass but no weight." That's not in any way a detraction, but it's a description. And it has nothing to do with the spiritual dimension. The main thing is as an intelligent viewer, to identify just what those things are that it does, that those rectangles do, and then not assume that they do these things over here. I don't know why that's challenging.
David SalleWhen I first came to New York, I knew some painters older than myself. I was kind of the kid who was allowed to hang out with them. That is more the way people talked in those days, it was perfectly normal to question a work's fundamental premises and its fundamental visual manifestations. It was perfectly okay to say, "Oh, that should have been red" or something like that. In a funny way, the way artists talk about art is to de-privilege it.
David SalleI have to say, that's pretty typical for artists, kind of embarrassingly typical for artists that everything is all about selection.
David SalleI think people have to be given - or take - the permission to say that something is nothing. Just because it's in a museum doesn't mean it's anything.
David SalleI feel like it's not so much a tradition as a system that has been codified over the centuries starting in the Renaissance that applies to any painted surface. So if you're engaging in paintings, this is the language that one has to learn and is obliged to speak. I was very fortunate that I learned this language when I was a kid before I went to California, where I learned the language of attitude. Somehow the two things began to coexist.
David Salle