ART : Cozy Connection : Exhibits of photographs by two figurative painters show how they make use of one art form to record images for another

Ever since the camera arrived on the scene in the early 19th Century, art scholars have been puzzling over how it changes the meaning of painting. There are those who say photography has no effect whatsoever and there are plenty who dismiss it as a lesser art form not even in the same league as painting. Though answers to such questions are largely a matter of taste, the advent of photography in the 19th Century inarguably served to free painting from one of the duties assigned to it from its inception: To record the way the world looks.

Thus, the camera played a significant role in shaping painting’s identity in the 20th Century as a tool for personal exploration and catharsis, a road to the self. Having staked out an entirely different patch of turf, photography has coexisted quite peacefully with painting--in fact, the two have always fed off each other, and never more so than in the ‘80s when media-based art dominated the avant-garde.

The cozy relationship between painting and photography is neatly illustrated in current local exhibitions of photographs by Eric Fischl and David Salle, two phenomenally successful New York artists widely credited with helping revitalize figurative painting in the ‘80s. Though one needn’t be familiar with their paintings to enjoy their photographs (indeed, these pictures are unexpectedly polished), this work is primarily of interest for the glimpse it provides into how these artists construct their paintings.

Though both artists insist they regard their photographs primarily as resource materials, Fischl, whose work is at the Michael Kohn Gallery through Feb. 20, and Salle, whose photographs go on view at Stuart Regen on Feb. 29, both concede they were somewhat startled to discover that their photographs read as cohesive bodies of work.

ERIC FISCHL

“I certainly don’t think this work is a major event in the history of photography,” said Eric Fischl, speaking from his New York studio. “However, I was surprised when I saw the photos blown up, isolated and edited--I saw that they do bear a very strong relationship to my work; both the photographs and the paintings focus on people making expressive gestures at awkward and inelegant moments.”

Casual snapshots taken on the nude beaches of St. Tropez in southern France, Fischl’s photographs resemble his paintings in their overt sensuality and abundance of flesh. However they differ significantly in mood. The photos depict people at leisure who appear to be genuinely relaxed and at ease; in his paintings Fischl takes those photographed figures and transposes them into suburban psychological dramas freighted with anxiety, alienation and misdirected erotic drive. Like the French artist Balthus (whose handling of paint and conceptual orientation appear to have influenced him), Fischl focuses on themes of adolescent sexuality, repressed impulses and strange indiscretions. Evoking an excruciatingly uncomfortable interior realm, these disturbing paintings probably would’ve been dismissed as too inflammatory were it not for the fact that Fischl paints in a comfortingly traditional style.

“My career’s been a dream,” said the 43-year-old artist, who had a retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum just nine years after he began exhibiting. “I keep waiting to get found out,” he adds with a rueful laugh.

A realist painter who cites Max Beckmann and Edgar Degas as central influences, Fischl was born in New York, one in a family of four children. His father was a businessman and his mother, who was alcoholic, was killed in an automobile accident in 1970 (it makes sense that the subject of childhood trauma is a recurring motif in his work). After attending prep school in Maryland, he flunked out of college in his freshman year and drifted to the hippie scene in San Francisco where he didn’t fit in either. He then moved back in with his parents, then living in Phoenix, and enrolled at a junior college where he discovered his aptitude for art. Things moved fast for Fischl from there.

After earning his degree at CalArts in 1972, he landed a teaching job at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design where he was to remain for four years. By the time he moved to New York in 1978, he’d begun to work in the representational style he’s known for, and in 1983 he was snapped up by high-powered dealer Mary Boone. The rest is art history.

Fischl’s relationship with the camera began in the late ‘70s when he began painting figures. “When I first started painting, I was trying to reconstruct scenes from memory because I thought memory would infuse things with deeper meaning,” he recalls, “but I abandoned that method because there was a level of inaccuracy that got in the way of what I was trying to do. Then I tried painting from life, but that didn’t work either because I paint in an intuitive way, and the idea I start with is fairly quickly abandoned as I begin to grapple with things that occur that I find more interesting than the original idea. I found I couldn’t tell a model what to do because I didn’t know what I was looking for.

“I finally discovered the camera when I was traveling in Europe,” he continues. “I remember sitting on a beach outside of Venice with a friend--he had a little movie camera and I had my sketchbook. I’d see something and start to draw it and the person would move. I’d wait, see something else and start again and they’d move again. After listening to me grumble for a while my friend said, ‘Why don’t you wise up and get yourself a camera?’ It finally dawned on me that that is the most efficient tool for recording information.”

The Fischl photos on view at the Kohn Gallery--22 images shot at St. Tropez between 1982-88, priced at $3,500 each--are predominantly beach scenes of groups of people, all of whom are undressed in varying degrees. In explaining how he went about shooting the pictures, he says: “Basically, the people didn’t know they were being photographed. Some noticed--a few are looking into the camera--but they have a different relationship to being seen than we do. The French are quite voyeuristic and exhibitionist--they like to watch and be watched and don’t see the space between people as aggressive space, whereas Americans see it as very aggressive. Impressionism could never have happened in America because Impressionism is about watching things happen in a comfortable way--Americans consider that kind of watching an invasion of privacy.”

As in his paintings, sexuality is the central subtext in Fischl’s photographs. It’s a subject he’s spent the past 14 years examining through his art, but when asked if he feels he has an unusually sophisticated understanding of this area of human behavior, he laughs and says “not at all. I wouldn’t say I’m an expert or a connoisseur of rarefied taste. For me, sexuality is different from sex and eroticism. Sexuality is about who we are in the world in relationship to our needs and desires, and I tend to see every situation as having a sexual component.”

In discussing particular photographers who’ve been important to him, Fischl comes up with a surprising name. “Pierre Bonnard--who’s often mistakenly dismissed as a minor late French Impressionist--was a spectacular photographer. He only took photos for a short time, but the pictures he took were amazing. They’re sort of faux classical nude studies, and the poses are always either eccentric or primal in their gesture. He also took snapshots of his family and friends that are these candid moments where everything looks bizarre.

“One of my favorites is a photo he took of his mother with a woman and child next to her. She’s sitting down and in her lap is an envelope with a big X on it, which traditionally was the way someone received news of a death in the family. The child in the picture doesn’t realize the gravity of what’s going on and his nanny is trying to pull him away. It’s a fabulous picture. I’ve been thinking a lot about Bonnard lately--in fact, I recently made a documentary on him for the BBC.” (Part of a series on contemporary artists paying tribute to artists who’ve influenced them, the segment is scheduled to air sometime in May.)

Fischl, whose paintings will be seen next year at the Daniel Weinberg Gallery (his last L.A. show was there in 1986), is unexpectedly candid on the question of whether photography is a lesser art form than painting.

“My photography is absolutely a lesser art form because I’m not a photographer. My pictures function for me like a sketch pad so I’m not dealing with the issues photographers deal with.

“However,” he adds, “there is a major difference between painting and photography for me and here’s a clear example. I recently saw a painting by Edvard Munch depicting his sister on her deathbed--it’s an extremely brutal view of death and loss and is one of the most tragic images one could see. Looking at it, I was reminded of a photograph of a dying AIDS patient by Nicholas Nixon.

“In comparing the experience of seeing these two works, I felt that despite the tragedy of Munch’s painting, it was infused with hope because he’d sat there and slowly recorded through observation everything needed to preserve that moment. That he was able to sit through the making of it, and could handle all the feelings of loss and terror, transforms it into an image of strength and hope. With the photo, the photographer could’ve been at this guy’s bedside throughout his illness and been deeply connected to this guy’s story, but that’s not what comes across. What comes across is an image of death with nothing attached to it. To me, that’s a major difference.”

DAVID SALLE

For David Salle, whose work draws heavily from mass media, the delineation between painting and photography isn’t quite so distinct. “I don’t have any qualms about photography as far as it being a lesser art form than painting,” he says, speaking by phone from New York. “However, I sometimes feel unwell about all the things in life that end up being caught by photographs. Sometimes I wish they were uncaught.”

One of the most controversial artists currently working, Salle makes paintings that are at once dizzyingly intellectual and vulgar. Lambasted by critic Robert Hughes for what Hughes perceives as shoddy drawing skills, Salle has also been attacked as an Appropriationist with no ideas of his own, a callow careerist, and a misogynist for the manner in which he depicts women. However, for all the criticism that’s been leveled against it, his work seems to attract great interest.

Layered compositions that mix high art quotations with allusions to literature, advertising, theater, film, cartoons and pornography, his work has no allegiance to any particular period or style and hence invites multiple readings. Emotionally cool despite the fact that Salle incorporates startling juxtapositions and abrupt shifts in all his paintings (he often positions a crudely executed figure next to a painstakingly rendered one), the work is a roiling stew of art history and modern life that attempts to abolish the hierarchy of value we use to interpret images, and to liberate them from the tasks and meanings traditionally assigned to them.

On one level Salle’s work can be read as an ongoing meditation on women, as female nudes appear in nearly all his canvases. Salle’s photographs echo his paintings in their preoccupation with the female nude, but are markedly different in their simplicity. Moving across the surface of a Salle painting is like surfing through the TV channels with a remote control; his black-and-white photographs are classical exercises in light and shadow that involve comparatively few elements and are consistent in mood; they all pulsate with a dark, brooding eroticism.

A book of Salle’s photos shot during the ‘80s was published last year by the Robert Miller Gallery in New York; however, his involvement with the camera stretches back much further than that.

“I’ve literally always taken photographs,” comments the 39-year-old artist, “but never with the intention of exhibiting them as autonomous art objects. Having said that, now that these photos have been seen independently I feel they stand on their own. I haven’t taken any pictures for a while and one reason I’m showing this work is that I’m not doing it anymore. There are thousands of other images from the same 10-year period that we might show at a later time, but I’ve basically stopped taking images like these. I’m sure I’ll take other kinds of pictures in the future though.”

Born in Oklahoma and raised in Wichita, Kan., Salle was interested in art as a child, and at the age of 8 was skilled enough to be admitted to a life drawing class for adults. In 1970 he enrolled at CalArts (Salle and Fischl have been friends since meeting there), where he did mostly photo-based conceptual pieces. (Instructor John Baldessari was an important influence during those years.) After graduating with a master’s degree in 1975, Salle moved to New York and landed his first solo show, at Artists Space, the following year.

Over the next three years he worked at a variety of odd jobs as he struggled to combine his various creative concerns into a coherent style. By 1979 he’d arrived at the technique of overlaid imagery that is the visual foundation of his work, and critical acclaim followed in fairly short order, as did a long and profitable relationship with dealer Mary Boone. (Salle left Boone for the Larry Gagosian Gallery last year.)

Salle has been taking photographs for a long time, yet he describes his approach to picture taking as “fairly primitive. Sometimes I develop the photos with the model, other times I have a clear idea of what I want and I simply stage it and shoot it. I often begin with a costume or prop, and in figuring out how to use it and light it, the picture takes shape.”

Known within the art world as one of the most intellectually astute artists of his generation, Salle has an extraordinarily wide frame of reference; during our conversation he proves himself knowledgeable about everything from furniture design, music, art history and film to literature and dance. On the subject of the history of photography, however, he dismisses himself as “largely ignorant. There are many photographers I admire enormously, but I don’t have enough technical knowledge to be influenced by them. I like different photographers for different reasons--everyone from Brassai to Weegee to Jan Groover to the big landscape photographs of the 1860s.”

On the subject of how the arrival of photography changed the meaning of painting, Salle says: “It’s hard to imagine what the world looked like before photography. It’s an appealing idea, but it also has a dose of regret because you’d know that the things you see will never be seen again by anyone else. That’s true of life today, of course, but photography gives one the illusion that things are capturable.”

Currently at work on a new body of paintings (some of which may be exhibited next year at the Fred Hoffman Gallery), Salle perceives a distinct and ongoing change in his work.

“My interests are evolving and I see a pattern to how they’re changing, but I see consistencies along with the change--it’s best described as a dynamic between two seemingly opposing impulses. On one hand, one wants to make work that communicates directly and clearly with people. At the same time, one wants to be very private and to make something fragile in its particularities. A good work of art gets you to an emotional place that’s quite rarefied--it’s just not of this world, and that’s something I value enormously.

“So much of life is banal and brutally inhumane, and one of the things you want to do if you make art is to create something that’s simply not part of anything else. It doesn’t take its meaning from the social, the political or even the aesthetic--it just is . Artists are always balanced between these two drives. People say of modern art--and about my art in particular--that it’s too complicated and obscure. When I was younger, I saw obscurity as a positive value, but as I get older I see it less that way. There’s so much moral, intellectual and emotional chaos in the world that you want to state things as simply and cleanly as possible.”

Asked if he ever gets a creative urge that specifically manifests itself as an impulse to take a photograph, he laughs and says, “Yes, sometimes, but I suppress it.”