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David Salle’s Art Embraces Artificial Intelligence in New London Exhibition
Even as you examine these words, it’s probable they’ve already undergone analysis by an artificially intelligent system. If queried about the renowned artist David Salle, sophisticated language models such as ChatGPT or Gemini might utilize elements of this very text in their responses. The more extensive the information pool, the more convincing the AI-generated output becomes. Salle, a figure of significant acclaim in the art world since his ascendance in the 1980s, has been extensively documented. The pertinent question arises: can AI art tools offer genuinely novel insights into Salle and his oeuvre, or are they perpetually destined merely to replicate existing interpretations?
The New Pastorals: A Dialogue Between Artist and Machine
This query also subtly permeates Salle’s recent paintings from 2023, a fresh body of work currently on display at Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in London. Entitled “New Pastorals,” these pieces were conceived with the assistance of machine-learning software, a fact not immediately discerned by casual observers. Each imposing canvas displays sweeping, expressive brushstrokes in oil, seemingly executed entirely by the artist. However, closer inspection reveals substantial areas of flat, digitally imprinted underpainting. This characteristic signifies the involvement of the AI model Salle employed to generate his art – or, at least, compositions remarkably akin to it.
From Virtual Game to Painterly Collaboration
This technological partnership commenced unexpectedly. Salle has expressed reservations about digital painting tools, noting in 2015 that “the internet’s chaotic sprawl is antithetical to the focused attention necessary for creating, or even appreciating, a painting.” Paradoxically, Salle’s own paintings exhibit a sprawling quality, interweaving imagery from diverse popular and art historical sources, often overwhelming the viewer’s focus. In 2021, Salle conceived the concept for a virtual game enabling users to manipulate these painted components via drag-and-drop mechanics.
Training the AI: An Art School for Machines
Despite the impracticality of the game’s realization, the project facilitated Salle’s meeting with Danika Laszuk, a software engineer at the tech startup EAT__Works, and Grant Davis, the mind behind the AI-driven sketchpad application Wand. Together, they inputted into an AI image generator artworks by artists whose techniques Salle admires as fundamental – Andy Warhol for color theory, Edward Hopper for spatial volume, Giorgio de Chirico for perspective, and Arthur Dove for line quality. Subsequently, they tasked the AI to produce images based on specific textual prompts. “Essentially, I enrolled the machine in art school,” Salle explains.
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Overcoming Initial Hurdles: Refining the AI’s Output
Initially, the machine proved to be an inconsistent student. The resulting eerie, cartoon-like figures with an unnatural sheen bore resemblance to images from OpenAI’s Dall-E Mini. “What constitutes the inherent unsatisfying nature of this type of digital imagery?” Salle pondered. He concluded that the answer lay in the treatment of edges. “Due to its pixel-based nature, there’s a lack of differentiation between an object’s edge and its background,” he clarifies. “Consequently, imbuing edges with meaning becomes impossible, yet in representational painting, edges convey significant information about an artist’s distinct style.” To address this, he provided the machine with scans of his own gouaches, observing the AI’s response to their fluid edges. “It could discern the physicality of the brush stroke,” he recounts. “This fundamentally reshaped the machine’s self-conception.”
Accelerated Learning and Painterly Evolution
Having taught at various institutions, Salle likened this process to an expedited art school critique. However, the AI model demonstrated rapid learning capabilities. Within a few iterations, it could generate images that Salle himself might have conceived, given sufficient time. “The machine can synthesize elements in mere seconds,” he remarks. “Such an evolution in painterly terms might otherwise span years, even decades.”
A Career Trajectory Marked by Innovation and Resurgence
Born in Oklahoma and raised in Wichita, Kansas, Salle epitomized artistic precocity upon entering the New York art scene in 1980. By 1987, he stood among the most commercially successful painters of his generation, becoming, at 34, the youngest artist to receive a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This meteoric ascent implied a subsequent market decline when figurative painting’s popularity waned. Nevertheless, Salle persisted in developing increasingly ambitious series, including the complex suite of paintings central to the New Pastorals. Now, with figurative painting experiencing a resurgence, Salle again finds himself at the forefront – or perhaps, the current artistic climate has realigned with his enduring vision.
The Original Pastorals: Setting the Stage for AI Exploration
To realize his most recent works, Salle trained the AI on the dozen expansive “Pastorals” created between 1999 and 2000. These landscape paintings, rendered with a distorted perspective, depict a couple by a lake, derived from a 19th-century opera backdrop, executed in vibrant, contrasting colors and overlaid with varied inset images and designs. While possessing a digitally manipulated aesthetic reminiscent of Photoshop, Salle meticulously crafted them using analogue techniques. “The initial lesson in color painting instruction concerns palette establishment,” he recalls. “I was consciously showcasing my skills, thinking, ‘I can seamlessly integrate three distinct color palettes within a single painting, defying conventional norms.’”
Critical Response to the Initial Pastorals
Initial critical appraisals of the Pastorals were mixed. Some reviewers deemed them detached and unemotional, a common criticism directed at Salle, whose persona can appear as detached and intellectual as his artworks. “The outcome appears more as a mélange of components than a cohesive, refined work,” noted David Frankel in Artforum.
The Nuances of the New Pastorals: Abstraction and Machine Application
However, the New Pastorals exhibit a noticeable shift. The brushstrokes are looser, quicker, and more pronounced, aligning more closely with abstract expressionism than Salle’s prior styles. The thematic content is deliberately disorganized, as if his earlier paintings have been fragmented and reassembled. Disembodied forms emerge and recede within the picture plane. Objects lack a sense of groundedness. Paradoxically, these works appear more organically painted than their source material, until closer examination reveals areas of paint so thinly applied that mechanical application seems the only explanation.
Pastorals as Ideal Material for AI-Driven Innovation
Salle acknowledges a lingering sense of incompletion with the Pastorals, alongside other factors that rendered them apt for his AI experiment. “I recognized that these paintings would furnish the machine with material comprehensible within its framework,” he explains. “It processed these multifaceted forms with diverse color harmonies, fully engaging with them – yet preserving the underlying structure, the horizon, the mountains, the water, the figures, and subsequently layering brushstroke-like edges.”
AI’s Evolving Understanding of Artistic Concepts
Davis, the creator of the Wand app, regards the incorporation of the Pastorals as a pivotal advancement for the model, necessitating a novel technique that “essentially abstracts an image’s content on a conceptual plane to generate varied iterations.” In essence, the machine began to interpret Salle’s paintings on a formal, aesthetic level. The Pastorals’ suitability may also stem from landscape painting as a genre – particularly theatrical backdrops – mirroring digital technologies in its generation of illusionistic depth. The New Pastorals deliberately challenge the traditional art historical imperative to simulate depth on a flat surface.
Fine-Tuning AI Output: A Spectrum of Artistic Control
Salle can instruct the AI model to produce outputs ranging from close approximations to radical departures from his signature style. “Fundamentally, it functions as a lever along a continuum: similarity at one extreme, dissimilarity at the other,” he clarifies. “The lever’s positioning dictates whether the results closely echo the input or become wildly divergent.”
Human Artistry Prevails: AI as an Auxiliary Tool
While embracing AI, Salle remains unconcerned about its potential to surpass or supplant human artists. He views it as another tool, akin to a brush or an easel. “I don’t believe the machine has profoundly informed my artistic understanding,” Salle states. “It hasn’t prompted a fundamental reevaluation of pictorial space or composition. I merely leverage what the machine offers, based on my specific instructions.”
Postmodern Echoes: Originality in the Age of AI
In a way, Salle’s postmodern paintings are ideally suited to this exploration. Characterized by eclectic sampling and stylistic diversity, they seem less preoccupied with original sources and distinctly unencumbered by traditional notions of originality. In 1985, during Salle’s peak fame, art historian Rosalind Krauss critiqued originality as a “modernist fabrication,” asserting that all artworks inherently borrow from other sources, consciously or otherwise. Perhaps, in their creative process, human artists and their robot kin aren’t fundamentally dissimilar.
The Future of AI in Art: Collaboration and Guidance
The reciprocal influence of AI on Salle remains an open question. The data amassed by EAT__Works is proprietary, preventing Salle’s specific feedback from directly training other artist-machines in the immediate future. However, digital reproductions of his new paintings, accessible on the gallery’s public website, could conceivably serve as prompts for further AI-generated imagery. “In theory, our model could autonomously generate images,” Davis concedes, yet stresses that “the most compelling images arise from a highly interactive, hands-on approach.” For the present, AI still requires human direction to refine its artistic capabilities – at least until the student potentially surpasses the teacher.
Exhibition Information
David Salle: Some Versions of Pastoral is on view at Thaddaeus Ropac London until June 8th.