In Racism and the Aesthetic of Hyper Real Violence: Pulp Fiction and the Other Visual Tragedies, Henry Giroux argues against what he terms the "aesthetic radicalism" that marks the films of director Quentin Tarantino. His cinematic oeuvre "attempts to render the underbelly of society on its own terms (but really) betrays the overt racism that informs his films" as Tarantino exhibits a blatant disregard in how he justifies his use of racial slurs in character dialogue as being a part of realism, his reality. Without acknowledging and assuming any responsibility of how such language is situated within a larger history of its cultural and political meaning, Tarantino propagates through these derogatory associations the power of the white dominant group in the name or the cause of a hip brand of coolness. Giroux points this out as a conscious strategy to douse the flames of racism by trumpeting it as formalism in favor of White Boy aesthetics. A product of the eighties, Tarantino belongs to the era of Reagan-Bush predatory capitalism, a fusion of greed and egotism.
As such, this contention also applies to the artist David Salle, a Neoexpressionist painter who vanguarded the return of the figure on canvas using postmodern discourse concerning fragmentation by juxtaposing unrelated iconic flotsam with demeaning portraits of women culled directly from assorted hardcore girlie magazines. Supposedly his paintings represent a culture, "our" culture, anesthetized from the requisite moral obligations resulting from external influences within societal standards elongated by geopolitical, technological unpredictabilities. The artist overlays popular icons/symbols on top of monochromatically brushed female nudes as pornographic vignettes using collage principles to compose pseudo-narratives with actual objects to break up pictorial space. This imagery per se bears resemblance in meaning to the not-so-subtle cynicism and White Boy Cool irony as defined by Tarantino.
Is it coincidence then that Salle, also considered as the darling of the eighties art scene, incurred the wrath of feminists who found his exploitation of women pornographic too? Like Tarantino, Salle defends his social indifference through the formalistic vocabulary of art for art’s sake. How art history perceives Salle’s role then is iffy at best, impugning his dismissive callousness to such warranted criticism at the expense of social and cultural relevance by asking what the pedagogical purpose such work offer. All of which begs many questions such as:
Why does an artist reject the larger context of critical accountability to the images or works they create? Is it because of the existing Western canon of art that acts as the primary educational tool to emphasize Eurocentric dominant concerns within art history? And why is such importance placed on the primacy of Western art doctrine to interpret most art made outside these boundaries in these terms?