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In the work of Robert Longo, 32, painting resolves itself as large-scale montage, like film itself -- a chilly, imposing screen of images. Works like National Trust, 1981, fluctuate between the catastrophically private (contorted figures that might come from a disco, or might just have been felled by thrombosis or a bullet) and the blandly public (the face of a building, rendered in aluminum and fiber-glass relief). Longo's art is rooted in the mid-'70s conjunction of performance art, minimalism and video; it tries both to engage one's sense of one's body through melodramatic or newsy postures and "heroic" figuration, and to achieve the enigmatic distance of minimal art. Sometimes, in attempting this odd synthesis, it gets clunky and overworked, but it also benefits from its own unappeasable paranoia. The size of Longo's voyeuristic images reflects the scale of his essential subject: the American consciousness industry, and the way it grouts every cranny in public life.
With other artists of Longo's age, there are two main patterns of appropriation. The first is literal copying with intent to "deconstruct" the original, as done by Sherrie Levine, 38. Levine rephotographs photos by "classic" figures like Walker Evans and does small, exact, curiously loving copies of paintings by noted early modernists like Kasimir Malevich or Arthur Dove. The aim is to make people think about the status of originality; the work has a real and precise, if muted, aesthetic dimension.
The second mode is eclectic quotation from the image-haze, like a distracted viewer spinning the TV dial. Its leading practitioner in the U.S., among those born after 1950, is David Salle, 32. His main compositional device, putting emblems over a tangle of "transparent" figures, came straight from late Francis Picabia and perhaps from Salle's German contemporary Sigmar Polke. There is also a strong debt to earlier James Rosenquist. Salle draws, or rather traces, awkwardly and flatly. His imagery mimics the nullifying influence of TV, its promotion of derisive inertia as the hip way of seeing. Underneath, a congealed eroticism, derived from the misogynies of soft porn and the misty cliches of romance-illustration; on top, a disconnected shuffle of high-art fragments and other visual flotsam. The effect is often harshly sexist and supercilious: porn-in-quotes garnished with irony, the yuppie market's dream.
Nobody could call Salle unfaithful to his sources (which are as often high art as mass media), and his paintings do tell a certain truth about the image- glutted conditions of seeing in the mid-'80s. That is to say, they bear signs of social meaning beneath their inert stylishness, and they exude a creepy sense of the disconnectedness of things. He has developed a way, as in Miner, 1984, of dissolving conventional images of conflict (the slumped miner of the title is a '30s icon of labor, as the outlines of Frank Lloyd Wright's mushroom columns from the S.C. Johnson building are, literally, "capital") and then working them back in layers of visual-verbal puns and allusions. Thus the brutally splintered cafe tabletops anchored to the painting's surface work both as echoes of the capitals and as suggestions (presented like comic- strip balloons) of the miner's thoughts of violence. Salle can be taken more seriously than the painter with whom he used to be paired, Julian Schnabel.