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John Baldessari, (b. June 7, 1931, National City, California) is a conceptual artist.
His work often attempts to point out irony in contemporary art theory and practices or reduce it to absurdity. His art has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe[1].
My initial thoughts of Baldessari and his approach follow: my comments are in red.
At rescue in the sidelines, if he cares, or has the intellectual equipment to do, is the
experienced observer who, very often a philosopher at heart, has the opportunity and the
obligation to present evidence to the less aware that will be helpful in putting the product
where it belongs.
Although there are the cases of Taggart and Baldessari where more evidence of some minium
virtue exists than with the later Romans who , in some futile attempt to glorify their
politicians blatantly stole already existing statuary and merely changed the name ,there isn’t
a great deal.
Between the two of them (Baldessary and Taggart), however, it is evident that Baldessari has
more courage, or is it chutzpa(?) by virtue of the fact that, in some cases, the areas of the
original which he covers up are more significant if only because of their size and there does
seem to emerge, on occasion, just a hint of a possible meaning. Of course, it is, at least
theorhetically possible, that Baldessari is ennunicating a language with greater meaning than
I am able to discern and I am open to that possibility and await a convincing argument.
But what does Baldessari say about himself? In an interview with a Nicole Davis he replied: JB: I always had this idea that doing art was just a masturbatory activity, and didn't really help anybody. I
was teaching kids in the California Youth Authority, an honor camp where they send kids instead of
sending them to prison. One kid came to me one day and asked if I would open up the arts and crafts
building at night so they could work. I said, "If all of you guys will cool it in the classes, then I'll baby-sit
you." Worked like a charm. Here were these kids that had no values I could embrace, that cared about art
more than I. So, I said, "Well, I guess art has some function in society," and I haven't gotten beyond that
yet, but it was enough to convince me that art did some good somehow. I just needed a reason that
wasn't all about myself.
This statement by Baldesari strikes me as possibly true, quite probably true, for, I
believe, that for him stating the obvious in a shockingly outspoken way is his best
defense against being called a fake and will allow any possible opponent to be
momentarily perplexed as to where any meaning might lie. I too, have met on some few
occassions, students who under the umbrella of my mentorship took flight as if on a
spark of genious on a project of their own.
What the anecdote lacks is any further evidence of there being more values to art than
those intuitively sensed by the local ragazzi. And to Baldessari’s credit he acknowledged
he could only contribute the service of baby sitting. The only question remaining in my
mind is how could the California University system could justify keeping him on, that is,
if they followed the usual rules for hiring accredited teachers.Is it possible that the
authorities recognized in the possibly uncouth, rather rude personality of Baldessari
some element that they felt might help in comunicatng with the socially undisciplined?
And a related question might be is there a correlation between the brutal imagry of
making null the conceptual fabric of an extant work and behavior that gets one assigned
to a reformatory?
There is one idea that occurs to me and it seriusly involves current anti-semtic
prohibitions and in this case Paul Brach who, about the time Baldessari indicated he
moved to Los Angeles from the San Diego branch of the California University System
headed the art department there and very soon and very clearly made it plain he wanted
only Jews in the department. Additionally while Paul Brach may have been close to 6 feet
in heigth being in close physical standing to one who measured at leat 7 inches taller
might have been found intimidating. And, for sure, Brach, would have treated Baldessari
with racial disdain just s he had done the Scots painter who was (but not for long) a
member of the faculty when I visited there.
In this interview with Davis, Baldessari recounts a discussion at a local hangout in New
York, I believe, where either another faculty or painter asks a provocative question back in
the late ‘60s, hanging out in New York at Max's Kansas City. You'd just go there every night, and it's like
every artist, always at least six, ten or eight artists at the same table. And, I said something, some art
idea, and you could hear a pin drop. And someone said, "Well, how does that fit into art history?" And, I'm
thinking inside, "Who the fuck cares?" …Out here you don't worry about how things fit into art history. You
just do what you're going to do.
I believe this account to be not only true in itself as an experience Baldessari has had,
but it is also vitally true in describing the creative artist’s primary responsibility (probably
since 1850 and certainly since the advent of Jackson Pollack) that he, the artist, become more
aware of how he reponds, how his neuro-mental-psychic construction informs the
character of the end product. Or to turn this coin over, how well is the critic able to
reconstruct from evidences in the work the pathway of its evolution and from that how
the work portrays the creator of it. The sadness involved in all of this Baldessari
remaking is that it seems while he has taken the first step in deconstruction he seems to
have a very limited awareness of his responsibiity to reconstruct…or, perhaps, I expect
too much. Richter Katz
Employing generalizations succinctly, Richter destroys any evidence of any
formr life form, even more than Baldessari and Taggart just blindly follows
along and Katz transforns a life form into a carboard inanity while Andrew
Wyeth almost always challenges us to reconsider meaning.
It would be correctly stated
that Richter is the only one of these artists thus far mentioned who seems to
work from a non-objective point of view. But this is not always true, yet, there
does seem to be in Richter’s attitude a feeling of disinterest in subject.
Baldessari, on the other hand would like to obiterate it and Katz seems
incapable of recognizing anything beyond the most superficial and Wyeth
gently, but firmly, pushes the observer into a position where he is unable to
avoid recognizing there being a complete ambiance of affective meaning
embodied in the simplest formal composition.
Main Entry: iro·ny
Pronunciation: \ˈī-rə-nē also ˈī(-ə)r-nē\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural iro·nies
Etymology: Latin ironia, from Greek eirōnia, from eirōn dissembler
Date: 1502
1 : a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false
conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning —called also Socratic irony
2 a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b : a usually
humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c : an ironic expression or utterance
3 a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an
event or result marked by such incongruity b : incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the
accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play —called also
dramatic irony, tragic irony synonyms see WIT
O.K. I can agree, in part at least, wih the idea that irony plays a role in both
Baldessari’s work and his comments about his work, but isn’t it ironic,
basicly, because Baldessari has chosen to ignore, or is unable to recognize,
more substantial values in the activity of picture making than the rather
limited and inconsequentially critical implications his work attaches to the
endeavors of some in the larger field? If, his aim is to point up, however
ironically, the limited comprehension of some artists and some critics and
most patrons and their absence of an experienced vocabulary why, in the
name of the everlastig universe, does he choose to colored-balloon out people’s
faces? Is he perhaps, misplacing his irony onto the compassionate and
disparing view of Edvard Munch.
On the other and we might consider the possibility that dealing with highly
traumatic issues are so petrifying he is, simply, unable to conceptualize a
response, that is, an adequately artful one. Instead he opts for ridicule. This is,
after all, a fairly common response to undealable challenges. If this is true,
than Baldessari is, consistent with one of my theories, dealing with his
problem. But is it, therefore, reasonable that such a meager effort be
institutionalized and nationalised to the level where he is presented as
representing the mind-set of an entire nation?
While he may be dealng with his problem in his way, the results, which may
solve his problem as he perceives it forces another one upon his audience
which either must submit to his jocular bullying or stand up to the challenge
and shrink it to its proper size.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6eSfKeJ_VM (singing Sol Le Witt). I find this attempt at the reconstrucion of iconoclatic results, mildly amusing, but, even more importantly, there are some elementary elements of creative thought, which, regretably, seem never to be brought to fruition either in his own eorks or in this example of concertizing…instead, great stisfaction with his juvenile ridicule is apparent.
The following report by Christopher Miles may give us clue as to the importance of Balessari’s behavior at least to himself if no one else:
When I visited John Baldessari, the first thing he showed me after introducing me to his dog, Giotto, was a
reproduction of a Velázquez he saw recently at the Prado – a painting he appreciates for the way its
representational imagery yields to a kind of embedded abstraction. Such an interest in Old Masters might seem
odd for an artist who famously burned most of the paintings in his studio four decades ago. That radical gesture
marked the end of what one might call Baldessari’s first career (that of an abstract painter) and the beginning of
his second career and emergence as a conceptual artist. But that career would come back to an intensive
studio practice and an intimate involvement with making things by hand.
Another work, Painting for Kubler, 1967-68, presented the viewer theoretical instructions on how to view it and on the importance of context and continuity with previous works. The seemingly legitimate art concerns were intended by Baldessari to become hollow and ridiculous when presented in such a purely self-referential manner……..hhhmmmm, maybe
Juxtaposing text with images
Related to his early text paintings were his Wrong series, which paired photographic images with lines of text from a book about composition. His photographic California Map Project found physical forms that resembled the letters in "California" geographically near to the very spots on the map that they were printed. In the Binary Code Series, Baldessari used images as information holders by alternating photographs to stand in for the on-off state of binary code; one example alternated photos of a woman holding a cigarette parallel to her mouth and then dropping it away.
Another of Baldessari's series juxtaposed an image of an object such as a glass, or a block of wood, and the phrase "A glass is a glass" or "Wood is wood" combined with "but a cigar is a good smoke" and the image of the artist smoking a cigar. These directly refer to Rene Magritte's The Treachery of Images; the images similarly were used to stand in for the objects described. However, the series also apparently refers to Sigmund Freud's famous attributed observation that "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" as well as to Rudyard Kipling's "... a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke."
Arbitrary games
Baldessari has expressed that his interest in language comes from its similarities in structure to games, as both operate by an arbitrary and mandatory system of rules. In this spirit, many of his works are sequences showing attempts at accomplishing an arbitrary goal, such as Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line, in which the artist attempted to do just that, photographing the results, and eventually selecting the "best out of 36 tries", with 36 being the determining number just because that is the standard number of shots on a roll of 35mm film.
Pointing
Much of Baldessari's work involves pointing, in which he tells the viewer not only what to look at but how to make selections and comparisons, often simply for the sake of doing so. Baldessari critiques formalist assessments of art in a segment from his video How We Do Art Now, entitled "Examining Three 8d Nails", in which he gives obsessive attention to minute details of the nails, such as how much rust they have, or descriptive qualities such as which appears "cooler, more distant, less important" than the others.
Baldessari's Commissioned Paintings series took the idea of pointing literally, after he read a criticism of conceptual art that claimed it was nothing more than pointing. Beginning with photos of a hand pointing at various objects, Baldessari then hired amateur yet technically adept artists to paint the pictures. He then added a caption "A painting by [painter's name]" to each finished painting. In this instance, he has been likened to a choreographer, directing the action while having no direct hand in it, and these paintings are typically read as questioning the idea of artistic authorship. The amateur artists have been analogized to sign painters in this series, chosen for their pedestrian methods that were indifferent to what was being painted. One might well wonder the degree of indifference on Baldessari’s part.
The major difference, I believe, between Baldessari’s approach to reality and O’Keeffe’s approach is that Baldessari doesn’t like what he sees and O’Keeffe does. If Baldessari say an inset he thought ugly he’d stomp on it while O’Keeffe would pick it up and study it.
And while Doris Cross described herself to me as a “destructionist” which I understood to mean tht she was merelty trying on the costume to see if it fit, I noticed in her subsequent work the process of destruction was giving way to one of construction. Whether that chnge had anything to do with our frequent discussions I cnnot say.
David Hockney, on the other hand, seems to me to waver between a good little boy and doing what he’s told to being purposefully a little irritant , feeling, perhaps, that as a “good little boy” he was unrecognize as to who he felt himself to be, but as a destructive irritant he made it…despite the fact the audience was still not bright enough to understand.
I am presenting three of my own collaged works as potential examples of destruction ermerging into another form. It is inevitable, generally speaking, that generations succeed their fathers…and the pain of the difference is the difference…unless one gets far enough away from it.
and five
examples of painted sculpture desined to go beyond the aesthetics of the Greek and the tribal.
It is my contention that the main difference between the work of Georgia O’Keeffe on the one hand and th productsd of Baldessari, Taggart amd Richter on the other is the difference between the changes in organic form brought about by observation and the destruction inflicted in response to frustration, anger and self-hatred. If this difference is generational and that it might be said that between 1887 the year of O’Keeffe’s birth and 1931 that of Baldessari we
have the emergence of Paul Cezanne and Max Beckman
1839-1906 and 1884-1950, respectively.
It might seem that in the intervening years , the approximate century some of us have lost the idea, despite our rhetoric, that communiction beyond an expression of negation is a worthy aim. At any rate, Balderi hs given us cause for comment.