Return to John Baldessari: Pure Beauty
Forty years after making this cartoonish depiction of a divine, disembodied nose floating in a blue sky, Baldessari rediscovered it in an exhibition of his work in Vienna; it had an immediate impact on his current thinking. He explored isolated body parts in the series Nose & Ears, Etc. (2006; see image), and in 2007 he produced a sculptural relief in hand-painted aluminum of a nose amid a constellation of clouds for a multiple also titled God Nose. Literary treatments of the nasal appendage, such as Nikolai Gogol's The Nose (1836) or one of the artist's favorite novels, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759–67), no doubt played a role in these works.
For an artist whose work was hardly selling and whose subject matter ran defiantly counter to the formulaic clichés offered here, the choice to depict these commercial tips on a large canvas was deeply ironic. The least autocratic or didactic of teachers, Baldessari has relentlessly inveighed against "tasteful" subjects and the value judgments inherent in such formulas for success. At the same time, by their very presence in his work, we are asked to consider these art maxims, which no doubt contain a grain of truth. While many of Baldessari's text paintings typify his subversive wit, he has always maintained that, as much as humor may be a byproduct of his work, it is not its aim.
Baldessari literally demonstrates a lesson in one-point perspective by positioning the designated spectator on a nondescript street in National City, California. To produce his photo-text works, he covered a prepared canvas with a light-sensitive emulsion in his makeshift darkroom and projected a 35mm slide onto the canvas. The grainy quality of the black-and-white image, which has acquired a patina with age, resembles a newspaper photograph, just as the lifted text mimics straight reportage. Baldessari enlisted himself as model because, as he has said, he was the cheapest and most available alternative. However, as a portrait of a solitary artist embedded within his own searching, groundbreaking work, it is touchingly poignant. By the mid-1970s he would choose to eliminate his own image in favor of more anonymous subjects.
"Some of the photographs," Baldessari explained, "were originally taken for non-art use, some were taken to violate then-current photographic norms, and others were taken by pointing the camera blindly out the window while driving." For his photo-text works, he prescribed conditions in which he made a limited number of aesthetic decisions. He captured the snapshot of the local car wash, without the aid of a viewfinder, to record the ordinary, unglamorous environs of his hometown, illustrating his conviction that "truth is beautiful no matter how ugly." He then recorded the location for the caption, which was installed by a professional sign painter. The images were neither edited nor retouched in any way. The only "art signal" was the canvas support, and its format was determined by the maximum size that could fit through the doors of Baldessari's Volkswagen bus.
Baldessari, long fascinated with painters who made their living by selling scenes of landscapes, flowers, and boats at sea, sought out artists at local craft fairs for these commissioned paintings. On canvases that he provided, they painted as faithfully as they could an image of their choice from a selection of 35mm slides—photographs Baldessari had taken of a friend pointing at various things encountered on a walk. Perhaps he had in mind a sardonic remark from the abstract painter Al Held (1928–2005): "All conceptual art is just pointing at things." When his collaborators' work was complete, Baldessari had a sign painter hand-letter the painter's name on each canvas.
For this play on aesthetic judgment—one that foregrounds an important theme in the artist's work—Baldessari asked a participant to choose one carrot from a lineup of three and photographed the selection process. Frame by frame, the chosen vegetable—indicated by the contestant's finger—remained in the mix while the rejects were switched out. The game continued until all the carrots in a given bunch were used. What is left for the viewer to surmise is why a certain carrot was selected over the others—or, in other words, what constitutes a value choice between one object and another.
Baldessari described finding an old photograph of his father, waving good-bye to his mother, who was on a ship bound for Europe (where they both were born). Here, Baldessari replicates this emotional act, substituting his mother's ship with anonymous sailboats—both leaving and arriving—whose passengers do not know him. He explained, "The pain and anxiety of the act is counterbalanced by repeating it endlessly, perhaps obliterating the sadness."
In 1971 the curator and filmmaker Willoughby Sharp (1936–2008) invited twenty-seven Conceptual artists to create projects for an abandoned Hudson River pier, a relic of a time when New York's waterfront was a bustling port. The photographers Harry Shunk and Janos Kender photographed each artist's activity. According to Shunk, Baldessari performed as many as ten different actions over the course of a few hours. The work chosen for Sharp's portfolio of performances—all displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in summer 1971 as Projects: Pier 18—was this photograph, in which the artist's hands frame the vestige of a since vanished harbor scene.
In 1971 Baldessari was asked to participate in an exhibition at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, a school famous for its pioneering program in Conceptual art. The college did not have the funds to bring the artist from California to Canada, so he devised a work comprised entirely of the Canadian students' participation: they were to write "I will not make any more boring art" on the walls of the gallery, "like punishment," said Baldessari. "To my surprise," he continued, "they covered the walls." In the meantime, Baldessari made a recording of himself repetitively writing the same phrase in his own Venice Beach studio.
Baldessari once remarked that a large part of his work "arises from a single word, a chance phrase, or an overheard comment or part of one." For Floating: Color it was "defenestration"—the act of throwing something out a window—a word the artist liked, "because it had a limited meaning, specific to a particular act." Deciding that he should throw colors instead of objects, and basing his sequencing on the simple order of the spectrum, Baldessari jettisoned large sheets of colored paper from his window and captured the process on film.
As Baldessari once described: "An art professor once told me that in composition, elements should either overlap or there should be some space between them; that it produces discomfort when things were tangential. He called this phenomenon 'kissing.'" Here, Baldessari experiments with this "incorrect" strategy, photographing his model in uncomfortable proximity to a large palm tree.
Baldessari hired one of his students and filmed him from above as he painted a cubicle a different color each day, following the order of the color wheel. As Baldessari tells it, "In a way, Abstract Expressionism started all this. De Kooning used [a] house painter's brushes and [a] house painter's techniques" (in his own youth, Baldessari painted houses for his landlord father). Sped up so that each day is compressed into about five minutes, the sequential layering of hues becomes a luscious but laborious game—an existentialist task: "It could be a kind of painter's hell," said Baldessari, "but essentially it is about work with some small amount of pleasure attached."
Beginning with a film still of a rooftop shoot-out, Baldessari covered the central point of action—the one at which the two gangsters' gazes meet—with a white square, one reminiscent of the monochrome abstractions made by the Russian modernist Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935). It is an operation that parallels something that attracted Baldessari to the ancient Greek vases here at the Metropolitan Museum: "Seeing that plaster filled the spaces where shards were missing," he wondered, "How many shards would have to be missing before that vase was no longer a vase? How many shards make a vase?"
Baldessari observed that "people carry around ideas of movies in their heads," and, by exploiting film stills, he taps into the collective unconscious of the modern viewer. Although a devoted cinephile, he favored the stills, not out of any love for Hollywood but because they were inexpensive found images in endless supply. "I never go to stock places where they have the stills already arranged in categories. I want to feel like a gold miner, and I don't want the gold given to me." Among the categories he established, two that emerged early on were kisses and guns. Here, a representation of the former, the only part of the composition in color, is surrounded by gun-toting hands, at once threatening and protecting the embrace within—and perhaps also instigating the panic of the adjacent crowd. For all his flouting of convention, Baldessari calls himself a "closet formalist," and the tight rectilinear organization of Kiss/Panic owes something to the abstract canvases of the Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian (1872–1944).
In 1985 Baldessari enlarged this work into a billboard that was temporarily displayed in downtown Minneapolis for a group exhibition. The classic cinematic image of attraction and desire is reinforced by the horizontal format and dramatic chiaroscuro lighting, but the "come-hither" gazes of the players are psychologically disrupted by the image of a fox treading with trepidation along a log against a stormy sky. "People apart, either by attraction or repulsion. The subject is the space between, the magnetic field created by the peripheral poles. A way to scrutinize relationships," said the artist.
"As soon as you put together two things you have a story," Baldessari has said. In this diptych filled with Hitchcockian intrigue, he juxtaposes opposites—color and black-and-white, indoor and outdoor, human and animal, still and active—and exploits the associative connotations that arise when images abut one another. While the pictures are compelling on their own, their implications are multiplied when combined. One cannot help but wonder if the seemingly menacing birds are responsible for the woman's bleeding nose (a trickle of red paint), or do they only seem menacing because her nose is bloodied? This kind of instability of meaning, demonstrating how images are influenced by their context, derives in part from Baldessari's longstanding interest in linguistic theory.
Baldessari, who has likened his use of images to certain literary techniques, builds meaning through juxtaposition and structure rather than through a fluidly predictable narrative. The cinematic stills he uses in works such as Heel have been excerpted from their original context—the nonstatic continuum of film—and recast in a new configuration. The title could alternatively refer to Achilles' vulnerability, annoying personalities, or the wounded anatomies depicted here. The street scene at the center of the composition grew out of the artist's interest at the time in Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power, an influential study of crowd behavior published in 1960.
Baldessari reintroduced text to his work in the mid-1990s. In the Goya series, he paired aggressively banal images with captions that Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) gave to his prints in The Disasters of War (1810–20), his eyewitness response to Napoleon's campaign in Spain. What drew the artist to Goya's laconic titles was their puzzling ambiguity and open-ended meaning. The Spaniard's original There Isn't Time depicts a scene of wanton slaughter, whereas Baldessari's floral still life grew out of his Vanitas series (1981) about the fleeting nature of life. "It can also be read," he said, "as when someone sends flowers it is usually about trying to repair something and often being too late."
For this series Baldessari experimented with images printed on clear acetate, reversing and overlapping them. Two disparate scenes, a black-and-white film still from a Buck Rogers movie and an unremarkable color snapshot taken near the artist's studio, visually merge, and the newly created hybrid world is reinforced with acrylic color.
Baldessari photographed movies on a television to make the Duress series, which features figures silhouetted in solid colors caught in moments of great physical stress or danger. "It is a subject I believe suitable for these trying times," he said. When painted a single hue, the men in contorted positions—perilously poised, Harold Lloyd–style, above the metropolis—can be read as a triad of abstract shapes. Using rigid foamboard, the artist incorporated recessed and raised surfaces to isolate the figures and create an effect of shallow relief.
With the series Nose & Ears, Etc., Baldessari returned to an early subject, creating strangely abstract visages by isolating parts from the whole and blocking out critical information with acrylic paint. The artist was attracted to noses and ears for the alien quality they exhibit when detached from the body. Eyes and lips, on the other hand, are freighted with emotion and, as the artist has said, "get a lot of attention" in art history. Although he was still relying on film stills as source material, the works may in part refer to his own six-foot-seven frame. He once told an interviewer, "I never thought of the parts of my body as going together. I saw them as separate. Maybe it's because I'm so tall. I have to use willpower to glue them together."
In this body of work, the artist again investigates color by way of conceptual, rather than aesthetic, strategies. Having explored color structure and sequencing in the 1970s, Baldessari here indulges his fascination with the language of color. Working in a hardware store as a young man, he was drawn to charts of paint colors and the names assigned to various hues. He has since noted different types of chromatic nomenclature, including "artist colors" (cerulean blue) or "landlord colors" (light green). Among the most amusing discoveries were "designer colors," names assigned by American paint companies that invented such unlikely appellations as "Avant Garde" (mustard yellow) or "Organic Order" (mulchy green). Here, the color coding links hues to common foods.