John Baldessari Overview

Baldessari's work involves mundane objects tagged with equally unremarkable texts that often produce barks of laughter and/or cynicism from viewers. His compositions are montages of apparently unrelated visual or textual fragments from photographs, film stills, newspapers, magazines, and artworks. Works from... [more]

Baldessari's work involves mundane objects tagged with equally unremarkable texts that often produce barks of laughter and/or cynicism from viewers. His compositions are montages of apparently unrelated visual or textual fragments from photographs, film stills, newspapers, magazines, and artworks. Works from his recent "Goya Series" (1997) pair the titles from Goya's etchings with isolated, unremarkable objects: an empty bowl floats above the phrase "This is bad," and an overripe peach sits atop the text "Less than perfect." The effect is an impulse toward anti-art. The texts do not explain the images and vice versa. All signs fail and the only meaning to be had from the compositions are the associative leaps viewers make for themselves: a kind of do-it-yourself concept art. His work also operates in the tension generated by inherent dualisms (order/chaos, love/hate, banality/tragedy). "Ingres and Other Parables" (1971) trades on the idea of the monumental by displaying invented fables about the contemporary art world with oddly placed photographs of Egyptian pyramids. In "Ashputtle" (the German name for Cinderella), images are taken out of their original contexts in order to transform the mundane and anonymous into the new, seductive, and emotionally charged. The works often parody the illusion of art and the subliminal strategies behind familiar messages from the media. Baldessari comments on this much-loved topic: "The world constructed by the media seems to be a valid surrogate for 'real life', whatever that is. I decided that aiming my camera at the television set was just as reasonable as aiming it out the window." [show less]