When visiting the exhibition “John Baldessari: Pure Beauty” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I couldn’t find the entrance, and ended up entering through the exit. As I followed the artworks carefully, I realized that I was going backward through this chronologically arranged exhibition. I decided to start over from the beginning, and I saw the entire exhibition in the right direction. Though it felt different, I was unsure whether it was the order, or the familiarity that made the difference in my newly found appreciation for the work. When I thought about it later, I asked myself if seeing the show “in order” would even matter to a conceptual artist like John Baldessari.
His earliest work, “Bird” (1962), a painting of an upside-down bird, and one of his most recent ones, “Nose & Ears: Head (with Nose)” (2006), a digitally-printed image depicting a photographed nose superimposed on a face-shaped brown blob, seem to belong to two separate artists. While the former is rather realistic, the latter is very abstracted. I tried unsuccessfully to find similarities throughout his varied body of work; were they mostly abstract or representational? It was hard to tell. For this reason, Baldessari appears to be distinct among his contemporaries.
For the most part, the majority of the works seem to be abstract, aside from some photographs and mixed media works. In the middle of the exhibition are his series of black and white photographs with red, yellow, and green circles on them. In one way, they are abstract, because he mixed several parts from different pictures, and then hid his subjects’ faces using colored circles. It is not always easy to make sense out of all the works because they seem to have little connection to one another. Like a lot of conceptual art, I had to do some background research to fully understand this elusive artist’s intentions, so I promptly ran to the museum’s store to purchase the exhibition catalogue.
Baldessari, who was born and has worked mostly in California, is one of the most influential and prolific conceptual artists alive today. He started out as a painter, but shocked people by literally destroying the works he generated for over a decade. His decision to cremate his paintings followed by a paid obituary in the newspaper in 1970 certainly served as one of the turning points for him and for the public. He called it his “Cremation Project”, and later explained the work, saying he was “getting doubtful that painting equaled art and art equaled painting.”[1] After that, he began to take photographs.
His works always contain a sense of humor, and his approach to language in relation to meaning helped him become a pioneer of conceptual art. “Pure Beauty” focuses on the theme of the gap between painting and photography as media, a theme that has interested Baldessari for the past 40 years.[2] One of his transitional works entitled “Econ-O-Wash, 14th and Highland, National City, Calif.” (1966-68), a snapshot of the local car wash, which was taken without the aid of a viewfinder, was intended to capture an unglamorous image of his hometown. He added a caption under the image that described the location of the car wash, and had it painted by a professional sign painter. In some ways, this work almost seems too simple to really be considered a serious artwork. Because of this, I began suspecting that he might have wanted to denounce photography as an art form altogether. Perhaps it was works like these that eventually led him to deal with the issue of the gap between painting and photography, since it seems to be critiquing both.
This work was also notable for his use of a new technique: using texts and abstract elements with his images. While anyone can take snapshots, he turns them into something more by adding mysterious abstract elements. Interestingly, the image and the text under it remind me of those old Polaroid pictures, under which someone has jotted down a notation about the location and the occasion. The genius in Baldessari’s work is that he captures the essence of everyday life, and stimulates our thinking of what constitutes an artwork.
He hired a sign painter for other works as well, as in “Pure Beauty” (1966-68), which incorporated the text “Pure Beauty” in the middle of a canvas without any images, and “Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell” (1966-68), which literally contains quite detailed—and somewhat ironic—written directions about how to make attractive paintings. While the question of authorship lingers in my mind in works such as these, I have to admit that it is quite impressive that he so fearlessly pushed the boundaries of the medium of painting. His art is not just composed of what is depicted, but also of the idea behind it.
When Baldessari moved into the unknown terrain of art making in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was inspired by the works of Ed Ruscha, who helped many artists expand and develop their work into the realm of conceptualism.[3] During this period, Baldessari became obsessed with the edge of the canvas as the most important part of the composition. For example, in “Aligning: Balls” (1972), a work consisting of 42 pictures that contain a ball in different locations, the camera moves into a tight semi close-up of the subject. Focusing on the edge of the composition in such images, he developed the technique of “snapshot edges.” The juxtaposition of these images creates a story of their own because unlike the traditional rectangle frame for painting, none of his photos are properly aligned. As a result, they create snapshot edges, which stimulate the viewer to create his own story related to the ball at the moment. In this regard, the viewer is invited into and instantly involved in the story making process.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the exhibition was Baldessari’s constantly morphing style. In both the aforementioned “Bird” and in “Autotire” (1965), a close-up image of a tire tread, he paints over billboard images, making his pictures almost look like photographs, which reminds me somewhat of the photorealist style of Richard Estes. However, it also seems that he was already interested in the relationship between meaning and image by this time. For instance, it may have been his intention that the grooves in “Autotire” are mistaken for cracks in the ground. He never makes it easy for the viewer to figure out what the work is about without reading about it. This fact illustrates one of the major problems with conceptual art. Yet, at the same time, I was surprised by the power such relatively simple illustrations can carry. Ultimately, their ambiguity actually stimulates new thinking in relation to their meanings.
Another work that shows his interest in meaning is “God Nose” (1965), in which he used oil paint to depict a nose in two colors on a blue background. The small white object floating above the nose starts to look like a cloud. However, only after the viewer reads the title, does he understand the true meaning (“God” is related to heaven and the sky). At the same time, the title has dual meanings: “nose” and “knows”. His manipulation of words in such works is the strongest element of his work.
Of all the works on view, I was especially drawn to “The Duress Series: Person Climbing Exterior Wall of Tall Building/Person on Ledge of Tall Building/Person on Girders of Unfinished Tall Building” (2003). As one of the most recent works included in the exhibition, it is composed of three black and white photos that look like they were printed from a magazine or a newspaper. In each of these photos, there is a shape of a human being in a different pose climbing over the wall or trying to balance on the ledge of a building. These shapes are depicted in various colors such as blue, yellow, and red. The people in these works look like either spies chasing after someone, or the targets of such a chase. I found it interesting that the buildings look old in each photo because of their antique black and white quality, while the spy-like figures are quite colorful and modern.It is this addition of the colorful human shapes that gives these particular works originality, demonstrating the power of Baldessari’s minimal touch. I stood in front of these works for some time, but I don’t know why I did. It might have been because of the contrast between the old images and the bright colors, or simply because of the tiring poses of the upward moving human beings they depicted. In any case, they caught my attention and made me think.
After leaving the museum, I realized that I had experienced contemporary art in its most challenging form. Baldessari certainly succeeds in stimulating the brain activities of his viewers, and the exhibition forces viewers to think about the hidden sides of objects. While the images may not have always been “purely beautiful,” they nonetheless communicated strong messages, the strongest of which is his conviction that the truth is beautiful no matter how ugly it is. In the end, pure beauty and the ironic messages it implies can only truly live in eyes of the beholder.
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