John Baldessari: Beauty Los Angeles County Museum of Los Angeles June 27-September 12, 2010 John Baldessari is a demigod in Los Angeles a revered educator, patron, thinker, and artist. Countless individuals have been influenced by his teachings, as well as his works, to such an extent that almost nothing that juxtaposes found image and text is devoid of reference to his creations. In 1990, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary (LACMA) launched a Baldessari exhibition that introduced the artist to those unacquainted with his works, and now twenty years later, LACMA is revisiting that territory with Pure Beauty. Whether it is pure coincidence or not, these exhibitions have over thirty-five works in common (out of 150 in the current LACMA exhibition). Because Baldessari is an incredibly prolific artist, the overlaps are unfortunate and the show might have been stronger had it concentrated on work made since 1991. Baldessari works in myriad media, making paintings, prints, photographs, installations, and now even an iPhone app. The finished pieces are usually derived from isolating or rearranging--taking things apart and putting them back together anew. Best known for his appropriationist strategies, Baldessari uses movie stills as the basis of insightful and witty juxtapositions that occasionally offer poignant social commentary. In a retrospective, the underlying premise is to introduce a vast body of work in a condensed fashion to a general audience. For that reason, many museum shows are generalized presentations of an artist's work--one from this series, one from that series--to round out the artist's oeuvre. Baldessari exhibitions are frequent, therefore, this museum exhibition becomes a walk down memory lane. What makes the LACMA exhibition different from previous Baldessari shows is its ability to trace a new trajectory--the influence and use of technology on his work. Because the exhibition spans more than forty years, one can now look back in time and clearly see Baldessari's inventive uses of technology. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Early text paintings including Wrong (1967), Beauty (1967 68), and A Painting That Is Its Own Documentation (1968-) set the stage for Baldessari's conceptualism. In the late 1960s, he began purging art of imagery in favor of words that describe its making or meaning. These, among other works, display Baldessari's wit and cunning alongside a pointed commentary on the process of creating an artwork. While it previously could have been a rare treat to see him sing Sol Lewitt's 35-point tract on conceptual art to tunes like the Star Spangled Banner and Heaven (1972) or state I Am Making Art repeatedly for eighteen minutes as he moves his hands and body in quirky motions (1971), these early video works arc now prevalent on the internet. In Baldessari's development, from the mid-1970s to the present, what becomes striking and relevant is how he has used technology and taken advantage of various equipment (such as the Portapack in the 1970s) and software development (such as the iPhone app in 2010) to become a leader in expanding new fields for artistic experimentation. In the digital age, where everything is reproducible, how does an artist like Baldessari stay current? When Baldessari first started juxtaposing images and texts, the seamless collage of Photoshop or the easy downloading of internet imagery was hardly commonplace. To create many of his works in the 1980s and '90s he collected Hollywood film stills, marking up and isolating individual segments, gestures, and looks. He then had them rephotographed and enlarged and assembled these croppings into wall-sized works. He focused on how a look could lead the eye through a succession of images in such works as Man and Woman with Bridge (1985). Later, as in Three Red Paintings (1988), he masked parts of the images using handpainted circles to block out specific elements--faces as well as the paintings--in the original work. …
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Dec 11, 2023
Mª Carmen África Vidal Claramonte 
Open Access