See This: John Baldessari is at LACMA
This week I visited LACMA to check out Pure Beauty, the John Baldessari retrospective. The show, a survey of painting, photography and video spans from the 1960s to today. Though Baldessari's methods and mediums have evolved through his career, his focus on communication has remained consistent.
Playing with language, images and the everyday observed, Baldessari has described himself as "Dr. Frankenstein breathing life into the inanimate." The California conceptual artist is like a witty mad scientist; Baldessari's work controls the narrative story-lines that are instinctively placed on art.
In dramatic fashion, Baldessari cremated most of his paintings in 1970. Like much of his work, the surviving canvases challenge the way we view art. Black words painted on a solid-colored canvas ironically list the ways to sell a painting or simply state an expression, like PURE BEAUTY, for which the show is named. Descriptive text is painted beneath found photographs. In this series, my favorite has always been the word WRONG, 1966, painted beneath a portrait of a man (Baldessari) standing in a suburban neighborhood. The composition is terrible, color and printing even worse. And then of course there's the underlying disdain about the rise of American suburbia. It's art and it's all wrong.
For Baldessari color and shape are content and content seems to be more like a joke than fine art. Swatches of colors are printed on a large canvas with descriptive names after food- yellow/orange is American Cheese, brown is Warm Brownie. Colored price stickers are placed over the faces of found photos. A discarded film still of a spaceman is cut and framed as a triangle pointing to a framed image of stars in space.
In 1971 Baldessari made the notorious 13 minute video of himself writing the phrase "I will not make anymore boring art" over and over... Four decades later we see how he has succeeded.
FROM GOYA SERIES, 1997 INKJET, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS
WRONG, 1966-68, PHOTOEMULSION AND ACRYLIC PAINT ON CANVAS
STARRY NIGHT BALANCED ON TRIANGULATED TROUBLE, 1984 B/W PHOTOS, OIL TINT
PRIMA FACIE, 2006 PIGMENT PRINTS, LATEX PAINT, MATTE CANVAS
