John Baldessari

Script is the opposite of an improvisational exercise. Seven couples, all amateurs, are handed pages from random movie scripts and instructed to enact the absurd text through force of imagination, without direction or knowledge of what the others are doing.

John Baldessari is today known as one of the leading conceptual artists of his generation, using found or appropriated images and exploring the associative power of language. Like many experimental artists Baldessari began his career in the more traditional realm of painting. Rather than merely moving on from these early works, Baldessari decided in 1970 to have them destroyed. In the summer of 1970 all paintings in the artist’s possession dating from the thirteen years 1953–66 were incinerated at a local crematorium. This is the film of that cremation. [Overview Courtesy of Tate Modern]

'Folding Hat' is a deadpan conceptual exercise that represents a dashed attempt to rescue an object from the meaning assigned to it. Whistling an aria from The Barber of Seville, Baldessari bends and folds a simple hat into numerous configurations. However, for the duration of the exercise, which unfolds in real time, the object never loses its "hatness." In the end it is untransmutable—no escape can be made from its meaning. Although Baldessari tries to drive a wedge between the signifier and signified, the viewer never misrecognizes the hat.

In 1971, Baldessari was commissioned by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada to create an original, on-site work. Unable to make the journey himself, he suggested that the students voluntarily write the phrase "I will not make any more boring art" on the gallery walls. Inspired by the work's completion — the students covered the walls with the phrase — Baldessari committed his own version of the piece to videotape. Like an errant schoolboy, he dutifully writes, "I will not make any more boring art" over and over again in a notebook for the duration of the tape. In an ironic disjunction of form and content, Baldessari's methodical, repetitive exercise deliberately contradicts the point of the lesson — to refrain from creating "boring" art.

“[A] rather perverse exercise in futility,” this tape documents Baldessari’s response to Joseph Beuys’s influential performance, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. Baldessari’s approach here is characteristically subtle and ironic, involving ordinary objects and a seemingly banal task. The philosophical underpinnings of Baldessari’s exercise are structuralist theories about the opaque and artificial nature of language as a system of signs. Using a common houseplant to represent nature and instructional flashcards to represent the alphabet, Baldessari ironically illustrates this theorem. That language is the structuring element of the tape—the length of the tape was determined by the number of letters in the alphabet—enforces the connection between language and art, a recurrent theme in Baldessari’s work.

Baldessari introduces eight news photos to Ed Henderson — ranging in subject matter from geese at the zoo to an accidental electrocution — and asks him to identify them. Henderson's associative responses suggest the projection of unconscious desires and fears onto these arbitrary images, which are removed from their original contexts. The implied narratives that emerge from the seemingly random juxtapositions and sequences of photographs give rise to questions of manipulation, inference and meaning.

In an ironic reference to body art, process art and performance, Baldessari challenges definitions of the content and execution of art-making. Performing with deadpan precision, he moves his hands, arms and entire body in studied, minute motions, intoning the phrase "I am making art" with each gesture. Each articulation of the phrase is given a different emphasis and nuance, as if art were being created from moment to moment. This index of body movements is ironically offset by the repetitive monotony of the exercise.

Seen from a bird's eye view, a figure paints the walls and floor of a windowless room six times in six days, using each of the primary and secondary colors.

Baldessari progresses from simple, static images, such as a rock in an empty room, to complex narrative scenes, like a woman eavesdropping on her next-door neighbor. Through the gradual integration of cinematic techniques—motion, color, sound, acting, editing and arc—the artist inverts the traditional Hollywood model, stressing structure over narrative coherence.

These two anecdotes are paradigmatic of Baldessari's investigations of language systems and meaning through disjunction and juxtaposition. In a strategy that recurs throughout his work, Baldessari presents the pieces as lessons, appearing first as teacher and then as student. Some Words I Mispronounce is an absurdist exercise in which he writes a series of words on a blackboard — poor, cask, bade, Beelzebub, bough, sword. The words are never pronounced. The second lesson juxtaposes two sign systems, language and music. As instructed by a foreign language lesson book (a found object), Baldessari repeats a sentence — "You tell me what I do" — according to notes on a musical scale. His intonations are exaggerated, his delivery is deadpan, and the phrase is rendered absurd. Ironically, the literalness of the phrase as articulated, and the reduction of English to basic units of sound and pronunciation, nullifies the point of the lesson — to speak the language fluently.

A series of 19 short parables concerning modes of representation, language and cognition. Often conveyed through conscious misinformation, Baldessari's witty puns and jokes play off the relation of word, image and meaning; the intersection of what is heard or written, what is seen, and what is understood. For example, he shows us an image of a duffel bag and proceeds to describe, in detail, an object bearing no resemblance to a duffel bag, which is eventually revealed to be a stool. In A Sentence with Hidden Meaning, he writes the phrase, "A sentence with hidden meaning" on a legal pad, hiding the word "hidden" so that it reads, "A sentence with meaning."

A tribute to fellow artist Sol LeWitt, Baldessari sings lines from LeWitt's thirty-five statements on conceptual art to the tune of popular songs.

Contemporaneous to his best-known video works, these Super-8mm films represent Baldessari's conceptual engagement with motion picture film, pointing to the technical strengths and weaknesses of the celluloid medium relative to video, such as the superior reproduction of color, on one hand, and the difficulty of adding synchronized sound on the other. Conceived on an intimate scale (only the artist's hands are visible as he manipulates a range of objects), Baldessari's Super-8 films replace text and speech with a cunning visual language, in which he wordlessly describes physical changes in his environment: a bright light flashes on a mirrored surface, red liquid rises in a thermometer, and powdered pigment makes an indelible mess. Here Baldessari employs a method of communication that is based on spectacle rather than performance.

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