John Baldessari
In 1931 Sergei Eisenstein published a piece on ‘intellectual montage’: editing understood as a clash of pictures, producing meaning that wasn’t inherent in the individual images. That same year John Baldessari was born. He’s an artist, not a director, but, being Los Angeles-based, he has the Hollywood visual cosmology at his doorstep. And if there was ever anyone who took Eisenstein’s assertion to heart, it’s him.
For anyone who thought Baldessari was first and foremost the guy with the ‘dots’ – plain colours obscuring faces and objects in photos sifted from an extensive archive of film stills, their meaning tottering like tipsy ducks – the Vienna exhibition (spanning 1962–84, and the most extensive display of work from that period to date) was instructive. However, for Baldessari, instruction is a form of communication to be avoided. 'I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art', he wrote repeatedly, like a naughty schoolboy, in an eponymous work from 1971. Creating witty art by fulfilling an extremely dull task – writing the same sentence over and over – was, of course, the point. Although he brushed aside conservative resentment towards Conceptual and Performance art, these approaches, with their at times slightly pompous proclamation of significance, weren’t exempt from his ridicule either: in the video I Am Making Art (1971) we see the artist, like a rehab patient, raising each of his arms slowly, while proclaiming with Valium fervour that making these gestures is art.
About a decade earlier, in 1963, like a bored teenager desperate for something new, Baldessari took a ride in a red sports car, photographing the rear of every truck he overtook on the way from L.A. to Santa Barbara. The year before, Ed Ruscha had done something very similar, taking dead-
pan photographs of 26 Gasoline Stations (1962) on the way from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City, which he then published in a 26-page booklet. These two works amounted to the Californian manifesto of Minimalist Pop: no Marilyns, just trucks and petrol stations. But there was more in it for Baldessari than the rock-steady beat of the standardized: he observed that the backs of trucks ultimately weren’t that different from the picture plane of a painting – within the rectangle they offered myriad possibilities for subdivision, from stacked planks to cross-beams to logotypes. What does this mean, ultimately? Sublime abstraction is turned into a vernacular, and, vice versa, an ordinary phenomenon is suddenly looked at with an inquisitive eye. If painting hadn’t already lost its innocence for Baldessari, it certainly did so now.
Not that he simply stopped painting canvases. In 1965 he painted a little puffy cloud, falling from the sky like a rejected lamb, followed by a comic-style dotted line (The Falling Cloud, 1965) and God’s nose, floating in a baby-blue sky like a pyramid-shaped tea-bag in a cup (God Nose, 1965). Even the choice of motif already bespeaks a deep-seated discontentment with participation in the painterly production of the Sublime. In Vienna these mid-1960s’ paintings were positioned opposite the entrance, providing the first of several surprises to come. For anyone who thought they knew Baldessari’s oeuvre reasonably well could have been forgiven for assuming that no paintings existed from that period in the first place. In 1970 – a fact the exhibition reveals at a later stage – he arranged for the cremation of any pre-1966 painting in his possession (the aforementioned paintings were on display because they had already been sold off). I am both tempted to tell Baldessari his paintings weren’t that bad, and to tell many painters who may think they are better than him to follow his example.
But why did he spare the post-1966 paintings? This was the year that Baldessari started to delegate the application of paint. Professional signwriters were asked to transfer quotes from art books, in neat print letters, onto canvas: for example, Clement Greenberg claiming that ‘ you can no more choose whether or not to like a work of art than you can choose to have sugar taste sweet or lemons sour’, and that aesthetic judgements were ‘not arrived at afterwards through reflection or thought’. Yet when such assumptions appear on canvas, they contradict themselves beautifully: the quote is too long to prevent you from reflecting (hopefully) while reading it. Stoic text-image and haughty declaration suddenly seem like to two kids pointing at each other, saying ‘it wasn’t me’.
In general, every third or fourth work in the show would have easily been enough to serve as the basis for another artist’s whole career. Jenny Holzer may have perfected the visual language of the moving LED display, but as early as 1968 Baldessari was already using the medium to allow a rather complicated line of reasoning dealing with classical Greek compositional techniques which appear like the latest bargain sales slogan (Lighted Moving Message: Viewpoint, 1968). The film Title (1972) announces its name in the opening credits. ‘Over there’, the following subtitle reads, as someone is pointing to the bushes. Then a stone, a chair, a dog and a man (the young David Salle) are introduced in separate shots, before, in Episode Two, stone and dog are combined in one image (An encounter! A story unfolds!), as are Salle and stone, and so on – all in all, making many recent engagements with questions of the structural versus the narrative in film look rather laboured in comparison. And of Baldessari’s post-1970s game of obscuring parts of film stills with a plain colour field, there was an early example here: two gangster types on a roof, gazing at someone or something on the cornice, which is covered by a big white square (Two Stares Making a Point But Blocked by a Plane (For Malevich), 1976). Is it a superhero they are staring at, or an attempted suicide? Very much in the vein of Eisenstein’s intellectual montage, sublime abstraction makes a cameo appearance in a B-movie, sending any convictions about what is seen and what it means straight into the abyss.
