ART-PRESENTATION:John Baldessari

John Baldessari created conceptual art that asks questions about what art is, how it is made and what it looks like. Combining imagery from pop culture with linguistic explorations, his work challenged artistic norms and limits throughout his entire career. The exhibition of around 30 works in Moderna Museet, is the first extensive presentation of his work in Sweden.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Moderna Museet Archive

John Baldessari has had over 200 solo exhibitions since his debut in 1960 and participated in some thousand group exhibitions worldwide. The exhibition at Moderna Museet is the first in Sweden to present his body of work on a large scale and includes some 30 works from different chapters of his long and extensive career. Baldessari was born in National City, California, a city located fifteen minutes from the Mexican border. His parents were both immigrants to the USA (his mother from Denmark and his father from Austria). John Baldessari studied to be a teacher and taught art at schools around San Diego before being invited to teach at the newly founded art academy CalArts outside Los Angeles in 1970. In his professional role as teacher, Baldessari had an impact on several generations of artists, and former students includes artists like Mike Kelley, David Salle, and Tony Oursler. By the mid-1960s, John Baldessari had come to realize that a photographic image or written text could better express his artistic intentions than a representational painting, and his artistic practice developed in a new direction. John Baldessari worked ceaselessly in his investigation of what art is. Inspired by a comment by the abstract painter Al Held that “all Conceptual art is just pointing at things”, John Baldessari made the series “Commissioned Paintings” (1969) in which he asked a friend to literally point at objects or events that he found interesting. The action that had been pointed out was then photographed and a number of amateur painters were commissioned to make copies of the photographs. These reproductions include the text “A painting by” followed by the respective painter’s name clearly written by a professional sign painter. There are no traces of John Baldessari himself in any of the works in the series, a commentary on Abstract Expressionism’s conception of the artwork as a direct expression of the artist’s emotional life and genius. In an ad placed in a local newspaper on July 24, 1970, John Baldessari announced that he had had all the artworks in his possession created between May 1953 and March 1966 destroyed at a crematorium. The result was a total of ten boxes of ashes, with some of it collected in book-shaped urns bearing the text “John Anthony Baldessari May 1953–March 1966”. Baldessari described this act as a way of liberating himself from all his accumulated art. The exhibition at Moderna Museet includes the work “Cremation Project” (1970) with its urn containing the remains of thirteen years of creative work. In the 1970s, Baldessari took a more ‘artless’ approach to image making by appropriating stills from B-movies to create synthesized photomontages. The photographs were cheap and easy to acquire, allowing him to systematically juxtapose various images to create a new narrative context. Influenced by early Hollywood cinema, the work suggested movement, similar to a storyboard grid, allowing him to document actions rather than monumentalizing his subject matter. In the video work “I Am Making Art” (1971), that will also be shown in the exhibition, John Baldessari moves stiffly in front of the camera while repeating the sentence “I am making art” emphasizing the words differently every time—a nod at Conceptual Art and the notion that all actions can be art. As seen in “Frames and Ribbon” (1988), he incorporated stickers to conceal individual faces, thus veiling emotional content and drawing attention to minor details and the negative space between frames. The pricing stickers serve as a minimalist painting technique, creating a new depth within a flat field of color, breaking up the realistic black and white photo content. Baldessari continued to examine parts of the body through the series “Noses and Ears” (2006-07) and “Arms and Legs” (2007-08). Both series expose isolated features on a minimal field of color, allowing the viewer to interpret the work through sensual precepts. Baldessari viewed his own features as separate entities, rather than belonging to a whole face or body.

Info: Curator: Matilda Olof-Ors, Moderna Museet, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Duration: 21/3-16/8/20, Days & Hours: tue & Fri 10:00-20:00, Wed-Thu 10:00-18:00, Sat-sun 11:00-18:00, www.modernamuseet.se