Tag Archives: Conceptual Art

John Baldessari: Pure Beauty at the Met

Posted on by
Commissioned Painting: A Painting by Anita Storck, 1969
This work, up at the Met as part of its John Baldessari: Pure Beauty exhibition, was painted by Anita Storck, an artist who, like others in this series, Baldessari found at a local craft fairs selling scenes of landscapes, flowers, and boats at sea. He commissioned them to paint as faithfully as they could an image of their choice from a selection of photographs Baldessari had taken. After, Baldessari had a sign painter hand-letter the painter’s name on each canvas. Like much of the work on view, the story behind the object is more interesting than the object itself.

As the first major U.S. exhibition in 20 years to survey the Baldessari’s work, this pioneer of conceptual art was a bit of a history lesson for me, as I can see the shadow of his long arm in many contemporary artists’ work, but also a reminder of some of my inherent dislike of conceptual art. In Pure Beauty, one can witness the many evolutions of form in his long career, but much of the same focus, such as the process of art making and how we perceive things.
Heel, 1986
The story of how he makes the works, like how he pulled images, for example cinematic stills like the works above and below, and put them back together is more interesting than the end result is visually. (Conceptual art in a nutshell?). For example, to create the Duress series below, Baldessari went through the process of him standing in front of the TV with a camera and taking pictures of movies, blowing up those stills, inking in the figures, and creating depth with foam as an examination of mass media. The process in interesting, but is doesn’t necessarily come through in the work.
The Duress Series: Person Climbing Exterior Wall of Tall Building / Person on Ledge of Tall Building / Person on Girders of Unfinished Tall Building, 2003

For me, the continuous focus on structure, rules, media, and the process of art making is a questioning of convention without actually saying anything in response. His work can be interesting, even decorative, but shallow. That said, I feel like I understand contemporary art better for having seen it. 
On view at the Met through January 9.

Doing Dumb Stuff?

Posted on by
Stills from video “I will not make any more boring art”, in which Baldessari writes that phrase repetetively

 “John Baldessari, the 79-year-old conceptualist, has spent more than four decades making laconic, ironic conceptual art-about-art, both good and bad. His style is familiar and recognizable, wry and dry: It usually incorporates a photo or grid of pictures, often black-and-white and grainy, with the vibe of a seventies issue of Artforum; text of some kind; a found object placed casually; a video or maybe a newspaper clipping or some other element taken from popular culture. The approach is hugely influential, setting the precedent for interesting artists like Cindy Sherman and David Salle. In a sense, Baldessari imagined a large circular room with a hundred entrances and exits. Thousands of artists could go through, and did. After a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s retrospective, you’ll see that Baldessari’s children have overrun Chelsea.

And that’s the problem. Even a former student like Salle admits that “at least three generations of artists” doing “dumb stuff … is largely John’s fault.” Baldessari’s interesting niche bewitched too many people, creating a hackneyed academy of smarty-pants work that addresses the same issues in the same ways, over and over, just the way Baldessari and others of his generation did 40 years ago.”

 -Great article on John Baldessari (ostensibly inspired by the new exhibition at the Met) by Jerry Saltz
True?
Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell, John Baldessari

In & Out of Amsterdam at MoMA

Posted on by


Amsterdam in the 1970s functioned as a hub for Conceptual artists, MoMA’s thorough, enlightening new exhibition documents. Old exhibition posters lead you down the hall into rooms of slide projectors and photographs. For me, it drew connections between various familiar and unfamiliar artists. For example, this wall:

is not Sol Le Witt, but by Lawrence Weiner, or at least according to his directions. So which came first, the Weiner or the Sol?

All the art felt dated, and the exhibition felt like a collection of excavated fossils brought out for study at the Natural History Museum. Partly the concepts have been absorbed into mainstream contemporary art, so that a video of a chorus singing doesn’t have the same effect it once would have and Gilbert and George’s living art is remembered with nostalgia.

Personally, I found it hard to pay so much attention to artifacts that lacked real intellectual or visual interest. For all that I found certain pieces cool or neat, I never really felt engaged. That doesn’t diminish the scholarly and historical value of the exhibition, and it’s quite possible I’m not familiar enough with the material to get it, but I found it a challenging exhibition to really enjoy. Maybe any thorough exhibition of conceptual art is bound to be, in my case at least, in one ear–

Photograph of exhibition wall [ears mine].

–and out the other.