Tag: john baldessari

Your Name In Lights, by John Baldessari

January 6th, 2011 · · Articles of interest, Find an Artist, Writing about Art/ Artists No comments - Tags: , , , , ,

On the wall: Mick Jessop celebrates his name in lights. Picture: Katrina Tepper Source: The Daily Telegraph

JOHN Baldessari, one of the pioneers of conceptual art, a man who built a reputation for rethinking the possibilities of expression long before anyone heard of Damien Hirst, doesn’t much like the idea of the artist as celebrity. Being an artist is like being a plumber, he says. It’s a job like any other. To make sense of this, it helps to go back to the time, many years ago, when the young artistic craftsman was finding his voice near San Diego. In those days, he would avoid telling people he was an artist, thinking he’d be seen as an outcast. He’d say he was a teacher or a professor instead.

“Then I realised I was looking at that word, artist, with a capital A,” he says, “and you need a small A. It’s just a profession. You can be a good artist or a bad artist . . . but the word does not imply any specific thing about quality.”

This realisation came to Baldessari early in his career, before the attention of the art world came his way and his works started breaking records at auction. One of those works, Quality Material, a piece of text art from the late 1960s, sold at Christie’s in New York in 2007 for $US4.4 million. Baldessari had asked a sign painter to write the following phrase on a piece of canvas: “QUALITY MATERIAL – CAREFUL INSPECTION – GOOD WORKMANSHIP. ALL COMBINED IN AN EFFORT TO GIVE YOU A PERFECT PAINTING.”Baldessari, speaking before the launch of his new project in Sydney, laughs about his changing fortunes. “I’m lucky I have a sense of absurdity,” he says. “I had pieces I couldn’t give away. I think the top price I got for some early works was $500, and in the last four or five years they’ve gone to four or five million dollars each. The same works.” The 79-year-old doesn’t think it’s him, either. “I don’t think I’ve changed,” he says. “The world’s changed.”

Enthusiasm about Baldessari’s work has been growing steadily for the past four decades. He has continued to explore the potential of images and text, asking questions about the nature of art, beauty, language and communication, as well as what it means to be an artist. In 1970, he cremated most of his old paintings – a decade of work that ended up in an urn he called The Cremation Project – and turned to video, photography, film stills and other forms of art.

I am Making Art is one of Baldessari’s best known works. It’s a black-and-white video in which he utters those four words, deadpan, while moving different parts of his body. Another was completed in 1971, when he wrote, “I will not make any more boring art” over and over again in a notebook for a video work of the same name.

“If I was trying to be humorous I wouldn’t be doing what I was doing,” the artist says. “It’s just the way I think, the way I observe the world. And it’s slightly askew, probably, of other people.”

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‘PURE BEAUTY’ John Baldessari @ LACMA

July 16th, 2010 · · Articles of interest, Find an Artist, Writing about Art/ Artists No comments - Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Article Tab : Kissing Series: Simone Palm Trees (Near) (1975), two color photographs on board by John Baldessari. On view at the L.A. County Museum of Art through Sept. 12.
“Kissing Series: Simone Palm Trees (Near)” (1975), two color photographs on board by John Baldessari. On view at the L.A. County Museum of Art through Sept. 12.
COLLECTION OF CRAIG ROBINS, MIAMI; IMAGE COURTESY OF LACMA

‘John Baldessari: Pure Beauty’ Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Ave., Los Angeles, Through Sept. 12 Noon-8 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays; noon-9 p.m. Fridays; 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays $12 adults, $8 seniors and students 18+ with ID, free for children 17 and younger . lacma.org

‘PURE BEAUTY’

Over at LACMA, the largest-to-date retrospective of John Baldessari’s work is currently on view in the Broad Contemporary Art Museum. This show comes to LACMA by way of the Tate Modern in London, where it was on display from Oct. 13, 2009 to Jan. 10.

I had the opportunity to see this exhibit in London, and I have to say, it looks a whole lot better in Los Angeles. Maybe it’s the newer, fresher gallery space at LACMA, versus the Tate’s gray, institutional interiors. Or perhaps it’s the palm trees that are visible outside the museum and also present in Baldessari’s work. Whatever the reason, “Pure Beauty” feels at home at LACMA.

Baldessari is an extremely influential artist, one of the vanguards of conceptual art stretching back to the 1960s. He was also an art professor at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia and at UCLA, and has taught generations of artists, including David Salle, Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger. Basically, you can hardly escape Baldessari’s reach and influence if you are an artist, critic or art historian living and working in California.

“Pure Beauty” is fascinating, occasionally repetitive, and, at times, darn humorous. It’s enlightening to see how Baldessari moved from traditional painting to text and photographic image-based collages, bringing much of the art world with him.

The show features some iconic Baldessari works, including “Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell” (1966-68), “Everything is Purged…” (1966-68) and “A Painting That is its Own Documentation” (1966-2010).

Baldessari uses old images from forgotten films, sometimes isolating specific parts and other times covering faces with colored or white circles, rendering the people anonymous. “Frames and Ribbon” (1988) is a sardonic commentary on an art competition, while “Kiss Panic” (1984) is a powerful collage of guns pointing in a kaleidoscope of directions.

His later work embraces shape, dimension and color, demonstrating that he’s still exploring relevant concepts even as he approaches his eighth decade.

Like Andy Warhol, Baldessari tells us volumes about our culture and our obsessions, using text, film, TV and photographic images to reflect fundamental characteristics of our era.

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective @ MOCA

July 15th, 2010 · · Articles of interest, Find an Artist, Writing about Art/ Artists No comments - Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Despite the growing popularity of artists’ collectives, collaborative work and the social nature of viewing and talking about art, the making of art remains a decidedly individual pursuit. It’s a solo game. So it’s only natural for museums and galleries to present solo exhibitions and retrospectives.

http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/nour-rolf/blackangel/images/golden%20brown.jpg

Golden Brown, 1943-44 Oil on canvas, 43 5/8″ x 55 5/8″ University purchase, Bixby Fund, 1953

Two of Southern California’s largest art institutions are currently hosting extensive retrospectives of two titans in contemporary art. In downtown Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) is showcasing “Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective” through Sept. 20, while along Miracle Mile, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is featuring “John Baldessari: Pure Beauty” through Sept. 12.

The Gorky show at MOCA is perhaps the rarer one, since it’s the first full-scale survey of the Armenian American’s artwork since 1981. The exhibit offers more than 120 works, including paintings, drawings and a handful of sculptures. Some of these pieces are on public display for the first time.

Born Vostanik Manoog Adoyan in Khorkom, Armenia, Gorky was an important early abstractionist, and his work influenced American art for decades. He was also influenced by the giants in modern art. One can certainly see the connections between Gorky and Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Joan Miró, Wifredo Lam and Hans Hofmann.

The show is arranged chronologically, from his early years to his final works. His paintings from the 1920s are obviously influenced by Cézanne, sharing the same attention to geometry, shade and texture. Between the late 1920s and early 1930s, cubism is clearly a guiding principle, in works such as “Still Life” (1930-31) and “Blue Figure in a Chair” (circa 1931).

We can see Gorky begin to develop his own individual style in the “Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia” graphite and ink series (1931-32) and in his large, haunting oil portraits “The Artist and His Mother” (1926-36) and “The Artist and His Mother” (c. 1926-42).

Gorky noticeably matured in the late 1930s to early 1940s, with paintings such as “Enigmatic Combat” (1936-37) and “Painting” (1936-37). These works are tightly composed, yet colorful and clearly delineated.

As the 1940s progressed, Gorky’s work got looser and more abstract. Many paintings from this period share characteristics with Spanish/Catalan painter Miró. But he also crystallized a signature style – one that put him on the map – with works such as “The Liver is the Cock’s Comb,” a 1944 oil on canvas, considered his most important painting; and “Betrothal I,” a 1947 oil on paper that recalls a traditional Armenian wedding, according to Gorky’s own notes.

Gorky committed suicide in July 1948 at about the age of 46. (Records of his exact birth date vary.) But the MOCA show is a tribute to his life, creative spirit and impressive accomplishments.

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