Citizendia
Your Ad Here

John Baldessari, (b. June 17, 1931, National City, California) is a conceptual artist. Events 1462 - Vlad III the Impaler attempts to assassinate Mehmed II ( The Night Attack) forcing him to retreat Year 1931 ( MCMXXXI) was a Common year starting on Thursday (link will display full 1931 calendar of the Gregorian calendar. National City is a city in San Diego County, California, United States. Conceptual art is Art in which the Concept (s or Idea (s involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns

His work often attempts to point out irony in contemporary art theory and practices or reduce it to absurdity. His art has been featured in more than 120 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the

Contents

Body of work and themes

Early text paintings

Baldessari's early major works were canvas paintings that were empty but for painted statements derived from contemporary art theory. Canvas is an extremely heavy-duty plain-woven fabric used for making Sails Tents Marquees Backpacks and other functions Aesthetics or esthetics ( also spelled æsthetics) is commonly known as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values sometimes called An early attempt of Baldessari's included the hand-painted phrase "Suppose it is true after all? WHAT THEN?" on a heavily worked painted surface. However, this proved personally disappointing because the form and method conflicted with the objective use of language that he preferred to employ. Baldessari decided the solution was to remove his own hand from the construction of the image and to employ a commercial, lifeless style so that the text would impact the viewer without distractions. The words were then physically lettered by sign painters, in an unornamented black font. In typography a font (also fount) is traditionally defined as a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular Typeface. The first of this series presented the ironic statement "A TWO-DIMENSIONAL SURFACE WITHOUT ANY ARTICULATION IS A DEAD EXPERIENCE. " (1967)

Another work, Painting for Kubler, 1967-68, presented the viewer theoretical instructions on how to view it and on the importance of context and continuity with previous works. The seemingly legitimate art concerns were intended by Baldessari to become hollow and ridiculous when presented in such a purely self-referential manner.


Juxtaposing text with images

Related to his early text paintings were his Wrong series, which paired photographic images with lines of text from a book about composition. [1] His photographic California Map Project found physical forms that resembled the letters in "California" geographically near to the very spots on the map that they were printed. California ( is a US state on the West Coast of the United States, along the Pacific Ocean. In the Binary Code Series, Baldessari used images as information holders by alternating photographs to stand in for the on-off state of binary code; one example alternated photos of a woman holding a cigarette parallel to her mouth and then dropping it away.

Another of Baldessari's series juxtaposed an image of an object such as a glass, or a block of wood, and the phrase "A glass is a glass" or "Wood is wood" combined with "but a cigar is a good smoke" and the image of the artist smoking a cigar. Glass in the common sense refers to a Hard, Brittle, transparent Solid, such as that used for Windows many Wood is hard fibrous lignified structural tissue produced as secondary Xylem in the stems of Woody plants notably trees but also shrubs These directly refer to Rene Magritte's The Treachery of Images; the images similarly were used to stand in for the objects described. René François Ghislain Magritte ( 21 November 1898 - 15 August 1967) was a Belgian Surrealist artist The Treachery of Images ( La trahison des images 1928&ndash29 is a series of paintings by Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte However, the series also apparently refers to Sigmund Freud's famous attributed observation that "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" [2], as well as to Rudyard Kipling's ". Sigmund Freud (ˈziːkmʊnt ˈfʁɔʏt born Sigismund Shlomo Freud (May 6 1856 &ndash September 23 1939 was an Austrian Psychiatrist who founded Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936 was an English Author and poet . . a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke. "[3]

Arbitrary games

Baldessari has expressed that his interest in language comes from its similarities in structure to games, as both operate by an arbitrary and mandatory system of rules. In this spirit, many of his works are sequences showing attempts at accomplishing an arbitrary goal, such as Throwing 4 Balls in the Air to Get a Square, in which the artist attempted to do just that, photographing the results, and eventually selecting the "best out of 36 tries", with 36 being the determining number just because that is the standard number of shots on a roll of film.

Pointing

Much of Baldessari's work involves pointing, in which he tells the viewer not only what to look at but how to make selections and comparisons, often simply for the sake of doing so. Baldessari critiques formalist assessments of art in a segment from his video How We Do Art Now, entitled "Examining Three 8d Nails", in which he gives obsessive attention to minute details of the nails, such as how much rust they have, or descriptive qualities such as which appears "cooler, more distant, less important" than the others.

Baldessari's Commissioned Paintings series took the idea of pointing literally, after he read a criticism of conceptual art that claimed it was nothing more than pointing. Conceptual art is Art in which the Concept (s or Idea (s involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns Beginning with photos of a hand pointing at various objects, Baldessari then hired amateur yet technically adept artists to paint the pictures. He then added a caption "A painting by [painter's name]" to each finished painting. In this instance, he has been likened to a choreographer, directing the action while having no direct hand in it, and these paintings are typically read as questioning the idea of artistic authorship. See also, Choreography (literally "dance-writing" from the Greek words "χορεία" (circular dance see chorea) and "γραφή" The amateur artists have been analogized to sign painters in this series, chosen for their pedestrian methods that were indifferent to what was being painted.

Quotes

"If I saw the art around me that I liked, then I wouldn’t do art. " [4]

Awards

Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities Fellow, sponsored by the University of Southern California.
College Art Associations Lifetime Achievement Award.

Education

References

  1. ^ Interview with Moira Roth
  2. ^ attributed in Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, 15th Ed.
  3. ^ "The Betrothed," Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads, Ed. Project Gutenberg
  4. ^ Robert Ayers (August 7, 2006), John Baldessari, ARTINFO, <http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/19202/john-baldessari/>. Project Gutenberg, abbreviated as PG, is a volunteer effort to Digitize, archive and distribute Cultural works Retrieved on 22 April 2008 

External links

© 2009 citizendia.org; parts available under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License, from http://en.wikipedia.org
 Dapyx Software network: MP3 Explorer | Ebook Manager | Zenithic