John Baldessari (1931–2020)

John Baldessari (born 1931) is a luminary in the realms of Conceptual art and book art, and one of the most important figures in contemporary art of the last 40 years. Since his sensational Cremation Project of 1970, for which he incinerated every single painting he had made between 1953 and 1966, Baldessari's work has mined the tensions between language, image and sign-making. Baldessari unpicks the very mechanisms of media representation, and even the idea of artistic subject matter show more itself, using painting, photography, film/video, collage and reliefs, integrating images and text from advertising and movies into his works. Since 1980, Baldessari has worked mostly without text in serial photographs and pictures, and strategies such as overpainting, visual omissions and withheld information have increasingly taken on the earlier function of language. For this superbly designed book, Baldessari has designed a sequence of enigmatically fragmentary and geometrically emphatic images, arranged rhythmically across the volume's landscape format, that slowly accrete narrative as the reader-viewer moves through the book. These fragments, derived largely from B-movie stills, lead into a second chapter that reproduces the complete pictures. Juggling these themes of composition, information, omission and rhythm, Parse consolidates Baldessari's signature concerns into a great work of book art. show less

The first major monograph on the rich and varied art of Matt Mullican.

Over the last four decades, Matt Mullican has created a complex body of work concerned with systems of knowledge, meaning, language, and signification. His work takes the form of painting, collage, video, sculpture, and installation, but Mullican is perhaps best known for his performances: these take place under hypnosis, allowing the artist to treat his own psyche as yet another medium. The drawings Mullican makes in this show more state-as an alter ego he refers to as "that person"-recall Surrealist experiments with automatic writing. In recent years, interest has surged in Mullican's work as younger artists and curators have rediscovered him.

In this first major monograph on the artist, a group of renowned art world figures considers the expanse of Mullican's art-from the "bulletin boards" that combine notes, sketches, and archival photographs to the graphic language used to illustrate his idiosyncratic cosmology. Curator Lynne Cooke and art historian Hal Foster address various aspects of Mullican's multidisciplinary practice, while a roundtable conversation between Mullican, Conceptual artist John Baldessari, and curator Ulrich Wilmes completes this comprehensive survey. The in-depth discussion investigates Mullican's early days as a student-when Baldessari was his professor-and the development of his signature works. show less

Artist's book by John Baldessari. Book design and editing by John Baldessari with Nina Holland, Simon Johnston and Jerry Sohn. "It all began many years ago with an innocent interest in the way people like to anthropomorphize. Animals, objects, just about anything can be given human characteristics. Following his curiosity, John Baldessari was soon enough making his own pictures of objects with barely perceptible human features. Maybe they would be detected, maybe they wouldn’t. It was akin show more to seeing the Virgin Mary in a tortilla. Next came a series of noses and ears gleefully placed on colorful, flat, somewhat lumpy and rounded shapes: faces. Much to Baldessari’s surprise and our amusement, he recently looked again at these mustard and cobalt colored face shapes that populate his studio and came to a decisive conclusion: Potato chips! Those faces are potato chips! In a moment he had handed over a stack of prints of chips with just visible full faces peering out at us, only to issue a kind-hearted warning: These are really too perfect. Life isn’t perfect. Potato chips break, pieces crack off. Think of the Venus de Milo, and I think you’ll know where I’m going with this book. And look, I have a title too... And thus Baldessari’s Miracle Chips began to make their way one by one into the world." -- publisher's statement.

references
No. AB2010.1 in "John Baldessari Catalogue Raisonné, Volume Six: 2011 – 2019" by Patrick Pardo, Robert Dean, Michael Auping, Philipp Kaiser, David Platzker. New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, 2020, pp. 494. show less

The American artist John Baldessari rose to prominence in the late 1960s, combining Pop art's use of mass media imagery with Conceptual art's use of language to create a unique body of work that has become a hallmark of postmodern art. Early in his career, Baldessari began incorporating images and text utilized by the advertising and movie industries into his photo-based art. He appropriated pictures and movie stills, juxtaposing, editing and cropping them in conjunction with written texts. show more The resulting montage of photography and language often counters the narrative associations suggested by the isolated scenes and offers a greater plurality of meanings. The layered, often humorous compositions carry disparate connotations, underscoring how relative meaning can be. Throughout his long and celebrated career, Baldessari has continued to play with and critique popular culture, and over time he has increased the scale and visual impact of his work. This publication looks at new works Baldessari created on commission for the Deutsche Guggenheim. show less