John Baldessari – Research – Charlotte Wallington

Was born, 1931, national city, California. Interestingly whilst researching this photographer his website had a lot of great information about his life, structured in almost a CV piece. This was a great way of showing all of his achievements throughout his life to date, from his honorary degrees which interestingly showed that he graduated from the national university of Ireland as well as being a student at the San Diego state University and the California State university. Also available was a rather long list of awards from 1986 until 2012. As well as being a famous photographer, Baldessari has taken part in one/two person exhibitions as well as selected group exhibitions and his own special projects, working in film and video also with a number of 23 products made by the artist and many more. Including his film he created in 1997, “Six colourful inside jobs”, in which he hires someone to come in to paint a small room, made of 4 walls. Starting with a white room, each day the individual would come in and paint the walls a different colour. The first, red, the next orange, yellow the next day green, blue and finally violet. All of the time, this would be being shot from an ariel view overhead of the worker. The whole process at an estimate, 3-4 hours each day and then reflecting in the film, compressed to about 5-6mins. 6 primary and secondary colours. This piece of work interests me, the whole idea of using something that was an everyday chore, (Baldesari having to renovate buildings for his father who was a landlord) he would try to occupy his mind each time, which anyone could relate to. I quite often when doing a mundane task let my mind wander, use my imagination to make it less dull, or even like Baldessari was doing, help my mind believe I was creating something else. He would think of it that he wasn’t just painting a wall, he was a painter. I believe this same thought process then foreshadows into his later work, having the insight of an observational mind. Baldessari’s determination to make people see beyond the obvious which then links into his more recent work, “Dots”, where the faces within his images are taken away from the observer in a contextualised idea of taking away an identity. I can relate to the idea of his way of concentrating on other forms, other beauty besides that of somebody’s face, which is very much over thought of being the most important feature, especially in society.

http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/34/800

Baldessari with his creation of “Dots” was challenging the way that society have defined beauty for generations. Although he respects the terms of beauty, he enjoyed playing around with this idea and turning them upside-down. He is very well known as an icon in art circles, especially in Southern California. Over the years, critiques have described him as thoughtful and provocative. He has been known to burn his own paintings, put coloured dots over the faces within his photographs and covered a carpet at the Los Angeles County museum with a carpet of blue sky and puffy white clouds. When interviewed, Baldessari confirms that he is trying to “slow down” the viewers, in order us to look at things in a completely new perspective.

He started to collect the price stickers found in of black and white newspapers, collecting black and white news photographs, images of people in various occasions. He got fed up of the same cliché images reoccurring in the newspapers, with mayors shaking hands with fire-fighters, faces of local officials at ribbon-cutting ceremonies and so on. In 1985, Baldessari decided to create his idea of covering these featured faces with the dots. Contextualising the idea of their identity, the thought of what would happen if you take the faces away.

“if you cant see their face, you are going to look at the way they are dressed maybe, their stance, their surroundings. You know, you really do see that handshake. It’s not about those guys, its about that handshake.”

Baldessari believes by taking away the faces of the people within the photograph, you are able to see behind the faces, you can start to see what the photo is all about and really dig beneath the surface. The idea that if you obliterate the face, you begin to see the hands and the ribbon as full of a greater meaning given the fact that no two ribbons, no two hands and no two ceremonies are the same. In a way, Baldessari works with great metaphors, within these images he is taking away the central view of your vision, strips it from the photo and then you are left forced to concentrate else where in the images, almost for the first time.

“Chews out the familiar and spits it out into something else”, says Lesley Jones, curator. Thinks of Baldessari’s work is like a surrealism for the multi-culture age. The idea of him taking pre-existing imagery and reconfiguring it and with that creating re surrealities.

“I would say that John’s work possesses something like deep humor,” Govan reflects. “It’s funny, but … it leads you somewhere. It’s never a one-liner that ends there. It’s always based on some deep philosophy, consideration, reconsideration, way of seeing. It’s never just funny for the sake of being funny.”

I really like the way that Baldessari works in a very art-contextual way within his pieces, it makes the viewer really try to find the meaning the artist had in his mind whilst creating his pieces, in a reading between the lines nature.

This artist/photographer works well within my project as I am focusing on similar ideas upon self-identity and how it creates an identity for a person.