Exhibit of the week: John Baldessari: Pure Beauty

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Through Sept. 12

John Baldessari is “arguably America’s most influential conceptual artist,” said Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times. A onetime painter, the San Diego native publicly renounced that medium in the late 1960s, with a series of works upending its most treasured presumptions. One canvas contains only a written description of a typical genre scene: “Semi-close-up of girl by geranium (soft view)” and so on. In 1970, Baldessari actually incinerated two decades’ worth of his own early canvases, then placed a death notice for them in his local paper. “Some ashes were interred in a book-shaped bronze urn”—which is one of the odder objects on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “endlessly rewarding” retrospective dedicated to the artist’s photographs, films, and other “strange and often very funny” conceptual art.

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Over the years, Baldessari has created an incomparably diverse oeuvre of works designed to playfully upset viewers’ expectations, said Doug Harvey in the LA Weekly. Yet his lasting works may be the early ones, in which he undertook “a systematic disavowal of painting.” Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell consists of hand-lettered, tongue-in-cheek instructions for hack painters. For Commissioned Paintings, from 1969, he hired graphic artists to “faithfully reproduce photographic slides of one of his friends walking around and pointing at things that caught his attention”—including stains, smudges, and other seemingly meaningless detritus. Similarly, in Baldessari’s early photographs, “the pointing finger was one of his primary and most effective pictorial widgets.” Line of Force (1973) consists of repeated shots of a hand aimed off-screen. In such works, Baldessari was making a serious theoretical point about how conceptual artists could create meaning by simply pointing out things in the real world. But the images were also hilarious ways to “overtly flip the bird” at more traditional artists.

That’s just the problem with Baldessari, said Lance Esplund in The Wall Street Journal. His critiques of painting are “primarily cheeky,” intended to mock artists whose tastes differed from his own. The epitome of this artist’s anti-art aesthetic is the 1971 video I Am Making Art. In it, Baldessari faces the camera, striking one pretentiously silly pose after another. “With each new gesture, he states, ‘I am making art’”—parodying the whole idea that anyone would ever bother to create something beautiful or meaningful. Yet if making art is really such an absurd and pointless endeavor, why has Baldessari kept doing it?