One of the most influential artists of the past 50 years, John Baldessari has continually investigated how image and language collide and collude, and how art itself is made and understood. Using devices such as visual puns, word games, quotations and instructions, the artist employs a wry humor that, beneath the surface, touches on deeper truths regarding how we communicate through culture, and how art might reinvent itself.
By Dimitris Lempesis Photo: Sprüth Magers Gallery Archive
As a young artist in the 60s, John Baldessari had trouble squaring his work with a greater purpose. “I always had this idea that doing art was just a masturbatory activity and didn’t really help anybody” In 1970, he burned all the work he had produced between 1953 and 1966, a break with the past that allowed him to explore new ideas of what art could be. In the late 60s, he had begun making text paintings, printing simple phrases on canvas. He sometimes contracted the work out to professional sign painters, thereby removing any trace of the artist’s hand. John Baldessari’s solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers Gallery features 27 works from his new series of large-scale paintings based on the Emojis. Emojis are ideograms and smileys used in electronic messages and web pages. Emoji are used much like emoticons and exist in various genres, including facial expressions, common objects, places and types of weather, and animals, they are always the same no matter who uses them, and their exact meaning is determined in the digital ether, the result of collective usage as opposed to subjective decree. These paintings, which are actually inkjet prints with acrylic paint, are also the result of several layers of displacement: from the original animal to its symbol (as conceptualised by the emoji designer) to the mobile phone, computer screen, printer and finally the canvas. The figures show evidence of this progression, as both enlarged pixels and dots from the printing process are visible. Baldessari then paints out the blank space around the animals with white paint, adding the slightest trace of the artist’s hand. Snippets of dialogue give another layer of meaning to these seemingly “stupid” images. When he asked how he selects the text. “They just have to sound good, kind of cheesy, I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex”. In the exhibition large Inkjet prints of animal Emojis dominate large canvases that are painted over in acrylic. Below each picture plane, typed snippets of dialogue appear to caption the icons, although it is difficult to find any connection between them. In one work, a lizard appears above what seems to be an extract from a theatrical text. The scene description is a line of dialogue attributed to MAYO says: “Is there a Courbet for sale here?” The combination raises more questions and possibilities than answers. Is the gecko asking the question, or is MAYO addressing the gecko?
Info: Sprüth Magers Gallery, 5900 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, Duration: 27/10-9/12/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.spruethmagers.com
One of the most influential artists of the past 50 years, John Baldessari has continually investigated how image and language collide and collude, and how art itself is made and understood. Using devices such as visual puns, word games, quotations and instructions, the artist employs a wry humor that, beneath the surface, touches on deeper truths regarding how we communicate through culture, and how art might reinvent itself.
