John Baldessari - Softcover

Art - Baldessari, John (Coosje Van Bruggen)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0847811905 ISBN 13: 9780847811908

Publisher: Rizzoli, 1990

Synopsis

A fascinating look at conceptual artist, John Baldessari 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 200 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe. 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. He is known for his statement "If I saw the art around me that I liked, then I wouldn’t do art."

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Juxtaposing images from popular culture and mundane reality, conceptual artist Baldessari turns the vernacular of mass perception back on itself, jolting viewers out of programmed ways of seeing. An artist with a keen sense of humor and an instinctive feel for the absurdity of much of modern culture, he creates open-ended messages, clues for the spectator to decipher. Wedding 375 plates to a perceptive essay that tracks the Southern Californian's ever-shifting modes, this monograph--a tie-in with a touring retrospective--explores Baldessari's imagist "mind games" of the 1960s and '70s, text-and-image parables, composite photoworks blending newsreel-like reportage with fabrication, collages and installations. Van Bruggen ( Bruce Nauman ) illuminates how Baldessari wrests poetry, meaning and hope from alchemical fusions of movie stills, words, billboard posters, ads, old photographs and art-historical references.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Contemporary art aficionados will appreciate Conceptualist John Baldessari's jarring juxtapositions of imagery drawn from popular culture, including photographs and texts appropriated from advertising, magazine articles, television, and film. This broad selection of his work, here presented in 375 photographs, challenges viewers to confront the idiosyncracies and banal details of modern American life. This book, the first full-scale monograph on Baldessari and catalog for an exhibition that will be shown at six U.S. and Canadian venues through 1992, offers a lucid account of his development over the last three decades and a discussion of the narrative and psychological themes in his work. Van Bruggen, an independent curator and wife of Pop artist Claes Oldenberg, is also the author of Bruce Nauman (Rizzoli, 1989).
- Russell T. Clement, Brigham Young Univ. Lib., Provo, Ut.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Rizzoli
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0847811905
• ISBN 13: 9780847811908
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256