Awards
2011 Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
John Baldessari
Few artists of the postwar era are so influential—or so elusive of definition—as John Baldessari, who has made extraordinary contributions in such wide-ranging registers as Conceptualism, appropriation, and art education. This seeming paradox—in which the artist at once towers over contemporary art and often slips through its cracks (while also prompting his students to seek new alternatives—no doubt arises, at least in part, from his subtle wit. Time and again Baldessari has put forward the conventional wisdom of the day in his work only to subvert it. In classic pieces like Clement Greenberg (1966–68), for instance, he commissions a sign painter to render on canvas the critic’s words about aesthetic judgment—only to suggest that the arbitration of “immediate experience” is tenuous at best. In the screenprint for the canvas Wrong (1966–68), the artist stands immediately before a palm tree so that it seems to grow out of his head, at once articulating and violating a basic rule of composition. In Concerning Diachronic/Synchronic Time: Above, On, Under (with Mermaid) (1976), an arrangement of images of the sky (an airplane, a bird) and sea (a submarine, a mermaid) plays with a fundamental hierarchy of structuralist theory.
Even Baldessari’s contemporaries do not escape his humor. In the videotape Baldessari Sings LeWitt (1972), the artist sings each of Sol LeWitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art” to a different pop melody, deflating the mandarin seriousness of LeWitt’s manifesto. Most recently, Baldessari has produced numerous works focusing on ears and noses, directing attention to those parts of the body usually overlooked in any assessment of beauty. In all these aesthetic engagements, the artist belies expectations and, like Oscar Wilde before him, turns the logic and language of authority against itself to both humorous and philosophical ends. Baldessari has explained his interest in cropping and juxtaposing pictures to create meanings that go beyond a singular image: “Putting forward just one image is to suggest that there is just one way of seeing things, or one truth. And I just don’t believe that’s the case.”
Born in 1931, Baldessari was the subject of traveling midcareer retrospectives at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1981 and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1990. But this year’s retrospective, John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, which opened at Tate Modern in London, appeared at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and ends its tour this winter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—firmly establishes his preeminence over postwar art through five prodigious decades of artistic production. Finally, “wrong” is, in a sense, entirely right.
Jury: James Meyer, Emory University and National Gallery of Art, chair; Johanna Burton, Bard College; and John Yau, Rutgers University.
