John Baldessari: Life’s Balance
Works 1984-2004
Mar 5, 2005 – May 16, 2005
Opening: Saturday March 5, 2005, 11 a.m.
Kunsthaus Graz am
Landesmuseum Joanneum
Lendkai 1, A-8020 Graz
T +43-316/8017-9213, F -9212
presse [at] kunsthausgraz.at
www.kunsthausgraz.at
Why is something art, and why is something else not art?” This is how John Baldessari, one of the most important and most influential contemporary American artists, has described his major conceptual preoccupation.
Born in National City, California, in 1931, he was focused in his early video works and collages, as many conceptual artists in the mid 1960ies, on deconstructing the modernist notion of autonomous art, quickly developing his own unique stylistics characterized by using overlapping layers of texts and photographic images reproduced on plain white canvases. One of the missions set up behind the early works was to fully introduce photography into galleries, strengthening the medium’s independent and emancipatory aspects. This very soon evolved into an attempt to confront and jam the media world with what the artist calls the “real world”.
In the mid 1970s Baldessari began to apply such techniques as cropping and montage to juxtapose appropriated press photographs and movie stills from nostalgic Hollywood B-movies of the1940s and 50s in order to analyse an inherent ambiguity of meaning and its always open structure as well as to discover “memories of the soul”. His entire oeuvre seems to be marked by a continuous attempt to map a territory of the in-between: on the formal level it is a hybrid of photography and painting, on the narrative one, it is a sophisticated and humorous investigation into an almost baroque edifice of art-historical reference linked with the conventions of everyday life and found footage from all available sources of the collective consciousness. As such, Baldessari’s work, simultaneously providing the viewer with an uttermost visual fest, is a study of the impossibility of grasping a total truth or obtaining complete knowledge.
The exhibition in the Kunsthaus Graz concentrates on the last two decades of the artist’s oeuvre, from 1984 until the present moment. Structurally it consists of three parts including singular works from the period between 1984 – 1996, then works that belong to various series developed in the years from 1996 to 2003 and finally, the last section which gathers the very recent photo-based compositions from 2004. The exhibition also includes a video installation, “Five ’68 Films”, 2002, which further develops the artist’s preoccupation with a specific act of “surgery” done on the surface of a cinematic image.
Within this period Baldessari’s stylistic approach has achieved its uppermost mastery and perfection: from a vast body of impressively complex works of the late 80ies to the 90ies where a narrative tendency reaches its apogee and the manipulation of the image causes a visual vertigo through serial works of the late 1990ies and early 00′s with a summary of the most recognizable aspects of Baldessari’s style, such as overlapping layers of photographic material and painterly surface as well as compositional experiments with framing and the recurring usage of language confronted with pictorial narratives to the stylistically balanced and most recent “Orange” series where the focus on colour becomes very evident and the formal interventions into an existing filmic narrative seem to be more precise and almost mathematically structured.
The exhibition John Baldessari: Life’s Balance at Kunsthaus Graz is realized in coordination with an exhibition at the MUMOK, Museum Moderne Kunst (Vienna) which is simultaneously going to present earlier works of John Baldessari.
PROGRAM:
Tuesday, April 12, 2005, 7.00 p.m. Martin Prinzhorn talks to
Cerith Wynn Evans
Space04, Conversation
Tuesday, April 26, 2005, 7.00 p.m. Russell Ferguson:
Everything Is Connected
Space04, Lecture
Tuesday, May 03, 2005, 7.00 p.m. Gertrud Koch: Film Images.
To Baldessari’s Film Motifs
Space04, Lecture
——————————————————————- Curated by:
Adam Budak, Peter Pakesch
Exhibition opening:
Saturday, March 5, 2005, 11 a.m.
Kunsthaus Graz, Foyer
Opening hours:
Mar 5, 2005 – May 16, 2005 (Whit Monday)
Tue – Sun 10 a.m. – 6 p.m., Thu 10 a.m. – 8 p.m.
