The nihilistic hollowness of Baldessari; the emotional and intellectual vacuum at its core. The implied sadism and hatred of humanity.Is this a kind of messianic art , one that allows for an inverse association between what is profane and the arrival of a new kingdom; art with a foundation in nihilism,which is political in a paradoxical way. In the art of Baldessari there is a certain happiness and joy in the profane, an ecstasy climaxed in its destructive values. The artist as nihilistic actor/agent of something divine enabling an ideology on the destruction of art history, thus making way for the arrival of a new messianic age of art.
But, is this an empty radicality one without a theological context that would allow the viewer to understand what could be termed its “profane” implications. Is this art that yearns for the eternal, for something completely other which suppresses the temporal, the political, the ever unpredictable transient found within reality?…
From Donald Kuspit:
…The influence of the movies on art can be traced back to Cubism, and the use of mass reproducible movie imagery has a precedent that dates back at least to Dali — certainly to Warhol (and more broadly Pop Art) — but for them it was an imaginative novelty, and had hypnotic power, which made it perversely convincing, while for Baldessari it is all stereotype, not to say stereotyped (which means popularized and mass reproducible) art. So is his circle of pure color an attempt to de-popularize and de-stereotype it — or does the pure color confirm that pure art (more particularly, abstract painting reduced to — dead-ended in — monochromatic purity) has been popularized into a stereotype of itself, making it mass reproducible and photogenic, like a movie star?…
---It may be that his expressive figures are empty signifiers -- even, I dare say, the concentration camp corpses stacked in rows are just Inventory like the supermarket carts stacked in rows in another frame of that work -- and that movie art and pure art are grand illusions. But illusion, as the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott famously argued, is an "intermediate area between the subjective and that which is externally perceived," more particularly, "the intermediate territory between ‘inner psychic reality’ and ‘the external world as perceived by two persons in common’," and as such the area of experience in which we "weave other-than-me objects into a personal pattern." Baldessari’s personal pattern, such as it is, reveals a hostile attitude to the other-than-himself objects represented in the movies as well as the art that represents them. The circle of color is the card that trumps them, but it is the only magic card in Baldessari’s deck of tricks, suggesting the profound limitations of his so-called art. Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/john-baldessari1-20-10.asp
… Has it become banally beautiful and carefully staged like a movie image? Is it part of the stage set? Baldessari’s works follow a prepared avant-garde script, just as the movies follow a prepared populist script — no departing from the script, or changing it, as Rauschenberg does. Or does the circle of pure color announce the death of painting and the abundance of readymade photographs in Baldessari’s works signal photography’s triumph over painting?
But it may be a Pyrrhic victory, for painting — however “purified” into monochromatic matter-of-factness, however much a trompe l’oeil illusion of purity, however small a space it occupies in the total picture — sadistically cuts into Baldessari’s faces, figures and scenes, like Duchamp’s trompe l’oeil gash sadistically cuts into his illusion or “representation” of painting, for he “pictures” a painting rather than actually paints one. Baldessari’s circle of color is in effect the formal equivalent of Van Gogh’s informal brushwork, to recall Fairbairn’s comment on its sadistic character….
---"The task of reality-acceptance is never completed," Winnicott writes, "no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality, and relief from this strain is provided by an intermediate area of experience," which "is in direct continuity with. . . play." Baldessari does not know how to play the game of art well, mocking it in lieu of comprehending its function and value as illusion,...Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/john-baldessari1-20-10.asp
…The faces, figures and scenes are also ironical trompe l’oeil illusions or “representations” — Van Gogh’s brushwork creates the illusion that one can touch what the figures, faces and scenes he represents, indicating that it is a kind of haptic trompe l’oeil. Like Duchamp, Baldessari is an expert in the art of faking art, including pure art, for, like Rodochenko’s three Last Paintings, Baldessari’s Three Red Paintings fake painting, argue that “it’s all over” by reducing painting to a boring monochromatic minimum. Baldessari’s little circles of color are not simply “anti-art cultural gestures,” as Milner says Rodchenko’s are, and as Duchamp’s gash is, nor are his movie illusions simply representations of a stereotyped reality, but rather, taken together, assert that art as a whole is a fake and farce, an “act,” a deception not worth the esthetic trouble. Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/john-baldessari1-20-10.asp
--If Baldessari’s use of the barrel is not an anti-art gesture, I don’t know what is. The resulting "work" is stupid art -- a dumbing down attack on Giacometti’s art -- a dumbing it down into meaninglessness -- into "sensational" emptiness, for the figure doesn’t fill the empty barrel. Adding insult to injury, the barrel hangs by blue suspenders from the shoulders of the somber figure. Baldessari mocks the existential significance that Sartre saw in it, mocks its history as a reminder of the misery and destruction that Europe experienced in World War II, mocks the human figure in general as though what the sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson called "the human esthetic" is meaningless. Baldessari’s pseudo-sculpture is a futile attempt at satire -- always implicitly sadistic -- and the last gasp of modernist anti-humanism, that is, what the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset famously described as the dehumanization of art in modernity. Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/john-baldessari1-20-10.asp
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