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21/2/2005

John Baldessari

Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen

Somewhere Between Almost Right and Not Quite (With Orange)
Work commissioned for the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin

For the tenth time, between 21 February and 27 March, the Museum Weserburg Bremen is presenting works from the Deutsche Bank Collection: Somewhere Between Almost Right and Not Quite (With Orange) by the American artist John Baldessari. The cycle of works was originally commissioned for the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, a joint venture of the Deutsche Bank and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

American artist John Baldessari rose to prominence in the late 1960s combining Pop Art’s use of imagery from the mass media with Conceptual Art’s use of language. Early in his career, Baldessari began incorporating images and texts in his photo-based art. He appropriated pictures from advertising and movie stills, juxtaposing, editing, and cropping them in conjunction with written texts. His resulting montages of photography and language often counter the narrative associations suggested by the isolated scenes and offer a greater plurality of meanings. The layered, often humorous compositions carry disparate connotations, underscoring how relative meaning can be.

It was during the 1970s that Baldessari began to utilize other people’s photographs in his work rather than his own snapshots: “What got me interested in found imagery was that it was not considered art, but just imagery, and I began dumpster diving in photo shops.” Finding that film stills, as well as publicity shots and press materials, were readily available, Baldessari gathered images in abundance.

Understanding how these photographs could suggest narratives, Baldessari began to use film stills more and more. He created work from sequences of these found images by bringing together related or disparate photographs, sometimes in a grid, sometimes in linear or freely arranged compositions, but always with some structure or concept underscoring the arrangement.

By the 1980s Baldessari favoured using appropriated images without text. By relying on arrangements of photographs and entirely removing written text, Baldessari demonstrated that pictures alone could deliver the same narrative message that his previous text-and-image composites had so effectively conveyed.

Later Baldessari adopted the technique of concealing a face by placing a coloured adhesive dot over it. This technique simultaneously flattened the image and emphasized the illusion of the scene. By obscuring a face (or later, a body part) Baldessari was able to erase individuality and transform a specific person into an obscure object. The white dots used in the first of these works were eventually replaced by coloured dots, coded so that Baldessari could get multiple layers of meaning—red signalling danger, green for safety, and so on.

Throughout his long and celebrated career, Baldessari has continued to play with and critique popular culture, and over time he has increased the scale and visual impact of his work. In Somewhere Between Almost Right and Not Quite (With Orange), 2004, the group of thirteen large-scale works commissioned for the Deutsche Guggenheim, the artist is concerned with “betweenness,” Zwischenraum in German. Orange—a colour “between” yellow and red—is dominant in this project.

Baldessari revels in juxtapositions: his imagery conveys harmony and discord, security and disruption—and he focuses on the voids left between these extremes, the uncomfortable existence of “betweenness.” The film stills, removed from time and space and freed from their original filmic narratives are here newly combined and reconnected in the works and in the gallery. By using montage to combine and reorganize imagery, Baldessari illustrates again that meaning is constructed relationally rather than emanating from within.

Parallel to the exhibition the Neue Museum Weserburg is presenting editions, films and art publications by John Baldessari.

The exhibition will accompany a publication in German and English.
Price: 28 €
Now available at db artshop.

Image: John Baldessari, Umbrella (Orange): With Figure and Ball (Blue, Green), 2004
Photo: Deutsche Guggenheim
Copyright: © 2004 John Baldessari

Neues Museum Weserburg Bremen
Teerhof 20
28199 Bremen
Germany
phone: +49-(0)421-59839-0
fax: +49-(0)421-505247

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