Born 1931 in National City, California; lives in Santa Monica, California
For the last five decades, John Baldessari has constantly reinvented himself, working in a variety of media and forms including painting, photography, books, sculpture, and exhibition design. Although typically associated with Conceptual art, the only consistent aspect of the artist’s work—aside from his commitment to mining the archives of art history and the mass media—is his defiance of expectations.
So it was again in 2006 when Baldessari aimed his disruptive sensibility toward museum interventions. Notable was his installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art of Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images (2006–07), a gathering of works by René Magritte and contemporary artists. Through a dramatic installation gambit, the artist transformed the neutrality of the white cube into a surprising exhibition environment, essentially structuring the show’s dialogue between past and present. Viewers walked on carpeting printed with images of Magritte’s white clouds against a blue sky while the ceiling was papered with images of Los Angeles freeways. In a characteristically playful turn of the screw, the artist even arranged for museum guards to wear bowler hats similar to those famously populating Magritte’s paintings. Baldessari’s juxtapositions, displacements, and spatial interventions resonated with Magritte’s uncanny aesthetics but also with the disjunctive poetics very much at the dyslexic heart of his own work. This was further achieved through the deployment of elective amenities, primarily by displacing the familiar—and familiar narratives—with the unexpected or with other elements of disruption, including surprising spacing or gaps.
For the last five decades, John Baldessari has constantly reinvented himself, working in a variety of media and forms including painting, photography, books, sculpture, and exhibition design. Although typically associated with Conceptual art, the only consistent aspect of the artist’s work—aside from his commitment to mining the archives of art history and the mass media—is his defiance of expectations.
So it was again in 2006 when Baldessari aimed his disruptive sensibility toward museum interventions. Notable was his installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art of Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images (2006–07), a gathering of works by René Magritte and contemporary artists. Through a dramatic installation gambit, the artist transformed the neutrality of the white cube into a surprising exhibition environment, essentially structuring the show’s dialogue between past and present. Viewers walked on carpeting printed with images of Magritte’s white clouds against a blue sky while the ceiling was papered with images of Los Angeles freeways. In a characteristically playful turn of the screw, the artist even arranged for museum guards to wear bowler hats similar to those famously populating Magritte’s paintings. Baldessari’s juxtapositions, displacements, and spatial interventions resonated with Magritte’s uncanny aesthetics but also with the disjunctive poetics very much at the dyslexic heart of his own work. This was further achieved through the deployment of elective amenities, primarily by displacing the familiar—and familiar narratives—with the unexpected or with other elements of disruption, including surprising spacing or gaps.
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