JOHN BALDESSARI AT THE TATE MODERN

JOHN BALDESSARI AT THE TATE MODERN

 This exhibition represents a retrospective of the work of Italian-American conceptual artist John Baldessari (1931- ). Baldessari was interested in a whole series of developments in his own work, including (in chronological order) pop art (yes and isn't that somehow tautological, a terminological incongruence, pop and art being mutually exclusive opposites. Perhaps another name for pop art is American Imperialism, offering the harsh pill Empire within the framework of something that is or seems to be easy, accessible, groovy, happening, with it.), abstract expressionism, graphics, design, photography, performance art, film (the artist lived close to Hollywood), photo montage. 

Is Baldessari's work heartless avante-garde flummery ultimately emboldened by his successful leaps into culture: does he re-tread the wearying cliches of post-modernism just one more time, encountering and becoming a vast, empty cul de sac? Or are his structuralist methodologies closer to those of Andy Warhol, intimately related to his moment in American history: blown up images of dead gangsters, strips of meat being lifted by a (faceless) butcher, pointed yet yellowed or yellowing images of the Holocaust, drab bits of meat all piled on a railway car surrounded by their liberators who unfortunately happened to arrive too late. 

Living in an image-driven society where the image subsumes everything, including the meaning of the image itself, this is surely art for museums not for fans. There’s a certain 1970’s condescension within Baldessari's work, as if there was an arrow, alongside explanatory text, pointing at everything. An arrow pointing at the artist's brain, explaining 'this dawgone thang is overheating, will explode like a thermo-nuclear device, immolate the remaining Injuns...' The artist burned all his work in 1971 and was probably waiting for everyone to beg him to reconstruct the deconstruction when he did it anyway. Ultimately I had to ask myself: is this the kind of art I'd like on my wall at home? The answer is no. This looks fine in a museum. But I'd love to own a Warhol. Its all been done before: Marcel Duchamp, Warhol himself and Joseph Beuys, but even within Vermeer, Rembrandt, Goya there is the will to question reality, their art is innately conceptual if the viewer has the interest to find that out. Baldessari's work is made for the Tate Modern, an analytical factory building (which closely resembles a factory and in fact is a former factory) where industrial art workers can pull apart previous deconstructions of the Western tradition, where the tradition itself is all laid out in some implausible graph replete with the okay names of artists, the names of the okay movements, all the rest of the heartless sophistry, mental masturbation of a civilisation rapidly declining into a sunset position. Baldessari's own self-portrait seems (in some sense knowingly) to resemble Charles Manson, there's a certain willingness to view this as artwork of the ultimate deranged serial killer, a slasher who's taken his stanley knife and ripped out the heart of mankind to lay it bare in this drab analytical deconstruction of a deconstruction.
 Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, London

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