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Lot Essay
"I use a lot of animals because I want them to have parity with humans in some way. I always remember this phrase of Bob Smithson saying, even flies should have art" (John Baldessari, as interviewed by Meg Cranston, "John Baldessari: Many Worthwhile Aspects," exh. cat., Baldessari, While something is happening here, something else is happening there, Works 1988-1999, exh. cat., Sprengel Museum Hannover 1999, p. 26).
Conceptual art of the sort Baldessari specializes in is predicted on the one-liner. Practically speaking, Baldessari's set-ups involve an action or task-juggling for example-that veers into absurdity, or an image-frequently culled from rejects pile of Hollywood film history-where essential components have been cancelled thereby leaving the surviving parts in the role of subjects or objects dispossessed of their raison d'être. If every detail of the latter counts, every erasure counts more because it calls into question the structure of the whole that is built around it like a sentence missing one or more crucial words. Naturally, the desire to restore meaning-and so restore order-dictates that the viewer read into the gap a plausible alternative to what has been surgically removed. In this manner Baldessari's deconstructed photographic pieces resemble Rorschach tests, but the deftness with which he blanks things out virtually guarantees that the inferences we draw and are left with are not "readings" of any useful kind but "riddlings" of the most disconcertingly pleasurable variety" (R. Storr, "Levity in Defiance of Gravity," John Baldessari, From Life, exh. cat., Carré d'Art_Musé d'art contemporain de Nîmes, 2005, p. 24).
Conceptual art of the sort Baldessari specializes in is predicted on the one-liner. Practically speaking, Baldessari's set-ups involve an action or task-juggling for example-that veers into absurdity, or an image-frequently culled from rejects pile of Hollywood film history-where essential components have been cancelled thereby leaving the surviving parts in the role of subjects or objects dispossessed of their raison d'être. If every detail of the latter counts, every erasure counts more because it calls into question the structure of the whole that is built around it like a sentence missing one or more crucial words. Naturally, the desire to restore meaning-and so restore order-dictates that the viewer read into the gap a plausible alternative to what has been surgically removed. In this manner Baldessari's deconstructed photographic pieces resemble Rorschach tests, but the deftness with which he blanks things out virtually guarantees that the inferences we draw and are left with are not "readings" of any useful kind but "riddlings" of the most disconcertingly pleasurable variety" (R. Storr, "Levity in Defiance of Gravity," John Baldessari, From Life, exh. cat., Carré d'Art_Musé d'art contemporain de Nîmes, 2005, p. 24).