Object (With Observer)

John Baldessari’s Object (With Observer) (1988), uses contrasts of light and dark to emphasize the presence of an observer and the lack of identity in its figures. Baldessari combines two black and white photographs, with one of his signature white dots, to create a composition that draws the viewer to its multiple subjects. By mixing media, he explores the ways he can manipulate photography and painting to create new meanings behind his work. The central motif of this piece is a young girl, naked and wrapped around a large teddy bear. The muted blue and pink add a child-like nature to the photograph, which is in dramatic contrast to the sinister, spotlight-like yellow tone of the observer to the left. While the white photograph takes up more of the composition, it is the black photograph and the uncovered gaze of the man that pulls the viewer into the piece.
In this work, Baldessari masks the identity of the young girl while choosing to keep the man’s face exposed. He purposefully disrupts the familiarity of his figures though the juxtaposition of light and color in each photograph and through masking one of his subject’s identity with a painted dot, a motif often employed in his works of the late 1980s. Baldessari, in an interview with David Salle, claims he made the colored dots, “for two or three years, and then it becomes a kind of branding, like Warhol or Lichtenstein” (J. Baldessari, quoted in D. Salle, “John Baldessari,” Interview Magazine, 9 October 2013). Although he often uses only a few dots at a time, the uniformity of the shape and placement calls on Lichtenstein’s Ben-Day dots, a Pop Art motif that’s repetitive use is reflected in Baldessari’s colored dots styling. This becomes a way for the viewer to look beyond the central subject and look closer at how the other aspects of the composition relate to one another.
“The only thing I’m kind of sure about is that when two things are brought into some sort of magnetic proximity, that meaning occurs” (J. Baldessari quoted in T. Bashkoff, Somewhere between Almost right and Not Quite (With Orange), exh. cat., Berlin, Deutsche Guggenheim, 2004, p. 25). What is significant about these two photographs, although they differ in subject matter, color, and composition, is the one-sided relationship between the observer and the young girl that only the viewer of this work from the outside can see in its entirety. A unique position to be in, the theme of the observer is one Baldessari often uses when merging multiple photographs into a single work. What binds these particular figures together is the intriguing eye of the observer and magnetic quality of his gaze, but what separates them are the ways Baldessari manipulates color and light to lead the viewer’s eye in new directions.