Metropolitan Museum of Art

John Baldessari: Pure Beauty

AUDIO TOUR PRESS SCRIPT (Download Version)

Curator and Narrator: Marla Prather Lead Producer: Mara Gerstein Writer: Anne Byrd Producer: James Morgan Featuring: Thomas Campbell, John Baldessari, James Casebere, David Salle and Barbara Bloom

MMA/ John Baldessari: Pure Beauty/ Audio Guide DLT

MMA/ John Baldessari: Pure Beauty/ Audio Guide DLT

STOP LIST 400. Exhibition Introduction and Brain/Cloud (2009) 401. The Backs of All the Trucks Passed while Driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, California, Sunday, January 20, 1963 (1963) 402. Autotyre (1965) 403. Art Lesson (1964) 404. The Spectator is Compelled (1966-68) 405. Looking East on 4th and C, Chula Vista, California (1966-68) 406. Commissioned Painting: A Painting by Hildegard Reiner (1969) 407. Aligning: Balls (1972) 408. California Map Project Part I: California (1969) 409. Cremation Project (1970) NOT FOR BROADCAST 410. A Movie: Directional Piece where People Are Walking (1972-73) 411. Scenario: Story Board (1972-73) NOT FOR BROADCAST 412. A New Sense of Order: The Art Teachers Story (1973) 413. I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971) 414. LEVEL 2 Baldessari as a teacher 415. Floating: Color (1972) 416. LEVEL 2 - Floating: Color - Salle 417. Six Colorful Inside Jobs (1977) 418. Embed: Ice Cubes: U BUY BAL DES SARI (1974) 419. Violent Space Series: Two Stares Making a Point but Blocked by a Plane (for Malevich) (1976) 420. Virtues and Vices (for Giotto) (1981) 421. Lizards to Pianist (with Gold Sphere) (1984) 422. Kiss/Panic (1984) 423. Heel (1986) 424. The Overlap Series: Jogger (with Cosmic Event) (2000-2001) 425. The Duress Series: Person Climbing Exterior Wall of Tall Building/Person on Ledge of Tall Building/Person on Girders of Unfinished Tall Building (2003) 426. Hope (Blue) Supported by a Bed of Oranges (Life) amid a Context of Allusions (1991) NOT FOR BROADCAST 427. Prima Facie (Third State): From Aghast to Upset (2005) 428. LEVEL 2- Prima Facie (Fifth State): Warm Brownie / American Cheese / Carrot Stick / Black Bean Soup / Perky Peach / Leek (2006) 429. Sediment: Hand, Ladle, Spaghetti, Pot, Plate and Chair (2010) 430. LEVEL 2 - Conclusion 440. Exhibition and Audio Guide Teaser 450. Great Hall Works - Palm Tree/Seascape and Brain/Cloud (2010)

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400. Exhibition Introduction and Brain/Cloud (2009) THOMAS CAMPBELL: Hello, Im Thomas Campbell, Director of the Metropolitan Museum and Im pleased to welcome you to John Baldessari: Pure Beauty. Born in 1931, Baldessari is one of the most inventive and influential living artists. He began as a painter, and was one of the first artists of his generation to combine photography with other media. He thinks about language like a poet, but combines it with images in ways that break with poetic tradition. Hes been described as a conceptual artist, but even this is a bit off there are certainly interesting ideas in his work, but these are tools, not ends unto themselves. The exhibition is a retrospective. Well begin with paintings and photo projects from the early sixties, and move chronologically to the present day. This audio guide will be narrated by Exhibition Curator Marla Prather and features excerpts from interviews with Baldessari himself. The artist has also been an influential and beloved teacher, and weve included three of his former students on the tour as well. On the exhibitions title wall, youll see a rendering of one of Baldessaris most recent works, a variation on one he originally made for the 2009 Venice Biennale. MARLA PRATHER: On one side of this image stands a palm tree. Its from a photograph taken near Baldessaris studio in Santa Monica, Californiajust outside of Los Angeles. Its tall and graceful like a classical column. That association is especially vivid in the Metropolitans Neoclassical Great Hall where another version of this work is currently hanging. It was striking, too, in Venice, where Baldessari lined numerous palm trees up like a colonnade on the faade of a building. At the same time, the tree looks a bit like part of a stage setit has a Technicolor artificiality that reminds us of Baldessaris proximity to Hollywood. On the other side is Baldessaris work Brain/Cloud. As youll see in the next gallery, Baldessari used the cloud image in some of his earliest works. Here, he began with a scanned picture of a brain, and altered it to heighten its resemblance to a cloud. The image has many associationsfrom cartoon thought-bubbles and cloud computing to the work of the Surrealist painter Ren Magritte. As youll see in the exhibition, this kind of playful, wide-ranging association runs throughout Baldessaris work. The Museum is pleased to offer this tour as a free download for you to use on your own mp3 device. To continue, move into the first gallery and look for the numbered audio label. Each audio number you see will match a track title on your tour. When you come to the end of each stop, we suggest that you keep MMA/ John Baldessari: Pure Beauty/ Audio Guide DLT 4

your player in pause mode while you look for the next audio label. Please note that several of the audio stops have second level messages with additional information. You can listen to these or skip to another work when youre ready. I hope you enjoy the tour!

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401. The Backs of All the Trucks Passed while Driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, California, Sunday, January 20, 1963 (1963) MARLA PRATHER: The title of this work tells you exactly how Baldessari made it: he took a photograph of the back of every truck he passed while driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara. JAMES CASEBERE: The decisions made in taking these pictures are not aesthetic decisions. They're not about composition. There's nothing particularly formally significant about them. MARLA PRATHER: James Casebere is a photographer, and studied with Baldessari in the late 70s. CASEBERE: They seem to be hiding any content, inasmuch as it's not the front of the truck. Its the back of the truck. And you don't know what's inside the truck. MARLA PRATHER: In downplaying content, Baldessari invites us to pay attention to structure instead. Not only the grid into which hes organized the photographs, but the structure of the exercise--counting every truck along the road. Its a bit like the games we play as children while riding along the highway. We do it partly to amuse ourselves, and partly to find out what the worlds like. This kind of philosophical purpose distances Baldessari from Pop art, which began around the time he made this work in 1963. CASEBERE: I think that what's significant, historically, in this case, about this particular work may be that Pop artists had explored the mundane in contemporary art. But they had valorized it, I guess might be the word, or they had glamorized it, they had sensationalized it. Here, John is successfully utilizing the mundane without elevating it to what we think of as high-art status, in his attempt to construct meaning from the ground up.

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402. Autotyre (1965) MARLA PRATHER: In Autotire, treads zigzag diagonally across the surface of the work. Their scale is dramatic were obviously looking at a very small section of a tire. And the lighting is rather atmospheric for such a prosaic subject, and for a work with roots in roadside advertising. At the time, billboards were made up of small sections that would be pasted up like wallpaper. A friend who worked in advertising gave Baldessari unused sections. The artist painted on some of them. Here, he simply titled and signed the billboard fragment. In the mid-1960s, Baldessari was still a painter, but he was experimenting with the medium. He liked the fragmentary quality of the billboard sections, and the way they handed him ready-made subject matter. In his preference for the partial and the chance-driven, he was influenced by Dadaan early-twentieth-century movement that rejected classical aesthetics and attempted to make meaning through encounters with the irrational and absurd. As youll see today, some of that spirit has continued in Baldessaris work.

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403. Art Lesson (1964) MARLA PRATHER: Here, Baldessari presents us with an art lesson. As it says in the upper-left corner, the painting shows us some common mistakes. In the upper right, theres a portrait that looks flat because the artist deliberately neglected the play of light and shade. In the lower right, theres a road that hangs out of the picture like a necktiea point that Baldessari dramatizes by including the real thing. Near the lower left, there are a number of white smudges that hes helpfully, and humorously, labeled dull areas. In the 1960s, when Baldessari made the works in this gallery he was still living in the city of his birthNational City, California. Its one hundred miles away from Los Angeles, the nearest real art center. Baldessari participated in regional shows, but had yet to find commercial success. His isolation gave him a tremendous sense of freedom he had no one to please but himself. But he also had to figure out on his own what art was all about. He took a skeptical look at a lot of art instruction manuals during this time. In this painting, he plays with the illustrations from one of themreproducing all of the rules and breaking them in doing so. The artist, John Baldessari. JOHN BALDESSARI: On one hand, you know, what they're saying is right, but it means nothing. [Laughs.] It doesn't make art. And I think that's what I'm getting at. I mean, you can follow all kind of rules, and they're probably all right, but it doesn't mean you're going to come up with anything that we can call art.

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404. The Spectator is Compelled (1966-68) MARLA PRATHER: A man the artist himself stands in the middle of the road, which recedes into the suburban Californian distance. Baldessari based this image on an illustration in a book called Perspective Made Easy. That book was the source of the works title as well. Photographer James Casebere. JAMES CASEBERE: The Spectator Is Compelled to Look Directly down the Road and into the Middle of the Picture. I guess that's typical Baldessari from start to finish because, as a viewer, you can't look down the road because he's in the way. He's standing in the middle of the street himself, blocking your field of vision. But I think because he's in the middle of the picture he's beginning to, how should I say it give you access to his thought process in kind of metaphorically dissecting the picture itself. So he's not referring to a real road. He's referring to a mental process here and inviting you to participate in the process of kind of deconstructing the images and thinking about how we actually make meaning. MARLA PRATHER: Not everyone would see the painting as Casebere does. But Baldessaris practice of combining text and photographic images makes works like this complex and open to interpretation. Painter David Salle began studying with Baldessari in 1971.

DAVID SALLE: It was a style that imbued a heretofore modest, bounded thing like a photograph imbued that with the plasticity and malleability and material variability and expressiveness of any other more traditional art form.

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405. Looking East on 4th and C, Chula Vista, California (1966-68) MARLA PRATHER: Artist David Salle discusses works like this one, called Looking East on 4th and C, Chula Vista, California. DAVID SALLE: It's very much about the way the world looks. And the way the world looks is actually very odd, especially the way the world looked in California in the very early '70s. It's this very strange place, the world, with its flat-roof buildings and cracked streets and ugly apartment houses and, Detroit cars and so forth, hazy sky . . .

I have a feeling in John's work a much more loving embrace for the for the crummy streets and cars and buildings and whatnot. I think he really likes it. And I think its presented with affection might be too strong a word, but an acceptance for the way the world is, which is which is both cinematic and philosophical at the same time.
MARLA PRATHER: When he made this work, Baldessari was actively questioning the usefulness of painting. What was the point when he was trying to make paintings as straightforward as photographs? Why not just take photographs? He began shooting pictures out his car window, almost at random, that he then printed on the canvas. The resulting works were hybrids. The image was clearly photographic, but the canvas reminds us of painting. Baldessari showed these National City Paintings, as theyre known, in his first Los Angeles solo exhibition. It was held at the Molly Barnes Gallery in 1968, and brought Baldessari his earliest recognition in L.A.

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406. Commissioned Painting: A Painting by Hildegard Reiner (1969) MARLA PRATHER: As its title announces, this is a painting by Hildegard Reiner. But its an artwork by John Baldessari. Its one of a number of paintings Baldessari commissioned from various realist painters whom he met at local art fairs. In each case, he gave the painter a photograph hed taken of a friend pointing at objects of their choice. In this case its a strange, rather mysterious object. The painter then reproduced the photograph in his or her own realist stylewhich is what we see here. He then had a sign-painter add the title. Take a moment to compare this painting to the ones on the wall nearby, which Baldessari commissioned from Anita Storck and Elmire Bourke. The titles emphasize that different hands painted these works, but they dont look that different. This raises some questions. Is style really important? Or is it the idea behind the whole thing that counts? In the late sixties, people began describing art that privileged the idea or concept behind the work as Conceptual Art. At the time, the abstract painter Al Held said that Conceptual Art amounted to nothing more than pointing at things. Baldessaris paintings, with their pointing fingers, play with that statement by taking it literally. And as you look around this gallery youll see other works that point, albeit less literally, and that use other contextualizing techniques, like framing and cropping. The effect is often funny, but the works arent one-liners. They show Baldessaris sincere efforts to make sense of the visual world.

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407. Aligning: Balls (1972) NARRATOR: Each of these forty-one photographs depicts a ball that Baldessari threw up in the air and photographed, trying to get the ball in the middle of the frame. Mostly, he failed as he knew he would. If you look closely at the gallery wall, youll see a pencil line that runs from one end to the other. The pictures have been hung so that the ball are in a straight linewhich means that the frames are out of alignment with each other. Artist David Salle comments on this work.

DAVID SALLE: The organizing principle for the visual information is so patently absurd that it's hilarious. And yet, you have to obey the rules of the game because without that then you have there's nothing there. But even with the rules of the game observed, there's still nothing there. And that kind of double negative, a particularly that is a particularly Baldessari-like aesthetic experience. I say aesthetic advisedly, because there's not much outwardly, not much aesthetic, going on here. But that, sense of absurdity and I want to say good will that goes into executing these arbitrary and pretty meaningless games and presenting them as if they're of great significance is pretty classic John.

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408. California Map Project Part I: California (1969) MARLA PRATHER: At the time he undertook the California Map Project, Baldessari was beginning to want to make art that existed out in the world. John Baldessari. JOHN BALDESSARI: So then I found a map of California, with California going pretty much down the middle of the state, from south to north, and then I travelled where each of those letters were located. I went to where each letter was, and put that letter, imprinted it on the surface of the earth. And they range in scale all the way from, I think one of the letters is just maybe two feet tall, and they go maybe in some of the other ones, you know, down in the desert, they might be 30 or 40 feet. It was kinda fun, you know back before GPS, you know, just going with a map and trying to figure out where on the map, you know, you're trying to go, exactly where that was. And then of course when you're there, you're nowhere. MARLA PRATHER: Jorge Luis Borges an Argentine writer who became very popular among artists in the late sixties wrote an essay about mistaking the map for the territory. In treating the letters on the map like they are places, Baldessari makes this mistake deliberately. Its a very typical move for the artist, because it involves treating language as something that is both utterly real and deeply strange.

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409. Cremation Project (1970) MARLA PRATHER: In 1970, Baldessari decided to stop painting. He marked the occasion by taking most of his paintings to a crematorium and having them burned. JOHN BALDESSARI: I did this as sort of a symbolic act, you know that thinking of my work as a body of work, that your art is you. And I didn't really need to own those works of art. I had photographs of them, I had memories of them, and physically, I had the memory of doing them, so I really didn't need to own them. So, I figured why not just get rid of them. And I made a public ad, putting a notice in the newspaper. And I think my motivation was there, that sort of like when you diet, you can't -- you know, if you diet in secret, you can always break it, but if you tell friends and then you break your diet, then they'll remind you that you, you've broken the diet. MARLA PRATHER: The crematorium sent the paintings back to Baldessari in nine adult-sized boxes and one that was meant for a baby or amputated limbs. JB: (Tate) And I did actually make some cookies out of them at one point. Only one person that I knew ever ate one. And the idea there was that thered be some kind of eternal return, you know that pigment comes out of the earth, and its made into the painting, and the painting is burned, and it goes back into the earth again by shitting it out, and so painting is just one point on the circle. I was truly sick! [laughs]

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410. A Movie: Directional Piece where People Are Walking (1972-73) MARLA PRATHER: Baldessari called this work A Movie: Directional Piece where People Are Walking. JOHN BALDESSARI: At that point I was a lot of my imagery would come off a television. I would just have a camera set up in front of a TV set on a tripod, and then with something called an intervalometer, which you know, it'll take a, you can take a photograph at certain intervals. So I would set it up where maybe it would take a picture every five minutes, and I would just leave it. MARLA PRATHER: Like the photographs of balls thrown in the air, the pictures taken of Baldessaris TV screen are chance images. He mixed them with his burgeoning collection of movie stills, and developed systems to organize and group the results. One group was of people walking. JOHN BALDESSARI: I don't know how I made the leap, but one day, I just started putting an arrow on the photograph, you know, where -direction which they were walking. I don't know why, but I did. And then one day, I remember just spreading them out on my studio floor and playing with them. And you know, I put one photograph down, and then wherever the arrow was, I would locate another photograph, and then wherever that photograph was, I'd locate another one, anywhere the arrow was pointing. And it would just, you know, come up with, with this kind of pattern. MARLA PRATHER: The result is a kind of narrative constructed entirely of physical movement there isnt quite a story in the work, but it invites us to make one.

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411. Scenario: Story Board (1972-73) MARLA PRATHER: Living in Los Angeles, Baldessari came in frequent contact with the tools of the film industry. He made this work on the paper used for storyboards, the cartoon-like cells used to plan out dialog and images for movies or television. It was an interesting tool for an artist who was constantly inventing his own strategies for determining composition. Storyboard paper comes with a ready-made way to relate text to images a regular grid, a striking visual pattern, and a sense of narrative, cinematic progress. JOHN BALDESSARI: (Tate) The real truth of the universe is movement and change, and what art reflects that? Dance, you know anything with movement or music or whatever, but you know in painting, sculpture, its just all static. I guess around certain objects or certain situations there are certain conventional parameters, and then we can begin to use those meanings like a writer, like a musician, like a cook whatever and create some kind of composition or dish.

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412. A New Sense of Order: The Art Teachers Story (1973) MARLA PRATHER: A New Sense of Order: The Art Teachers Story begins with a text about an art teacher who tells his students to stand on one leg, because being off-balance will create tension in their works. What follows is a kind of visual continuation of that fiction: five photographs that have been framed improperly, as if made by a group of students who literally see the world askew. On their own, the photographs would be meaningless. Each signifies as part of a whole, and in relationship to the text. Baldessari is interested in the power of words in themselves but also in language as a system. In many works, including this one, he treats images as if they were part of that system. JOHN BALDESSARI: I've always been interested in, in words, and I've said in the past that I consider a word and an image of equal value. You know, they're both means of communication and for me, interchangeable. And so, I tend to work back and forth, you know, combining words, the image, sometimes it's just language, and sometimes just images, but for each image, I'm kinda thinking of a word behind it. I think I kinda work almost like a poet, you know, building, you know, syntactically with one word after another and, and yeah, it's the same for me.

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413. I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971) MARLA PRATHER: In this video, Baldessari writes the sentence I will not make any more boring art over and over again. Repetitive writing is the classic punishment for a schoolboymainly because its boring. Here, the repetition of the promise not to be boring has an oxymoronic quality: the promise not to be boringmade over and over is boring. And, at the same time, were entertained by the contradiction. The paradoxes double up and add upto humorous effect. The artists promise not to be boring isnt boring because it is. This work began when Baldessari was invited to do a piece for the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. They had no budget to fly him across the country, so he made an artwork that could be executed at a distance. He sent instructions for the students to cover the gallery walls with I will not make any more boring art. They did, and Baldessari recorded his own version of the project on videoone of his first. The schoolboy feeling of this work is playful, but art education was genuinely important to Baldessari. To hear about his approach and legacy as a teacher, listen to the next track. 414. LEVEL 2 Baldessari as a teacher MARLA PRATHER: In 1970 Baldessari began teaching at the California Institute of the Arts. Along with Allan Kaprow, Miriam Schapiro, and Judy Chicago, he helped make CalArtsas it was better knownone of the most adventurous programs of its day. He called his class Post Studio Art, a title that reflects his interest in art as an idea that can be executed anywhere. His former students talk about his extreme generosity as a teacher and mentor. His approach was to help students understand what is possible, not to tell them what to do. This attitude has made Baldessari one of the most important and revered art teachers of the last four decades.

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415. Floating: Color (1972) MARLA PRATHER: There are six photographs in the work Floating: Color. Find the one with the purple rectangle. In the second-story window you can clearly see a figure, arms raised, whos just tossed the colored panel into the air. You cant see the figure as clearly in the other pictures, but hes there throwing more colored planes out the window. Baldessari has said that this work began with the word for this action, to defenestrate. He thought it was remarkable that a word exists to mean something as specific as throwing something out a window. So in part, this is another work about the strangeness of language. At the same time, its a work about the history of paintingthe medium Baldessari had recently abandoned. Abstract artists of the earlier twentieth century gave a lot of thought to the so-called liberation of colorto how they could make color signify all on its own, without using it in a picture of a thing. Here, Baldessari treats that question literally: this color is so free it floats. It looks as though its in the very act of being liberated. The effect is humorously subversive: the whole theory of color in abstraction comes down to throwing a piece of colored cardboard out the window. But this isnt pure criticism. As the painter David Salle explains, the work has its own odd beauty. To hear him talk about this, listen to the next track.

416. LEVEL 2 Floating: Color - Salle DAVID SALLE: If you just look at it as pictures it's stunningly beautiful and there's something very sad about it at the same time, because these instants in time when the colored board is floating in exactly the right relationship to the rectangle, knowing that that's that instant is immediately past and gone forever there's something very poignant about it. It's also it depends for its effect largely on the specific character of the architecture that is the star of the scene, as it were. This pretty ramshackle-looking house of John's that is so neglected, and so much the house of someone who doesn't bother to paint his trim or fix his shingles or worry if the banister is about to come off.

It's so much the house of a social outcast that is to say an artist, poet, philosopher, intellectual in the old school, of the old school for whom worldly appearances mean little or nothing.

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417. Six Colorful Inside Jobs (1977) MARLA PRATHER: Six Colorful Inside Jobs starts with a white room. On Monday, one of Baldessaris students paints it red. The next day he paints it orange, then yellow, then greenand on down the spectrum. Every day he paints himself into the corner and out of the room. The act has a Chaplinesque air of futility, which Baldessari emphasizes by speeding three or four hours of painting into five minutes. When Baldessari was growing up, his father was in the salvage business. Among other things, he would build or renovate houses and then rent them out. Baldessaris job was to paint the interiors. While he was working, hes said, hed play a conceptual game to amuse himself. One moment hed think, Now Im painting a wall. Then hed think, Now Im making a painting and back and forth. Whats the difference? What makes painting special? What makes art special? Six Colorful Inside Jobs with its combination of banal activity and rich chromatic beauty poses these questions too. It opens up the possibility that art isnt that distinct from the mundane tasks of everyday life. In Baldessaris work, this kind of breakdown isnt a loss for art its a gain for life.

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418. Embed: Ice Cubes: U BUY BAL DES SARI (1974) MARLA PRATHER: At first glance, these five photographs of ice cubes appear to be identical. But if you come in close, youll see letters scratched into their surfaces. Theres a U in the first one. The second one says BUY. The remainder spell out Baldessaris name. The work dates from 1974. JOHN BALDESSARI: Somebody had written a book at the time about sort of embedded messages in advertising that would, they would be beneath the surface, but one's unconscious would pick up on them, and you'd wanna go out and buy that product. And I remember some of the illustrations were like ice cubes in a glass of liquor. And so, because the reflections in the ice cube are so variegated, it would be very easy to imprint an image in them that you would see, but if you really know what you were looking for, but if you weren't looking for it, it would just get directly into your unconscious. At least, that was the theory. MARLA PRATHER: When Baldessari made this work, he had signed on with Ileana Sonnabend, an influential dealer with galleries in New York and Paris. His work had begun to sell and here hes playing with a kind of covert selfpromotion. But, not surprisingly, its a parody he gives up the game in his title.

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419. Violent Space Series: Two Stares Making a Point but Blocked by a Plane (for Malevich) (1976)

MARLA PRATHER: This is Two Stares Making a Point but Blocked by a Plane (for Malevich), in the Violent Space Series. Barbara Bloom is a conceptual artist. She was one of Baldessaris students when he first got to CalArts.

BARBARA BLOOM: One may be tempted to look at the shapes in the Violent Space Series. I suggest looking at what is left out. On the subject of absence, theres no better saying than a drink before and a cigarette after are the three best things in life.

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420. Virtues and Vices (for Giotto) (1981) MARLA PRATHER: Hope, Prudence, Temperance, Sloth, Gluttony, Avarice here, Baldessari matches the seven virtues and vices to photographic images. Like the other photographs in this room, these images are film stills that Baldessari found in a Burbank memorabilia shop. He could buy them for pennies, and they were available in massive numbers. He began constructing a huge archive. In it, he avoided images of recognizable stars and movies, preferring B-movie clichs. These were images that had lost their meaning, in a way. This emptiness meant that Baldessari could pump new significance into them through juxtaposition. Originally, Baldessari hung the Virtues and Vices in a chapel-like alcove. By installing the works in this way and dedicating the work to Giotto, Baldessari recalls the sequential narratives of frescoes in Giottos Arena chapel. Giotto is one of Baldessaris favorite artists hes even named his dog after the Renaissance master. In 1981, the year he made Virtues and Vices, the New Museum in Soho gave Baldessari his first solo exhibition. At the same time, a similar, major exhibition was held in the Netherlands and West Germany. Baldessaris reputation was now international. And it stayed that way. Overall, he has shown more in New York and Europe than in Los Angeles.

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421. Lizards to Pianist (with Gold Sphere) (1984) MARLA PRATHER: Titles are always important in Baldessaris work. This one, Lizards to Pianist (with Gold Sphere) tells us how to look at the work beginning with the lizard on the bottom, and working our way up to the pianist at the top. JOHN BALDESSARI: The subject matter of the information goes to, you know, something primordial to something with high culture on top. It's a little bit like, you know, the fish coming out of the water turning into an ape-man, turning into an upright man, and then I guess the upright man would start playing the piano, you know, high culture. MARLA PRATHER: In the 1980s, Baldessari began working on a larger scale, sometimes building the works up in an almost architectural manner. JOHN BALDESSARI: The idea structurally came from just, you know, I think I was doing some photographs of books, and then skewing them to the point where they might topple. And then I decided to do the same thing with photographs, but then also going from large to small. So, the idea that they might topple over and, and fall upon this gold sphere, which is some sort of Platonic idealization of perfection.

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422. Kiss/Panic (1984) MARLA PRATHER: In the center of this composition, two mouths meet in a kiss. Theyre bordered by photographs of hands holding guns, all pointing outward to give the work a spikey centrifugal force. Baldessari has used an oil tint over the kiss, whose warm flesh tones contrast with the coldness of the black-and-white guns. Despite the charged content, the works geometry gives it a kind of formal purity that looks back to the grid-based paintings of Piet Mondrian. Once again, Baldessari is working with film stills. When he first began working with these images, the results tended to be fairly low-key and ironic. But Kiss/Panic is more emotionally charged. At the time he was making it, he was becoming increasingly interested in Freud. He began thinking about the way that his archive of film stills represented a kind of collective unconscious. As he organized his collection, he discovered not surprisingly that one of the largest groups involved love scenes and guns. Kiss/Panic treats those images as two sides of the same psychic coin.

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423. Heel (1986) MARLA PRATHER: Baldessari called this work Heel. Of course the title refers to the body part, which appears several times in the composition. But it might also suggest the order youd give to a misbehaving dog the work includes two, one biting at a pant leg. And yet again, it might indicate that one or both of the men pictured is a heel, or a jerk. JOHN BALDESSARI: I'm just setting things up, where one having that information could construct a narrative out of it. I'm not dictating what the narrative would be, I'm just suggesting. MARLA PRATHER: The pun creates uncertainty in one way and the blue and yellow dots create it in another. Whats the woman holding in her hands? What is the mans expression? In the mid-1980s, Baldessari frequently put dots like these over figures faces, or used them to hide their actions. JOHN BALDESSARI: One of the hallmarks of my work always has been omitting information, or deleting it that might be very, you know, necessary to understanding the image, but thinking, you know, that what you leave out, the spectator with their imagination could perhaps replace.

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424. The Overlap Series: Jogger (with Cosmic Event) (2000-2001) MARLA PRATHER: In the Overlap Series, Baldessari puts two images together to create a partial double exposure. In this one, hes combined a photograph of someone jogging down the street in front of his studio with an image from a Buck Rogers movie. JOHN BALDESSARI: On one hand, you've got the photograph, the banal photograph, your snapshot kind of quality of the street scene, and the one taken out of a movie, which is, you know, something that's constructed out of somebody's head. And then where they overlap, I've used that as an occasion to paint. MARLA PRATHER: When Baldessari began the Overlap Series in the year 2000 he hadnt painted in about thirty years. JOHN BALDESSARI: At a certain point, I began painting into the photograph simply to you know, I'm very against categories. And another reason I do that is just to change the surface. You know, pretty much, it's a cruel thing to say, but all photographs look the same in the sense that they all have the same surface to them, because of the photographic paper. You know, only, only the subject matter changes. So, I decided then to bring in another surface quality, the quality of the paint over the, you know, the surface quality of the photographic paper.

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425. The Duress Series: Person Climbing Exterior Wall of Tall Building/Person on Ledge of Tall Building/Person on Girders of Unfinished Tall Building (2003) MARLA PRATHER: In the Duress Series, we see blown-up stills from silent movies featuring the great physical comedian Harold Lloyd. Baldessari has simplified Lloyds figure, using a flexible plastic called Sintra to make raised and recessed silhouettes. He also painted the figures flat, in the three primary colors. So literally and optically, the body pops out of the picture. Baldessari has once again reduced the amount of information in the image: the simple physical action of the figure conveys its meaning and emotional tension.

When Baldessari made the Duress Series in 2003 he was no longer at Cal Arts. He had been teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles since 1996. And he stayed thereteaching and making artuntil 2007.

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426. Hope (Blue) Supported by a Bed of Oranges (Life) amid a Context of Allusions (1991) MARLA PRATHER: This is Hope (Blue) Supported by a Bed of Oranges (Life) amid a Context of Allusions. Like its title, the composition is elaborate. We sense there is an open and complex narrative. JOHN BALDESSARI (Tate): I think in one way you can say Im a collagist. And whats that about? Taking things from here and there and putting them together. Look at my studio Im a pack rat! I cant get rid of anything! And I think, you know, that gets recycled in ones art. In my mind collage is when two things dont go together too easily. If its right, theres a kind of tautness there thats kind of if you pull them apart any further itll snap, if you get them too close together itll be flabby, but if you get it just right its terrific! I do credit audiences with being incredibly sophisticated. I dont think you have to pander to an audience. But once theyre looking, then the question becomes how to hold their attention. And if theyre saying yeah, ok, an image of a chair and an image of a table, I get that, big deal, next picture! But if you get an image of a table and a shark and then you start to think, yeah, why is that table and that shark together? Then you try to find a reason for that shark and that table to be together. And thats where it really gets you have to be creative. Because it could be really stupid to have a shark and a table together. Right now I even think its a stupid idea! (laughs) But it has to be something dissimilar enough that its intriguing.

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427. Prima Facie (Third State): From Aghast to Upset (2005) MARLA PRATHER: On the left side of this work, we see a photograph of a woman. Its tinted yellow, except for her wide, expressive eyes. On the right side Baldessari provides an alphabetical list of emotions. Any of them might seem to describe the woman, despite the fact that some of them like enchanted and offended are contradictory. Baldessari called the work Prima Facie (Third State): From Aghast to Upset. JOHN BALDESSARI: Its a legal term, Prima Facie, which means, you know, on the surface things, you know, in first evidence, you know, how, how it would appear. So what I'm getting at there is that if you look at somebody's face, can you, can you really tell what their emotional state is, what are they thinking about? And quite, quite often, you know, we're in error. I mean, you might look at a, you know, somebody's face in a restaurant and say oh, that person's very, you know, upset or angry or whatever, but you know, if you were to ask them, he said, No, I'm not angry at all, I just have indigestion. So what I'm trying to do is linking up a person's expression with a word that might apply, but who knows, uh, if that's accurate at all. It's just it's just a calculated guess. MARLA PRATHER: Art-interpretation has often come down to questions like these: just think how many people have debated the meaning of Mona Lisas smile. Its equally tempting to read meaning into color a tendency Baldessari takes on in Prima Facie (Fifth State) which is hanging nearby. Look for six large colored squares. To hear him talk about it, listen to the next track.

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428. LEVEL 2- Prima Facie (Fifth State): Warm Brownie / American Cheese / Carrot Stick / Black Bean Soup / Perky Peach / Leek (2006) JOHN BALDESSARI: I just decided to abandon the facial expression and use pure color in how we attribute, uh, meaning to color. And then I, you know, began to explore names of paint, and, and then discover that when you get into interior decoration, they're using words that have no, no correspondence to the kinds of things we give, artists give colors, like cerulean blue or whatever, ivory black. If you were to go into an art store and say, I would like a tube of warm brownie, they wouldn't know what you were talking about but if you went into a decorating store for selling paint, yes, we have warm brownie. MARLA PRATHER: The expressionist fallacy is as evident here as it is in From Aghast to Upset there is absolutely nothing that seems inevitable about calling a color American Cheese. But here the fallacy is a bit more manipulative the decorators prefer these more expressive, associative terms because it is what sells.

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429. Sediment: Hand, Ladle, Spaghetti, Pot, Plate and Chair (2010) MARLA PRATHER: Baldessari began the Sediment series early in 2010. With works like this one, he returns to painting although he began with a photograph, which was digitally printed on the canvas. By painting over the printed image, he supressed the details and subtracted the figure, leaving only the objects and minimizing the photographic appearance of the work. JOHN BALDESSARI: What I was trying to do there is, again, very banal imagery, and leaving out information, but you could probably, you know, fill it in. And then, I would just list what you were presented with down below. Almost, you know, like you're writing out an inventory of what you're seeing before you. I'm becoming very, uh, very minimal, very reductive, more than I have in a long time. And that's why I call them Sediment, you know, in that if you poured all this stuff, you know, into a funnel with filter paper, uh, it's the stuff that would remain visually. And all the other stuff is, is abandoned or thrown away, discarded. MARLA PRATHER: In many ways, the Sediment series circles back to the artists earlier works. Visual queues and missing pieces invite speculation. We see a familiar black, white and gray palette. And, overall, the bare-bones approach to representation asks one of Baldessaris earliest and most enduring questions: what is it that distinguishes art from ordinary life? This is the last stop on our tour. To hear a brief conclusion, listen to the next track.

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430. Level 2 - Conclusion MARLA PRATHER: John Baldessari usually talks about art as something he does, not something he makes. He treats art as a form of life a process of seeing possibilities and making new meanings. And this is the art he teaches. Students such as David Salle, James Casebere, Barbara Bloom, Tony Oursler, and James Welling do not make work that looks anything like each others or like his. What they share instead is his wide-ranging approach, and the free hand he takes with his materials. His work can be funny or absurd, but it is all the more serious for having these qualities. How else to deal with the fact that the world can be a very strange place? Im exhibition curator Marla Prather, and I thank you for joining me today. For more information about activities related to this exhibition, please be sure to pick up our programs leaflet as you exit this gallery. The exhibition is made possible in part by The Daniel and Estrellita Brodsky Foundation. Additional support is provided by Glenstone. The exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association with Tate Modern, London. It is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. The audio guide at the Metropolitan is sponsored by Bloomberg. With thanks to James Casebere, David Salle, Barbara Bloom, Ian Alteveer, Vivian Wick, Tessa Jagger and Tate Media. This has been an Antenna Audio production.

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440. Teaser BARBARA BLOOM: Having the privilege of knowing John Baldessari for forty years is like taking part in a really good and very long shaggy dog story. MARLA PRATHER: In John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, youll encounter one of the most important artists living today. Baldessari plays at the edge of the absurd, mixing painting and photograph, word and image. He combines a poets sensibility with a painters visual skill resulting in works that are sophisticated, seductive, and often quite funny. On the audio program, youll hear from Baldessari himself and his students, the artists Barbara Bloom, David Salle, and James Casebere. DAVID SALLE: I don't think there's anyone who's gotten the poetry of what a strange place Southern California was in the 1970s as I would say magically and-and with as much originality. JAMES CASEBERE: Part of John's process is to look at conventions, make fun of conventions to abandon conventional expectations, and put things back together from a -- from the ground up, I guess. JOHN BALDESSARI: I mean, you can follow all kind of rules, and they're probably all right, but it doesn't mean you're going to come up with anything that we can call art.

MARLA PRATHER: The exhibition John Baldessari: Pure Beauty is on view October 20th, 2010 to January 9th, 2011. Audio guides are available near the exhibition entrance, in the museums great hall and online at metmuseum.org

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450. Great Hall - Palm Tree/Seascape and Brain/Cloud (2010)

MARLA PRATHER: For the exhibition John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, on view October 20th, 2010 through January 9th, 2011, the artist made two works for the Metropolitans Great Hall. On one end of the hall, youll see Palm Tree/Seascape. Its adapted from a photograph taken near Baldessaris studio in Santa Monica, California. Its tall and graceful like the columns of the Neoclassical Great Hall. At the same time, the tree looks a bit like part of a stage setit has a Technicolor artificiality that reminds us of Baldessaris proximity to Hollywood. In the work on the other side of the hall, the central imagea Brain/Cloudfloats. The artist began with a scanned picture of a brain, and altered it to heighten its resemblance to a cloud. Baldessari used the cloud image in some of his earliest works. The image has many associationsfrom cartoon thought-bubbles and cloud computing to the work of the Surrealist painter Ren Magritte. As youll see in the exhibition, this kind of playful, wide-ranging association runs throughout the artists work.

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