Hirshhorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden
Independence Avenue
at Seventh Street SW
Washington
202-633-4674
Ways of Seeing: John Baldessari Explores the Collection
July 26, 2006-
September 20, 2007

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden invited John Baldessari to be the first artist to organize an installation using works drawn from the museum’s holdings. In addition to the artist’s installation of the collection, four early works by Baldessari, recently given to the Hirshhorn, will be on view along with additional key early works by the artist from other institutions.

The Hirshhorn developed Ways of Seeing, an on-going project that invites noted visual artists, authors and filmmakers to create installations from the Hirshhorn’s collection of modern and contemporary art, as part of its commitment to the art and artists of our time.

“Having Baldessari collaborate with us on this project allows Hirshhorn visitors to experience our collection through the lens of this artist’s vision and process,” says chief curator Kerry Brougher. These continuing presentations will offer fresh perspectives and a diverse range of viewpoints that encourage visitors to see the Hirshhorn’s collection in new ways.

For Ways of Seeing, Baldessari selected a wide range of works — from the height of modernism to contemporary pieces — some of which have not been on view for decades. Included in the installation are paintings by Milton Avery, Philip Guston and Thomas Eakins, photography (also by Eakins) and sculpture by Emily Kaufman. In past interviews Baldessari has described his art as being about “betweenness.” He said, “I’m concerned with what happens between things and ideas.” The artist brings this thought process to his exploration of the Hirshhorn’s collection.

In the late 1960s, Baldessari abandoned traditional painting and embarked on an exploration of the way visual images establish and represent meaning. Since that time, the artist has produced canvases executed by sign painters that contain text describing the processes of exhibiting and evaluating art, sequences of photographs that raise questions about human perception, and videos and mixed media works that investigate the associations people connect with images and words.

The Hirshhorn Museum’s recent acquisition of works by the artist include: Exhibiting Paintings (1967–1968); Songs 1: Sky/Sea/Sand (1973); Cremation Project, Corpus Wafers (With Text, Recipe and Documentation (1970) and Blasted Allegories (Black and White Sentence): Red To What Is Red All Over And Black And White (1978). These works are the first by the artist to enter the museum’s collection and were given by The Glenstone Foundation.

Baldessari, born in California in 1931, taught at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, Calif. from 1970 to 1988 and has been at the University of California, Los Angeles since 1996. He has had more than 120 solo exhibitions worldwide and was the recipient of a lifetime achievement award by Americans for the Arts in 2005. He organized exhibitions from the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1994 and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1991.

His work often attempts to point out irony in contemporary art theory and practices or reduce it to absurdity. His art has been featured in more than 120 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe.

Baldessari's early major works were canvas paintings that were empty but for painted statements derived from contemporary art theory. An early attempt of Baldessari's included the hand-painted phrase "Suppose it is true after all? WHAT THEN?" on a heavily worked painted surface. However, this proved personally disappointing because the form and method conflicted with the objective use of language that he preferred to employ. Baldessari decided the solution was to remove his own hand from the construction of the image and to employ a commercial, lifeless style so that the text would impact the viewer without distractions. The words were then physically lettered by sign painters, in an unornamented black font. The first of this series presented the ironic statement "A TWO-DIMENSIONAL SURFACE WITHOUT ANY ARTICULATION IS A DEAD EXPERIENCE." (1967)

Another work, Painting for Kubler (1967-68), presented the viewer theoretical instructions on how to view it and on the importance of context and continuity with previous works. The seemingly legitimate art concerns were intended by Baldessari to become hollow and ridiculous when presented in such a purely self-referential manner.

Related to his early text paintings were his Wrong series, which paired photographic images with lines of text from a book about composition.[1] His photographic California Map Project found physical forms that resembled the letters in "California" geographically near to the very spots on the map that they were printed. In the Binary Code Series, Baldessari used images as information holders by alternating photographs to stand in for the on-off state of binary code; one example alternated photos of a woman holding a cigarette parallel to her mouth and then dropping it away.

Another of Baldessari's series juxtaposed an image of an object such as a glass, or a block of wood, and the phrase "A glass is a glass" or "Wood is wood" combined with "but a cigar is a good smoke" and the image of the artist smoking a cigar. These directly refer to Rene Magritte's The Treachery of Images; the images similarly were used to stand in for the objects described. However, the series also apparently refers to Sigmund Freud's famous attributed observation that "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, as well as to Rudyard Kipling's ... a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

Baldessari has expressed that his interest in language comes from its similarities in structure to games, as both operate by an arbitrary and mandatory system of rules. In this spirit, many of his works are sequences showing attempts at accomplishing an arbitrary goal, such as Throwing 4 Balls in the Air to Get a Square, in which the artist attempted to do just that, photographing the results, and eventually selecting the "best out of 36 tries", with 36 being the determining number just because that is the standard number of shots on a roll of film.

Much of Baldessari's work involves pointing, in which he tells the viewer not only what to look at but how to make selections and comparisons, often simply for the sake of doing so. Baldessari critiques formalist assessments of art in a segment from his video How We Do Art Now, entitled Examining Three 8d Nails, in which he gives obsessive attention to minute details of the nails, such as how much rust they have, or descriptive qualities such as which appears "cooler, more distant, less important" than the others.

Baldessari's Commissioned Paintings series took the idea of pointing literally, after he read a criticism of conceptual art that claimed it was nothing more than pointing. Beginning with photos of a hand pointing at various objects, Baldessari then hired amateur yet technically adept artists to paint the pictures. He then added a caption "A painting by [painter's name]" to each finished painting. In this instance, he has been likened to a choreographer, directing the action while having no direct hand in it, and these paintings are typically read as questioning the idea of artistic authorship. The amateur artists have been analogized to sign painters in this series, chosen for their pedestrian methods that were indifferent to what was being painted.