Arts Publications

In Conversation: John Baldessari & Jeremy Blake

ArtForum, March, 2004 by Tim Griffin

The classic pedagogical practice of juxtaposing slides of art-works allows for the quick comparison of paintings, photographs, sculptures, and installations and invariably produces a plethora of similarities and differences to be conveyed and discerned with critical detachment. Artforum's "In Conversation" series, inaugurated with this discussion between Los Angeles-based artists John Baldessari and Jeremy Blake, is intended as a slight perversion of that model: What if, instead of providing an outsider's view of slides set side by side, we were to put the artists side by side and let them speak for themselves? Such pairings--providing two viewpoints that will necessarily inflect and expand on our understanding of either one--may build bridges but also reveal provocative gaps, when it comes to negotiating the terms of those cross-generational, cross-cultural, and cross-media discourses that contemporary art demands. It is our hope, too, that these tete-a-tetes, which reflect this publication's ongoing commitment to providing an active platform for the artist, will also contribute to a more complex model of critical exchange and lead to renewed engagement with--and a heightened sense of what's at stake in--contemporary artistic practices. "In Conversation" is introduced here in the spirit of engendering fertile, ongoing, often unexpected dialogue.

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A connection between Baldessari and Blake was established in my mind two years ago, during the last Whitney Biennial, when I found myself in a gallery with the younger artist's Winchester, a digital-video projection that hardly announced itself as such. Its lingering image of a nineteenth-century mansion possessed the warm pallor of an albumen silver print, the blur of the moving picture confusing the lexicons of advancing technologies. Indeed, Blake had gone so far as to mimic the skips and scratches of a weathered film and antique projector, whose appropriated whir occasionally filled the darkened gallery at high volume, spiriting an outmoded medium's indexical mark into our own arguably nonindexical time. The uncanny sense of loss induced by this palpably absent yet sensuously evoked form was only compounded by the hypnotic rise of swaths of rich, electric color--unmoored Greenbergian shades recalling Morris Louis and Jules Olitski--that soon saturated the image. Many discussions of Blake's work have centered on the formalist terms of modernist painting--with his use of technology upping the ante on questions of surface and depth, and of medium-specificity. And yet it was John Baldessari who sprang to mind. Just some twenty blocks away, Marian Goodman Gallery was hosting the New York debut of his "Intersections" series: photographic montages of landscape and cinematic imagery arranged in crossing panels, the central frames of which were painted, such that emulsion and paint, the optical and the textural, reality and fantasy commingled to obtain, as in Blake's Winchester, quantum properties.

For me, regardless of generational differences (or perhaps because of them), the association was evocative. For years, Baldessari has moved somewhat freely among media and genres, mixing them, appropriating dated imagery from cinema while remaining steeped in questions of painting, managing also to locate a deep psychological, sometimes romantic and playful pulse in his work even while negotiating the rigorous terms of Conceptualism. Many similar observations could be made of Blake, even as the aesthetic and critical terms surrounding, and prompting, his artistic decisions are not so clearly drawn (or, better, not so clearly articulated). Certainly, in work and in person, the two share a kind of low-key irreverence when it comes to artistic postulates and predicates, an elementary willingness to move around and outside the accepted terms of art and of operating in the art world. In the case of Baldessari, Artforum will forever have to live down the artist's This Is Not To Be Looked At--or live up to it, as the case may be. Either way, it is Artforum's hope that "In Conversation" will contribute to the continual reevaluation of artistic norms, to serious, irreverent play, and to a blended sense of permission and provocation. This is to be looked at.

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JOHN BALDESSARI: I recently saw a piece of yours in a collector's house in Miami, right between a painting and a sculpture. And I thought to myself that you've some-how been able to get beyond technology so that one can actually look at the image. But what I like most about what you're doing is probably the worst nightmare come true for a lot of people in the art world, in the sense that everybody fears Bill Gates's idea of flat screens, where the visitor comes in and has a memory of what his favorite art is, and it's projected there. That looking at an image of a van Gogh on a flat screen will be just as good as looking at a van Gogh.