| Showing 1 of 1 |
|
John Baldessari
American
(1931–2020)
16th and Highland, National City
1966-1967
Photo emulsion and acrylic on canvas
16.5 x 16.5 in. (41.91 x 41.91 cm)
Gift of the Marie Eccles Caine Foundation
1998.40
While Ed Ruscha’s distinctive photo-and-text work of the early and mid-1960s provided a bridge between pop and conceptual art, it was primarily John Baldessari, and later artists like William Wegman and Robert Cumming, who combined photography and text with humor to create a peculiarly potent strain of California conceptual art. Such work is distinguished by its use of understated wit in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp, and Baldessari is a master of the visual one-liner presented with a self-effacing, low-key humor.
The abundance of mundane, small-town detail captured in Baldessari’s seemingly random drive-by photographs of National City, the artist’s hometown, provided the perfect deadpan reply to skewer the pretensions of the “serious” conceptual art practiced at the time in New York and London. The fact that Baldessari could make cutting-edge conceptual work while living and teaching in relatively provincial circumstances is primarily a tribute to his intelligence and tenacity (though also partly the result of the “global village” impact of art periodicals in the 1960s).
16th and Highland, National City: what you read is what you see. Perhaps such a guileless environment was liberating to Baldessari as he sought the simplest, most accessible form art can take: pictures with captions such as you’d find in a high-school yearbook, a photo album on the coffee table, or the local newspaper. Blowing them up big like a painting and putting them on canvas: that’s how you know it’s art.
Hugh M. Davies
Exhibition List
This object was included in the following exhibitions:
- Uses of the Real I , 1/20/2008 - 4/30/2011
- Uses of the Real Part II , 7/1/2009 - 8/30/2010
- Collecting on the Edge , 9/15/2018 - 5/4/2019
- Collecting on the Edge Part II Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art , 1/17/2019 - 5/4/2019
Also found in
Click a portfolio name to view all the objects in that portfolio
This object is a member of the following portfolios:
Your current search criteria is: Portfolio is "Collecting on the Edge Part II" and [Objects]Artist is "John Baldessari".