John Baldessari

 

 

 

John Baldessari’s art, which was initially close to Pop Art, from the mid-Sixties focussed on the critical analysis of mass communication systems with the intention of altering the structure of visual language by abolishing the traditional coordinates of composition and replacing them by the original value of the relationship between form and meaning.
This work, a white surface on which the words «Everything is purged from this painting but art; no ideas have entered this work» stand out, is one of Baldessari’s early and now historic reflections against and within the system of art which he achieved by resorting to paradox – following the ideas of Marcel Duchamp – but also by drawing on the work of Joseph Beuys and Roland Barthes. Although both the writing on the work and its title maintain that
it contains no ideas, the painting immediately reveals its mental nature, offering a
“something which goes beyond” traditional painting which gives it every
right to join the debate on conceptual art and on its theorization of art as, first and foremost, an idea. Rather than dispensing “absolute truth”, this work provides a moment of stimulation, an incentive to further analysis of and reflection on the nature of art; it presents the viewer with the concrete fact that the lack of painting as traditionally understood does not simply mean the absence of art.