John Baldessari

For the 10th time, the Museum Weserburg Bremen is presenting works from the Deutsche Bank Collection: on view is Somewhere Between Almost Right and Not Quite (With Orange) by the American artist John Baldessari. This cycle of works was commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, Deutsche Bank’s joint venture with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

John Baldessari became known in the late 1960s for works in which he combined imagery from the mass media – as known from Pop Art – with writing, as used by Conceptual Art. Early on, Baldessari began integrating images and text from the advertising and film industries into his photographic images. He contrasted, cropped, and edited the visuals in conjunction with texts. His montages of photography and writing continually countered the narrative associations triggered by the individual scenes, offering a broader range of meanings. The multilayered, often humorous compositions allow for a wide variety of interpretations and underscore how relative meaning can be.

In the 1970s, Baldessari began incorporating photographs from other people’s hands into his projects: “Found images appealed to me because they weren’t considered art, but simple pictorial commodities. I rummaged around in the garbage cans of photo stores.” Since still, publicity and press photos were very inexpensive, an extensive archive was created within a short time.

As Baldessari realized how individual images from a film could suggest entire narrative sequences, he used them more and more. Related and unrelated found images were arranged into cycles, sometimes in the form of a grid, then again as a linear or free structure, but always according to a fixed ordering principle.

After 1980, Baldessari preferred to process the adopted pictorial material without textual underlay. By limiting himself to photo cycles without text, Baldessari proved that pure images are just as capable of conveying narrative content as the earlier image-text montages. Later, he moved on to covering depicted faces with a splash of color. As the pictorial space flattens, the illusionary effect of the scene becomes all the more pronounced. The covering of the face (or later of a body part) negates individuality and transforms an identifiable subject into an unidentifiable object. The white stickers of the first attempts were later replaced by colorful ones. A color code created by the artist opened up additional levels of meaning: Red signaled danger, green stood for safety, and so on.

To this day, playing with and criticizing pop culture remain at the center of his successful artistic work, in the course of which the format and forcefulness of his images have grown ever larger. His new large-scale series Somewhere Between Almost Right and Not Quite (With Orange), 2004, for the Deutsche Guggenheim deals with the phenomenon of “space in between.” Orange, the color “between” yellow and red, dominates this project. Baldessari teases out the contradictions: The images tell of harmony and conflict, security and danger, and do not conceal the void that lies between the two extremes – the unsettling existence of the “space in between.” The stills are detached from time and space. Liberated from the original film script, they take on new form in Baldessari’s presentation direction. Baldessari’s visual montage technique is meant to illustrate that the meaning of the image develops only in the course of a dialogue and is not already inherent in the work.