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Baldessari's career spent on a dismantling mockery of art's formal givens, puppeteering its dumbified literal versions, removing the protective aura of seriousness so a skepticism could seep into it cracks, paving the way for today's boorish Pop conceptualism.
Here focused on dissonant image/text relations, including a PR that may or may not correspond the exhibition on view, leaves a viewer floundering to connect the basic formality of art: that the text relate. That we still find this Baldessarian gimmick relevant 800 exhibitions later, sometimes even comically worth it, even when unable to ascertain its intentionality, shows how strong this base impulse is ingrained.
See too : Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza , Vern Blosum at Kunsthalle Bern , Mitchell Syrop at Midway Contemporary Art