Passed: John Baldessari

"Baldessari's career spent on a mockery of art's formal givens, puppeteering its dumbified literal versions and removing the protective aura of seriousness so a skepticism could seep into it cracks, paving the way for today's boorish Pop conceptualism.

"Here, dissonant image/text relations 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, shows how strong this base impulse is ingrained."

"The text's irrelation performs the poetic fissure lamely, mechanically, i.e. Baldessari's engineered breakage of logical closure, conclusion. The space we rush to fill with guesses, the INTERPRETATION of art, that interminable precursor to MEANING. The poetic is the process for staging these interpretive fissures, founts for guessing, which Baldessari's plain creation of feels like a corpse made to dance. That dullness feels a point."


Click here for full John Baldessari at Marian Goodman, John Baldessari at Sprüth Magers