John Baldessari

Los Angeles, Margo Leavin Gallery, John Baldessari, September - October 1986
Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945 - 1986, December 1986 - January 1988
Breda, Museum de Beyerd, John Baldessari: Breda Fotographia '94, July - September 1994

In Space Between; Equal Time, California Conceptualist John Baldessari, with his typically playful approach, fractures a black and white film still into nine narrow vertical bands of aluminum, each panel separated by a negative white band of equal width. By dismantling the enlarged print and editing it for repetition, Baldessari accentuates the source image's inherent geometry while also evoking film strips, which film directors often examine closely for narrative and visual continuity. Like the children's games in which one is intended to identify the differences between two seemingly identical images, the present work urges us to examine it with a recursive eye for minor alterations. And while the vast majority of  panels closely mimic their neighbors, the top of each panel features a cast of different behind-the-scenes characters: presumably producers and directors, but also cinematographers and cameramen.  

Executed in 1986, Space Between; Equal Time is decidedly of Baldessari's post-painting period, which began in 1967 and features a turn towards found photography and appropriated text. "I will not make any more boring art," Baldessari once famously scribbled over and over again in a notebook, committing the exercise to videotape. And he remained true to his word. Baldessari never fails to make us laugh or discover new meanings in images that without his prescription might appear mundane and forgettable.