John Baldessari

Ileana Sonnabend Gallery, New York
Massimo Valsecchi, Milan
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner circa 1985

New York, New Museum, John Baldessari 1966-1980, 1981, p. 13, illustrated
Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst Ludwig Gesellshaft, John Baldessari: A Different Kind of Order 1962-1984, 2005, p. 238, illustrated

Word Chain: Palm Tree (Cynthia's Story) epitomises the cryptic visual irony and subversion of established tradition and practice that occupied John Baldessari's innovative conceptual oeuvre throughout the 1970s. In 1970 he had burnt all the work he had produced between 1953 and 1966 - defining his photo-text and text paintings as his self-edited, extant corpus. The present work was thus part of a concentrated and focused effort to rearticulate the most basic of artistic assumptions.

Here, a host of black and white images illustrate an erratic and eclectic range of imagery. This ranges from a dolphin and a carton of milk, through an ice-cream cone and a butterfly to Van Gogh's painting of Dr Gachet, a knight's armour, deer, lungs, curry powder and tartan plaid. They are laid out on squared graph paper in the simplified schema of a palm tree, and it is a colour image of a palm tree that sits at the epicentre of the arrangement. Written in pencil below the whole configuration is: 'WORD CHAIN: PALM TREE (CYNTHIA'S STORY)'. The literal reading of this work could therefore conclude that these images represent the database of snapshot visual memories that constitute Cynthia's life. The patterned layout of the tree evokes the format of the family tree, while the human mind's relentless desire to organise naturally searches for signs of logic to group the images into some sort of order. For example, the image of a feather appears next to the gull-like bird, the female and male torsos are near each other, and indicators of the human senses - ear, eye, tongue - are scattered across the whole arrangement. It is almost as if the disposition of this imagery purposefully hides some enigmatic code or formula, which holds the key to the work's ultimate meaning.

This is consistent with the trait of games and puzzles resident in much of Baldessari's output. This theme is often dependent upon text either in the work or its title, from his earliest conceptual paintings like Everything is purged from this painting but Art, no ideas have entered this work (1967-68) to the stop motion photography of Strobe Series/ Futurist: Trying to get a Straight Line with a Finger (1975). Baldessari's epic career has encompassed monumental variety and incessant questioning. Amongst its patterns and connotations, the fragmentary collage of images that comprise Word Chain: Palm Tree (Cynthia's Story) incites a singularly independent interpretation from each of its viewers. As Igor Zabel has stated "Baldessari builds sequences of pictures using exactly the effect of "conflict of fragments"...Being a synchronous arrangement of pictures, they can be read and re-read in several directions, and also in a personal rhythm: thus, besides strict compositional rules, it is also our involvement which determines the "montage" of such a work" (Igor Zabel in Exhibition Catalogue, Manchester, Cornerhouse, John Baldessari: This Not That, 1995, pp. 30-31).