John Baldessari

Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery

New York, Marian Goodman Gallery, John Baldessari: Double Play, October - November 2012

This work is in very good condition overall. Minor accretions can be seen in the bottom section of the canvas where the white quadrant begins, which are visible under close inspection. Under Ultraviolet light inspection there is no evidence of restoration. Unframed.
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In John Baldessari’s Walking the Dog (2012), a green-tailed mercreature seems caught mid-flip. Back arched, hair flying wildly, and fingers spread, the figure seems to defy gravity, tipped upside down within the pictorial frame of the canvas. The background of the image is split between a flattened black swath of nothing, and a reddish brown earthy foreground. Beneath the image, black letters against a white background read boldly—yet nonsensically—WALKING THE DOG.

Baldessari has leveraged text, image, and quite a great deal of wit in his artworks for over half a century. Based in Los Angeles for most of his career, Baldessari left behind an abstract painting practice in 1970 to become a pioneer of photo-textual conceptual art. Taking all of his previous paintings and burning them ceremoniously in 1970, Baldessari launched into an artistic career that has continued to shift, grow, and experiment grandly in the years since. He is well-known for using found or appropriated images, overlaying photographs with graphic, colorful additions, and incorporating a wry, sometimes absurd voice into many of his works.

Walking the Dog is a part of Baldessari’s 2012 series, Double Play. In this series of works, the artist isolates small details and fragments of canonical works of art and blows them up large. Removing these shards from their original contexts, Baldessari renders these fragments anew. Combining these images with phrases borrowed from songs—like Shirley Temple’s Animal Crackers in My Soup, Tom Waits’s Eggs and Sausage or Clang Boom Steam, and, here, The Rolling Stone’s cover of Rufus Thomas’s original, Walking the Dog—Baldessari creates juxtapositions between text and image.

Double Play extends Baldessari’s interest in art history, as well as his forever playful manipulation of the recognizable into something we can’t quite pinpoint, and the literal into the unreadable. Using bits and pieces from works by three centuries of painting—borrowing from Gaugin, de Chirico, Matisse, Duchamp, and others, Baldessari’s Double Play works act as propositions. The fragments of imagery overlaid with Baldessari’s characteristic patches of bold color and textual fragments urge viewers to search for a thread of meaning to combine the two disparate elements. While Balessari is not keen on giving away his meanings, he is open to viewers creating their own.

Baldessari shares an affinity for image, language, and tongue-in-cheek commentary with several other prominent West Coast artists. Often paired and compared, Baldessari and Ed Ruscha seem to have absorbed a similar fascination with words, color, and the city of Los Angeles. Ruscha's iconic artist book, Various Small Fires and Milk (1964), for instance, relies on the title and a series of found images to create a droll yet fascinating collection of images. Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, working under the name Clatworthy Colorvues, created a series of text and image billboards that they placed in commercial advertising spaces starting in 1973. While some of the billboards made in the fifteen years of their collaboration approach an infographic sort of style, many of them repeat the kind of irreverent nonsense that Baldessari also wields. One of the earliest works in this series, their Oranges on Fire (1975) billboard pairs a manipulated illustration typical of California's citrus industry ads with the words of the title. Combining and manipulating mundane images, words-as-images, and words as ambiguous keys to meaning, these four artists explore the ways that we build and synthesize the world from fragments of information.

In 1971, Baldessari vowed (and asked students to declare, as well): “I will not make any more boring art.” Across the ensuing decades, he has continued to hold true to this pledge, continually re-thinking and expanding his practice, as he continues to do now, well into his eighties. Walking the Dog is a fantastic recent example of Baldessari's unselfconscious engagement with art and its history as well as a testament to his characteristic humor.