John Baldessari

Pure Beauty

Tate Modern 13 October 2009  –  10 January 2010

Explore:

• Interview
• Room 1
• Room 2
• Room 3
• Room 4
• Room 5
• Room 6
• Room 7
• Room 8
• Room 9
• Room 10
• Room 11
• Room 12
• Room 13

Room 4

Having given some paintings away and put aside works that represented a new direction he was exploring, Baldessari burned his remaining canvases on 24 July 1970. This radical gesture signalled a shift in his career, and the Cremation Project became a defining work in the emerging conceptual art movement.

Shortly thereafter Baldessari moved to Los Angeles and began to work almost exclusively in photography, using multiple images to construct a new sense of order. Whilst many of the images are mundane and meaningless on their own, by carefully placing them together, Baldessari is able to construct narratives, emphasise a specific viewpoint or emotion, and encourage different ways of looking at the world. Many of these works use seemingly bizarre tasks or games with peculiar rules to bring art back into the realm of the everyday. The artist’s experimentation with film and video was a natural progression from these performative photographs. Using irony and continuing to embrace absurdity, the early videos in this room refer to other artists, but are also mantras around artistic practice.