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 5

Baldessari’s engagement with the film and television industry was fuelled by his proximity to Hollywood, as well as his realisation that film and video helped him to synthesise and understand his own thoughts. Movies reinforced the importance of time and sequence that he had begun to explore in his photographs. The film industry also yielded a ready-made repertoire of images and gestures to choose from. Not only did Baldessari play with the idea of a script, he also appropriated the format of storyboards, displaying images in sequence to explore different scenarios and suggest multiple narratives.

Baldessari once explained that his goal was to make visual order by word order and vice versa. He wanted his work to be informed by the order of language, colour and other random systems, rather than considerations of taste. Informed by Structuralist methodologies, the Blasted Allegories and Word Chain series are based on complex systems of interrelated visual fragments and linguistic parts.