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 6

Baldessari’s interest in combining images and words led him to explore the idea of subliminal images in advertising, and he began to experiment with varying levels of invisibility. Through a range of techniques, including airbrushing and double exposure, he embedded words and occasionally images within his photographs. For example, a sequence of ice cubes contains the message ‘U - BUY BAL DES SARI’. The titles of the works in the Pathetic Fallacy series instruct us as to what we should see, ascribing human emotions to inanimate objects or body parts when none of these values are, or could be, evident.

Baldessari’s portraits, with faces hidden by hats or manually altered by retouching and airbrushing, continue the theme of disguise, leading us to wonder what the artist really looks like, but also highlighting the absurdity of our obsession with capturing a likeness.

Whilst Baldessari regularly puts things together, assembling disparate images and words, the Thaumatrope Series is about taking things apart. A thaumatrope consists of two disconnected images that seem to combine into a single image when it spins. Presented statically alongside each other, it is left to the viewer to unite the images in their mind.