Cultural Event Response 1

Heather McGuire's Talk on Concept Artist John Baldessari

It was interesting how much McGuire’s talk about Baldessari’s work tied in with what we had been discussing about detournement. Baldessari uses a combination of images and text, like in detournement, to create a new form of art. I also found the distinction between fine art and concept art that McGuire spoke of interesting. Looking at Baldessari’s work from the perspective of fine art will give you a different experience than looking at it from a concept perspective. For Baldessari, it is not the piece itself that is important; it is the idea that it represents. In fact, Baldessari had cremated all of his paintings once to show that it was the ideas that were important, not the piece itself.

Baldessari uses text a lot in his work, especially in his "Blasted Allegories" piece with the red image of a father in the top left corner. He uses text so much in his work because he feels there is such a strong connection between art and language, that it is appropriate to combine the two. In most pieces, however, it seemed as if the text was not necessary; the image tends to speak for itself and adding text seems to degrade the value of the piece as a whole. But, because Baldessari was so focused on the ideas and not the aesthetics of a piece, it is understandable how he would consider the use of text so appropriate for his work.