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Its cosmic mapping, truth, illusion, an off-the-chart kind of imaginary freedom.
All of this work was made in the late 1960s and early 1970s when painting had been pronounced dead.
It was afterJohns, Rauschenberg, Cage, Cunningham, and an onslaught of Pop and minimal art.
At the same time the booming art market emptied out and art took refuge in schools and academies.
What Baldessari was doing was eventually pronounced post-studio art; artists still say they practice this.
By the early 1970s, art had gotten fairly airless.
Soon, it was pronounced dead.
(The art world loves playing coroner and pronouncing things dead.)
Then an act of abnegation and revelation.
Baldessari dropped a bomb on himself.
He called thisCremation Project.Something happened and he knew it.
In a letter to curator Marsha Tucker he pronounced it my best work to date.
This was happening to artists everywhere who were simultaneously starting over, looking for new forms, other rules.
Ed Ruscha made books of photographs of gas stations and all the buildings on Sunset Strip.
Vito Acconci famously masturbated under a gallery floor.
Bruce Nauman videotaped himself walking in strange ways around his studio.
Richard Serra threw molten lead at the wall.
Eva Hesse made sculptures from funky rope.
Sol LeWitt invented instructions for other people to draw his art on walls.
Not long after, Baldessari sang LeWitts Sentences on Conceptual Art to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy.
Unlike almost all the others, however, Baldessari soon started making paintings again.
His early canvases are basically blank except for words.
Another, A work with only one property.
Hed invented a new encyclopedia of artistic possibilities.
And again, he knew this.
But now others saw him doing this, too.
(Bear in mind that these were his peers mostly.
All this really made art a beautiful, if insular, hothouse.)
These and other Baldessari works are some of the most iconic conceptual and post-minimal art of the period.
See where it takes you.
Baldessari located an enigmatic realm where the lightness of being, philosophy, and paradox merge.
This arrives at an infinity point I see as art.
I write it out as A + I (O2) = .
By now more than four generations have passed through the gates of art that Baldessari revealed.
Salle meant this lovingly.
But this love also mutated into reams of hackneyed, bad (boring) conceptual art.
I have a soft spot for one lesser-known, very early 1963 photographic work in particular.
This work consists only of a grid of 32 small color photographs.
Drop-dead simple, self-explanatory, brave, mortifying, dotty, transitory, rhythmic, reiterative, singular.
