Colecciones de arte

Blasted Allegories (B.W.Sentence): Fondle Facts, 1978

DESCRIPTION

With this piece, John Baldessari was questioning the traditional sense of the allegory, presenting photographic montages that, given their ambivalence, acquire several meanings.

This series, produced in 1978, departs from a phrase by the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, "Upon my honor, I am not quite sure that I entirely comprehend my own meaning in some of these blasted allegories; but I remember that I always had a meaning or, at least, thought I had."

With the "blasted allegories", symbolic representations of abstract ideas, employed over and over again in all artistic manifestations, Baldessari questioned the meaning of images and what they represent.

The Blasted Allegories consist of a set of photographs taken directly from a television screen over a ten-minute period. Afterwards, the author wrote a word on top of them, the first word that came to mind when he saw each image. Later, without any apparent order, they were stuck on a piece of cardboard upon which the complete title of the work was written. The result is a montage of disjunctive images, mostly fragments taken out of their context and introduced into another at random.

How should these Blasted Allegories be read? From left to right? From top to bottom? These questions arise from the bewilderment they cause. Baldessari thus demonstrates that the reading of a work of art, of an image, cannot and should not be closed. He achieved this with this radical discursive model, construed through the direction the reading is done. Since there are many possible directions, the meanings change, converting each montage into an open piece. The way to approach these works is to scrutinise each one of the apparently unconnected photographs, and drift endlessly while fleeing from coming to any conclusions.

The meanings change depending on the direction and the direction varies with each spectator.

There are multiple readings, each image-text may occupy a place and the final meaning of the set depends on the connections established between them. All the images belong to a story and a set, individually they would lose part of their meaning. Baldessari's montages are in many aspects a place for experimentation, an improbable meeting point for subjects that would otherwise not come into contact and who exist as such by their inclusion therein. As opposed to what happens with a text where all the terms are defined and where the allegory can be decoded, this set of images functions as an unlimited text, where each sign could occupy different places within the syntax, offering an unlimited number of stories. The Blasted Allegories do not have a single solution or a correct interpretation, since they are full of slippery meanings. C. D.