Colecciones de arte

Man Fallen in S-Curve
(with Man looking down and Man looking up), 1984

This black-and-white diptych clearly illustrates John Baldessari's concerns: exploring the connections between images and words.

To produce it, he appropriated images to which he usually added a word or text, normally in a descriptive way, utilizing the logic of the association of ideas, thus conditioning the spectator upon his/her perception of the image. As occurs in these photographs, in which a man dressed in black and lying down on the floor with his arms stretched apart, can be converted, once the title is read, into an anthropomorphic representation of the letter S.

Baldessari himself explained his procedure when establishing a connection between images and words, "I don't make much of a distinction between words and images. I have made a lot of work where the camera took pictures every x minutes and later, to escape my own sensitivity, I had my assistant look at the photos and think of a substitute word. In short, if there was a plane, she would write plane on the back, or fly or escape. I organized those words in alphabetical order, according to the words, not the images. Afterwards, I composed a kind of narrative with words. I'd look through the files for the word I wanted, turn it over and use the image". Another way of working with images taken from film, was to group them together according to similarities, in other words, those portraying cowboys, falling people, people looking at each other.. creating an image dictionary that functions syntactically like words, and that are prepared to be joined with one another to suggest stories.

Black-and-white photographs are very representative of this decade of the eighties. In them, the subjects' heads were cut out in a circle, where a brushstroke of acrylic paint was added, as in Bloody Sundae (1987) or Cruelty and Cowardice (With Malice) (1988).

He bases his theoretical premises on the text "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" by Sol LeWitt from 1967, where the supremacy of the idea over the materialisation of the work of art is proclaimed, in an effort to address the spectator's mind rather than his glance. This anti-object attitude with which he attempted to flee from beauty was not merely reinforced through his works, full of ambiguous metaphors and elaborated semantic relationships, but also by way of his ingenuity and his intelligence, for he is considered to be one of the maximum representatives of visual art. C. D.