Baldesaurus Rex

This last effect isn't at all unusual in Baldessari's figurative work, which is typically littered with interpenetrating points of view. In "Junctions and Intersections," gauzy unicorns and stuffed birds gaze mutely into the gallery space, a phalanx of soldiers stand at attention with their backs turned to us, concerned onlookers peer into the distance over our shoulders, two men with fully bandaged faces ogle a lurid pink aerobicizer in a perpendicular universe. Most of the people wear some sort of uniform — soldier, prisoner, priest, acrobat, chorister, etc. Baldessari seems to be suggesting an equivalency between complex collective social identities and the generative organic context from which such symbols are supposed to differentiate their bearers. Our attention is drawn to the fact that the polarization of nature and culture is itself a cultural artifact, and not a force of nature.

In his 1998 book Trickster Makes This World, idiosyncratic scholar Lewis Hyde traces art to its etymological root artus, Latin for bodily joints, and proposes a model of the Artist operating at the point where two different ways of seeing reality connect, the place where power is mediated, where sacred and profane interface, where hierarchical spheres and territories adjoin. Using Duchamp as a model, Hyde identifies the trickster-artist as one "whose mischief keeps the protective barriers surrounding cultural forms porous and open to change." John Baldessari's provocative articulation of unsuspected connections, gaps, hinges and puns in art, culture and the world literalizes this insight and locates it at the center of art practice, lifts the conceptualist and painterly world views that insist on their mutual exclusivity, and lays them atop one another to see if something new and surprising happens. Something always does.

JOHN BALDESSARI: "Junctions and Intersections"| At MARGO LEAVIN GALLERY, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-0603 Through December 7