Research- John Baldessari

John Baldessari is an American conceptual artist. He is particularly interested in creating narrative, how this can be achieved and also the effect that text can have on imagery. He is a very successful artist with several hundred solo exhibitions and a large catalogue of work he's made. I find his work extremely interesting and very relevant for his experimentation with text and also the way he has displayed work.

He is not only incredibly inspirational but has often been at the cutting end of art and photography. In the 1960s his work changed entirely and he burnt [or at least claimed to] all previous works, concentrating more on a photographic approach. He famously raided bins and rubbish to find relevant bits for his photo-montage-compositions.

Often his work has a tongue in cheek element to it and is very visually stimulating. The series 'Wrong' is brilliant as he juxtaposed imagery with quotes from a book that talked about how to take photographs, focusing on the chapter about composition. It's a clever series.



'Prima facie' is a project I really like. It juxtaposes portraits of sorts with a seemingly relevant verb that explains the image. The trickery is within this. Baldessari doesn't know anything about the people in the images, but by putting these words with them, he's giving them some kind of identity and there's that moment where as a viewer you believe it or wonder about it and start to associate it with the person. Sometimes you may even create stories of how or why that person is that way. It's interesting to see how different people react to the series and he really does explore what adding text to photographs can do. I think 'prima facie' is Latin for something and I believe it's a stab at how people make snap judgements when they meet people or see a photograph of somebody. We're all guilty of it. Here are two below.