From Publishers Weekly
Juxtaposing images from popular culture and mundane reality, conceptual artist Baldessari turns the vernacular of mass perception back on itself, jolting viewers out of programmed ways of seeing. An artist with a keen sense of humor and an instinctive feel for the absurdity of much of modern culture, he creates open-ended messages, clues for the spectator to decipher. Wedding 375 plates to a perceptive essay that tracks the Southern Californian's ever-shifting modes, this monograph--a tie-in with a touring retrospective--explores Baldessari's imagist "mind games" of the 1960s and '70s, text-and-image parables, composite photoworks blending newsreel-like reportage with fabrication, collages and installations. Van Bruggen ( Bruce Nauman ) illuminates how Baldessari wrests poetry, meaning and hope from alchemical fusions of movie stills, words, billboard posters, ads, old photographs and art-historical references.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Contemporary art aficionados will appreciate Conceptualist John Baldessari's jarring juxtapositions of imagery drawn from popular culture, including photographs and texts appropriated from advertising, magazine articles, television, and film. This broad selection of his work, here presented in 375 photographs, challenges viewers to confront the idiosyncracies and banal details of modern American life. This book, the first full-scale monograph on Baldessari and catalog for an exhibition that will be shown at six U.S. and Canadian venues through 1992, offers a lucid account of his development over the last three decades and a discussion of the narrative and psychological themes in his work. Van Bruggen, an independent curator and wife of Pop artist Claes Oldenberg, is also the author of Bruce Nauman (Rizzoli, 1989).
- Russell T. Clement, Brigham Young Univ. Lib., Provo, Ut.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Russell T. Clement, Brigham Young Univ. Lib., Provo, Ut.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
