| Artist: | John Baldessari |
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|---|---|---|
| Title: | Blasted Allegories | |
| Date: | 1978 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Conceptual Art | |
| Movement: | ||
| Materials: | ||
| Subject: Baldessari blasts the traditional allegory apart in images and text that challenge how the viewer is to "read" the work; he plays on an1854 quotation by Nathaniel Hawthorne: "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." Should the image-texts be read across? up and down? diagonally? or all of the above? Baldessari adopts a radically discursive model in which the play of meaning moves in all directions, skimming over many apparently unconnected subjects; digressive and open-ended, shunning the certainty of conclusions; he repositions fragments of vision appropriated from TV; the end result is a montage of disjunctive images, each with one word superimposed; there is no one, wholistic, all-encompassing moral to the story or one singular reading; the image is an open-ended text that asks you to read for possible meanings rather than a closed text that is clear-cut in terms of how to decode the allegory. Remember Laurie Anderson's question: "You can't read the signs? Do you want to go home now, do you want to go home?" No way "home" or back to a simplistic allegory in a radically decentered, postmodern world where meaning is discursive and multiple rather than singular and stable. The unfixing of meaning. Style: appropriated imagery by taking a photo of the TV screen every 10 minutes and then adding the first word they could think of to the image. There is no logical sequencing in a narrative sense to how the images are laid out, and yet one can develop a syntax or connective order linking the image-texts in various directions, thus reading them as sentence structures; Baldessari neither wanted the image nor the word to dominate but to work in tandem so the viewer would have to determine how to read the signs, and each viewer would probably pull out different meanings depending on what kinds of links they made; meaning thus is not stable, determined, or closed; blasted allegories have no one right answer or correct read, but they are meaning-full; it is also quite dazzling in purely a visual sense through all the color filters. Context: Baldessari comes out of conceptual art; taught a course called "poststudio art" at Cal Arts in the 70s that was very influential; postmodern questioning of images and texts pulled from the mass media culture at large; the work addresses the question of meaning and whether it can ever be unified, fixed, singular; makes us aware of how meaning is not immanent (internal, belonging to the thing itself; each thing having its own essence), but rather how meaning is constructed and contextual; each reading of the work is a construction of possible meanings, so the viewer becomes an active force in making meaning; this is not passive TV entertainment; these works make us aware of how art can teach us to "read the signs" in multiple, critical ways rather than just consuming their pre-packaged messages. | ||
