| Artist: | John Baldessari |
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|---|---|---|
| Title: | Blasted Allegories | |
| Date: | 1978 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Conceptual Art | |
| Movement: | ||
| Materials: | ||
| Subject: from the "Blasted Allegories" series. Working out a syntax for the still image he pulls off the TV, which he then adds a word to; thinking about how images connect up or equate; his notes below read: "carefully weighed words with grey definition." No singular read, thus; the viewer can puzzle out possible links and meanings;Baldessari's structural strategy for composing a "random order." 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 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 | ||
