In the present work, Baldessari cuts apart and reworks selections from two very different paintings – Max Ernst’s Aquis Submersus, 1919, and David Hockney’s Sunbather, 1966. Melding, superimposing, and cropping the source images – Baldessari moves Hockney’s figure from the background to the foreground of the composition, positioning Ernst’s mysterious figure looming behind the unaware sunbather, infusing the composition with an ominous, yet humorous effect. The private swimming pools in Hockney’s most iconic paintings represent the sexual freedom and hedonism that he found upon his arrival in Los Angeles, where Baldessari lived, worked, and taught throughout his career; while the psychologically charged pool in Ernst’s surrealist composition signifies an act of disappearing and diving into the unconscious part of one’s psyche. Through his poignant juxtapositions, Baldessari encourages the viewer to imagine the narratives and relationships that manifest from the collision between the seemingly disparate images.
While the source imagery of Baldessari’s Double Bill (Part 2) series came as a surprise, these canvases encompass the trademark motifs and recall the formats and compositions of the most iconic works throughout the artist’s oeuvre. Despite the depth and breadth of his career, the artist ironically suggested that he will be best remembered as “the guy who puts dots over people’s faces.” From the mid-1980s, onwards, Baldessari employed circular price tags and painted flat, geometric shapes to occlude distracting elements and alter the meanings of his appropriated images. In Double Bill (Part 2): …and Ernst, the gray, green, black, purple, and white geometric planes recall elements of earlier iconic works by the artist, such as Frames and Ribbon, 1988. The format of Double Bill (Part 2): …and Ernst also recalls Baldessari’s iconic 1969 Commissioned Painting series, where the artist prominently featured as self-reflexive captions, the names of the sign painters that he hired to render photorealistic images upon each canvas. Baldessari uses a similar device in the Double Bill (Part 2) series, revisiting his examination of the nature of artistic authorship through his Magritte-like semiotic experiments of pitting text against images.
“Conceptualism doesn’t really describe what I do. If somebody wants to use that term, it’s fine, but I’d prefer a word that’s broader and better. I’m really just an artist.”
John Baldessari
One of the reasons Baldessari has been labeled a conceptual artist is the ease with which he transitioned between making paintings, photographs, billboards, sculptures, books, prints, and videos – most comfortable blurring the distinctions between these mediums. Over the astounding sixty years of his artistic practice, with over three hundred solo shows and over one thousand group shows, Baldessari shaped the careers of the following generation of conceptual artists, influencing artists such as Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, Richard Prince, David Salle, and Matt Mullican. Baldessari never ceased to innovate – as Catherine Opie proclaims “perhaps his most famous statement ‘I will not make any more boring art’ was his recognition that the world contained enough material to explore for a lifetime.”[i]
[i] Catherine Opie, quoted in Calvin Tomkins, “No More Boring Art: John Baldessari’s crusade”, The New Yorker, October 18, 2010, online