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TWO PERSONS, TWO HANDS, TELEPHONE (WITH WINDOW), JOHN BALDESSARI, 1995

PROCESS

JOHN BALDESSARI

THROWING THREE BALLS IN THE AIR TO GET A STRAIGHT LINE, JOHN BALDESSARI, 1973

KEY IMAGE:

TWO WHALES (WITH PEOPLE), JOHN BALDESSARI, 2010

TWO OPPONENTS (BLUE AND YELLOW), JOHN BALDESSARI, 2004

Now that contemporary art has become a global enterprise, we tend to forget that a few pockets of regional difference still exist.

In Los Angeles, for example, artists rarely talk about Andy Warhol.

Warhol’s shadow hangs heavy over the international art world, but not in L.A., where the most relevant artist of the moment, the seventy-nine-year-old John Baldessari, said recently that he “hadn’t thought about Warhol in forty years.” Baldessari’s endlessly surprising retrospective, which was on view all summer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, comes to New York this month, opening on October 20th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The fact that none of our modern or contemporary museums could find room for it in their schedules suggests a strain of parochialism at work here, too, but who knows? Baldessari’s contrarian brand of conceptual, photography-based art-about-art has so few regional or even national characteristics that it probably belongs at the Met, among all those certified treasures of fifty centuries.

Baldessari has made a career out of upsetting priorities and defying expectations. “Pure Beauty,” an early work that doubles as the exhibition’s title, consists of those two words, painted by a professional sign painter in black capital letters on an off-white canvas. When Baldessari had it done, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, he was teaching art at a junior college near his home in National City, California, a working-class town near the Mexican border, and painting in his spare time. His work until then had been fairly traditional—oil paint on canvas, applied with loose, gestural brushstrokes in the Abstract Expressionist manner. “I was getting tired of people saying my art was like Abstract Expressionism,” he told me.

“Being in National City, where nobody cared what I was doing, I thought, What if you just give people what they want? People read magazines, and look at photographs, not at Jackson Pollocks.”

There was more to it than that, of course. Baldessari is a prodigious reader—art history, novels, philosophy, the Bible, comics—and in those days he subscribed to a dozen international art magazines.

What he really decided to give people was his version of conceptu-

al art, in which ideas take precedence over images and the artist’s personal “touch” doesn’t count. In New York, in the mid-sixties, conceptual art had just started to take hold. It was a pretty serious business, severe and theoretical: Joseph Kosuth’s “One and Three Chairs,” an iconic early example, consists of a folding chair placed against a wall, a photograph of the same chair on the wall to one side of it, and a dictionary definition of “chair,” enlarged and hung on the wall to the other side. Baldessari reinvented conceptualism, in his own vein of laid-back, irreverent humor. “Everything Is Purged from This Painting But Art, No Ideas Have Entered This Work,” another of his text paintings proclaims—conceptual art mocking conceptual art. “Don’t do any beautiful calligraphy,” Baldessari had told the sign painter. “I just want this to be information.”

“I’ve often thought of myself as a frustrated writer,” he said last summer, when I spent some time with him in L.A. “I consider a word and an image of equal weight, and a lot of my work comes out of that kind of thinking.” We were visiting his exhibition at lacma, where a good many museumgoers recognized him. Baldessari’s height (six feet seven inches), his shoulder-length white hair and patriarchal beard, and his wheezy, high-pitched laugh command attention in any setting, but out here he is a landmark presence, a famous artist and art teacher, whose former students proliferate and prosper in New York as well as in L.A. Several of the text paintings were quite funny, and a few actually evoked visual images in the mind. “Baldessari gave conceptual art a visual language,” as Paul Schimmel, the chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A., puts it. The clearest example is his “Semi-Close-Up of Girl by Geranium (Soft View),” from 1966-68, whose text, filling the pale-gray canvas, is lifted from the screenplay for D. W. Griffith’s “Intolerance”: “Finishes Watering It—Examines Plant to See If It Has Any Signs of Growth, Finds Slight Evidence—Smiles—One Part Is Sagging—She Runs Fingers Along It—Raises Hand Over Plant to Encourage It to Grow.” Standing in front of the painting at

UMBRELLA

lacma, Baldessari said, “It’s probably my all-time favorite piece. I just think it’s perfect—very simple, and you can imagine it so easily.

David Foster Wallace once said that the duty of the writer is to make the reader feel intelligent, and let them fill in the gaps. I feel that way, too.”

In the same gallery were more early works, most of them dated 1966-68, which combine texts with greatly enlarged photographic images. The photographs, grainy and over- or underexposed shots of locations in National City, had been printed in photo-emulsion on canvas, so they looked just like bad amateur snapshots. Underneath each one, in large, generic capitals, was a text identifying its location: “Econ-O-Wash/14th and Highland/National City Calif.”

Baldessari took the pictures, shooting through the window of his car “with the idea that truth is beautiful, no matter how ugly it is.”

His wife took one that makes sport of the rule in every photography manual about not posing your subject in front of a tree, because it will look like the tree is growing out of the subject’s head.

This picture, which lacma now owns, shows Baldessari standing directly in front of a spindly palm tree, and underneath is a oneword printed text: “wrong.”

After the photo-and-text pictures, Baldessari’s work becomes more complicated and increasingly ambitious, but no less playful.

Hearing that Al Held, the New York abstract painter, had said that conceptual art was “just pointing at things,” Baldessari did a series of “Commissioned Paintings”: he took photographs of a friend’s finger pointing at various objects or places around National City, then asked a dozen amateur artists, whose work he had seen at county fairs, to choose one of the photographs and reproduce it in a realistic painting, pointing finger included. Baldessari has often said that he wants his work to make people stop and look, rather than just take it in passively. In two large galleries devoted to works from the nineteen-seventies, several exhibits stopped me

cold. One was “Cremation Project” (1970), a glass-topped cabinet containing three objects: a bronze plaque inscribed “John Anthony Baldessari—May 1953—March 1966,” an urn in the shape of a book, and a notarized affidavit stating that “all works of art done by the undersigned between May 1953 and March 1966 in his possession as of July 24, 1970 were cremated on July 24, 1970 in San Diego, California.” As Baldessari explained to me, his National City studio then was full of unsalable paintings, and his work was headed in a new direction, so it seemed logical to have the early stuff cremated. “I thought about Nietzsche and the eternal return,” he said, “and equating the artist with the ‘body’ of his work, and so forth.

The problem was that several local mortuaries refused to cremate paintings. I found one finally, but the guy said we had to do it at night.”

The second showstopper was “Baldessari Sings LeWitt,” a 1972 video of Baldessari sitting in a chair, very relaxed, reciting each of Sol LeWitt’s thirty-five “Sentences on Conceptual Art” to the tune of a different song—“Some Enchanted Evening” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” among others. LeWitt, an older, New York-based artist whose work Baldessari admired, had agreed to the recital. “Sol was very sweet. I called him up, and he said, ‘Sure, go ahead.’ ” This one is now on YouTube. The third stopper was the video version of “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art,” his best-known work. The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design had invited him to have an exhibition in 1971, but it couldn’t afford to pay shipping or travel costs. What he proposed, instead, was that any students at the school who felt inclined should come in and write “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art” on a gallery wall, “to redeem themselves, or whatever,” and so many of them did that all the walls were entirely covered. The school subsequently published a lithograph of the phrase, and one of the prints was bought by the Museum of Modern Art. The video version shows Baldessari’s hand as he writes the words, like a penance, for thirteen minutes. “And it’s very boring,

A (ORANGE): WITH FIGURE AND BALL (BLUE, GREEN), JOHN BALDESSARI, 2004

STONEHENGE (WITH TWO PERSONS) VIOLET, JOHN BALDESSARI, 2005

FRENCH HORN PLAYER, JOHN BALDESSARI, 1994

MONEY WITH SPACE INBETWEEN, JOHN BALDESSARI, 1994

Tomkins, Calvin. “No More Boring Art.” The New Yorker, 19 June 2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/18/no-more-boring-art.

YVES SAINT LAURENT COLLECTION, JOHN BALDESSARI, 2014

isn’t it?” he said, laughing.

The range and complexity of Baldessari’s work over the next thirty years gradually silenced persistent attempts to dismiss him as a joke artist, a mere purveyor of visual one-liners. He produced prints, artist books, installations, films and videos (sometimes featuring his students), and photographic montages whose scale and wall power made them look more and more like paintings. He investigated the use of chance methods, photographing successive attempts to make a straight line or a square by throwing three or four colored balls in the air. He played visual games that involved choosing one out of three green beans (or carrots, or sticks of rhubarb), and he had himself photographed “Hitting Various Objects” from a garbage dump with a golf club. In his cinematic photo-collages of the nineteen-seventies and eighties, film stills advertising B movies or film noirs cohabited with suburban group portraits, landscapes, urban architecture, water sports, mermaids, art history, and surrealist fantasies. Baldessari constructs a vivid, skewed world in which the viewer can either participate or smile and walk away—a world whose complicity with the one we know becomes increasingly perplexed as the exhibition unfolds. Baldessari once said, regarding his work from the late sixties, “So much of my thinking at that time was trying to figure out just what I thought art was.”

And had he figured it out? I asked him. “Not a clue,” he said, with another big laugh. “Not . . . a . . . clue.”

WORD LIST:

GREEN KISS/RED EMBRACE (DISJUNCTIVE), JOHN BALDESSARI, 1998

INVITING

COLLAGE

POPULAR

NEW

AWARDED

CLEAN

EXHIBITED

SIMPLE

BLUE

COMPLEX

PRIMARY

FUN

BRIGHT

VIBRANT

INTERESTING

CONTEMPORARY

CURRENT

PAINTING

INTERNATIONAL

DOTS

INSPIRED

SCREENPRINTING

INSPIRING

PHOTOGRAPHY

INTERACTIVE

BEAUTIFUL

ABSTRACTED

PURE

COLOURFUL

CONCEPTUAL

EXCITING

PROVOCATIVE

BOLD

CREATIVE

GEOMETRIC

FRESH

RETROSPECTIVE

UNIQUE

COMEDIC

LIGHTHEARTED

COUNTER-CULTURE

EXPLORATIVE

POP ART

DIVERSE

PRISMATIC

PERFORMACE

UPLIFTING

INSTALLATION

WHIMSICAL

UNUSUAL

COLLAGE AN ASSEMBLAGE OR OCCURANCE OF DIVERSE ELEMENTS OR FRAGMENTS IN UNLIKELY OR UNEXPECTED JUXTAPOSITION ABSTRACTED THOUGHT OF APART FROM CONCRETE REALITIES, SPECIFIC OBJECTS, OR ACTUAL INSTANCES INTERESTING ENGAGING OR EXCITING AND HOLDING THE ATTENTION OR CURIOSITY DOTS A SMALL ROUNDISH MARK PRISMATIC (OF COLOURS) VARIED AND BRILLIANT UNIQUE HAVING NO LIKE OR EQUAL; UNPARALLELED; UNCOMPARABLE

TITLES AND QUOTES: I WILL NOT MAKE ANYMORE

GODFATHER OF CONCEPTUAL ART...

BORING ART...

MASTER OF APPROPRIATION...

PURE BEAUTY...

SURREALIST FOR THE DIGITAL AGE...

RISING FROM THE ASHES... ...THE WORK OF JOHN BALDESSARI

PRISMATIC COLLAGE UNIQUELY ABSTRACTED DOTTED CURIOSITY COLOURFUL CURIOSITY PRISMATIC ABSTRACTION UNIQUELY INTERESTING

OVERLAP SERIES, JOHN BALDESSARI, 2001

“BALDESSARI GAVE CONCEPTUAL ART A VISUAL LANGUAGE” “TRUTH IS BEAUTIFUL, NO MATTER HOW UGLY IT IS” “I THOUGHT ABOUT NIETZSCHE AND THE ETERNAL RETURN AND EQUATING THE ARTIST WITH THE ‘BODY’ OF HIS WORK, AND SO FORTH. THE PROBLEM WAS THAT SEVERAL LOCAL MORTUARIES REFUSED TO CREMATE PAINTINGS. I FOUND ONE FINALLY, BUT THE GUY SAID WE HAD TO DO IT AT NIGHT” “I WILL NOT MAKE ANYMORE BORING ART”

JEAN-LUC GODARD

WEEKEND, JEAN-LUC GODARD, 1967

ALPHAVILLE, JEAN-LUC GODARD, 1965

BREATHLESS, JEAN-LUC GODARD, 1960

VIVRE SA VIE, JEAN-LUC GODARD, 1962

BREATHLESS, JEAN-LUC GODARD, 1960

MASCULIN FÉMININ, JEAN-LUC GODARD, 1966

As a charter member of the Nouvelle Vague, Jean-Luc Godard was also arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the postwar era. Beginning with his groundbreaking 1959 feature debut A Bout de Souffle, Godard revolutionized the motion picture form, freeing the medium from the shackles of its long-accepted cinematic language by rewriting the rules of narrative, continuity, sound, and camera work. Later in his career, he also challenged the common means of feature production, distribution, and exhibition, all in an effort to subvert the conventions of the Hollywood formula to create a new kind of film.

Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930, the second of four children. After receiving his primary education in Nyon, Switzerland, he studied ethnology at the Sorbonne, but spent the vast majority of his days at the Cine-Club du Quartier Latin, where he first met fellow film fanatics Francois Truffaut and Jacques Rivette.

In May 1950, the three men united to publish La Gazette du Cinema, a monthly film journal which ran through November of the same year; here Godard printed his first critical pieces, which appeared both under his own name and under the pseudonym Hans Lucas. With Rivette’s 1950 short feature Quadrille, Godard made his acting debut, also appearing in Eric Rohmer’s Presentation ou Charlotte et son Steack the following year.

In January 1952, Godard began writing for Cahiers du Cinema, the massively influential film magazine. However, Godard’s first tenure at Cahiers proved to be brief: In the autumn of 1952, he left France

UNE FEMME EST UNE FEMME, JEAN-LUC GODARD, 1961

LE MEPRIS, JEAN-LUC GODARD, 1963

to return to Switzerland, where he worked on the construction of the Grande-Dixence Dam. With his earnings, Godard was able to finance his first film, the short subject Operation Beton. While in Geneva in 1955, he helmed his sophomore effort, the ten-minute Une Femme Coquette, subsequently appearing in Rivette’s Le Coup de Berger. Upon returning to France in the summer of 1956, Godard resumed his work at Cahiers after a four-year break from writing. There he rose to the top ranks of French film criticism while honing his increasingly fresh and freewheeling directorial style over the course of the short comedies Tous les Garcons s’appellent Patrick (1957), Charlotte et son Jules, and Une Histoire d’Eau (both 1958).

In 1959, Godard embarked on his feature debut, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless). Released at roughly the same time as Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, the picture helped establish the emergence of what was dubbed the French New Wave, a revolutionary movement in film heralded primarily by Cahiers alumni. A Bout de Souffle quickly earned global acclaim as the definitive document of its era.

Seemingly overnight, Godard was revered as the most important cinematic talent of his generation.

In 1960, he resurfaced with his second feature, an oddball political thriller titled Le Petit Soldat. The first of many films to star his then-wife Anna Karina, it became the subject of controversy over its characters’ connection to the Algerian crisis and was banned in France for three years. Shooting for the first time in color and in CinemaScope, he next filmed 1961’s comic tale Une Femme Est une Femme, followed a year later by the episodic essay on prostitution Vivre Se Vie. Again, both starred Karina, prompting criticism that Godard was using her as a non-actress, a mere screen presence utilized and manipulated in ways that she herself did not fully comprehend.

The first of Godard’s films to receive a critical thrashing was 1963’s war drama Les Carabiniers, but Le Mepris, a study of the nature of cinema itself, starring Brigitte Bardot, returned him to reviewers’ good graces. An astonishingly prolific and brilliant period followed, led off by 1964’s Bande a Part and Une Femme Mariee. Pierrot le Fou and Alphaville, une Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution, a singular science fiction effort, appeared in 1965, and a year later no less than three new features -- Masculin Feminin, Made in USA, and Deux ou Trois Choses Que Je Sais d’Elle -- bowed. Godard repeated the trifecta in 1967 with La Chinoise, ou Plutot a la Chinoise, Loin du Viet-Nam, and finally the apocalyptic Weekend, his most formally radical film since A Bout de Souffle.

PIERRE LE FOU, JEAN-LUC GODARD, 1965

LE MEPRIS, JEAN-LUC GODARD, 1963

Ankeny, Jason. “Jean-Luc Godard Biography.” Fandango, Rovi, www.fandango.com/people/jean-luc-godard-248094/biography.

LE MEPRIS, JEAN-LUC GODARD, 1963

SUSAN SONTAG

WALL STREET, PAUL STRAND, 1915

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE, ALFRED STIEGLITZ, 1933

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images.

To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King's Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard's gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is

written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.

Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out.

They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them.

For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker's film, Si j'avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books.

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile

HAND AND WHEEL, ALFRED STIEGLITZ, 1933

Sontag, Susan. “On Photography.” Susan Sontag, www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/onPhotographyExerpt.shtml.

populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something "out there," just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life.

While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject's face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry.

In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography's "message," its aggression.

Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots).

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography's glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.

That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

DALI WITH RHINOCEROUS, PHILIPPE HALSMAN, 1956

ALEXEY BRODOVITCH

HAPRER’S BAZAAR, ALEXEY BRODOVITCH, 1947

HAPRER’S BAZAAR, ALEXEY BRODOVITCH, 1946

HAPRER’S BAZAAR, ALEXEY BRODOVITCH, 1944

Alexey Brodovitch was a celebrated twentieth century Russian born graphic designer, photographer and art director. He is best known for his art direction of the one of the leading fashion magazines, Harper’s Bazaar. Besides, he also introduced new approaches to teaching design.

Alexey Cheslavovich Brodovitch was born to a wealthy family in 1898, in Ogolitchi, Russia. His mother was an amateur painter while father was a respected psychiatrist, physician and huntsman. His family relocated to Moscow during the Russo-Japanese War. There his father treated Japanese prisoners in a hospital. Brodovitch was enrolled at a prestigious institution in St. Petersburg, the Prince Tenisheff School. Then he intended to attend the Imperial Art Academy, although he had no formal training in art through his childhood. However, he couldn’t follow his dream of attending the Imperial Art Academy at the advent of World War I. At the age of 16, he abandoned his home so as to volunteer to join the Russian armed forces. His father brought him home and paid for his private tuition to help him graduate. On several occasions, he ran away sporadically after his graduation and subsequently sent to an officers’ school.

HAPRER’S BAZAAR, ALEXEY BRODOVITCH, 1958

Brodovitchs moved to France as the family reunited again after being torn apart during war. Being a Russian émigré in Paris, Brodovitch found himself deprived of wealth and looked for a job for the first time. As he wanted to be a painter, he took up a house painting job, while his wife Nina began sewing. In Paris he met other emigrated Russian artists and this connection rendered him to create more artistic work as a painter of backdrops for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Paris being the hub of major art movements and artists, Brodovitch had witnessed the development of several movements. Some of these movements include Dadaism from Zurich and Berlin,

HAPRER’S BAZAAR, ALEXEY BRODOVITCH, 1963

German Bauhaus design, Constructivism from Moscow, Futurism from Italy the native strains of Surrealism and Purism.

The knowledge of these artistic movements helped Brodovitch develop as a designer.

While working for the ballet, he began creating designs for china, jewelry and textiles in his spare time. Soon he compiled an extensive portfolio of these side projects and sold the designs to a fashionable market. Moreover, he took up another job of designing layout for magazines and art journals.

The two seminal art magazine and journal that sought his designing expertise include Cahiers d’Art and Arts et Métiers Graphiques. His task was to juxtapose the type, illustrations and photographs on the magazine page. As there was no art director to dictate him, he had the rare opportunity of adding a personal touch to the layout of the magazine. Eventually, he gained public recognition by earning the first prize in a poster competition for an artists’ soiree called Le Bal Banal.

Alexey Brodovitch’s fame continued to grow with the display of his artwork at the Paris International Exhibit of the Decorative Arts held in 1925. He was presented five gold medals; for the Beck Fils pavilion “Amour de l’Art”, two silver medals for the fabric design and three gold medals for jewelry.

The design studio of the Parisian department store, Athélia requested him to design and illustrate catalogues and advertisements for Madelios. Eventually, he was recognized as a well respected graphic artist of commercial art and his career skyrocketed. However, in his final years, he suffered from ill health and poverty. He died at the age of 73, in a small village Le Thor in France.

HAPRER’S BAZAAR, ALEXEY BRODOVITCH, 1936

“Alexey Brodovitch | Biography, Designs and Facts.” Famous Graphic Designers, www.famousgraphicdesigners.org/alexey-brodovitch.

PORTFOLIO 1, ALEXEY BRODOVITCH, 1950

HAPRER’S BAZAAR, ALEXEY BRODOVITCH, 1940

BRODOVITCH RESEARCH: ALEXEY BRODOVITCH IS MOST KNOWN FOR HIS WORK WITH HARPER'S BAZAAR. HE SAW THE GROWTH OF DADAISM, THE BAUHAUS, RUSSIAN CONSTRUCTIVISM, ITALIAN FUTURISM, AND SURREALISM. THESE ALL HELPED SHAPE HIM AS A DESIGNER. HE INITIALLY WORKED FOR THE BALLET AND MADE JEWELRY AND OTHER WEARABLES WHICH HE EVENTUALLY SOLD. HE BEGAN WORKING ON ART MAGAZINE DESIGNS WITH NO ART DIRECTION MEANING HE WAS ABLE TO MAKE IT COMPLETELY HIS. HE USES IMAGES AS SHAPES AND OBJECTS TO PLACE ON A PAGE NEXT TO TEXT. HIS SPREADS ARE REFLECTIVE OF CONCRETE POETRY AND HIS USE OF COLOUR IS VIBRANT YET SUBTLE.

GAIL ANDERSON

ROLLING STONES, GAIL ANDERSON, 2001

ROLLING STONES, GAIL ANDERSON, 1966

During the early part of her career Gail Anderson was seen but not much heard, which doesn't mean she wasn't outspoken. In fact, typographically speaking she was incredibly eloquent. At Rolling Stone magazine, where she held numerous positions from 1987– 2002, starting as an associate and becoming senior art director, Anderson lent her flair to much of the conceptual typography that defined the magazine's feature pages. She appreciably contributed to the widespread eclectic typographic fashion that prevailed throughout the 1990s but never fell into a style trap. For much of her tenure at Rolling Stone, working with art director (and AIGA Medalist) Fred Woodward, she fine-tuned her typographic expressionism in a cramped office filled floor to ceiling with all kinds of stimulating scraps, devising quirky letterforms out of traditional and untraditional materials, from hot metal and wood type to twigs and bottle caps. From this typographic wellspring came an ever-expanding vocabulary of signs and symbols, methods and mannerisms that, in turn, influenced a slew of designers who followed (and at times copied) her graphic eccentricities. After Rolling Stone she joined SpotCo, one of the largest entertainment design agencies in New York, where she is now creative director of design, and for half a dozen years her poster designs for scores of Broadway and off-Broadway plays have illuminated bus shelters, subway stations and billboards.

A lifelong New Yorker, Anderson embodies three virtues: inspiring art director, inspired designer and inspirational teacher. Despite being deceptively low key, she does everything with intense passion.

Her extreme devotion to craft (she often frets for ages over the minutest typographic detail) combined with an unceasing, though always natural, pursuit of whimsy distinguishes her brand of quirkiness from the larger pack of knee-jerk quirks. While some might choose to call her method retro, the work defies stylistic pigeonholing. She revels in making typography from old and new forms, which is neither modernist nor post-modernist, but rather spot-on contemporaneous. During the early digital '90s when typography was alternately under- and over-adorned, Anderson exacted the right balance with compositions that were elegant yet muscular, and, more importantly, surprising and delightful. “Her significant contribution to design,” says Drew Hodges, her former classmate and current employer as founder and president of SpotCo, “is a belief in the tradition of typography and a joy in using it in a contemporary vernacular.”

Anderson developed her approach while studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York under Paula Scher. But growing up, she recalls, “I used to make little Jackson Five and Partridge Family magazines. I wondered who designed Spec, 16 and Tiger Beat in real life, and as I got older, I began to research what was then called 'commercial art.'”

“2008 AIGA Medalist: Gail Anderson.” AIGA | the Professional Association for Design, www.aiga.org/medalist-gailanderson.

ROLLING STONES, GAIL ANDERSON, 1997

Anderson's first job post-college was a brief stint at Vintage Books in 1984, followed by two years at The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, from 1985–1987. Under art director Ronn Campisi, the Globe was at the vanguard of new newspaper design. She worked on the magazine with Lynn Staley and Lucy Bartholomay. Meanwhile, Campisi was an early proponent of typographic eclecticism, which stirred together Victorian, Deco and Futurist typographies in a contemporary stew.

Working with Woodward at Rolling Stone was a hand-in-glove experience—they knew each other about as well as two people could. “Music always set the tone, and he was into low lighting, so the design room felt sort of cozy,” Anderson recalls. “And he'd just howl with glee when we 'got it' and it was a winner. He could really get you jazzed about the process, even when it was difficult.” Anderson's own typographic proclivities were ultimately well suited to Rolling Stone, where she designed what might best be called “theatrical typography.”

Like actors on a stage Anderson directed letterforms to perform dramatic and comic feats. In just two dimensions they emoted, expressed and exuded energy that projected them off the page. It is no surprise that the class she now teaches in the School of Visual Arts' MFA Designer as Author program is about choreographing typefaces, making them dance to the beats and rhythms of popular and alternative music.

Anderson has a special gift for assigning illustration and has been a stalwart advocate of illustrators, both upcoming and established.

“With her keen eye for fresh talent, she nurtured a whole generation of illustrators, while staying loyal to the greats as well,” says Woodward.

AVENUE Q, GAIL ANDERSON, 2003

The most difficult time in her career came in 2002, after her move to SpotCo, when negotiating the transition from editorial design to advertising. “You approach each project searching for a dozen great ideas, not just one or two,” Anderson explains of how her work competes for the attention (and dollars) of theatergoers.

“After about seven designs, you realize there really are infinite ways to look at a problem. I now completely enjoy the process, though I'm keenly aware that all but one of those dozen great ideas will eventually be killed. It's strangely liberating.”

Always looking for that little visual wink or tiny gesture of extra care, Anderson says, “I'm all about the wood-type bits and pieces.

I love making those crunchy little objects into other things, like faces.” A fancy border and detailed extras are always part of her repertoire. “I'd ask the designers I work with to put them on everything, if I could,” Anderson says, “but I like being employed.”

More often than not, however, Anderson admits that even in her theater posters the ornamentation is peeled off little by little. “If we've done our job properly, the doodads become part of the package, and not something in the way that needs to be reduced or cut out.”

I have worked with Anderson for close to 20 years as a co-author on various books, only two of which she has also designed. Each collaboration has been an exceptional treat. In a collaborator it is the greatest asset for an author to be motivated by design. Every section—indeed each spread of the books we did that Anderson designed—was ingenious, if not joyful. The mixture of disparate, elegantly proportioned faces and ornamental borders and rules— among her graphic signatures—produced smile-inducing visual experiences that engage the reader more intimately with the content.

In this sense she is a generous designer who actually cares about her audience.

ROLLING STONES, GAIL ANDERSON, 1995

ROLLING STONES, GAIL ANDERSON, 2001

ANDERSON RESEARCH: GAIL ANDERSON IS BEST KNOWN FOR HER WORK AT ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE. HER TYPOGRAPHY FILLS THE PAGE AND CREATES A PATTERN OR TEXTURE SIMILAR TO THAT OF FABRIC OR QUILTS. THIS IS DESCRIBED AS THEATRICAL TYPOGRAPHY. SHE ALSO HAS DONE SEVERAL POSTER DESIGNS FOR BROADWAY AND OFF-BROADWAY PLAYS. SHE ENJOYS PHYSICALLY MANIPULATING WOODTYPE BITS TO LOOK LIKE FACES AND OTHER OBJECTS. SHE ALSO IS KNOWN FOR PUTTING A FANCY BORDER AND DETAILED EXTRAS ON HER SPREADS. SHE IS KNOWN FOR MOVING INTO NEW MEDIA WHICH CREATES A DIFFERENT SENSE OF EMOTION FROM HER TYPE: IT GIVE A SENSE OF MOTION.

NEVILLE BRODY

FUSE EXHIBITION TOKYO, NEVILLE BRODY, 1999

FUSE POSTER, NEVILLE BRODY, 2015

Neville Brody is an eminent name among the twentieth century English graphic designers. His versatility extends to art direction and typography as well. His well-known works include his contribution to The Face and Arena magazines.

Moreover, he designed record covers for several famous music artists, including Cabaret Voltaire and Depeche Mode.

On April 23rd, 1957, Neville Brody was born in Southgate, London. He received his early education from Minchenden Grammar school focusing on A-Level Art. After graduation he attended Hornsey College of Art in 1975, to study Fine Art foundation course. A year later he enrolled himself at the London College of Printing for a three-year Bachelor of Arts degree in graphics. His designs were often condemned by his teachers for having ‘uncommercial’ quality to them.

Late 1970s is marked as the era of punk rock, thus the trend highly influenced Brody’s work and motivation. However, his experimentation with punk rock was not met with encouraging remarks by his tutors. One of his queer postage stamp design that featured Queen’s head sideways, almost had him expelled from the college. Despite the threat of being expelled he continued to explore the new boundaries in graphic design. Therefore, his first-year thesis focused on the subject of comparison between Dadaism and pop art.

During his college days he did a stint as a poster designer for student concerts, as well. Brody began his career as a record cover designer. However, his true success came from his distinguished work as an Art Director for The Face magazine.

Henceforth, he gave direction to several international magazines and newspapers such as Arena, Lei, City Limits and Per Lui. He also redesigned the two leading English newspapers and magazines, The Guardian and The Observer, showcasing a radical look. Furthermore, his achievements include his input into visual communication that revolutionized the media.

His experimental and challenging artwork gave new meaning

ARENA HOMME, NEVILLE BRODY, 2009

ARENA HOMME, NEVILLE BRODY, 2009

to visual language.

As to learn from Brody’s creative genius, Thames & Hudson published two volumes based on his graphic designing, in 1988. The books ultimately reached the world’s best-selling ranking. In addition to this, an exhibition of his work was held at Victoria and Albert Museum attracting thousands of art lovers to the affair. During late 1980s Brody collaborated with several renowned graphic designer, artists and typeface-designer, mostly from Berlin, on various projects. One such project included the Corporate Identity designing for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures).

In 1994, Brody established his own design practice, Research Studios, in London in partnership with Fwa Richards. The success of his first studio led to the establishment of mutiple branches across Europe, such as in Paris, Barcelona and Berlin. The studio takes pride in creating unique visual languages for industries ranging from publishing to films. Other projects handled by the studio include innovative packaging, website design, on-screen graphics and corporate identity. Some of these clients include Kenzo, Homechoice and Paramount Studios. In recent years the firm has redesigned The Times (2006) and the BBC (2011).

Furthermore, Brody is one of the founding members of Fontworks and the leading website the FontShop. He designed numerous notable typefaces for the website. A well-known FUSE project was also the result of his initiation which featured the fusion of a magazine, typeface and graphics design.

Besides, he co-founded a typeface library, the FontFont, with Erik Spiekermann, in 1990. Currently, he is appointed at the Royal College of Art as the Head of the Communication Art & Design department.

THE FACE, NEVILLE BRODY, 1983

“Neville Brody | Biography, Designs and Facts.” Famous Graphic Designers, www.famousgraphicdesigners.org/neville-brody.

THE FACE, NEVILLE BRODY, 1983

BRODY RESEARCH: NEVILLE BRODY IS AN ENGLISH DESIGNER WHO IS KNOWN FOR HIS CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FACE MAGAZINE. HE ALSO FOUNDED FUSE MAGAZINE, AN EXPERIMENTAL MAGAZINE THAT SENDS ITS SUBSCRIBERS 5 TYPEFACES AND ENCOURAGES THEM TO MESS AROUND WITH THEM. THE IDEA IS VERY MUCH SO ABOUT INTERACTION AND MANIPULATION OF TEXT. HE DESIGNED THE BLUR TYPEFACE AND MANY OTHERS. HE STATED ONCE THAT HE USED HELVETICA IN EDITORIAL WORK AS A TEST TO SEE IF SOMETHING SO EMOTIONLESS AND COLD COULD BE WORKED WITH AND EDITED UNTIL IT CREATED EMOTION ON THE PAGE VIA SURROUNDING CONTEXT OR SIMPLY EDITING THE TYPEFACE.

BRAND STRATEGY FOR NIKE, NEVILLE BRODY, 1998

DAVID CARSON

MAGAZINE FACTORY, DAVID CARSON, 2013

David Carson is a prominent contemporary graphic designer and art director. His unconventional and experimental graphic style revolutionized the graphic designing scene in America during 1990s. He was the art director of the magazine Ray Gun, in which he introduced the innovative typographies and distinct layouts. He is claimed to be the godfather of ‘grunge typography’ which he employed perpetually in his magazine issues.

On September 8, 1954, Carson was born in Corpus Christi, Texas.

He went on to study Sociology from San Diego State University and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He touched upon graphic designing briefly while attending a two-week commercial designing class at the University of Arizona, in 1980. Subsequently, he attended the Oregon College of Commercial Art to study graphic designing and a three-week workshop in Switzerland as a part of his degree. He also took up a teaching job at a Californian high-school where he taught for several years. Besides, his many talents include professional surfing and he was ranked 9th best surfer in the world, in 1989.

David Carson embarked on his passion for graphic designing in his later life. In the beginning he worked as a designer for a magazine, Self and Musician, covering surfers’ interests. His early experiences also include working for Transworld Skateboarding magazine which paved way for his experimental designing. He became the art director for the magazine in 1984 and revised its style and layout until his tenure ended. During his time at Transworld Skateboarding, he developed a signature style with the use of unconventional ‘dirty’ type photographic techniques. In 1987, he also lent his expertise to the extension of the magazine, Transworld Snowboarding.

In 1989, he was landed a job at the magazine Beach Culture, as an art director. After the publication of only six issues, the mag-

SURFING FLORIDA, DAVID CARSON, N.D.

MAGAZINE FACTORY, DAVID CARSON, 2013

“David Carson | Biography, Designs and Facts.” Famous Graphic Designers, www.famousgraphicdesigners.org/david-carson.

RAY GUN, DAVID CARSON, 1997

SURF PORTUGAL, DAVID CARSON, 2012

azine folded. Notwithstanding, Carson made a name for himself through the opportunity, as his designs were recognized for his for his unique style and typography and consequently earned over hundred design awards. In 1992, he was offered a job at an alternative-music magazine Ray Gun, whose publisher saw true potential of his graphic design skills. Once again, Carson proved himself as he tripled the magazine’s circulation and attracted a wide readership. In fact, to keep the spirit of the magazine alive he notoriously published a tedious interview with Bryan Ferry in Zapf Dingbats (symbol) font.

His work is characterized by the chaotic typography and pattern it embodies, disarray of photos overlapping each other, seemingly meaningless at the surface but holding a larger picture. To put in simpler words as Albert Watson stated, the disorganized use of his typography has its own purpose, such as the each stroke of a painter’s brush evoke different emotion, imagery and idea, so does Carson’s designs possess such attributes. Where his innovative style of visual communication attracted new readers it also repelled many who considered his work fractured, hence misleading.

Although his covers for Ray Gun were often radical and bold, it fascinated the young readership, thus the big corporations also hired him for their brand advertisements through both print and electronic media. In 1995, Carson quit his job at Ray Gun and established his own firm, David Carson Design. He signed contract with a host of major corporate clients, including Nike, Pepsi Cola, Ray Bans, Levi Strauss and MTV Global among others. Additionally, he published a comprehensive collection of his graphic works The End of Print: The Graphic Design of David Carson (1995) and other highly experimental works; 2nd Sight, Trek and Fotografiks.

MAGAZINE FACTORY, DAVID CARSON, 2013

SURFING FLORIDA, DAVID CARSON, N.D.

CARSON RESEARCH: DAVID CARSON IS KNOWN AS THE GODFATHER OF GRUNGE TYPOGRAPHY. A LOT OF HIS WORK IS FOR A MAGAZINE CALLED RAY GUN WHERE HE WAS THE ART DIRECTOR AND WAS ABLE TO DESIGN WHATEVER HE WANTED. HE SAID THE WAY HE CAME ACROSS HIS GRUNGE STYLE WAS SIMPLY READING THE TEXT AND RESPONDING TO HOW IT MADE HIM FEEL. HIS TYPOGRAPHY EXPLORATIONS ARE THUS AN EXPLORATION OF EMOTION EVOKED

BY TEXT. HE BELIEVES STRONGLY THAT TYPE CAN INFLUENCE MESSAGE. AS SUCH A LOT OF PEOPLE FIND HIS WORK TO BE DISJUNCT AND MISLEADING YET OTHERS STRIVE TO IMITATE IT.

TIBOR KALMAN

COLORS MAGAZINE: AIDS, TIBOR KALMAN, 1994

COLORS MAGAZINE: HEAVEN, TIBOR KALMAN, 1995

Tibor Kalman was a renowned American graphic designer of Hungarian descent. He is recognized for his position at Colors magazine as editor-in-chief. He also authored numerous books on the subject. His accomplishments were legend within the field and widely known outside as well.

the Pope and Queen Elizabeth, as racial minorities. He played an instrumental role in transforming Colors into a global phenomenon and remained a driving force behind it. Sadly, in 1995 the onset of non-Hodgkins lymphoma resulted in him withdrawing from the job and his return to New York.

Born on July 6, 1949 in Budapest, Hungary and later moved to United States with his family, attaining the residency in 1956. His family escaped Hungary under dire circumstances which involved the Soviet invasion. They permanently settled in Poughkeepsie, New York. There he studied at the New York University, although he dropped out a year after, attending journalism classes. During 70s he did a stint at a small New York City bookstore which would become one of the nation’s leading bookstores, Barnes & Noble.

Soon after, he was appointed the supervisor of bookstore’s inhouse design department.

Upon his arrival to New York, Kalman re-opened M & Co. in 1997.

He continued to work for the firm for another two years until he couldn’t fight the fatal disease anymore and passed away in Puerto Rico, in 1999. A retrospective of his graphic design work entitled Tiborocity was mounted by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, shortly after his death. Furthermore, Princeton Architectural Press published a book about Kalman and M & Co’s work, Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist. It has been years since Kalman’s demise, but the influence of M & Co is still strong. His legacy is still carried on by Alexander Isley, Stefan Sagmeister, Stephen Doyle, Emily Oberman and Scott Stowell. All these eminent designers had the benefit of learning from his firm and later they established their own studios. Kalman’s associates Howard Milton and Jay Smith, whom he worked with in the late 1970’s founded their own Smith & Milton studios in UK.

Subsequently, in collaboration with Carol Bokuniewicz and Liz Trovato, Kalman founded the design firm M & Co. The studio managed the corporate work providing a diverse range of solutions to their clients. The company dealt with various clients including the new wave group Talking Heads, Restaurant Florent in New York City’s Meatpacking District and the Limited Corporation. Early 90s is marked as the time when Kalman served as the creative director of Interview magazine. Moreover, the Benetton-sponsored Colors magazine sought his expertise as founding editor-in-chief. Consequently, Kalman had to dissolve M & Co. in 1993, and as to work exclusively on the magazine he relocated to Rome.

Colors focused on multiculturalism and global awareness as its motto says, a magazine about the rest of the world. The viewpoint was communicated through typography, bold graphic design, and juxtaposition of photographs and doctored images. The magazine also ran a series which featured the renowned figures, for instance

Besides, Tibor Kalman served as a board member of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI). The American Institute of Graphic Arts presented him with the highest honor of graphic art, AIGA Medal, in 1999. Among the 33 signers of the First Things First 2000 manifesto, Kalman was also the one who signed the manifesto. He remained married to the author and illustrator Maira Kalman till his death.

COLORS MAGAZINE: HEAVEN, TIBOR KALMAN, 1995

COLORS MAGAZINE: IT’S A BAB

COLORS MAGAZINE: ECOLOGY

“Tibor Kalman | Biography, Designs and Facts.” Famous Graphic Designers, www.famousgraphicdesigners.org/tibor-kalman.

COLORS MAGAZINE: AIDS, TIBOR KALMAN, 1994

COLORS MAGAZINE: RACE, TIB

BY, TIBOR KALMAN, 1993

Y, TIBOR KALMAN, 1994

BOR KALMAN, 1993

COLORS MAGAZINE: SPORTS, TIBOR KALMAN, 1995

KALMAN RESEARCH: TIBOR KALMAN IS BEST KNOWN FOR HIS WORK AT COLORS MAGAZINE AS WELL AS HIS COMPANY M&CO. HIS WORK AT COLORS IS KNOWN FOR ITS PROVOCATIVE NATURE. HE USES THE IMAGES AS OBJECTS THAT FLOAT ON A WHITE BACKGROUND AND HE CLEARLY USES THE GRID WHILE STILL FORMING THE TEXT TO THE GENERAL SHAPE OF THE OBJECT IT IS PAIRED NEXT TO. I FIND HIS WORK TO BE EXTREMELY INTERESTING AND THOUGHT PROVOKING. HIS COMPANY M&CO WAS KNOWN FOR CREATING INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS TO PROBLEMS. MOST RECOGNIZABLE OF THEIR WORK IS THE TALKING HEADS ALBUM ART FOR REMAIN IN LIGHT.

COLORS MAGAZINE: RELIGION, TIBOR KALMAN, 1994

HERB LUBALIN

BEARDS, HERB LUBALIN, 1949

THE NEXT WAR..., HERB LUBALIN, 1972

Herb Lubalin was a celebrated twentieth century American graphic designer. He is recognized for his collaboration with Ralph Ginzburg on three of Ginzburg’s magazines. The magazines showcased his artistic skills as he brought out the creative visual beauty of these publications. ITC Avant Garde typeface is one of his creations and it is mostly known for being a revision of art-deco.

On March 17, 1918, Herbert F. Lubalin was born in New York, United States. At the age of seventeen, he was enrolled in a privately funded college located in the East Village, Cooper Union. An array of possibilities offered by the field of typography as a communicative implement fascinated him. Lubalin learned about the fundamentals of typography and was awestruck by the impact a typeface can have if traded with another and how it affects the whole text’s interpretation. Upon receiving his graduation degree in 1939, he had a rough time searching a suitable job. He was able to get a job at a display firm, though he got sacked after requesting a two dollar raise on his weekly salary.

Soon after, Lubalin found work at Reiss Advertising and eventually he was landed a job at Sudler & Hennessey. At S & H he became a practitioner of a wide range of skills. In fact, it was he who attracted talent from multidiscipline, such as design, typography and photography, to the firm. While working there he made associates with George Lois, John Pistilli and Art Kane. He stayed with Sudler & Hennessey for two long decades before he decided to establish his own design firm, Herb Lubalin, Inc in 1964. With the foundation of his private studio he enjoyed the liberty of taking on a variety of art projects. He excelled in a number of projects including poster designing, magazine designing and packaging and identity solutions. Lubalin’s talent was best manifested when he designed Ralph Ginzburg’s succession of magazines; Eros, Fact and Avant Garde.

Ginzburg first launched Eros which was dedicated to beauty and emerging sense of sexuality in the burgeoning counterculture. It had a large format, similar to a regular book rather than a quarterly magazine, with no advertisement. Lubalin’s editorial design for the magazine is considered one of the

AVANTE GARDE, HERB LUBALIN, 1968

“Herb Lubalin | Biography, Designs and Facts.” Famous Graphic Designers, www.famousgraphicdesigners.org/herb-lubalin.

SATURDAY EVENING POST, HERB LUBALIN, 1961

AVANTE GARDE, HERB LUBALIN, 1969

brilliant of its kind. However, following an obscenity case filed by the US Postal Service against the magazine it immediately folded. In response to the treatment Eros received, Ginzburg and Lubalin launched a second magazine, Fact. The managing editor of Fact Warren Boroson defined it as having spiced up issues instead of sugar-coated pieces like in Reader’s Digest. Lubalin applied an elegant design to the magazine with minimalist palette, based on dynamic serifed typography and exquisite illustrations. Notwithstanding the fact that the magazine received great reviews, it followed the lead of its predecessor and folded. It was a consequence of their publication of an article on the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, titled “The Unconscious of a Conservative: A special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater” . Goldwater sued the magazine repeatedly and put it out of business eventually.

However, Lubalin and Ginzburg stayed undeterred by demise of one magazine as they released another one by the name Avant Garde. Lubalin created ITC Avant Garde typeface for the magazine. During the last ten years of his life, Herb Lubalin supervised various projects. His most distinguished works include his typographic journal U&lc and the foundation of International Typographic Corporation.

EBONY, HERB LUBALIN, 1968

EROS, HERB LUBALIN, 1962

LUBALIN RESEARCH: HERB LUBALIN IS KNOWN MOST PROMINENTLY FOR HIS WORK ON THREE OF GINZBURG'S MAGAZINES: FACT MAGAZINE, AVANTE GARDE, AND EROS. HE CREATED THE AVANTE GARDE TYPEFACE AFTER CREATING THE MASTHEAD FOR THE MAGAZINE. HIS TYPE WORK IS KNOWN FOR BEING A REVISION OF ART DECO. LUBALIN FELL IN LOVE WITH TYPOGRAPHY VERY QUICKLY BUT HAD A HARD TIME LANDING A SOLID JOB SO HE CREATED HIS OWN STUDIO IN 1964 WHICH IS HOW HE GOT CONTRACTED TO DO THE GINZBURG MAGAZINES. THE MAGAZINES DIDN'T LAST LONG BUT HIS DESIGN STYLE AND ART DIRECTION HAVE ESSENTIALLY BEEN IMMORTALIZED.

ESQUIRE RESEARCH: ESQUIRE MAGAZINE IS A MEN'S MAGAZINE KNOWN FOR PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES OF WHAT A MAGAZINE HAS TO BE. IT WAS ORIGINALLY A QUARTERLY PRESS AND EVENTUALLY TURNED INTO A MAGAZINE THAT EMPHASIZES MEN'S FASHION. IT FLOURISHED DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION. IT HAS SURVIVED AN EXTREMELY LONG TIME.

ESQUIRE MAGAZINE ANDY WARHOL, GEORGE LOIS, 1969

FONT STUDY:

NOTE: I WANTED TO USE SANS SERIF FONTS WITH OPTICALLY CIRCULAR O’S SO THEY REPRESENTED THE DOTS OF BALDESSARI’S ART.

PRISMATIC ABSTRACTION

prismatic a b s t r a c t i o n

THE GODFATHER OF CONCEPTUAL ART

PRISMATIC ABSTRACTION

prismatic abstraction

THE GODFATHER OF CONCEPTUAL ART

PRISMATIC A B S T R A C T I O N

Prismatic Abstraction

THE

PRISMATIC ABSTRACTION

prismatic ABSTRACTION

THE GODFATHER OF CONCEPTUAL ART

PRISMATIC ABSTRACTION

The Godfather of Conceptual Art

THE GODFATHER OF CONCEPTUAL ART

prismatic A B S T R A C T I O N

The Godfather of Conceptual Art

THE GODFATHER OF CONCEPTUAL ART

prismatic a b s t r a c t i o n

The Godfather of Conceptual Art

The Godfather of Conceptual Art

prismatic abstraction

The Godfather of Conceptual Art

The Godfather of Conceptual Art

Godfather OF CONCEPTUAL ART

DESIGN QUESTIONS: WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF A MULTIPLE COLUMN GRID? THE MORE COLUMNS YOU HAVE IN A GRID THE MORE VARIEATION AND FLEXIBILITY YOU HAVE TO MOVE THINGS ON THE PAGE. IT WILL ALSO CREATE MORE VISUAL INTEREST ON THE PAGE.

HOW MANY CHARACTERS IS OPTIMAL FOR A LINE LENGTH? WORDS PER LINE? AN AVERAGE LINE SHOULD BE 50 TO 60 CHARACTERS. HOWEVER, SOME PEOPLE BELIEVE 75 CHARACTERS IS THE OPTIMAL LINE LENGTH. FOR WORDS PER LINE AN AVERAGE OF 9 TO 12 WORDS IS UPHELD AS OPTIMAL.

WHY IS THE BASELINE GRID USED IN DESIGN? THE BASELINE GRID HELPS ENSURE CONSISTENT LEADING AND ENSURES THAT EVERYTHING LINES UP HORIZONTALLY. IT CREATES A CONSISTENT VISUAL ACROSS THE PAGE AND WHEN MIXED WITH VERTICLE LINES CREATES A GRID.

WHAT ARE THE REASONS TO SET TYPE JUSTIFIED? OR RAGGED (UNJUSTIFIED)?

JUSTIFIED TYPE CREATES A NICE BLOCK AND SHAPE ON THE PAGE BUT MAY CONTAIN RIVERS. RAGGED TYPE IS MORE FREE FLOWING AND HAS AN ORGANIC SHAPE THAT CAN HELP DETIRMINE THE RHYTHM OF THE TEXT.

WHAT IS A TYPOGRAPHIC RIVER? A TYPOGRAPHIC RIVER IS THE SPACE OR GAPS BETWEEN WORDS IN JUSTIFIED TEXT THAT APPEAR TO FLOW DOWN THE BODY OF TEXT AND DISRUPT READABILITY.

WHAT DOES A CLOTHESLINE, HANGLINE, OR FLOW LINE MEAN? THEY ARE HORIZONTAL LINES ON THE PAGE THAT TYPE AND IMAGES “HANG” OFF OF. THEY CREATETHE ROWS OF A GRID AND HELP CREATE HORIZONTAL CONSISTENCY ACROSS THE PAGE.

WHAT DOES TYPE COLOUR/TEXTURE MEAN? HOW DOES X-HEIGHT EFFECT TYPE COLOUR? TYPE COLOUR MEANS HOW HEAVY OR DARK THE TEXT IS ON THE PAGE. WHEN YOU HAVE MULTIPLE FONTS ON A LINE THAT ARE ALL THE SAME POINT SIZE BUT HAVE DIFFERENT X-HEIGHTS IT WILL MAKE SOME OF THE TEXT APPEAR DARKER OR LARGER.

WHAT ARE SOME WAYS TO INDICATE A NEW PARAGRAPH? ARE THERE ANY RULES? YOU CAN INDENT, LEAVE SPACE BETWEEN, USE A SYMBOL, OR OUTDENT THE TEXT. YOU ALWAYS LEAVE THE FIRST PARAGRAPH UNDENTED. 1 INCH IS PROBABLY TOO MUCH INDENT FOR THE POINT SIZE OF NORMAL BODY TEXT. NEVER INDENT AND ADD SPACE BETWEEN PARAGRAPHS, IT DESTROYS THE OVERALL SHAPE OF THE TEXT.

MAGAZINE COVER INPIRATION I LIKE THESE MAGAZINE COVERS BECAUSE THEY ARE, FOR THE MOST PART, SIMPLE. THEY ARE UNLIKE THE AVERAGE MAGAZINE ONE WOULD FIND IN A CHECKOUT LANE AT THE GROCERY STORE IN THE SENSE THAT THEY DON’T CROWD THE COVER WITH TOO MUCH TEXT. IT IS INTERESTING THAT ALMOST ALL OF THEM MAINTAIN A MASTHEAD ON THE TOP WHEREAS IT WAS EXPRESSED THAT TEXT “SITS” BETTER ON THE BOTTOM PORTION OF THE PAGE. I LIKE THE USE OF NEGATIVE SPACE IN A LOT OF THESE COVERS TOO. IT ALLOWS YOUR EYES TO BREATHE AND WANDER AROUND. I ALSO ENJOY THE WAY EACH USES COLOUR. THEY CHOOSE ONLY ONE OR TWO COLOURS IN TOTAL AND IT HELPS SIMPLIFY THE IMAGES AND DRAWS THE VIEWER’S EYES TO WHAT IS IMPORTANT ABOUT THE IMAGE/ COVER. I ALSO AM A HUGE FAN OF THE COLLAGED IMAGES. I THINK THEY ADD A LOT OF DEPTH TEXTURE AND INTEREST TO THE IMAGE. FINALLY, I ENJOY HOW MOST OF THEM HAVE THE IMAGE BLEED AND BECAUSE OF THE SIMPLE BACKGROUND, THE PEOPLE OR SUBJECTS BECOME OBJECTS ON THE PAGE.

TITLE: GOTHAM ULTRA

SUBTITLE: GOTHAM BOOK

BODY: TIMES NEW ROMAN REGULAR

PULL QUOTE: GOTHAM BOOK

The Godfather of Conceptual Art THE WORK OF JOHN BALDESSARI

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In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo.

Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

BODY TEXT 8.5/12pt: Agnationsed exerem velestisquam facilla pedit eosti sintiam utem quisti custore raecto blandus andisi quis et lique es sed maximil ellatur epudit voluptas aut plitati busdae paruntis ut volo te net alignih itassit ationsecti cum quis ex entusciam vendebis dolupti cum raeratur? Qui coresequo iliam sequatum ne ratentis antur, odit vendese ditiundaes non res nam dis coreper ationest, elicillut que pa sed magnatur maio doluptas nosamenduci dolenim aiorepeliqui occupta spedipidic te vendi dem dolorepercia evenit que voluptate vellupt atibere prepel ma consedi ilit deriore perspitia quatibus mi, consequatem ipsunt ut dolorro rerionsequi sequi dus arcipsandus doluptatqui non es sum conecae qui voluptatus et lab ius dolupta tibusae magnatus mos si berunt laciis aut vel is expelent ad excest, te pre, officaborum quas velessum fuga.

Sus doloreptur? Sit, optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat.

Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOptatis nost, sim lam nobit, odi reprate pelitiorrum quat.

Optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat. Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga.

Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOmnitiist aut es ut labor as earion necerum quuntib erferibus, sam restiis ma cores ut harciis aut doluptia qui dolorpor molupta cum eatur?

Nobitas event reictotatis pedi odit laborro volore si archilla as aut voloremquias dolorem porume mi, cus volore doluptatam liqui ima as porrum etur atinctem remqui am raturem aut volende rsperferiate nobis quatet, vendendandi volorro cus audipsumquat liquiant omnisim olupta diat omnis acimint quisime cum corit hillo eum ut hiciam, non etur, oditat qui apis aut elit veria ped quaeper ioremol uptaten daecessinum, id milisqui dolorum estrum aut volupta spelecte pla sam, qui dollent paria adioribus reicipi cienimu sciandae doluptam faceat dis si il ipsapita quia delit et, conessi minullab id everiberit mo beati re volest, sandae lab imusam, est vel ipsapellat quassequi vita doloribus mo to et labo. Et ulluptatur am fugit magnihil et aces aliquam endis modis essin nimoluptatem dolorum suntur sam conecer sperum ne min reperspedit hario. Hic te explatem sinum nonsequi berrum ventur autem. Nam quas explis eiusti.

TITLE: GOTHAM ULTRA

SUBTITLE: GOTHAM BOOK

BODY: MERCURY DISPLAY REGULAR

PULL QUOTE: MERCURY DISPLAY SEMI BOLD ITALIC

The Godfather of Conceptual Art THE WORK OF JOHN BALDESSARI

Ehenihic totae et, il ipis doloratiberi sed eaquati nverfer uptatem sunt ommodio conet que a aut omnisti busapero inte volum re non exerro veliqui quaecto ex eumquae errorum fuga. Nam ea conectatem. Ignis secta eaquata tectur? Ihit et qui digendi tatiusci voluptatus, quibus doluptatum quodi odiat odioriti aut endionet mod quia ipsandis mo con re parchil in prat excerunte simus sam que molorio vel enis aut ulliquaturit ventusdae. Fugia nulparum iur si comnihit prae exceaqui corem. Videro conseru mquiantium ad ut acessime accus duntibus magnati anducius vent architi rem sequi vel ea vendem explabo.

INTRO TEXT 14/18PT:

CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo.

Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

BODY TEXT 8.5/12pt: Agnationsed exerem velestisquam facilla pedit eosti sintiam utem quisti custore raecto blandus andisi quis et lique es sed maximil ellatur epudit voluptas aut plitati busdae paruntis ut volo te net alignih itassit ationsecti cum quis ex entusciam vendebis dolupti cum raeratur?

Qui coresequo iliam sequatum ne ratentis antur, odit vendese ditiundaes non res nam dis coreper ationest, elicillut que pa sed magnatur maio doluptas nosamenduci dolenim aiorepeliqui occupta spedipidic te vendi dem dolorepercia evenit que voluptate vellupt atibere prepel ma consedi ilit deriore perspitia quatibus mi, consequatem ipsunt ut dolorro rerionsequi sequi dus arcipsandus doluptatqui non es sum conecae qui voluptatus et lab ius dolupta tibusae magnatus mos si berunt laciis aut vel is expelent ad excest, te pre, officaborum quas velessum fuga. Sus doloreptur? Sit, optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat.

Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga.

Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOptatis nost, sim lam nobit, odi reprate pelitiorrum quat.

Optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat. Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOmnitiist aut es ut labor as earion necerum quuntib erferibus, sam restiis ma cores ut harciis aut doluptia qui dolorpor molupta cum eatur?

Nobitas event reictotatis pedi odit laborro volore si archilla as aut voloremquias dolorem porume mi, cus volore doluptatam liqui ima as porrum etur atinctem remqui am raturem aut volende rsperferiate nobis quatet, vendendandi volorro cus audipsumquat liquiant omnisim olupta diat omnis acimint quisime cum corit hillo eum ut hiciam, non etur, oditat qui apis aut elit veria ped quaeper ioremol uptaten daecessinum, id milisqui dolorum estrum aut volupta spelecte pla sam, qui dollent paria adioribus reicipi cienimu sciandae doluptam faceat dis si il ipsapita quia delit et, conessi minullab id everiberit mo beati re volest, sandae lab imusam, est vel ipsapellat quassequi vita doloribus mo to et labo. Et ulluptatur am fugit magnihil et aces aliquam endis modis essin nimoluptatem dolorum suntur sam conecer sperum ne min reperspedit hario. Hic te explatem sinum nonsequi berrum ventur autem. Nam quas explis eiusti.

TITLE: GOTHAM ULTRA

SUBTITLE: CHRONICAL DISPLAY ROMAN

BODY: CHRONICAL DISPLAY ROMAN

PULL QUOTE: GOTHAM BOOK

The Godfather of Conceptual Art THE WORK OF JOHN BALDESSARI INTRO TEXT 14/18PT: Ehenihic

totae et, il ipis doloratiberi sed eaquati nverfer uptatem sunt ommodio conet que a aut omnisti busapero inte volum re non exerro veliqui quaecto ex eumquae errorum fuga. Nam ea conectatem. Ignis secta eaquata tectur? Ihit et qui digendi tatiusci voluptatus, quibus doluptatum quodi odiat odioriti aut endionet mod quia ipsandis mo con re parchil in prat excerunte simus sam que molorio vel enis aut ulliquaturit ventusdae. Fugia nulparum iur si comnihit prae exceaqui corem. Videro conseru mquiantium ad ut acessime accus duntibus magnati anducius vent architi rem sequi vel ea vendem explabo.

CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo.

Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

BODY TEXT 8.5/12pt: Agnationsed exerem velestisquam facilla pedit eosti sintiam utem quisti custore raecto blandus andisi quis et lique es sed maximil ellatur epudit voluptas aut plitati busdae paruntis ut volo te net alignih itassit ationsecti cum quis ex entusciam vendebis dolupti cum raeratur? Qui coresequo iliam sequatum ne ratentis antur, odit vendese ditiundaes non res nam dis coreper ationest, elicillut que pa sed magnatur maio doluptas nosamenduci dolenim aiorepeliqui occupta spedipidic te vendi dem dolorepercia evenit que voluptate vellupt atibere prepel ma consedi ilit deriore perspitia quatibus mi, consequatem ipsunt ut dolorro rerionsequi sequi dus arcipsandus doluptatqui non es sum conecae qui voluptatus et lab ius dolupta tibusae magnatus mos si berunt laciis aut vel is expelent ad excest, te pre, officaborum quas velessum fuga. Sus doloreptur? Sit, optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat.

Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOptatis nost, sim lam nobit, odi reprate pelitiorrum quat.

Optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat. Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOmnitiist aut es ut labor as earion necerum quuntib erferibus, sam restiis ma cores ut harciis aut doluptia qui dolorpor molupta cum eatur?

Nobitas event reictotatis pedi odit laborro volore si archilla as aut voloremquias dolorem porume mi, cus volore doluptatam liqui ima as porrum etur atinctem remqui am raturem aut volende rsperferiate nobis quatet, vendendandi volorro cus audipsumquat liquiant omnisim olupta diat omnis acimint quisime cum corit hillo eum ut hiciam, non etur, oditat qui apis aut elit veria ped quaeper ioremol uptaten daecessinum, id milisqui dolorum estrum aut volupta spelecte pla sam, qui dollent paria adioribus reicipi cienimu sciandae doluptam faceat dis si il ipsapita quia delit et, conessi minullab id everiberit mo beati re volest, sandae lab imusam, est vel ipsapellat quassequi vita doloribus mo to et labo. Et ulluptatur am fugit magnihil et aces aliquam endis modis essin nimoluptatem dolorum suntur sam conecer sperum ne min reperspedit hario.

Hic te explatem sinum nonsequi berrum ventur autem. Nam quas explis eiusti.

TITLE: GOTHAM ULTRA

SUBTITLE: GOTHAM BOOK

BODY: VOLLKORN REGULAR

PULL QUOTE: VOLLKORN SEMI BOLD ITALIC

The Godfather of Conceptual Art THE WORK OF JOHN BALDESSARI

Ehenihic totae et, il ipis doloratiberi sed eaquati nverfer uptatem sunt ommodio conet que a aut omnisti busapero inte volum re non exerro veliqui quaecto ex eumquae errorum fuga. Nam ea conectatem. Ignis secta eaquata tectur? Ihit et qui digendi tatiusci voluptatus, quibus doluptatum quodi odiat odioriti aut endionet mod quia ipsandis mo con re parchil in prat excerunte simus sam que molorio vel enis aut ulliquaturit ventusdae. Fugia nulparum iur si comnihit prae exceaqui corem. Videro conseru mquiantium ad ut acessime accus duntibus ea vendem explabo.

INTRO TEXT 14/18PT:

CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo.

Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

BODY TEXT 8.5/12pt: Agnationsed exerem velestisquam facilla pedit eosti sintiam utem quisti custore raecto blandus andisi quis et lique es sed maximil ellatur epudit voluptas aut plitati busdae paruntis ut volo te net alignih itassit ationsecti cum quis ex entusciam vendebis dolupti cum raeratur? Qui coresequo iliam sequatum ne ratentis antur, odit vendese ditiundaes non res nam dis coreper ationest, elicillut que pa sed magnatur maio doluptas nosamenduci dolenim aiorepeliqui occupta spedipidic te vendi dem dolorepercia evenit que voluptate vellupt atibere prepel ma consedi ilit deriore perspitia quatibus mi, consequatem ipsunt ut dolorro rerionsequi sequi dus arcipsandus doluptatqui non es sum conecae qui voluptatus et lab ius dolupta tibusae magnatus mos si berunt laciis aut vel is expelent ad excest, te pre, officaborum quas velessum fuga. Sus doloreptur? Sit, optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat.

Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur?

Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOptatis nost, sim lam nobit, odi reprate pelitiorrum quat.

Optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat. Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOmnitiist aut es ut labor as earion necerum quuntib erferibus, sam restiis ma cores ut harciis aut doluptia qui dolorpor molupta cum eatur?

Nobitas event reictotatis pedi odit laborro volore si archilla as aut voloremquias dolorem porume mi, cus volore doluptatam liqui ima as porrum etur atinctem remqui am raturem aut volende rsperferiate nobis quatet, vendendandi volorro cus audipsumquat liquiant omnisim olupta diat omnis acimint quisime cum corit hillo eum ut hiciam, non etur, oditat qui apis aut elit veria ped quaeper ioremol uptaten daecessinum, id milisqui dolorum estrum aut volupta spelecte edit hario. Hic te explatem sinum nonsequi berrum ventur autem. Nam quas explis eiusti.

TITLE: VOLLKORN BOLD

SUBTITLE: GOTHAM LIGHT

BODY: GOTHAM LIGHT

PULL QUOTE: VOLLKORN SEMI BOLD ITALIC

The Godfather of Conceptual Art

THE WORK OF JOHN BALDESSARI Ehenihic totae et, il ipis doloratiberi sed eaquati nverfer uptatem sunt ommodio conet que a aut omnisti busapero inte volum re non exerro veliqui quaecto ex eumquae errorum fuga. Nam ea conectatem. Ignis secta eaquata tectur? Ihit et qui digendi tatiusci voluptatus, quibus doluptatum quodi odiat odioriti aut endionet mod quia ipsandis mo con re parchil in prat excerunte simus sam que molorio vel enis aut ulliquaturit ventusdae.

Fugia nulparum iur si comnihit prae exceaqui corem explabo.

INTRO TEXT 14/18PT:

CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo.

Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

BODY TEXT 8.5/12pt: Agnationsed exerem velestisquam facilla pedit eosti sintiam utem quisti custore raecto blandus andisi quis et lique es sed maximil ellatur epudit voluptas aut plitati busdae paruntis ut volo te net alignih itassit ationsecti cum quis ex entusciam vendebis dolupti cum raeratur? Qui coresequo iliam sequatum ne ratentis antur, odit vendese ditiundaes non res nam dis coreper ationest, elicillut que pa sed magnatur maio doluptas nosamenduci dolenim aiorepeliqui occupta spedipidic te vendi dem dolorepercia evenit que voluptate vellupt atibere prepel ma consedi ilit deriore perspitia quatibus mi, consequatem ipsunt ut dolorro rerionsequi sequi dus arcipsandus doluptatqui non es sum conecae qui voluptatus et lab ius dolupta tibusae magnatus mos si berunt laciis aut vel is expelent ad excest, te pre, officaborum quas velessum fuga. Sus doloreptur? Sit, optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat.

Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, ratemo enduciis eossim volupta tiunt.

Optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat. Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOmnitiist aut es ut labor as earion necerum quuntib erferibus, sam restiis ma cores ut harciis aut doluptia qui dolorpor molupta cum eatur?

Nobitas event reictotatis pedi odit laborro volore si archilla as aut voloremquias dolorem porume mi, cus volore doluptatam liqui ima as porrum etur atinctem remqui am raturem aut volende rsperferiate nobis quatet, vendendandi volorro cus audipsumquat liquiant omnisim olupta diat omnis acimint quisime cum corit hillo eum ut hiciam, non etur, oditat qui apis aut elit veria ped quaeper ioremol uptaten daecessinum, id milisqui dolorum estrum aut volupta spelecte pla sam, qui dollent paria adioribus reicipi cienimu sciandae doluptam faceat dis si il ipsapita quia delit et, conessi minullab id everiberit mo beati re volest.

TITLE: GOTHAM ULTRA AND TIMES NEW ROMAN BOLD ITALIC BODY: VOLLKORN REGULAR

SUBTITLE: GOTHAM BOOK PULL QUOTE: VOLLKORN SEMI BOLD ITALIC

The Godfather of Conceptual Art

THE WORK OF JOHN BALDESSARI Ehenihic totae et, il ipis doloratiberi sed eaquati nverfer uptatem sunt ommodio conet que a aut omnisti busapero inte volum re non exerro veliqui quaecto ex eumquae errorum fuga. Nam ea conectatem. Ignis secta eaquata tectur? Ihit et qui digendi tatiusci voluptatus, quibus doluptatum quodi odiat odioriti aut endionet mod quia ipsandis mo con re parchil in prat excerunte simus sam que molorio vel enis aut ulliquaturit ventusdae. Fugia nulparum iur si comnihit prae exceaqui corem. Videro conseru mquiantium ad ut acessime accus duntibus ea vendem explabo.

INTRO TEXT 14/18PT:

CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo.

Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

BODY TEXT 8.5/12pt: Agnationsed exerem velestisquam facilla pedit eosti sintiam utem quisti custore raecto blandus andisi quis et lique es sed maximil ellatur epudit voluptas aut plitati busdae paruntis ut volo te net alignih itassit ationsecti cum quis ex entusciam vendebis dolupti cum raeratur? Qui coresequo iliam sequatum ne ratentis antur, odit vendese ditiundaes non res nam dis coreper ationest, elicillut que pa sed magnatur maio doluptas nosamenduci dolenim aiorepeliqui occupta spedipidic te vendi dem dolorepercia evenit que voluptate vellupt atibere prepel ma consedi ilit deriore perspitia quatibus mi, consequatem ipsunt ut dolorro rerionsequi sequi dus arcipsandus doluptatqui non es sum conecae qui voluptatus et lab ius dolupta tibusae magnatus mos si berunt laciis aut vel is expelent ad excest, te pre, officaborum quas velessum fuga. Sus doloreptur? Sit, optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat.

Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOptatis nost, sim lam nobit, odi reprate pelitiorrum quat.

Optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat. Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga.

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EXPLORATIONS:

the work of john baldessari

transcendent

RANSCENDEN

DESIGN PROC

TWO PERSONS, TWO HANDS, TELEPHONE (WITH WINDOW), JOHN BALDESSARI, 1995

CESS

BALDESSARI: INITIAL 25 SPREADS

COMMISSIONED PAINTING: A PAINTING BY EDGAR TRANSUE, JOHN BALDESSARI, 1969

RUNNING TITLE

THE GODFATHER OF CONCEPTUAL ART

the work of John Baldessari

by Calvin Tomkins

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ow that contemporary art has become a global enterprise, we tend to forget that a few pockets of regional difference still exist. In Los Angeles, for example, artists rarely talk about Andy Warhol. Warhol’s shadow hangs heavy over the international art world, but not in L.A., where the most relevant artist of the moment, the seventy-nine-year-old John Baldessari, said recently that he “hadn’t thought about Warhol in forty years.” Baldessari’s endlessly surprising retrospective, which was on view all summer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, comes to New York this month, opening on October 20th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The fact that none of our modern or contemporary museums could find room for it in their schedules suggests a strain of parochialism at work here, too, but who knows? Baldessari’s contrarian brand of conceptual, photography-based art-aboutart has so few regional or even national characteristics that it probably belongs at the Met, among all those certified treasures of fifty centuries.

1

THE GODFATHER OF CONCEPTUAL ART

RUNNING TITLE

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by Calvin Tomkins

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ow that contemporary art has become a global enterprise, we tend to forget that a few pockets of regional difference still exist. In Los Angeles, for example, artists rarely talk about Andy Warhol. Warhol’s shadow hangs heavy over the international art world, but not in L.A., where the most relevant artist of the moment, the seventy-nine-year-old John Baldessari, said recently that he “hadn’t thought about Warhol in forty years.” Baldessari’s endlessly surprising retrospective, which was on view all summer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, comes to New York this month, opening on October 20th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The fact that none of our modern or contemporary museums could find room for it in their schedules suggests a strain of parochialism at work here, too, but who knows? Baldessari’s contrarian brand of conceptual, photography-based art-about-art has so few regional or even national characteristics that it probably belongs at the Met, among all those certified treasures of fifty centuries.

Baldessari has made a career out of upsetting priorities and defying expectations. “Pure Beauty,” an early work that doubles as the exhibition’s title, consists of those two words, painted by a professional sign painter in black capital letters on an off-white canvas. When Baldessari had it done, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, he was teaching art at a junior college near his home in National City, California, a working-class town near the Mexican border, and painting in his spare time. His work until then had been fairly traditional—oil paint on canvas, applied with loose, gestural brushstrokes in the Abstract Expressionist manner. “I was getting tired of people saying my art was like Abstract Expressionism,” he told me. “Being in National City, where nobody cared what I was doing, I thought, What if you just give people what they want? People read magazines, and look at photographs, not at Jackson Pollocks.” There was more to it than that, of course. Baldessari is a prodigious reader—art history, novels, philosophy, the Bible, comics—and in those days he subscribed to a dozen international art magazines.

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ow that contemporary art has become a global enterprise, we tend to forget that a few pockets of regional difference still exist. In Los Angeles, for example, artists rarely talk about Andy Warhol. Warhol’s shadow hangs heavy over the international art world, but not in L.A., where the most relevant artist of the moment, the seventy-nine-year-old John Baldessari, said recently that he “hadn’t thought about Warhol in forty years.” Baldessari’s endlessly surprising retrospective, which was on view all summer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, comes to New York this month, opening on October 20th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The fact that none of our modern or contemporary museums could find room for it in their schedules suggests a strain of parochialism at work here, too, but who knows? Baldessari’s contrarian brand of conceptual, photography-based art-aboutart has so few regional or even national characteristics that it probably belongs at the Met, among all those certified treasures of fifty centuries.

1

THE GODFATHER CONCEPTUAL ART

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THE GODFATHER OF CONCEPTUAL ART

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ow that contemporary art has become a global enterprise, we tend to forget that a few pockets of regional difference still exist. In Los Angeles, for example, artists rarely talk about Andy Warhol. Warhol’s shadow hangs heavy over the international art world, but not in L.A., where the most relevant artist of the moment, the seventy-nine-year-old John Baldessari, said recently that he “hadn’t thought about Warhol in forty years.” Baldessari’s endlessly surprising retrospective, which was on view all summer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, comes to New York this month, opening on October 20th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The fact that none of our modern or contemporary museums could find room for it in their schedules suggests a strain of parochialism at work here, too, but who knows? Baldessari’s contrarian brand of conceptual, photography-based art-about-art has so few regional or even national characteristics that it probably belongs at the Met, among all those certified treasures of fifty centuries.

Baldessari has made a career out of upsetting priorities and defying expectations. “Pure Beauty,” an early work that doubles as the exhibition’s title, consists of those two words, painted by a professional sign painter in black capital letters on an off-white canvas. When Baldessari had it done, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, he was teaching art at a junior college near his home in National City, California, a working-class town near the Mexican border, and painting in his spare time. His work until then had been fairly traditional—oil paint on canvas, applied with loose, gestural brushstrokes in the Abstract Expressionist manner. “I was getting tired of people saying my art was like Abstract Expressionism,” he told me. “Being in National City, where nobody cared what I was doing, I thought, What if you just give people what they want? People read magazines, and look at photographs, not at Jackson Pollocks.” There was more to it than that, of course. Baldessari is a prodigious reader—art history, novels, philosophy, the Bible, comics—and in those days he subscribed to a dozen international art magazines.

1

THE GODFATHER OF CONCEPTUAL ART THE WOR JOHN BA

BY CALV

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RK OF ALDESSARI VIN TOMKINS

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THE GODFATHER OF CONCEPTUAL ART

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THE WORK OF JOHN BALDESSARI

BY CALVIN TOMKINS

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ow that contemporary art has become a global enterprise, we tend to forget that a few pockets of regional difference still exist. In Los Angeles, for example, artists rarely talk about Andy Warhol. Warhol’s shadow hangs heavy over the international art world, but not in L.A., where the most relevant artist of the moment, the seventy-nine-year-old John Baldessari, said recently that he “hadn’t thought about Warhol in forty years.” Baldessari’s endlessly surprising retrospective, which was on view all summer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, comes to New York this month, opening on October 20th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The fact that none of our modern or contemporary museums could find room for it in their schedules suggests a strain of parochialism at work here, too, but who knows? Baldessari’s contrarian brand of conceptual, photography-based art-about-art has so few regional or even national characteristics that it probably belongs at the Met, among all those certified treasures of fifty centuries.

Baldessari has made a career out of upsetting priorities and defying expectations. “Pure Beauty,” an early work that doubles as the exhibition’s title, consists of those two words, painted by a professional sign painter in black capital letters on an off-white canvas. When Baldessari had it done, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, he was teaching art at a junior college near his home in National City, California, a working-class town near the Mexican border, and painting in his spare time. His work until then had been fairly traditional—oil paint on canvas, applied with loose, gestural brushstrokes in the Abstract Expressionist manner. “I was getting tired of people saying my art was like Abstract Expressionism,” he told me. “Being in National City, where nobody cared what I was doing, I thought, What if you just give people what they want? People read magazines, and look at photographs, not at Jackson Pollocks.” There was more to it than that, of course. Baldessari is a prodigious reader—art history, novels, philosophy, the Bible, comics—and in those days he subscribed to a dozen international art magazines.

1

THE GODFATHER OF CONCEPTUAL ART

RUNNING TITLE

THE WORK OF JOHN BALDESSARI

BY CALVIN TOMKINS

N

ow that contemporary art has become a global enterprise, we tend to forget that a few pockets of regional difference still exist. In Los Angeles, for example, artists rarely talk about Andy Warhol. Warhol’s shadow hangs heavy over the international art world, but not in L.A., where the most relevant artist of the moment, the seventy-nine-year-old John Baldessari, said recently that he “hadn’t thought about Warhol in forty years.” Baldessari’s endlessly surprising retrospective, which was on view all summer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, comes to New York this month, opening on October 20th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The fact that none of our modern or contemporary museums could find room for it in their schedules suggests a strain of parochialism at work here, too, but who knows? Baldessari’s contrarian brand of conceptual, photography-based art-about-art has so few regional or even national characteristics that it probably belongs at the Met, among all those certified treasures of fifty centuries.

Baldessari has made a career out of upsetting priorities and defying expectations. “Pure Beauty,” an early work that doubles as the exhibition’s title, consists of those two words, painted by a professional sign painter in black capital letters on an off-white canvas. When Baldessari had it done, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, he was teaching art at a junior college near his home in National City, California, a working-class town near the Mexican border, and painting in his spare time. His work until then had been fairly traditional—oil paint on canvas, applied with loose, gestural brushstrokes in the Abstract Expressionist manner. “I was getting tired of people saying my art was like Abstract Expressionism,” he told me. “Being in National City, where nobody cared what I was doing, I thought, What if you just give people what they want? People read magazines, and look at photographs, not at Jackson Pollocks.” There was more to it than that, of course. Baldessari is a prodigious reader—art history, novels, philosophy, the Bible, comics—and in those days he subscribed to a dozen international art magazines.

1

THE GODFATHER OF CONCEPTUAL ART

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THE WORK OF JOHN BALDESSARI

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ow that contemporary art has become a global enterprise, we tend to forget that a few pockets of regional difference still exist. In Los Angeles, for example, artists rarely talk about Andy Warhol. Warhol’s shadow hangs heavy over the international art world, but not in L.A., where the most relevant artist of the moment, the seventy-nine-year-old John Baldessari, said recently that he “hadn’t thought about Warhol in forty years.” Baldessari’s endlessly surprising retrospective, which was on view all summer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, comes to New York this month, opening on October 20th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The fact that none of our modern or contemporary museums could find room for it in their schedules suggests a strain of parochialism at work here, too, but who knows? Baldessari’s contrarian brand of conceptual, photography-based art-about-art has so few regional or even national characteristics that it probably belongs at the Met, among all those certified treasures of fifty centuries.

Baldessari has made a career out of upsetting priorities and defying expectations. “Pure Beauty,” an early work that doubles as the exhibition’s title, consists of those two words, painted by a professional sign painter in black capital letters on an off-white canvas. When Baldessari had it done, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, he was teaching art at a junior college near his home in National City, California, a working-class town near the Mexican border, and painting in his spare time. His work until then had been fairly traditional—oil paint on canvas, applied with loose, gestural brushstrokes in the Abstract Expressionist manner. “I was getting tired of people saying my art was like Abstract Expressionism,” he told me. “Being in National City, where nobody cared what I was doing, I thought, What if you just give people what they want? People read magazines, and look at photographs, not at Jackson Pollocks.” There was more to it than that, of course. Baldessari is a prodigious reader—art history, novels, philosophy, the Bible, comics—and in those days he subscribed to a dozen international art magazines.

1

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BALDESSARI: 3 DESIGN DIRECTIONS

COMMISSIONED PAINTING: A PAINTING BY EDGAR TRANSUE, JOHN BALDESSARI, 1969

THE GODFATHER OF CONCEPTUAL ART

THE WORK OF JOHN BALDESSARI

BY CALVIN TOMKINS N ow that contemporary art has become a global enterprise, we tend to forget that a few pockets of regional difference still exist. In Los Angeles, for example, artists rarely talk about Andy Warhol. Warhol’s shadow hangs heavy over the international art world, but not in L.A., where the most relevant artist of the moment, the seventynine-year-old John Baldessari, said recently that he “hadn’t thought about Warhol in forty years.” Baldessari’s endlessly surprising retrospective, which was on view all summer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, comes to New York this month, opening on October 20th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The fact that none of our modern or contemporary museums could find room for it in their schedules suggests a strain of parochialism at work here, too, but who knows? Baldessari’s contrarian brand of conceptual, photography-based art-about-art has so few regional or even national characteristics that it probably belongs at the Met, among all those certified treasures of fifty centuries.

Baldessari has made a career out of upsetting priorities and defying expectations. “Pure Beauty,” an early work that doubles as the exhibition’s title, consists of those two words, painted by a professional sign painter in black capital letters on an off-white canvas. When Baldessari had it done, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, he was teaching art at a junior college near his home in National City, California, a working-class town near the Mexican border, and painting in his spare time. His work until then had been fairly traditional— oil paint on canvas, applied with loose, gestural brushstrokes in the Abstract Expressionist manner. “I was getting tired of people saying my art was like Abstract Expressionism,” he told me. “Being in National City, where nobody cared what I was doing, I thought, What if you just give people what they want? People read magazines, and look at photographs, not at Jackson Pollocks.” There was more to it than that, of course. Baldessari is a prodigious reader—art history, novels, philosophy, the Bible, comics—and in those days he subscribed to a dozen international art magazines.

1

2

“NO IDEAS HAVE ENTERED THIS WORK”

What he really decided to give people was his version of conceptual art, in which ideas take precedence over images and the artist’s personal “touch” doesn’t count. In New York, in the mid-sixties, conceptual art had just started to take hold. It was a pretty serious business, severe and theoretical: Joseph Kosuth’s “One and Three Chairs,” an iconic early example, consists of a folding chair placed against a wall, a photograph of the same chair on the wall to one side of it, and a dictionary definition of “chair,” enlarged and hung on the wall to the other side. Baldessari reinvented conceptualism, in his own vein of laid-back, irreverent humor. “Everything Is Purged from This Painting But Art, No Ideas Have Entered This Work,” another of his text paintings proclaims—conceptual art mocking conceptual art. “Don’t do any beautiful calligraphy,” Baldessari had told the sign painter. “I just want this to be information.”

“I’ve often thought of myself as a frustrated writer,” he said last summer, when I spent some time with him in L.A. “I consider a word and an image of equal weight, and a lot of my work comes out of that kind of thinking.” We were visiting his exhibition at lacma, where a good many museumgoers recognized him. Baldessari’s height (six feet seven inches), his shoulder-length white hair and patriarchal beard, and his wheezy, high-pitched laugh command attention in any setting, but out here he is a landmark presence, a famous artist and art teacher, whose former students proliferate and prosper in New York as well as in L.A. Several of the text paintings were quite funny, and a few actually evoked visual images in the mind. “Baldessari gave conceptual art a visual language,” as Paul Schimmel, the chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A., puts it. The clearest example is his “Semi-Close-Up of Girl by Geranium (Soft View),” from 1966-68, whose text, filling the pale-gray canvas, is lifted from the screenplay for D. W. Griffith’s “Intolerance”: “Finishes Watering It—Examines Plant to See If It Has Any Signs of Growth, Finds Slight Evidence—Smiles—One Part Is Sagging—She Runs Fingers Along It—Raises Hand Over Plant to Encourage It to Grow.” Standing in front of the painting at lacma, Baldessari said, “It’s probably my all-time favorite piece. I just think it’s perfect—very simple, and you can imagine it so easily. David Foster Wallace once said that the duty of the writer is to make the reader feel intelligent, and let them fill in the gaps. I feel that way, too.”

In the same gallery were more early works, most of them dated 1966-68, which combine texts with greatly enlarged photographic images. The photographs, grainy and over- or underexposed shots of locations in National City, had been printed in photo-emulsion on canvas, so they looked just like bad amateur snapshots. Underneath each one, in large, generic capitals, was a text identifying its location: “EconO-Wash/14th and Highland/National City Calif.” Baldessari took the pictures, shooting through the window of his car “with the idea that truth is beautiful, no matter how ugly it is.” His wife took one that makes sport of the rule in every photography manual about not posing your subject in front of a tree, because it will look like the tree is growing out of the subject’s head. This picture, which lacma now owns, shows Baldessari standing directly in front of a spindly palm tree, and underneath is a one-word printed text: “wrong.”

3

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DO IT AT NIGHT.”

GUY SAID WE HAD TO

ONE FINALLY, BUT THE

PAINTINGS. I FOUND

REFUSED TO CREMATE

LOCAL MORTUARIES

WAS THAT SEVERAL

“THE PROBLEM

After the photo-and-text pictures, Baldessari’s work becomes more complicated and increasingly ambitious, but no less playful. Hearing that Al Held, the New York abstract painter, had said that conceptual art was “just pointing at things,” Baldessari did a series of “Commissioned Paintings”: he took photographs of a friend’s finger pointing at various objects or places around National City, then asked a dozen amateur artists, whose work he had seen at county fairs, to choose one of the photographs and reproduce it in a realistic painting, pointing finger included. Baldessari has often said that he wants his work to make people stop and look, rather than just take it in passively. In two large galleries devoted to works from the nineteen-seventies, several exhibits stopped me cold. One was “Cremation Project” (1970), a glass-topped cabinet containing three objects: a bronze plaque inscribed “John Anthony Baldessari—May 1953—March 1966,” an urn in the shape of a book, and a notarized affidavit stating that “all works of art done by the undersigned between May 1953 and March 1966 in his possession as of July 24, 1970 were cremated on July 24, 1970 in San Diego, California.”

As Baldessari explained to me, his National City studio then was full of unsalable paintings, and his work was headed in

a new direction, so it seemed logical to have the early stuff cremated. “I thought about Nietzsche and the eternal return,” he said, “and equating the artist with the ‘body’ of his work, and so forth. The problem was that several local mortuaries refused to cremate paintings. I found one finally, but the guy said we had to do it at night.”

The second showstopper was “Baldessari Sings LeWitt,” a 1972 video of Baldessari sitting in a chair, very relaxed, reciting each of Sol LeWitt’s thirty-five “Sentences on Conceptual Art” to the tune of a different song—“Some Enchanted Evening” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” among others. LeWitt, an older, New York-based artist whose work Baldessari admired, had agreed to the recital. “Sol was very sweet. I called him up, and he said, ‘Sure, go ahead.’ ” This one is now on YouTube. The third stopper was the video version of “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art,” his bestknown work. The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design had invited him to have an exhibition in 1971, but it couldn’t afford to pay shipping or travel costs. What he proposed, instead, was that any students at the school who felt inclined should come in and write “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art” on a gallery wall, “to redeem themselves, or whatever,”

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“AND IT’S VERY BORING, ISN’T IT?”

and so many of them did that all the walls were entirely covered. The school subsequently published a lithograph of the phrase, and one of the prints was bought by the Museum of Modern Art. The video version shows Baldessari’s hand as he writes the words, like a penance, for thirteen minutes. “And it’s very boring, isn’t it?” he said, laughing.

The range and complexity of Baldessari’s work over the next thirty years gradually silenced persistent attempts to dismiss him as a joke artist, a mere purveyor of visual one-liners. He produced prints, artist books, installations, films and videos (sometimes featuring his students), and photographic montages whose scale and wall power made them look more and more like paintings. He investigated the use of chance methods, photographing successive attempts to make a straight line or a square by throwing three or four colored balls in the air. He played visual games that involved choosing one out of three green beans (or carrots, or sticks of rhubarb), and he had himself photographed “Hitting Various Objects” from a garbage dump with a golf club. In his cinematic photo-collages of the nineteen-seventies and eighties, film stills advertising B movies or film noirs cohabited with suburban group portraits, landscapes, urban architecture, water sports, mermaids, art history, and surrealist fantasies.

Baldessari constructs a vivid, skewed world in which the viewer can either participate or smile and walk away—a world whose complicity with the one we know becomes increasingly perplexed as the exhibition unfolds. Baldessari once said, regarding his work from the late sixties, “So much of my thinking at that time was trying to figure out just what I thought art was.” And had he figured it out? “Not a clue,” he said, with another big laugh. “Not . . . a . . . clue.”

7

THE GODFATHER OF C NCEPTUAL ART THE WORK OF JOHN BALDESSARI

by Calvin Tomkins

1

2

“I thought, What if you just give people what they want? People read magazines, and look at photographs, not at Jackson Pollocks.”

Now that contemporary art has become a global enterprise, we tend to forget that a few pockets of regional difference still exist. In Los Angeles, for example, artists rarely talk about Andy Warhol. Warhol’s shadow hangs heavy over the international art world, but not in L.A., where the most relevant artist of the moment, the seventynine-year-old John Baldessari, said recently that he “hadn’t thought about Warhol in forty years.” Baldessari’s endlessly surprising retrospective, which was on view all summer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, comes to New York this month, opening on October 20th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The fact that none of our modern or contemporary museums could find room for it in their schedules suggests a strain of parochialism at work here, too, but who knows?

Baldessari’s contrarian brand of conceptual, photography-based art-about-art has so few regional or even national characteristics that it probably belongs at the Met, among all those certified treasures of fifty centuries.

Baldessari has made a career out of upsetting priorities and defying expectations.

“Pure Beauty,” an early work that doubles as the exhibition’s title, consists of those two words, painted by a professional sign painter in black capital letters on an off-white canvas. When Baldessari had it done, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, he was teaching art at a junior college near his home in National City, California, a working-class town near the Mexican border, and painting in his spare time. His work until then had been fairly traditional—oil paint on canvas, applied with loose, gestural brushstrokes in the Abstract Expressionist manner. “I was getting tired of people saying my art was like Abstract Expressionism,” he told me. “Being in National City, where nobody cared what I was doing, I thought, What if you just give people what they want? People read magazines, and look at photographs, not at Jackson Pollocks.”

There was more to it than that, of course.

Baldessari is a prodigious reader—art history, novels, philosophy, the Bible, comics—and in those days he subscribed to a dozen international art magazines.

What he really decided to give people was his version of conceptual art, in which ideas take precedence over images and the artist’s personal “touch” doesn’t count. In New York, in the mid-sixties, conceptual art had just started to take hold. It was a pretty serious business, severe and theoretical: Joseph Kosuth’s “One and Three Chairs,” an iconic early example, consists of a folding chair placed against a wall, a photograph of the same chair on the wall to one side of it, and a dictionary definition of “chair,” enlarged and hung on the wall to the other side. Baldessari reinvented conceptualism, in his own vein of laid-back, irreverent humor.

“Everything Is Purged from This Painting But Art, No Ideas Have Entered This Work,” another of his text paintings proclaims—conceptual art mocking conceptual art. “Don’t do any beautiful calligraphy,” Baldessari had told the sign painter. “I just want this to be information.”

“I’ve often thought of myself as a frustrated writer,” he said last summer, when I spent some time with him in L.A. “I consider a word and an image of equal weight, and a lot of my work comes out of that kind of thinking.” We were visiting his exhibition at lacma, where a good many museumgoers recognized him. Baldessari’s height (six feet seven inches), his shoulder-length white hair and patriarchal beard, and his wheezy, highpitched laugh command attention in any setting, but out here he is a landmark presence, a famous artist and art teacher, whose former students proliferate and prosper in New York as well as in L.A. Several of the text paintings were quite funny, and a few actually evoked visual images in the mind. “Baldessari gave conceptual art a visual language,” as Paul Schimmel, the chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A., puts it. The clearest example is his “Semi-CloseUp of Girl by Geranium (Soft View),” from 1966-68, whose text, filling the pale-gray canvas, is lifted from the screenplay for D. W. Griffith’s “Intolerance”: “Finishes Watering It—Examines Plant to See If It Has Any Signs of Growth, Finds Slight Evidence— Smiles—One Part Is Sagging—She Runs

3

Fingers Along It—Raises Hand Over Plant to Encourage It to Grow.” Standing in front of the painting at lacma, Baldessari said, “It’s probably my all-time favorite piece. I just think it’s perfect—very simple, and you can imagine it so easily. David Foster Wallace once said that the duty of the writer is to make the reader feel intelligent, and let them fill in the gaps. I feel that way, too.”

4

In the same gallery were more early works, most of them dated 1966-68, which combine texts with greatly enlarged photographic images. The photographs, grainy and over- or underexposed shots of locations in National City, had been printed in photo-emulsion on canvas, so they looked just like bad amateur snapshots. Underneath each one, in large, generic capitals, was a text identifying its location: “Econ-O-Wash/14th and Highland/ National City Calif.” Baldessari took the

pictures, shooting through the window of his car “with the idea that truth is beautiful, no matter how ugly it is.” His wife took one that makes sport of the rule in every photography manual about not posing your subject in front of a tree, because it will look like the tree is growing out of the subject’s head.

This picture, which lacma now owns, shows Baldessari standing directly in front of a spindly palm tree, and underneath is a oneword printed text: “wrong.”

After the photo-and-text pictures, Baldessari’s work becomes more complicated and increasingly ambitious, but no less playful.

Hearing that Al Held, the New York abstract painter, had said that conceptual art was “just pointing at things,” Baldessari did a series of “Commissioned Paintings”: he took photographs of a friend’s finger pointing at various objects or places around National City, then

“Baldessari took the pictures, shooting through the window of his car “with the idea that truth is beautiful, no matter how ugly it is.”

asked a dozen amateur artists, whose work he had seen at county fairs, to choose one of the photographs and reproduce it in a realistic painting, pointing finger included. Baldessari has often said that he wants his work to make people stop and look, rather than just take it in passively. In two large galleries devoted to works from the nineteen-seventies, several exhibits stopped me cold. One was “Cremation Project” (1970), a glass-topped cabinet containing three objects: a bronze plaque inscribed “John Anthony Baldessari—May 1953—March 1966,” an urn in the shape of a book, and a notarized affidavit stating that “all works of art done by the undersigned between May 1953 and March 1966 in his possession as of July 24, 1970 were cremated on July 24, 1970 in San Diego, California.”

As Baldessari explained to me, his National City studio then was full of unsalable paintings, and his work was headed in a new di-

rection, so it seemed logical to have the early stuff cremated. “I thought about Nietzsche and the eternal return,” he said, “and equating the artist with the ‘body’ of his work, and so forth. The problem was that several local mortuaries refused to cremate paintings. I found one finally, but the guy said we had to do it at night.”

The second showstopper was “Baldessari Sings LeWitt,” a 1972 video of Baldessari sitting in a chair, very relaxed, reciting each of Sol LeWitt’s thirty-five “Sentences on Conceptual Art” to the tune of a different song—“Some Enchanted Evening” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” among others. LeWitt, an older, New York-based artist whose work Baldessari admired, had agreed to the recital. “Sol was very sweet. I called him up, and he said, ‘Sure, go ahead.’ ” This one is now on YouTube. The third stopper was

5

the video version of “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art,” his best-known work. The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design had invited him to have an exhibition in 1971, but it couldn’t afford to pay shipping or travel costs. What he proposed, instead, was that any students at the school who felt inclined should come in and write “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art” on a gallery wall, “to redeem themselves, or whatever,” and so many of them did that all the walls were entirely covered. The school subsequently published a lithograph of the phrase, and one of the prints was bought by the Museum of Modern Art. The video version shows Baldessari’s hand as he writes the words, like a penance, for thirteen minutes. “And it’s very boring, isn’t it?” he said, laughing.

The range and complexity of Baldessari’s work over the next thirty years gradually silenced persistent attempts to dismiss him as a joke artist, a mere purveyor of visual one-liners. He produced prints, artist books, installations, films and videos (sometimes featuring his students), and photographic montages whose scale and wall power made them look more and more like paintings. He investigated the use of chance methods, photographing successive attempts to make a straight line or a square by throwing three or four colored balls in the air. He played visual games that involved choosing one out of three green beans (or carrots, or sticks of rhubarb), and he had himself photographed “Hitting Various Objects” from a garbage dump with a golf club. In his cinematic photo-collages of the nineteen-seventies and eighties, film stills advertising B movies or film noirs cohabited with suburban group portraits, landscapes, urban architecture, water sports, mermaids, art history, and surrealist fantasies. Baldessari constructs a vivid, skewed world in which the viewer can either participate or smile and walk away—a world whose complicity with the one we know becomes increasingly perplexed as the exhibition unfolds. Baldessari once said, regarding his work from the late sixties, “So much of my thinking at that time was trying to figure out just what I thought art was.” And had he figured it out? I asked him. “Not a clue,” he said, with another big laugh. “Not . . . a . . . clue.”

6

“I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art”

7

THE GODFATHER OF CONCEPTUAL ART

THE WORK OF JOHN BALDESSARI

by Calvin Tomkins

N

ow that contemporary art has become a global enterprise, we tend to forget that a few pockets of regional difference still exist. In Los Angeles, for example, artists rarely talk about Andy Warhol. Warhol’s shadow hangs heavy over the international art world, but not in L.A., where the most relevant artist of the moment, the seventy-nine-year-old John Baldessari, said recently that he “hadn’t thought about Warhol in forty years.” Baldessari’s endlessly surprising retrospective, which was on view all summer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, comes to New York this month, opening on October 20th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The fact that none of our modern or contemporary museums could find room for it in their schedules suggests a strain of parochialism at work here, too, but who knows? Baldessari’s contrarian brand of conceptual, photography-based art-about-art has so few regional or even national characteristics that it probably belongs at the Met, among all those certified treasures of fifty centuries.

Baldessari has made a career out of upsetting priorities and defying expectations. “Pure Beauty,” an early work that doubles as the exhibition’s title, consists of those two words, painted by a professional sign painter in black capital letters on an off-white canvas. When Baldessari had it done, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, he was teaching art at a junior college near his home in National City, California, a working-class town near the Mexican border, and painting in his spare time. His work until then had been fairly traditional— oil paint on canvas, applied with loose, gestural brushstrokes

1

“EVERYTHING IS PURGED FROM THIS PAINTING BUT ART, NO IDEAS HAVE ENTERED THIS WORK.”

in the Abstract Expressionist manner. “I was getting tired of people saying my art was like Abstract Expressionism,” he told me. “Being in National City, where nobody cared what I was doing, I thought, What if you just give people what they want? People read magazines, and look at photographs, not at Jackson Pollocks.” There was more to it than that, of course.

Baldessari is a prodigious reader—art history, novels, philosophy, the Bible, comics—and in those days he subscribed to a dozen international art magazines.

What he really decided to give people was his version of conceptual art, in which ideas take precedence over images and the artist’s personal “touch” doesn’t count. In New York, in the mid-sixties, conceptual art had just started to take hold. It was a pretty serious business, severe and theoretical: Joseph Kosuth’s “One and Three Chairs,” an iconic early example, consists of a folding chair placed against a wall, a photograph of the same chair on the wall to one side of it, and a dictionary definition of “chair,” enlarged and hung on the wall to the other side. Baldessari reinvented conceptualism, in his own vein of laid-back, irreverent humor. “Everything Is Purged from This Painting But Art, No Ideas Have Entered This Work,” another of his text paintings proclaims—conceptual art mocking conceptual art. “Don’t do any beautiful calligraphy,” Baldessari had told the sign painter. “I just want this to be information.”

3

“I’ve often thought of myself as a frustrated writer,” he said last summer, when I spent some time with him in L.A. “I consider a word and an image of equal weight, and a lot of my work comes out of that kind of thinking.” We were visiting his exhibition at lacma, where a good many museumgoers recognized him. Baldessari’s height (six feet seven inches), his shoulder-length white hair and patriarchal beard, and his wheezy, high-pitched laugh command attention in any setting, but out here he is a landmark presence, a famous artist and art teacher, whose former students proliferate and prosper in New York as well as in L.A. Several of the text paintings were quite funny, and a few actually evoked visual images in the mind. “Baldessari gave conceptual art a visual language,” as Paul Schimmel, the chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A., puts it. The clearest example is his “Semi-Close-Up of Girl by Geranium (Soft View),” from 196668, whose text, filling the pale-gray canvas, is lifted from the screenplay for D. W. Griffith’s “Intolerance”: “Finishes Watering It—Examines Plant to See If It Has Any Signs of Growth, Finds Slight Evidence—Smiles—One Part Is Sagging—She Runs Fingers Along It—Raises Hand Over Plant to Encourage It to Grow.” Standing in front of the painting at lacma, Baldessari said, “It’s probably my all-time favorite piece. I just think it’s perfect—very simple, and you can imagine it so easily.

David Foster Wallace once said that the duty of the writer is to make the reader feel intelligent, and let them fill in the gaps. I feel that way, too.”

In the same gallery were more early works, most of them dated 1966-68, which combine texts with greatly enlarged photographic images. The photographs, grainy and over- or underexposed shots of locations in National City, had been printed in photo-emulsion on canvas, so they looked just like bad amateur snapshots. Underneath each one, in large, generic capitals, was a text identifying its location: “Econ-OWash/14th and Highland/National City Calif.” Baldessari took the pictures, shooting through the window of his car “with the idea that truth is beautiful, no matter how ugly it is.” His wife took one that makes sport of the rule in every photography manual about not posing your subject in front of a tree, because it will look like the tree is growing out of the subject’s head. This picture, which lacma now owns, shows Baldessari standing directly in front of a spindly palm tree, and underneath is a one-word printed text: “wrong.”

After the photo-and-text pictures, Baldessari’s work becomes more complicated and increasingly ambitious, but no less playful. Hearing that Al Held, the New York abstract painter, had said that conceptual art was “just pointing at things,” Baldessari did a series of “Commissioned Paintings”: he took photographs of a friend’s finger pointing at various objects or places around National City, then asked a dozen amateur artists, whose work he had seen at county fairs, to choose one of the photographs and reproduce it in a realistic painting, pointing finger included. Baldessari has often said that he wants his work to make people stop and look, rather

“THE PROBLEM WAS THAT SEVERAL LOCAL MORTUARIES REFUSED TO CREMATE PAINTINGS.”

than just take it in passively. In two large galleries devoted to works from the nineteen-seventies, several exhibits stopped me cold. One was “Cremation Project” (1970), a glass-topped cabinet containing three objects: a bronze plaque inscribed “John Anthony Baldessari—May 1953—March 1966,” an urn in the shape of a book, and a notarized affidavit stating that “all works of art done by the undersigned between May 1953 and March 1966 in his possession as of July 24, 1970 were cremated on July 24, 1970 in San Diego, California.” As Baldessari explained to me, his National City studio then was full of unsalable paintings, and his work was headed in a new direction, so it seemed logical to have the early stuff cremated. “I thought about Nietzsche and the eternal return,” he said, “and equating the artist with the ‘body’ of his work, and so forth.

The problem was that several local mortuaries refused to cremate paintings. I found one finally, but the guy said we had to do it at night.”

The second showstopper was “Baldessari Sings LeWitt,” a 1972 video of Baldessari sitting in a chair, very relaxed, reciting each of Sol LeWitt’s thirty-five “Sentences on Conceptual Art” to the tune of a different song—“Some Enchanted Evening” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” among others. LeWitt, an older, New York-based artist whose work Baldessari admired, had agreed to the recital. “Sol was very sweet. I called him up, and he said, ‘Sure, go ahead.’ ” This one is now on YouTube. The third stopper was the video version of “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art,” his best-known work.

The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design had invited him to have an exhibition in 1971, but it couldn’t afford to pay shipping or travel costs. What he proposed, instead, was that any students at the school who felt inclined should come in and write “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art” on a gallery wall, “to redeem themselves, or whatever,” and so many of them did that all the walls were entirely covered. The school subsequently published a lithograph of the phrase, and one of the prints was bought by the Museum of Modern Art. The video version shows Baldessari’s hand as he writes the words, like a penance, for thirteen minutes. “And it’s very boring, isn’t it?” he said, laughing.

The range and complexity of Baldessari’s work over the next thirty years gradually silenced persistent attempts to dismiss him as a joke artist, a mere purveyor of visual one-liners. He produced prints, artist books, installations, films and videos (sometimes featuring his students), and pho-

5

“BALDESSARI CONSTRUCTS A VIVID, SKEWED WORLD IN WHICH THE VIEWER CAN EITHER PARTICIPATE OR SMILE AND WALK AWAY.”

tographic montages whose scale and wall power made them look more and more like paintings. He investigated the use of chance methods, photographing successive attempts to make a straight line or a square by throwing three or four colored balls in the air. He played visual games that involved choosing one out of three green beans (or carrots, or sticks of rhubarb), and he had himself photographed “Hitting Various Objects” from a garbage dump with a golf club. In his cinematic photo-collages of the nineteen-seventies and eighties, film stills advertising B movies or film noirs cohabited with suburban group portraits, landscapes, urban architecture, water sports, mermaids, art history, and surrealist fantasies. Baldessari constructs a vivid, skewed world in which the viewer can either participate or smile and walk away—a world whose complicity with the one we know becomes increasingly perplexed as the exhibition unfolds. Baldessari once said, regarding his work from the late sixties, “So much of my thinking at that time was trying to figure out just what I thought art was.” And had he figured it out? I asked him. “Not a clue,” he said, with another big laugh. “Not . . . a . . . clue.”

7

BALDESSARI: FINAL DIRECTION

COMMISSIONED PAINTING: A PAINTING BY EDGAR TRANSUE, JOHN BALDESSARI, 1969

THE GODFATHER OF CONCEPTUAL ART

THE WORK OF JOHN BALDESSARI

1

Brain/Cloud (with seascape and palm tree), 2009

BY CALVIN TOMKINS

N

ow that contemporary art has become a global enterprise, we tend to forget that a few pockets of regional difference still exist. In Los Angeles, for example, artists rarely talk about Andy Warhol. Warhol’s shadow hangs heavy over the international art world, but not in L.A., where the most relevant artist of the moment, the seventy-nine-year-old John Baldessari, said recently that he “hadn’t thought about Warhol in forty years.” Baldessari’s endlessly surprising retrospective, which was on view all summer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, comes to New York this month, opening on October 20th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The fact that none of our modern or contemporary museums could find room for it in their schedules suggests a strain of parochialism at work here, too, but who knows? Baldessari’s contrarian brand of conceptual, photography-based art-about-art has so few regional or even national characteristics that it probably belongs at the Met, among all those certified treasures of fifty centuries.

Baldessari has made a career out of upsetting priorities and defying expectations.

“Pure Beauty,” an early work that doubles as the exhibition’s title, consists of those two words, painted by a professional sign painter in black capital letters on an off-white canvas.

When Baldessari had it done, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, he was teaching art at a junior college near his home in National City, California, a working-class town near the Mexican border, and painting in his spare time. His work until then had been fairly traditional—oil paint on canvas, applied with loose, gestural brushstrokes in the Abstract Expressionist manner. “I was getting tired of people saying my art was like Abstract Expressionism,” he told me. “Being in National City, where nobody cared what I was doing, I thought, What if you just give people what they want? People read magazines, and look at photographs, not at Jackson Pollocks.” There was more to it than that, of course. Baldessari is a prodigious reader—art history, novels, philosophy, the Bible, comics—and in those days he subscribed to a dozen international art magazines.

2

“NO IDEAS HAVE ENTERED THIS WORK.”

Overlap Series, 2001

3

What he really decided to give people was his version of conceptual art, in which ideas take precedence over images and the artist’s personal “touch” doesn’t count. In New York, in the mid-sixties, conceptual art had just started to take hold. It was a pretty serious business, severe and theoretical: Joseph Kosuth’s “One and Three Chairs,” an iconic early example, consists of a folding chair placed against a wall, a photograph of the same chair on the wall to one side of it, and a dictionary definition of “chair,” enlarged and hung on the wall to the other side. Baldessari reinvented conceptualism, in his own vein of laid-back, irreverent humor. “Everything Is Purged from This Painting But Art, No Ideas Have Entered This Work,” another of his text paintings proclaims—conceptual art mocking conceptual art. “Don’t do any beautiful calligraphy,” Baldessari had told the sign painter. “I just want this to be information.”

“I’ve often thought of myself as a frustrated writer,” he said last summer, when I spent some time with him in L.A. “I consider a word and an image of equal weight, and a lot of my work comes out of that kind of thinking.” We were visiting his exhibition at lacma, where a good many museumgoers recognized him. Baldessari’s height (six feet seven inches), his shoulder-length white

hair and patriarchal beard, and his wheezy, high-pitched laugh command attention in any setting, but out here he is a landmark presence, a famous artist and art teacher, whose former students proliferate and prosper in New York as well as in L.A. Several of the text paintings were quite funny, and a few actually evoked visual images in the mind. “Baldessari gave conceptual art a visual language,” as Paul Schimmel, the chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A., puts it. The clearest example is his “Semi-Close-Up of Girl by Geranium (Soft View),” from 1966-68, whose text, filling the pale-gray canvas, is lifted from the screenplay for D. W. Griffith’s “Intolerance”: “Finishes Watering It—Examines Plant to See If It Has Any Signs of Growth, Finds Slight Evidence—Smiles— One Part Is Sagging—She Runs Fingers Along It—Raises Hand Over Plant to Encourage It to Grow.” Standing in front of the painting at lacma, Baldessari said, “It’s probably my all-time favorite piece. I just think it’s perfect—very simple, and you can imagine it so easily. David Foster Wallace once said that the duty of the writer is to make the reader feel intelligent, and let them fill in the gaps. I feel that way, too.”

In the same gallery were more early works, most of them dated 1966-68, which combine texts with greatly enlarged photographic images. The

4

photographs, grainy and over- or underexposed shots of locations in National City, had been printed in photo-emulsion on canvas, so they looked just like bad amateur snapshots. Underneath each one, in large, generic capitals, was a text identifying its location: “Econ-O-Wash/14th and Highland/National City Calif.” Baldessari took the pictures, shooting through the window of his car “with the idea that truth is beautiful, no matter how ugly it is.” His wife took one that makes sport of the rule in every photography manual about not posing your subject in front of a tree, because it will look like the tree is growing out of the subject’s head. This picture, which lacma now owns, shows Baldessari standing directly in front of a spindly palm tree, and underneath is a one-word printed text: “wrong.”

After the photo-and-text pictures, Baldessari’s work becomes more complicated and increasingly ambitious, but no less playful. Hearing that Al Held, the New York abstract painter, had said that conceptual art was “just pointing at things,” Baldessari did a series of “Commissioned Paintings”: he took photographs of a friend’s finger pointing at various objects or places around National City, then asked a dozen amateur artists, whose work he had seen at county fairs, to choose one of the photographs and reproduce it in a realistic painting, pointing finger included.

Baldessari has often said that he wants his work to make people stop and look, rather than just take it in passively. In two large galleries devoted to works from the nineteen-seventies, several exhibits stopped me cold. One was “Cremation Project” (1970), a glass-topped cabinet containing three objects: a bronze plaque inscribed “John Anthony Baldessari—May 1953—March 1966,” an urn in the shape of a book, and a notarized affidavit stating that “all works of art done by the undersigned between May 1953 and March 1966 in his possession as of July 24, 1970 were cremated on July 24, 1970 in San Diego, California.” As Baldessari explained to me, his National City studio then was full of unsalable paintings, and his work was headed in a new direction, so it seemed logical to have the early stuff cremated. “I thought about Nietzsche and the eternal return,” he said, “and equating the artist with the ‘body’ of his work, and so forth. The problem was that several local mortuaries refused to cremate paintings. I found one finally, but the guy said we had to do it at night.”

“TRUTH IS BEAUTIFUL, NO MATTER HOW UGLY IT IS.”

5

Yves Saint Laurent Collection, 2014

6

Two opponents (blue and yellow), 2004

7

“I WILL NOT MAKE ANYMORE BORING ART... AND IT’S VERY BORING ISN’T IT?” The second showstopper was “Baldessari Sings LeWitt,” a 1972 video of Baldessari sitting in a chair, very relaxed, reciting each of Sol LeWitt’s thirty-five “Sentences on Conceptual Art” to the tune of a different song—“Some Enchanted Evening” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” among others. LeWitt, an older, New York-based artist whose work Baldessari admired, had agreed to the recital. “Sol was very sweet. I called him up, and he said, ‘Sure, go ahead.’ ” This one is now on YouTube. The third stopper was the video version of “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art,” his best-known work. The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design had invited him to have an exhibition in 1971, but it couldn’t afford to pay shipping or travel costs.

What he proposed, instead, was that any students at the school who felt inclined should come in and write “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art” on a gallery wall, “to redeem themselves, or whatever,” and so many of them did that all the walls were entirely covered. The school subsequently published a lithograph of the phrase, and one of the prints was bought by the Museum of Modern Art. The video version shows Baldessari’s hand as he writes the words, like a penance, for thirteen minutes. “And it’s very boring, isn’t it?” he said, laughing.

The range and complexity of Baldessari’s work over the next thirty years gradually silenced persistent attempts to dismiss him as a joke artist, a mere purveyor of visual one-liners. He produced prints, artist books, installations, films and videos (sometimes featuring his students), and photographic montages whose scale and wall power made them look more and more like paintings. He investigated the use of chance methods, photographing successive attempts to make a straight line or a square by throwing three or four colored balls in the air. He played visual games that involved choosing one out of three green beans (or carrots, or sticks of rhubarb), and he had himself photographed “Hitting Various Objects” from a garbage dump with a golf club. In his cinematic photo-collages of the nineteen-seventies and eighties, film stills advertising B movies or film noirs cohabited with suburban group portraits, landscapes, urban architecture, water sports, mermaids, art history, and surrealist fantasies. Baldessari constructs a vivid, skewed world in which the viewer can either participate or smile and walk away—a world whose complicity with the one we know becomes increasingly perplexed as the exhibition unfolds.

Baldessari once said, regarding his work from the late sixties, “So much of my thinking at that time was trying to figure out just what I thought art was.” And had he figured it out? “Not a clue,” he said, with another big laugh. “Not . . . a . . . clue.”

BALDESSARI: FINAL REFINED

COMMISSIONED PAINTING: A PAINTING BY EDGAR TRANSUE, JOHN BALDESSARI, 1969

THE GODFATHER OF CONCEPTUAL ART

Brain/Cloud (with seascape and palm tree), 2009

THE WORK OF JOHN BALDESSARI

1

BY CALVIN TOMKINS

N

ow that contemporary art has become a global enterprise, we tend to forget that a few pockets of regional difference still exist. In Los Angeles, for example, artists rarely talk about Andy Warhol. Warhol’s shadow hangs heavy over the international art world, but not in L.A., where the most relevant artist of the moment, the seventy-nine-year-old John Baldessari, said recently that he “hadn’t thought about Warhol in forty years.” Baldessari’s endlessly surprising retrospective, which was on view all summer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, comes to New York this month, opening on October 20th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The fact that none of our modern or contemporary museums could find room for it in their schedules suggests a strain of parochialism at work here, too, but who knows? Baldessari’s contrarian brand of conceptual, photography-based art-about-art has so few regional or even national characteristics that it probably belongs at the Met, among all those certified treasures of fifty centuries.

Baldessari has made a career out of upsetting priorities and defying expectations.

“Pure Beauty,” an early work that doubles as the exhibition’s title, consists of those two words, painted by a professional sign painter in black capital letters on an off-white canvas.

When Baldessari had it done, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, he was teaching art at a junior college near his home in National City, California, a working-class town near the Mexican border, and painting in his spare time. His work until then had been fairly traditional—oil paint on canvas, applied with loose, gestural brushstrokes in the Abstract Expressionist manner. “I was getting tired of people saying my art was like Abstract Expressionism,” he told me. “Being in National City, where nobody cared what I was doing, I thought, What if you just give people what they want? People read magazines, and look at photographs, not at Jackson Pollocks.” There was more to it than that, of course. Baldessari is a prodigious reader—art history, novels, philosophy, the Bible, comics—and in those days he subscribed to a dozen international art magazines.

2

Overlap Series, 2001

“NO IDEAS HAVE ENTERED THIS WORK.”

3

What he really decided to give people was his version of conceptual art, in which ideas take precedence over images and the artist’s personal “touch” doesn’t count. In New York, in the mid-sixties, conceptual art had just started to take hold. It was a pretty serious business, severe and theoretical: Joseph Kosuth’s “One and Three Chairs,” an iconic early example, consists of a folding chair placed against a wall, a photograph of the same chair on the wall to one side of it, and a dictionary definition of “chair,” enlarged and hung on the wall to the other side. Baldessari reinvented conceptualism, in his own vein of laid-back, irreverent humor. “Everything Is Purged from This Painting But Art, No Ideas Have Entered This Work,” another of his text paintings proclaims—conceptual art mocking conceptual art. “Don’t do any beautiful calligraphy,” Baldessari had told the sign painter. “I just want this to be information.”

“I’ve often thought of myself as a frustrated writer,” he said last summer, when I spent some time with him in L.A. “I consider a word and an image of equal weight, and a lot of my work comes out of that kind of thinking.” We were visiting his exhibition at lacma, where a good many museumgoers recognized him. Baldessari’s height (six feet seven inches), his shoulder-length white

hair and patriarchal beard, and his wheezy, high-pitched laugh command attention in any setting, but out here he is a landmark presence, a famous artist and art teacher, whose former students proliferate and prosper in New York as well as in L.A. Several of the text paintings were quite funny, and a few actually evoked visual images in the mind. “Baldessari gave conceptual art a visual language,” as Paul Schimmel, the chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A., puts it. The clearest example is his “Semi-Close-Up of Girl by Geranium (Soft View),” from 1966-68, whose text, filling the pale-gray canvas, is lifted from the screenplay for D. W. Griffith’s “Intolerance”: “Finishes Watering It—Examines Plant to See If It Has Any Signs of Growth, Finds Slight Evidence—Smiles— One Part Is Sagging—She Runs Fingers Along It—Raises Hand Over Plant to Encourage It to Grow.” Standing in front of the painting at lacma, Baldessari said, “It’s probably my all-time favorite piece. I just think it’s perfect—very simple, and you can imagine it so easily. David Foster Wallace once said that the duty of the writer is to make the reader feel intelligent, and let them fill in the gaps. I feel that way, too.”

In the same gallery were more early works, most of them dated 1966-68, which combine texts with greatly enlarged photographic images. The

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photographs, grainy and over- or underexposed shots of locations in National City, had been printed in photo-emulsion on canvas, so they looked just like bad amateur snapshots. Underneath each one, in large, generic capitals, was a text identifying its location: “Econ-O-Wash/14th and Highland/National City Calif.” Baldessari took the pictures, shooting through the window of his car “with the idea that truth is beautiful, no matter how ugly it is.” His wife took one that makes sport of the rule in every photography manual about not posing your subject in front of a tree, because it will look like the tree is growing out of the subject’s head. This picture, which lacma now owns, shows Baldessari standing directly in front of a spindly palm tree, and underneath is a one-word printed text: “wrong.”

After the photo-and-text pictures, Baldessari’s work becomes more complicated and increasingly ambitious, but no less playful. Hearing that Al Held, the New York abstract painter, had said that conceptual art was “just pointing at things,” Baldessari did a series of “Commissioned Paintings”: he took photographs of a friend’s finger pointing at various objects or places around National City, then asked a dozen amateur artists, whose work he had seen at county fairs, to choose one of the photographs and reproduce it in a realistic painting, pointing finger included.

Baldessari has often said that he wants his work to make people stop and look, rather than just take it in passively. In two large galleries devoted to works from the nineteen-seventies, several exhibits stopped me cold. One was “Cremation Project” (1970), a glass-topped cabinet containing three objects: a bronze plaque inscribed “John Anthony Baldessari—May 1953—March 1966,” an urn in the shape of a book, and a notarized affidavit stating that “all works of art done by the undersigned between May 1953 and March 1966 in his possession as of July 24, 1970 were cremated on July 24, 1970 in San Diego, California.” As Baldessari explained to me, his National City studio then was full of unsalable paintings, and his work was headed in a new direction, so it seemed logical to have the early stuff cremated. “I thought about Nietzsche and the eternal return,” he said, “and equating the artist with the ‘body’ of his work, and so forth. The problem was that several local mortuaries refused to cremate paintings. I found one finally, but the guy said we had to do it at night.”

“TRUTH IS BEAUTIFUL, NO MATTER HOW UGLY IT IS.”

Yves Saint Laurent Collection, 2014

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Two opponents (blue and yellow), 2004

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“I WILL NOT MAKE ANYMORE BORING ART... AND IT’S VERY BORING ISN’T IT?” The second showstopper was “Baldessari Sings LeWitt,” a 1972 video of Baldessari sitting in a chair, very relaxed, reciting each of Sol LeWitt’s thirty-five “Sentences on Conceptual Art” to the tune of a different song—“Some Enchanted Evening” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” among others. LeWitt, an older, New York-based artist whose work Baldessari admired, had agreed to the recital. “Sol was very sweet. I called him up, and he said, ‘Sure, go ahead.’ ” This one is now on YouTube. The third stopper was the video version of “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art,” his best-known work. The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design had invited him to have an exhibition in 1971, but it couldn’t afford to pay shipping or travel costs.

What he proposed, instead, was that any students at the school who felt inclined should come in and write “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art” on a gallery wall, “to redeem themselves, or whatever,” and so many of them did that all the walls were entirely covered. The school subsequently published a lithograph of the phrase, and one of the prints was bought by the Museum of Modern Art. The video version shows Baldessari’s hand as he writes the words, like a penance, for thirteen minutes. “And it’s very boring, isn’t it?” he said, laughing.

The range and complexity of Baldessari’s work over the next thirty years gradually silenced persistent attempts to dismiss him as a joke artist, a mere purveyor of visual one-liners. He produced prints, artist books, installations, films and videos (sometimes featuring his students), and photographic montages whose scale and wall power made them look more and more like paintings. He investigated the use of chance methods, photographing successive attempts to make a straight line or a square by throwing three or four colored balls in the air. He played visual games that involved choosing one out of three green beans (or carrots, or sticks of rhubarb), and he had himself photographed “Hitting Various Objects” from a garbage dump with a golf club. In his cinematic photo-collages of the nineteen-seventies and eighties, film stills advertising B movies or film noirs cohabited with suburban group portraits, landscapes, urban architecture, water sports, mermaids, art history, and surrealist fantasies. Baldessari constructs a vivid, skewed world in which the viewer can either participate or smile and walk away—a world whose complicity with the one we know becomes increasingly perplexed as the exhibition unfolds.

Baldessari once said, regarding his work from the late sixties, “So much of my thinking at that time was trying to figure out just what I thought art was.” And had he figured it out? “Not a clue,” he said, with another big laugh. “Not . . . a . . . clue.”

10 MAGAZINE COVERS

COMMISSIONED PAINTING: A PAINTING BY EDGAR TRANSUE, JOHN BALDESSARI, 1969

Defining the Abstract ISSUE No. 01

Defining the Abstract ISSUE No. 01

Defining the Abstract ISSUE No. 01

Defining the Abstract ISSUE No. 01

With features on: John Baldessari Jean-Luc Godard and an essay by Susan Sontag

Defining the Abstract ISSUE No. 01

Defining the Abstract ISSUE No. 01

ISSUE No. 01 Defining the Abstract

Defining the Abstract ISSUE No. 01

With features on: John Baldessari Jean-Luc Godard and an essay by Susan Sontag

Defining the Abstract ISSUE No. 01

Defining the Abstract ISSUE No. 01

COVERS REFINED

COMMISSIONED PAINTING: A PAINTING BY EDGAR TRANSUE, JOHN BALDESSARI, 1969

Defining the Abstract ISSUE No. 03 Spring ‘17

Defining the Abstract ISSUE No. 03 Spring ‘17

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Defining the Abstract

ISSUE No. 03

Spring ‘17

GODARD: 3 DESIGN DIRECTIONS

COMMISSIONED PAINTING: A PAINTING BY EDGAR TRANSUE, JOHN BALDESSARI, 1969

8

FRENCH THE MOVIES OF JEAN-LUC GODARD

by Jason Ankeny

H

9

NEW

10

“THE MOST INFLUENTIAL FRENCH FILMMAKER OF THE POSTWAR ERA.”

As a charter member of the Nouvelle Vague, Jean-Luc Godard was also arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the postwar era. Beginning with his groundbreaking 1959 feature debut A Bout de Souffle, Godard revolutionized the motion picture form, freeing the medium from the shackles of its long-accepted cinematic language by rewriting the rules of narrative, continuity, sound, and camera work. Later in his career, he also challenged the common means of feature production, distribution, and exhibition, all in an effort to subvert the conventions of the Hollywood formula to create a new kind of film.

Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930, the second of four children. After receiving his primary education in Nyon, Switzerland, he studied ethnology at the Sorbonne, but spent the vast majority of his days at the Cine-Club du Quartier Latin, where he first met fellow film fanatics Francois Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. In May 1950, the three men united to publish La Gazette du Cinema, a monthly film journal which ran through November of the same year; here Godard printed his first critical pieces, which appeared both under his own name and under the pseudonym Hans Lucas. With Rivette’s 1950 short feature Quadrille, Godard made his acting debut, also appearing in Eric Rohmer’s Presentation ou Charlotte et son Steack the following year.

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3

11

2

4

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1. Breathless, 1960 2. Breathless, 1960 3. Masculin Féminin, 1966 4. Masculin Féminin, 1966 5. Vivre Sa Vie, 1962

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In January 1952, Godard began writing for Cahiers du Cinema, the massively influential film magazine. However, Godard’s first tenure at Cahiers proved to be brief: In the autumn of 1952, he left France to return to Switzerland, where he worked on the construction of the Grande-Dixence Dam. With his earnings, Godard was able to finance his first film, the short subject Operation Beton.

While in Geneva in 1955, he helmed his sophomore effort, the ten-minute Une Femme Coquette, subsequently appearing in Rivette’s Le Coup de Berger. Upon returning to France in the summer of 1956, Godard resumed his work at Cahiers after a four-year break from writing. There he rose to the top ranks of French film criticism while honing his increasingly fresh and freewheeling directorial style over the course of the short comedies Tous les Garcons s’appellent Patrick (1957), Charlotte et son Jules, and Une Histoire d’Eau (both 1958).

In 1959, Godard embarked on his feature debut, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless).

Released at roughly the same time as Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, the picture helped establish the emergence of what was dubbed the French New Wave, a revolutionary movement in film heralded primarily by Cahiers alumni. A Bout de Souffle quickly earned global acclaim as the definitive document of its era. Seemingly overnight, Godard was revered as the most important cinematic talent of his generation.

In 1960, he resurfaced with his second feature, an oddball political thriller titled Le Petit Soldat. The first of many films to star his then-wife Anna Karina, it became the subject of controversy over its characters’ connection to the Algerian crisis and was banned in France for three years. Shooting for the first time in color and in CinemaScope, he next filmed 1961’s comic tale Une Femme Est une Femme, followed a year later by the episodic essay on prostitution Vivre Se Vie. Again, both starred Karina, prompting criticism that Godard was using her as a non-actress, a mere screen presence utilized and manipulated in ways that she herself did not fully comprehend.

The first of Godard’s films to receive a critical thrashing was 1963’s war drama Les Carabiniers, but Le Mepris, a study of the nature of cinema itself, starring Brigitte Bardot, returned him to reviewers’ good graces. An astonishingly prolific and brilliant period followed, led off by 1964’s Bande a Part and Une Femme Mariee. Pierrot le Fou and Alphaville, une Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution, a singular science fiction effort, appeared in 1965, and a year later no less than three new features -- Masculin Feminin, Made in USA, and Deux ou Trois Choses Que Je Sais d’Elle -- bowed. Godard repeated the trifecta in 1967 with La Chinoise, ou Plutot a la Chinoise, Loin du Viet-Nam, and finally the apocalyptic Weekend, his most formally radical film since A Bout de Souffle.

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6. Le Mepris, 1963 7. Pierre Le Fou, 1965 8. Le Mepris, 1963 9. Le Mepris, 1963 10. Pierre Le Fou, 1965

8

THE MOVIES OF JEAN-LUC GODARD

by Jason Ankeny

Le Mepris, 1963

9

10

As of the Nouvelle Vague, Jean-Luc Godar the most influential French filmmaker of ginning with his groundbreaking 1959 f de Souffle, Godard revolutionized the m freeing the medium from the shackles cinematic language by rewriting the rul tinuity, sound, and camera work. Later i challenged the common means of featur bution, and exhibition, all in an effort to tions of the Hollywood formula to create God is on December 3, 1930, the second of receiving his primary education in Nyon, ied ethnology at the Sorbonne, but spent his days at the Cine-Club du Quartier Lat fellow film fanatics Francois Truffaut an May 1950, the three men united to publish ma, a monthly film journal which ran thro same year; here Godard printed his first c appeared both under his own name and u Hans Lucas. With Rivette’s 1950 short fea ard made his acting debut, also appearin Presentation ou Charlotte et son Steack

Pierre Le Fou, 1965

Le Mepris, 1963

11

Weekend, 1967

a charter member rd was also arguably f the postwar era. Befeature debut A Bout motion picture form, of its long-accepted les of narrative, conin his career, he also re production, distrio subvert the convene a new kind of film. dard was born in Parf four children. After Switzerland, he studt the vast majority of tin, where he first met nd Jacques Rivette. In h La Gazette du Cineough November of the critical pieces, which under the pseudonym ature Quadrille, Godng in Eric Rohmer’s k the following year.

Pierre Le Fou, 1965

12

Vivre Sa Vie, 1962

“RADICAL FILM.”

Breathless, 1960

In January 1952, Godard began writing for Cahiers du Cinema, the massively influential film magazine. However, Godard’s first tenure at Cahiers proved to be brief: In the autumn of 1952, he left France to return to Switzerland, where he worked on the construction of the Grande-Dixence Dam. With his earnings, Godard was able to finance his first film, the short subject Operation Beton.

While in Geneva in 1955, he helmed his sophomore effort, the ten-minute Une Femme Coquette, subsequently appearing in Rivette’s Le Coup de Berger. Upon returning to France in the summer of 1956, Godard resumed his work at Cahiers after a four-year break from writing. There he rose to the top ranks of French film criticism while honing his increasingly fresh and freewheeling directorial style over the course of the short comedies Tous les Garcons s’appellent Patrick (1957), Charlotte et son Jules, and Une Histoire d’Eau (both 1958).

In 1959, Godard embarked on his feature debut, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless).

Released at roughly the same time as Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, the picture helped establish the emergence of what was dubbed the French New Wave, a revolutionary movement in film heralded primarily by Cahiers alumni. A Bout de Souffle quickly earned global acclaim as the definitive document of its era. Seemingly overnight, Godard was revered as the most important cinematic talent of his generation.

In 1960, he resurfaced with his second feature, an oddball political thriller titled Le Petit Soldat. The first of many films to star his then-wife Anna Karina, it became the subject of controversy over its characters’ connection to the Algerian crisis and was banned in France for three years. Shooting for the first time in color and in CinemaScope, he next filmed 1961’s comic tale Une Femme Est une Femme, followed a year later by the episodic essay on prostitution Vivre Se Vie. Again, both starred Karina, prompting criticism that Godard was using her as a non-actress, a mere screen presence utilized and manipulated in ways that she herself did not fully comprehend.

The first of Godard’s films to receive a critical thrashing was 1963’s war drama Les Carabiniers, but Le Mepris, a study of the nature of cinema itself, starring Brigitte Bardot, returned him to reviewers’ good graces. An astonishingly prolific and brilliant period followed, led off by 1964’s Bande a Part and Une Femme Mariee. Pierrot le Fou and Alphaville, une Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution, a singular science fiction effort, appeared in 1965, and a year later no less than three new features -- Masculin Feminin, Made in USA, and Deux ou Trois Choses Que Je Sais d’Elle -- bowed. Godard repeated the trifecta in 1967 with La Chinoise, ou Plutot a la Chinoise, Loin du Viet-Nam, and finally the apocalyptic Weekend, his most formally radical film since A Bout de Souffle.

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Masculin Féminin, 1966

8

9

THE MOVIES OF JEAN-LUC GODARD

by Jason Ankeny

10

11

“THE MOST INFLUENTIAL FRENCH FILMMAKER OF THE POSTWAR ERA.”

As a charter member of the Nouvelle Vague, Jean-Luc Godard was also arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the postwar era. Beginning with his groundbreaking 1959 feature debut A Bout de Souffle, Godard revolutionized the motion picture form, freeing the medium from the shackles of its long-accepted cinematic language by rewriting the rules of narrative, continuity, sound, and camera work. Later in his career, he also challenged the common means of feature production, distribution, and exhibition, all in an effort to subvert the conventions of the Hollywood formula to create a new kind of film.

Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930, the second of four children. After receiving his primary education in Nyon, Switzerland, he studied ethnology at the Sorbonne, but spent the vast majority of his days at the Cine-Club du Quartier Latin, where he first met fellow film fanatics Francois Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. In May 1950, the three men united to publish La Gazette du Cinema, a monthly film journal which ran through November of the same year; here Godard printed his first critical pieces, which appeared both under his own name and under the pseudonym Hans Lucas. With Rivette’s 1950 short feature Quadrille, Godard made his acting debut, also appearing in Eric Rohmer’s Presentation ou Charlotte et son Steack the following year.

12

In January 1952, Godard began writing for Cahiers du Cinema, the massively influential film magazine. However, Godard’s first tenure at Cahiers proved to be brief: In the autumn of 1952, he left France to return to Switzerland, where he worked on the construction of the Grande-Dixence Dam. With his earnings, Godard was able to finance his first film, the short subject Operation Beton.

While in Geneva in 1955, he helmed his sophomore effort, the ten-minute Une Femme Coquette, subsequently appearing in Rivette’s Le Coup de Berger. Upon returning to France in the summer of 1956, Godard resumed his work at Cahiers after a four-year break from writing. There he rose to the top ranks of French film criticism while honing his increasingly fresh and freewheeling directorial style over the course of the short comedies Tous les Garcons s’appellent Patrick (1957), Charlotte et son Jules, and Une Histoire d’Eau (both 1958).

In 1959, Godard embarked on his feature debut, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless).

Released at roughly the same time as Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, the picture helped establish the emergence of what was dubbed the French New Wave, a revolutionary movement in film heralded primarily by Cahiers alumni. A Bout de Souffle quickly earned global acclaim as the definitive document of its era. Seemingly overnight, Godard was revered as the most important cinematic talent of his generation.

In 1960, he resurfaced with his second feature, an oddball political thriller titled Le Petit Soldat. The first of many films to star his then-wife Anna Karina, it became the subject of controversy over its characters’ connection to the Algerian crisis and was banned in France for three years. Shooting for the first time in color and in CinemaScope, he next filmed 1961’s comic tale Une Femme Est une Femme, followed a year later by the episodic essay on prostitution Vivre Se Vie. Again, both starred Karina, prompting criticism that Godard was using her as a non-actress, a mere screen presence utilized and manipulated in ways that she herself did not fully comprehend.

13

14

15

The first of Godard’s films to receive a critical thrashing was 1963’s war drama Les Carabiniers, but Le Mepris, a study of the nature of cinema itself, starring Brigitte Bardot, returned him to reviewers’ good graces. An astonishingly prolific and brilliant period followed, led off by 1964’s Bande a Part and Une Femme Mariee. Pierrot le Fou and Alphaville, une Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution, a singular science fiction effort, appeared in 1965, and a year later no less than three new features -- Masculin Feminin, Made in USA, and Deux ou Trois Choses Que Je Sais d’Elle -- bowed. Godard repeated the trifecta in 1967 with La Chinoise, ou Plutot a la Chinoise, Loin du Viet-Nam, and finally the apocalyptic Weekend, his most formally radical film since A Bout de Souffle.

GODARD: 2 DESIGN DIRECTIONS

COMMISSIONED PAINTING: A PAINTING BY EDGAR TRANSUE, JOHN BALDESSARI, 1969

8

FRENCH

THE MOVIES OF JEAN-LUC GODA

by Jason Ankeny

H

ARD

9

NEW

10

“THIS DIRECTOR WAS REINVENTING CINEMA.”

In the American cinephile circles of the 1960s, each new film from the French director Jean-Luc Godard was an event. Vital film critics like Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael and public intellectuals like Susan Sontag weighed in, creating a near-constant colloquy on how this director was reinventing cinema. The buzz and argument were equally fevered in Paris, Mr. Godard’s home at the time.

But Anna Karina, the Danish-born model turned actress who during this period was Mr. Godard’s muse, leading lady and wife — one of the screen’s great beauties and an enduring symbol of the French New Wave — doesn’t recollect the hype or intellectual foment. Reminiscing about working with Mr. Godard, she largely remembers freedom and fun.

“We did not see ourselves as remaking cinema at the time, at least not in my view,” Ms. Karina, now 75, said, speaking in English by phone from Los Angeles. “Myself and the other actors were not part of the industry; we weren’t inside the star system. We were running around, shooting in the streets, hiding behind trees to do our makeup. It was a very simple way of working.”

When he was a critic in the 1950s, Mr. Godard wrote, “The cinema does not query the beauty of a woman, it only doubts her heart, records her perfidy” and “sees only her movements.”

Masculin Féminin, 1966

Vivre Sa Vie, 1962

Masculin Féminin, 1966

Breathless, 1960

Breathless, 1960

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“IN JEAN-LUC’S MOVIES, YOU WERE DOING EVERYTHING AT ONCE.”

Le Mepris, 1963

Le Mepris, 1963

In “Le Petit film together (although its release w al years by French censors), she was ary as object of desire. In “A Woma she was a stripper flirting with dom Vie,” Ms. Karina played a desulto into streetwalking on the way to

“Band of Ou naïve, coquettish but clever, with a “Alphaville,” she was a robotic wom introduced to love via poetry by the stantine. For their final collaborations soon-to-be-ex-wife a femme fatale. (T In “Pierrot Le Fou,” she seduces an Paul Belmondo, and in “Made in U.S es the trench-coated noir antihero, lea

“We appreciat doing was different through the way physically,” she said on the phone. movies, a character will make an entr a cigarette, sit down, have a drink. In were doing everything at once, and so shut the door all the way. Sometimes light on first try. You were alway

13

Pierre Le Fou, 1965

Weekend, 1967

t Soldat,” their first was held up for severs the young revolutionan Is a Woman” (1961) mesticity. In “Vivre Sa ory beauty who drifts o cinematic sainthood. utsiders” saw her as streak of mischief. In man of the bleak future, tough guy Eddie Cons, Mr. Godard made his They divorced in 1965.) nd double-crosses JeanS.A.” she gender-reversaving a trail of corpses. ted that what we were y Jean-Luc directed us, . “In older Hollywood rance, close a door, light Jean-Luc’s movies, you ometimes you wouldn’t your cigarette wouldn’t ys moving through the

14

WEEKEND, 1967

PIERRE LE FOU, 1965

LE MEPRIS, 1963

15

“IT’S A FANTASTIC GIFT HE GAVE TO ME.”

scene in an active way that was more like being than acting.”

While Mr. Godard never worked from a standard script, Ms. Karina insisted that the actors were not improvising. “He would come in with prepared texts for us, which we rehearsed, and were required to say as he presented to us.” She added: “The only thing I can recall being allowed to improvise was the little singsong ‘I don’t know what to do’ chant in ‘Pierrot Le Fou.’ Which I came up with because I literally did not know what to do!”

The Godard-Karina relationship was famously tumultuous. She told a dizzying story of the pair’s embarking on an impromptu road trip to the South of France: “Maybe I didn’t understand Jean-Luc exactly. There I was thinking we’d have a nice holiday in the South of France; about 200 kilometers in, I look at him and say, ‘You’re not happy.’ And he says, ‘I’m not unhappy, I’m just a little disappointed, I canceled a meeting with Truffaut in Paris.’ So he turns back. And after 100 kilometers, he looks at me and says ‘You’re not happy,’ and he turns around again. And so it goes.”

Ms. Karina seems to regard her work with Mr. Godard with pride and affection. “It’s very touching, wherever I go, to see very young people come to the films, whether in Japan or South Korea or the United States or France,” she said.

“The films feel like they are not old, or old fashioned; they still feel fresh and touch people. It’s a fantastic gift he gave to me.”

ALPHA VILLE, 1965

8

THE MOVIES OF JEAN-LUC GODARD

Le Mepris, 1963

by Jason Ankeny

9

10

WEEKEND, 1967

PIERRE LE FOU, 1965

LE MEPRIS, 1963

11

“THE CINEMA DOES NOT QUERY THE BEAUTY OF A WOMAN IT ONLY DOUBTS HER HEART, RECORDS HER PERFIDY, AND SEES ONLY HER MOVEMENTS.”

In the American cinephile circles of the 1960s, each new film from the French director Jean-Luc Godard was an event.

Vital film critics like Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael and public intellectuals like Susan Sontag weighed in, creating a near-constant colloquy on how this director was reinventing cinema. The buzz and argument were equally fevered in Paris, Mr. Godard’s home at the time.

But Anna Karina, the Danish-born model turned actress who during this period was Mr. Godard’s muse, leading lady and wife — one of the screen’s great beauties and an enduring symbol of the French New Wave — doesn’t recollect the hype or intellectual foment. Reminiscing about working with Mr. Godard, she largely remembers freedom and fun.

“We did not see ourselves as remaking cinema at the time, at least not in my view,” Ms. Karina, now 75, said, speaking in English by phone from Los Angeles. “Myself and the other actors were not part of the industry; we weren’t inside the star system. We were running around, shooting in the streets, hiding behind trees to do our makeup. It was a very simple way of working.”

When he was a critic in the 1950s, Mr. Godard wrote, “The cinema does not query the beauty of a woman, it only doubts her heart, records her perfidy” and “sees only her movements.”

In “Le Petit Soldat,” their first film together (although its release was held up for several years by French censors), she was the young revolutionary as object of desire. In “A Woman Is a Woman” (1961) she was a stripper flirting with domesticity. In “Vivre Sa Vie,” Ms. Karina played a desultory beauty who drifts into streetwalking on the way to cinematic sainthood.

“Band of Outsiders” saw her as naïve, coquettish but clever, with a streak of mischief. In “Alphaville,” she was a robotic woman of the bleak future, introduced to love via poetry by the tough guy Eddie Constantine. For their final collaborations, Mr. Godard made his soon-to-beex-wife a femme fatale. (They divorced in 1965.) In “Pierrot Le Fou,” she seduces and double-crosses Jean-Paul Belmondo, and in “Made in U.S.A.” she gender-reverses the trench-coated noir antihero, leaving a trail of corpses.

ALPHA VILLE, 1965

12

“We appreciated that what we were doing was different through the way Jean-Luc directed us, physically,” she said on the phone. “In older Hollywood movies, a character will make an entrance, close a door, light a cigarette, sit down, have a drink. In Jean-Luc’s movies, you were doing everything at once, and sometimes you wouldn’t shut the door all the way. Sometimes your cigarette wouldn’t light on first try. You were always moving through the scene in an active way that was more like being than acting.”

While Mr. Godard never worked from a standard script, Ms. Karina insisted that the actors were not improvising. “He would come in with prepared texts for us, which we rehearsed, and were required to say as he presented to us.” She added: “The only thing I can recall being allowed to improvise was the little singsong ‘I don’t know what to do’ chant in ‘Pierrot Le Fou.’ Which I came up with because I literally did not know what to do!”

The Godard-Karina relationship was famously tumultuous. She told a dizzying story of the pair’s embarking on an impromptu road trip to the South of France: “Maybe I didn’t understand Jean-Luc exactly. There I was thinking we’d have a nice holiday in the South of France; about 200 kilometers in, I look at him and say, ‘You’re not happy.’ And he says, ‘I’m not unhappy, I’m just a little disappointed, I canceled a meeting with Truffaut in Paris.’ So he turns back. And after 100 kilometers, he looks at me and says ‘You’re not happy,’ and he turns around again. And so it goes.”

Ms. Karina seems to regard her work with Mr. Godard with pride and affection. “It’s very touching, wherever I go, to see very young people come to the films, whether in Japan or South Korea or the United States or France,” she said. “The films feel like they are not old, or old fashioned; they still feel fresh and touch people. It’s a fantastic gift he gave to me.”

LE MEPRIS, 1963

“THE FILMS FEEL LIKE NOT OLD, OR OLD FAS THEY STILL FEEL FRES TOUCH PEOPLE.”

VIVRE SA VIE, 1962

13

E THEY ARE SHIONED; SH AND

BREATHLESS, 1960

MASCULIN FEMININ, 1966

SONTAG: 3 DESIGN DIRECTIONS

COMMISSIONED PAINTING: A PAINTING BY EDGAR TRANSUE, JOHN BALDESSARI, 1969

ON PHOTOGRAPHY

a

an exerpt Plato’s cave by Susan Sontag

Wall Street, Paul Strand, 1915

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.

They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images. ▬ To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich.

But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. ▬ To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. ▬ Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out.

They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. ▬ For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. Since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the

book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. ▬ Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects.

Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. ▬ While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression. ▬ Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. ▬ That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

ON PHOTOGRAPHY 13

an exerpt Plato’s cave by Susan Sontag

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images.

To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King's Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard's gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power.

A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.

Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; pub-

lishers compile them.

For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker's film, Si j'avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books.

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual pho-

“PHOTOGRAPHS REALLY ARE EX THE CAMERA IS THE IDEAL ARM ACQUISITIVE MOOD.”

14

Hand and Wheel, Alfred Stieglitz, 1933

XPERIENCE CAPTURED, AND M OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN ITS

tographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects.

Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something "out there," just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life.

While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject's face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography's "message," its aggression.

Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography's glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.

That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

13

ON PHOTO

OGRAPHY

14

an exerpt Plato’s cave Susan Sontag

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images.

To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power.

A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.

Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them.

Dali with Rhinocerous, Philippe Halsman, 1956

“PHOTOGRAPHS REALLY ARE EXPERIENCE CAPTURED, AND THE CAMERA IS THE IDEAL ARM OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN ITS ACQUISITIVE MOOD.” For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and

more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books.

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects.

Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life.

While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression.

Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.

That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.