"Everybody knows a different world, and only part of it. We communicate only by chance, as nobody knows the whole, only where overlapping takes place."
Boldly concealing faces and forms with vibrant vinyl paint, John Baldessari’s Source from 1987 epitomizes the artist’s acclaimed visual language and satirical sentiment which defined his nearly seven decades-long career. Through the appropriation and manipulation of found imagery, Baldessari challenges common pictorial codes that denote class, social hierarchies, and rank. By defacing the figures and deleting artworks from their elaborate frames, the artist renders each individual and artwork anonymous, thus drawing attention to body language and dress, indicators of identity, meaning, and class. Indeed, Source is rich with irony, mimicking the very presentation of the works which the artist has graphically blocked out. Describing the defacement of the 1987 works, John Miller writes, “...This gesture allegorizes how the path of the artwork into the world and into history (pace Marcel Duchamp and Maurice Blanchot) effaces the artist’s personal attachment to it. This includes definition of meaning as well as ownership.” (John Mitchell, “John Baldessari,” Artforum, March 1988, vol. 26, no. 7, p. 135) With a strong Duchampian sentiment, Source brilliantly alters a readily available resource of mass culture, yielding new perspectives and configurations of meaning.
Assembled from photos, film stills, books and other ephemera that the artist dutifully collected over the years, John Baldessari's photoworks emerge as visual non-sequiturs. In the early 1980s, Baldessari began to block out the faces of the people featured in his images with painted discs in primary colors, reminiscent of enlarged benday dots. In so doing, the artist divested the images of their singularity and invested them with symbolic meaning. Cryptic and comical, the juxtaposition of paint and image defy ready interpretation, leaving the viewer to ruminate over evasive interpretations. For Baldessari, the solution to these visual puzzles is never absolute, but derives from the manifold experiences and associations that each viewer uniquely brings to the work. As the artist explains, "everybody knows a different world, and only part of it. We communicate only by chance, as nobody knows the whole, only where overlapping takes place." (the artist cited in: Exh. Cat. Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, John Baldessari, March 1990 - February 1992, p. 11)
"By the mid-1980s Baldessari adopted the technique of concealing a face by placing a colored dot over it... the images were instantaneously rendered powerless... [and] recognizable people were converted to anonymous 'types'. This technique simultaneously flattened the image and emphasized the illusion of the scene. By obscuring a face... Baldessari was able to erase individuality and transform a specific person into a secure object."
Baldessari, who likened his use of images to certain literary techniques, builds meaning through juxtaposition and structure rather than through a fluidly predictable narrative. The dramatic stills he uses in works such as Source have been excerpted from their original context and recast in a new configuration. Outlined by Tracey Bashkoff, "By the mid-1980s Baldessari adopted the technique of concealing a face by placing a colored dot over it... the images were instantaneously rendered powerless... [and] recognizable people were converted to anonymous 'types'. This technique simultaneously flattened the image and emphasized the illusion of the scene. By obscuring a face... Baldessari was able to erase individuality and transform a specific person into a secure object." (Tracey Bashkoff in: Exh. Cat., Berlin, Deutsche Guggenheim, John Baldessari: Somewhere Between Almost Right And Not Quite (With Orange), 2004, p. 24-25)
Source encourages multiple readings from a piecing together of image fragments and subjective interpretation. Like fragmented visual poetry, the works operate on various levels, ranging from the symbolic to the literal. “…[Baldessari] takes away the thing that's most obvious in the center of your vision, forces you to look at everything else, almost for the first time, to make new sense of what you're seeing” (Michael Govan quoted in: Susan Stamberg, “For John Baldessari, Conceptual Art Means Mischief,” NPR, 11 March 2013, (online)) Source suggests its own code to be deciphered, yet at the same time, resists any ready determination. It is a playful game on our unconscious, a stunning representation of semantics which captivates the mind.
