John Baldessari at Sprüth Magers

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The text's irrelation performs the poetic fissure lamely, mechanically, i.e. Baldessari's engineered breakage of logical closure, conclusion. The space we rush to fill with guesses, the INTERPRETATION of art, that interminable precursor to MEANING. The poetic is the process for staging these interpretive fissures, founts for guessing, which Baldessari's plain creation of feels like a corpse made to dance. That dullness feels a point.


Also these look a lot like Vern Blosum at Kunsthalle Bern and see too: John Baldessari at Marian Goodman

“Play” at Tanya Leighton

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By bringing the others under Cesarco's distancing, they too have their discrepancy become a loss. The mismatched image/text of a Baldessari become numb, a Louise Lawler photograph no longer feels critical but sentimental, and Steinbach's rhetorical question floats with lost meaning, everything like dark ships passing in the night.

John Baldessari at Marian Goodman

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Baldessari's career spent on a dismantling mockery of art's formal givens, puppeteering its dumbified literal versions, removing the protective aura of seriousness so a skepticism could seep into it cracks, paving the way for today's boorish Pop conceptualism.
Here focused on dissonant image/text relations, including a PR that may or may not correspond the exhibition on view, leaves a viewer floundering to connect the basic formality of art: that the text relate. That we still find this Baldessarian gimmick relevant 800 exhibitions later, sometimes even comically worth it, even when unable to ascertain its intentionality, shows how strong this base impulse is ingrained.

See too : Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza , Vern Blosum at Kunsthalle Bern , Mitchell Syrop at Midway Contemporary Art