COMMENTARY : The Resurrection of John Baldessari : Why is the Southland artist bigger everywhere else than here?: Assessing his career on the eve of a major MOCA retrospective

In 1970, the same year John Baldessari settled into the book-lined studio he still occupies today, his work was the subject of a one-person exhibition at the old Eugenia Butler Gallery. The aspirations for that particular event are unrecorded, but the moment of his arrival in Los Angeles is worth pondering nonetheless. For today, Baldessari’s career is the subject of the most eagerly anticipated museum retrospective to be mounted for any American artist this year.

A sprawling exhibition of nearly 100 works, dating from 1967 to 1990, the show opens next Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, following two days of previews. From there, the assembly will travel to five other important museums, including Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center and New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. The two-year tour would be the envy of any artist.

At 59, this pioneer in the uses of photography in Conceptual art has accumulated a compelling body of work that ranks among the finest of his generation. Through more than two decades of committed teaching, he also has been the most influential pedagogue since Hans Hoffmann opened his legendary New York school in 1933. The retrospective, in addition to its insights, will likely be something of a victory tour.

Looking back to the moment John Baldessari settled into Santa Monica, the likelihood of all this well-deserved fanfare seems rather dim. Remember the 1970s? If, for postwar American culture, the ‘50s had been cast as the equivalent of classical Greece and the ‘60s decadent Rome, then the ‘70s were its oppressively Dark Ages.

Strong and important art certainly was being made. But, somehow, it seemed the culture was being Balkanized, shredded into a thousand mutually exclusive bits. Bleakly confusing and emotionally draining, the era effectively concealed a strong underground current, fueled by hard-won artistic gains, which would suddenly erupt in the dizzying rebirth of the 1980s.

Baldessari’s art has been central to that trajectory. In the late ‘60s it helped set the stage. Throughout the ‘70s it kept the underground current buzzing. And in the early ‘80s it came gloriously into its own.

Baldessari’s 1970 exhibition at Eugenia Butler was his second solo show in Los Angeles. The first had come two years earlier, at Molly Barnes Gallery, even before the 38-year-old transplant from the San Diego suburb of National City had made the decision to pack up and move 125 miles to the north.

In the wake of L.A.’s first flush as a lively artistic center, he had accepted a teaching post at a new, interdisciplinary school called the California Institute of the Arts. An avid teacher, he knew the job would support him when the sale of his own art probably wouldn’t. But something went awry in the seemingly rosy scenario. Six long years would pass before Baldessari had another one-person gallery show in the city that had become his home. And eight more years would drag by before the next.

It isn’t that Baldessari was sitting idle during that difficult decade. Nor were the insightful (and often slyly funny) works of art he produced being widely disdained. In fact, it was quite the other way around.

A perusal of his exhibition history between 1970 and 1983 reveals more than 50 solo shows--in Dusseldorf, Brussels, Milan, London, Amsterdam, New York, Paris, Basel, Sydney, Houston, Munich, Chicago and elsewhere--at an array of galleries and museums spanning the upstart and the long celebrated. Together with a number of Americans and Europeans, Baldessari had emerged as an artist pivotal to the development of Conceptual art. Employing materials that ranged from the mundane (cardboard, photographic snapshots, pencil, graph paper and other items more common to the graphic-display table than the easel) to the latest in available technology (the new, portable video camera), this was an art that meant to emphasize the liberating quality of ideas over the preciousness of material objects.

A loopy kind of logic had governed Baldessari’s mature artistic path, which effectively required nothing less than the building of an aesthetic from scratch. His earliest important work, made in San Diego in 1967-68 and shown at Molly Barnes, went about the philosophical business of examining just what that peculiar thing called a painting might be. Trained as a painter in the heady years of gestural abstraction, and suddenly shook up by the explosive upheavals of Pop and Minimal art, he’d been at it for some 15 years before he finally got around to taking serious stock of the very activity in which he had been so long engaged.

His first task in this self-reflective procedure was simply to shake off the stifling, hidebound limitations of the established genre. Formalism was the spur.

The ruling aesthetic doctrine of the triumphant postwar era, formalism insisted that great modern paintings were great because, in progressively more refined ways, they forthrightly declared the unique properties of their own medium. Paintings--consisting simply of a flat surface marked with paint and affixed to the wall--embodied things that sculpture, music, theater and dance didn’t.

Formalists were convinced of the painter’s obligation to entrench his art within its own formal area of competence. Baldessari towed that party line in his newly self-reflective mode--albeit in wickedly subversive ways that undermined the doctrine’s very rhetoric. Looked at coldly, as if seen by some extraterrestrial who had never encountered one before, a painting is but a piece of dirty cloth that, for a host of ideological reasons peculiar to our earthly Western culture, we fervently revere. It’s hard to imagine a more exact description of that condition than Baldessari’s “Quality Material” or “Pure Beauty,” in which the concise phrase of the title was commercially hand-lettered in black paint on a white canvas. The sign-like paintings forthrightly declared what they were, while leaving you to wonder, Why do we revere this?

Word-paintings weren’t exactly what followers of formalism had in mind, of course, and that’s precisely what made them so galvanic. Once Baldessari had turned the frozen certainties of formalism into fluid, open-ended questions, he gathered together all the earlier paintings of his own that he could find, and he took them to a local crematorium. The lot was reduced to ashes, and interred in a book-shaped urn.

This ritual enactment of artistic death-and-resurrection, executed in 1970, announced the beginning of a new phase in the artist’s work. Painting was banished. Using the simplest of materials, he would soon be engaged in an expansive rethinking of what art is, and of how it operates in contemporary life.

Clearly, this was not an artist who was going to merely bide his time. (Baldessari is notably gregarious.) No, what instead proved generally indolent during the decade just beginning, and specifically indifferent to any of the myriad things Baldessari was up to, was the small, recently established art scene in Los Angeles.

On the West Coast, the high-flying spirit of the ‘60s was about to crash and burn. Important Southern California galleries folded, and museums retrenched. The precious few venues for lively critical argument either disappeared entirely or sank further into a morass of determined provincialism. Area collectors never exactly a daring bunch tended to remain eupeptically conservative.

Still, L.A.’s brand-new pedigree as the nation’s second city for art was not about to be easily relinquished. For sustenance it merged seamlessly with something new: the American art-world’s determinedly pluralist effort to dismantle the deformative status quo, an effort that was groping futilely toward an aesthetic based on regional identity. (If the monolithic New York art world seemed to have lost its way, let a thousand flowers bloom across the land!) Provincial pride eloped with the new regionalism--an unwittingly demonic union whose monstrous offspring was ( shudder, gasp ) the gruesome Decade of the Local Artist.

Baldessari has never been shy about decrying the entrenched provincialism of Southern California, where the anarchistic challenges of art typically have counted for less than the pleasant “local-ness” of an artist. There’s no doubt he’s been wounded, as any artist would, by the relative indifference to his work on the part of the local constituency. But, the disregard isn’t surprising. For among the traits being held aloft as regional banners were an emphasis on sensual experience, a distrust of intellectualism, a spiritualized reverence for nature, even the preponderance of pastel colors--none of which applied to Baldessari.

Yet, neither has the artist failed to acknowledge that the cultural vacuum was oddly suitable to his temperament. For in the absence of a dynamic cultural milieu, Baldessari had to jump-start his own art. That, or expire from the grinding boredom.

And without the permissiveness of the climate, it’s unlikely he ever would have been so audacious as to expect that he could actually build an aesthetic from scratch.

The cultural vacuum had another facet. The overwhelming majority of Baldessari’s principal artistic constituency--which, as for all artists, is composed of other artists and other works of art--could be found in just two places. One consisted of the range of established artistic capitals, meaning in New York City and Europe. The other included the range of established artistic achievements, which is to say in history.

In short, the absence of a broadly convincing local aesthetic meant that art was necessarily something that, for better or worse, largely existed “someplace else.” Baldessari found his great subject in the peculiarly disconnected, modern experience of the echo chamber created by mass culture, with all its assorted mediums of reproduction. Like a photographic negative that creates a beautifully revealing positive when brought into play by a gifted eye and mind, the provincial regionalism of Southern California conspired to set the stage for the cosmopolitan worldliness of Baldessari’s art.

That art took off in a dozen different directions in the 1970s--and so did his career. This is the work by Baldessari that American audiences know least. The retrospective is likely to be most illuminating in its display (about one-third of the show) of mixed-media works from this fecund period.

Baldessari’s work since the early 1980s has been widely acclaimed. Reminiscent of a kind of jigsaw puzzle, it is assembled from disparate photographic stills, some used to advertise undistinguished “B” movies, others clipped from old newspapers and magazines, and none taken by the artist himself. Selected and stored in carefully labeled, overstuffed file cabinets in his studio, these mostly black-and-white photographs get cropped, enlarged, conjoined and sometimes colored. The “local region” they identify and examine is the cognitive landscape of late-20th-Century Westerners.

As in no other culture before, today we apprehend our basic worldly relationships through media channels--an apprehension that is typically crabbed, unintelligible and chaotic. Coaxing forth the fantasies and fears of our collective unconscious, which lies submerged within the residue of mass culture, Baldessari has created an often startling visual poetry that is restorative and emancipatory. Spoken through those selfsame media conduits, the achievement is prodigious.