In San Diego, Baldessari’s Defiant Art, Then and Now

Seeing the show, “John Baldessari: National City,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego’s downtown location, is like making a pilgrimage to a great guru and hearing the Big Questions direct from his own lips.

The metaphor is not gratuitous. Baldessari’s influence as a teacher has been profound, and his inversion of conventional artistic practices, his witty questioning of what art is, how it’s made and how it should be looked at, were the ABCs to a generation of younger artists, many of whom came out of CalArts when Baldessari taught there between 1970 and 1990. His impact permeates the current, concept-driven art scene, and here, in this show, are the master’s own words in their original, potent form. What could be better, except perhaps a private audience with Baldessari’s own spiritual mentor, the late Marcel Duchamp?

Baldessari was born in National City, just south of San Diego, in 1931 and it remained his home base until he moved to Los Angeles in 1970. The museum’s show focuses on his last few years in National City, when, immersed in a quintessentially banal suburb, isolated from (but not ignorant of) critical discourse in L.A. and New York, and disenchanted with painting, he began to make text and photo-text works that undermine the traditional rules of art. In these smashingly funny and dryly astute canvases, Baldessari laid the foundation for his work of the next 25 years.

Baldessari countered several fundamental assumptions about art with a teasingly defiant “Why Should I?” Convention dictates that the subject matter of a painting should be important or at least beautiful, so Baldessari went out and shot random, ugly street scenes, transferred them to canvas and captioned them with the bare bones description of their street address. Tradition has it that art should reflect the artist’s refined technique. Instead, Baldessari took mediocre snapshots, which looked grainy and smudged when transferred to canvas, and hired a commercial sign painter to write his texts in neutral, uninflected print.

Purposeful composition gets its witty retort in the 1967 work, “Wrong.” The photograph transferred onto the canvas shows Baldessari standing on the curb near his house. A desert of dead space yawns before him and a palm tree behind him seems to spring from his head. Quoting from any number of how-to books, Baldessari flatly pronounces the image “wrong.” As in the brilliant text paintings from 1967-68 (“Pure Beauty,” “This Is Not to Be Looked At,” “A Work With Only One Property” and others), a loopy self-contradiction makes what seems like a one-liner last and last. It’s this elliptical logic that keeps Baldessari’s work fresh: the more wrong he aims to be, the more right he ends up; the more answers he pronounces, the more questions they raise; the more obvious his humor, the more oblique its ramifications.

In 1970, Baldessari destroyed all of the work he had made prior to 1966, cremating it in a documented performance. A jar of cookies he made from the ashes, on display here, marks the end of his National City years. The show skips over the subsequent quarter century to pick up again in 1996, when, prompted by this exhibition, Baldessari revisited his old stomping grounds and made a dozen new works.

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Baldessari’s first museum show was in 1960, at this very same institution’s flagship location, which was then called the Art Center in La Jolla. With that building newly reopened earlier this month after a splashy renovation, the museum has occasion to celebrate itself, its history and a native son it nurtured early. Nostalgia, then, crept in from both sides in the making of the show--co-curated by museum Director Hugh Davies and assistant to the director/curatorial coordinator Andrea Hales--and in the newest work, its presence is less than welcome.

The new photo-text paintings look much like those from the late ‘60s, except some are made in color and inkjet printed onto the canvas in saturated, almost lurid hues. Instead of shooting randomly, this time around Baldessari focused mostly on sites with personal meaning and associations--his old home, the location of his first studios, a building built and owned by his father. Again, the images are transferred onto canvas slightly crudely, and addresses in a sign painter’s hand appear beneath them.

Baldessari has even remade “Wrong,” but the grin on his face as the tree launches from his head is ironic in an entirely different way now. “Wrong (Version #2)” perversely fetishizes version one, which in its humble but coy way, mocked the idea of the artwork as precious object. The new works are made in the spirit of a sequel, drawing their energy from their references to earlier hits. As unconventional as Baldessari’s work was in the late ‘60s, these rehashes are absolutely conformist today, for they turn what was originally a probing, uncontrived approach into a formula.

One of the most seductive aspects of Baldessari’s work, from the early years on, has been its lack of bitterness, considering its innately critical stance. The new National City works are not bitter; if anything, they suffer from sentimentality but they evoke a cynical response in the viewer. What Baldessari first cooked up in National City was a great mental feast, and now he’s serving leftovers.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, downtown location, 1001 Kettner Blvd., through June 30. (619) 234-1001.