Influential despite image

JOHN BALDESSARI

‘We don’t notice him’

“WHEN I was in school, Duchamp was the major force,” Baldessari says, musing over Magritte’s place in art history. The French Dadaist still gets much more respect than the Belgian Surrealist. But “Wrong,” Baldessari’s deadpan painting of a photograph explaining how not to compose a picture, based on an example in an art instruction book, has a lot in common with Magritte’s irreverence toward the rules and conventions of art education.

LACMA’s invitation to design the installation of “Magritte and Contemporary Art” took Baldessari by surprise, and not only because it was a first for the museum. Magritte just wasn’t on his radar.

“The problem with Magritte is that he’s too popular,” Baldessari says. “He has been so absorbed by our culture, we don’t notice him anymore. I had to go back and study Magritte and make notes on what I wanted to do at the museum. I wanted to make him not such a musty old Belgian painter, something more contemporary. The show attempts to look at him in a new light, so we don’t see him as a cliche or a stereotype.”

When the notion of turning the galleries “topsy-turvy” took hold, he didn’t think the museum would go for it. Much to his amazement, LACMA agreed to commission the freeway-intersection wallpaper for the ceiling and the carpet replicating a Magritte-like sky for the floor. He had the fun of plucking clouds from Magritte’s paintings and rearranging them.

Blue skies and fluffy clouds permeate the exhibition. Baldessari’s transformation of a window, with the help of a large transparency of a New York skyline, is a singular surprise that bears contemplation.

“You can see palm trees and some of the traffic on Wilshire through the skyline, sort of like a double exposure,” he says.

The Los Angeles museum’s request for Baldessari’s services arrived, coincidentally, just after he had agreed to organize a yearlong exhibition from the permanent collection at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., which runs through July. At the Hirshhorn, he made an unpredictable selection of works and arranged them to point out fresh frames of reference; at LACMA, he designed an environment intended to stimulate reconsiderations of a historic figure.

“If the art bubble bursts, maybe I can have a new career,” he jokes.

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ELEANOR ANTIN

‘He was one of the precursors’

“MAGRITTE is an artist I personally love,” Antin says. “Most Surrealists are too schmaltzy. I don’t like that psychoanalytic kind of image. In his case, when his work has that quality, it’s a real deep kind of angst and psychology that I think is interesting. I have always loved him.”

That may surprise fans of Antin, a multifaceted performance artist with a subversive spirit, known for delving into history and re-creating herself in films and photographic tableaux. But her inkjet print in the exhibition pays homage to LACMA’s famous “This Is Not a Pipe” painting by adding a chapter to her hilariously touching series of photographs of 100 rubber boots, shot in many locations. While preparing for her 1999 retrospective at LACMA, she photographed 22 boots arranged in an arc around Magritte’s painting and added a line of text, “This is not 100 Boots.” In 2002, she made a limited-edition print from the photograph.

“When I taught at UC San Diego, once a year I would have a big intro class, and my most favorite lecture to the 300 kids was Magritte. The kids all loved him. You would expect that, but I also did. For me, it’s partly the displacement he creates. I think he’s really interesting and, of course, witty. I love the verbal materials, all the interaction between the images and the words. You don’t think of my connection with him immediately. It’s the ideas that seem to have attracted so many contemporary conceptualists and later artists. You don’t always think of Magritte, but he’s there, and he has meant a great deal to a lot of people. He has certainly influenced me, but it’s deeper than that.

“We are used to a postmodern landscape. He was one of the precursors. And he was very distinctive from the other modernists in his day. He was in time with them, but in the future with wit and charm. His pictures are small, and that’s interesting too. They loom much larger.”

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MIKE KELLEY

‘He was a very smart artist’

“WHEN I was a teenager, I loved Magritte and Dali,” says Kelley, whose works in the exhibition include “Wallflowers,” an acrylic-on-paper diptych in which five black circles on one side correspond to depictions of the artist’s head on the other. “Everyone in the art world didn’t like them. They were using what were considered retrograde techniques. I was embarrassed for a long time because my love for them didn’t go away. But wait a minute here -- who’s wrong? Not me, I don’t think. Their stuff is just interesting.

“Magritte was often looked down upon, as if he was a cheap Magic Realist,” Kelley says, recalling his college days. “His work was omnipresent in posters, album covers and things like that, generally focusing on Magic Realist kinds of images. But his flat-footed use of illustrational techniques really appealed to me. More important was his treatment of image as a kind of text. That struck me as very conceptual. By dissolving the connection between the text and the image, you see image as text and text as image. That’s such a simple but such an important lesson.”

In the text-image paintings and the works conceived as visual conundrums, Kelley says, “Magritte shows you one of the main considerations of art, that it’s a construct in that it reveals in its very making how meaning is produced. He was a very smart artist who understood how pictures work. Endlessly clever, but he doesn’t make a spectacle of it. Some of the images are really amazing.

“I find him more interesting as time goes by. And there’s a lot of his work you’ve never seen.”

Magritte’s angry, expressionistic paintings of the 1940s were repressed and excluded from books on the artist and Surrealism, he says. “People either didn’t get those paintings or didn’t like them. The targets of those works, like Van Gogh, are held as such gods, but the paintings look so much like all the Bad Painting that started in the late ‘70s and painting all the way up to today. That work looks completely fresh.

“I thought it was about time there was a revisionist show about Magritte. But I’m curious about how it will be bounced off contemporary art. Some people are obvious, like Ruscha and Baldessari. After that generation, so many works could be seen as Magrittean: Bad Painting, New Image painting, appropriation art, a lot of conceptualism, although conceptualism was iconoclastic and Magritte used materials that were out of fashion at one point. But with post-conceptualist painting, it’s all kind of Magrittean. Magritte is almost the definition of the postmodern artist. Look at Magritte and you can see how intelligent he is and how much later work is really indebted to it in some way, even if not consciously.”

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JIM SHAW

‘It’s already been done’

“ALL the Surrealists were important to me in the 1960s,” says Shaw, whose visual dialogue with Magritte includes “Red Rock,” a drawing of an airborne rock covered with scary portraits and topped by tiny buildings, a la Magritte’s “The Castle in the Pyrenees.” As a kid, I wanted to be an artist, and I had a poster with a picture of a Magritte painting. It more or less said ‘Magritte’s OK, Dali [isn’t].’ It was generally accepted that Dali was a clown and Magritte was more serious. I didn’t understand ‘This Is Not a Pipe’ intellectually. I didn’t understand it not being a pipe, but a painting of a pipe. I just understood it as a reversal.”

Nonetheless, Shaw took the lesson to heart.

“I made myself a T-shirt that said, ‘This is not a T-shirt.’ I might have been in college at the time. I just drew it with a marker. In this one art history class, I could make art, so I made this Magritte painting based on some rebuses from Katy Keene comic books, like there was a C on top of a nun next to a drum, which spelled conundrum. I hand-painted frames like his frame pieces. Also, I had a pair of boots and I added some toes out of clay and latex,” he says, referring to his absurd version of Magritte’s painting “The Red Model.”

Magritte does not have a large presence in Shaw’s entire body of work, but Shaw’s “My Mirage” series features a fictitious teenager whose adventures are recounted in the styles of various artists, including the Belgian Surrealist. One work in the LACMA exhibition, “Bon Idee” (which should be spelled Bonne Idee), was inspired by Magritte’s segmented paintings that suggest associations between disparate images. But Shaw replaced Magritte’s pictures with visual references to Jimi Hendrix songs.

“One thing about Magritte is that it’s already been done,” Shaw says. “If you are doing anything like it, you are quoting it. You can’t work in that style, which is OK with me. When I was doing my dream work -- not that Magritte worked from dreams; I believe he made paintings of poetic themes -- I had to work out a way that it wasn’t the same thing.”

Has he used up Magritte?

“I can’t tell you,” he says. “Right now, I’m working on a painting that has a floating hunk of a mountain that is referencing Masonic symbolism. It’s a pretty odd thing.”

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suzanne.muchnic@latimes.com