Zinzin

John Baldessari

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Face off: John Stezaker and John Baldessari show how to create audience engagement

John Stezaker - Pair IV

John Baldessari - Man and Woman with Bridge
Top: John Stezaker, Pair IV. Collage, 2007. Whitechapel Gallery, London. Bottom: John Baldessari, Man and Woman with Bridge, 1984. Black-and-white photograph on board.

I really care about meaning in art. I want things to look simple, but to raise issues, and to have more than one level of comprehension.
John Baldessari

Our lives are inundated with images, and arranging and re-arranging them is often how we tell stories, convey meaning, or throw wrenches into the works of literal interpretation. Advertising creates image juxtapositions to communicate the messages of commerce: “you want this,” or “buy now.” In either case, the story, no matter how inventive, always has a rational, understandable outcome: a product is being peddled, it’s a great product, and you should buy it. Art, on the other hand, creates an open-ended type of non-linear narrative whose meaning is unique to the viewer / perceiver, rather than dictated by the producer (artist). The most powerful brand names function in the same way that art does: they have great depth and multiple meanings, creating manifold pathways for audience participation, which fosters emotional investment and attachment in the brand. By giving people the power to create their own narratives to explain the “meaning” of a brand name, they become participants in the creation of the brand, the very definition of brand engagement.

The works above, by the British conceptual artist John Stezaker and the American conceptual artist John Baldessari, deftly illustrate this concept of creating user engagement. In similar ways, and with a similar economy of means, they each set up a narrative event between a man and a woman, and it is up to the viewer to complete the story. There is no “right” answer. The story isn’t fixed, predetermined, or laden with ulterior motives. And it can evolve and morph over time — just like the best brands.

(Hat tip to Melanie Seyer for connecting the Baldessari to the Stezaker, on her blog melsbox: Stezaker, Baldessari & Hyperreality.)

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Dear John: Postcards from On Kawara to John Baldessari

on_kawarai_got_up_at

I Got Up At…, 1974–75: On Kawara’s works, particularly those associated with early Conceptual art, are exemplary of an oeuvre that is at once personal and universal. The confessional autobiographical quality of I Got Up At…, a series of postcards providing diurnal accounts of his rising times that he sent to his artist friend John Baldessari over the course of three months, document Kawara’s existence in time while also allowing that which is typically immaterial to assume material form. Source: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Image credit: On Kawara (b. 1933, Kariya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan; lives and works in New York), I Got Up At…, 1974–75. Ninety postcards with printed rubber stamps, 3 1/2 x 4 in. each and 4 x 6 in. each. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Gift of John Baldessari and Denise Spampinato.

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On the Road with Garry Winogrand

As a follow-up to Sightseeing with Garry Winogrand, we uncovered an image of a late Winogrand contact sheet of Los Angeles photos (see below) on a 2007 blog post by a blogger named “J.T.”, who offers his own take on Winogrand’s late work. J.T. begins by ruminating on “Figments of the Real World, Winogrand’s massive, out of print 1988 MOMA monograph,” from which he quotes several passages, interspersed with his own commentary. The first thing he mentions from the catalog are more exact numbers for Winogrand’s unseen output near the end of his life: “At the time of his death, it was discovered that Winogrand had been sitting on 2,500 rolls of exposed, but undeveloped film, and an additional 6,500 rolls of developed, but unproofed, film. That’s 9,000 rolls of film that he shot but never bothered to look at.”

The thing we found most interesting, however, is that J.T. came to a similar conclusion as us, that Winogrand, in the end, had become more of a conceptual artist than the “street photographer” he had been and is known for: “Could it be possible that, through these tectonic shifts in methodology, Winogrand was undergoing an honest-to-god sea change in his approach to his medium (a change that privileged the act, not the results?) Is it an accident that the late contact sheets bear more than a passing resemblance to the medium-subverting projects of John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha? Was Garry Winogrand becoming–in his own stubborn, round-about, contrarian way–a conceptual artist?”

A change that privileged the act, not the results. Whether Winogrand “lost his mind” or “evolved his thinking” is a moot point. We have to take what he left the world and make of it what we will. And if most of the images are more interesting as part of a conceptual idea than as individual images, then so be it, because the idea is really interesting, a gift to the future from a dying artist who remains a force to be reckoned with.

Garry Winogrand contact sheet 1982-83
(Click image to enlarge)