From Los Angeles: Pure Beauty

Standing in the middle of the pristine, cathedral-like gallery space, I caught myself letting out a muffled chuckle at a video of John Baldessari singing each of Sol LeWitt's thirty-five conceptual statements to a different pop tune. Quite frankly, I can’t remember the last time art made me want to laugh out loud. Baldessari’s retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Pure Beauty, is filled with moments of delight. The massive exhibition features work spanning the artist’s career from the ’60s through contemporary pieces.

The accumulation of Baldessari’s work reveals a reinvention of human perception: that which one perceives is a function of outside objects and the context of one’s mind—seeing and understanding. Baldessari uses these two human faculties as his medium, destabilizing the pedestrian reality. His famous dots placed on people’s faces obscure the customary focal point of a photograph and force a viewer to negotiate a different visual experience. Often overlooked parts of an image come to the center of attention, while others become irrelevant.

Baldessari uses a system of alternative pattern recognition that subverts expectations. In a number of works, images are arranged according to internal composition or logic and not according to borders or customary alignment. In fact, borders also serve as a destabilizing device rather than a form of containment. In many of Baldessari’s compositions, borders are misaligned and form crooked lines, emphasizing the piece as only a fragment of some reality. The composition and internal logic of the pieces arise not inside but despite the borders.

Detail of Kissing Series: Simone Palm Trees (Near), 1975; two color photographs on board, 14 3/4 x 20 3/4 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Pure Beauty makes Baldessari’s mercurial approach and wit evident across his career. Baldessari Sings LeWitt (1972) lets viewer in on an inside joke; the artist’s seemingly simple gestures often exist in a complicated context—be it formal composition or social interaction. Highlighting the artist’s polemic with both the art world and the world in general, Pure Beauty reveals the unfolding of a mind over fifty years and affords the only perspective in which larger patterns become visible.

Pure Beauty was on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through September 12, 2010.