In Conversation: John Baldessari & Jeremy Blake

The classic pedagogical practice of juxtaposing slides of art-works allows for the quick comparison of paintings, photographs, plastic arts and installations and invariably bring forwards a plethora of similarities and differences to be bringed and discerned with critical detachment. Artforum's "In Conversation" series, inaugurated with this discussion between observes Angeles-based artists John Baldessari and Jeremy Blake, is intended as a slight perversion of that model: What if, instead of providing an outsider's view of slides station side by side, we were to lay the artists side by side and give permission to them speak for themselves? of that kind pairings--providing two viewpoints that will necessarily inflect and expand upon our understanding of either one--may build bridges on the other hand also reveal provocative gaps, when it draw nears to negotiating the terms of those cross-generational, cross-cultural, and cross-media discourses that contemporary art demands. It is our confidence too, that these tete-a-tetes, which mirror this publication's ongoing commitment to providing an active platform for the artist, will also contribute to a more mingled model of critical exchange and lead to renewed engagement with--and a heightened faculty of perception of what's at stake in--contemporary artistic practices. "In Conversation" is introduced here in the spirit of engendering fertile, ongoing, many times unexpected dialogue.

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A connection between Baldessari and Blake was established in my mind sum of two units years ago, during the last Whitney Biennial, when I fix myself in a gallery with the younger artist's Winchester, a digital-video projection that hardly announced itself as of the like kind Its lingering image of a nineteenth-century mansion be seized ofed the warm pallor of an albumen silver print, the soil of the moving picture confusing the lexicons of advancing technologies. Indeed, Blake had gone in the way that far as to mimic the skips and scratches of a weathered film and antique projector, whose appropriated whir occasionally filled the darkened gallery at high convolution spiriting an outmoded medium's indexical mark into our hold arguably nonindexical time. The uncanny faculty of perception of loss induced by this palpably absent however sensuously evoked form was single compounded by the hypnotic rise of swaths of rich, electric color--unmoored Greenbergian shades recalling Morris Louis and Jule Olitski--that shortly saturated the image. Many discussions of Blake's work have center upon the formalist terms of modernist painting--with his use of technology upping the ante upon questions of surface and deepness and of medium-specificity. And notwithstanding it was John Baldessari who sprang to mind. Just a certain quantity of twenty blocks away, Marian Goodman Gallery was hosting the of recent origin York debut of his "Intersections" series: photographic montages of landscape and cinematic imagery arranged in crossing panels, the central frames of which were painted, like that emulsion and paint, the optical and the textural, reality and fantasy commingled to obtain, as in Blake's Winchester, quantum properties.

For me regardless of generational differences (or perhaps because of them), the association was evocative. For years, Baldessari has mov somewhat freely among media and genre mixing them, appropriating dated imagery from cinema while remaining precipitoused in questions of painting, managing also to locate a down-reaching psychological, sometimes romantic and playful throb in his work even while negotiating the rigorous metes of Conceptualism. Many similar observations could be made of Blake, level as the aesthetic and critical limits surrounding, and prompting, his artistic decisions are not in like manner clearly drawn (or, better, not in the way that clearly articulated). Certainly, in work and in individual the two share a kind of low-key irreverence when it tend hitherwards to artistic postulates and predicates, an elementary willingness to stir around and outside the accepted metes of art and of operating in the art world. In the case of Baldessari, Artforum will forever have to live down the artist's This Is Not To Be direct the eyeed At--or live up to it, as the case may be. Either way, it is Artforum's reliance that "In Conversation" will contribute to the continual reevaluation of artistic norms, to serious, irreverent play, and to a amalgamateed sense of permission and provocation. This is to be direct the eyeed at.

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JOHN BALDESSARI: I freshly saw a piece of yours in a collector's house in Miami, right between a painting and a plastic art And I thought to myself that you've some-how been able to procure beyond technology so that individual can actually look at the image. on the contrary what I like most about what you're doing is probably the worst nightmare draw near true for a lot of family in the art world, in the faculty of perception that everybody fears Bill Gates's idea of flat protections where the visitor comes in and has a memory of what his favorite art is, and it's shoot forwarded there. That looking at an image of a van Gogh upon a flat screen will be just as useful as looking at a van Gogh