JOHN BALDESSARI: MOVIE SCENARIOS
Screening of Films & Videos by John Baldessari, introduced by the artist
JOHN BALDESSARI: MOVIE SCENARIOS
Screening of Films & Videos by John Baldessari, introduced by the artist
535 West 22nd Street, 5th floor
New York, NY 10011
JOHN BALDESSARI: MOVIE SCENARIOS
Screening of Films & Videos by John Baldessari, introduced by the artist
535 West 22nd Street, 5th floor
New York, NY 10011
JOHN BALDESSARI: MOVIE SCENARIOS
Screening of Films & Videos by John Baldessari, introduced by the artist
535 West 22nd Street, 5th floor
New York, NY 10011
Works
Demonstrating how pop cultural narratives are embedded in the American collective unconscious, Baldessari introduces his sometime collaborator Ed Henderson, who is called upon to interpret a series of movie stills. The blurred photographs, which are virtually indecipherable to the viewer,...
Baldessari has commented that he is "less interested in the form art takes than the meaning an image evokes." In Ed Henderson Suggests Sound Tracks for Photographs, he explores the relation between what is heard and what is seen, appropriating deliberately cliched imagery and generic film music...
Four Short Films 1972-1973
John Baldessari
1972-1973, 6:15 min, color, silent, Super 8mm film on video
These Super-8mm films represent Baldessari's conceptual engagement with motion picture film, pointing to the technical strengths and weaknesses of the celluloid medium relative to video. Conceived on an intimate scale (only the artist's hands are visible as he manipulates a range of objects), Baldessari's Super-8 films replace text and speech with a cunning visual language, in which he wordlessly describes physical changes in his environment. Here Baldessari employs a method of communication that is based on spectacle rather than performance.
Script is the opposite of an improvisational exercise. Seven couples, all amateurs, are handed pages from random movie scripts and instructed to enact the absurd text through force of imagination, without direction or knowledge of what the others are doing.
Six Colorful Inside Jobs is one of a series of films that Baldessari produced in the 1970s, which are newly available through EAI. Seen from a bird's eye view, a figure paints the walls and floor of a windowless room six times in six days, using each of the primary and secondary colors.
Baldessari progresses from simple, static images, such as a rock in an empty room, to complex narrative scenes, like a woman eavesdropping on her next-door neighbor. Through the gradual integration of cinematic techniques—motion, color, sound, acting, editing and arc—the artist inverts the traditional Hollywood model, stressing structure over narrative coherence.
