[microsound-announce] Podcast: THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE. Communication and ambiguity in the work of John Baldessari

[Radio Web MACBA]

*Podcast: THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE. Communication and ambiguity in the
work of John Baldessari
*
Link: http://rwm.macba.cat/en/specials/john_baldessari/capsula
MP3: http://rwm.macba.cat/uploads/specials/baldessari.mp3
Related info: http://rwm.macba.cat/uploads/20100426/Baldessari_eng.pdf

Curated by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros

"Language is your most versatile scientific instrument. Learn to use it
with precision." This message, which George L. Trigg claimed was
prominently displayed at the front of the main chemistry lecture hall of a
North American university in the 1940s, could also be seen as one of the
mainstays of the oeuvre of John Baldessari (United States, 1931). The
immense majority of his works, even those in which words are not explicitly
and directly used as a vehicle, are based on a meticulous treatment of
language that totally dissolves the division between the semantic field and
external appearance. In the course of his long career, Baldessari has
repeatedly mentioned his impartial treatment of words and images, to the
point of confusing the two categories: "one way you could look at my work
is as a piece of writing, and look at the imagery syntactically as you
would look at a sentence." It thus seems natural that ambiguity—which is
ultimately an essential and inescapable fact of the communication
act—should be part of an approach to art that suggests all kinds of
linguistic and meta-referential games.

Concealing information from the viewer, and constantly testing his or her
perception of the narrative by providing clues and challenges, is the force
that drives Baldessari's artistic oeuvre. It can be seen in the flat areas
of colour that shrewdly hide fragments of photographs, and in the
association/dissociation games of his juxtapositions of film stills. In
this sense, film language is a key element in the dialectic that Baldessari
sets up. It is present in his use of film techniques, like discontinuity
tricks such as jump cuts (in the spirit of masters like Méliès and
Goddard), but also in the very notion of a "sequence", expressed in the
form of dozens of photographic montages that are nothing like the
prevailing unitary composition. The use and perversion of the communicative
power of images is also a result of the collective cinematic imaginary,
built up over several decades: Baldessari takes advantage of the viewer's
subconscious to set traps, connect signs, question familiar scenes and
highlight key parts of a mental or visual image, in order to generate new
stimuli in a continual and elaborate "double entendre".

Baldessari's generation of artists, who created their works in the midst of
the conceptual fervour that began in the sixties, witnessed radical
innovations in a diverse range of areas such as the philosophy of language,
physics, cognitive linguistics, logic and the study of neural networks.
This cluster of ideas unmistakably seeped into the work of Baldessari and
his contemporaries, who used different media to tackle many of these new
arguments raised in the academic world. Without going any further, "Pure
Beauty" (1966-68), the work that lent its title to the MACBA’s John
Baldessari retrospective, gracefully revolves around the concept of
"qualia" that had been described by Clarence Irving Lewis a few decades
earlier. "Qualia" is a term used to describe the subjective quality of
conscious experience. Two classic examples are the "redness" of red things
and the "painfulness" of pain. In the very simple work "Pure Beauty"—a
canvas with these two words painted in black on a white background—
Baldessari tries to evoke a subjective quality like "pure beauty" based on
its corresponding syntactic coding (completely aware of the impossibility
of such an undertaking). A direct, seemingly unambiguous statement,
transformed into an unattainable mental image. Returning to the initial
parable, the thorough analysis of the artistic act that can be inferred
from Baldessari's work as an artist, and also as a theoretician and
educator, fits in perfectly with the analogy made by Neils Bohr, Nobel
Laureate in Physics, when he said that "when it comes to atoms, language
can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned
with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental
connections." And it is precisely this veil of uncertainty over
Baldessari’s compositions that transforms the everyday into something
singular, into an emergent cognitive experience that avoids single
perspectives.
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