Books by John Baldessari

Bow Down (Littoral/Ml&Nlf)

by Douglas Messerli, John Baldessari

Poetry. Art. Translation. Dedicated to Italian poet Amelia Rosselli, who committed suicide in 1997, BOW DOWN is in part a response to art by Los Angeles artist John Baldessari, whose collage methods are not unlike those that the author uses in his poetry. Several of these poems are a direct response to Baldessari's art, responding to and addressing issues in the visual work. The book contains Messerli's poems in the original English as well as in Italian translation by Manuela Bruschini. Also featured in the book are twelve black and white images of Baldessari's artwork. "On the contrary/the obscure is vast at a distance/confused as a single/act of flight/just as it arrives/in the night sky/to be engulfed/ in light..."--from "Unto Us."

Museum of the Future (Documents)

by Bice Curiger, John Baldessari, Chris Dercon

Museums of contemporary art are expanding and in crisis. They attract ever-larger audiences; architects constantly redesign them; and the ever-swellling ranks of artists are producing a greater quantity of art than ever before. Meanwhile, museum funds are dwindling amid economic crisis and an overheated art market. The question of which art is to be collected has also become a more openly discussed topic. How do curators meet these challenges? How do artists view their relationships to museum? How do practitioners navigate between ideas, ideals and realities? This publication gathers interviews with artists, architects and curators of the contemporary art world, such as John Baldessari, Ute Meta Bauer, Suzanne Cotter, Bice Curiger, Chris Dercon, Charles Esche, Liam Gillick, Michael Govan, Jacques Herzog, Thomas Hirschhorn, Philipp Kaiser, Rem Koolhaas, Lars Nittve, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Thierry Raspail, Tobias Rehberger and Beatrix Ruf, among others.

John Baldessari The Städel Paintings

by John Baldessari

In 1970, California-based conceptual artist John Baldessari (b. 1931) destroyed all the paintings he'd produced from 1953 to 1966, paving the way for an independent and unmistakable pictorial style that lay between painting and photography, text and image. The last member of the American postwar avant-garde, Baldessari is known for creating collages featuring found photography and appropriated images--often pieced together to suggest a narrative or riddle, but typically in a way that reveals the similar messages communicated by seemingly unrelated images.

His most recent series of large collages, created for an exhibition at the Städel Museum Frankfurt in Germany, draw on masterpieces from Lucas Cranach the Elder to Maria Lassnig at the Städel. This publication reproduces these collages, while accompanying essays and an interview with John Baldessari and Philipp Kaiser add depth to the pieces. The book explores how Baldessari used texts and photographs to uncover a multifaceted opposition and juxtaposition of old and new art. It also examines the ways that Baldessari employs classic modernist pictorial strategies--including montage and the integration of everyday elements--in order to confront the artistic practices of the postwar avant-gardes, such as discourses on consumerism and the media. As he intertwines media and materials and combines entirely distinct groups of artistic subjects, the unambiguousness of the pictorial language gives way to a multilayered readability.

Lavishly produced and illustrated with seventy color images, John Baldessari offers an early look at the latest works by one of today's most important conceptual artists.