There’s nothing worse than boring art. Tedious paintings in bland mega-galleries – bleurgh. Eightysomething Californian artist John Baldessari has no patience for it either: in 1970 he burned his life’s work to ashes, and in 1971 he made a work called ‘I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art’. His work after 1970 is some of the funniest, most colourful and important art of the twentieth century.
So it’s a little shocking to walk into this show of brand new paintings (all from 2015) and find a total lack of colour. Each work is made up of a black-and-white screen print of a film still – with big chunks of the image blacked out with acrylic paint – combined with a chunk of dialogue from an imaginary film script.
At first, everything seems glum, grey and miserable – you find yourself wondering if Baldessari has lost his edge. But as you walk through the gallery, reading all the made-up scripts and seeing all the blacked out film stills, you realise that this show may be one of his masterstrokes. The scripts are filled with characters from the art world – dealers, collectors, artists, hangers-on – and Baldessari is viciously lampooning the lot of ’em. Dealers rave about fennel salads, art critics discuss pointless descriptive language, collectors bargain for stolen artworks. They’re portrayed with an almost aggressive sneer. And always the artist is the victim, getting literally stabbed in the back. In one work, a character called Lois says: ‘Art is about who’s in power’. Edna replies: (audible sigh) ‘Dystopia I guess.’
Every work here mocks and criticises the greedy, pompous art world, and they’re on display in one of the world’s biggest, richest galleries. It’s a massive ‘fuck you’, right in the belly of the beast. Are these beautiful works of art? Not really. But as big visual ideas, they’re totally amazing. They’re stark, simple, funny, mean and aggressive – after all these years, JB’s still got it.
Eddy Frankel