Tate Modern: John Baldessari: Pure Beauty and Pop Life: Art in a Material World

One of the best parts of living in London is the amount of fantastic art galleries and museums showing some excellent and inspired work. To many Londoners, that is one of the reasons to look forward to the long and dark winter – the respite we can get by visiting one of the capital’s many exhibitions. Yet, this winter was disappointing and it wasn’t just the bad weather. It was the choice of exhibitions at the Tate Modern, which thankfully is currently being changed out for spring shows that holds much more promise. The Tate Modern has held a prominent place in London’s art scene for a long time and rightly so. Bringing often fantastic shows to Londoners and tourists alike (Frida Kahlo, Cildo Meireles, and Gilbert and George come to mind), it’s rare for the Tate to miscalculate its choices. If at least one of their two simultaneous exhibitions had been inspiring, I could have overlooked the one that left me emotionally cold. But this was not so.

The two exhibitions shown this year during the winter season were John Baldessari’s Pure Beauty and Pop Life: Art in a Material World. Both were supposed to be radical, shocking, thought provoking, and monumental. And yet, they were not.

Continuing a tradition of presenting lesser-known artists to a wider audience, the Tate Modern held a retrospective of California-based American artist, John Baldessari. Some art critics have said that he is one of contemporary art’s foremost conceptual artists. Well, he certainly has had a long career as an artist, being not only a creator of art, but also a teacher of immense influence. He is sometimes credited as being one of the first artists to incorporate the written word into his artwork, helping start a worldwide movement. Was he visionary for his time? Did he radically change the face of art? Was he able to influence the artistic landscape the way very few other modern artists have? Perhaps.

Yet, disregarding all the explanations, history, and biographies, his art falls flat. When taken out of context, his work seems to lose most meaning. The cleverness or wittiness that perhaps was amusing, challenging, even radical and shocking at the time, is no longer so. Now, it just feels tired and overdone. Can we appreciate Baldessari for being at the forefront of an artistic movement and for the contributions he made to modern art – of course. But that does mean that we cannot critique his work.

Truly great art should be able to withstand the challenge of being stripped of its place in the timeline of art history. When viewed in a vacuum, it should still do something to the viewer. Often, that “something” is inspire or uplift. Sometimes, it is cause the viewer to question or wonder. And other times, it’s to cause the audience to turn away in pain or disgust. But art should inspire a feeling in the viewer. Any feeling will do. Unfortunately, Baldessari’s work does not meet this challenge. It’s too simple, too obvious, and not interesting enough to keep my attention. I simply walk on by.

Even if he is rightly credited as one of the first artists to incorporate words into his work, then my response is a tacit, “so what?” Just because it was different at the time and perhaps even radical, doesn’t make it long-lasting and good. Some use of words in art is great and fantastic, and some is less so. It’s a bit like cheating on a maths test with a calculator when you’re supposed to do long division. The idea of art is to impart a feeling without words, but rather with images – that’s what separates artists from writers. That’s why many artists choose to leave their work untitled, for fear that adding a title would unfairly influence the viewer’s reaction to the work. In the end, Baldessari may be all the things that some art critics believe he is – a revolutionary and long-standing figure of the American art world. Yet, I believe we can all agree that this doesn’t put him above criticism. And in this author’s view, the criticism is not that his work is too radical or not radical enough or too beautiful or too ugly, but that ultimately it didn’t make any feelings stir.

Unfortunately, the Tate Modern’s other winter show, Pop Life: Art in a Material World, was the other extreme. It tries to outrage audiences with the usual tactics, namely explicit images. But not all shocks are shocking. And not all explicit images are worthy of being called art. Some are just pornography and do not deserve the respect afforded artwork. Indeed, this debate of what is and isn’t art is an ongoing discussion throughout the centuries that will thankfully never end as new ideas are incorporated and society changes and adapts.

The purpose of the Pop Life exhibition is to show the work of artists who became pop starts by embracing the media in a way that their predecessors had rarely done. Does this intimate relationship with mass media dilute art? Certainly. But that’s not always a bad thing as it also makes it more accessible in many ways. I take less issue with art’s exploitation of the media mass market, partly because it’s simply reversing a sadomasochistic relationship that has been around for a while – except now the usee becomes the user. What I do take more of an issue with is the reliance on explicit images as avenues for artists to shock their audience. Of course, not all explicit images are inappropriate for art, and what is too explicit for one person may not be for another. But in the final analysis, just like the use of words within images, not everything which is shocking is good and it often just cheats the image out of meaning and the audience out of an experience that they deserve.

While the Tate Modern has indeed been a disappointment this winter, other venues and outlets have picked up the slack, in more ways than one. Here’s to hoping for a beautiful spring and some exhibitions that will inspire us in 2010.