Penta

John Baldessari was an influential conceptual artist who used a range of materials and mediums—including photography, painting, video, sculpture, and text—to create works that often punctured artistic conventions with humor and color. 

Craig Robins, the founder of the Miami Design District, was naturally drawn to Baldessari’s art as he had been unknowingly collecting works by several of the artist’s students. Robins’ friend, Bonnie Clearwater—who today is the director of Nova Southeastern University’s Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale—recognized who Robins was collecting and said he needed to meet Baldessari. The artist and collector were introduced in the early 1990s.  

“I was immediately enthusiastic,” says Robins, who is also the CEO of Dacra, a Miami real estate development company. “I was very young and did something that was a bit out of character—I bought three works by him.” 

One of these pieces was Clement Greenberg, 1966-68, which is a “conceptual anchor” for the first section of  “John Baldessari: The End of The Line,” a survey of the artist’s work that opened Wednesday at the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires, also known as Malba. The exhibition features 45 of Baldessari’s paintings, photographs, and installations from Robins’ collection. 

Baldessari, who died in 2020 at age 88, had lived in Los Angeles and taught at the California Institute of the Arts and the University of California, Los Angeles. He famously set 125 of his early abstract expressionist works on fire in a crematorium in 1970, marking the departure of one mode of expression and the beginning of others.

The Malba exhibition, put together by Robins Collection curator Karen Grimson, includes Clement Greenberg, a work that is among a series with text on canvas that Baldessari commissioned by a professional sign maker. It marks the artist’s turn away from abstract expressionism—a form that Greenberg, an art critic, had championed. It also features the Cremation Project, 1970, which responds to the text: “The world has too much art—I have made too many objects—what to do?”, 1969.

A second section titled, “Seeing the World Askew,” focuses on the artist’s photography “through which he most frequently explored ideas of causality and repetition to debunk and transgress artistic mandates,” according to a statement on the exhibition. In their first meeting, Robins also bought a couple of these early photographs. 

An example is Aligning: Balls (Version A), 1972, where each image has a “colored ball marking the midpoint of alignment with the next, creating a linear yet irregular sequence.” 

Aside from being a collector of works by Baldessari’s students—including Mike Kelley and David Salle—Robins also was drawn to the artist because he had been a fan of Marcel Duchamp, the pioneering French conceptual artist who had been an inspiration to Baldessari. 

After their first meeting, Robins continued to collect Baldessari’s work and they formed what became a lifelong friendship. Throughout those years, Robins observed the artist’s continuing invention of “new ways to express himself that related and connected to the past,” Robins says.

“He made the argument that just stenciling words onto a canvas—that could be a painting. Then blowing smoke to match the picture of clouds—that was through photography—but it was a different way to do a landscape,” he says. 

Later, Baldessari took images from films in the ’80s and ’90s, integrating them with paint in primary colors and photography. 

One work owned by Robins that’s in the exhibition began with two photographs, one vertical and the other horizontal. The images are overlaid on one another and  where they cross, “he combines them into one intersecting painting,” Robins says.

“There were always these new inventions that were brilliant, but they also touched on or related to the same basic thing—that he was finding new ways to express himself and to say what art is,” he says. “It was very conceptual. There was also always wit and humor in his work.”

In the section, “Atlas of an Iconoclast,” the exhibition brings together Baldessari’s figurative “atlas” of photographs, film, newspaper clippings and other images that he used in such works. In Fugitive Essays (With Ants), 1990, the artist puts these sourced images into frames “to construct visual metaphors that suggest multiple narratives,” the museum said. 

A fourth section titled “Doubling Histories,” includes works that nod to the disparate artists who have informed Baldessari’s art, such as Marcel Duchamp (Repositories), 2002, a spring-green urinal basin scrawled with the text “The artist is a fountain.” There’s also Francisco de Goya (That Always Happens, Tetrad Series), 1997, 1999. 

As the museum wrote about the exhibition, “In his later works, Baldessari resumes pictorial activity and interconnections of meaning that aim to provoke astonishment, bewilderment, and perceptual hesitation, revealing the productive gaps between image and word.”

The show, which runs through Oct. 30, is the first survey of the artist’s works to appear in Latin America. The accompanying catalog “presents a perspective of Baldessari’s legacy and impact on South American artists, featuring contributions by David Lamelas, Alejandro Cesarco, and Analía Sabán—artists from the region who were friends, collaborators, and students of Baldessari’s,” Grimson says.

Although the museum mostly focuses on Latin American art, “the fact that they’re featuring John demonstrates that there’s a global dialogue that he connects to,” Robins says. “I love seeing the versatility and how he expressed himself through his life.”

See media coverage at Penta.