AzizArt Jan2020

as a parody of cataloging rather
than a thorough straight
classification.
Pointing
Much of Baldessari's work
involves pointing, in which he
tells the viewer not only what to
look at but how to make
selections and comparisons, often
simply for the sake of doing so.
Baldessari's Commissioned
Paintings (1969) series took the
idea of pointing literally, after he
read a criticism of conceptual art
that claimed it was nothing more
than pointing. Beginning with
photos of a hand pointing at
various objects, Baldessari then
hired amateur yet technically
adept artists to paint the pictures.
He then added a caption "A
painting by " to each finished
painting. In this instance, he has
been likened to a choreographer,
directing the action while
having no direct hand in it, and
these paintings are typically read
as questioning the idea of artistic
authorship. The amateur artists
have been analogized to sign
painters in this series, chosen for
their pedestrian methods that
were indifferent to what was being
painted.Baldessari critiques
formalist assessments of art in a
segment from his video How We Do
Art Now (1973), entitled
"Examining Three 8d Nails", in
which he gives obsessive attention
to minute details of the nails, such
as how much rust they have, or
descriptive qualities such as which
appears "cooler, more distant, less
important" than the others.
Dots
Circular adhesive dots covering up
the faces of photographed and
painted portraits are a prevailing
motif in Baldessari's work from the
mid-1980s onward.The artist
himself suspected that, despite the
broad array of approaches he's
taken over the course of his career,
he will be best remembered as "the
guy who puts dots over peoples
faces."Examples of the "dot
portraits" would include—for
example—Bloody Sunday (1987) or
Stonehenge with Two Persons
(2005), though these works are
numerous and it is difficult to
identify an exemplar. The dots in
these paintings evoke brightly
colored price-stickers sometimes
seen at garage sales,