John Baldessari
American, 1931–2020
Spaces Between (One Risky)
INV-1208
John Baldessari
American, 1931–20201986
Spaces Between (One Risky)
John Baldessari American, 1931–2020 →Conceptual Artgelatin silver (developing-out-paper) prphotographic process
Date
1986
Medium
Gelatin silver prints
Dimensions
148 × 90.8 cm (58 5/16 × 35 3/4 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Gift of Boardroom, Inc.
John Baldessari works in painting, sculpture, film, photography, and installation. Not a photographer himself, Baldessari uses found images—such as these two film stills from Hollywood movies—to demonstrate his fascination with mass media and its influence on everyday life. Here Baldessari combined two movie scenes, removing portions of the actors’ faces or, in one case, an entire head. By stripping the facial expressions from these moments, the artist undercut their narrative possibilities: the viewer is left to fill in the full story and to question the means by which stories are told in cinema generally.
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