John Baldessari - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 13, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Private Collection

  • Catalogue Essay


    Lion Jet Truck is a composite photo collage that provides an attractive visual and forms an interpersonal dialogue with the viewer. The disparate imagery is taken from movie stills reshaped in grid-like fashion to create a new storyline, like an obscure Old Hollywood film. It is up to the audience to figure out its meaning only given bits of information, forced to create rather than react to his work. And it is inherently and entirely conceptual. The two brightly hued dots covering the figures’ faces are a landmark trait of the artist, heavy with meaning that extends far beyond the subject matter.
    Baldessari developed colored disks and other geometrical shapes based on the outlines of his motifs. The painted dots whose provenance could equally be traced back to price labels, to the tossed ball motif that he used so frequently in the early 1970s or even to the hats the artist used to conceal his face in his 1974 series of self-portraits (“Artist’s Identity Hidden with Various Hats”) soon became Baldessari’s central motif and hallmark. These colored disks are used mainly to hide the countenances of the figures he paints, and it is this, paradoxically, that lends them their revelatory function. Without a face to monopolize it, viewers can turn their attention to other structural features of these works, such as gestures and postures of the figures or the photographic style of their reproduction. To the extent that Baldessari interrupts and inhibits the flow of practiced perception, he diverts viewers’ consciousness to the act of perception itself and to its many pitfalls. The painted dots, in other words, not only shift perception away from what should be the works’ motifs but shift it so profoundly that it focuses henceforth on itself. What the painted dots also do is to make us suspicious of the illusory familiarity of photographic images, exposing these as media reproductions of reality that by their very nature gloss over their own status as a construct. It is as if the faces blocked out by Baldessari’s colored disks were there to alert viewers to their own blindness to the seductive power of images.
    R. Fuchs, “Masking the Face – Facing the Mask,” John Baldessari: Noses & Ears, Etc. (Part Two), New York, 2006, p. 9

134

Lion Jet Truck

1988

Three photographs with acrylic mounted on board in artist’s frame.

96 x 56 in. (244 x 142.2 cm).

Estimate
$250,000 - 350,000 

Sold for $554,500

Contemporary Art Part I

13 May 2010
New York