John Baldessari

An Artist is Not Merely the Slavish Announcer
1966–1968

A black and white photograph showing a parking lot with several cars, trees in the background, and a palm in the foreground, bisected by a vertical pole. Below the image is a caption that reads, "AN ARTIST IS NOT MERELY THE SLAVISH ANNOUNCER OF A SERIES OF FACTS, WHICH IN THIS CASE THE CAMERA HAS HAD TO ACCEPT AND MECHANICALLY RECORD."

For The Artist Is Not Merely the Slavish Announcer, John Baldessari commissioned a commercial sign painter to hand-letter a hackneyed statement taken from an art textbook. Above it, he printed a photograph of an ordinary suburban parking lot. The uppercase, sans serif lettering style presents the clichéd message of the text with a deadpan sense of factuality. Likewise, the photograph presents the banal scene as if it were a piece of forensic evidence. Even the work’s odd dimensions reflect the circumstantial: 59” x 45” is the size of the door of the van used to transport the work.

The combination of text and image raises narrative and allusive possibilities even while cancelling them out. Are we to look at the image for evidence that the photographer has not “slavishly announced” facts, but has created a carefully considered composition? Or do the text and image simply represent a random, meaningless juxtaposition? Baldessari has distanced himself as much as possible from making artistic decisions that would elicit clearly defined meanings. As he has said, “Seeing selectively means you screen out a lot of interesting things.” His works are open, and encourage, in his own words, “conceptual leaps people can make from one bit of information to another.”

Not on view

Date
1966–1968

Classification
Photographs

Medium
Photographic emulsion, varnish, and gesso on canvas

Dimensions
Overall: 59 1/8 × 45 × 7/8in. (150.2 × 114.3 × 2.2 cm)

Accession number
92.21

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee and gift of an anonymous donor

Rights and reproductions
© John Baldessari
Permission courtesy of the artist

API
artworks/8018

Audio

John Baldessari, An Artist is Not Merely the Slavish Announcer, 1966–68

In America Is Hard to See

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John Baldessari, An Artist is Not Merely the Slavish Announcer, 1966–68

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Narrator: The text at the bottom of this canvas came from an art book that proclaimed the superiority of painting to photography. The artist, John Baldessari.
John Baldessari: And it kind of bothered me that photography had one history and, and art had another history or, or more specifically painting. And to me it was all kind of the same. It was just different materials, photographic materials versus paint and canvas. And so I think that, it was that argument I was addressing.
Narrator: The photo in this piece is of an anonymous parking lot in San Diego, with a tree randomly dividing the picture in half.
John Baldessari: I was. . .trying to counter that I just would go around taking snapshots and trying to, to really violate rules of photography. And I thought, Well, what would be more violative of a photograph than just having this post come down in the middle of it, just splitting the image left and right? Some of them are just driving around in my VW bus and holding the camera out the window and shooting without even looking through the viewfinder. Basically I was just trying to avoid the conventional ideas of art.
Narrator: Towards this end, Baldessari was trying to downplay the role of the artist, both in his non-choice of photographic subject matter and his mechanical, impersonal approach to painting this work. He hired a professional sign painter and had him print the featureless script on the canvas rather than paint it. Baldessari coated the canvas with emulsion—the chemical mixture used to make photo paper light sensitive—using a photographic process to develop a painting. By doing so, Baldessari ironically challenges the authority of the reproduced text, and its insistence that photography is somehow a less artistic and more mechanical medium than painting.