If you donât like self-serious artists, John Baldessariâs your man. A household name in conceptual art, Baldessariâs work exists comfortably in the liminal space between clean abstraction and postmodern critique. His pieces tend to be dryly funny, or simply weird, and if you ever get a chance to see them in real life, you should take it. Weâre in luck this month, with Madame CĂ©zanneâs Hairdos at Elizabeth Leach Gallery. The title is a literal one: The show features a series of tricolor screenprints of a womanâs forehead, with her hair arranged slightly differently in each one, and titles like âRhomboidâ and âPyramidâ nodding at the shape of each vaguely representational image.
As a sight gag and as a joke at the expense of portraiture, poorly-cropped snapshots, or conceptual art itself, the series is funny and light. It reminds me of previous Baldessari projects, like the ones collected in Pure Beauty, a retrospective of the artistâs work that landed at New Yorkâs Met in 2010, and included such delights as Baldessariâs collage pieces, ironic text paintings offering instructions for selling your work, and I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, in which Baldessari repeatedly Bart Simpsonâd that sentence on paper; it was a gesture that New York Magazineâs Jerry Saltz said âevery artist ought to be required to make once in his or her life.â I couldnât agree more.
Why am I describing a show thatâs long over, that you wonât see, and that didnât come to Portland? Because thereâs a huge difference between a giant retrospective and a small gallery displayâwhile the former provides plenty of context to newcomers, the latter does not. And though Iâm a fan of Baldessariâs work, even I have reservations about recommending that you go out of your way to see a slight show that includes only one print series, even one this visually clever. So if youâre new to Baldessari, arming yourself with a preemptive Google image search isnât a bad idea. Itâs also fortunate that Elizabeth Leachâs adjacent New Modernism show, featuring work from Math Bass, Pat Boas, Chris Gander, Chris Johanson, Samuel Levi Jones, Joanna Pousette-Dart, and Amanda Wojick, is also worth seeingâparticularly Pousette-Dartâs works in acrylic on panel, their large gestures and bright color scheme evoking such disparate points of reference as Sonia Delaunayâs geometric paintings and pop artâs neon precision.
Much of conceptual art isnât particularly accessible, making it the upper limit of art appreciation unless youâre someone who actually studies or makes it. But some conceptual artistsâthe ones I think are actually the most interestingâcan draw in a casual viewer through clever uses of scale or nods at the process itself. With his large-scale wall drawings, Sol LeWitt comes to mind immediately as one of these artists. So does Barbara Kruger, whose text work was some of the first conceptual art I was exposed to. But neither of these artists quite equals the same humorous, picaresque sensibility of John Baldessari. Thatâs why I think his work is worth seeingâbecause if youâre willing to take a chance on conceptual art, itâs likely heâll reward that effort.