John Baldessari Wrong tee

John Baldessari (1931 – 2020) was an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lived and worked in Santa Monica and Venice, California. Initially a painter, Baldessari began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid-1960s. In 1970 he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography. He created thousands of works which demonstrate—and, in many cases, combine—the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language within the boundaries of the work of art.

In 1967 John Baldessari exhibited his "wrong" series. He uses a selection of photographic images anchored by text. The most famous of these shows an image with poor composition juxtaposed with the text "wrong" bellow the photograph. This image references a chapter on composition in a photography techniques book. The irony of the word is what makes the image so appealing: a deadpan comic adoption of doing the wrong thing (shooting the subject off-centre) coupled with a subtle satire of the implied judgment of objective correctness. Doing so, Baldessari participated in a general tendency in conceptual art to use photography in a deskilled, non-aesthetic way, as a document of an action or as an illustration of an idea.

Baldessari asked: why should we conform to conventional aspects of art or photography, and why does our work have to be judged at all? Can an aesthetic idea simply be wrong or right? John Baldessari once stated: "You don't want anyone to say 'You can't do that!' But you do get a lot of that in New York. One of the healthiest things about California is - 'Why not?'

• 100% combed and ring-spun cotton (Heather colors contain polyester)
• Fabric weight: 4.2 oz/yd² (142 g/m²)
• Pre-shrunk fabric
• Side-seamed construction
• Shoulder-to-shoulder taping
• Blank product sourced from Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico, Honduras, or the US

 

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