{"id":563,"date":"2009-12-08T16:42:59","date_gmt":"2009-12-08T15:42:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/blog\/?p=563"},"modified":"2016-01-24T19:48:25","modified_gmt":"2016-01-24T18:48:25","slug":"pop-life-john-baldessari-perfect-beauty-tate-modern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=563","title":{"rendered":"John Baldessari, <em>Perfect Beauty\/Pop Life<\/em>, Tate Modern, London"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Walking around London at present, it\u2019s easy to think that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tate.org.uk\/modern\/exhibitions\/poplife\/default.shtm\">Pop Life<\/a> is the only exhibition on offer at Tate Modern this winter: Jeff Koons\u2019 silver bunny shines at you from innumerable billboards like a sanitised version of Donnie Darko\u2019s rabbit nemesis desperate for your cash. Were this the case, you might feel ready to question the government\u2019s recent decision to award the Tate extra funding, because Pop Life is, by a long way, the worst exhibition I\u2019ve seen in ages.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">The exhibition starts with two rooms of middling Warhol and has a brief upturn in Piotr Uklanski\u2019s <em>The Nazis<\/em>, a work that subtly questions Hollywood\u2019s glamorisation of the SS room, but overall, the exhibition is one where room after room is filled with instantly forgettable work, or with art you only remember because it annoyed you so much.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Jeff Koons and Cosey Fanni Tutti may once have seemed challenging to dealers and fans, but now they look like little more than shallow exhibitionists, while Damien Hirst\u2019s sub-adolescent musings on death continue to bewilder by their presence in exhibition after exhibition. Overloud music that long since ceased to be hip but follows you into every gallery compounds the sheer awfulness of the exhibition, and once again it\u2019s hard not to leave this Tate exhibition with the suspicion that it\u2019s main purpose is to sell badges, posters and innumerable stocking fillers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Fortunately, there is another exhibition for those who venture to Bankside, and it\u2019s so good that you can almost forgive them for Pop Life. In fact, walking around the much more sedate but infinitely more interesting <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tate.org.uk\/modern\/exhibitions\/johnbaldessari\/default.shtm\">John Baldessari: Pure Beauty<\/a> is a chance to remember that there are artists for whom experimentation is crucial, artists for whom art is less about making money and more about making the viewer think about the world around them.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">John Baldessari was one of the main players in the west coast\u2019s conceptual art movement in the 1960s. But he followed his initial success with his Cremation Project in 1970, literally burning the majority of his work-to-date to ashes in an act that was at once both creative and destructive. The Tate exhibition includes some of the few pieces to survive this project, such as \u2018Pure Beauty\u2019, which in their ability to simultaneously question both art and language hint at what would come in Baldessari\u2019s later career.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Baldessari\u2019s work in this exhibition is so varied it would be impossible to give a full account of it without entering into a room-by-room account of it, but one thing that shines through consistently is his constant need to question the nature of art. Already in the late-60s he was producing works like \u2018Wrong\u2019, one of a series of works that incorporate photographs whose angles and composition contradicted the advice given in a book on the correct way to take photographs, and this questioning attitude never seems to have diminished.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">However, while in the hands of a lesser artist the impulse to confront the question of \u2018What is (good) art?\u2019 may have led to a self-indulgent and solipsistic body of work, Baldessari\u2019s engages with the viewer through a wonderfully dry and quirky sense of humour, and it never loses sight of the world outside the studio either. \u2018Inventory\u2019 (1972) combines an image of smiling shoppers and stacked supermarket shelves with an image of the stacked corpses of holocaust victims to create a profoundly unsettling work on historical amnesia in our consumer society.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Where Pop Life is an exhibition full of shallow art whose purpose often threatens to be little more than the artists\u2019 self-aggrandisement, John Baldessari: Pure Beauty is an exhibition of work that is consistently profound, challenging and rewarding. The former may have glitz and the cold glamour of neon, but the latter is the real gem, warm and imbued with the sparkle of fantastic art.<\/p>\n<p><!--EndFragment--> <!--[if gte mso 10]&gt;--> <!--[endif]--> <!--StartFragment--><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><!--EndFragment--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Walking around London at present, it\u2019s easy to think that Pop Life is the only exhibition on offer at Tate Modern this winter: Jeff Koons\u2019 silver bunny shines at you from innumerable billboards like a sanitised version of Donnie Darko\u2019s rabbit nemesis desperate for your cash. Were this the case, you might feel ready to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[12,283],"tags":[42,248,277],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>John Baldessari, Perfect Beauty\/Pop Life, Tate Modern, London - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=563\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"John Baldessari, Perfect Beauty\/Pop Life, Tate Modern, London - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Walking around London at present, it\u2019s easy to think that Pop Life is the only exhibition on offer at Tate Modern this winter: Jeff Koons\u2019 silver bunny shines at you from innumerable billboards like a sanitised version of Donnie Darko\u2019s rabbit nemesis desperate for your cash. Were this the case, you might feel ready to [&hellip;]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=563\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2009-12-08T15:42:59+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2016-01-24T18:48:25+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Nicholas Murgatroyd\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Nicholas Murgatroyd\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=563\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=563\",\"name\":\"John Baldessari, Perfect Beauty\/Pop Life, Tate Modern, London - The Manchester Review\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2009-12-08T15:42:59+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2016-01-24T18:48:25+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/7d2ce9b323b04c3e741f71523781049a\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=563#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=563\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=563#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"John Baldessari, Perfect Beauty\/Pop Life, Tate Modern, London\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#website\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/\",\"name\":\"The Manchester Review\",\"description\":\"The Manchester Review\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/7d2ce9b323b04c3e741f71523781049a\",\"name\":\"Nicholas Murgatroyd\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-includes\/images\/blank.gif\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-includes\/images\/blank.gif\",\"caption\":\"Nicholas Murgatroyd\"},\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?author=24\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"John Baldessari, Perfect Beauty\/Pop Life, Tate Modern, London - The Manchester Review","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=563","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"John Baldessari, Perfect Beauty\/Pop Life, Tate Modern, London - The Manchester Review","og_description":"Walking around London at present, it\u2019s easy to think that Pop Life is the only exhibition on offer at Tate Modern this winter: Jeff Koons\u2019 silver bunny shines at you from innumerable billboards like a sanitised version of Donnie Darko\u2019s rabbit nemesis desperate for your cash. 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