John Baldessari's 'elusive' beauty takes to NY Met

He's the high priest of contemporary art with a retrospective at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art called "Pure Beauty."

But don't expect John Baldessari to go defining beauty.

"It's a fairly elusive question," he told AFP in an interview Monday. "It's such an ambiguous term."

Elusive questions are at the heart of the show opening Wednesday, the first ever staged for Baldessari at the Met and the first major US exhibition for the California-born artist in two decades.

Tall, stooping, white-bearded, Baldessari looks like a gentle giant and indeed he is a giant of the contemporary art world.

The 79-year-old helped build the conceptual art movement, transforming ordinary objects into cultural icons and putting words, photographs and video film on the same level - if not higher - as painting and sculpture.

"Pure Beauty," which previously showed at Tate Modern in London and Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, then made its US landfall at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, tells the entire story.

Approximately 120 works span from 1962 to today, featuring all Baldessari's hallmarks, from collages of photographs and over-painted photos to paintings and film.

A favorite technique is placing colored dots to mask the faces of characters in blown-up stills from Hollywood B-movies.

Another is using ironic, humorous text to undermine long-held notions of art and the art market.

"TIPS FOR ARTISTS WHO WANT TO SELL," for example, simply lists in black block capital letters three purported rules for success, such as executing still lifes "free of morbid props... dead birds, etc."

In a 13 minute video called "I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art," from 1971, the artist writes that same sentence on a sheet of paper over and over again - for all 13 minutes.

More recent works reflect Baldessari's interest in fragmenting the human body, as in the "Noses and Ears" series, and use of photography overlaid with paint and sculptural techniques.

Baldessari says there are no limits to art, which he calls "a believable lie," and adds that even if beauty is hard to define, it does exist.

"It's like what the Supreme Court justice said about (the definition of) pornography: that you know it when you see it."

To get to Baldessari's works in the Met, the visitor first passes cavernous halls of the museum's great collection of Greek and other ancient art. Asked if today's artistic output would be around in two millennia - and what that output would resemble, the American chuckled.

"I think there's more and more a blurring of boundaries," he said. "There's more and more blurring of what we used to call high and low culture. Right now, the whole idea of performance is a hot topic."

He noted with a wry smile that curators putting on retrospectives of performance art today, let alone in centuries' time, might face a challenge.

Marla Prather, a curator of the exhibition, said Baldessari has influenced today's art scene so completely that "many of the things he introduced are taken for granted now. It's hard to remember how radical they were."

But the aging provocateur isn't finished yet, she predicted.

"The secret is that through 50 years of work - and that becomes very clear in this exhibition - the work never really stays the same," she told AFP.

Not everyone is a fan, Baldessari himself admits. Recalling his wild early days that in 1970 led to him cremating his entire output of paintings, he says:

"I had a couple critics viewing my retrospective saying it might be time to do it again."

The "Pure Beauty" show runs from Wednesday through January 9, 2011.