About This Artwork
John Baldessari
American, born 1931
The Fallen Easel1988
Photolithographs (9), edition 20/35
53 x 63.4 cm; 52 x 43.5 cm; 35 x 170 cm; 142 x 43 cm; other various dimensions
Gift of David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg, 1991.1256
An influential pioneer of Conceptual Art, John Baldessari began appropriating film stills, advertisements, and found photographs in the 1980s to examine the social impact of mass culture. Using photographic excerpts in unorthodox arrangements, he highlights dissonance and gaps in meaning to undermine expectations for how images function. The Fallen Easel employs a framed, multipart composition to suggest its own physical instability and thereby underscore the "fall" of easel painting from the apex of fine art to a grammar of simple color combinations. The colored dots, placed to obscure identities or expressions, additionally frustrate conventional markers of meaning in photographs.