Cinema According to Baldessari
by Angel Fernandez-Santos

The complicities between movie people and those dedicated to literature and the arts in the so-called (no one really knows why) American "Lost Generation" have been the subject of articles by the Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante: he feels there were many. Not long ago, I believe it was in one of these articles, he wrote that in classic Hollywood film dialogues he had observed an influence close to mimetism, taken from the way characters in Ernest Hemingway's novels and stories tend to talk.

It is not difficult to show that the opposite is true: that it is the Hemingway characters who tend to speak with classic laconic Hollywood elegance. You can find replicas in silent film titles (for example, in John Ford's Three Bad Men), which today seem very Hemingwayesque even though Hemingway had not yet popularized his particular and mannerist form of dialogue. Filmdom did not learn as much from this writer as has been said; it drew little benefit from his work, which is considerably less cinematographic than it appears at first reading. On the other hand, the work of William Faulkner, despite being more literary and rhetorical in a noble sense, did penetrate further into cinema than that of Hemingway. Nearly all movies extracted from Hemingway stories soon lost to tightness: they wrinkled and aged quickly, so that today his word sounds literary in an ignoble sense. Two exceptions coming form the 40's prove the rule: The Killers, directed by Robert Siodmak, which had very little to do with the original story, and above all To Have and Have Not, which Howard Hawks directed and Faulkner himself wrote. Here there is very little similarity to Hemingway, as Faulkner (who had little in common with his fellow writer) took advantage of a malevolent golden opportunity to decapitate his colleague's arguments and counter-arguments.

If cinema derived less benefit from Hemingway's word than is presumed, Hemingway, on the other hand, used movies to absorb torrents of literature like a sponge. And he is no exception: cinema has nourished both his contemporaries and later artists up to the present more than the canons of their gild would admit. Cinema is definitely permeating the tissues of imagination in this century, soaking in like a drizzle through a waterproof trench coat. For living art, cinema is not merely the exterior reference carried by art recently born, another formalizing of the imaginary. It is more than this: for almost a century it has been the scene of the soundless battle of a mutation, almost a genetic order, in the mechanisms of perception and therefore it conditions any perspective we may adopt to consider art, every art, and even every thing. Before the cinemas century no one could envision in the interior routes of Las Meninas of Velazquez, or in Vermeer's Interior Day, what today we extract from these surfaces as naturally as we breathe. The shifting concavities of another view extract traces of movement never before revealed from the secular quietude of these canvases, and extract the inexplicable trace of an interval from their condition of moments detained.

This new way of seeing things comes from the experience of cinema (and has by now become viscera beneath each human skin). Vladimir Maiakovski said (and shouted, as was his custom) that cinema is more than an art: it is a conception of the world, a radical way to remold it. However, the poet did not find a unanimous endorsement of this idea in his colleagues of brush, burin, chisel or pen. And when his voice did achieve an echo, he found that his perception would not bloom elsewhere as energetically as when he himself expressed it. Today an infinity of artists stubbornly resists accepting - or accepts only marginally - that cinema modifies the current of contemporary creation, the translucid behavioral laws of the imaginary, in a fatal manner from within the current itself. Only a few of the old avant garde, particularly between-war Soviets, sifted through the limbo where the quietude of traditional art drowses. They opened their doors to the contamination emanating from the mélange of summer fair shanties we still call cinema, a mélange that spills out images that creep over the curved ramps of time into the arteries of everything, absolutely everything contemporary, beginning with art.

And one must penetrate the suburbs of the American aesthetic adventure of a couple of decades ago to find an open gesture of awe towards Maiakovski's foundational shout. The ritual gesture of John Baldessari was one, with the power of a baptismal paradox (birth in the form of suicide). One day he piled up all his conventional pictorial work and used it to create a funereal bonfire, to become the cradle of his future exploration of the world through the legacy cinema left in his lens, the window through which Baldessari approaches the world and investigates it. From that savage expiation, Baldessari had embarked on an adventure with no return, to search for access routes to that hidden territory of the imaginary where cinema filters into the inner sanctum of art and provokes deep, although at times nearly imperceptible, transformations. These occur in the discernment of those who see his work (and this includes its creator) as much as, or more than in the artistic object itself.

Cinema as the object of painting was already present, but the revelation that he mechanisms of cinema are in the subsoil of all contemporary contemplation is a later conquest, and Baldessari one of its discoverers. I think it was Ernst Lubitsch who, during one of his last filmings about half a century ago, showed the place cinema truly occupies in regard to observation for a photographer given to preciosity. The photographer was determined to excessively polish two consecutive frames of two faces looking at each other in a take-countertake, and Lubitsch (who loved quick solutions) commented that it was useless to waste time on such an enterprise: "You will not improve the movies by paying so much attention to the frames: movies are not within the frames, but in what is between them." The photographer, perplexed, answered "But there is nothing between the frames!" The filmmaker replied, "That's the reason, because there is nothing but the spectator's eye, which joins them and therefore creates the continuity of the movie." This nothingness (this lack of images which is the frontier between consecutive instants that compose the chain of a sequence) is the crack where cinema penetrates, through the sight of those who watch it, as much in one of Lubitsch's flickering moves as in an (apparently) smooth composition from Baldessari.

Ironic and cruel witness to self-contained obsolescence and the fragmented images of the daily demolition of things, Baldessari reclaims an old human passion: that of bestowing an extreme degree of existence on the non-existent, applying plenitude to the interstices of empty spaces generated by the stuttering of everything visible; or, in another way, permitting the mechanism of blinking in contemporary plastic creation. The material Baldessari uses to fill these empty spaces is something so extremely evident yet conceptually elusive as an interval, time in regard to the flowing or fluid, which is the specific raw material of cinema: its canvas. Cinema does not consist so much in seeing one now immediately followed by another now, as in giving access to those who look at those nows through the transition produced from one to another ( which is called interior rhythm of the sequence in the jargon of filmmakers). This is converted into pure intervals, into the movement of this nothingness that occupies and closes the emptiness, the insurmountable abysm and wound implied by two consecutive instants from a sequential chain.

Or the hollow, the abysm and the wound that lie between two consecutive brushstrokes, which is what Velazquez captured in Las Meninas; or between two mobs of people converging on the magnet of a peasant festive ritual in Brueghel's ant hill; or between the two somber shadows that prop up and impede toppling of the abandoned house Edward Hopper once robbed in a nightmare; or between two stitches of an embroideress floating crookedly between two surrounding silences in a nondescript room constructed by Vermeer; or between successive fixations of the mobility of a bloody outburst codified by Bacon; or in Munch's shout that breaks open a breech in the continuity of the thread of silence; or between the interior lightness and the tenuity of an Antonio Lopez dream, white as a shroud, while it is being dreamed; or between the fingers of the outdoor caress of a breath from the surfaces of Poppies, The Nymphs, and the ages of light revealed by Monet on the façade of the Chartres Cathedral; or between two floatations with human forms gliding across the rough black surface of an impenetrable Chagall Russian night.

The mystery of capturing a period of time is not an invention of the cinema. It comes from much further back. It is an ambition as old as the imagination and was already alive under the skin of a bison flowing across wrinkled stone in a cave at Altamira. Cinema appropriated (although they belonged to it before they were born) the writhing routes that free associations follow. As the language of this new ageless art was forged in the second and third decades of this century, it revealed that the vertebrae of cinematographic syntaxes had already been elaborated, and in part codified, in remote times; and that they could be found disseminated among the residues human ingenuity had been leaving in its path throughout centuries. What cinema brought to evidence is not the invention of an immemorial passion and an immemorial language capable of expressing it, but its rapid disclosure and complete articulation, self-enclosing: the prodigiousness of taking ownership of the time span of things and even changing this span (primordial raw material of cinema) into an entity, outside the closed areas of consciousness, as had already occurred in selected moments in the history of visual poetry. Therefore behind Baldessari there is more than the radical change wrought by the invention of cinema and its creation of a new technique of seeing things; there is also everything this new viewpoint owes to some primordial instants of eternal and timeless painting (although Baldessari repudiated any contribution to this painting, even burning that part of his work as words already spoken are eliminated in memory's wasteland).

In Baldessari's gesture there is a substratum of ill humored humorist, of one who maintains the umbilical cord joining creative ambition to subversive attitudes. This may be the source of the sense of coherence escaping from his games with the arbitrary: they derive from random juggling as a trained instinct can separate the essential from the hazardous. Of all the arts, it is cinema which offers its viewers most facilities to project their own interior ego onto exterior discourse, to release an open subjectivity spilling an identification into the contagious concavity of its condition as object. This is in definitive what Lubitsch said to his obtuse photographer (who could not understand it) in the anecdote mentioned before. The laws of editing are the invisible architectural skeleton, detached from space, which sustains the logical armature of cinema; and Baldessari is the son of those laws, an innate editor, allowing those who see his chains of images the opportunity to fill in the spaces, the emptinesses that link or weld them together and therefore give the condition of plenitude to the incomplete. Baldessari inverts, as do subtle cineasts, the sense of traditional projected movement on plastic arts: it is the viewer who puts what he sees in order, and not the reverse. And therefore his compositions stimulate dormant associations from the conscience of the viewer, and it is this viewer (with the projective liberty of a visual test) who determines the logical or the illogical in the sequence, the series, or the composition.

There is an insistence (even thought it is excessively obvious) that because of this the keys to a Baldessari composition (frequently elaborated as reciprocal collisions of images which simultaneously repel and attract) can be revealed by the dialectic molds of the Assembly of Attractions conceived by Serguei Eisenstein in the middle of the 20's. It is an irrefutable fact, although somewhat insignificant. On the other hand, there is a much more subtle fold in the cloth of cinematographic edging, which better identifies the source of the imaginary energy of Baldessari's constructions. It is the mysterious mechanic of the ellipsis: this imageless screen that is instantly filled, without a break in sequence or in continuity of plot, by the imagination of the spectator, who is thus instantly converted into a creator of cinema, in cineaste. The vigor, the interior cohesion disclosed by some of Baldessari's associations, have the same capacity to stimulate creativity; the screen invites the spectator to deduce an ellipsis. Baldessari, as a good weaver of cinematographic ellipses, composes incomplete works which lack an objective something which the viewer subjectively elaborates. Thus the viewer finalizes, terminates the work, in the same way the movie viewer films the invisibility of the elliptic occurrences in the interior of his memory, just as Lubitsch said. And so the example of the German magician, tamer of everyday paradoxes, goes beyond Eisenstein's example towards a discovery of this singular artist.

And also the example of Alfred Hitchcock and his legendary gravitational takes: astounding images, apparently inconsistent, seemingly arbitrary and meaningless, which suddenly (why or how we do not know) contaminate the sequence and take control of the viewer's attention to become centres of gravitation. The viewer uses them to configure and totalize the meaning of all inconsistencies that happen on the screen. Hitchcock ironically used the term "MacGuffin" for these takes, or shots, or at times even small scenes endowed with a certain autonomy in the armature of a story. This picturesque name comes from an old London joke, which recounts the meeting of two elegant gentlemen on an aristocratic sidewalk of the City. With an impeccably gloved hand, one of them dragged a filthy rope tied to a dirty sac sewn with appallingly coarse seams: "Might you tell me, sir, what you are carrying in that pouch?" asked the second gentleman. "A MacGuffin, my dear sir", was the answer. The second gentleman inquired "And what might be a MacGuffin?" Answer: "A domestic animal." Another question: "I have never heard of one. Please inform me, exactly what is the purpose of a MacGuffin?" The first gentleman elucidated "To hunt lions in Scotland, sir." It would appear that the clarification is not totally satisfactory. "That is impossible, my good man" said the second. "Why is it impossible?" the interrogated asks the interrogator. "Because there are no lions in Scotland." "In that case", deduced the gentleman carrying the sack, "evidently what I am carrying in the pouch is not a MacGuffin." And both continued their paths with no change of expression, their doubts apparently assuaged.

Hitchcock recounted a traditional British nonsense. Jan Kott observed in an insuperable essay about King Lear that all Shakespeare's work is a concentrated compendium of every sort of nonsense: insensate paradoxes deriving from Italian medieval theatre, extended and prolonged throughout the European scene until finally becoming incrusted in London music halls at the beginning of the century, in the between-wars Berlin cabaret and in the Parisian theatre of the absurd immediately after World War II. The work of Charles Chaplin, Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett, each of them the pinnacle of these three contemporary peaks of humor, is laced with the twists of nonsense. And cinema received its legacy. Hitchcock's strong construction (with infinite gags from the foundation of Hollywood comedy) is sustained by the solidity of these vacuums of meaning he called "MacGuffins", genuine nonsense, arbitrary dilatory ellipses, sudden sprouts of irrationality that mysteriously strengthen the rationality of the story or the composition.

Baldessari is also full of nonsense. And through this bizarre variant of logical cinematographic editing one penetrates deeply into the irony of the artist's sequences (simultaneously static and restless), in which he manages to express the order which paralyses disorder and the disorder which churns within all order ( to paralyze all disorder): a singular contemporary ridicule of classic tricks of plastic composition; and a rejection, so coherent that it seems harmonious, of the laws of harmony: nonsense not removed (it just intrudes, without evoking its name, and this can not be coincidental) from what is intrinsically part of that perturbing fear Beckett deduced from his ruthless incursions into the dark side of artistic behavior; when he warned of the mortal danger threatening every artist with pretensions of being meaningful. Baldessari is one of those rare creators conscious of the danger implicit in an elaboration of messages in today's computerized universe, as a slanderous ambition to be meaningful makes (in this case) almost all his colleagues throughout the world morally insignificant. And he wishes to save himself from the bonfire.

Baldessari is part of the chapter of living art which adopts the search for the imperfect as the material used by the artist to mold perfection. His passion for creating an anti-pictorial painting is a sort of vitriol that corrodes the temptation (ingenuous for disbelievers of this species) to create beauty. His ridicule of beauty endows him with great ironic energy, allowing him to wash the face of his artistic craft with dirt and free himself from the temptation of concealing cosmetics. Situated at floor level, soiled by the dirt imperfection generates, the material of Baldessari's compositions is very similar to a barely civilized and even somewhat feral systemization of the violent disorder of civilization, which is another of his many connections to cinema and, concretely, with black movies. His violent series and black sequences are therefore representations of the solidity of violence drawn and quartered; ordinances consequent with the counter meanings of civilization, which Baldessari sarcastically summarized in the vulgarity of his fetishes and urban dumping grounds; a sort of image of a ridiculous West disgorged by its own plunder. Art of the accessory, of the perishable, of the useless. Art therefore of maximum realism, imperfect as life is always to a death row convict, which is another nonsense, another meaningless old joke in bad taste.

from the exhibition catalog
John Baldessari. Santiago de Compostela (Spain): Xunta de Galicia, 1992,
based on an exhibition organized by Brooke Alexander for Galeria Weber, Alexander y Cobo, Madrid