John Baldessari’s Nose/Silhouette: Green, 2020 Screenprint
Last month, my friend Laura hosted a Dalí-themed dinner party at Main Projects, the gallery she owns with one-half of the Icy Gays duo, Eric Thomas Suwall. Between courses, an artist asked what kind of art I like, and I wasn’t sure whether he meant the art I like to see in museums, or put on walls, the art I like to experience, or simply like to think about. Whatever he meant, it didn’t matter because it was a question I have no interest answering—which I was polite about, of course. Defining art by style, medium, subject, school, technique, color or artist has always felt like a list-buiding exercise rather than providing another person with a greater understanding of who you are, which think is generally the purpose of any such question. I appreciate art that evokes an emotional response. It doesn’t need to be a fuzzy or inspiring feeling; art that makes me uncomfortable is often more compelling. With that, I’ll try to articulate how John Baldessari‘s Nose/Silhouette: Green, 2010, makes me feel and why I love it.
My eyes like following the irregularities in the circumference of the green blob encompassing the nose—a facial feature that, unlike eyes or smiles, no human in the history of the world has ever held responsible for being the cause of love at first sight. And yet that is what Baldessari forces us to see when we aren’t doing laps around a face we’re trying to imagine. Baldessari died on January 2, 2020, and I can’t help but wonder how the generation-defining pandemic that unfolded three months after he passed would have shaped later works, had he lived through it. Baldessari’s legacy is multilayered, but the part I return to the most is that his art pushed thinking about how the meaning of an image shifts depending on the context. The world didn’t see noses for nearly year after Baldessari died (give or take, depending on your politics), which may have made some of us realize how much a nose can tell you about a person.
