Mosaic

I recently recommended the Baldessari show, Pure Beauty at Tate Modern as essential viewing for the interested mosaic artist. Nancie Mills Pipgras of Mosaic Art Now (essential reading for the mosaic aware) wrote and asked why. I thought I would explain.

The world bombards us with visual matter. Making effective work means accepting you can’t include everything. In fact, the most powerful work often uses the most minimal of means. I am aware that artists may do what they do without ever analysing exactly how it works, or look at the principles operating behind how it is made, but that isn’t a strategy that anyone who teaches art can take.

John Baldessari found a way to make the limitations of an enquiry into the process of making art, the subject of his work. So what you see at the show is an extraordinary wealth of content — sometimes humorous and sometimes deceptively light — that come from settling on a series of rules as a starting point and sticking to them in a rigorous way. I do not think it is a coincidence that he has been a transformative teacher.

So when he photographs and presents images of  car doors in the sequence in which they are parked down a street, leaving a gap on the wall for areas where a car is absent, this might seem an experiment with little to offer the mosaic artist. But any enquiry into a visual system, conducted earnestly, has something to teach the maker. It might be looking at reflective materials, or ways of laying a similar type of tile. Limit what you ask of the material, and you may be surprised by the richness that results from following up what might at first glance seem to be a rather narrow set of questions.

Posted under: Mosaic by Emma Biggs | Tags: John Baldessari > Mosaic Art Now > Pure Beauty