Heather McGuire Lecture on John Baldesarri

In Heather McGuire's lecture, she talks about John Baldesarri's work and how he used surrealism in his photographs. Baldesarri looks at 2 specific themes: one is the questioning of the arts and art does not have a meaning. He points out that art critiques our thoughts when looking at an image. He calls objects as a way of seeing things. McGuire shows different slide shows of his artwork. Here are a few examples: "Blasted Alleghories"- in this picture, he took pictures of scenes from a television and mounts them into different individual squares; he then puts words and color together in each square( "Blue Delayed"); it is supposed to read like a poem starting from top to bottom. One thing about alleghories is that they can mean so many things and they can create new ideas. "I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art"- in this picture, he asked students to write this statement over and again on a classroom wall in Nova Scotia; the photographs seemed interesting to me because of the way the students were positioned; my favorite one was the close up picture of the statement written in cursive; I also liked the way the pictures were mounted in the slide show as well. "The Pencil Story"- this picture was about narration and storytelling; Baldasarri kept a pencil on the inside hood of his car and decided to take 2 pictures, one of an unsharpened pencil and the other with a sharpened one; he concluded that this piece of artwork had something to do with art. In conclusion, Baldesarri explores the dissolutions in photography, meaning he breaks down the rules of photograpy.