In Memory of John Baldessari (1931-2020)

Audiovisual installations in museums, when they are longer than a few minutes, tend to encourage the viewer to move on. Wandering through the wonderful Kunstmuseum in Basel three years ago, however, my eye caught a 16mm projection. It was John Baldessari’s Six Colorful Inside Jobs. I was riveted, and I sat through the entire 30-odd minutes. Like much of Baldessari’s other pieces, Six Colorful Inside Jobs is a work that revels in irony and paradox, elevating banality by subjecting it to a conceptual structure based on repetition.

The conceit here is simple: a man walks into an empty room of about 12×8 feet and paints it all over with a single colour. He performs this action six times over six days, going through the colours of the rainbow from red to violet. Despite the plainness of the idea, there’s some amount of mathematics underlying each ‘job’. Since each day is a single unbroken shot, sped up to five minutes of screen time, the painter must complete his task before the camera runs out of film.

This ingenious concept turns Six Colorful Inside Jobs from a whimsical idea into a study of the contrast between painting and cinema. The frame here is literally being painted, and the film is a document of the frame making itself. (A comparable notion is at work in Sharon Lockhart’s NŌ.) At the beginning of each day, the room is a flat, colour field, undifferentiated except for the reflection of the overhead light. As the bearded man, dressed in white, starts painting, he emphasizes the room corners to produce an illusion of depth, or real space. This three-dimensionality, conversely, collapses into abstract flatness once the painter exits the room via the door on top right. Baldessari’s cool, impersonal art, though, is located beyond Greenbergian polemics, and his intervention here registers as a parodic take on the heated debates of post-war American painting.

A rather stark religious allegory, Six Colorful Inside Jobs begins with white light, which then breaks down into its individual wavelengths over the next six days. (In a bit of magic, the blue room at the end of Friday becomes indigo on Saturday morning.) The camera is fixed on the room’s high ceiling, and its wide lens embodies a ‘God’s eye view’ of the action. The artist in the room literally plays God, or an anti-God, creating a three-dimensional world from nothing, only to take it back to nothing.

In situating the act of creation in the humble task of painting walls, Baldessari also collapses the distance between the artist and the worker—a gesture that’s part of Baldessari’s general practice as well as a larger theme in 20th century art. A direct ancestor to Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, Six Colorful Inside Jobs presents routine, structured as a six-day work week, as a source of unsuspected beauty. The painter carries out the same task every day, but the way he goes about constantly changes: his movement about the room, his brush strokes, his rhythm. He pauses now and then for a smoke break or to contemplate his creation. In a framework that leaves no room for qualities conventionally associated with artmaking—self-expression, innovation, skill—the painter nevertheless finds a space for an individual style. Six Colorful Inside Jobs is a cogent summary and entry point into Baldessari’s witty, provocative and ultimately edifying body of work.

 

[Six Colourful Inside Jobs (1977)]