Painting Language

This are two pieces by John Baldessari, who I heard of for the first time today in Art History class. We looked at a couple of works of art in which artists painted words. My friend Megan and I were of course both interested since we spend a lot of time thinking about the material properties of language. She went to talk to the professor after class about these interesting paintings, like the one shown to the left, but we ended up just talking together instead. At first, Megan was troubled by the way that Baldessari was representing words, as if mocking the fact that printed text didn't already have material aspects, at least I think that was her argument. But I looked at it a different way. think the best way to read these paintings is similar to how we read Johns' flags: Johns' doesn't represent a flag, he makes a flag. In the same way, Baldessari makes a word; he doesn't represent it. If anything, he seems to be pointing to words' material reality. The fact that they can be reproduced and made by an artist speaks to their uniqueness and quality as objects. Like Johns', Baldessari is not representing language, he is making it, and that is what we do every time we write. We reproduce sound-images that are already stocked in someone else's mind as a symbol. Anything but boring in my mind.