Australia’s longest-running art journal Art & Australia has become the site for the latest project of international artist John Baldessari. The recipient of the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 2009 Venice Biennale and the subject of a major retrospective at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Baldessari, 79, chose to collaborate exclusively with Art & Australia on the eve of his January project for the 2011 Sydney Festival and Kaldor Public Art Projects, ‘Your Name in Lights’.
For Art & Australia's Summer 2010 issue, Baldessari was given creative freedom to reinvent the magazine’s traditional square format cover. In a playful response to the issue’s theme of sculpture, the artist offers a photo collage of a hand grasping a spider. And for the first time in its 47-year history, Art & Australia's logo has been replaced – with Baldessari’s signature handwriting.
‘It is thrilling to collaborate with John Baldessari,’ says Art & Australia's Publisher/Editor Eleonora Triguboff. ‘He is an artist who constantly pushes the boundaries, and through partnerships such as these Art & Australia continues to reinvent itself as a magazine.’
Art & Australia's Baldessari commission is the latest in an ongoing series of artist projects which have seen celebrated artists such as William Kentridge, Del Kathryn Barton and Louise Weaver use the magazine’s cover as their canvas.
The Baldessari cover commission accompanies an extensive interview with the artist by Art & Australia's Managing Editor Michael Fitzgerald, who writes: ‘His importance as an artist and as a teacher cannot be separated, and nor can the categories of painting, photography, performance and video which he has helped relax over the last half century or so.’
Joining Baldessari in this Summer issue of Art & Australia is an international who’s who of contemporary art, with featured artists including Christian Boltanski, James Turrell, Clement Meadmore, Paul Selwood, Peter Robinson and Louise Bourgeois. Also commemorating the Baldessari cover commission is a limited-edition poster print, available for purchase as part of Art & Australia's ongoing series of artist editions. It coincides with ‘Your Name in Lights’ – a major commission by Sydney Festival and Kaldor Public Art Projects that will see the names of 115,000 Sydneysiders projected onto the Australian Museum facade in January 2011.
[The above text was copy/pasted from a recent email from Art & Australia magazine titled "For Immediate Release: Baldessari creates special cover for Art & Australia", 1 December 2010. All bold, italicised and underlined words rendered so by me.]
No comments:
Post a Comment