Screening of Films & Videos by John Baldessari, introduced by the artist

Please join EAI for a special event with John Baldessari:

Saturday, November 20, 2010
6:30 pm

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
535 West 22nd Street, 5th floor
New York, NY 10011
www.eai.org

Admission $ 7.00 / Students $ 5.00
RSVP: info@eai.org
Please note: Seating is very limited.
Reservations are required.

EAI is pleased to present a special screening of John Baldessari's early film and video works, introduced by the artist. The screening will feature Baldessari's rarely seen films from the 1970s, including Title (1972) and Four Short Films (1972-73), as well as selected early video works.

John Baldessari is one of the most influential figures in contemporary art. From his text-and-image canvases and photo series to his films and videos, Baldessari's works are informed by popular culture, movies in particular. Film stills, Hollywood and genre movies, scripts, and the tropes of cinematic language are all deployed, with wit and irony, as source material.

Baldessari's conceptual videos from the 1970s—such as Baldessari Sings Lewitt (1972) and I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971)—are among his best-known works. Less well known are his important 16mm and super-8 films from the same period. The films Six Colorful Inside Jobs (1977) and Four Short Films consider the medium in relation to performance and painting processes, while Script (1972) and Title employ amateur ensemble casts to deconstruct the syntax of narrative cinema. In deadpan videos such as Ed Henderson Reconstructs Movie Scenarios (1973), Baldessari illustrates how Hollywood movie vernacular is embedded in the collective unconscious.

John Baldessari was born in 1931 in National City, California and lives in Santa Monica. He received a B.A. and an M.A. from San Diego State College, and also studied at U.C. Berkeley, UCLA, Otis Art Institute and Chouinard Art Institute. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from San Diego State University in 2003, and in 2004 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986 and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, he was also awarded the Oscar Kokoschka Prize and the California Governor's Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts. He has taught at Southwestern University, California; the University of California at San Diego; and the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. His work has been exhibited internationally in numerous group exhibitions, and in one-person shows at Marian Goodnan Gallery, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Sonnabend Gallery, New York; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. In 2009 the major retrospective exhibition John Baldessari: Pure Beauty opened at the Tate Modern, London. It traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2010. The retrospective is accompanied by a catalogue publication, also entitled John Baldessari: Pure Beauty (2009).

John Baldessari: Pure Beauty is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

EAI is pleased to announce that a selection of Baldessari's films, including Title, Script, Four Short Films and Six Colorful Inside Jobs, are now available on video through EAI. For more information on Baldessari's films and videos, please visit: www.eai.org

About EAI

Founded in 1971, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is one of the world's leading nonprofit resources for video art. A pioneering advocate for media art and artists, EAI fosters the creation, exhibition, distribution and preservation of video art and digital art. EAI's core program is the distribution and preservation of a major collection of over 3,500 new and historical media works by artists. EAI's activities include viewing access, educational services, extensive online resources, and public programs such as artists' talks, exhibitions and panels. The Online Catalogue is a comprehensive resource on the artists and works in the EAI collection, and also features extensive materials on exhibiting, collecting and preserving media art: www.eai.org

Electronic Arts Intermix   535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor   New York, NY 10011
info@eai.org   t (212) 337-0680   f (212) 337-0679

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the Experimental Television Center. The Experimental Television Center's Presentation Funds Program is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.