The Lewis Baltz Library - Steidl
The Lewis Baltz Library - Steidl
The Lewis Baltz Library - Steidl
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John Baldessari<br />
Miracle Chips<br />
It all began many years ago with an innocent interest in the way people like to anthropomorphize. Animals, objects, just<br />
about anything can be given human characteristics. Following his curiosity, John Baldessari was soon enough making<br />
his own pictures of objects with barely perceptible human features. Maybe they would be detected, maybe they<br />
wouldn’t. It was akin to seeing the Virgin Mary in a tortilla. Next came a series of noses and ears gleefully placed on<br />
colorful, flat, somewhat lumpy and rounded shapes: faces. Much to Baldessari’s surprise and our amusement, he<br />
recently looked again at these mustard and cobalt colored face shapes that populate his studio and came to a decisive<br />
conclusion: Potato chips! Those faces are potato chips!<br />
In a moment he had handed over a stack of prints of chips with just visible full faces peering out at us, only to issue a<br />
kind-hearted warning: <strong>The</strong>se are really too perfect. Life isn’t perfect. Potato chips break, pieces crack off. Think of the<br />
Venus de Milo, and I think you’ll know where I’m going with this book. And look, I have a title too...<br />
And thus Baldessari’s Miracle Chips began to make their way one by one into the world.<br />
John Baldessari was born in 1931 in National City, California, and today lives and works in Santa Monica, California.<br />
His art has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe and in over 750 group exhibitions.<br />
His projects include artist books, videos, films, billboards and public works. His awards include the Americans for the<br />
Arts lifetime achievement award, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, the Governor’s Award for Lifetime<br />
Achievement in the Visual Arts in California, the Oscar Kokoschka Prize from Austria and the Spectrum-International<br />
Award for Photography of the Foundation of Lower Saxony, Germany. A forthcoming retrospective at the Tate Modern<br />
will open in London in 2009.<br />
John Baldessari<br />
Miracle Chips<br />
Book design and editing by John Baldessari<br />
with Nina Holland, Simon Johnston and Jerry Sohn<br />
80 pages with full color throughout<br />
8 x 9.75 in./20.3 x 24.7 cm<br />
Softcover<br />
US$45.00/£25.00/€35.00<br />
ISBN 978-3-86521-677-9<br />
231
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