John Baldessari: Cut to the Chase
by Leslie Dick
Film stills are useful to Baldessari precisely because they are detached from the movie, cut away from their meaningful context. His inventory of film stills constitutes a deep image bank of 20th century American culture, a proliferation of images that haunt us, or at least those of us old enough to remember watching black-and-white movies on TV in the afternoons after school. Arguably those born after about 1980 have internalized an entirely different kind of image bank, a digital one, which exists without limits, instantly available, taking up no space, and requiring only a wireless connection and a screen.