VENICE ASTRAL PROJECTION CLINIC

I never saw this show.
How can I review it?
The great Hal Foster can help me with that.

During an impromptu visit to Fondazione Querini Stampalia, one finds themselves gravitated towards the bookstore. From the handwritten wall signals to the well-oriented books splayed across a white labyrinth, a magnetic field pulled me into grabbing the catalogue for the late Baldessari’s retrospective. After flipping through the pages, a name I recognized –despite my atrocious Italian– popped up. Hal Freaking Foster. Franticly I flipped in search of the English translation, and there it was, Allegories on full Blast. The sensation that loomed over me upon facing Foster’s writing was similar to the reaction a gambler feels when they win big in Vegas. Pure ecstasy, pure liberation from the shackles of visual experience.

Foster notes on Baldessari’s questioning of the human need to project meaning, as seen in his 1975 photo series “Pathetic Fallacy”. Baldessari’s work and the ideas of John Ruskin are intertwined, through the title of the work referring to Ruskin’s caution on manufacturing an emotional taxis between human feelings and non-human objects. Baldessari questions “Can a photo of a mottled sky be called “happy”? Is an empty chair “wistful”? Is curly hair “glowering”? Is pink “suspicious”? or “tremulous”? Is yellow “resigned” or “yearning”?[1]. To attribute feelings to objects is a general fallacy that people like you, people like me, engage with on the daily. One might even engage with that fallacy while interracting with Baldessari’s work. There’s a reason why people like Rothko so much. When seen in terms of the human interior condition, the pathetic fallacy tells the truth, because it presents the world as experienced by a man under the influence of tremendous emotion, which can reveal much about another person's inner existence. From this perspective, the distorting consequences of emotion, when fully understood, are neither solipsistic nor isolating. Rather, by altering an aspect of reality, the pathetic fallacy allows one to see the passions that exist within another person's consciousness. Since we know that hues like pink and yellow are nothing more than electromagnetic waves that we see with our eyes, assigning words like "suspicious" is an emotional mistake resulting from our anthropocentric lens. The pitiful fallacy's distortions act similarly to a speaker's voice inflections in a common, spoken language: they allow something to be communicated that would be impossible to state "directly." The tragic fallacy permits Baldessari's work to emphasize sadness and joy, communicating them significantly more effectively than just stating that the speaker is happy or sorrowful.

Another facet to note that exists within Baldessari’s work is the visual and linguistic game that reveals itself under the guises of sequencing. Foster hones in on the “Diarchronic and synchronic” as “linguistic terms for two kinds of temporality; we can study a language or an art in its historical (diachronic) development or in its present (synchronic) usage”[2]. Through this statement one can witness a linguistic opposition when thinking of the image and its sequence. One is “invited to consider what qualifies as each category, and how arbitrary the designations might be”[3]. This invite –at least in my case– is relevant to Foster’s writing about Baldessari, as one can be granted access to an apparition of an image.


Notes

1. Fondazione Querini Stampalia and Hal Foster, John Baldessari No Stone Unturned. Conceptual Photography, trans. Scriptum (Torino, Italy: Allemandi, 2025), 71.
2. Foster, John Baldessari No Stone Unturned. Conceptual Photography, 73
3. Ibid.