Man with Nails/Car/Reluctant Man

John Baldessari taught for many years at CalArts, counting among his students Barbara Bloom, David Salle, Jack Goldstein, and James Welling. He pioneered “post studio” art, encouraging students to break from handmade, original artwork, and to embrace found images. One of his pithy class assignments directed students to, “Photograph backs of things, underneaths of things, extreme foreshortenings, uncharacteristic views,” while another dictated, “One person copies or makes-up random captions. Another person takes photos. Match photos to captions.”

Baldessari’s own work influenced the Pictures artists. Man with Nails / Car / Reluctant Man joins three unrelated photographs, “subvert[ing] analytic thought,” in the words of Douglas Crimp, but also prompting irrational or imaginative thinking. Baldessari himself described it thus: “Somehow this is an imminent crucifixion—at the left, the crucifier; at the right, he who is to be crucified. In the middle, a gigantic technological phallus with a transposable name, Goldenrod. Sexuality in the modern life as nearly insurmountable.”