Life's Balance (with Money)
Primary
John Baldessari
(National City, California, 1931–Los Angeles, California, 2020)
Printer
Branstead Studio
NationalityAmerican, North America
Date1989-1990
MediumPhotogravure with color aquatint
DimensionsSheet: 42 3/4 × 51 1/16 in. (108.6 × 129.7 cm)
Image: 49 × 40 5/8 in. (124.4 × 103.2 cm)
Image: 49 × 40 5/8 in. (124.4 × 103.2 cm)
Credit LineBlanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Archer M. Huntington Museum Fund, 1992.305
Keywords
Rights Statement
Collection AreaPrints and Drawings
Object number1992.305
On View
Not on viewJohn Baldessari obtains imagery directly from television and film. In Life's Balance, he uses media imagery to lure the viewer into the work and then forces him to participate in constructing a new meaning. By using film stills that have been fragmented and dislocated from their original narrative context, this meaning remains unstable, and the viewer's ambitions are complicated.
Exhibitions
Workshop of Hendrick Goltzius
circa 1592
Pieter van der Borcht I
circa 1558-1619
![Le Denier de César [The Tribute Money of Caesar], from Le Nouveau Testament [The New Testament]](/internal/media/dispatcher/17939/thumbnail)
![Si porque te ves con plata a un pobre lo disminuyes, más altas suben las nubes y el viento las desbarata [Just Because You Have Money, You Hold the Poor Folk in Contempt; the Clouds in the Sky are Higher and the Wind Still Destroys Them], from Dichos popu](/internal/media/dispatcher/18421/thumbnail)