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Extract from Carol Vogel article in the York Times:

The California artist John Baldessari first came to Venice in the early 1970s, when he was invited to show his works in a Biennale. He recalled, I slept on top of a Volkswagen bus parked in the Giardini, the shaded gardens that have been home to the Biennale for well over a century.

This year he is back, ensconced in a hotel and no longer considered part of the avant-garde. At 78 he is one of two winners of the Golden Lion Award, a lifetime achievement prize he is sharing with Yoko Ono.

A Santa Claus look-alike, with snow-white hair, a bushy beard and a hulking 6-foot-7 frame, Mr. Baldessari was hard to miss the other day. He was standing in front of what has long been called the Italian pavilion but this year has been renamed the Palace of Exhibitions, an 1895 colonnaded structure that is the first thing visitors see when they walk through the Giardinis iron gates. An anchor of sorts, the building is a familiar meeting place amid the labyrinth of national pavilions. It is also here that the artistic director presents a special exhibition.

For the first time the pavilion is no longer white. From a distance the structure seems a cool sky blue. But close up a vista reveals itself: Mr. Baldessari has wallpapered the top half of the pavilion with a photographic image that resembles a sun-dappled sky and the bottom half with an image of a calm rippled sea. At either end of the building stands a tall pair of palm trees, also part of his wallpaper handiwork.

It looks like a faux Roman villa, something from Malibu, he said.

When Daniel Birnbaum, the Biennales artistic director, asked Mr. Baldessari if he wanted to create a work inside the pavilion or out, he immediately opted for the facade.

The choice is vintage Baldessari. For the last five decades he has continually reinvented himself, working in a variety of mediums including painting, photography, books, sculpture and exhibition design, all the while taking inspiration from art history and mass media.

I had just finished this architectural project in Krefeld, Germany, with a Mies van der Rohe house, and I was in the frame of mind to continue doing something architectural, he said.At first he proposed painting on the facade the words No More Boring Art, a signature phrase he first used in 1971. (A banner with that sentence hangs off Ca Giustinian, a nearby palazzo on the Grand Canal.) But the idea didnt fly with the Biennales organizers.

They thought some of the artists would have thin skins and think I was talking about them, he said. Then he suggested placing the phrases Greetings From or Welcome to above his sky and seascape so it would look just like a postcard. But that idea was shot down too.

I still hope that instead of sending postcards, people will take a picture of this, Mr. Baldessari said. And then e-mail it to their friends.

FROM NEW YORK TIMES, 4 June 2009 (Carol Vogel)

Duration : 0:9:57

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