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The Twilight Saga: New Moon
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A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
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London,
Ben Lewis's rating
Reader rating
Description: Films, books, ephemera, photographs and unusually shaped paintings spanning the artist's career.
Times: From Oct 13, Mon-Thu & Sun 10am-6pm, last adm 5.15pm, Fri & Sat 10am-10pm, last adm 9.15pm, closed Dec 24-26, ends Jan 10
Price: £10, concs £8.50, mems free
Phone: 0207887 8888
Website: www.tate.org.uk/modern
Email: visiting.modern@tate.org.uk
Trains: Tube: Southwark/Blackfriars 
, Tube / Bus: 45, 63, 100, 344, 381, RV1 
Extra info: Air Conditioning, Telephones, Pub, Food
Conceptual art unfairly carries the reputation of being the driest and dullest of art movements but there are plenty of Pythonesque moments in this expansive and accessible retrospective of the movement’s granddaddy, American West Coast artist John Baldessari.
This exhibition opens with a video of the artist teaching a plant the alphabet, and continues with photographs in which people have picked their favourite carrot (no reasons given).
A piece called The Artist Hitting Various Objects With a Golf Club does exactly what the title says.
Now aged 78, Baldessari took inspiration from the word-and-image games of Magritte and fused them with roadside America and a fascination with Hollywood. The result was an influential series of zany and clever works, beginning in the Sixties — among the most famous, a sequence of photographs of the back of trucks, shot on a road trip.
In the Seventies, he progressed to loose arrangements of film stills, many of them found in rubbish tips, which invite the viewer to build his own narratives.
Baldessari also does a great line in gags about contemporary art. In Floating Colour (1972), he threw large rectangles of coloured card out of the first-floor window of a house, in mockery of the monochrome.
Sadly, his work since the Eighties disappoints with its brightly coloured circles and silhouettes slapped inelegantly over grainy photographs.
Like all good humour, there is much serious thought behind Baldessari’s work. He was among the first artists to combine photographs and words, and among the first to get his pictures painted by someone else. His subject is how we read images.
It’s not all easily digestible, but it’s helped by exemplary, clearly written gallery wall texts. If you always wanted to know what conceptual art was but were too scared to ask, this is the show to see.
Until 10 January. Information:
020 7887 8888; www.tate.org.uk
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
