Lights, camera, art: John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha and Hollywood film

In the past decade there has been an interest in contextualizing the loose group of practices and practitioners that comprise American Conceptual art both within a sociopolitical context and within strictly visual traditions, especially photography. Prior to this, Conceptual art was broadly defined as an inward-looking, self-contained semiotic circuit, in which ideas or concepts behind a work of art are more important than the resultant art object. Scholarship also gave more weight to East Coast art and to works with theoretical tendencies.;My project is an extension of this revisionist trend regarding Conceptual art. It investigates the affinities between the work of California Conceptual artists John Baldessari's (b. 1931) and Ed Ruscha's (b. 1937) art and another---commercial---art form: Hollywood films made from 1930 to 1960. I use film theory to expose the works' structural and sociological links to film. Narrative theory is used to discuss the artists' films and videos; semiotic theory is used to discuss Baldessari's photocollages; and apparatus theory is used to discuss Ruscha's paintings.;A brief comparison of Hollywood and the art world in the 1960s reveal that both were transforming as a result of similar pressures. As Hollywood shifted away from studio-system dominance, the art world began to function more like the world of commerce. Baldessari and Ruscha successfully avoided the label of regionalists that was applied to previous generations of California artists and produced works tied to the Hollywood cinema.;This analysis demonstrates the value of film as a commercial enterprise for elucidating major themes in both artists' works. It prompts a reassessment of the work as commentary on the visual culture and commercial mechanisms of Hollywood. A by-product of this recontextualization is the identification of West Coast Conceptualism as more closely aligned with the increasingly commercial impulses of its East Coast counterpart.