Pointing

Separate from concepts like guidance and direction, this collection shows the ways that arrows are used for clarity or emphasis. Quite a few of these examples the arrows are redundant and the text alone would get the point across.

Calvin Tomkins’ excellent New Yorker profile in 2010 on artist John Baldessari had this: “Hearing that Al Held, the New York abstract painter, had said that conceptual art was “just pointing at things,” Baldessari did a series of “Commissioned Paintings”: he took photographs of a friend’s finger pointing at various objects or places around National City, then asked a dozen amateur artists, whose work he had seen at county fairs, to choose one of the photographs and reproduce it in a realistic painting, pointing finger included. Baldessari has often said that he wants his work to make people stop and look, rather than just take it in passively.”