Pangram Series
Documented by Eduard Sánchez Ribot

In the 1970s, the late multidisciplinary artist John Baldessari created the Pangram Series, in which he attributed a visual image to pair with each letter of the alphabet, from A = Ashtray, to Z = Zipper. Baldessari’s exploration of this was epitomised by Pack My Box With Five Dozen Liquor Jugs (1976), in which he created a pangram sentence where every letter of the alphabet is used out of photographs of 26 objects. From the 1960s on, much of Baldessari’s conceptual art was concerned with exploring the interchangeable, and sometimes disconnected, relationship between language and image, and the ways in which the latter can conjure up subconscious associations. This was something that the artist explored from different perspectives, by bringing words to images, in paintings like Pure Beauty (1968), and vice versa, as is the case with Wrong (1967). By using photographs of objects that correspond to each letter of the alphabet, the Pangram Series exhibits a playfulness that the artist often employed in his work.

The layered meanings that Baldessari achieves by using this image-word alphabet also ties into the artist’s approach of turning art on itself as a critique of the ways in which artistic ideas are realised. To pay homage to that pursuit, still life photographer Eduard Sánchez Ribot and set designer Adrià Escribano put Baldessari’s image-word alphabet into practice. Their interpretation of Baldessari’s ideas offers a modern take on the original Pangram series, while using the same visual equivalent of each letter that he proposed in 1976, and which is reproduced in the edited second volume by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Meg Cranston, More Than You Wanted to Know About John Baldessari (2013).