JOHN BALDESSARI

JOHN BALDESSARI and I were friends for thirty-six years. Do friendships have a purpose? If so, ours was to do things that were fun and made for a halfway decent story after. Here are a few:

John was the first person I knew who had GPS in his car. Because neither of us had any sense of direction, we rarely drove outside of Santa Monica at night. But with the new GPS, we tried going to a party at Ed and Danna Ruscha’s on the other side of town. We thought we followed the directions but got lost anyway. Baffled and defeated, we pulled over to the side of the road. John looked at me and said, “Maybe

Odilon Redon, Domecy Decoration: Trees, Yellow Background, 1901, oil, distemper, 94 5/8 x 72 7/8".

print December 2011

THEIR FAVORITE EXHIBITIONS OF THE YEAR

To take stock of the past year, Artforum contacted an international group of artists to find out which exhibitions and events were, in their eyes, the very best of 2011.

ERICKA BECKMAN

Mary Reid Kelley, Sadie the Saddest Sadist (Armory Show, New York) Tucked away in the back of the Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects booth at the 2011 Armory Show was a monitor showing a costumed figure with exaggerated face paint, pacing in front of a hand-drawn black-and-white background. The piece was Mary Reid Kelley’s Sadie the Saddest Sadist, 2009, and the mixed metaphors, narrative snippets, and repurposed